And then, dizzily reversing her twirling direction Jewel brought herself down, down to the ice in an enveloping mist of clothing, sprayed ice and tangled skates. I ran to her in panic. If she miscarried now—there was no telling. As I reached her, bending low, murmuring my unintelligible fears, she cracked into laughter and a flood of words. “No,” she said. “No, damn it, Wolf, there is no baby, no, not any more, no—forget all that yes,” saying, “no, we did it the old, old way—nothing changed for anybody, no, nothing.” And the flood of words sprinkled with laughter became tears and then more words that told, indeed, the old, old story: the furtive visits to the illegal doctor, the fear, the night-sweats, the grimy operating room—all the classic cliché furniture of disaster. Only it had been even more banal than that. No apparent aftermath except some nausea and another fight with Max. No one was saved, no one was changed, and they arrived at the Secret Film Festival in New Mexico a day early. (And now the final banality: post-abortion depression leading to the suicide attempt. A dime a dozen.) Children would continue to gestate for nine months and then be born. One’s life would go on having beginnings, middles and ends.
I held her shivering against me. I was glad. If her fantastic plan had succeeded there might never have been a need for Suicide Academies again. If beginnings need not progress toward their ends—but of course there was no need to fear that now. There was only my own end to worry about and Jewel’s, now that the rest hour was coming to an end.
Dizzy with equal parts alcohol, fear and excitement I stood up and brought Jewel with me. I kissed her then. Her mouth responded but the body attached to it was limp in my arms. My God, Wolf, how low can you sink? First drinking on the job and now this. But no, I answered, my lips still squashed against hers, I have to try everything I can. Indifference is like virginity; once you give it up, you give it all up!
The loudspeaker was putting out the beginning of a new selection. It took half a minute for me to realize it was another of my subversive Ravel pieces. This time, La Valse. Thus I gave myself my own cue and instantly, instinctively, took it. As the kiss ended I hid my face in the elegantly concave crook of her neck and whispered, “Jewel, Jewel …” Before she could reply I began to sway back and forth, forcing her into a kind of collusion.
Together we regained her balance for the moment, recovered it in a half-realized movement that was the prelude to dancing. From my cue I moved to my plan. “Jewel,” I kept whispering, preparing myself for one big try that would leave Jewel saved, unresolved or stillborn.
At the Academy the struggle for a soul is always coeval with the struggle for the body. As I repeated her name to hypnotize and prepare her, the music whispered into a waltz-pastiche, the lush and weary sound of old Maurice, French hothouse Jew choked with 1920’s sophistication.
“Listen, Jewel,” I said. “Let’s not forget Miss Greenthal.”
“Mmmmmm.”
It was like trying to speak to someone under anesthesia.
“Remember how you used to complain about my dancing?”
“Mmmmmm.”
“Remember?” I was going to be ruthless.
“But—you don’t know how to dance.” She’d spoken. Progress.
“That’s it. Teach me.”
But it was beyond words at this point. I sat her down on the wooden bench and took off her skates and mine. Returning to our own shoes and feet was like going back to an earlier form of locomotion. Deprived of the magical and dangerous gliding we walked charily to get our snow legs back. It made the idea of dancing seem exotic, secret and sexual.
I led us to a stony area near the Sick Rock. My arms did not leave her; she could be lost so easily at this point. From here on it was going to be as delicate a matter as waking a sleepwalker on the edge of a steep fall.
Slowly I began to coax her, to cajole her to teach me, to start from scratch as if I didn’t know what dancing was. It was good to start with the waltz; its primitive circling was just suited to the charade of innocence and experience that constitutes the teacher and the taught. Carefully, with idiotic awkwardness, I placed one foot after the other. The way I lagged behind the music must have given her pain. But she was still sunk in the reverie of her own errors and gave no sign. Then, step by step, she began to demonstrate, first by guiding my faltering feet, then by showing me herself. Our movements began to coincide a little more. Her eyes grew animated. I was witnessing the re-birth of Miss Greenthal. Patiently she pointed out to me the center of balance without which there is no dancing—or much of anything else for that matter. Her animation picked up tempo. Our speed followed. We were caught up with that old, gay wizard Ravel. If he wasn’t careful we’d leave him behind. My clumping feet almost seemed to carve out graceful arcs of air. Was it Jewel’s cure or mine? It didn’t matter any more. When the going is good in these matters there is always a tendency for the giver and the taker to merge. One or both of us might reach grace through grace.
The frosty air flew around our outstretched arms as Jewel guided me in increasingly complex patterns. Rocks and pebbles flew from beneath our feet in a rattle of applause. I began to whistle, a half-whistle under my breath—as scarce as breath was getting to be—remembering the old men in the Study House: “Shut up the hoodlum. Doesn’t he know whistling disturbs the dead?” Of course that was precisely what I wanted to do—disturb the dead. The curriculum began to coalesce in my turning brain. My rigid penis, between us like a guide-point, invoked and dismissed my childhood anxiety—my father’s, that is—as to size. Jewel’s stomach grew and grew, was sustained then subsided as we turned, and the words she tossed out at me seemed to hit the wind and return to my ears in reverse. All our ambitions and fears were subsumed in that wild waltz. That’s what creation is always like; for I believed I had succeeded in creating Jewel at last. Only here, at the Academy, at the last extreme, had it been possible. Would it stick? Was she fully aware of what had happened—was happening? I couldn’t tell, nor could I be bothered with such considerations. In the first place, the music had stopped, abruptly, and had been replaced by the sound of chimes. The rest hour was up. In the second place, as we slowed our pace in automatic accommodation to the absence of the music I became aware that the magnificently stiff penis that still rose between us was gradually being invaded by a desire to pee. Sic transit … In the third place, the wind which had kindly maintained a more or less even velocity for the past hour was now picking up speed as we lost ours. Through the developing gusts of snow, over Jewel’s shoulder, I saw, or thought I saw, the approaching figure of my secretary, Leona.
It was strange. For an hour I had been free of Gilliatt’s probes, of administrative responsibilities, of being haunted by Max. Leona was crossing a larger piece of territory than she knew in order to get to me again. What would she think if she saw me dancing on the snowy stones? I knew what she was coming to tell me. That the hour of my trials was beginning. First my appointment with Brand, the Chairman of the Board, and President Rath. Then the Board of Management meeting. Gilliatt’s revenge. I realized how cold I’d gotten. My nose was absolutely frozen and I could barely feel my ears. In trying to save Jewel I’d stitched the day together. It remained to be seen if it would hold.
We had stopped moving at all by the time Leona reached us, but we held on to each other still, like drunks needing the support. The ache in my bladder confirmed the metaphor. Leona said, “Mr. Walker—”
“Yes,” I said. “I know. It’s time.”
“It’s Barbara,” she said.
“What?”
“It’s Barbara. She’s missing. Gilliatt is out with some of the staff trying to find her. He asked me to tell you. And you’re due at Mr. Brand’s at four o’clock. Now.”
I leaned my cheek against Jewel’s face. One minute, I thought, to gather strength. “Have we been acting for each other again,” I said, “like our old days in winter stock? Or is it maybe like that backward language I invented for the Fellowship when I was a kid. Perhaps we’ve been doing
everything backward just to make it clearer.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know.” Her perfume filled my head until I thought it would burst. But the minute was up.
“Jewel,” I said. “I haven’t missed you while I’ve been here. But I haven’t forgotten you.”
She unveiled her second full smile of the day. Dazzling, it was a smile that seemed to tell more than it knew.
“Know I, yes,” she said.
It’s strange how much the same things are, whether said backward or forward.
5
I HURRIED ALONG THE path to the main House, smoothing my hair down on the run. I was a mess. I hadn’t eaten lunch and hunger was beginning to trouble me. I was overheated from the wild bout of waltzing, and to make things worse I desperately needed to pee. But my meeting with Brand was at four and it was already eight minutes past. I’d heard, too, that Rath was a stickler for punctuality—and my session with him was scheduled for four thirty. The Board of Management met at five. If I was late for the first one it would throw everything off.
Actually, I should have checked the three o’clock computer reports in case I was to be questioned on the progress of today’s guests; but if there was no time to empty my aching bladder there was certainly no time for dryer details. Should I, I wondered, bring up my proposed plan for trading results with the other Academies? Or my plan for expanded research facilities? No—best not look too eager—defensive. Let them lead. Gilliatt would have provided them with ideas I’d have to refute.
A powder of snow began to invade the air, confusing the fading afternoon light still further. Because of the wind I could not tell if it was snowing again or was just a disturbance of drifts by the wind. It would be good to know. If it were snowing again precautions might have to be taken for tomorrow. Tomorrow! Three nonsense syllables: nothing more.
I ran into Gilliatt and Max on the steps. Max looked a little bewildered but in the main recovered from his outburst. I felt a little ashamed of having taken advantage of his madness by going off with Jewel. But that was the way things were. Homo hominis lupus.
“Any luck with Barbara?” I said, before Gilliatt could take the offensive.
“I think she’s off somewhere trying to get to some of the guests. Maybe start a rebellion.” He grinned. “A Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Child Suicides.”
“Find her,” I said.
“Yes, sir.”
Max was shooting a picture of Gilliatt and myself.
“Then report to me,” I said, attempting to grab hold of the day again. “I don’t want her starting a panic.”
“Yes, sir” Gilliatt mocked again. “And good luck.”
I ignored him. Instead I said to Max, “Jewel’s down at the skating rink. Gilliatt will show you the way.” And I vanished from their sight.
Brand’s office was on the fourth floor. On the landing below it I paused for breath and looked out of the window. The loudspeaker was still now. Stretched out below, my domain accepted the snowfall with grace. From the southern rim bordered by a bare apple orchard, to the northern boundary which was the Sick Rock with its initialed roll call of the dead, the white shadows of hills cupping all in their declivity, the magnificently neutral fields surrounding the cluster of activities buildings, past the skating rink where I thought I saw Jewel and Max, tiny stick figures, in silent, snowy colloquy—all of it was there to safeguard me from too specific a fate. The role was my alternative to destiny. Acting was, of course, a beautiful way to achieve this, as long as it lasted. Jewel’s sustained pregnancy was the acting out of an enormously ambitious role: a destiny without consequence. You couldn’t beat that! It was the way most people, in their hysterical innocence, thought of suicide.
That marvelous landscape in which only others chose—how could I endanger that for the sake of one woman’s face? When Gilliatt had instigated this afternoon’s proceedings against me I had been innocent. Now I was not. It remained only to learn if innocence could be regained.
6
“LANGUAGE,” BRAND SAID, “IS finished.” He stepped out from behind his enormous desk. Producing an inhaler from a pocket he inserted the tip into each of his nostrils and sniffed.
“Finished?” I said.
“Exhausted. Played-out. Over!”
“Oh.”
His largeness overwhelmed me. Nothing soft there, but massive. I braced myself for a session of alienation clichés. Language finished—communication impossible—I’d managed to purge the curriculum of most of that nonsense during my first year as Director.
“That’s why gesture is so important now. And that’s why the Academy matters. Suicide is gesture. But that’s not why I wanted to speak to you.”
At least I was wrong about the clichés. Now I braced myself for the personal onslaught. “Yes,” I said.
He sniffed again. “Allergic,” he said. “Nose closes up entirely. Can’t breathe without these things.”
“I see,” I said.
“Do you know,” Brand said, “that language had me by the throat before I came here?”
Fooled again. “Really?”
“By the throat.” He mimed the action with a ham-like hand and a giraffe neck. “I knew too much, you see.”
“I suppose one can know too much about that,” I said. My way of being essentially inaudible yet responsive, which is what people like the Chairman of the Board want from an audience, was to be absolutely banal. Banality carried to the extreme, when well done, is perfectly silent and cannot be heard by the average human ear.
“Yes,” he said. “Every time I spoke a word, its derivations, the endless backward series of origins, sprang to my mind and choked me with detail. My mother would call me when I was away at college and warn me not to try any college-type antics, and instantly my mind would swarm with pictures of the walls of the Roman Emperor Titus’s villa, the antico carvings; and aware that antic is simply an abbreviation of the Italian word for old I would find myself choking with explanations, none of which I could share with my mother. The result was a pregnant silence which she took to mean the worst, and immediately she put my father on to find out if I’d gotten some unworthy girl pregnant.”
I filled his pause with, “Communication—impossible.”
“After I left school it grew and grew—it became a madness. If someone bargained and said the word dicker I saw the number ten (from the Latin decuria, a set of ten pelts, from the Latin decem, meaning ten). A painting had cobalt blue and I saw a goblin (the demon of the mines—Swedish). If you can’t control a thing like that you’re in trouble.”
“That’s murder” (allied to the Latin mors for death: hence interchangeable with suicide), I agreed.
“It hit hardest when I was trying to make love to a young lady. You can imagine.”
“Yes,” I said. “I can imagine.”
“Listen, Walker,” he said, “how about another drink?”
Guilt froze in my eyes. Did he know about Max’s flask? “Another?” I said.
He ignored the gambit. “What’ll it be?” he asked.
“I never drink on the job,” I said. And trying to lighten the atmosphere I added, “It’s the only resemblance to a policeman I admit to.” Actually my bladder was so full I was as much aware of its pressure as I was of anything else. As much as the thought of Barbara running wild among the guests, or of Jewel making and remaking her decision down in the snow. I pulled my legs together and squeezed tightly.
“Look,” Brand said, “there’s no use in beating around the bush. We’re in trouble!”
“We …?”
“I want you to know, if you cooperate with me I’ll make it worth your while.”
“In what way—I mean cooperate in what way?”
“Never mind. Just make sure you don’t repeat any of what I tell you to your contacts.”
“I have no contacts.”
“Oh, now it’s no
contacts.” He was pacing up and down. The conversation had taken an odd turn. He exuded threats from the hunch of his shoulders, from the corrugated gather in the middle of his forehead. “I suppose there has never been a spy here. Is that what you’re going to tell me?”
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “I’ve always felt that it was exaggerated—all this about spies.”
“I didn’t say you were a spy, Wolf. But there are conspirators.” He took a whiff of his magical inhalator and muttered, “From the Latin—to breathe, closely together—con (with) spiro (breathe).”
“Mr. Brand …” I began.
“Don’t forget—not a breath of what I tell you.”
“All right.”
He paused long enough to let his eyes move across my face from left to right. “Do you speak any foreign languages?” he asked suddenly.
“French, Yiddish, Hebrew.”
“I see,” he mused. “Rath speaks French.”
“Oh?”
“Well, he’s German, you know. His real name is Von Rath. He dropped the Von when he came here as President.” I see.
“I suppose I can trust you,” he said.
“What’s the trouble?”
“Everything. The Academy. Everything this place is built on. It’s not working. Now you never see the final totals—but let me tell you, it seems to me that no matter what we do the number of positive and negative choices remains constant.”
“Oh?”
“Rath thinks we need a re-definition of the terms positive and negative. I don’t agree. I want to go back to original sources. The foundation documents of the Academy.”
The white light from the window slanted into the room. It outlined his massive back as he rustled through some papers and began to read to me. As he read—in a rhythmic way, almost chanting—his face softened. The menace was gone. The documents were typical of many I’d studied in the Academy Library. Purposes and principles were set down never quite clearly enough to be self-explanatory, never quite vaguely enough to be dismissed. In addition they were all cross-referenced with commentary confirming and denying their authenticity. I looked beyond Brand’s shoulders at the sky. Clouds were being massed in broad strokes behind the ragged screen of snow. The afternoon grew limp and mysterious under the reading of the documents. I felt as if the clocks had gone off again. What had Jewel been trying to tell me? Gesture, Brand had said; we have need of gesture. What better gesture than her extraordinary, passionate attempt to envision a way out—to break the biological chain that binds women so that everyone could have a new life, even if it was only a dream or one of her ambitious lies. It wasn’t so far from the ambitions that had brought me here. Her narcissism had driven me crazy. But if persisted in to the extreme it could turn into something beautiful—the eternal mother carrying a baby endlessly into some impossible dream of perfection. (Was not my identification with the surrounding hills and the Academy sky, like the semi-tropical sky of my Florida childhood, a supreme, almost theological narcissism?) How I wished I had halted the curriculum before she’d gotten carried away and recited to me the lie of her experiment. It was as if the very thing I hated most in her, when pressed to the limits, could enthrall me all over again; as if I had never been through the shapeless miseries of our marriage and the pain of her desertion. In saving her, or trying to (I had no way of judging the success or failure of the attempt at this time), I had been forced to create her, to push her to the point where she would perform a simple act from which there was no escape: like teaching an ex-husband, devoid of physical grace, to dance. Now, it seemed, in creating her I might have destroyed myself. Have another drink, Brand had said, while Barbara went on building some lethal weapon out of her grief to conspire in my destruction.)
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