Little Fugue

by Robert Anderson

  “Yes.”

  “Have you children?”

  “Two.”

  “I see,” the police inspector from Sheffield says. He bends down over the oven and peels away the laundry satchel. But it isn’t a laundry satchel at all. It’s Sylvia’s patterned bed comforter. She is sleeping beneath it. “Is this your wife?” he asks before Ted can bring himself to look.

  And he sees the briar of her hair, boring up out of the black casing of the oven. She has allowed her blond bottle coloring to tarry away. Her hair resembles a berry heath. A living thing. Yet her skin is milky white and with a translucent skim of film at its topmost layer. Ted stands looking at her.

  What does Assia really know about the two of them? Were they ever happy together? She remembers Ted saying that they used to play imagistic little word games with the flora and fauna on their walks in North Tawton. He said that they were most in tune with each other out in the open air. Alas, said Ted, marriage is usually a contest of interiors.

  Now look at her. Who but Sylvia would take what was at this point essentially her own internal contest to such an outward extreme? She is struggling to kill and struggling to save herself all in one motion.

  “Is this your wife, sir?”

  “No,” Ted says, shaking his head. “No, that’s not her.”

  Ted leaves the inspector and goes into the loo. He sees the willow reeds on the wall that he thought broadened the narrowness of the room by putting one in mind of the woods. Other than that, there is no evidence in the entire flat that he ever lived here. He regrets that he didn’t cast a more prominent shadow on these surroundings. Here’s the sponge mitten that she bathed herself and the children with. It’s faintly damp. A nest of reddish hair is tangled over the drain of the tub. The thirty-pence perfume that had her smelling venal. The makeup case with the engraved coat of arms and the veneer of talc dust. Ted opens the kit. He turns her lipstick wand in his hand. He uncaps the rouge stick. He finds the groove of Sylvia’s lips in the smudged, misshapen tip. She has left him a cold French kiss.

  Now he is walking back toward the kitchen. He passes the veiled bust on the marble end table. He puts his fingertips to its throat and listens for a pulmonary rumor.

  “Where are my children?” he asks the inspector.

  “Children?” the inspector snorts. “Don’t tell me . . .”

  “We knocked on doors and we didn’t get any takers from the neighbor ladies,” a policeman in the corner says.

  “Answer the question dir-ec-tly, mister,” says the inspector.

  “We had no other choice,” the policeman says. “We had to take them to the garrison.”

  The inspector does a military turn upon his heel to face Ted head-on. “Your children are being attended to by a matron at the police garrison.”

  “We took them out bundled in the bed gear,” the policeman adds. “They didn’t see an accursed thing.”

  The inspector says, “It should do you good to have the air while you’re after bringing them home. But you’d better have a look in the mirror before we go out, lad. I think your lip’s bleeding.”

  Ted brings his hand to his mouth. There are lawless iron footsteps coming from the stairway. Some ferociously shod creature is climbing up from the landing. “In fact,” says the inspector, “if you’re going as far as the garrison, we could take care of the formalities at the mortuary.”

  “No,” Ted answers with his hand to his mouth.

  “What is your name again, please?”

  “Ted Hughes.”

  “Ted, due to the nature of this death, the coroner is going to have to question you.”

  “He’s not going to question me today.” He says this through his hand. The inspector is about to ask him to repeat it. A slender man with a pencil mustache, a scrutineer’s kestrel features, and two riser shoes, tipped with metal at the toes, is standing there at the edge of the stairs. He comes forward into the kitchen. He carries a boxy black valise. He opens the case and takes out an old Kodak Hawkeye. He crouches and begins snapping pictures of Sylvia in her repose, deftly changing the flashbulbs, dropping the dead ones into the pockets of his topcoat. He keeps pouring his fleeting saffron down upon her. Her hair keeps changing color. Ted, the inspector, and the policemen are standing there watching. Suddenly, the slender man stands up. He turns his Kodak upon Ted. “For our records,” he says. The liquid portrait of a terrified man with his hand concealing his mouth falls like a Veronica over Assia’s face as she sleeps, dreaming as usual in the third person.

  5.

  Ted

  “The look, Ted.”

  Circa 1982, the poet laureate of Great Britain, Edward James Hughes, is being photographed for the cover of his new volume Recent Poems. His reputation precedes him. Bones start rattling in bookshops every time a new tome hits the racks. He is famously gun-shy in conversation, they say. How idiosyncratic for a man of his stature. The photographer’s name is Leela Aimee Silvert. He has never heard of her until yesterday at the cocktail reception. She emerges straight from Trollope, riding on a glimmer into his dreams.

  “Give me the look, Ted,” she repeats. Her one eye is clear, green, and rapt. The other is a glassy, inquiring adit. Her right hand is a splayed wing, thumb and forefinger fiddling her camera’s viewfinder. She has framed his handsome, despoiled face in a cowl of shadow, accentuating its faceted peaks. His forehead is quite high. His eyebrows are craggy, pointed, and academic. His nose is acute. His lips are incipient, calling up cruelty as well as that old adage about poetry being the art of enhanced silence. His jaw is Byronic, big as Oscar Wilde’s. His chin is brutal. He embodies an abstraction that the movies have always tried to convince us of, the uncommon charisma of the common man. Leela is aware of this, but, although smitten since the cocktail party, she has an alternate vision of him. She has waited for this one for years. She has come to make Caesar look sinister, not to flatter him, or to end up in bed with him. Given Ted’s reputation, she well knows that the very worst thing she can do to him is cause him to appear sexy in shadows.

  Her assistant is holding the palm leaf, just so, between the path of the sun and the subject’s face. Another squats behind Ted’s back and aims a klieg at his shoulder to illuminate the blade of his shirt collar so that in the picture his stubbled chin will nuzzle a hatchet’s blade. “Please, Ted, the look,” Leela says, her pretty teeth flashing. She means the money shot, the leading-man look, the thousand-yard ray of seduction. “A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,” to quote Yeats, the Irish mystic fellow who once inhabited the psychic space that Ted so long ago estranged himself from and, long ago, reclaimed in the aftermath of a death that has impacted his life likely more than his own death will. It is the same glance that he gave this very same photographer yesterday by the poolside, before they had been introduced, and before he learned that she was the one who had been flown in to do the book cover. Leela took it too seriously, of course. Ted’s been happily married for several years to the registered nurse with the heart-shaped face who coaxed him back from the requisite end-of-the-1960s breakdown, although Ted laid claim to better excuses than most. The look is only a reflex now. It’s nothing but target practice. It’s also the last thing that he wishes to find on the book jacket of his latest effort. Rather, Ted thinks, like John and Yoko starkers on that album cover with their ductile bodies confiding the formlessness of the product within.

  After all these years, he still can’t help but wonder at the omission of Sylvia from the Sgt. Pepper’s cover in favor of Dylan Thomas. The album was, of course, a benignant message from the ivory air raid shelter in the basement along Abbey Road. And although Dylan Thomas might have haunted that moment with his baroque, spooky eloquence, Sylvia embodied the moment and the moment’s aftermath, the brevity, the abandonment, the religiosity, and the peril. Did the lads fail to read the news on that day, oh, boy?

  “C’mon, Ted, please!”

  A movie memory from his boyhood enters his mind. An unsubtle legionnair
e reworking of Billy Budd. It was called Sunstruck, he suspects. The corporal’s a former clubfighter who slew a man in the ring. The wicked commandant is a troll-like Erich von Stroheim double with a forced Prussian accent and a moonscape of desiccated lesions marking his face. The rank private is a Nordic orphan, a Hansel of purest gingerbread. His presence wets the corners of the troll’s lips. The troll keeps licking at his handkerchief, and the corporal marks this by tightening his eyes and jaw, the skin of his face going shaley as a dead man’s.

  Late in the reel, this corporal with a conscience to go with his grit topples the commandant’s tent with his hickory walking stick, just as Hansel is cowering in a blanket and Stroheim is removing his insigniaed blouse to reveal the prickly chest hair of a wild boar. In retaliation for such insolence, the commandant orders the platoon to act as the corporal’s firing squad. Else he’ll refuse, even unto the point of torture, to divulge where he has sunken the infernal compass, and the lot of them can try their luck amid the merciless sun, fourteen hundred miles from camp.

  The troll finishes speaking. He licks at his silken handkerchief.

  Then, at the last, this piece of homoerotic rubbish redeems itself in the throb of its climactic moment. The corporal stands resolute beneath the Sahara sun. He bucks up his shuddering men with a close-up that actually mirrors the longitude of the focus of the conscripted riflemen, diamond tears sprouting in their marksmen’s eyes. He fixes them with a look that says, Know me, hate me, love me, annihilate me, remember me. And with the trace of a smile.

  The photographer has never seen anything like this before. She has never seen blood flow stall and restart so except in the face of the heavens. She has never seen any actor’s face segue so compellingly from the lacuna of unworked stone to the full-dress rigidity of the features of a colossus and so clearly display the calculated math of its work along the way as well. The right eye dips to half-mast. The cheekbones tighten like knuckles. The thin lips go bloodless and the mouth slashes into the smile of a jackdaw. Lady-killer, Leela Aimee thinks and, instantly, she repents the thought. For the very first time in her life, she feels like apologizing for an unspoken brain wave.

  Ted notices the camera shaking in her hands. He sees this for what it is now. Leela has him standing in this web of shadow because, for the last nineteen years, his public life has been one long, successful advertising campaign for Sylvia’s death, despite his best efforts to assert his own identity and allow his ongoing life to bury the dilatory dead. For her part, Leela can’t help but be struck by the revelation of just how mortal a man he really is. He can almost hear her thinking that, if she plays along, she can have the best of both worlds. Ted’s bed is nothing less than the centerpiece of Sylvia’s living tomb.

  6.

  Assia

  Ted walked right up to the fire and began warming his hands. The Tinkers spread out, hemming him in, in case he had come for trouble.

  “I want to have a look at a horse,” Ted said.

  “What horse?”

  “A horse named Ariel.”

  “She’s put down, mister.”

  “Why was she put down?”

  “She threw a boy that was riding her.”

  “She did? Was the boy killed?”

  “Naw, cracked his spine for life. It was none of our beast.”

  “Whose beast was it?”

  No one answered.

  “Cheers,” Ted said, and he started to walk away.

  “Do you want your fortune told?” one of them called behind him.

  Assia could tell that Ted had gotten up and left the bed for the lack of equilibrium. She hated to sleep alone. Sleep was a matter of balance to her. Even when her dreams were not up and running, her slumber was always well lit and populated with figures that were not human and not sculptural so much as they were abstractions finely drawn in lampblack.

  Lying awake was preferable to sleeping alone. Sylvia, Ted told her, was a light sleeper. She is awake yet. An outrage in the marriage bed makes for an unquiet grave. Less an end than a state of endless uncertainty for the survivors. A treading of water. A push for the Dead Sea.

  7.

  Robert

  Sabbath always told people that we were photographing specifically chosen individuals for a “sociological time capsule.” The capsule was to be opened at the advent of Aquarius. They, and Sabbath used the word they without exemption because we were certain that we would either be dead or other individuals entirely in thirty years, would be welcome to take their long look backward and laugh heartily at us. The subjects took delight in the idea that their images would be given a temporary burial with honors, and they also looked forward to the ceremonial disinterment, three decades hence. At least one individual asked to be given his image back when we were “done making history with it,” meaning that he couldn’t wait to watch some part of him rise from the dead.

  Sociology seemed the ultimate arbitrator at the time. The old power structure of faith and fealty was coming apart. To say that there was a generation gap in the late 1960s is no underestimation. But the split ran much deeper than along age lines alone. The rift seemed to run cleanly through the hearts of all individuals, old and young, splitting them apart. The travesty of Vietnam was delineated through still and moving photography, and then spoken and written about to such an extent that the overanalysis of the obvious served only to further obfuscate the truth. Vietnam broke down the Manichaean division of good and evil that had forever been at the heart of the American imagination. The American flag, not that coming summer but the next, would fly over two polar-opposite craterscapes. One of them was upon the valley of the moon. The other lay along the Mekong Delta. The heights that we could rise to were to be matched only by the depths that we could plumb.

  And here we were, Sabbath and I, off in search of narcotic degenerates, walking along the fault line, or so we imagined. We really thought that when the national rift closed, drug use would decline. We had to get the Deuce down on photographic paper while it was hot. I didn’t even sound Sabbath out on how much she knew about the drug culture for fear of opening myself up to ridicule. For that matter, it wasn’t as though I would learn all there was to know in the months that followed. For at least a year thereafter, I would cling to the belief that cocaine was a drug interchangeable with amyl nitrite. I thought it an aphrodisiac because the hookers, the pimps, and the connoisseur johns could not have sex without taking a hit of blow. Of course, the guys did it to get their “heads right” for the experience, and the girls did it to banish their minds from the dirty work that their genitals had to do for them. I never saw any Huggy Bear long-waisted jackets, velvet bell-bottoms, and peacock-feathered sombreros on those macks, either. They dressed pretty much like high school civics teachers in powder-blue leisure suits with puffed shoulders and thickly cut neckties. They accessorized in the diamond district, as you would expect, getting themselves on permanent first-name bases with the Lubavitchers who cut them special deals for buying in bulk. The ladies wore white mesh mostly, or that’s the way I remember it anyway, skirts, blouses, and crisp little hats to top off the ensemble.

  The dope fiends were hip to sociology as well. Some of them had been subjected to clinical studies at one of the local receiving hospitals or the nascent Daytop treatment center. I met the older hard nuts who said that they had undergone what they described as “cold treatment”—I assumed that that meant cold turkey—at the infamous Federal Narcotics Farm in Lexington, Kentucky, or in the old Thirty Day Detention Program on Rikers Island, or the even longer drying-out period at Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island in the East River. One and all, they had that air of incarceration even out in the open.

  The junkies lived mostly in forty-eight-hour cycles, since the majority of them were able to forfeit a night of sleep in favor of their intensive reconnaissance activities. A great many of them wouldn’t crash for three or four nights. The goal of the interminable hunt was to purchase enough dope to last their double day,
and if, by some providence, they were able to score in the course of their twenty-four-hour morning, they would usually grant themselves a holiday and just go and get high somewhere.

  The expectation was of pleasure. The lifestyle wrought agony. Most of their bodies had worked up a tolerance to the junk. Heroin wouldn’t cause the accustomed euphoria any longer, but the lack of it brought physical torment, the glands, joints, and small of the back being areas of great favoritism, the disease of withdrawal employing the deft, anatomically informed dolor of an inquisitor’s assistant. Intimates and strangers alike ignored the addicts’ pleas and their panhandling spiels, judging, semicorrectly, that to aid them in prolonging their lives was the cruelest thing that one could do to them. You wondered how they survived. Then you looked around at the excess of commodities on the street and you realized that New York City was Swag Central, with thousands of delivery trucks haphazardly secured over lunch breaks, thousands of cellar grates left unlatched, scores of sleepless dreamers who took ill-advised walks along the parks at night, and innumerable homosexuals whose fantasies would afford them a succinct and irreversible education.

  The junkies would brag of their invulnerability, and, in the next breath, speak longingly of death. Death copped every day, every hour, every minute.

  “Junkies, you want?” the lady in the leopard skirt with the half mesh top and the bewildered expression said. This was the one person whom Sabbath and I agreed on as being safe to approach. “Go on down to the Mission. They’re giving a special on junkies today.”

  “The Mission” was the area between Seventh and Eighth Avenue on Forty-second. That strip was the preferred prowling grounds of prostitutes, johns, gay adventurers, and vice cops. It had the same kinesthesia of magnified familiarity among total strangers as a tent revival. We walked over and Sabbath began her sociology rap, stepping into the center of a random group while I hung behind.