“Be my guest,” I said. The Bat disappeared into the bathroom and I reached under the hideabed for Oscar’s knife box, and I took a knife out and hid it under a magazine. I reached over to the bowl where the potato chips were, and I grabbed some and ate them.
The door to the bathroom opened an inch or two. “Hi,” he said, from behind the door. Here things get a little hazy, a little unclear.
After another minute or so, the Bat walked out, with his pants off, and his underwear off, and his shoes and socks removed. His dick swung back and forth like an inspection tool, as he made his way in slow motion toward me. I remember looking at the window quickly. Maybe someone would see this. He stood there for a moment, naked from the waist down, as if he couldn’t decide on his next move. Then he said, “How ’bout that hug now?”
“Mac,” I said, trying to hold my breathing steady, “you left your underwear and your pants off.” I couldn’t run; he was closer to the door than I was.
“Yeah, I guess I did,” he said, clearing his throat. “Maybe I oughtta put ’em back on.”
“That’s a good idea.” I stood up. My knees were shaking. My face had gone ice cold. “Why don’t you do that? Just turn around and go back in there.”
“I forgot,” he said. “Thought I was home. Thought it was Missy and Mac, quiet evening at home.”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t that.” I was measuring the distance to the door. He started to walk toward me, his dick swinging again a little.
“I’d like that hug now,” he said. “Then I’ll put the pants back on.”
I couldn’t think. I didn’t have a single good idea to help me out.
“The shades aren’t down,” I said, feeling my tongue rattling. “People will see.” The Bat turned around to lower the shades, and when he did, I reached for the knife under the magazine and held it behind me. I took a deep breath. I’d never been so scared in my life, but I was also not scared, which is harder to explain. But I am going to explain it, because I’ve thought about it ever since. I mean, I knew he could kill me, or rape me and kill me, but I also knew that I could probably kill him, if I wanted to, and that maybe at any moment any of us could do any of that to anybody. He hadn’t decided what he would do, not yet. But the more amazing thing is, I felt Oscar’s spirit pass through me right at that same exact instant, and I almost cried out, Oscar! ’cause there he was, my boy and my man and my husband, he had just walked inside of me out of nowhere, out of death, and I could think like Oscar and move like Oscar and be strong like him, strong and fearless. Maybe all I was doing was thinking of Oscar. That’s probably it. Thinking of being fearless. Which I wasn’t, scared to death as I was, but I was also this other person, right at that moment, like that person was on one side and the scared person was on the other. I was going to give room to the fearless side. Oh Oscar, I thought, be in me.
The Bat walked over to me, calm as a cucumber, but drunk all the same. Concentrating on his every move, calculating the odds. “Shades’re down now.”
“Get away,” I said. “Don’t come any nearer to me.”
“You sure are pretty,” he said, getting closer. “Prettiest little thing. Always were. I can be pretty, too. I can be a kindly man.”
“Put your clothes on, Mac,” I said. “Besides, I’m pregnant.”
“I get so confused,” he said. “Help me. There isn’t anybody I can talk to. I get so tired. Help me out, little one.” His arms reached out as he got next to me. “I’m not askin’ for much. Please. I’m askin’ please. From politeness. Just a little hug. And a kiss? The tiniest bit of love.”
Then the air unfroze itself.
The Bat put his arms around me and he pressed himself against me, and my hand came down once, stabbing him through his shirt into the upper arm with Oscar’s knife.
He looked hard at his arm for a second, then howled in surprise and dropped to his knees. Some blood appeared on my blouse, as the knife sort of worried its way out of his arm, and with its blade shiny with blood fell to the floor, spattering the linoleum. I got to the doorway and grabbed my jacket and ran outside. I turned the lights off as I went. I thought: I’ll get the neighbors. No no no: he’ll be here in a minute, he’ll accuse me of something. Assaulting him. I should’ve gotten the neighbors, but I wasn’t thinking so clearly. I just wanted to get out of that building. I raced down to the Matador and started it. I had a few minutes on him, but no particular place to go.
If you’re in your right mind, you drive straight to the police, but I wasn’t in my right mind, and besides, the roads were terrible. I was thinking: I did the wrong thing, and now they’ll arrest me, Chloé, for what I did. I saw myself, arrested, ruined, panhandling on the street. I thought of Rhonda, my sister, too far away; my friends, too unhelpful and stoned; and then I thought of Bradley, my boss and my friend, and his girlfriend, Margaret, because maybe I was still thinking of Oscar, I could still feel him, and I was thinking of our wedding day, and the party that Bradley had thrown for us, the feast of love he’d laid out on his table. I thought of that, too.
THE ROADS HADN’T been plowed yet, and this thick snow lay over everything, and the Matador had rear-wheel drive, plus it was old and rusty, and the first thing I knew I was going down my street sideways, and then I wasn’t going anywhere at all, just spinning and spinning at an intersection. I thought of the Bat and his four-wheel truck gaining on me, and that was when a face appeared on my driver’s side window, and I screamed.
But it was only a passing pedestrian walking his dog, and, like, offering to push me. It’s amazing he stayed when I screamed like that. But he did, and he pushed my car, and I was off again.
I made my way around the city trying to get to Bradley’s street, over by Allmendinger Park, and at one point the engine died and I had to start it again, and at another point I found myself on a dark street with the snow falling and I had to stop the car because I was crying and shaking and shivering. But then I faced up to things and got strong, and I made another New Year’s resolution two months early that I wouldn’t give in to cheesy panic or anything, even though it made sense to panic, and was the easy, logical thing to do, lame though it was.
The street lights passed over me, and I felt myself getting faint and helpless, and I had the sudden recognition that I didn’t know where I was, but then I passed the football stadium where Oscar had once given me a Slurpee, and I made a right turn, and another left, and another right, and I started skidding down Bradley’s street, and suddenly I felt my baby kick, although it was way too early, it couldn’t have been the baby kicking, so I guess it was my heart thumping, which is how I knew Oscar was leaving me, because I was having this little tiny heart attack, just like the one Oscar’d had, except very small, so it was time for Oscar to go. And then he was gone, out of me entirely, having helped me in my time of trouble. He re-died.
I parked in front of Bradley’s house, which was, like, totally dark. I opened the Matador door with its formerly satisfying squeak. I ran up to his door, and when I did, the snow got into my running shoes, and I rang the bell, rang it and rang it and rang it, and Bradley the dog started barking inside, but there was no Bradley the human there, or Margaret either, and I thought, oh please, someone save me now before the Bat gets here.
So I ran over next door, where Harry and Esther Ginsberg were, and there was more snow in my shoes, and I thought I would faint, but I pounded on their door knocker, and I said, “Help! Please, help! Somebody, please!”
And I heard Harry coming toward the door, and as he opened it, he said, like he didn’t know it was me, like my voice wasn’t my own but a man’s voice, like he thought it was someone else, “Aaron? Is that you? Aaron?”
TWENTY-SIX
I KNOW ONE UNASSAILABLE TRUTH: Help your friends and those whom you love; hurt your enemies. The very banality of this formulation ensures that most academics — who enjoy hurting their friends — will ignore it.
For days, in any case, I lay awake, thinking of Aaron an
d of how I might have done him indeliberate harm. I awoke, nocturnally fevered, my forehead sweating, perspiration soaked into my pajamas, in my unforgiving mind’s eye the spectacle of Aaron being ill served by my negligence. On my son’s behalf, I had performed no heroic measures, the ones that, bright with prudence, you wisely do not perform in the daytime but whose nonperformance terrorizes your conscience following the arrival of dusk. Disquieted, assailed, I would rise out of bed and aimlessly walk down the hallway to the bathroom. I would switch on the light. All bathrooms, whatever their minute variations, are overilluminated at night, just as, at night, all telephones when they ring are too loud. The existential nocturnal glare of bathrooms has a certain ghastliness built into the shadowless illumination. Under such lights one discovers the first signs of cancer.
Moody and forlorn with middle age, baffled by the enigmatic Christian knight of faith, Kierkegaard, who nevertheless came to grips with spiritual psychologies as few thinkers ever have, battered with visual memories of Aaron, I would walk back to the bed, comically abandoned by sleep. It occurred to me that my lifelong tramps through the landscapes of philosophy had set Aaron off in the direction of counterphilosophy, of Scientology and Theosophy and Anthroposophy and the other occult sciences he favored. Who knows, who knew, what set him off? Perhaps he loved men and not women. But who would care one way or another about such a choice, in this era, except the unenlightened? We would have accepted him gladly, accepted his homosexuality, if that’s what it was. We would have welcomed him back to the house. He knew that. He could have come back, our own beloved prodigal, bedecked with strange clothes and jewels, dressed like a gypsy, and we would have swung wide the door and hugged him and kissed him. But no, he preferred to hate and to be hated.
This is the only cure for insomnia I know. Lying on my back, I would imagine myself in a cosmopolitan but still rather lethargic city, a city that had long ago given up worldly ambition, a city in genteel decline, Lisbon, for example (which I have never visited), where I am sitting at an outdoor café during a mild summer afternoon, drinking bitter coffee and reading the paper in Portuguese. Esther sits there with me, commenting on the architecture of the square — shabby Baroque — and on the passersby. Some are solitary. Others, the lovers, walk arm in arm. They all have an inaptitude for work. The women wear bright scarves tangled around their necks, the young men wear peacock-colored shirts. Occasionally we witness a group of three or four, laughing quietly as they pass in front of us. Then I revise the city so that the square faces the estuary. Boats sail in and out past the anchorage, near a breakwater at whose end is a harbor light. I am also on some of these boats (I am subdivided), and I wave to myself affably. No one has to go anywhere, no one has to accomplish anything. One has, it seems, an entire lifetime to sort through the major questions and to develop a coherent set of opinions and judgments on these matters. The meaning of everything will arrive in due course.
Gulls land and then take flight from the quay at Alcântara. The waiter brings another cup of coffee, a boat toots in the distance over the lapping waves, there is a hint of rain beyond the wharf, a bank of clouds developing over the horizon suggests but does not threaten the relief of a storm. At the next table over a man feeds olives to a gray pet parrot perched on his finger. Esther murmurs something to me, a consoling phrase, I don’t quite attend to it, though I may register the words later. I look around again at the harbor and now at the buildings behind me. Nearby, children are playing hopscotch. Two scholars of the Talmud stroll by, arguing in Portuguese flavored with Yiddish. A small band of musicians is tuning up, a trio of vagabond string players enjoying the outdoors, intending to perform Rossini. I am not particularly hungry, but when the solicitous waiter comes by I order a plate of the local delicacy, a rolled pastry with honey tucked inside.
I take another sip of coffee.
Usually this little nighttime fantasy is enough to send me off to sleep. But on certain nights, following fierce committee meetings at the Amalgamated Education Corporation, I must calm down by closing my eyes and reading the imaginary paper in imaginary Portuguese at length. I don’t read Portuguese, but in my insomnia cure I do. I scan the paper at my sidewalk café near the harbor. The paper I imagine has trivial matters reported in a lively and almost comically beautiful prose. This is paradise, to read a newspaper containing matters of no consequence written by vainglorious prose stylists. A woman has her purse stolen in a leather shop, all this reported in a fashion that would have done honor to Gibbon, if the great man had written in Portuguese. A man falls off a balcony, breaking a bone or two, and the account has the melancholy wit of Saint-Simon. In another section of the paper, a cat is reported missing, but the story has been written by G.W.F. Hegel, and one can barely discern the cat. Well, no one admires Hegel’s prose style, but it is pleasing and relaxing to imagine Hegel, humbled at last, having to write for a newspaper. Hegel also reports on the doings at the racetrack. Elsewhere, a soccer match is narrated by Proust, an apartment is offered for sale by Heine, a quarrel between two neighbors is accounted for by Colette. Virginia Woolf has control of the financial columns, which, in this newspaper of mine, detail how money should be spent, and on what items, not how it should be invested. In this city of my making, my imaginings, there are no major investments. Savings are minimal. The bankers are as poor as mice. They must go begging, organize bake sales.
But then, or now (I am still awake), I lower the paper and look into the harbor, and there, in a rowboat without oars or motor, is Aaron, drifting away from shore, and shouting. Behind me the great clock tower in the central square sounds its lugubrious and melancholy bells. These are large bells, with a complex layering of overtones, and their announcements dictate the timing of the social life of the city. It is four in the afternoon. Aaron is shouting or screaming. The bells clang repetitively, going past the hours into tollings of sorrow. I cannot make out any of his words. My son is shouting at me. He is drifting out to sea. He is gesturing. My G-d, I must help him. I am sweating, I have a fever.
Somebody save him.
ALMOST EVERY RELIGION obsesses over the sacrifice of a son by a father. For the Jews, it is Abraham and Isaac, an example appropriated by Kierkegaard for the purposes of irrational faith. For the Christians, of course, the son, Jesus, is sacrificed, is donated as an offering for the first and last time by the father-god; Gentiles cannot get over this. There is Absalom. Elsewhere, we find Prometheus, understood as a young god, who must be killed time and again. These myths I find more compelling than the tales of the father’s death, organized by the primal horde, an idea whose commonplace vulgarity was so aptly taken up by Freud, a vulgarian of the clinical variety.
When I was in college, my father, a gruff undemonstrative man, died of a stroke on a ladder one Saturday afternoon while painting the house. When he tumbled down to the ground, the can of white paint went tumbling with him, splashing over his face and torso. My father died stretched out on the green lawn, the nearby grass and my father’s face painted white, clownishly, as if by an action painter. I believe it gives me no pleasure to tell this story, but Esther says that it does, I have told it so often and so compulsively to anyone who would listen. He, my father, thought me bookish and unworldly. He sold copper pipe in Chicago and wanted me to go into the business, which I refused to do from the age of seven onward. My father was given to rages, as is Aaron. He suffered from a metaphysical anguish without any apparent cause. I see my father in my son. Both have a talent for withering cryptic conclusive remarks. I never said Kaddish over him. I am not that sort of Jew. It complicates things.
THIS SATURDAY NIGHT, I was pacing through the house while Esther did her sewing. I was trying not to think of Aaron but could not help myself. To block my worries, I had taken up Kierkegaard and was deliberating over the Wittgensteinian pronouncement in Repetition (Wittgenstein, who admired Kierkegaard enormously, was the Knight of Rules) that “He who knows how to keep silent discovers an alphabet that has just as many letters as t
he ordinary one.” What does it mean, knowing how to keep silent? What kind of silence would this be? How do such silences differ from one another? How does this particular silence contrast with being morosely mute? What is a knowledgeable silence? How would we know or for that matter recognize this knowledge? And what, if I may ask, is the nature of this silent alphabet?
Wittgenstein regarded metaphysics as the lint on a suit. However, after he picked off the lint, the suit itself vanished.
Perhaps these musings would find a chapter in my new book, a refutation of the tendentious and mannered arguments concerning Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein in Herbert Quain’s The Labyrinth of the God.
Outside it was snowing, a dreadful December snow, wet and clumped and cumulative. Sitting in my study, mulling over K’s notice that all life is a repetition — these silent alphabets must have existed before us — but actually visualizing Aaron’s wanderings over the face of the earth, I peered through the window.
I imagined my son pursued by barking dogs.
Helpless in my imaginings (where was Lisbon? my city had faded with the pitiless evanescence of all fantasy), I imagined Aaron, hapless and lonely, an orphan of this midwestern storm, pelted by wet snow, one of the wretched. I would like very much to say that I did not think of Aaron at all and that my thoughts were free, but my son, having disappeared, commanded my thoughts entirely in his absence and silence. At that moment it occurred to me that Aaron had discovered Kierkegaard’s secret alphabet and was writing letters to me, employing it.
A car rumbled out on the street. It was not Bradley’s car, which I recognized, but one of an unknown pitch and timbre. The driver stopped the car, opened the door — it squeaked — and slammed it.
I am not inclined to magical thinking. Nevertheless my breath quickened, I must tell you, at that moment. My heartbeat increased. I stood up and approached the front hallway. Aaron had at last come home, was my intuition. He had given up his rebellion and had returned, remorseful, quite possibly drug-free, and grateful for our forgiveness. Perhaps he would bring someone with him. There would be wildfires of contrition on all sides. Fine, fine. I made my way toward the foyer.
The Feast of Love Page 26