The Syme Papers

by Benjamin Markovits

  ‘Damn you!’ – a mutter, from the same source.

  Then the noise of Miss Susie waking the boys, equivalent cries, equivalent mutters, like father, like sons.

  Then footsteps, rustle of dressing, touch of make-up against the eyelashes and lips (dreamily, daintily imagined by a happy half-sleeping husband, or a half-happy unsleeping husband, depending). Then a pause, of steps, beside the bed, beside the head of Pitt within the bed. A brisk, a disappointed, an uninspired ‘good morning’. A moment’s wifely pity – a button pressed – the buzz of the television dwindling, dwindling into the centre of the tube, swallowed by grey reflecting glass once more. Footsteps. Door slam. Silence.

  Silence.

  Almost sleep.

  Sleep. A moment or two – a quarter-hour. (At the most.)

  Then the dull flap and thud of the mail upon my feet – upon the feather-bed over my feet.

  The morning rejections.

  Susie and the boys were gone when I arose, showered and shaved, naked and pink in the steaming bathroom, wiping from time to time the fogged glass with my squeaky palm. ‘Our joy is a country of one,’ Phidy said; and he was right, for how much of my life passes in snatched pleasures, Pitt does not like to say. But our grief is a country of one, too; and I sagged lonely between the cushions of the couch, coffee in hand, among the papers, and read over the almost endless flotsam of denials, both equivocal and unequivocal, that the tide of Susie tossed upon my feet each morning; interested denials and uninterested denials; formal and informal denials, in plain and pedantic English; refusing publication, refusing publication, refusing publication.

  Thus uplifted, I walked to work.

  The work itself, the teaching itself, went swimmingly enough, with this proviso: that it is difficult to swim in puddles. I taught two classes: first, a standard history of science from Plato to Planck, in which I managed to attract (quite remarkably) the fewest students to enrol among any of the three lecturers engaged to teach the subject (among them Bunyon, who considered it a mark of proletarian pride to assume the most basic duties of his faculty, mostly, I believe, because it is the only subject he had truly mastered, broad and shallow enough for him to escape drowning). Second, a seminar of my own devising based largely upon my doctoral thesis, which proposed and comprehensively proved the notion that Newton’s alchemical and astrological speculations ran not only side by side but hand in hand with the mathematical and physical advances that made him famous – so true it is that the army of reason marches upon its imagination, as Napoleon’s battalions are said to have marched upon their stomachs.

  ‘Newton & Nonsense’, I called it: an enquiry into Newton’s unorthodox conjectures. I had two students. The tenure committee was due to meet in the spring. I had only a few months left to make my mark.

  Susie had supper on the table when I came home. I left the rejections open for her to see beside the telephone, but they were never touched when I got back (after a snooze stretched out on the piebald carpeting of my office, among the coffee stains and the cigarette stubbings, left over from the days of academic smoking). She was a wonder of organization, and beside our bedroom window had erected an antique discovery of mine (from a year when my gifts brought peace): the pine partitioned despatch box of an old telegraph office, discovered in Fredericksburg, a pigeon-holed wall-hanging of a hundred little cubicles, in which she filed (each hole neatly labelled) the bulk of her (I should say, our, for they were in fact mostly mine) significant papers, from tax returns, to jury summonses, to job applications, to school reports. But she would not touch my rejections, nor slip the cover-notes in the little box marked Rej above the slot for Rel (which contained a great many pamphlets on mixed marriages, and their results, the decline of faith in modern Judaism, etc., etc., and other paper pills to poison our marriage). The rejections she left to me.

  The gift, by the by, had only just smoothed over a most diluvian row, occasioned by the disappearance, or, rather, the reappearance of a little, apparently harmless, slip (six pages long, front and back) of a job application – for the position of History Lecturer, with a Special Interest in the Sciences, at Fordham University, located in the Bronx, New York. The date of application had, as dates will (a physical fact of which I could not persuade her), passed by, and no bickering or regret could push the time back, regardless of how much she desired a return to ‘the City’, as she said, nor how much I disliked such prospects, considering the presence there of both her mother and grandmother, not to mention the significant dip in position, from Texas to Fordham, the move would occasion.

  Susie discovered this little packet – the long lines untouched, my name in white, my previous salaries a nought, my education a wide snowfall of blanks – propping up the shortened leg of my bedside table. She said, stooping to retrieve the crumpled wadge, ‘How you can live in such mess, I don’t know.’ She said, ‘You wouldn’t find something like this at my end of the room.’ She said, ‘Honestly, Pitt, what’s this doing down there,’ and yanked the bundle, black with dirt and deeply indented, out from under the foot, causing last night’s glass of dusty water to wobble and spill and drip steadily on to the mock-Eames bedside table.

  ‘Because it wobbles,’ I said, ‘otherwise.’

  Then she began to read. (This is a great fault in Susie, that she reads things better left unread, like bills, and warranties, and leases, and mortgages, and Christmas cards, etc. There are some games that can only be lost by playing – and the challenge of the daily mail is one of these, as I have told her, again and again.)

  ‘What’s this?’ she said. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘And then my water, if it is water,’ I added, by way of explanation, ‘spills; or tea, if it is tea.’

  Susie turns aside too readily from my explanations; she seeks the truth herself; discovers a different version of events from mine (to which she has scarcely attended) and complains. (There are always different versions of events, which is why the word carries such an uncertain weight in the world’s vocabulary. ‘Eventually’ suggests only that at some stage, in the future, a thing will probably come to pass, most likely when everyone has ceased to care about it one way or another. The Germans, an exact and subtle race, have whittled away at even this much conviction; and their word ‘eventuell’ means only that something may or may not occur, depending on contingencies, an assertion undoubtedly correct.)

  The next thing she said was ‘But this would be fantastic!’ as she twigged the nature of the application, and rifled through the thin pages. At this point, I confess, I felt a certain amount of shame (and that curious flush of tenderness that rises in us when we have done the thing that will upset our loves). ‘At Fordham,’ she said, ‘why that’s perfect! You could catch the train to 59th Street and transfer to the Q. It’s so sweet to be out of the tunnels and over the river. I could get the yellow bus up 1st Avenue, and leave no later than a quarter till – just as I used to, riding up to school. Oh my dear,’ she said, ‘oh my dear.’ (A strange phenomenon, I believe, how sudden love blooms at even the prospect of being planted in a privately desired patch of real estate.) ‘Na-na will be just around the corner from your office. We could all meet up for coffee when class is out.’ And she pressed her fingers to one another and then to her lips, as if to kiss the prospect they had caught between them.

  A word about this Na-na. I first met Susie’s grandmother on a bleak, whistling day in December, before we were married, when school shut because snow had flooded the subway tracks. Susie managed to snaffle a car from the college counsellor and we rode up to the Bronx through a haze of dirty snow and brake-lights. We arrived three hours late for lunch, or three hours early for supper, to a little row house with an old Cadillac in the front yard that hadn’t been driven since 1962, and had begun to grow things and resemble a rusted flower box. There is nothing unusual or shameful in this, only it was known as ‘the family car’, in the sense, I suppose, that all the family benefited equally from it, that is, not at all.

&
nbsp; At various points in our history together (this being the first), at the slightest of provocations (such as the bus never came, the subway’s down, the airport’s closed, my back hurts), we were told (or I was told, as Susie didn’t drive at the time, and we had only just begun to ‘go out’ and lived apart) to take it, to take it with all blessings, to take the family car, and not be silly, it’s only sitting there. This much is true – it was only sitting there. This is also true – it could only sit there. Regardless, before we left that evening in a blizzard, after a seven-hour supper that involved, it seemed, a single dish at several stages in its evolution, I was told, by Susie’s mother, not to be a fool, to take the family car back to Manhattan, where it could get a run-around, with her blessing, and I should never think twice about it. Only Susie’s insistence that our friend, the college counsellor, may be somewhat put out if we left his car in the Bronx and returned with another prevented our pushing that Cadillac across the Triborough Bridge to get it home.

  Na-na had come out of the shower to answer the door; she wore in lieu of a bath-robe an old blue overcoat that belonged once to her husband, and now hunched about her wet shoulders with an air of misplaced military bravado. Clumps of thin black hair hung from her skull, revealing the nude pink of her scalp, slightly steaming in the chill of the doorway. Regardless of her ablutions, she smelled of cabbages and onions. She smelled always of cabbages and onions. There are only some things, I should say now, to which the odour of cabbages and onions can be seen as a welcome addition. Such as sausages. Na-na was not sausages.

  Much of the first two hours were taken up with a number of variations on the question, ‘Na-na, why were you in the shower at three in the afternoon?’ We sat down to tea – Na-na, it should be said, still dripping through her overcoat. ‘Lovely tea,’ Susie would say, ‘Na-na, why did you take a shower?’ This was followed, at certain points, by ‘Was it a nice shower?’ and ‘Did you dry off?’ and ‘Do you want me to get you a towel?’ and ‘Did you manage to use the soap we tied to the shower-head?’ But we always returned, faithfully, to the heart of the matter, and ‘Why did you take a shower at three in the afternoon?’ In its own way, the conversation offered no less scope for variety than your ordinary get-ting-to-know-you chats; and I was not ungrateful for being given a set theme to work upon.

  The only trouble was that Na-na spoke no English. And neither Susie nor her elegant and assimilated and successfully married (in every sense of the phrase) mother Bétte – the busy and trim head of a gallery, painfully slender to Susie’s eyes, though more of a sister, etc., than anything else – spoke whatever it was that Na-na did speak. Regardless of this circumstance, Na-na is held to be something of an oracle; consulted upon the slightest family decision, her advice religiously followed – if anyone can ever figure out what it is. Pitt should have spent his childhood boning up on Lithuanian; his omission to study this has led to the current impasse in his relations with Na-na, who (Pitt should now confess) is not really called Na-na at all, but Nanna or some such nonsense – it is only Pitt who believes a slight misapprehension of a name can be both humorous and healthful to the subject, and insists upon calling her Na-na, like a goat braying, no, no, no.

  Pitt, believe me, is familiar with this bray. To do him some justice, he has suffered greatly at Na-na’s hands, in that the least decision involving any member of the Wielengrad extended family must first be put to Na-na’s incomprehension – or, rather, it is the family’s incomprehension to which Na-na’s decision must be put. It seems to Pitt more than likely that the ancient oracles were in fact simply cabbage-scented foreigners who never understood their supplicants, and who uttered replies their supplicants never understood (demands, no doubt, for such necessaries as a new overcoat for the shower, or larger onions) – thus manufacturing between them a considerable air of divine mystery. The fact that Na-na eventually consented to Susie’s coming to Texas belongs to the more miraculous of these mysteries – it is Pitt’s belief that only the tickling whisper in her boiled ear of his sly suggestion (unheard by Susie) that they would transport themselves in the ‘family car’ to the great Southwest ‘sealed the deal’, as they say, in one of her lucid moments – if lucidity can be defined as that access to understanding that permits the function of a constitutional insanity.

  But I digress. (She was cold, by the by; that’s why she took a shower at three in the afternoon, because her house was so cold the lettuce froze, and she was losing the feeling in her fingers. That’s why she wore the overcoat, too.) Then Susie said, ‘What was this doing under your goddamn bedside table?’

  She had asked the right man, I don’t deny that. I could have given several answers to this question, having made a particular study of Aristotelian notions of causation in all their glorious variety. The efficient cause was no doubt Pitt himself, who slid what came to hand under the bedside table – prompted, I believe, by a wobble too far, as he set his cup of tea upon a much-loved copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, and spilled a thin ring of brown over the leather cover. The final cause was obvious enough – to steady the mock-Eames bedside table Pitt had purchased only the week before in a moment of solitary antiquing on Burnet Road. The formal cause (though here I am liable to muddles) lay no doubt in some predictable flaw in the carpentry that resulted in the shortened leg (just as such a flaw had resulted in my son’s abbreviated arm?) and the ensuing wobble – the ideal form of the bedside table being in some abstract fashion satisfied by the addition of a heap of folded papers beneath its foot. The material cause – and here I venture on firmer ground – was the application for the position of History Lecturer, with a Special Interest in the Sciences, at Fordham University, located in the Bronx, New York: a sheaf of coloured paper, which Pitt had been using as a bookmark in the copy of Jurassic Park he had turned to (he is ashamed to admit) when Palgrave’s Golden Treasury had begun to … pall.

  The real trouble with the material cause was that the material was out of date. (Now that I come to think of it, there may have been some ambiguity in the final cause as well.)

  ‘What’s this? What’s this?’ Susie repeated, frowning and squeezing her eyes, as the penny dropped. And then she gave a large, heartbreaking sigh – a sigh, in the first sweetness of upset, directed more at the vagaries of human nature in general than Pitt’s in particular. ‘Oh, Doug,’ she said, at last. ‘Oh, Doug.’ (How plump and lovely her cheeks looked then; how brave and miserable!) ‘Why?’ she asked, now wrinkling her lips into a horrible false smile, a smile of suppressed distaste, of stifled condescension. ‘Why?’ she asked again, all her natural loveliness of temper and feature puckered into anger. ‘Why did you not apply for this?’

  ‘Because …’ Pitt murmured.

  ‘Why did you not discuss this job with your wife?’

  ‘Because …’he managed to breathe at last, ‘the date had passed. Because I forgot and the date had passed. Because I am sorry and I forgot and the date had passed. Because I am deeply sorry and the table wobbled and I forgot and the date had passed. Because I am sorry; and it wobbled.’

  Susie began to tear the application, with considerable force, and a great red grinding of her jaws and swelling of her cheeks, into little pieces; which she then dropped, effortless and gently (in sharp distinction to the violence of her previous exertions) to the floor, drifting like snow into a scattered heap, while she said nothing.

  ‘I am hopeless,’ Pitt freely admitted, believing as always that the best policy is apology, abashed and abased and wholehearted, ‘empty-headed; irresponsible and unreliable; wool-gathering and hare-brained; addled and forgetful; scatter-and feather-brained. I am sorry and the date passed and I could not bring myself to bring it up and the table wobbled.’

  ‘You’d have been better off,’ she said, in a quite terrifying calm, ‘if you had thrown it away.’

  ‘I thought of that,’ Pitt said. (Then wished he hadn’t.)

  ‘You wish you hadn’t said that,’ Susie said.

  ‘I si
mply forgot,’ Pitt urged.

  ‘I thought you were many things, Doug: childish and selfish, a little bit crazy and full of junk ideas. I knew you made things up to please yourself, things that wouldn’t please anybody else, but they pleased you. I never minded that, much. I used to like it. Pompous, too, if you could be, but you can’t be, even when you try, you’re just too odd, so it doesn’t count. But I never thought you were dishonest, not dishonest … when it mattered.’

  ‘I simply forgot,’ Pitt repeated.

  The truth is that I simply do not know whether the week I let slip past before I turned again to Robinson Gould’s The Science of History & the History of Science (in which wonderful and neglected tome I first stuck the packet and proceeded to neglect it further) resulted from intention or inattention, the tiny insertion of a harmless preposition (‘at’) marking, it seems, a world of difference. In Pitt’s defence, I should say that I am a great tagger of books, scribbler of restaurant phone-numbers, jotter of projected revisions of my academic ambitions, presser of leftover receipts and theatre tickets and sandwich coupons. Any book of Pitt’s should scatter an autumn of loose leaves from its hair, when held at the spine and violently shook. In my defence, I can honestly say that the sin at least was characteristic.

  The fact is I did not wish to return to Susie’s life and world. And the time passed by … conveniently.

  In my youth I remember faintly envying the adult capacity for indecision-making, which, according to all sophisticated accounts (of which I read whatever I could lay my hands on, Updike, Amis, C.P. Snow, grand tales of foreign life), allowed grown and responsible men to act from motives that were not only mysterious to the heroes themselves but cast such ambiguity over their acts that legitimate doubts could arise regarding what, even on the simplest level, had actually occurred. Growing up, Pitt committed many dubious but no doubtable acts. I knew why I did whatever I did and what I had done. Most of the time, Pitt acted out of hunger – though I am not such a stubborn prole as to limit this hunger to the purely physical appetites. (Of which I had, and still have, plenty, though I also wanted to get up in the world and make a name for myself; and I wanted class.) I anticipated, on growing up, experiencing a kind of mild intoxicated pleasure (life enjoyed at one remove) on learning to commit those loose and ambiguous actions that seemed to have not one but many and shifting causes, and not one but various and doubtful effects.