“Then you remember that I make films. When I can scrape up the money.”
“Who scraped up the money so you could come here of all places?”
“People.”
“Why to the Academy? And why to this one? Come on, Max.”
He swung around to face me squarely. “Come on,” he shouted. “I’ll come on, all right. I came here because I thought I could find a breaking through, here. A—a liberation—a breaking down of things. And what the hell do I see? This place is as organized—as dead—as the goddamned life that drives people here.”
He started to move around wildly. The camera slapped at his chest. He was a big man—over six feet. But the habit of bending or slouching over a camera seemed to have shortened him. It made him somehow less formidable. Now he unfolded himself in fury, like a large, berserk accordion.
“What are you staring at? I look like my own death mask, don’t I … Have you ever experimented with that notion … live long enough to turn your face into your death mask … then you know you’ve lived exactly long enough … that’s one way of transforming nature … that’s what I expected to find here … a transformation … a transfiguration …”
I broke in. “We don’t have much to do with nature here,” I said. “That’s why Academies are always built in beautiful countryside. Nature is all chance, accident. That’s what we’re fighting here.”
“… not a cure … just the same fucking sickness … the slime of order … the order that serves up sex in a cold sauce … winters full of stifling heat …”
Behind Max the closed circuit TV went blank as the day’s guests moved to the next area.
“… know damned well there’s no such thing as madness … what’s a lunatic, do you know, Wolf? …”
Before I could answer he said, “It’s somebody society wants to shut up … I’ll tell you a secret … a lunatic is a man who prefers to go mad … for the sake of purity.” He laughed; no madman’s laugh, though. Cool, it was. “Yes … all madmen are Boy Scouts … they choose madness to keep their honor … to play fair with the mysteries all around them … instead of stupidly pretending they’re dealing with them … or acting as if they weren’t there …” He looked around him at the empty chairs lined up in front of the empty TV screen, at the window that looked blindly out at the surrounding grounds. “Where is the mystery here …” He stopped short. The possessed look melted from his beefy face. It was replaced by a sly expression, almost feminine.
“The only mystery,” he said, “is how she stayed married to you for five years … and for two of those years she was modeling for me …”
The bastard was deliberately re-activating my old anxieties. Strangely, the question of whether Jewel had been unfaithful with Max had not plagued me at the time she left me. I think I’d assumed that she probably had been. After all—it was Max for whom she’d left. It was Max who’d promised to make her the queen of the non-territory of Cardillo filmland. Later, I began to brood. I suffered from a post-possessive sickness. It became essential to me that there had been a clean break. Stop with me—start with Max. I convinced myself after the fact that this was the case. At one point I think I would have died if I’d been forced to believe otherwise.
Jewel’s entire self was tangled up in her body, more so than most people, most women. She was the triumph of the apparent: utterly white skin, absolutely blue eyes, blonde hair that was the complete absence of black, of darkness. Perhaps it was her all-embracing narcissism that finally transferred itself to me. I saw her body and her self through her eyes. The strength of my passion for her was doubled, adding to it Jewel’s love for herself. Like all passions this self-love was far from simple. Toward the end of our marriage, when I knew she was going to leave, I would look at her while she slept. It was the only moment of the day when she was cut off from the intensity of her own self-regard. She lay there, whitely beautiful under the harsh latticing of the venetian-blind shadows—abstract as a piece of exquisitely carved wax fruit. (Yet only a few hours earlier she’d paraded in front of me, half-naked, wearing a mad orange beret she’d just bought—or had Max given it to her?—asking: “How do I look? Does the French style become me?” as if I were nothing but a mirror.)
I’d woken her up and made love to her, searching out new possibilities with lips and fingers.
Now, of course, with three years at the Academy behind me, a certain objectivity was ingrained. Or so I’d thought. The dream in which Jewel sang “reviens …” mixed in my mind with Max’s verbal jab.
“What mysteries are you making, Max?” I said.
“What mysteries?” he replied.
“I remember you, Max,” I said. “Jewel’s modeling for you was no mystery. Was there anything else—while she was still living with me?”
“That,” he said, “was the question you wanted to ask.”
“Well?”
“… whether the serpent ever invaded that fourth floor walk-up Eden on Bleecker Street?” He smelled control. “Listen,” he said. “I’d like a drink.”
“Against the rules.”
“You’re the goddamned Director.”
“Rules.” I wasn’t giving an inch.
“Then how about a cup of coffee.”
“How about an answer,” I said, implacable.
“What’s the difference when something starts? When things end is all that matters.”
“When?”
“I told you, Wolf: you’re too sensitive.”
I moved toward him. I had no idea where I could borrow the menace I was trying to invoke. There was urgency, too—I could feel it at the back of my neck—knowing that the door could open at any moment and I might not be alone again with Max for the rest of the day, forever. He took a step backward. To distract him from my intensity I changed the subject.
“What are you doing here, anyway? You didn’t want to find your big liberation by making a movie of the Suicide Academy. You wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t. Who told you to come? Are you going to report to someone?”
“To who?”
“That’s what I want to know.”
“You’re crazy.”
“They can make it pretty rough on you if it turns out you’re spying.”
“Spying for who?”
I was right next to him now. He was disconcerted for the moment by my last question—or rather by his own, whether because of his innocence or his guilt I didn’t know. Anyway I took advantage of it, though I was as surprised as he was when I did it, by grabbing the camera and lifting it from around his neck.
“Give it back, Wolf.”
“Not until you tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Is that your way of telling me?”
“Give me that camera.”
“It’s a good one, isn’t it? Ah—German. They know how to do it, all right.”
“Give.”
“Expensive, isn’t it? Where’d you get the money for a camera like this?”
He made a lunge for me but I backed off swiftly, keeping a row of chairs between us.
“Come on, you Jew-bastard,” he said. “Give it to me.”
“Good,” I said, exhilarated. “Turn ugly. Let’s have only the truth between us.”
He lunged for me again and fell, his big bulk flopping among the wooden chairs like a fish on dry land.
I have always been the kind of Jew who provokes the anti-Semitic remark. Some Jews go through life just missing the slur, narrowly avoiding but never knowing the open contempt or anger of their neighbors. Not me! It’s a kind of perverse destiny. Perhaps because I was brought up in a pseudo-Chasidic community devoid of all but Jews. Good, I thought, perverse as my destiny, Gilliatt has company for the day.
And before he could get up—he was on his knees—I pinned Max to the floor. He was flabbier than I thought and I was able to hold firm.
“Let go!”
“When did it happen?”
“Go to hell.”
I shoved his
neck down, hard, toward his chest, imagining the sounds of breaking bones.
“When?”
“I thought … you wanted to know why we came … who sent us …”
“Answer, you bastard.”
“Which—” he gasped. I could feel him trying to get a purchase with his knees, tensing his body to lunge upward.
“Who—” he blew like a mad owl, “When, why—which?” His mad sounds communicated to me my own madness. I stopped abruptly. I tried to catch my breath while he disentangled himself from the debris. Then in a blast of snowy air, Gilliatt and Jewel stood in the doorway; behind them, Barbara. Max was on his feet, looming large next to me. He took the camera from my hands with an incongruous delicacy for one so large and furious. Jewel stared at Max and then at me. She seemed to know everything that had passed between us, but that was of course only the consequence of her blue eyes set wide apart in her ingenuous ingénue’s face.
“We’re ready for you, Mr. Cardillo,” Gilliatt said, blandly. “We’ve set up lights for the filming at three places. First—”
“No lights, you idiot!” Max said. “I use available light whether there’s any available or not.”
Jewel said, “What have you and Wolf been doing?”
“Playing,” he said.
“What did you tell him?”
I looked from Jewel’s frozen face to Max’s sweaty one. Laughter was threatening to bubble up in my throat. It was, after all, not only broad daylight but before noon. And such physical jealousy, long after loss, was funny. Even looking at Jewel’s perfect, upthrust cheekbones (she had repaired her make-up in the interim) and her slender legs placed in some balletic stance that had not yet been given a number, I could see how funny the whole notion was, and the violence that had followed from it. Over her shoulder Barbara’s face stared at me or past me. It was impossible to tell.
“I told him why I’m here,” Max said.
“What?”
“Yes. From the old anarchy, the old wildness—to see if, maybe, my suicide is waiting for me here. I believe in the freedom of suicide. An American to the last. But I could never create the time and place for my suicide; the minute it becomes the only logical step—I’ll take it.”
“Romantic,” I said. “Those choices are too random. Your whole life has to lead toward the logic—or it’s foolishness.”
“… want the luck of my death … not the plan … the lie …” As his internal pressure grew, his speech began to splinter apart again. He made a contemptuous gesture with his arms. “Naaah,” he said. “I’m not like the ones you get here…. If I would ever commit suicide it would be not to break up myself and the old painful combinations—it would be to paste myself together, once and for all …”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jewel’s stiffened mouth unpurse itself. Was he lying, then? Perhaps they were hiding something worse than Max’s dabbling in suicide. Spies? No, spying was at the same time too complicated and too simple for them. Something even worse? My mind slipped around the slippery edges of that one.
By the natural mechanism of a silence the lead passed to Gilliatt. He took advantage of it by starting to herd everyone out of the room. Barbara escorted Jewel; Gilliatt, after a reproachful glance that included both the scattered chairs and myself, followed; and after him came Max and myself. Suddenly, Gilliatt reversed his course and appeared at my elbow as Max bent to retrieve some equipment.
“By the way,” he said softly, “Brand wants to see you at four o’clock. And then Rath. Just before the meeting of the Board of Management.”
Brand was the Chairman of the Board, a difficult man who rarely saw anyone outside the confines of the Board Room. I’d only seen him twice since my employment at the Academy. And I’d never met Rath, the Academy President. Something was up.
“I’m impressed,” I said to Gilliatt, to cover my confusion.
“I would be,” he said, with a friendly, demonic smile. He blinked swiftly; the skin of his eyelids was pinkish, trailing off to blue-blacks near the lashes. He left, followed by a burdened Max.
Just before he reached the door, Max turned to me.
“I remember you,” he said. “You were a lousy actor and a lousy director. Jewel told me all about your crazy childhood. That’s why you’re up here in this phony Nirvana playing Buddha to a bunch of scared suicides who haven’t got the guts to do it. No matter how lousy I treat Jewel she’s better off with me. I remember you!”
Alone in the room observed only by the silent blank TV screen, I remembered me, too.
13
I COUNTED TO TEN, slowly. Then I opened the door and walked out into the corridor. It was a comforting and familiar sight. Two chambermaids were carrying linen to the guests’ rooms. From the Administration Office a typewriter announced the existence of endless lists of names, of personal histories, each one different, yet not quite different. Each one the same, yet not quite the same.
Outside, snow was sifting slowly down from the opaque sky. Part of me registered the occurrence personally: white to the eye, cold to the heart. Part of me, the Director-part, worried about having someone sweep off the steps to the Administration Building. But my encounter with Max had left my head whirling. The snowy steps would have to wait. It was seeing Jewel again that should have thrown me. But it turned out to be Max and the disturbing insanities of his tongue. What did he know of my childhood? What could Jewel have told him, except the part that she understood? And I had labored unsuccessfully, I’d thought, to make her understand.
My childhood was my father. How explain Solomon, the king of my young years? Especially to Jewel, the white, Gentile virgin, waiting to be sacrificed to the tormented Jewish God she had married. Solomon had been a member of a rebel Chasidic sect that settled in Key West in the mid-nineteen-thirties. There, again—should I explain Chasidism, its strange joys and historical origins? I chose the easy way out, telling her it was a kind of Christian Science Judaism—a little more pantheistic, perhaps. There were thirty families living in our village-within-a-village. A sheltered island in the midst of the twentieth-century ocean.
Like Buddha I was brought up entirely sheltered from pain and the uglier realities of life. (My mother died when I was two. She was never, thus, an abandoning presence, merely an absence.) My father tutored me at home. I never set foot in a public school. Yet his purpose was not particularly religious. My father said his morning prayers sporadically. He attended synagogue some Friday nights and Saturday mornings—others not. What were consistent were the precepts of the sect, for sect it was, as poorly organized as it had been.
God’s will is man’s will. Therefore the will is to be honored and trained above the mind and the emotions.
What happens in the world is good. Because the world is all there is: heaven, earth and hell, all at once. Thus, the world is to be shunned. Because good without evil is a sickness.
These slightly addled pseudo-Talmudic sayings were the daily bread of my childhood. Some of them were deliberately witty, like: Love thy neighbor before he loves you. Thus you have the moral advantage.
I studied these puzzling precepts with the same zeal as I did Chaucer, biology or the commentaries of Rashi.
The physical surroundings in which I grew up contributed to my sense of special protection. The lucidity of mornings that rose, dazzling, over the sea. Arching, rainbow-colored umbrellas of sky that accepted the sun as no sky has since. The result was a clarity of light that touched every shape, every outline, whether house or tree or abandoned boat, with luminescence. With this came a freshness of air that only the semi-Tropics knows—air that has the weight of the fragrances it bears, a delicate weight that presses on the sixteen-year-old heart, that squeezes out the anxious and nameless feelings that are carried in a tight cluster in the breast, until a breath of scented evening air releases them in an inarticulate flood.
Those who live near the sea develop an intense and continuous relationship with the sky. Sea—sky—the natural conjunctio
n of the two is no accident. It is in the nature of such landfalls that the sky becomes a kind of comment on the meeting of ocean and land. That sky, that blue was of such an intensity that it promised a myriad of meanings to my eyes, looking always to see through it! Finally, I grew content to accept it as a silent and opaque partner in all my young—largely imaginary—ventures.
Then there were the rains. For days, weeks, months the sky deluged me with pouring reproaches. My brain musty with damp heat, I went about my studies with a sense of personal betrayal. When the skies were clear, during the few hours not actively filled with study or play or prayer, I would lie on my back and examine it the way lovers look moonily and endlessly at the beloved’s face. I would search for omens in the topography of the heavens. If I had a conflict—say a friend wanted me to play sick to avoid lessons, then sneak out with him to the movies—I would look upward for an answer. This had nothing to do with my supposed location of a God above. It was a primitive duality, myself and the sky. The question of choice even at that tender age was so crucial to me that I had to involve the great, inanimate vault overhead which I felt, in my motherlessness and in my self-imposed loneliness, to be my only true friend. If a girl whom I had been secretly lusting after was not returning my glances, I turned to the sky for some special configuration of puffy cloud or sun-gilded quadrant of blue that would tell me the time was ripe to be bold—or to bide my time in secret hunger. That was why I felt the rainy season to be a betrayal. It was like a mask over a father’s face (I could not remember my mother’s) hiding possible auguries that could influence choice.
One day, of course, the rain would stop. Then the world was revealed in a primary light, its blues definitive, its yellows gilding the crystalline air: in the face of such magnificent renewal who could believe in the existence of death. Obviously an old wives’ tale! Having endured the ordeal of rain for so long, sometimes months, for the rest of the year the sky had an impossible purity. It was at this time, right after the rains, that the entire Fellowship gathered at the Bay to celebrate the end of the deluge. Together we chanted the b’rocha of gratitude for deliverance from natural disaster (we were not farmers; rain was not cherished among us). The summer I remember best was when Solomon, my father, was chosen to speak afterward. I don’t recall everything he said too clearly—I was only about eight years old—but I do remember snatches of his themes. He spoke of speech and silence. Speech, he said, was marvelous. And silence, too, was marvelous. Only the deaf monologue was bad. Most of our lives, he said, we carry on a deadly monologue while fooling ourselves into thinking we are engaged in a dialogue—with anyone or anything—with a teacher, a wife, an automobile. Actually all of life must be a dialogue to be of any value. There are no excuses, he added with a laugh that twisted his short black beard foolishly. He was not a prepossessing-looking man. Rain, for example. When rain falls a dialogue is instantly initiated. You are depressed by the rain? You are responding in dialogue. You delight in it? Likewise! There is the dialogue between man and man. Very difficult, he grinned. And there is the dialogue between man and nature. Almost impossible. And there is the dialogue between man and God. This is, of course, quite impossible. After all, we do not know that God exists. We only have His word for it. And our experience shows us that everything and everyone that claims to exist is not necessarily telling the truth. This is why the impossible dialogue is important. It keeps the mind and the heart forever open to the interchange of thought and feeling. In replying with our answers to a question that may never have been asked, we are affirming the glory of dialogue for its own sake. If God answered directly one day, we would no doubt plead with him to be silent again so the human possibilities of dialogue could continue, so the idea could remain always present. If that mad dialogue between the language of men and the deafness of the heavens could remain always potentially possible, then surely the simply difficult dialogues between men and men—and the almost impossible dialogues between men and nature—surely these must continue for the sake of whatever revelations they might bring!
Suicide Academy Page 4