Little Fugue

by Robert Anderson

  That night I believe we went to an auto body shop on Twelfth Avenue where blue mihrab smoke was coming out in snake coils from a carburetor and the gentleman with the firkin chest, who had lately been on rollers underneath an El Camino, looked straight-faced at Sabbath and me and said that he had never heard of anything known as smack. Except, that is, in the context of what would happen to our heads if we didn’t immediately “take a travel.”Then we went by the Rialto on Eighth, seeking out a man known as Ponce de León.

  The Rialto’s neon still had the capsizing gondola that Lana Turner comments on in her memoirs. There was Mr. de León, up in the vacated organ loft, taking in his second consecutive viewing of Rossellini’s Open City and explaining for the benefit of his new girlfriend the similarities between Rome in the aftermath of the war and San Juan in the aftermath of the exodus. Starving junkies, caught short on stuff, squirmed in the seats behind him, waiting for the intermission. Sabbath didn’t think her flash would be illuminant enough, and so she sent me to open the men’s room door in the rear. I cracked the door and aimed the bathroom’s beam directly at Ponce as he sat there, gesturing in the organ cupola. I looked over my shoulder and a guy a little older than me was standing there against the toilet wall, wiping blood from the corner of his mouth. He nodded with his eyes only and said, “My mother acts like I’m an intense disappointment.”

  We went up into a tenement hallway with a blighted plaster job and an exquisite mural that flowed across the seam in the wall with the effortless-ness of a river. All the days of the month were color-coded, and minuscule asides were written in the margins in Spanish. DannyOrtiz—who was never called anything but DannyOrtiz—warned us that it was bad luck to photograph the mural because it was the gatefold of his brother AngelOrtiz, a deceased numerologist. “You know, like the gates of Tut’s tomb,” DannyOrtiz told us. He pointed out Friday, red twenty-one on the mural map. “That’s the day my brother AngelOrtiz died,” he said. “He finished the fresco and didn’t know what to live for.” We visited a Spanish ballroom above a carniceria where a double wedding and double baby shower were taking place. The dancing had been so tumultuous as to set off the sprinkler system, and infant gifts sat there on the long table in a vinyl puddle. Eleven Cuban musicians in damp toupees and frill-front, rust-colored tuxes saw our white faces and called out for us to take a turn on the wet floor. The furtive, irregular merengue steps eluded Sabbath and me, and everyone agreed that it looked as if we were trying desperately not to get robbed. Then it was on to a church basement where a group of men stood in a meridian. In the center two roosters were engaged in killing each other. The scoring judge in the striped shirt got up off his knees when we entered the cellar. He pointed a revolver at us and pulled the trigger. It was a starting gun. It signaled to the spectators that it was time to run and that the organizers of the bout would once again have to explain to undercover police agents that cockfighting was a religious ceremony in Puerto Rico marking the blessed assumption of Santa Maria Volcano de Voluptuoso y Retrasado. José Negron, our interpreter on that trip, explained that we meant no harm. The match went on. We dropped into the kitchen of Evalene “Missy” Arias—she is still alive and living in a motorized love seat in a home in Loisaida—who fed addicts oxtail stew from twin kettles on the back of her stove in order to mitigate the judgment upon the soul of her son Rafael, the drug-dealing breadwinner. Then because this had been one long drought day, a day devoid of sunshine and scag, Sabbath and I went by the all-night Duane Reade on Fortieth Street and photographed the gleaming white shelves, emptied of the cough syrup, paregoric suppositories, which the junkies would suck like Charm Pops, and the three-for-a-quarter Duplex Creams, and frosted Macamellos.

  Then we went to get something to eat.

  8.

  Assia

  They called it the War for Independence. It seemed to her to have more to do with simple survival. By that yardstick, it qualified as a losing battle for a goodly portion of the population. First chance that Assia got, she left the country. She did it at a time when girls like her were routinely bending to kiss the earth in order to swear fidelity to the poverty, squalor, and warfare that served to confirm that God Almighty had finally consented to answer their prayers. From time immemorial, all covenants struck up in the Holy Land were not applicable unless they were sealed in blood.

  Her first husband rescued her from the Old Testament. He was a former ace in the Royal Canadian Air, just having mustered out of his own long conflict. He had a room in the King David Hotel and was stringing for one of the Toronto dailies. There was no one to marry the two of them. The justices were in the field, or in strategy sessions underground. The rabbis were busy with the dead and would have declined if they had been asked. He managed to find a ring of gold somewhere. He promised that they would be married in a Toronto church. She had never been in a church.

  Her new husband was crazed with her exoticism. While her English was fermenting, he liked for her to do the endogenous drawings on parchment that pierced their language barrier. She drew self-portraits alongside the armadas of gyrfalcons that the Arab armies had released over the Negev, a gesture of the deepest contempt. The birds summoned the artillery. The blood of one biblical prognosis or another rained from the sky. Her flier, no wiser for having been to war, mistook the falcons for a legion of owls. He thought that his wife was asking him to help her with her sleeplessness. He apologized for his insensitivity. He went out and bought her some sleeping tablets, misreading her and thereby forfeiting their marriage vows, as far as she was concerned. In her mind, she moved on.

  Ted came back from the coroner’s inquest. He started up the stairs.

  “What happened?”

  He didn’t turn. “She’s legally dead.”

  “How are you?”

  “The same.”

  She drafted her letter of resignation to the officers of the J. Walter Thompson Agency, London division. It was going to be a full-time job covering Sylvia’s retreat from the world. She wasn’t worried. Misfortune had a way of engendering fortune. Always another door opening.

  She found herself falling steadily in love with the complexity of the children. They cried at the maddening regularity of things, and, within moments, they would be comforted and sometimes overjoyed by the same. Caprice shocked through them with the force of wizardry. A pirouette upon their bellies—they were little turtles the way they got around—changed the stage setting and made the world new once more. They traded roles seamlessly, cueing each other with the ease of two chamber players. The one had ahold of the red truck and was mesmerized by the revolution of the wheels. The other was looking right and left fretfully, seeking out a new excuse to cry. Then some climactic shift in the room perpetrated a role reversal. They were enemies to Assia’s efforts to clean and straighten. Patch carpeting had been laid in the front room— she would have to do something about that. But the pleat of the rug absolutely had no business remaining tucked into the corner of the wall and the struggle to free it was violently mercurial, involving chuffing tears at the inert tug-of-war and triumphant crowing at the revelation of the bare floorboards. There was no reality to the children that was not tactile. Objects held mysteries. Every inanimate thing that they could hold in their hands had to be evaluated and affirmed by way of their fingertips, and most often also by their taste buds. The way in which they incessantly sucked on their fingers seemed to Assia a valid exercise in self-analysis. They solicited her dry nipple when they grew hungry. She indulged them their cravings for the time that it took to warm the suckling bottle. They indulged her, most uncharacteristically, the fallowness of her breast. They looked up from the depths of those sparkling urns that were Sylvia’s eyes with a combination of absorption and sympathy, their little mouths chewing over the complexity of a lifeless teat.

  She felt sick that morning. She felt indolent that afternoon. It was early. It was psychosomatic. It was a reaction to suddenly being the one not getting any attention. She napped with the
babies after Ted had come home from the coroner’s. When she got up to start dinner, feeling much refreshed, he was not in the house. She ate alone and put the children down for the night. She waited. When he came in, she was sitting there at the tea table. He went toward the stairway. She said hello, and he looked at her from the landing. He went up the stairs and turned the record player on. He slept in the room that he and Sylvia had occupied before their daughter and son were born. The next day was the day of the funeral. He left without breakfast, without a word of good morning or goodbye. The cold, silent steel of his departure was something of a mercy wounding. Assia had no idea what she would say to him, either. In what words could she have adequately expressed her sympathy and resentment? All morning, she could not stop petting the children. She wanted to get busy and clean up the flat. Each time she moved away from them, the nerves of her palm missed the feel of their chinchilla hair and even softer skin. They were, she knew, replicas of the self inside her. It had been so many years since she last had a family.

  She was apprehensive of her sudden feelings of gratitude toward Sylvia for her largesse, for granting the victor her spoils in such an uncharacteristically magnanimous fashion. She knew from experience that it was a ceaseless and hopeless thing, once one started to feel beholden toward the dead.

  She liked the English word offspring. In her mind’s eye, the word made her see delirious fetuses working a trampoline. Instead of weeping over Sylvia’s grave, she could stay behind and mind Sylvia’s offspring. The arc of her afterlife. She lay on the floor and ran her fingers up and down their spines, and tickled them on the spare flesh beneath their chins.

  Why did the barely living insist on putting death on such display? There was a colonel in the war whose name she cannot even remember, who had taken shrapnel and was lost on the operating table. The entire exhausted staff was expected, one by one, to spend a silent moment with him as he lay on a gurney in the alcove. This was a surefire morale booster, the head doctor assumed. And Rebecca—the nurse who had hid in a tunnel system beneath Berlin and who refused to divulge specific details about her experience because there might be survivors living down there still who may have been spared the news of Auschwitz—made use of the vigil as an opportunity to curl up on the cot with the dead officer. Called to account in front of the whole staff, she said, “You’ve slept with one of them, you have slept with them all.”

  Why were those dusty window shelves so naked? Some potted plants would block the view of the dirty-gray snow outside. There was a garden on the grounds of Court Green, a white-covered menagerie now. She and Ted could plant flowers in the springtime and import them into the city. They could take the children out and photograph them in the new rose bed. Assia wasn’t sure that she could grow flowers. She had never had the opportunity to try.

  If she laid the babies in the crib with their pacifiers and cooed serenely to them, they would probably take the notion to sleep. She should really get serious with the broom, the mop, and the duster. She wouldn’t mind if Ted returned later this afternoon, only to have his depleted tear ducts deluged with the air of clean, hard ammonia. Let him understand that this is a new beginning for him as well. New beginnings. New old clothes. She would like to make the rounds of the secondhand clothes garrets, the empyrean that the British Empire had gravitated to. Ted would disagree, but Assia knew wardrobe to be a form of fiction. No, a form of poetry. Ted was a fashion illiterate, and this worked to Assia’s great advantage. To this day, he had no idea what tricks she used to hook him, although the technique that she used was treacherously close to the modus of poetry. You dress and you comport yourself with all possible economy, but with the suggestion—no, make that the hypnotic suggestion—always that your private persona is so complex and bewitchingly contradictory that it is beyond even your own capacity for understanding.

  You can call Assia an actress, but it wasn’t she who went so over the top in her role that she ended up, poor dear, in the ground.

  She remembers asking her father how things would have been if he had remained in Odessa and raised his family there. He said that they, meaning the entire family, would have had no sense of history. History didn’t just happen; it happened to them. What her father did not tell her, what he did not live long enough to say, was that someone who has outrun death itself can accept no state other than absolute freedom, the most wrenching condition of all. Freedom requires much more than the refugee may have been able to escape with.

  All right, new beginnings. New stage properties. Do you know that she hasn’t seen a single feather boa all the time that she has been in England? Except at the opera. This reminds her that late last night Ted played a record album of Gluck’s Orpheus and Euridice. His disregard for the sleeping children was totally out of character. There were two arias that he spun over and over. The first was Gli squadi trattieni. The second was Che faro senza Euridice. Her knowledge of Italian and her familiarity with baroque opera are not what she has led Ted to believe they are. But she has viewed that opera twice, once in Toronto and once here in London. And also she is able to rough out the translations of those titles. The first would be something like “Restrain your glances.” The second something like “Euridice was my lighthouse.”

  He’s not himself. He’s into Sylvia’s stash of particulars. That’s what they say in code for pills on Carnaby Street. She is going to find his supply and flush them. She’s going to clean him out like she intends to clean this house, should she ever get her mind and arse in gear. Not only are the tiles in the kitchen lusterless, she’s noticed something of an odor venting up. A between-the-seams, rooting-in-cracks sort of smell.

  There’s the memory of that Sephardi, the recuperating soldier. Oh, she should just leave it alone and get the mop and bucket before Ted comes home from the burial with that big head of his needing both her shoulders to cry on. No, that’s a definite no on the yellowy octogrampatterned kitchen tiles and on the unmatched fringed red sofa section, squatting over there like some charity boarder. It is pear-shaped, and has no arms, and no visible legs, for the dangling fringe like a gypsy’s gown. An old invalid in a shawl.

  When he first came in, the Sephardi solider had multiple wounds, none of them really serious. She had time to get to know him, whereas others simply died or went back to the fighting right away. He was conscious all the time. Like many men who initially faced the heat of the desert in their maturity, he had taken to wearing patchouli. It was one of her very first experiences with love, this Sephardi who smelled so sweetly. It was strictly forbidden, and this made it all the more delicious. And the pleasing lack of any goodbye between them. The impregnability of the memory. The smell of his patchouli in the pores of her skin, sweet for three days thereafter and then souring, setting off such an epidermal alarm that she thought she had caught hives. And the Sephardi’s return to the infirmary, speechless, his chest open. Then dead. The lack of the goodbye in the second context more terrible for the disregard of it in the first.

  Last night, she had waited until the record player was silent. Gray light was already in the window, and the babies, from the rhythm of their breathing, were already on the brink of waking up. She went up the stairs on her toes. She climbed underneath the winding fleece of Sylvia’s black Asian quilt. She bit open the buttons of Ted’s pajama top, tasting the umbral residue of his pipe in the fabric. She had the Magen David medallion dangling from her neck, and she slithered its wintry ingot along his chest and into the thicket of his chest hair. She put her fingertips to his lips, and he opened his mouth obligingly. She felt the perverse thrill of her penile finger moving across the vulva of his tongue. She lifted her nightgown. She allowed him to enter her. She felt it immediately. The raw touch of dead tissue. He was fucking her in cold blood. Love, as Assia has had occasion to learn, is the only virus that mandates its own quarantine. Fearing contagion and fearing a miscarriage, she falsified an unlikely orgasm.

  “I’ll owe you one,” she told him. She got up out of the bed a
nd went back downstairs.

  She checked and made sure that the babies were sleeping. She went up and she opened up the oracular suite of Sylvia’s wardrobe closet. Ted went around in one of the two variations on tweed that he owned, and, if his four neckties were all in the wash, he was apt as not to leave the house with an old light-gray lisle hose hanging crookedly from his collar. Lo and behold, Sylvia had had a color sense. It wasn’t brazen, but it was nothing less than game, calling to mind the glossy sophistication of those MGM pageants of years past. However did she and Ted afford all this on the scant salary of an itinerant bard? Before he landed the BBC spot, Ted had supplemented his paltry income from Cambridge by whoring himself out to far-flung student union smokers. Sometimes he would find, to his equal parts chagrin and amusement, that he had been hired to emcee for a batch of pimply skiffle groups, masters all of the proper slant rhyming of the words boy, joy, and corduroy. Sylvia’s mum had been the one with the bankroll. According to Ted, though it wasn’t the sort of thing that he liked to go on about, Mum’s finances had been garnered by a lifetime of scavenging and sacrifice rather than any windfall. She was more meddlesome than she was benevolent. Each “loan” was followed by another prolonged visit.

  Assia was ordinarily as lusty as a tabby in season—she had never made any exceptional secret of it, either. But it was something of a comfort to her to think that clothes would provide a particular cupidity when sex was but a fond and qualmish memory. These fabrics possessed much the same magnetism to the female as female flesh does to the male. The mind disengages upon contact. She slipped her waifish torso into the parenthetical space between two smart woolen jerseys, feeling the delight of having her back and belly scratched simultaneous with the herniate ripple through the entire layer cake of the trousseau. She breathed deeply and discerned nuances of Ted’s pipe smoke and the piquancy of Sylvia’s anxiety, which had the exact sort of elevated citrus tang to it that the air of the ladies’ washroom at the competitive cotillions always seemed to be rife with. Little Miss Agatha, her old nickname for Sylvia, had always seemed a tense caricature to her. Her smile was overbright, the shaft of her frame was overbred, elongated to the point of brittleness, her jaw was overlong, her manner was overardent, her cards were (if you want to know the truth, honey, girl-to-girl) overplayed. She obviously didn’t understand that in this particular game you were allowed to bluff.