I am in shock, I think, because I want the outer edges of the possibilities; I want what must surely come, never to come. My vanity urges connection between these immensities.
I know I have said and thought it a thousand times in just the past few days since Paul’s death, but I say it again: I wonder what he wanted when he called, and if talking would have helped.
Closer to me, she murmurs, The old common denominator. The metaphor of Paul’s America.
Good paraphrase of Wright, I think. I say, The old retainer.
Retainer?
One who retains. A service to a household. A device for holding things up, you know, like a retaining wall? But I never wanted to, baby, or to be.
She replaces the pages. I know, she says. The problem is—
What is my problem?
You simply can’t help making eye contact; that’s always been your problem.
I laugh and laugh and laugh.
She gives me a soft shot in the back of the head. You know people aren’t supposed to really see each other when they look at each other, darling.
Betsy wants answers she cannot have.
We have invited Amos to join us, figuring that he may be able to help her and even himself after all these years. He is still at Phaeton, not doing very well, the rumors say, for niggers are out of style now.
So there they sit, two representatives, they may well be, from Suicide Survivors Anonymous. Dorothea Blue-Sky could have come, or Caitlin Thomas, but they would have been in slightly different categories.
It is a tough session. I knew it would be from the way we started drinking. No white wine for us. No spritzers. No Perrier. Booze, maybe with spits of water.
By the time we get to the table, we’re off like shots. I am glad Mack’s away at camp. The conversation’s too intense. Allis would have sent him off to his room, and he would have been relieved. And had he been here I would have resented Betsy’s putting all that weight on him, when she didn’t even bring her own kids. Of course, Amos no longer has kids to bring anywhere.
Maybe, Amos is saying, what he really wanted was to get back with you, Betsy.
I don’t think so.
Did he ever talk about it? Allis asks.
Sometimes, when he was drunk.
Maybe he needed to be drunk to talk about it, Amos says, but wait. Let’s back up. You wanna talk about what caused the breakup? I mean, you don’t have to, but you’re looking for—
Betsy is pensive. Then she says, He changed.
Our silence is not helpful.
There was a drastic change, she says, looking at me. Didn’t you notice?
He was in the process of changing, Allis says.
But I mean, all the crap going to his head. He believed it.
It’s hard not to, Amos says. He chortles. All the publicity, interviews, appearances, questions, letters, phone calls …
I say, Paul badly wanted to be a great success as a writer.
That’s just it. His only good book was The Burnt Offering.
Even one these days is a triumph, I say. I don’t know if I believe it, though.
At first, when we were alone he was truly embarrassed by it. He insisted, Cate, that you were the better writer. His uneasiness was real then. One day it was gone. I never even missed it for a while. It was a very fragile and beautiful thing before it went, aware, completely in touch with what real writing was all about.
Yeah. It can turn a man’s head, all right, Amos says.
Then there were those women! Betsy lights a little cigar.
Amos flashes a look across the table toward me. Allis sees it; she misses nothing. Her personal recollections, however, do not even begin to show through.
Selena, Betsy says, ruefully. Marianna Wayland. Elizabeth Tottenham. Maude Tozer. Maxine Culp when she was about to quit agenting and became a literary expert on geriatric fuckings—
The risks of the business, Amos says. Art is cock.
Betsy is sullen and, having finished off the wine, has pounced on the cognac. Yeah? Then how come Cate didn’t go through those trips, Allis? Or did he?
The honest-to-God truth, Betsy, is that I don’t know.
Amos stumbles over a chuckle; he remembers too much.
Betsy studies first me and then Allis. I know Allis is thinking of Raffy.
Does all this add up to why? I ask. I don’t want to linger around this end of the conversation.
You, Betsy, Amos says, do a little discoing out there?
She disposes of the question quickly and surgically. No. I’ve never, ever, enjoyed making love.
There is nothing for any of us to say.
Betsy shrugs. So sue me.
This next silence is too much for her. I never knew why, she says. If I was making Paul happy, or anyone before I married him or after we divorced, that was enough for me. Not enjoying it didn’t make me want to be a dike or make me want to be loved by one.
Very, very gently Allis asks, You and Paul ever talk about it?
He never knew.
Allis persists. Maybe he did. Wouldn’t that help to explain the women?
No, Amos says, as if on some pedestal from which he views both past and present. The women come with the package. Or the men.
I was glad to see him when you came back from Europe the first time, I say. Remember? We’d just returned from the Caribbean. This place was such a mess then, with the Rebellions, the assassinations, this movement, that movement. I needed something familiar, an anchor.
But that didn’t last more than a few hours, as I remember, Betsy says.
You can’t spend the rest of your life wondering why he did it, Allis says. We’d been out of touch a long, long time.
Betsy wibbles her ash into a tray and nods. I hear you, she says, and winks a congratulation at Allis. Yeh, I guess I did enjoy some of the good, high times with the special people in the special places. Yes, Allis, guilty. But when I found out where I was, I guess I was too ashamed to admit that being Mrs. Paul Cummings or Kaminsky or whatever had its grand moments.
People are already talking about books on Paul, Amos says. Proposal came in just the other day. The committee liked it, but they’ll sit on it a while, just so it doesn’t look too crass. Editors and authors will be calling you.
My former editor thought I might—I begin and then wish I hadn’t, for Amos has bent halfway across the table.
Former editor? You’ve left Twentieth Century?
They left me, I say.
Got you. What kind of bread you want? Is it a novel?
Hey, man, you don’t hafta …
A shadow dances across his eyes. Let me see it, okay?
Sure. You can take it with you tonight, I say. But he’s just remembered that times have changed; that mostly what he does is sit in an empty office with sharpened pencils beside a cleared blotter. He makes a lot of phone calls and takes extremely long lunch hours. Phaeton does not know how to fire him gracefully. His opinions no longer count at his committee’s meetings; his vote is discounted. For a moment I can see him in a last, drunken hurrah, trying to sell a Cato Caldwell Douglass novel to a firm that, like all the others, has closed the door quietly and firmly against, well, not against black writers (they are saying), but their themes!
Now we smile at each other. They are the old smiles of men who have recalled the nature of the game and all the nuances, and precisely why it is played in the first place.
I really would like to read it, Cate, he says.
So take it with you.
Betsy and Allis have been watching and listening; Betsy doesn’t understand. Allis, of course, does.
Betsy stubs out the cigar. No ideas? Well, what the hell.
Before the silence can land, Allis says, as hostesses have said for millennia when it’s time for the company to get the hell out, Who wants coffee?
We drove out that time to meet reality and it was in West Hampton, with Paul, with Betsy. But it began with just the visit.
T
hey were renting a house for the summer and hadn’t even stopped by their apartment when they arrived back from Europe.
“Whatever happens,” Allis said, “it’ll be nice to be at the beach for a while.”
“What’s supposed to happen?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but something will. Words.”
“Nah. It’ll be good to see them.”
“I want it to be a good visit.”
“It will be,” I said. “Hey, it didn’t take Betsy long to get pregnant, huh? Ole Paul rang the bell this time. Maybe it was the French water or the Israeli wine.”
“Cato.” She disapproved, but with a smile. “Didn’t he want children before? What about Claire and his first wife?”
“Janice,” I said. “What could I know, babe? We never talked about kids.”
We were on the Long Island Expressway, that engineering miracle that had somehow managed to make itself obsolete even before it was begun. It was, this summer day, wall-to-wall with cars outbound and inbound, a river of berubbered, beglassed, metallic money; the sheer amount of wealth creeping along astounded; the margins of profit amazed. For here was the very stuff of motor vehicle departments, insurance companies, automakers, steel companies, glassmakers; here on this panting, multicolored ribbon were all the parts that would suffice to keep a hundred thousand mechanics in three squares a day and more; oil company executives must now, at this very moment, be smiling at the fumes pouring into the air, the clouds of which must certainly indicate additional use of gas and oil. Sheriffs and state police had no fear that they would not make their quotas of summonses for the day; they had only to sit and wait for their radar to bleep the swift passage of one of the thousands kicking fifty-five in the ass to make up for lost time. These same radar trackers would also clock trees zipping along at ninety. But this snorting river of metal and glass was also providing a summer job for Glenn.
He was working in Detroit on the Ford assembly line with a friend from the Bowling Green College basketball team. I wanted Glenn to know what work was like; wanted him to know and smell his own sweat, not from dunks nor from clever passes that seemed to originate from within his scrotum, but from the exertion of having to do what he didn’t have to do so that he might come to understand, for a little while, what his ancestors had had to do every day down through their generations. And for free. (But, being young, he’d wake after a short nap and dinner, and be out there hitting the bricks.) We’d see him toward the end of summer.
Paul had put on weight. Strangely, I felt it when we embraced before I saw it. His hair was longer now and his movements less tugged by anxieties. Betsy was proud of herself; her smile asked, Isn’t this something? She grasped for Mack.
“And,” Paul said, passing out the drinks he’d fixed, “we’re going bingo for another as soon’s the coast’s clear with this one.”
“We’re not getting any younger,” Betsy said. “We don’t want to have the place filled with mongoloids. What about you two?”
“No,” Allis said.
Paul looked at me. “I’ve already got two,” I said.
He snapped his fingers. “That’s right. But Glenn is just about grown, isn’t he?”
“He’s only just finished his freshman year,” I said. “We were older when we went.”
“Okay,” Betsy said with a smile. “He’ll be a kid for a while longer then, if you want. Well! What do you think of this place? Isn’t it great? A motorboat comes with it, but we don’t know how to drive it.”
“I just want to lie on the beach,” Paul said. “To hell with the boat.”
“It’s great!” Betsy exulted. “It’s almost like being in La Ciotat, but of course we weren’t on the beach there. That was always a special trip, when Paul got tired of working—”
“Just think of it, Cate,” Paul interrupted in his own blast of enthusiasm. “Didn’t we always want this? Work a few hours, lie out on a beach somewhere and have a few cocktails later, good dinner out or go to a dinner party and just rap? God, it’s great!”
His hands gripped my shoulders. They tightened as he spoke and then, with some flash of recognition, they loosened, and the grip became embarrassed pats. “Hey! I haven’t held the kid yet, Bets.” She passed Mack over to him. Paul held him close and cooed to him.
Allis and I changed and we all shuffled out to the private beach on the bay, carrying drinks and snacks and talking about the things that’d happened to us since we’d last been together. Paul and Betsy talked of France, of course, and we talked of Grenada.
“But the high point was going to Israel, man. My God what a people! Can you believe what they did to the Arabs in just six days?”
“We went on a tour,” Betsy broke in. “Up along the Golan Heights—was that where it was, honey?”
“Yeah, yeah. And for miles all you could see were these trucks and jeeps, brand new, man, riddled with bullet and frag holes on their sides. The Israeli Air Force shot apart a few million dollars’ worth of Russian equipment like that!” He snapped his fingers.
“And do you know what? The Israelis will take that stuff and fix it up and put it right back into service with their army. Too much!”
“And,” Betsy said, “as we went around the country, they showed us where the Israeli land ended and the Arab land began. Fields cultivated on the Israeli side—”
“—rocks and stones on the Arab side,” Allis finished. We guessed just about everyone in New York had heard that by now. It was like saying, There is where the Upper West Side ends and Harlem begins; or There is where Little Italy ends and Chinatown begins.
Betsy was nodding her head in vigorous agreement with Allis. “Yes!” She had missed Allis’ meaning.
“The place is so alive—so vital,” Paul said. “The very air shudders with activity.” He smiled.
“And the Negev,” Betsy said. “It bursts with color—”
“It won’t be a desert much longer, honey.” Paul snorted. “They’re even bringing that back, with new watering methods. Think of it, Cate, cities that were gone by the time the Romans arrived are being restored: Arad, Ashdod. They are truly a remarkable people, if I do say so myself.”
Betsy smiled at him.
“You two should go,” Paul said. He glanced at Allis; the look carried a mild reproof.
Allis shrugged. “Maybe. One day. Who knows?”
Paul stretched luxuriously upon his towel. He placed Mack beside him. “Everything,” he said, “everything they do is just at the right time and in the right place. Eichmann. That showed the world.”
“Strangely,” Allis said, “Eichmann standing there in his bulletproof cage, with the side of that thin, thin mouth pulled down, evoked, whether one likes it or not, some sympathy edged in horror. He was visible; his victims were not—”
“Aw, c’mon,” Paul retorted, with a harshness that made me twist. “That goddamn weasel? I hope Wiesenthal catches them all. Leave it to the rest of the world, forget it. Get ’em all, every fuckin one of ’em; hang ’em, gas ’em, shoot ’em. Never again, goddamn it, never again.” He turned accusingly toward her. “Didn’t you lose some relatives?”
“Yes,” Allis said. “Yes, I did.”
“We shouldn’t forget,” I said. “We’re taught to forget too many things.”
But Paul was sulking in his righteous wrath.
Betsy said, “We all have things to remember, darling. Should my Irish part forget what the British did and are doing to the Irish?”
“Hah!” Paul said triumphantly. “The IRA’s doing exactly what we’re doing.”
I smiled, and Paul asked, “What’s funny, Cate?”
“Hey. Once we were talking about slavery and the slave trade—or I was—and you said we’d all be better off putting the past to rest. But you really meant my past, didn’t you, not yours?”
Betsy broke in quickly, like a cavalryman riding to the rescue. “Aren’t we, all of us, victims? And the past is a whole, a collective, linked, direct and indire
ct experience, Paul? Jews hardly ever talk about how well they did, living in the Arab-Iberian society, do they? Of course, that ended when the Christians kicked them both out.”
“Few people treated us better, Paul,” Allis said.
“I was talking about the crimes against Jews carried out by the Germans,” Paul said.
I drew a deep breath and tried to signal Allis and Betsy that perhaps we should change the subject. But one last thing insisted, pushed and arrived: “Crimes against humanity didn’t begin with the Jews and they won’t end with the Jews. What happened this time around was technology. Photography. Wire recorders. Radio. Duplicating systems. Almost instantaneous transmission, once the facts were disclosed, so you became fixed in time for a lot of people to remember, for many people to see. Other victims had to make do with not so hot photography, paintings by Goya, drawings—”
“Maybe,” Paul said, “black people ought to build their own Yad Va’Shem in Jamestown Harbor for sixteen nineteen—”
“That’s almost a hundred years too late,” I said.
“Why? Why? Why are we talking like this?” Allis demanded, reaching out for Mack as though to protect him. “Why does it always have to be blacks or Jews, Jews or blacks?”
“Metaphors, baby,” I said.
“I’m not a goddamn metaphor. I’m Allis Douglass.”
“Hear, hear,” Betsy said.
Something like waves of heat from concrete filled the air between us. Paul got up for more drinks. Betsy and Allis took Mack into the water. I watched a twenty-five-footer pump down the channel to the sea.
We were back together in another few minutes, Paul passing out drinks with a great flurry, Allis and Betsy drying off Mack.
“So,” Paul said. “What’re you working on now?”
“Nothing. Just delivered a novel to Twentieth.”
“Great,” Paul said.
“But he’s already into another,” Allis said.
Betsy said, “How nice. You know, David Susskind’s picked up an option on The Burnt Offering for the movies.”
“Marvelous,” Allis said.
“Fantastic,” I added. The game had begun. “Who’s to do the screenplay?”
Paul said, “They want me to take a crack at it.”
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