City of God

by E. L. Doctorow

  His loft, with its large, unshaded windows, was furnished effortlessly, by her unerring impulse. Even now, the careless perfection of it makes him reluctant to move a thing. That flung-about inevitability of the furnishings gives him the illusion of her presence, of the continuation of their life together. She had found the place, lived there alone, and then he had moved in. It was hers, and was still hers, the place, the street, the neighborhood, though she was gone.

  He wonders why he has stayed, why he takes the chance.

  The company downstairs finishes its work, packs up, and the street is deserted by the end of the afternoon. He thinks maybe he is overwrought and reading too much into the coincidence of that scene, but unable to get it out of his mind, he spends the next few days testing the proposition that it is his life, or their life together, that is being filmed. To his dismay he is able to track the company around town, guessing where they are by assuming to know the locations they must choose from. He finds them up at Columbia Journalism, where she got her master’s, he sees them at the Italian restaurant on Ninth Avenue with the decor restored to the way it was before the ownership changed. They even have the right table, the one in the corner under the sconce with the charred shade.

  His attempt to approach the filmmakers is easily thwarted by the A.D.’s with the walkie-talkies, the security guards. Not that he is anxious to make himself known. He catches glimpses of the actress, and it seems to him with each successive scene they do she is becoming more and more like his wife. He doesn’t know what to do. There are location days at Kennedy Airport, at Lincoln Center, at Battery Park. Eventually, he stops tracking them and retires to the loft to wait. And just as he knew they would, they knock on his door early one morning and move in, cables, cameras, lights, reflectors. He makes no attempt to stop them. Chairs are set up for the director, the script girl, the actors. Everyone seems to know him as the leading man. He is made up and takes his place as the camera rolls: There is a knock at the door. He opens it to find two detectives. They identify themselves and want to ask him a few questions. Would he mind if they came in?

  “You’ll think this is crazy or perhaps that I’m crazy,” he says later, on the set of the overnight lockup, where he sits with two actors playing small-time criminals waiting for their lawyers to spring them. He realizes he is talking compulsively, but he can’t stop. “Maybe I am crazy, but I swear to you something is going on with movies in a way even the people who make them don’t understand. I mean, something weird has happened, so that I’m convinced that the people who ostensibly make them are no more than instruments of the movies themselves, servers, factotums, and the whole process, from pitching an idea for one, and getting the financing and finding a star, I mean, the whole operation, while seeming to depend on the participation of directors, producers, distributors, and so on, and for all the animosities and struggles among them, the struggles for control, the interference of studio heads, and profound dicta of the critics, in fact the entire booming culture of movies—all of it is illusion, as the movie is supposed to be, a scripted reality, whereas it’s the movies themselves that are in control, preordaining and self-generating, like a specie with its own DNA. The human agencies who realize them, are subsidiary, like garden bugs who come into being to pollinate flowers, or those birds who live to ride atop the backs of African rhinos and beak away their lice.

  “There are more movies now than ever, you have to agree at least to that, they are in a population explosion, in theaters, on television, on cable, on tape, on discs, they’re everywhere, you can’t escape them, they are creatures, movies, incredibly astute, complex creatures who persuade us that they are manifestations of our own culture, with individual identities but participating in genres, just as we are individuals but within ethnic frameworks. You think I’m nuts but it is possible, I mean you just ought to consider that possibility, that movies are a malign life form that came to earth a hundred or so years ago and have gradually come to dominate not only our feelings but our thoughts, our intellects. They are feeding on us, having first forced us to invent them and provide them with the materiality of their existence, which is film or, latterly, tape. Maybe you would have a better idea of what I am saying by thinking of them as having the same desire to suck us up into themselves as a tapeworm in our guts, one planetary tapeworm living in the guts of the earth, using up the cities, the countryside, the seas, and the mountains.

  “But I don’t expect you to agree, I know what you’re thinking, and not even if I invoke those pseudoscientific horror movies to you, wherein one person, a scientist perhaps, sees some great threat to humanity that he cannot persuade the world of until it is almost too late—a giant bug, or plague or alien specie from space, a King Kongism of disaster is what I’m describing—even knowing that convention and having seen versions of it over and over, you are not about to credit me with the scientist’s perception—the awful knowledge given only to the lonely hero, and perhaps his loyal girlfriend, herself the daughter of an eminent scientist, who will die during the course of the film—because you think I’ve been watching too many movies!

  “But I offer to you as evidence my own life, which has somehow attracted the attention of the movie creatures. as they apparently have you, and look at me sitting here on this set with you, and already you think I’m just an actor reading his lines, that’s the role you’re supposed to be playing, but whether I am or not, I can testify that I’m feeling myself losing dimension, losing moral substance, complexity, I’m going flat, I’m turning into a shadow, and it’s a terrible feeling wherein even your most intimate passionate feelings are, you suspect, words on a page written for you to act out.

  “And I can’t even tell anymore if this is the first time I’m saying this or the second or the one hundredth. Can you tell? Am I the real person, or the film image? And you? I just don’t know. And even when I finish this monologue and the director calls, ‘Cut,’ I still won’t know, because he too may be nothing more than an image, a shadow, an arrangement of downloaded ones and zeroes.”

  Cut! a voice calls from the darkness. And he hears bravos and a scattering of applause from onlookers that may or may not be a sound track.

  —The Midrash Jazz Quartet Plays the Standards

  GOOD NIGHT SWEETHEART

  Good night sweetheart,

  Till we meet tomorrow,

  (applause)

  Good night sweetheart,

  Sleep will banish sorrow,

  Tears and parting may make us forlorn

  But with the dawn, a new day is born.

  So I’ll say. . .

  Good night sweetheart

  Tho I’m not beside you

  Good night sweetheart

  Still my love will guide you

  Dreams enfold you, in each one I’ll hold you

  Good night sweetheart, good night.

  Good night sweet thing, good night little lady

  I can’t believe you sleep alone whatever lies you’re telling me

  So good night too to whoever’s beside you

  Hope he don’t dissuade you from the dream I want you to have of me

  I expect we’ll meet in the a.m. as the new day comes up roses

  Each of us lying, posing our poses

  I won’t tell you what I did with you at night in my drunk dreaming

  if you don’t tell me what you didn’t do in that breathy voice of yours, and your eyes beaming and your heart streaming with happiness.

  So good night, miss,

  Good night, hurt so sweet,

  My heartbeat, good night.

  (applause)

  Hey you’re the one, you know, I’ve been around but this

  is something new, holding off at night for the bright

  of the day, and then suggesting it with all sorts of

  wordplay, and the surroundings not a deep purple haze

  But a white tile kitchen and toast and OJ. . . you are a

  witty woman, sweetheart, and I love your game
s,

  I love holding you with your hair still wet

  and your terry robe half open and beads of the shower water on your breasts, I love your demands

  that we be clean and rested to say nothing of sober when we make love

  and that it be done only in the realm of this household.

  Well then good night my dear fine funny face

  I’ll wake you from your dreams in the dawning day

  and we’ll have some clean and loving conversation

  before we latch on to the day’s obligation

  to earn a little money each in our capable way

  so we can pay the monthly cover for this place,

  lay down a fresh new paint job

  and make the bedroom over for a baby—

  Oh Baby,

  you know I just have to have another little sweetheart like you

  to say good night to,

  don’t you, sweetheart?

  Good night!

  (laughter, applause)

  I am on my knees to God, God is my sweetheart

  But He’s saying good night,

  My sweetheart is leaving

  He is telling me to sleep

  He is putting me out to bleak pastures

  Forlorn is hardly the word for the terror of my grieving

  Weeping out of me, scalding my eyes.

  Trouble in mind, God I’m blue

  Must I be blue always?

  Sun is rain, near is far, high is low, day is night

  Nothing is right, nothing is right

  Who is this sweet-talking God, what’s He up to?

  He knows sleep doesn’t banish sorrow

  but works it over, again and again,

  in the drowsing brain

  finding pictures for the pain.

  And what happens when tomorrow dawns

  with never nothing different in the next day’s daylight?

  Will Your love lead me, will Your dreams enfold me?

  After You’ve gone and left me, God,

  With only Your empty promises to guide me?

  (puzzled silence)

  She’s gone. It’s done.

  You’ve got no one.

  Tho dreams deceive

  And sleep consoles you,

  At dawn you’ll find

  No one beside you.

  She’s gone, it’s done,

  You’re all alone.

  The sorrow’s yours

  She’s gone. It’s done.

  ( grumbling)

  —Good night, hurt so sweet, heartbeat, good night.

  —Good night, my dear fine funny face.

  —Will Your love lead me, Your dreams enfold me?

  —She’s gone. It’s done. You’re all alone.

  Good night sweetheart,

  Till we meet tomorrow,

  Good night sweetheart,

  Sleep will banish sorrow. . .

  (audience leaving)

  —Pem has taken to wearing his hair in a ponytail. I go with him on Friday evenings to Eighty-ninth Street, where, in fact, Sarah Blumenthal conducts the services of the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism. There are usually no more than ten or twelve people in attendance, less than half of the number when Joshua Gruen was the presiding rabbi.

  As a result of study and discussion among the congregants, the Sabbath services are being redesigned to the basic and unarguable essentials, consisting so far of the Shema, the declaration of the oneness of God, the principle of abstract monotheism. . . a Kaddish, or ritual prayer for the dead, because this gives comfort to mourners, and renews their memories and restores their gratitude. . . an acknowledgment of the idea of the Sabbath both in the fact of the timing of the services and as the occasion for reflection in a state of freedom. . . and, for the rest, a commitment to the study of the Torah in order to derive from it the imperatives that would complete the restructuring of the services and eventually provide the theoretical basis for the evolved faith.

  Pem loves these evenings, and I am surprised myself to find them so fascinating. The members of the congregation include a professor of Comparative Religion at Columbia, a judge of the State Supreme Court, a young woman studying at the Actors Studio, a married couple, both of whom are physicians, a Barnard junior, and, most touchingly, an elderly white-haired man whose son carries him up the brownstone stairs and retrieves him at the end of the evening.

  Given his own scholarship, Pem finds much that is familiar from his days as a divinity student. I am in the different position of learning things for the first time. Little by little, the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, have under the group’s analysis become the collected texts of the different historical sources, J, E, P, and D. This doctoral candidate from Harvard one evening discussed the work of his eminent teacher J. L. Kugel, who has attended in detail to the distinction between the original texts and the interpretive commentary that sprang up in the three hundred years before and a hundred years into the Common Era that has created the Bible we read today under the illusion that we are reading the original Scriptures. The biblical texts from the beginning were seen as enigmatic, as why would they not be, having been written in a language without vowels or punctuation. And since they were supposed to be divine in their source, and therefore of a supernatural perfection, the scholars, priests, and sages of antiquity felt called upon to explain the contradictions, un-God-like sentiments, unsavory passages, and less than noble acts of noble personages of the stories as well as whatever else could not be countenanced in righteousness. . . by interpreting them metaphorically, symbolically, or allegorically, or changing their meaning by adding punctuation, or opportunistically applying syntactical emphases, or by otherwise reimagining whatever they felt needed improvement if it was to be truly theologically correct. I was happy that evening to recognize the venerable ancestry of hermeneutics. Beyond that, as a writer, I am only fascinated by the power of this hodgepodge of chronicles, verses, songs, relationships, laws of the universe, sins, and days of reckonings. . . this scissors-and-paste job that is in its original form so terse, inconsistent, defiant of common sense, and cryptically inattentive to the ordinary demands of narrative as to be attributed to a divine author.

  Migod. What have I been doing wrong all these years?

  But the Comp Religion guy from Columbia has this take on it: He says the interpreters knew what they were doing when they didn’t try to erase the inconsistencies and neaten things up. The priests and the redactors left in the stuff of the earlier spinmeisters. You never come close to God, you only hope to achieve a refinement of your awareness. The very contradictions, the histories living side by side with their rewrites, manifest the same struggle described in the narratives—to apprehend and accept the awesome completeness and creative totality of the Unnameable.

  After these sessions, Pem and I usually have dinner at a restaurant on Broadway, Amarillo. Less often, Sarah B. has joined us. It’s not a matter of rabbinical decorum (kashruth is one of the inessentials)—she is as concerned about leaving Angelina alone with only the children to be with as she would be about leaving her children alone without Angelina. As if, dear thing, having lost her husband, what else is she going to lose?

  But when Sarah consents to join us, I feel like a chaperon. Why should I feel this way except that something like a courtship is developing? In the candlelight and over the glasses of red wine, they regard each other with a degree of attention they are not even aware of. And when I have something to say, their shining attention to me in unison is clearly an effort of will. Yet they would not hear of my leaving them by themselves. They are afraid of that, both of them, Pem because he doesn’t want to descend to importuning, and she because of the enduring presence in her mind of her husband, Joshua. Her mourning should last, formally, for one year, but this is another inessential according to EJ, on the theory that whatever it takes to remember and memorialize your dead must come naturally from the heart. These things must work out anyway with a psychological inevitabili
ty, is the idea. But Sarah may be wrong about this, insofar as such a custom may be more for the sake of the living than for the dead. A closure. That they may go on. She is in her second year of the loss of her husband now.

  But I do see a drawing together, slow as it is. And since both she and Pem live a life committed to explicit moral seriousness—that is the most abstract construction I can put upon it—their convergence will have to be more than personal. Last Friday night’s study service at EJ dealt with Exodus 19–24, the giving to Moses of the Decalogue. On this evening Sarah led the discussion with great animation, her voice was strong, the consideration of this key episode seemed to lift her spirits, she was not worrying her way through the passages with her customary mien of skepticism and respect but with an assurance, even a sexiness of assurance. She lifted her head, ran her fingers through her hair, and a beautiful smile transformed her face, like the light of the sun breaking, her eyes shone, she has one of those smiles of total vulnerability that can so ambiguously be the moment before the onrush of tears. I’m quoting her from memory: “My sense here, what comes through to me, is the understanding these writers possessed of the morally immense human life. Do you see that? They were proposing an ethical configuration for human existence. Who before had done that in quite the same way? These Commandments were devised by human scriptural genius.. . . We could make the case then for God’s presence after all in the humanly written Bible. The Lord, blessed be His name, as my Orthodox colleagues say [she smiles]. . . being what impels us to struggle for historical and theological comprehension. The biblical minds who created the Ten Commandments that have structured civilization. . . provided the possibility of an ethically conceived life, an awareness that we live in states of moral consequence that, if not yet, must someday bring us closer to a union of understanding with the Creator. What a gift, what a great and profound gift. . . and how worthy of reverence!”

  Alone with Pem at our dinner following, I said I thought the two of them were beginning to look like they belonged together. “Really?” he said. “Really? Tell me what you see, how you can tell!” His face became more florid than usual. I couldn’t have said anything to make him happier. Then after another glass or two of wine, the gloom set in. “She’ll never have me,” he said. “The boys don’t take to me.”