Little Fugue

by Robert Anderson

  “Do you have a message?” she asked her father in stone.

  This had always been the impasse. He could metamorphose himself beyond measure. He was the star, and she was the bit player. He refused to give her her cue. Or acknowledge paternity.

  He stared back at her, through her, with the composure of a palisade. She looked to the Gaelic gibberish sparkling on the wall. Maybe he had never had a voice, or, more precisely, a voice independent of hers. His face seemed to be fading as well. Memory was a vital artery, expanding, then constricting.

  Maybe Daddy is a concept much like Santa Claus, whose identity, intrinsic to certain delusions of self, becomes fathomable when one grows old enough not to care anymore. Maybe husband is just such a concept as well.

  He would talk all right. Daddy would be sworn into testimony. Or face a second death. A martyr’s end this time. She crossed the room, hurry-scurry, catching herself in the chilled glass of the breakfront, her wireworked elbows rawboned and electric. She turned on Ted’s boyhood Philco, that pockmarked standing stone upon the mantel. The hooped banding glowed the color of cream. A chinook of static lariated into the air. She reined it in with the tuning dial. There was a panel from sundry universities deliberating on Minister Profumo’s dirty linen. Nöel Coward voices lamented that their security and way of life had been jeopardized by the fact that the queen’s minister of war had “been about” with a show-girl who had “been about” with Soviet agents. She fiddled at the dial. An American Negro solicitously asked her, by name, how she called her lover boy.

  Where is the moment? Where is the elucidation of the ulterior landscape that we could all agree upon defining as the now? The now and the nevermore. Here in England, of all places? Here in the land of Donne, Blake, Shelley, and Auden. Here, good-self Sylvia was without father, mother, and husband, and Mother England was, by all evidence, without true offspring. Spiritual bombast is the first symptom of impending collapse. The fish rots first at the tongue. The last time she had heard Ted on the Beeb, he had gone out with a remote to Sheffield and had spoken for an hour with Dame Edith Sitwell. They talked of tea, migraine headaches, the Chinese quarters of various European cities, opium, society pajama parties under the raj, the Plantagenets, spinsterhood, and Anna Pavlova. Ted broke the news that Dame Edith had converted to Roman Catholicism. He asked if she, as a rule, patronized Sunday services. In her best Miss Haversham voice, she said, “Yes, but I rarely stay past the snack bar.”

  Sylvia had once vowed that she would not speak to God ever again. But when did God ever, even once, speak to her? She could be resigned, for that matter, if He would grant some sign that He was at least tuning her in. God’s silence was at the root of her father’s. All men melt down into the same entity. She knew that God was male because every church she had ever been in had been designed to specifically suggest femininity. They all incorporated some impression of the colossus, the mill, and the mine of the female womb. God, Sylvia surmised, was inclined to configure the naves of His numerous residences in the shape of the uterus because the uterus was the one place in all of His creation that God the Father had never been. That meant that Sylvia was without a father and the Father of man was without a mother.

  She tuned the radio back to the starting point of all of this futility. The bust sat there on its perch, vulture dull and heavy. But her father was smiling.

  Daddy?

  I should have known when you scrapped your foot first and just lay there smoking with the nebula gathering above your head. You were readying for the passage. You were suffering the sea change. You were shedding not only skin but parts as well. I would have to invent you from the stray extremities that you left behind, but this was nothing new for me even before you died.

  I want to ask you something. Do you remember that hole in the wall of the basement where you stowed the firewood? You said that we would need the wood when the war began and the government repealed electricity, and cut off coal oil to the German-born. That black, dirt-bottomed bay? I slept in that box for three days. Three days, thirteen years after you left. I had grown so tired of looking for you that I decided that you could come looking for me, ready or not, now or never. I had a jug of water and a vial of Thorazine. I wasn’t afraid for one moment. I took so many pills that I became your lathery, silken, medicinal-smelling handkerchief. Daddy was going to take me up and breathe me in.

  When I couldn’t wait for you any longer, I cried out. Mother came and pulled me out by the roots. I was searching for you, and she had half the state of Massachusetts out looking for me.

  The doctor said that a death in the family kills the internal clock.

  To bed at noon.

  7.

  Ted

  The war passed over his and Sylvia’s houses. Close enough to feel the whirlwind, but still. Sylvia’s German-born father essentially killed himself of natural causes just prior to the conflict. Ted had uncles and cousins who were killed or wounded in the war, but, what with the mines, his uncles and cousins were forever getting killed or injured. As poets, it became necessary for Ted and Sylvia to impose the rank of refugee upon their own submerged psyches. It was always the estranged, in the final analysis, who spoke with the plenum of candor. The two of them remained hypocrites next to Assia. Assia is the wife of David Wevill, Ted’s Cambridge colleague and not a half-bad poet, poor soul. Her Russian father had been a prominent surgeon in Weimar Berlin. By the mid-1930s, he was setting splints for lamed dogs. Shortly thereafter, he was disallowed from doing even that. Assia’s mother’s ancestry, Lutheran or something, would not distinguish the family in the bone-poor kibbutzim in Palestine, where they emigrated just before the shooting started in Europe. Her father saved hundreds, maybe thousands in the Arab-Israeli War. Assia went into the nursing corps. She worked seventy-hour shifts. When she fell asleep with her hands in someone’s abdominal cavity, a doctor would rap at her knuckles with his scissors. The unkindest among her coworkers would call her a Nazi.

  She was a genuine castaway. Psychologically, she was the lone survivor of the wreck of her past. This informed every aspect of her being. She recreated herself daily with her brightly colored scarves, antiquated secondhand hats, and the heirloom jewelry that her family, she confessed, had gotten out of Germany in their anal canals, and that she stole her fair share of outright on the day she had left for the New World with her Canadian flier first husband. People on the street would look to the fore and aft of her, certain that they would find the scrutinizing film crew that had to be following her. She picked up languages without effort and chided Ted for his meager lingual base of English, High Latin, uncoordinated French, and strictly bel canto Italian. She spoke with a deep basso, a marble quarry in her lungs. She was profligate in all her habits. She ruined friendships by borrowing with no thought of return. She bought food that she had no plans to complicate her figure with for the sake of maintaining a reassuringly glutted larder. She showed visitors the icebox as though it were the centerpiece of the home ensemble, and, if she had a bad dream in the night, nothing could pacify her save for the fulsomeness of the refrigerator’s light in the darkness. She fantasized Mayfair. She set aside blocks of time for sex, and she was thoroughgoing to the point that Ted had recently attempted a poem about an earth goddess who had clitorises secreted in the multitudinous niches of her body, who slept in the rain and burgeoned with flowers in the dawn.

  He and Sylvia had tried out austerity as a life experiment. Oh, there had been vacations, drinking bouts, remorseless conjugal skirmishes bordering on the Greco-Roman, children, confessions, and moments of rare elucidation, but mostly what Ted remembers about his marriage, now that he is standing outside of it, is he and his wife alone together and individually in a room with one writing table between them. “Are you getting anywhere?” the one would ask the other as the first vacated the communal chair to let the other have a turn, the babies crying constantly in the background. As though some part of each of them had realized how directionless the marriage had b
ecome. As though each were telling the other, in the code of wedlock, to save themselves at any cost.

  He had married Sylvia but not her psychoses. He had never said “I do” to her obsession with her dead father, or her romance with mortality. The poor girl was born on her deathbed, and she hadn’t bothered to change the sheets for the wedding night.

  Assia, though married herself, had been after Ted from their first meeting. Marriage seemed a matter of security to her. It didn’t in any way compel fidelity. For that matter, adultery did not compel fidelity, either. She had moved out of her husband’s flat, but continued to meet with David in an effort to let him down easily and to borrow the odd quid here and there. Ted had the temerity to ask her if she was sleeping with him. He was told, to his incredulity, to mind his own affairs.

  Assia has transgressed the world and she remains exactly where she was born. At large. She is several people. She is free-minded. She is imperiled. She is indomitable. She is vulnerable. She is not to be resisted. Otherwise he would never have abandoned his wife at their dismal common front and forsworn the vows that he had never quite made. Sylvia is likewise several people. He hasn’t abandoned a wife; he has broken with a veritable colony, a veritable penal colony. All of her are free-minded, imperiled, and vulnerable. And so sadly nebulous and dormant. Ted can’t blame her for the failure of their marriage, but by the same logic, he cannot bring himself to blame himself.

  They are visiting the British Museum tonight. Ted majored in archaeology and minored in anthropology, and he visited these halls three or four times a week while going to school. His father had refused to fund a fine arts degree—Dad siding with the dead once again. Now he was seeing the museum for the first time in the clarity of romance. The trick was to give Assia free rein. She was a calculatedly introspective jewel. She would not, given room to work, fail to make everything around her glow. He wanted to show her around the Greek galleries, but she chose instead the fine temperance of the etchings rooms. Ted would have rather seen Perugino and Carpaccio in their full-dress drama, and closing time was not so far off. But this was Assia’s hour. He could step closer and stand apart, cutting away at her in little sidelong strips as he did in the night in his shirt and slippers, holding the feather of a candle above the bed. The splendid arrogance of the hidden glimmer that shone from deep in the vault behind her eyes. Her green irises devised in a minute latticework pattern like cleaved emeralds. The baby-fat fullness of her cheeks. The purse of her lips. The tightness of her jaw. Such were her formidable powers of acclimation. Upon entering a gallery, she took on the airs of a connoisseur.

  What is missing is me, Ted thought, feeling, as he did sometimes, alienated by her beauty; a beauty that, unlike his poems and his children, which were the only two things in life that he loved on parity with his mistress, he had no hand in creating and could never hope to control. He yearned for another helping of her affection to convince him that he was not deceiving himself. Without her constant and attentive love, she seemed a dream of his own devising. But she had every intention of revealing their collective self. She was only holding back to exaggerate the climax, as she was apt to do in bed. It was no surprise that she was drawn to these etchings, these endoskeletons of paintings. In their unconsummated state, they gave greater evidence of the voluptuousness of the artists’ naked inspiration.

  The red-chalk Carracci seraph playing the gamba in side view with his braid and his wispy robes unraveling. A smoky Botticelli; the figure of Autumn holding the bough of a cornucopia, fruit and flowers tumbling, a gathered ball of yarn in her other hand, the thread trailing off behind her like a spoor of smoke. Autumn wore a sheer sleeping gown so formfitting that the rise of her pubis and the prominence of her expectant belly were visible. Her hair was a cool tapestry of flames. The slant of her neck put Ted in mind of Sylvia. Sylvia nursing her babies, her head back and her throat bared. Cat-content with a poet’s mind that flared and a poet’s voice that tended to fizzle. Embryonic, he had remarked to himself, regarding her poetry, for several years now. True, but to think of Sylvia with her children. She was the very essence, among the infinity of essences, when she was holding those babies. The self-killer had become the self re-creator. The miracle had taken place, but, as always, at a price. His wife and former muse became a mother at a cost to them both. When she set the children down in their crib and moved away, she basically abandoned her transcendent persona behind her. If only she had the insight to quit now, to declare her poetic persona dead and abandoned, then that renouncement would constitute, in itself, the most poetic thing that Sylvia had ever done in her life.

  Ted wished that he could work all of this out openly with Assia’s help. He couldn’t, of course. You don’t talk of women to women. Assia, if she had occasion at all to mention Ted’s wife, referred to her as Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa. Assia is a copywriter with J. Walter Thompson. She was promoted from the obscurity of the stenographic pool owing to her luminous skin, the saber of her wit, and the indefinable aesthetic of silkaline that she invariably brought to any conference room.

  Ted cannot deny that his wife can be haughty on occasion. Such as the occasion of having her husband and her day-to-day reality stolen outright from underneath her by the spouse of one of his fellow professors. There were phone conversations between Sylvia and Assia that both preceded and followed Ted’s departure from the flat that he shared with his wife on Fitzroy Road. The requisite cussing out of each other’s houses. Promises of future consequences.

  What a pity, though. What a shame that he could not confide what a marvel Sylvia was, past tense. How she embodied the myth of the States, the fantasy of what America thought it was and never would be. She had the American faith in extremes, which consummately mirrored the romanticized national lunacy, by Ted’s lights. Her galloping, purblind, starry-eyed energy. Her implacable and forgiving spirit. The recantations of her stormy spells, followed by only more adamant avowals. He almost had her worn down at one point and halfway believing that a marriage could amount to the sum of its infidelities and compromises. Well, his infidelities. And her compromises.

  And her faith in him, her acknowledged potentate, so long as he managed to keep his trousers buttoned up. Her dogged efforts to constantly reanimate his faith in himself. There were those times when she would take his rejection notices, wax them over with a flaring crayon, scratch bloodroot poppies onto the surface with a hairpin, and then pin them to the wall. “Looks like Ted’s too good for them again,” she would remark to visitors.

  She had an admirable capacity for self-sacrifice. Literally, by the way. The family secret is that there have been two full-blown suicide attempts that Ted knew about for certain and a lot of little feints and forebodings, plus an electroconvulsive episode that mottled the fabric of her dreams, affording her a fondness for sedatives and the eerie conductivity of a spiritualist. Then there was the time that she, supposedly anyway, terminated a suspect pregnancy vis-à-vis a length of wire. Ted, as soon as he could afford to, emotionally, that is, got her with child, bricked her up with the blockade of motherhood. Not once, but twice, so as to leave nothing to chance. You really should have seen her in recent months before Assia entered their lives. Motherhood and then double-motherhood had wrought such a reversal.

  He was a backcountry boy who was sent to private school. He is used to being judged from a perspective of callowness. There are those who would say that he has abandoned his family. Yes, but he has not removed the sentry of his shadow. He knew that Sylvia loved him, despite everything, and he knew that she would never leave their children without a mother. She wouldn’t do it to him or them. In his darkest daydreams, he could see her killing herself in one of her furies. He could not, however, come near to imagining her lopping off the children’s limbs, which is what the self-murder of their mother would amount to.

  Ted loved his children. He would wholeheartedly die for their benefit. But, coldly, fatherhood had promised to bastardize him in the same way that marriage ulti
mately had and could not help but do. To the ordinary man, fatherhood was a growth factor. To the poet, it was the process by which his gravitational field was severely truncated. The poet is, by necessity, always apart. There were suddenly these two separate, other, new, evolving species under his roof. You cannot imagine the sterility of no longer being the only one in the household experiencing growth. With the babies crying constantly and with Sylvia rising heavily from her constant stupor, passing Ted at the writing table, droop-shouldered in that calico bed uniform, ordinary family life had begun to take on the flavor of a fall from grace.

  He felt the shame of it. He longed even to confess the ignominy to his two children. To get it off his chest and into the windmills of their psyches before they became conscious enough to trap the memory of Daddy owning to such a horrid thing. There wasn’t any need to confess to Sylvia. She already knew.

  Assia turned to Ted and looked over the top of her dark glasses, offering up the serrated green of her eyes. Her mouth was open, and her lower lip hung petulantly.

  “Ariadne’s claw,” she said.