“My father is sixty-six. He did not get to that age remembering the war the way it happened. Do you know what saved my father’s life?”
“What?”
“Poetic license.” And this is about as true as Sylvia’s abortion story. Dad is staying alive so that he can continue to fester out on the back porch, not even caring, or so Mum says, to come into the parlor and hear his son on the radio. It’s the only life that he knows at this point and not nothing, not nobody is going to take it from the old trouper without a fight. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“No.”
“He managed to put his memories into a framework that he could live with.”
“I don’t think your father did that, Ted. That’s not what you’ve told me before.”
“What did I say?”
“You sort of said that your father put his memories into a framework that he could not live without. He made a romance of death.”
“All right, maybe he did. It kept him alive.”
“Yes, but I’ve already tried that. And failed.”
Ted goes back to carving the bench. “You know you told me that you couldn’t.”
“I didn’t think I could. There was damage—”
“But you can.”
“Live and learn.”
“Do you understand that this changes things?”
“I don’t think so. I think it only makes everything more clear.”
“We could have talked about it.”
“I only want to have your child.”
“You want to have my child and you want to kill my wife.”
She grinds out her cigarette, leaving a black, smoking eyelet in the wood of the bench. “I don’t want to kill her, Ted. I want to be her.”
18.
Sylvia
If she was going to dare to do it, to stop analyzing the act and actually perform it, there had to be some safety net. Some means of protecting the only innocent ones that remained. She also definitely did not want her children waking and hearing her father’s assuredly acidulous, or else assuredly booming, or else assuredly dulcet voice, and crying out for her, and deflating her séance. There were spare towels in the cabinet underneath the kitchen sink. She could wet them under the faucet, like this, and she could come back across the living room, like so, and she could seal the crack beneath the nursery door, like she was doing right now.
But what if her and her father’s death trains crossed in transit and could not stop at the same junction? What if, like Orpheus and the bride of Lot, she was turning back only to tune in a lethal void? What if her father could not speak to her because he no longer had a voice independent of hers? These hectoring doubts only serve to take her death out of her own hands, just as Daddy’s lifelong deathwatch and ultimate departure, and Ted’s ship jumping, have succeeded in taking her life away from her. But why does death always have to be viewed as some sort of submission? At least this time she is surrendering to no one but herself.
Go into the kitchen and carve and cling-wrap three inches of baker’s bread. Like that. Okay, now pour out two glasses of milk. Now take it on the tray back into the nursery. That’s right, leave it there on the windowsill. Cool and soft upon their awakening. Like mother’s flesh.
Her little girl can eat a slice of bread, orbicularly, by herself and drink from a glass of milk if she uses both hands. Sylvia thinks that she would know enough to share with her baby brother. She hasn’t had the opportunity to teach them about sharing as yet, but so much of what we have to learn, we learn by imitating others. Right, Otto?
Quiet, now. Stop. Steady. Stop trembling. You’ve done this before. After the first suicide attempt, Mother couldn’t stop telling the doctors how eager you were to be born. “Sylvia came into the room before I got the door open,” Mother said.
Her boy and girl are sharing one common breath. Their twinship will sustain them. A mythical parent can prove much more sustaining than an actual one. Her posthumous relationship with her father has gotten Sylvia this far. Terribly unfair to Ted, though. She allowed him to marry a woman with one heart in the grave.
Replace those towels under the door. Take one to pillow your head. She should tie it like a turban. Like a Mussulman’s bride on her knees to make her Mecca. She’s opening up the oven door. Did you hear that? Both the drawbridge and the gurgling moat beneath. She’s kneeling now. The cold floor is burning her knees through the hose.
Daddy, look how low.
Okay, reach up and turn on the oven tap. The top burners, too. The ones that leap like hurricane lamps. That’s good. Now put your mouth to the hole in the zinc bottom of the oven. Now whisper into Daddy’s ear:
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the shadow
That’s from Eliot. “The Hollow Men.”
O.
19.
Ted
Ted says, “Here,” reaching out his hand with the blade of the knife open in his palm. Assia understands right away and extends her own hand. It’s a gesture of faith that neither of them quite believes in, but these are two people who have told themselves all their lives that faith will come in time. Both their fathers have warned them, in so many words, that what they will come to believe in will be commensurate to what they have lost.
Assia has no poetry. To her poetry is extraneous. She has no religion, either, since religion is extraneous as well. She may be the least mortal human being that Ted has ever known. He knows that he cannot trust her. He cannot put past her the ability to magically alchemize a mistruth into an actuality. That’s a trick that Ted knows how to perform on the page. It’s a trick Assia knows how to perform in the mirror. She might not be pregnant now. She might be planning to get pregnant tonight. She might be telling the lie to test the true waters.
She puts her hand into his. They press the digits together until the blood comes through their latticed fingers. Then he reaches for her. She straddles him on the bench, and he lifts her by the hips. He sets her down on the organ’s keyboard, expecting to wake this dead neighborhood with a celestial echo. But there is no water in the brazier below. Its vocal bouquet has dried up long ago. He hears only a slight wind through the bellows, a desiccated whisper. He leans forward to hear what prophecy the old organ portends. Assia thinks that he is meaning to tell her something and she turns her head so that he may say it into her ear. He knows not what to say, so he puts his tongue deep into the little pink seashell. She is not expecting this and the sudden roaring, the breath of the dragon, startles her. She shifts forward, and the unmoored bench teeters backward. Through the curtain of her hair, Ted sees the hull of the ceiling falling steadily down upon them. The grapnels and the mainstays of the old wooden garret come loose all at once, and the loft reluctantly accedes to gravity. Ted reaches backward with both hands and closes his eyes, and he hears the dissonant music of scandal—the testimony of the orchestra as it rises up in mutiny to kill off the conductor
—and they fall from the wonderland of the benighted museum into the dining room of the Rosenmontag on Holborn where the wallpaper looks in this light to be composed of smoky, trellis-patterned red glass. The elderly denizens have lost their virginity, they will readily tell you, or they have had their debutante or wedding balls within these walls. Like the hotel, they were wealthy once. They come down before light for the candlelit breakfast. The first biscuits, scones, tea cakes, and pastries grace the buffet table hours before greater London rises from bed. Then the fried bread and the back bacon. The urns of porridge with fanning patterns of cinnamon-dusted apple slices atop the thick, quick-forming crust.
Ted always feels, upon entering this dining room, that he has been abruptly plunged underwater. The trelliswork wallpaper seems to swim in the light of so many flickering candles, and the early-morning stirrings of the hotel’s residents always seem so sodden and weightless, like scuba men on the ocean’s floor. So
me of those present are not residents, but docksmen and toilers at the industrial islet four blocks to the south. They are no more nimble for being thirty or forty years younger than the denizens. Others are not workers at all, but inscrutable night people from nowhere special. They grow more ashen and clandestine, morning to morning, and they eat in silence, paying with the provisional scrip that the stopgap Labor government is ticker-taping the neediest with. They drink openly from flattened, six-ounce bottles. Once in a while, a ripple of raw laughter passes through their ranks, spasmodic and stagy, as though part of a background panorama in a production of Falstaff. These are the children and the wages of the war, Ted thinks. Six thousand white doves circled the Thames on the day that the Germans called it quits. Thousands of English children took on their own orbit. This is the world that he and Assia have decided to condemn one more child to.
20.
Sylvia
She is curled and fetal. She is a bomb in the black bore. She hears the hissing and the seething. She has finally met her father on her terms and in his milieu. Yet he is sticking to his empty guns. He will not speak. Instead, he lays on his hands. His banishing, perishing, vapory hands. His protective, paternal, kid-mittened, cold, custodial, defensive, dead hands. She is licking the last of the salt of life from them.
There will be suitors coming to look in on her in her shrine. They will turn the crisp white pages to sniff the air of Abdiel’s restrained little foreword to her posthumous volume. He will mention the veiled bust and make reference to Hamlet and Yorick. He will feint toward mythology. He will touch upon her relationship with the lack of her father. As a fixation.
As-a-fixation.
Stop.
She will poke her tongue through the dirt.
21.
Ted
It seemed that every guard in the museum trailed down from his abeyant post, hearing the crash, to have a look at them. A council of elders convened in their sad zookeepers’ uniforms. Ted and Assia had just enough time to raid the loo. They stood there with the bloody, wadded tissue paper in their hands. The oldest one, the jowly primate chieftain among them, pulled a long, sour face.
“Are the two of you thinking of opening up your own toilet?” he asked.
Ted took out his BBC credentials. He insisted that he was on the radio, as if that afforded him leave to trespass.
“Are you saying that you’ve never heard of me?”
“You don’t hear of people on the radio.”
Ted secretly agreed. Radio personalities possessed the “I am” nature of the gods. You heard from them, rather.
“If it will put things right, I’ll phone the Old Bill myself.”
“The Old Bill ends at the door,” said the primate.
Ted took Assia by the hand. He shrugged his big shoulders and stuck out his jaw, wearing a gathering smile of inclusive brotherhood and fellow feeling. “We’re sorry about this, gentlemen,” he said. “The two of us just got careless with the time.”
“But what’s happened to your hands?”
Ted couldn’t come up with anything.
“We made a vow,” Assia said.
“You made a blood vow?” the chief asked.
“Is there some other sort?”
“I want to know what you are going to tell Sylvia,” Assia says. It is too early for her appetite. She has taken a glass full of ice cubes from the geometric heap that rises out of the punch bowl.
“I don’t ask about you and David.”
She spits a chunk of ice back into her glass. Her lower lip is blood red and jutting. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“That’s an evasion, not an answer.”
“Let’s talk about Sylvia.”
“You let me worry about Sylvia.”
“That’s not an answer, that’s an order.”
“All right.”
“All right, what?”
“Do you want to know what I’m going to say to Sylvia?”
“That’s what I just asked you.”
“I’m going to say that marriage is a yoke of freedom. I’m going to tell her that our love is not at an end, but our freedom together is. I’ll tell her that I hope that she can find what we had with someone else. I’ll say that sometimes it’s not death that does you part. Sometimes it’s only life.”
He has extemporized every word that he has just said to Assia. The newness and the surety of the words cry out for them to be said, once and forever, and forever echoing afterward. He can hardly wait to take his leave of Assia. She will drive off in her little Aston Martin, which leaks fumes so that the windows have to be cracked no matter the weather. He will take the Hempstead line home. He will tell his grim truth and sever his uncertain life with someone whom he was once fairly certain he would never be able to live without.
22.
Sylvia
She opens her mouth for a good-night kiss. Chill fingers peel the congealed plasma of her lips. Daddy can have the teeth and the tongue back, too. She has bitten and licked his legacy. The salt from his hands is burning on her tongue, in her eyes, and down her throat. She is weeping from every orifice.
She cannot remember her last poem. No matter, it is now a poultice over a healed wound.
She thinks that she remembers a fragment:
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the shadow
That’s suitably epitaphic, but there’s only one problem. That’s not her. That’s T. S. Eliot, growing older with nothing so very new to say and with a newly reverenced voice to say it with. They say that he was married to a mad wife.
It’s from “The Hollow Men.” The lines must be fresh in her head because she appropriated them. In her sleepless and drugged delirium, she has robbed Eliot’s living grave. That’s what she must have mewled into the notebook in the living room that is sitting on the table beneath the bust of Mrs. Morpheus.
They will think that she has plagiarized her own suicide note.
Stop laughing, it hurts.
She has got to get up and get rid of that piece of cheap apocrypha.
Stop.
Before they catch her cribbing on her last day of class.
O, God.
Up.
Before someone is naïve enough to carve it on her headstone.
All right. All right, then.
O, no, don’t laugh anymore, you’ll die.
BOOK TWO
You Say You Want a Revelation?
London and Devonshire, February 1963. Los Angeles,
April 1982. New York All Along.
1.
Ted
2.
Assia
She sees the reflection of her bandaged hand changing hue as she reaches into the glass grove of colored bottles, thinking that it would be an appropriate gesture if she fixed Ted a drink and brought it to him in the living room. The fractured, multicolored mirror arrayed on the kitchen counter flickers the light from a prism. She likes the radiant play of the colors upon the Formica. She regrets the impatience that would not allow her to become an artist. She was born with a futility monitor built into the fabric of her personality. It has prohibited her from successfully playing the role of a wife as well. Thus far. For a moment, she thinks that she can feel her hand burning, not from the contusion across her palm, but a from a deeper region. In the marrow. She reaches and cools her hand on the windowpane. The palm print lingers there, blue and fissured. No one else, not one of the thirty or so “colleagues” present, has thought to offer their host a sample of the liquor that they brought along to warm their own welcomes, and the stock, now that she notices, is diminishing rather ponderously, considering that this is supposed to be a wake. As far as she is concerned, it is an insult not to drink to the dead. These are artists and educators, these revelers. They are, in one sense, constant mourners. They took these bottles, some of them a quarter or less full, down in haste from their p
antry shelves as they hurried out their front doors, not wanting to miss a moment of the grand satisfaction of standing around, drink in hand, in a grieving man’s living room, watching their darkest forebodings coming tangibly true. Some of them might have even petitioned neighbors to lend them a bottle because one couldn’t very well show up un-charitably dry at a poet’s exequies. There is absolutely not one drop to be had in the liquor stores or the pubs and there likely will not be until the weather lifts and the roads clear. Wait a minute, maybe they are not drinking with the relish that you’d expect because there’s such a scarcity of glasses. Assia did think to set out the babies’ jam glasses with the puppets from the Five O’Clock Club emblemed upon the sides, and the single beer pilsner, and the three teacups that she was able to locate. Sylvia’s domesticity left a great deal to be desired. Ted, ever cautious not to criticize intimates to other intimates, excused his wife’s failings, her awkwardness and her floundering personality, by saying something on the order of, “Well, you have to understand that she’s an immigrant.” She was no immigrant: the poor girl was a refugee. She was a refugee from the cradle onward. Assia sized Sylvia up quickly, self-discovery always being an act of rapid recognition for her.
But disregard this lack of drinking glasses because in Berlin, or even in the Holy Land, the survivors of a tragedy such as this one wouldn’t think themselves worthy of their salt unless they acted up a little bit. They’d make a party of it, nothing less. They would chug from the bare bottles like football kids. They would siphon the stuff from mouth to mouth, dancing with their hands over their heads to chase the malignant spirits back into the woodwork, or back into that one-walled bibliotheca in the front room, Ted and Sylvia’s shelf of books. Assia is an appreciative reader, and, what’s more, she’s enough of a creative writer to make a comfortable living of her own of it at J. Walter Thompson, but she has zero patience for those who cannot separate literature from life. These English are almost too well read in her opinion. London’s atmosphere, by and large, rates as glum, and cavernous, and as cautious of expression as one of their beloved and decidedly bog-standard Gothic epics. London Town, in Assia’s view, keeps cyclically burning to the ground because it is as brittle and flammable as the scratch-paper oeuvre of some of its most revered authors. These English are all passably adept at winning wars, organizing social classes, finishing endlessly peregrinating novels, and subjugating foreign provinces, but they have no idea how to throw a satisfactory funeral. And what does she think that she’s going to serve Ted his drink in? There’s not so much as a can left in the cupboard.
Little Fugue Page 9