Little Fugue

by Robert Anderson

  She went into the nursery. They were aligned in the crib, peas in their pod. But how could they sleep so soundly with those cathedral organ aircraft engines sounding overhead? Second thought, the noise didn’t seem to be coming from overhead. That humming was emanating from the bed linen of the crib. She put her hand to the crib’s wooden paling. She could feel the vibration. Plus it smelled like cigarette smoke in this room.

  She took the little girl out of the bassinet. Her tiny legs trod the air in protest at being disturbed. She laid her down on the bed. She took the boy and laid him next to his sister. She pulled back the crib’s miniature sheets. She put her head down on the crosshatched quilt mattress. She could smell their bodies in the linen, so warm and talcum-fresh. There it was. That mantra of the unbroken chord. Artillery in the hills.

  It couldn’t have been coming from the baby mattress. Perhaps whoever it was who lived downstairs had a pipe organ. She lay down upon the hardwood floor, her ear to the cold pine boards. The pitch was growing higher. Soon it would reach the canine range and it would be audible only in her spinal column. She forced herself to roll over onto her back because she was falling asleep. The ceiling was illustrated with continents of rust-colored seepage. In a little while, one of the babies woke and roused the other. They cried out for their mother. When Assia tried to rise from the floor, she found that she had a waterfall in her head. The whirlpool blinded her. She lay back and listened to the sound of the babies crying. They grew more and more agitated, and she was afraid that they would work their way over the edge of the bed and onto the floor. She found that she could work her shoulders and move by sliding her pelvis. She dreaded hearing that pitch from the babies’ mouths that would drop off into a crescendo of silence. She knew that silence. It was the silence of abandonment. This made her want to read what Sylvia had written in her last notebook, although it was very likely incriminatory. The dead, you see, never play fair.

  She could barely see through the waterfall, but she felt the touch of the bedspread against her bare shoulder. She could hear the little boy and girl crying directly above. If they would fall, they would fall upon her. The living did not play fair, either. There would always be people in this world who would try to use the inevitable as a weapon. Sylvia tried to incriminate her and certainly there would be those who would blame her, but it is nothing that she has not lived through before. Do they think that she does not already know what it is like to be condemned for someone’s ordained death?

  It was as though a vise were lifted from her body. The waterfall in her head drained away. She stood up and took the children in her arms.

  She was napping on the couch when she heard the voices and the jingling of keys in the lock. She opened her eyes onto the lavender of Sylvia’s party gown, a pale purple lather against her skin. She was running up the stairs before she was fully awake, the milky banister a cool glaze pouring through her palm. Ted raced the stairs as well, directly after her. He was eager to warn Assia that he had brought his parents and that they were anxious to meet her. She glided into the bedroom, shut the door behind her, and let down the straps of her gown. It made a glossy puddle around her ankles. When Ted opened the bedroom door, she was kicking Sylvia’s dress under the bed. Her nakedness was a sudden curtain between them. Assia covered her breasts and her pubis. Ted turned back toward the stairs and shut the door.

  11.

  Robert

  Sabbath and I walked over to the Saint James Hotel on Forty-fifth Street. We had glimpsed its red-and-blue wayfarer’s neon the night before. We were buzzed through two sets of begrimed glass doors. A big Sikh wearing a burgundy turban and inexplicable black elbow padding sat cramped into a schoolboy’s desk in the corner of the lobby. He looked grudgingly up from his newspaper. In the center of the lobby there stood a dispatcher’s cage with aluminum wire rising up to the ceiling. Seated upon a high swivel chair in the center of the coop, feet dangling, was my acquaintance, the bookseller Blind Isaac Goldovsky. Blind Isaac, seeing me, hopped down from his high chair and waved Sabbath and me into his inner sanctum.

  “Haven’t we met?” he asked me.

  Lying about were old manifests with yolk-colored pages, stacked like bricks, and crates of miscellanies including solidified cooking fat in tins, coiled copper cables and plumbing fixtures, newly stripped, engraved hymnals, gardening implements, trinkets and wampum, Saint Patrick’s Day Tam o’ Shanters made out of green foil with paper pom-poms, votive candles, paper-wrapped syringes, Roman-candle-sized cigars, still in their tubes, and fine stemware. The telephone switchboard in the corner hummed and blinked.

  Blind Isaac could not believe his new fortune. He had made the acquaintance of a man named Tognoli, a certain Adriano Tognoli aka Joey the Purse. Where do you get Joey the Purse out of this man’s name is the first question that Blind Isaac asked and all that he got for an answer was that the man had the nerve to look him in the eye and ask him if he were really blind.

  There’s a girl on the street out here. I asked her her name, although what is it to me to take an interest in these people? “Snowflake,” she says is her name, from this face which is Cameroon black, this mouth which is like the pucker scar my sister’s kid received in Vietnam. Snowflake, like I should be the object of her sportsmanship? I weep for her.

  Sabbath just stood there halfway politely, her weight shifted onto her right foot, looking away with her ear vaguely cocked in Isaac’s direction like someone stranded on a dais, receiving an unwished-for testimonial. Joey the Purse turned out to be someone in the undertaking business in Brooklyn. He was the representative of certain people whose names he did not like to give out. Blind Isaac said that he was happy to do business, but such business? He would have liked to have known the country that these people had come from with this virus in their veins that they have to mentholate with this, what-is-this-thing that you pronounce almost like the floppy marsh bird with the big fish-eating bill that you can’t tell from the common stork?

  This heron? . . . Ah, this heroin! Anyway, as a result of their arrival, these junkies from some other planet are driving down the property values all around the square. But this is still Center City, New York, here, the convergence of the train routes. When I was a young man in Poland, I had to pack up and leave for my life, and now young people, they come to seek this sickness here at the center. This is, what is this? It turns out that the Final Solution in Europe wasn’t so very final after all, eh, don’t you think? This time it is going to be a Holocaust between consenting adults, like they say. When sex is divorced from procreation? From caring? From nature? What is it? It’s self-flagellation. It’s ten dollars for the room for an hour and a two-dollar deposit for the key. Care for a towel?

  The next three days play on a constant tape loop in a screening room in my mind. A cinema of ether. Those three days were the genesis of my life as a writer, for better or worse, just as that night on the Trinity School rooftop reading Sylvia was, after hundreds of books, my nascent experience with reading. I didn’t write exclusively about romantic love even as a neophyte, but I did assume with a beginner’s lack of guile that what the reader was after was a sustained aura of edification. At fifty-two years of age, edification is an impossible concept to define. At twenty-one, it was elementary. Edification meant falling in love. Falling in love was, for me, the process by which an individual reached a state of nothing less than total idolatry. I had fallen in love with Sylvia, after all, anticipating nothing in return but room to kneel at her shrine. It followed that the solution to solving the enigma of the blank page was to work myself into an absurd emotional state of longing and then approach whatever subject I might happen to be writing about with the delirious surety of an ardent and unrequited lover.

  So Sabbath and I entered the hotel suite and the realm of memory, and she stenciled her signature tantric eyes across the dust-blanketed end tables. She told me to roll up the ashen rugs and the top blanket on the bed and to put them out in the cold storage of the fire escape.
They reminded her of “institutions,” she said. She bounced on the double bed, barefoot, and pronounced it a “wicked Albigensian’s rack.” I heard the whisper of her cigarette lighter and then the hiss of the cheery tip landing in the toilet bowl. I followed her into the bathroom. The bathtub was an antique upright with all the dignity of an heirloom. She bent down and put her palm flat against the blackened and weft-textured bottom of the tub. She took her hand away. She put it to my face.

  Somewhere around in there, I lose the thread of chronological order altogether. There’s a story that I think many long-term New Yorkers are familiar with. A photographer, some time after the war, was heartbroken at the ongoing dismantling of the old Third Avenue elevated train line. He had a railroad flat in the adjacency, and the prospect of trying to sleep without the vituperation of the north- and southbounds upset his internal compass and put him on the verge of a breakdown. As therapy, he set up a still camera that recorded images at fifteen-minute intervals. The camera documented day and night through the photographer’s window. The great girded iron mountain of the Third Avenue rail line passed into history. The avenue’s view was unobstructed, and the new panorama so intrigued the photographer that he kept taking pictures. The camera’s measured clicking replaced the regularity of the train sounds. Taverns and shops came and went. Hairstyles and fashion had their revolutions. Modes of behavior were visually altered. Joggers appeared. People took up residency in phone booths and doorways. The photographer died and an endowment was set up to keep the camera recording. A team of technicians moved into an apartment next door and serviced the project, always sneaking up behind the camera’s auditing eye, never obstructing it for an instant. For the sake of authenticity, they decided not to clean the apartment. Bacteria imposed its hegemony. The window grew steadily blacker. The photographs became chilling silhouettes. Time was moving forward, but, as the camera certified, it was moving forward in a defensive posture, safeguarding the intricate analytical chemistry of its ever-developing imagination. The camera had proven that time itself was also an artist and that all real art necessarily had to find means to collaborate with time.

  Memory is all the more sublime for its element of corrosion. I don’t really wish once again to enter the twin rooms of the hotel suite I shared with Sabbath. What I want is to stand in the shadows of the doorway, watching what probably never happened take place, just as I believe that if I met Sabbath tomorrow on the street, I could probably not bring myself to look her in the eye for fear that I would fail to recognize her as the same person who inhabits my dreams. I remember or I imagine that, later that first evening, she was in the bath and the tap was thundering. I knocked on the door and sheepishly petitioned to be allowed to urinate. She stepped out of the room, dripping wet and without a stitch of clothing on. She might as well have been the first nude I ever saw in my life. Her features were so exquisitely unique and I had fetished her appearance to such a degree that I had unconsciously expected her to have equipment wholly at variance with the rest of the female species. She’s mortal, I thought upon seeing her body, embarrassing her a little and myself overwhelmingly by looking her up and down and gawking like an oaf. She was delicate, and high-waisted, and so gangly that it was difficult to tell where the adolescent ended and the woman began. Her curves were abstracted. Her body had an air of incipience, although I couldn’t get over the idea that the utilitarian symmetry of her breasts, her buttocks, and the darkly armored pelt of her vagina were somewhat incongruous with her fairy-kissed features.

  From her purse, she had taken tiny vials of what I assumed to be bath essence and placed them around the narrow rim of the bathtub. The vials were filled with an irradiative blue liquid. They glowed like tiny prayer candles around the margin of the tub. The bathwater was foaming with suds. The smell was that of a confectionery. I had no more than yanked the toilet chain when she returned to the room. She walked directly into the bath, not looking at me, her slightly oversized foot barely clearing the glass vessels as she stepped in. The vials quivered there on the rim like miniature tenpins. She shut off the water and sat down. Her body was refracted by the water. The beard of suds over her nipples. Her tapered mermaid’s fingers playing distracted chords in the water. The starfish of her pubis. The algal tresses of her hair. Her long and plicate right foot hanging clear of the tub with the toes upturned, at once suggesting both a wing and a hoof. There was a window with a ledge wide enough to sit down on opposite the tub. The suite, front room and back, looked down on alley space. There must have been a church shelter or a city barracks exclusively for wild-haired indigents down the street. They walked along the alleyway, single file in their shoes of wadded rags, their little dogs pattering along behind them. We had planned to go back out and photograph the addicts, but she hadn’t given the word. Sleep seemed out of the question. I paced the front room. I turned the radio on. I sat at the window in the bathroom. In the small hours, shuttered storehouses clanged open on the street below and steel drawbridges were extended. Semis backed into the alley with the choreography of Sherman tanks. Men in uniforms emerged. Men with baling hooks and men with clipboards. Light beams were focused. Stationary flashers went on and off. Cautionary sirens bleated. It all made for a very precise and martial operation. Watching the nocturnal loading docks and listening to successive tests of the Emergency Broadcast System on the radio, which featured beginning bagpipers trying their hands at free jazz, I was reminded that the Cold War was more than the stagnant silver blip on the screens of the coastal monitors. Since the war was wholly psychological, both sides were forced to fight upon their own home fronts. The duplicitous reds fought with parades of hardware, and banners, and amplified harangues in their public squares. We fought with commodities in packing crates in the dead of night in our warehouses, shoring up stock in the American Dream of excess. As in the stratagems of romantic love, it was a war that was fought for the sake of its own perpetuation.

  Sometime before that first dawn in the hotel suite, I knelt down by the bathtub and touched her. Her skin was clammy and cold. Her heart was racing. She was not asleep. I said, “Time to come out of the pool now.”

  She said, “You can leave if you want.”

  “Where would I go?” I asked her. The outside world, the area beyond the hotel room and beyond the purview of the window, had been closed off. Later, I took a bath myself without changing the water. She gave me a deadpan look of condemnation. I said something about the charms of sharing. She said that the only thing that I was sharing was my neurosis.

  I also gleaned a thing or two about the abstruse numerology of the American credit system during those three days with Sabbath. The nine or so digits of her credit card were obviously emblematic of some much more redoubtable numbers on file in banking systems across town. The ciphers stamped upon her segment of plastic spoke in code, loudly and very clearly. She called downstairs for a phone book. A maid, wearing what looked to be a nurse’s uniform from the Crimean War, showed up at the door with the neighborhood directory along with two rolls of wrapped toilet tissue, possibly intended as a housewarming gesture, as Sabbath had told Blind Isaac that our stay was going to be indefinite. Sabbath got on the phone and ordered up moo shu bean curd, a round-cut, neutral-patterned eiderdown, a bottle of something called Kruskovac, and a pair of snifters. The goods arrived within an hour, the delivery people waving off the pittance that I tried to offer. We had dinner on the eiderdown, spread across the front room floor. The Kruskovac had journeyed all the way from the Baltics in a bottle shaped like a balalaika. It had a body of silk. It had a recessed kick like that of deferred sleep. I tasted the sealant of the pine barrel that it was cured in, in tandem with the delicate putrescence of pears. After I had drunk my fill, I lay back on the comforter with a horse’s bit of aluminum in my mouth.

  “Where does all this money come from?”

  “The mint,” she said.

  “Does your family have money?”

  “I’m an orphan.”

 
“Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know your parents?” I asked her.

  “I’m beginning to.”

  Without transition, she lay down with her head across my legs. I could feel her breath in the palm of my hand. “So that’s why you became a photographer?” I heard the quivering in my own voice.

  “Why?”

  “As a substitute for memory?”

  She said, “I see photography as an interpretation of the moment.”

  “You think you can capture reality in one moment? You know, forsaking memory?”

  “You want to talk to me about reality?” She sounded tickled to death.