Ted doesn’t have any money, but Assia has a little something set aside. Her husband David might be good for another loan. After all, someone has just died.
Abdiel gets up and moves behind the sofa. The space next to Ted is cleared. If she could just get through these people quickly before another female gets the idea to sit down next to him and offer her heartfelt condolences, and submit herself as a sounding board, night or day, proposing essentially that the frequency of Ted’s cleft heart might be most clearly heard through the harmonium of her vagina.
She pulls in her arms and allows her sharp shoulders and elbows to create space, since, at the moment, no one in the room wishes to make bodily contact with bone. She knows exactly what she will say once she slips her arm beneath his and frets their mismatched fingers together. She will whisper, I love you, but you are being just as preposterous as her, thinking that killing herself was going to shut me out of your life, as though her marriage that had gone bad in bed could be revived in her coffin. What’s the point of letting everyone see you like this, Ted? Everyone in this room is measuring the distance between themselves and your misfortune, except for me, that is, since I am the rival, I’m the nemesis, and I am meant to stop loving you in shock, and for fear of a blood curse, and another body always between us. I didn’t know. I swear that I didn’t know that she would do this. But I thought of the remedy before I even knew what kind of plague she would try to spread. Do you remember that I have a new life? Our new life?
Just as Assia reaches the sofa, Abdiel returns and squeezes in, sitting back down without sparing her so much as an upward glance. She finds herself standing practically on top of the two of them. Abdiel has brought the telephone, and the taut vine of the wire cordons off the group behind who are trying to crowd in and ascertain who it is that is about to receive the tidings. He sets the phone down in Ted’s lap and obligingly dials it for him. When Ted rings off, she’s going to pull him into the other room, if she has to do so by the hair of his head. She should have locked the door the first time the buzzer sounded. The phone lines, like everything else in the country, are hampered by the weather. Abdiel has to wind the spring several times before he gets a response.
Ted says, “Mother, it’s Ted.” By his tone she can tell it’s not his mum. Assia wonders at the brazen cheek that allows him to address a dispossessed mother so casually over such a great distance. She herself would have at least begun the conversation with the words I’m sorry. But doubtless Sylvia’s mother, knowing nothing, pours into the phone from across the Atlantic with her early-morning gentility, fresh as the mist of a grapefruit, newly halved. It stands to reason that she must have either confirmation or inkling that her daughter and her daughter’s husband have been having difficulty of late. Maybe Sylvia even confided that they had separated. But Mother, understandably, knows that she cannot show her own cards until one or the other of them files a brief. Her good cheer alone can constitute an impression of impartiality. Besides, Ted was always the likable one of the pair.
“Ted,” Mother says, consolingly, the sweet firmness in her voice resonating in Assia’s psyche, “I just wouldn’t know what to tell you, dear. Sylvia has her ways.” Across the ocean, the sky is blue, her daughter is difficult, and nothing is so very new or amiss. The worst thing that she can do, it is clear from what Assia imagines the foreday bell of Sylvia’s mother’s voice to sound like, would be to tell two sundered, bewildered spouses the truth about how they would most likely end up feeling about each other, twenty, thirty years into the inevitable downdraft. Sylvia, in all her mutability, remains alive in Mother’s geniality, her forbearance, and in her ignorance. Mother will continue to survive Sylvia for a few more seconds yet.
Ted says, “Mother, there’s been an accident.”
And in this silence, this mother’s silence, a very different Sylvia is present. This is a bromide negative of Sylvia, an X-ray of Sylvia. This will be the last her mother will never see of her.
“Mother, did you hear me? I said that there’s been an accident. Is there someone there with you?”
Everyone in the room hears the audible click. Everyone feels the curt refusal of disconnection coming up through the severed phone line.
3.
Robert
I remember that it was snowing, although it could not have been any earlier than April of ’68 because this was the occasion of her senior-year gallery show and we were both scheduled to graduate, she from the dollhouse of Barnard College across the street and I from Columbia University proper. I can see the footprints in the graying sludge along the asphalt on Low Memorial Plaza. I remember thinking about the Holocaust, what with all of the frenetic, pell-mell footprints and the barbed-wire stitching across the tops of the walkway fences, even then, to discourage rambunctious ROTC kids from playing their game of army obstacle course along the campus grounds. I knew that the genocide in Eastern Europe was, for the most part, orderly. It was the aftermath, the anamnesis that followed, that was crazed and impossible to assimilate. It made no difference that the events of the Holocaust took place prior to my generation’s point of origin. The verifiable survivors ensured that it remained an ongoing event, something set squarely in human terms and wholly divorced from the other abominations of the historical narratives, all the other voiceless holocausts. The events of the twentieth-century Holocaust happened to us all: we suffered and we perpetrated them as well, depending upon our perspectives and the duration of the evening that we were attempting to let lapse. Being the consummation of both unthinkable heroism and unthinkable cravenness, the events of the Holocaust seemed irresistible. Our generation had no compunction for using the killings as the fountainhead of our art—Jewish or not, the Holocaust was our inheritance.
Possibly, it was snowing in April. I’m certain that it was a Saturday night, that the show had a limited run of half a week, and that there were only a few people present at the gallery that evening. It is also possible that I remember it as happening in a snowfall because interiors in a blizzard have always had for me the aspect of the photographic developing room, charged with the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. The whiteness seems to seep through the walls, and it does not pale but galvanizes the interior world. I can remember the pricey and taciturn handbills that made the rounds of the campus, announcing the show. The Low Memorial Library Gallery hours were stenciled along the bottom margin. In the center was an engraving of a tantric eye with an equally tantric teardrop, a sort of variation on the yin-yang insignia. This was her emblem of arms. She liked to sign her photos with it, in ghostly silver pencil.
My friends from Dodge Hall and I—and I don’t know where they were on that evening—would routinely show up at these campus art openings all dressed in black. We were the neighborhood smart-asses. In the galleries, we would act as though we had mistaken the rite of the visual arts for a round of funerary rites. We would approach the painter, sculptor, or photographer, moist-eyed, and we would offer our grievous sympathy, breaking out in imitation tears as we perused the wall adornments. Among young people, it was thought uncool in those days not to exhibit a sense of humor under any sort of conditions. Getting angry was an indication that one was “taking themselves too seriously.” The gallery artists managed to chuckle through their rage.
The stroboscope was on as I entered the room. To run a strobe in silence was such a subtle deviation from the norm that it qualified as revolutionary. The excesses of psychedelia had succeeded in transfusing a state wherein only the effortless, only the ambient could henceforth qualify as revolutionary—witness the life-altering vacuity writ upon the cover of the Beatles’ White Album. In the lit lounge of Dodge Hall, it was said that the album cover brought to mind the book design of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel and the long poetic tradition of chary self-definition immediately prior to self-obliteration—a tradition that encompassed the legacy of the poet Jesus Christ. Sylvia had gone out just as the Beatles were coming in. Timing, it was thought among us lit kids, was a highl
y crucial element in self-iconization, which, we assumed, was at base the aim of all art.
The photographer’s name was Sabbath. Just Sabbath. Her photographs had the crepuscular rhythm of day dreading evening, slitting its eye, sparing what was left of its pearled light. Most of the prints had been snatched from their emulsive bath in the last of their latencies. They were all the more perspicuous for being somewhat blurred, all the more symmetrical for the gently floating quality of their compositions. There was a half transparency of a flock of honeycreepers shooting up off a power line with their serrated hackles showing. There was a shot of a female torso, indistinct and elongated, as though Sabbath herself were dreaming the image in a bed permeated with the fluorescence of dawn, the torso lying beneath layers of wedding veils that flowed over the pale form and across the clapboard floor like a tributary river.
The photo studies were one and all portraits of a bell, a bell of resonant brass captured precisely at the point when it is struck, vibrating imperceptibly, emitting reverberant shock waves in that momentary interval before it would emit sound. In the classrooms of my university days, a certain law of physics was revised to help elucidate the covenant of poetry. I don’t know who said it first, but I heard it in scores of seminars. “In a poem,” my professors liked to say, “nothing may be said without imputing an equal and an opposite silence.”
A tall girl was standing across the room. She had the long, straight-cut Christabel haircut of the moment and hands so long, delicately tapered, and alluring that she kept knotting them behind her back, and performing the mortified little two-step of someone who suddenly realizes that she has worn too short a skirt for the occasion. Her fidgeting and nervousness somehow did not surprise me or even register as odd, since everyone in the room seemed to be studying her digits in tandem with the photographs. She had reshaped our perception to such an extent that we could not quite accept that the specific subject matter of her photos hadn’t been limned by her hands as well. People were speaking to her, gesturing, asking long-winded questions, and offering praise. Her acknowledgment consisted of a slight bow.
I told her that I liked her name. She thanked me, saying that she had picked it out herself. An hour or so following our first exchange, we found ourselves alone in the gallery with every indication that the snow was still coming down outside. There were no windows in the Low basement but the carpet was wet and powdery. She had a melon crate and, this being the last night of her show, she needed to get her photographs back to her apartment on Morningside Avenue. I asked if I might carry the crate home for her, but it had gotten late and presumably she did not wish to arrive home with twin sets of baggage, one of which was dead set on sharing her bed. She said that she could manage by herself. But how did I feel about helping her shoot on Times Square one night next week? Did I think that I could keep up with her?
The guidebooks, the city maps, and the street and subway signs will have you believe that it is still there, but this is erroneous. From the ice mold of his cryonic grave, Walt Disney purchased Times Square in the early 1990s. He delivered it up to its Babylonian captivity in Anaheim. What’s left is memories, testimony, photos, footage, mass hallucinations, and a crater in the center of Manhattan. Way back then, it struck me as unusual that Sabbath wanted to bring her clinical sense of stillness into the atmosphere of peripatetic dynamism that characterized Times Square. As I was to learn, she had an advanced sense of finitude. Her “trip,” as we used to say, was to extract the seeds of inception from the deadwood of the terminus.
I had no idea at the time that Times Square was dying. It seemed to have all its vital signs in the springtime of 1968. It was, for that matter, the liveliest-looking place I had ever seen. The neon fortifications would burn until the energy crisis of the 1970s caused them to be dismantled and then interred in landfills like nuclear waste. The Camel smoke-ring machine blew its cool, spherical circles. The neon light wormed through the individual majuscule of the Pepsi bottle cap, and the bottle itself was slowly bled to an achromatic emptiness through the straw. Diaphanous nose rags puffed from out of the bosom of the brightly lit Kleenex box.
But much had already departed by ’68. The Roxy, Hammerstein’s Olympia and his rooftop Winter Garden, and Hubert’s Flea Circus were all memories. The Strand Theater was now the Warner. The Astor Hotel had been torn down to make way for the Minskoff building. Sabbath and I buttonholed idle press agents in the cafeterias, guys with high-water slacks and two-toned argyle stockings, for information on what we might have missed, having been born too late. They all said the same thing. The party had been going on since the turn of the century and, to their taste at least, the party had long since gone sour. To a one, they thought of themselves as the lone righteous survivor of the high times and, to a one, they had left off looking for the nine others who could complete the circle. There was no way to rescue the neighborhood from the flames of retribution. Let it burn, they all said.
People knew that they were crossing a line when they came to Times Square. They came there to either be someone other than themselves, or to be twice themselves over. Everyone was there. The black and the Spanish kids from uptown or across the river. The last of the Italian gangs from the Bronx in their embroidered bomber jackets, dated even then, like some sort of aviator-emulating bowling fraternity. The ornery Irish kids from Queens, red-faced and carnal as hillbillies, bloated and middle-aged in their teens. And the loners and the hybrid nobodies who pimped or dealt or panhandled or jostled. They were the truly dangerous ones, but not so much the ones at risk of being arrested or beaten up by the teenagers that they targeted, as long as they were not, or did not appear to be, homosexual. It seemed to me that gay people who came to the Deuce stood an even chance of getting laid, jailed, or killed. Or maybe all three.
A mass verbal shadowbox would ensue nightly. Kids with their chests out and cutthroat smiles came on with a veiled friendliness. Under an awning or pretending to wait for a bus, kids, white, black, Spanish kids, would say things to each other like, “You feature my Uncle Baby, all broke. He die by the swordfish. Bone in the throat.” Or “You want to do society a favor sometime and have a haircut? I seen you before and your hair is a repeat offender. It’s the prodigy of bad parenting.” The white kids would ask the black kids if they knew “Bubba upstate.”The black kids would ask the white kids if they knew “Chuckie upstate.” Upstate, for the ones who had truly been there, was the metal shop where they went to have their character traits and their reputations refined. If something started, it was agreed by common fiat that it would have a three-minute time limit, and I never saw a contingency that seemed to mind leaving their wounded sprawled in the field. Everyone was terrified of the mounted patrol and their oiled, black equine dragons, who were trained to fight from a lethal kangaroo stance and to breathe fire through the boreholes of their nostrils.
The atmosphere of those streets was constructed of layered migratory patterns. The square was, in its way, a microcosm for our America. The hippies were the newcomers, although one old-time Broadway guy told Sabbath and me that a longhaired Lost Tribe of Israeliters, refuseniks to everything that the twentieth century stood for, would roll in to preach from their wagons in the early 1930s. On Forty-second Street, the hippies looked exactly as they actually were, dropped out, turned off, burned out, and on the prowl. In memory, the boys are bare-chested and the girls wear only faded nylon bikini tops and ragtag jeans, hanging low, almost showing butt cleft, and their provocative near nakedness, combined with their surly nonchalance, stands out in hindsight as the most definitive stage costume in the entire street pageant of the era. The world was not to go their way. The war in Vietnam would stubbornly not end until the hippies ceased to issue the Pentagon its absolute final warnings. But Times Square in the years to come would do its goddamnedest to uphold the countercultural conviction that nudity, public masturbation, random sexual encounters, random sexual encounters with underaged children, profanity, pornography, drug taking and drunkenness
, alms asking by way of belligerent open-air chanting, deafening music complemented by pyrotechnics, and premature death by way of excess were one and all lawful avenues of expression, fully guaranteed under the big-top umbrella of the First Amendment. When the hippie movement died, its soul stayed on Forty-second Street.
Of course, when I first started to go to the Deuce, all manner of sex was available, but the difference is that in those days this insatiable desire for impersonal sex, at whatever cost to one’s dignity and self-respect, was held to be symptomatic of a deeper societal disease. That disease was loneliness. The pens of the generation after Freud and Jung were still warm and flowing at this point. The ones on this side of the ocean agreed that the cost of American rugged individualism was a deep-seated, virtually unrivaled, and hard-nosed brand of loneliness. Our mythos celebrated loneliness: our social fabric suffered terribly from it. That cowboy who rode into the sunset emptied his six-shooter into his own head, off camera. The level of violence in America wasn’t anything like it is today, but still violence was what was shaming us in comparison with the other industrialized democracies around the world. We could not look the Swedes and the Dutch in the eye, and the French, the same sovereignty that fumbled the Republic of North Vietnam into the hands of the American military, lost patience and started sending us the cinematic evil eyeball in the form of Godard’s mid- and late-1960s creations. The politicians may not have had a solution to the endemic American loneliness, but Times Square thought it did. Times Square peddled both the disease and the antidote. Times Square prescribed sealing up the individual gaps on a grand scale with the caulk of popular culture, and—to a greater degree than sex—popular culture was what was for sale on Times Square in those days.
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