Little Fugue

by Robert Anderson

  She whirled on her heel again and again and entered the individual fissures between the dresses, light-headed now. The coquettish thrill of burying herself alive in Sylvia’s costumes was, in its way, more of a triumph than the usurping of her rival’s bedsheets. She took a pale lavender gown from its hanger. As she shut the closet door, the impacted layer cake of clothes tittered like a fat man’s maw.

  9.

  Robert

  We went to the Horn & Hardart Automat between Forty-sixth and Forty-seventh, a large, high-ceilinged, ionized room with white-topped tables and booths, totally unregulated at four A.M. by employees, managers, or security people, and with the ambience of an interim area in a crisis center, much like the cafeteria in a benighted cancer ward. There were drunken sailors in their white bedclothes, several sprawled-over booths full of them. A fellow in a long coat, horn-rims, and with his galoshes permanently trussed with electrician’s tape, was reading a paperback in the proximate center of the room, looking up upon every second sentence or so to cross-reference reality. In a waxed paper pocket upon the table, the young man had half a peanut butter and sliced sour-cured pickle on white bread that he most emphatically did not receive from any of the vending slots up front. A group of high schoolers, all in orange-and-black team jackets, brooded over their sludgy coffees at the very back. From what I could glean, they had flouted the hour of curfew several hours ago and were now petrified of returning to Queens to face their fathers. There were three transeptal windows with rose motifs in the Automat. Each of them had been designed by the same turn-of-the-century master glassman who did the stained work in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. On Maundy Thursday vigils these past few years, with Columbia kids in sleeping bags for company, I have sat and remembered my night with Sabbath at the Automat. In the front of the restaurant, there were banks of chilled-front glass drawers with all manner of appetizers and entrées lurking behind in the shadows. I am sure that I stood there and mulled pop art’s early emphasis on comestibles, and I may even have tried to draw Sabbath into a discussion, although she had the least use for artistic theory that I have ever known in a terribly talented artist. She would have given me a nod and advised me that it was impolite to speak with my mind barren. She had a Lipton’s and a crudités platter that appeared to be suffering from radiation burn. Dialogue, for Sabbath, was more visual than verbal. She shifted in her seat. She pushed back the ashtray. She rolled her cigarette between thumb and forefinger. She knotted her hair. She hummed. She traced the cold Formica tabletop with her index finger. She read, or rather engaged in an unspoken dialogue with, her paper copy of the Upanishads, so corrugated that it might have accompanied her to Kathmandu and back. I knew that she was of a Welsh heritage. In my mind, I made up a matriarchal line of firstborn daughters all christened Sabbath, extending through the ages. Sabbaths who lived behind moats. Sabbaths perched on thrones, backdropped by idolatrous tapestries. Sabbaths who chose from sketch folios of comely drones with pleasing resemblances to forefathers in order to carbon out their breed’s immutable features. Sabbaths who sat reading the Brick of Kells in its original idiom while servants knit jewels into the fabric of their hair. The hours passed. The sun started to come up.

  “Did you sell anything from your Columbia show?” I finally asked, certain that I had done my purgatory and that she would now want to start up a conversation.

  My voice startled her a little. I saw her right shoulder hitch. She finished a paragraph, though, before she lifted her eyes from her book. “Are you looking to buy?”

  “Me?”

  “Is that a no?”

  “Do you extend credit?” I asked her.

  “Where it’s due,” Sabbath said.

  “I liked that one of the woman sleeping on the floor beneath the white veils.”

  She put her head back down and began to read.

  “I burned that photo,” she said, after a while.

  I leaned forward and caught the twin trembling in the white turret of her throat and in the flushed petal of her lower lip. Her honey-colored hair fell like two silkaline wings across her cheeks. I think that’s when I felt it for the first time. The single emotion that would envelop and encompass everything else that I felt for her. It was a desire to save her from her own intensity.

  “I burned that photo,” she repeated. Although I had said nothing, I must have been hanging the balloon of a reddening and incredulous expression right there in her face.

  “Burned it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You burned the photo?”

  “And the copies. And the negative.” Her voice had that instructive tone that you would take with a child.

  The hippie aesthetic held that the art of our generation was meant to fit into the grander scheme of “consciousness raising.” Obviously, the act of willfully destroying one’s artwork was meant to parrot those Buddhist monks who a few years before had torched themselves in front of military headquarters in Saigon. Sabbath was doing her thing for the cause. Still and all, I could barely remember a time when there had not been a U.S. military presence in Vietnam, and I had come to the conclusion that if we were ever truly going to pull out of the conflict, the young artists and the young intelligentsia might do well to lead the way. It was high time that we leave that war to rot in the jungle and get down to the business of deciding who we wanted to be when we grew up.

  Sabbath had read my mind. “The burning is the last step in the development process. On paper, all individual images are differentiated. And so are light and shadow. In ashes, they are one. Do you get it?”

  “Do you love your work?” I asked her.

  “I would have to, wouldn’t I?” she said.

  “How can you destroy what you love?”

  “Do you love your baked beans?” she asked, pointing at the empty, sauce-stained plastic crock that sat there at the corner of the table.

  “Wait, I didn’t destroy the beans, I consumed them.”

  She looked me straight in the eyes, and the vacuum of her expression blew my response directly back toward me. I think that I even flinched. She said, “You could study a bowl of beans forever, from all angles and in all different lights. Yet you can only experience its singularity by devouring it.”

  “If we were speaking of life,” I said, “I would agree with you. We’re talking about art. Art isolates truth in the face of random fortune. Art needs to be preserved at any expense.”

  “Art may need our help,” she said. “Truth doesn’t.”

  “I wonder what world you’re living in.”

  “You talk about truth and art? All along artists have romanticized the transient at the expense of the eternal.”

  “I don’t understand,” I told her.

  “Look, you know what?” she said. “I get tired very quickly, having this conversation. There’s one saying that reoccurs throughout the Upanishads. ‘Words are weariness.’ ”

  “Your Upanishads are composed of words.”

  “No,” she said, “my Upanishads are composed of light.”

  “As opposed to fire?” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Composed of illuminative light rather than annihilative fire? One brightens and the other burns. The distinction must be made.”

  Sabbath said, “The difference is only in degree.”

  “Ridiculous,” I said. “Anyway, any artist would tell you that it is only the differences in degree that matter. The gradations and the fine lines.”

  “A living artist would be likely to assume that when the light was separated from the darkness, the world was born. Van Gogh, come back from the grave, would tell us that the figurative separation of the dark from the light was a mortal blow to the consciousness of eternity. It separated and prioritized the concepts of death and life.”

  “Van Gogh was a student of light.”

  “Van Gogh was a suicide.”

  I flicked my fingernail at the paper Upanishads cover. “If you are really a follower,�
� I said, “you should be the one taking my side of the argument. As I understand it, the Hindus believe that death is nothing more than a way station.”

  She moved the book out of my reach, protectively. “You have everything opposite.”

  “Oh?”

  “Life is the way station,” she said. “Death is the climax. The evil and the deficient live again. The consummate die forever.”

  The piped-in radio said, “The organizers of the Woodstock Music and Art Festival to be held in Bethel, New York, next summer have predicted an audience of up to three hundred thousand youths. Reached for comment, Governor Nelson Rockefeller warned that the last time three hundred thousand revelers turned up to look at art was when the Crusader armies ravaged Constantinople in the thirteenth century. And, says the governor, they did not leave the pictures on the walls.”

  The breakfast crowd had begun to trickle in. They rushed the vending machines, eyeing the tables as though they were at a premium. Someone behind the rampart had snuck in and replaced the sandwiches and the plastic macaroni boats with bagels and lox. The breakfasters’ coffee cups quivered upon their saucers as they came down the aisles. They erected tents from their copies of the Times. They waved across the room to people they saw every day. Some of them, leery of losing their seats, crouched and scampered, each toward the center, as though meeting in a wind chamber. They touched hands for an instant and then retreated. If it was a man acknowledging a woman, the man would place his hand flatly above the cranium of his hat, make himself slightly shorter, and expose his bald spot, usually receiving a wan, bad-joke sort of smile in return. Those hats. They reiterated and reevaluated their heads in all sorts of ingenious ways, reinventing skull structure and cranial capacity. The ladies’ hats were decorated with waxen flowers, signaling brilliant, unspoken ideas. The adventure in Vietnam was meant to protect these people. They were the ones paying for it, after all. The expedition to the moon was meant to aggrandize these people. After all, they were the ones paying for it. The gathering in Bethel, New York, was meant to annoy these people. They were the ones, after all, paying for it in the price of their exclusion. Their lives were meant to be rewarded with dignity at the terminus. They were paying the ultimate price for that. Dearly and unconsciously. Sabbath and I sat there in the center of the Automat. We were the youngest and most death-conscious people in the room.

  Sabbath said, “I need a bath.”

  I said, “I don’t blame you.” I had meant that as a commentary on the people around us. The blankness of her stare confirmed that she thought that I was casting aspersions upon her hygiene. So I said, “I’m going to tie together a shawl made of napkins in case I rub any shoulders in here.”

  She said, “I don’t want to go home.”

  “No?”

  “Like leaving the scene of the crime. I’ll need more film. I’m shooting again tonight.”

  “I have classes,” I said.

  She said, “Sure,” and she turned up her mouth and glanced away. Her expression said, You had me thinking that you were different from the others.

  “Are you going to hang around here all day?”

  “I’m going to get a hotel room.”

  “Here?”

  She must have heard a cash register in my incredulity. “I have a credit card,” she said.

  A trust-fund kid. It sort of figured. “Did we finish up on death?” I asked her.

  “How do you finish an open question?”

  “In theory, it is an open question.”

  “What is it in reality?”

  “In reality, death is an orthodoxy, not a rebellion.”

  She said, “That’s the silliest thing I ever heard.”

  10.

  Assia

  She checked the label (Givenchy of all things) and set the lavender gown upon the bed while she divested herself of everything, undergarments not excluded. The dress was smocked with a light green silk floss that faultlessly offset its vineyard tint. Sylvia had not marked this one with her olfactoric cairn as she had the others. Assia wondered if it wasn’t purchased with the chimera of better times in mind. Had no one given any thought to burying Sylvia in it?

  It was too long in the hem, and the neckline plunged like a trollop’s. But it had the quiescence of vapor against her skin, and the tableau in the mirror switched on a cocktail bolero in the atmosphere. She hunted in the hold of Sylvia’s chiffonier and found a string of porcelain beads. She primped in the mirror and deeply regretted what maternity would inevitably do to her figure. She remembered her terror at fifteen at the thought of her belly swelling. That’s one advantage of growing older, and it is not as if there are so very many. Dread softens to regret. Could her baby overhear her thoughts? What need had they of secrets anyway? They had known each other far too long for that. Assia could not bring herself to differentiate the identity of this current fetus with the one that she had aborted in Palestine when she was but a child herself. She had not, as yet, laid eyes upon either, but both possessed similar character traits of a slight nausea in the morning and, if today were any indicator, an accelerated lethargy all through the afternoon. She had every reason to think of this pregnancy as the return of an old friend.

  She went downstairs in Sylvia’s party dress. She gave the broom and the mop a long resentful look. She went into the living room and curled up on the couch. They had a telly, Ted and her, at the manor in Devon. The newspaper observers were always complaining of the frivolousness of the medium, but its gray face heartily blanketed the slack moments of the evening and it was as easy to turn off as it was to turn on. Sylvia had refused to have a television set in her flat. She was afraid that the invention would superannuate poetry, and she therefore refused to participate in her own and Ted’s eventual undoing. Also according to Ted, they had forced her to watch television in the very same mental ward where they had obviously done such a thorough and diligent job of ridding her of her hereditary disposition toward self-destruction. The doctors, to hear Ted tell it, had taken their tubes from Sylvia’s nostrils and blood vessels, and the iron conducting cables from her temples, and they had wheeled her into a separate room with even more sedate wallpaper, where she was forced to stare at, if you will, a second mind-gelatinizing nexus of cables, and tubes, and currents. Ted had told Assia that Sylvia much preferred to listen to the radio in the evenings.

  By far the most troubling modern medium, to Assia’s way of thinking, was the testimony of witnesses. Well, let her restate that. Most of the witnesses she has known were not true witnesses. The real Holocaust survivors, the ones liberated in southern Poland, she had known exclusively in Israel, and they had steadfastly refused to speak of the camps. These “Never Again” and “Never Let Us Forget” campaigns had not been initiated by any of them. The attestants whom she had met here in London, mostly at academic functions because these individuals had a marked compunction to educate, had had only the footprints of their retreats from the killing ground exterminated. Just like her, they had been spared the camps.

  But the fact that they had not stopped running long enough to turn and reconnoiter the face of evil did not keep them from reinterpreting it. It was apparently held by these survivors that if you did not keep adding new dimensions to the genocide, the righteous dead just might be allowed to die out. It was therefore insufficient simply to condemn the killings and to remember the victims. The time had come for creating legend.

  The “witnesses” tended to whisper, and you were expected to whisper back. Who in your family had you lost and what had you recently heard? Then a bell would ring and the competition began. It was a contest of perspective versus perspective. However could the Germans think to despoil the romance of the European train journey, the pilgrimage rendered with such detail and such verisimilitudinousness in the great novels? How in the world could they even conceive of such a thing? Wasn’t evil ingenious?

  If you stood there and sipped your drink, and answered with only a corroborative expression of total incom
prehension, the attempts to measure the ramifications would switch without transition to efforts at mitigating the inhumanity of the ones responsible. As much as the SS had attempted to hide their humanity, they were in many ways surprisingly much like you and me. As clandestine as the killings were meant to be, they had paraded those transport trains from as far away as the outskirts of France, straight across the Polish countryside. The trains entered teeming and returned empty. The SS were flaunting their most diabolical secret, desperate to share their guilt, desperate to bloody the hands and darken, by way of sheer association, the souls of as many Polish farmers and railside townsmen as possible. So that there would be no such thing as innocent bystanders. And if they were truly concerned with getting away with the crime of time immemorial, why didn’t they think to destroy the collateral evidence, the mountains of shoes, clothes, luggage, and identity papers? Horrible as the SS were, they could not break the ultimate taboo. They could not help but show mercy to their victims’ memory.

  Why was she longing for the distraction of a television set anyway? Memory was her medium. No, memory was not her medium. Memory was a reoccurring malady. Conversation was her real forte. Tonight, she had an in utero friend to talk to. All these years, she had felt like something of an escapee on the maternal front as well. Although no one could fault her her caution, as many times as she had been put into a position of wishing that she had never been born. Millions died. She survived. Who was there of consequence left out there to judge her? Not only to judge her—who was left in the world to validate her? But that’s really why it was time now to have her child. The baby would be born in England instead of Palestine, where the virus of fascism immigrated following the war to lie in wait for the world’s remaining Jews. What’s more, Assia had hooked her baby a real father this time—an award-winning poet and not a sixteen-year old aspiring yeoman whose best feature was put forward on the night of that previous conception, that false start. And not to belabor the point, but when a girl reaches the age of thirty-five and she has sworn before the altar once or twice—all right, three times, never mind the details—and life and death themselves have become something of a bore, what with so many relatives having received an interment in the murky air over Poland, a circumstance that has proved impossible to survive or to even live down, well, my darling, a girl naturally begins to look for reasons to remain alive. It was wearisome to discuss the prospect of death with someone who had been waiting patiently for twenty years to be born. It was distressful to confer ground rules upon an angel. But Assia was not about to start deceiving her child. A lie between loved ones is a little death. And death can become a little bit of a habit. The thought reminded her that she hadn’t looked in on Sylvia’s children in over an hour.