“There is evidence that this portion was added at a later date to the Books of Moses …”
Gilliatt interrupted with a burst of laughter. “Even here the Jew is disputatious. Devious to the end.”
Barbara walked across the front of the auditorium, stately as an absent-minded swan. Slowly Max swung his camera from the activities on the stage to follow Barbara. I got up and walked over to Max. I said, “She’s just one of the guides.” He grunted something.
“I mean—you don’t want her for this film.” Max straightened up and clicked off his camera. “Dammit, Wolf,” he said, “I don’t make films. I accept what comes to my camera.” Something in the way his eyes moved away from Barbara gave me an idea. A diabolical one, worthy of Gilliatt himself. I knew Max’s weaknesses, or one of them. “She’s unattached,” I said. “Her name is Barbara.” He grinned at me, taking the bait. “A wild idea,” he said. “Here, of all places.”
When he was gone, I returned to my seat next to Jewel. Both of us sat still, oblivious to what was taking place on the stage. Jewel stirred, restless, in her seat. Then she turned to me. I caught some scent of light perfume—perhaps only the natural freshness of her skin; it came to me embedded in the flesh of hundreds of evenings of sitting next to each other. The sheer quantity of contact overwhelmed me with memory. Nothing particularly unusual: a sudden bout of lovemaking after returning from a movie, an argument in Washington Square Park. Just the brute, mindless repetition of experiences taken together—any experiences: afternoons of boredom, anger, seemed at that moment to have bound us together, forever.
17
REALITY! A WORLD FULL of ashtrays, street lights, trees and other artifacts—awnings, rocks, animals that appear to speak but cannot be fully understood, people whose wills resist ours—automobiles and wishes, jobs and orgasms, money and dirty dishes—it is all too much. Metaphor, the dream, you can’t do without them. Reality will just not do! We can bear tragedy. It’s so unreal. It is the ashtrays that can drive us to the brink.
Or take my own subtle form of ashtray despair: myself, Wolf Walker—apparently the clown, the charmer—actually the prey of metaphysical sorrows, the sad, searching eye unsatisfied with the comic vision as an answer; the middle-man, the divided man—and the despair of ever merging the two. The clown and the poet are not one. That is the cliché and naturally false. Between the clown and the poet lies the undefined land, a middle ground with neither comedy nor genuine sorrow, but the open possibility of a new metaphor for both. It is on this middle ground that the Suicide Academy stands.
I learned from that Greek psychiatrist who was here for his day that metaphor in Greek is defined as transformation. Perhaps that is why the Academy exists—for the same reason that the metaphoric and all the other forms of parody exist: so that that which we cannot actually experience may still be somehow lived.
18
ONE OF THE MAXIMS I was made to memorize and ponder during my strange education by the Fellowship was: When speaking to a woman, speak softly—because she hears you before you speak. (This one was presented after my father’s death, when I was seventeen and at the age for instruction about women.) I was reminded of this as Jewel and I walked the powdery snow. The snowfall had stopped. In the eastern sky a cold coin of a sun shimmered. As sometimes happens, the moon was already visible in the western sky even though it was barely noon. The two empty circles looked down on the group of guests we passed carrying ice skates and being guided to a pre-luncheon whirl on the frozen-over outdoor swimming pool. (We had been promised a genuine skating rink for so long by the Board of Management that none of us believed in it, and Gilliatt and I had made quite a creditable arrangement at the pool, complete with a heated wooden lodge adjoining.) Another group intersected our path as they were leaving one of the classrooms in the Annex. Several of them were conversing in whispers. They might just have heard a lecture on Actualities of Death or Laughter and Sexuality or any one of the ten lectures being given that day.
I had just begun to explain away my unpleasant little stratagem that had gotten rid of Max for the moment when Jewel interrupted.
“I’m used to all that,” she said.
“Does he still …?” I asked.
“It’s nothing personal with Max. It’s like a tic.”
“Well,” I said, “as long as it’s nothing personal.”
“What did he tell you about our being here?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And I went to some pains to get him to tell me.”
“Why?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, quit it, Jewel.”
She gave that drawing up of the cheekbone flesh that was her substitute for a smile. “All right,” she said. “I’ll quit.”
After a while I said, “Are you happy with him?”
“That’s not a question that fits, somehow. You were always busy about being happy, weren’t you?” I guess.
“Yes—Capricorns tend to be very organized about things like happiness.”
“I’m getting over that,” I said. We were walking up the pebbled path that led to the big rock, the Sick Rock the staff called it, on which so many couples had carved their names.
“I was in a play,” Jewel said brightly, “but Max made me quit.”
“Why?”
“He thought it was a phony play. He thinks all planned plays are phony.”
“I wish I could say I thought Max was phony.”
“Don’t you? I wish you would.”
“Why?”
“If he was fake he couldn’t be crazy.”
“You can be both,” I said.
“Max isn’t. It’s one or the other with him. Do they give you a house to live in if you’re the Director?”
“An apartment. Four rooms. With maid service.”
“I’d hate to see the way it looks right now,” she said.
“No, I’m different up here. Socks put away neatly, towels in the hamper.” That’s the way, I thought. Stroll in the snow, make small talk, stall.
“If you’ve changed,” she said, “does that mean you’re happier now?”
“I thought happiness was not the point.”
“For me and Max. You’re different.”
“It’s true. I was brought up to believe that happiness was an obligation. And I was an obedient child.”
She stooped and picked up a fallen branch speckled with snow; it made a handy walking stick.
“Max told me he’s been okay for a long time,” I said.
“That depends on how you look at it,” she said. “He’s been out of the hospital scene, if that’s what you mean.”
“It’s something.”
“Oh, it’s a lot.”
I looked at her then, deliberately willing my eyes to be the eyes of five years ago; it was an interesting experiment and it almost worked. I saw this white snowbird at my side, sad white skin paling in the noon light, eyes avoiding a direct meeting with mine as if she and I were connected by more than our separation, as if we were strolling in the Vermont countryside as we had that first winter we were married, while I told her how strange a thing snow was and that she could never understand how strange because she had known it, always, and I had not seen snow until my eighteenth year. My gaze slipped on the slippery present. The past held firm enough, but my vision was too clear these days not to see that the blighted look she’d worn when we were married was no longer sitting on her round cheeks.
“You’re blooming,” I said.
“What?”
“Blooming. You … are,” I said. “I don’t like to admit it. But true is true.”
“What did Max tell you?” she asked suddenly.
“About what?”
“Me.”
“Nothing. Oh, just that you were better off with him no matter how badly he treated you. I didn’t argue.”
“Blooming …” she repeated. Jewel began to laugh. The exquisitely smooth expanse of skin from chin to forehead crinkled and broke into a hundred pl
anes. The contrast with the carefully controlled non-smiling mask was shocking.
“What is it?” I said.
“Blooming …” she said again, trying to catch her breath. The laughter began to subside as quickly as it had started, one of those sudden winter laugh-storms you get in that part of the country. The sky of her face was clear and lovely again, but still touched with the remnants of a smile. We were at the Sick Rock and she leaned against it; there was a small avalanche of snow.
“It’s just,” she said, “that I’m going to have a baby.”
“A baby,” I said in idiot, troubled repetition.
“I am blooming, Wolf,” she said. “I am. Third month.”
I was disconcerted. She had thrown my intentions off balance. The question of her previous faithfulness seemed trivial now. Babies have a reality that beggars all fantasies.
“How does Max feel about becoming a father?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve changed, I think.”
“It may just seem so, Wolf,” she said. “I’ve got a lot on my mind today.”
So have I, I thought. I sat on a ridge of stone; I was swept by a pleasant feeling of detachment. It was simple. My ex-wife and her husband were going to have a child. It was no concern of mine. On the very day my objectivity was being questioned by the Board of Management I was allowing myself to be thrown off balance by the sight of Jewel and her same sad pale face that spoke of a thousand possibilities and choices—all paralyzed and immobilized in those wide, blue eyes. Thank God she wasn’t a guest or I’d be in real trouble.
To hell with her! I was wrong. She hadn’t changed a bit. She still owned that passive beauty that used to drive me crazy. It was almost inert—so much so that it became a kind of responsibility when it should have been a pleasure. It was a face almost sickly in its loveliness: full, always on the verge of a certain looseness. Formless, shapeless, it was a revealing mask for Jewel herself: tormented by the shapelessness of her life, yet unable to hammer out some structure for it—not even of the simplest kind. (“Oh, Wolf—I’m an hour late. Please forgive me.”) Not that she didn’t try. One week it was political action. Next week we were to go to India to found a retreat for artists with funds from a certain millionaire who found her ideas fascinating for quite obvious reasons. The month after that it was vital that we form an acting troupe that would tour America with the plays of Garcia Lorca. Then she was to be a singer of lieder. Each time when I refused to take over the function of her will, the plans died. She had the wrong customer. I was hung up on choice. I’d been raised that way. Almost every aphorism I was trained on in the Fellowship involved the will. I just didn’t understand what Jewel wanted from me, or I didn’t want to understand. I would listen to her crying in the night not knowing what to do or what not to do. It was to be expected she would react the way she did when Max Cardillo turned up. He treated her as an attractive object from the start. Max treated everyone as an object. There were useful and useless (or hostile) objects—and he dealt with them all accordingly. The treatment Jewel received was based on Max’s immediate perception of her truth. He treated her as a delicious object that was waiting to be created. She had always been begging me to invent a Jewel. I refused. Max did not. It was as simple as that. Now it turned out he’d extended the range of his creative activity. It was wise of him—if intentional. To invent Jewel was an endless and impossible task. To invent her child was a briefer, more finite matter.
Why the hell was I mooning here when I should be inventing the possible? I could invent snow, as indeed I had this icy day-after-New-Year’s-Day. Why should I get myself embroiled all over again in creating and re-creating my darling when I could be helping to prepare an old farmer with cancer for his choice, or a Rabbi whose crisis of belief was being aggravated by a taunting Gilliatt? What madness it was to arrange a private meeting with Jewel just so I could ask her the jealous question that nagged me. She would not tell me the truth anyway. Even her habitual lying had been based on her inability to choose. One lie can easily be replaced by another—if you’re caught—but once you choose to tell the truth, you’re stuck with it. The truth is limiting. That is its drawback and its comfort. It was not natural to Jewel.
What she hadn’t realized was that in turning to me for help with her shapeless horrors she was turning to a fellow sufferer. I gave shape to my days only in the parts I played. I had some sort of peace of mind for two and a half hours every day, while I was working.
Two things had been taking place while I pursued my angry thoughts: Jewel was talking to me and the skies had begun to drip snow again.
“… always had a kind of time sickness,” she was saying.
“What’s that?”
“A thing about every day being cut off from the one before. It used to drive me crazy.” I was not, it seemed, the only one with retroactive complaints about our marriage. “That’s why this place must be good for you,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, “each day is a different test, a separate experience.”
“It’s snowing again,” she said absently. “What is this rock? It looks official in a crazy kind of way.”
“It’s not really. It’s what we have instead of a Lover’s Leap. Want to cut your initials in it?”
“With yours?” She was suddenly flirtatious.
“Not allowed. I’m on duty.”
“Who was that tall girl Max followed out before?”
“She’s a guide here. She’s in trouble and I thought Max would distract her—and I wanted him away so I could ask you something.”
She looked at me with a kind of slapstick innocence—all eyes and pout. “Have you asked it?”
“Did you sleep with Max before you married him—that is—while we were still married?”
The slapstick became realistic. The mouth curved further downward in surprise; the eyes widened and creased the clear forehead in surprise.
“Married …? Max and I aren’t married!”
“What?”
“Didn’t you know? That was just preliminary Max-talk. He thinks being married is as phony and artificial as planned plays—or—anything!”
“But you’re on the forms as Mr. and Mrs. Cardillo.”
“Max doesn’t mind playing married.”
The loudspeaker was sifting music into the snowy air. It was Ravel’s Mother Goose suite—as if some cosmic-comic Gilliatt knew that Jewel was pregnant and was laughing at her and consoling her at the same time. I was filled with a scathing self-contempt for my descent into the personal. This delicate balance of mine—my collusion with the hills and sky, my gentleman’s agreement with the summer ocean and winter snow, days deliciously deprived of any destiny beyond twenty-four hours, a destiny without choice yet drowned in a flood of the choices of others—what was happening to it?
Jewel and Max had troubled the surface of this contentment. Whether they knew it or not, they were spies! And I was spying out in Jewel’s perfect face some trace of anxiety, of concern over the things she had told me: she was not married to Max after all; she was going to have a baby. Perhaps I was hoping for a hint of a simpler answer: that she had lied about one or both. Neither Jewel’s impassive expression nor the distant, graceful woodwinds of Ravel confirmed or denied.
19
WE CAUGHT UP WITH Max and Barbara outside the Administration Building. It was lunch time. Most of the guests were already inside. Gilliatt materialized from behind a snow-covered tree. Barbara’s face was flushed. Either she and Max had become lovers in the short space of an hour or they had been running through the snow, an activity that was characteristic of neither of them. Max turned to us. We froze into a tight tableau, snow-laden around the frozen fountain (imitation Bernini) decorated with figures of nymphs and shepherds. (No satyrs; like all Academy art it was neutral in character.)
“You’ve been smiling,” Max said to Jewel.
“Leave me alone,” she said.
“This is not something t
o be ignored,” Max said. “One hour alone with her ex-husband and she smiles for the first time in months.” He was taking the offensive before she could attack.
Gilliatt moved slyly until he stood almost between the two of them. He was assessing the situation. Then he made a decision. Gesturing toward me, he said, “The Jew works in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform.”
Max’s attack was deflected. “No,” he said, half to Gilliatt, half to me, “Jews aren’t really mysterious—just secretive.”
Gilliatt sensed an antagonist worthy of his imagination. “What do you know about them?” he said. It was a trial gambit.
“Everyone knows about them,” Max said. “They’re the only legacy every country in the world automatically inherits.”
Gilliatt broke into laughter. “All right,” he said. “Let’s see.” And they were squaring off for a lunatic wrestling match of words—with the Jew represented by Wolf Walker as the subject and prize.
“Jews are the eternal aliens,” Gilliatt led off. “Never involved.”
“No—” Max returned. “They always climb to the seats of power. They run everything from behind the throne. How involved can you get?”
Shifting quickly, Gilliatt summoned up some eloquence. “You’re selling them short. Power is not the issue. Because he was unjustly condemned the Jew attacks all injustices. Social reform is his real religion. Judaism is only a masquerade—a facade for the perpetual revolution in every city, every country in which he turns up. The Messiah is the front man for the French or Russian Revolution, for the New Deal.” Advantage Gilliatt.
Return by Max. “But they stand behind the toughest of status quos: money! The money is always concentrated in a few hands. Those are Jewish hands. They hold on to that money if they have to strangle change of any kind. The Jewish motto is: ‘I’m in, shut the door.’”
With a peculiar tenderness Gilliatt said, “But he is the permanent loser. If no one had ever lost before, he would have invented the idea.”
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