“Yes? You are familiar with the concept, aren’t you?”
“Reality,” she said, “is an extension of the eye.”
“What’s memory?”
“An extension of myopia.”
It was absurd. I knew that it was absurd. Maybe she knew it as well. I tried to step lightly. “Do you think that you’ll feel the same way in thirty years?”
“Thirty years?” she said, her voice rising. “I don’t even subscribe to the idea that there will be such a thing as feeling in thirty years.”
I had heard that one before, too. “And what do you base that on?” I asked her.
“Fact.”
Of course. What could I say? “Fact as defined by what you individually see?”
She said, “The Atman Foundation teaches that everything is in flux. Reality is defined by individual context. Everyone must guard against having their individuality imposed upon them. There are those who will shuffle the deck, jumble the contexts, airbrush the details—”
“That’s what artists do,” I interrupted.
“That’s what false prophets do.”
“What is this Atman Foundation?”
“It’s a family that adopted me when my parents killed themselves.”
“That’s how they died?”
“Yes.”
“Without any regard for your welfare?”
She said, “They left me my first camera.”
“That’s it?”
“I’ve never really needed anything else.”
“A camera?”
“The camera is a barometer of Karma. And that’s why my mother and father killed themselves. Collectively, Karma has reached its apogee. Nirvana is changing its nature. It’s steadily becoming war-like. They got out in time.”
I said, “Nirvana is transcendent. By definition, it cannot be war-like.”
“Everything is in flux,” she repeated.
“This is all a lot of crap.”
“You’ll see.”
“What will I see?”
“You’ll see,” she said again.
Later that night, I went into the bathroom where she was lying in the tub. I warned her that she might catch her death. I bent to kiss her and she reached up her soapy hand, and slathered it across my face. I told her good night. When I awoke in the morning, she was gone. She had left her camera there on the end table.
12.
Ted
Ted dropped into the BBC offices. It seemed as if there was a standing order in place to direct him to the senior producer’s office the moment that he showed his face. Three secretaries told him that the boss was waiting before he could reach his own tiny cubicle. Along the aisle, other colleagues offered their condolences simply by looking away, swallowing hard, and nodding impatiently in the opposite direction. He was surprised by their attitudes, but not ungrateful. Some of those who had come by or called to say how sorry they were about Sylvia’s death were the same ones who had gone on record with their reservations concerning the marriage. What with the party, the funeral, and these consoling phone calls, he had begun to be afraid that the same pretense that she had despised in life would serve as her proximate legacy. It had also crossed his mind that she might have been counting on just this sort of fakery. It might be a part of her grand plan. She had him confounded between feeling sorry for her and for himself. This was nothing new, either. It was pretty much the same state, for better or worse, that he had been in ever since he had married her. The marriage, he guessed, went on. Life, Ted guessed, went on.
The senior man stood up when he entered his office. He pumped Ted’s hand hard and gave him a gritted smile quite like the one that the gowned Cambridge doyen had accorded him years previously when handing him his undergrad degree. Good luck out in the wide world, both handshakes seemed to say. He thought that the check that the superintendent promptly presented him with, without asking him to take a seat, or bothering to explain the network’s outlook on Ted’s future as a broadcaster, was an irrevocable bill of severance. The BBC Third Programme, the division that he worked for, was devoted not only to the arts but to social issues as well and could be forthright almost to the point of muck-raking. It could therefore ill afford scandal in its own house. Ted had been an undeniable bounder as a husband and this had caused no small amount of saloon and lavatory talk, most of it admiring until the crashing moment when his blanket immunity had been pulled out from under him. He could well imagine what they were saying about him now. The senior gentleman made it clear, in fumbling, harried terms, that he presently had a hundred pressing matters in the air, all apologies, and he deeply envied Ted the opportunity to take a month or so off with full pay and benefits. Glancing at the brass clock on his desk, he told Ted to ring him up if there was anything he could personally do. And oh, yes, the staff had talked it over and decided that Ted might want to read some of the commiserative mail that had been coming in since the beginning of the week. Just a fraction of the total, the man wanted him to know. The rest would be available when he “felt up” to resuming his duties. He handed Ted a packet of letters, all of them with their seals undone.
The bitter chill was ebbing. A fog was rolling in. Not a Dickensian pea souper; this one was carnation white and feathery, though toxic all the same, a slayer of the backyard gardens and a proper excuse to phone in sick with a horrible head cold. He thought the fog was a fitting memorial. He thought it was an overobvious scrim for Sylvia to haunt him from behind. He had found a large bottle of her nerve pills in the loo of the flat and didn’t want to leave them around for fear of the children getting into them. He’d taken a few here and there, but only to admeasure how his other half had lived these last months. He owed it to her. He deeply regretted that he had not taken her copacetically seriously while she was still alive. He had to admit that in life she had always retained the power to surprise him. In death, she had taken things to a level a good deal beyond surprise. He took the train to Leicester Square without much contemplation and found himself rummaging in the book stalls at Charing Cross. The booksellers were eating battered cod and chips for their breakfasts. They blew steam across the rims of their tea steins. He tasted fryer fat in the air, mixed in with the alkalines. He felt a hint of ground glass deep in his lungs. Sylvia was fighting dirty. She had mastered only the low blows. He picked up an anthology. He read Matthew Arnold’s “Requiescat.” He read the Tennyson sonnet that began with “She took the dappled partridge flecked with blood.” It put him in mind of falconry for the second time in the last couple of days. Bloodying the bird was a technique of teaching.
He walked up Charing Cross. He cut across High Street. He came upon a wedding in a small church. He stood in the back. A curious usher came over. “Are you kin to the bride or to the groom?” he asked. They were trying to size up his identity yesterday at the funeral as well. Which side was he on, hers or his? Was he going to let this death exemplify the remainder of his life? Would he even have a say in the matter, poor man? Both brides were wearing white, Ted remarked to himself. Sylvia went to her rest in a dress that the undertaker had apparently picked out from the wardrobe department at the charnel house. No one had consulted him on the matter. He told the usher that he was kin to both the bride and groom, meaning that he was rudely cut from a common cloth. The usher, a wit, said, “Shall I sit you in the middle, sir?”
The assistant at the coroner’s seemed much too young for the sort of work that he did. He buttonholed Ted following the hearing. He said that he was bound by law to independently inform Ted what it was that his wife had died of although he had heard what the coroner had to say just like everyone else in the hearing room. Ted had even corroborated the testimony concerning her long history of depression and self-destruction, nodding his head, answering “Yes, sir,” several times over, and acknowledging that he knew he was under oath, and that what he said would be documented in the public record. Also by ordinance, the young man said, Ted must come along with him to identify the exact sa
me body that he could not bring himself to look at the previous morning.
It might have been Ted’s lack of tears that intrigued people. They kept staring throughout the ceremony in the church and the one at the graveside.
He went around to the British Museum. He went into the etchings room and looked in on Botticelli’s Ariadne, trailing her long thread of smoke. He looked for a taunting quality in her features. He looked a second time for sympathy. That wasn’t there, either. He crossed into the reading room, intending to take out the sympathetic letters that his chief had screened for him and read them if they proved interesting. He had thought that if he read them on the go, in the atmosphere of the rush, the very reason for the well wishes would seem somehow already foregone. The death would seem like something that had happened a long time ago. He would count himself a successful mourner if he could read the letters from a vantage point of invulnerability. It wasn’t Sylvia he was mourning, to be sure. How could he? She had had her way. He was mourning his former life. The one that she had killed and continued to desecrate the corpse of, witness the fact that the thought of making love to Assia, the most beautiful woman in the world until two days ago, now filled him with utter revulsion.
He was sitting in the rare-book room. The readers around him had old gilt-bound folios or stuffed dossiers containing manuscripts. The sight reinforced the permanence of what his wife had done. The unsavory conjecture, the loose talk in tongues, would go directly into Ted’s permanent file. It would survive him. It would possibly antiquate his poems.
He knew in an instant what he was doing out parading on the day after his wife’s burial. He was escaping the sort of poems that providence had dropped into his not wholly unwilling lap. Fate had filled his cup with venom and Ted was out here slowly, purposefully leaking away the propane like an aircraft with a faltering engine. When he stood up, the death monogram, the abstracted Asian version of the skull and bones, would likely be left behind, there in the wood of the chair, curling smoke. He was leaking inspiration so that when he went home and sat at the writing desk once again, he could beg off after a few moments, pleading the emptiness of his broken heart. He would promise to return once the trauma and its revelation passed. He wanted no part of this windfall. Yet.
The undertaker’s assistant gave Ted a Steady, man, look, but did not allow him a breath before pulling hard on the drawer handle and revealing the jack-in-the-box that was not his wife’s naked body beneath a crisp-looking hospital linen, but was the devious and, yes, hysterical epigram that she had left behind without the sly and still smile that he might have expected from her, but with the hyena’s overbite, the exaggerated grin of a carrion bird. Ted had taken a step back and the young man, obviously anticipating the response, had braced him up with a hand in the small of his back. He started talking about some circulatory phenomenon, or it even might have been something to do with pigment and the lack thereof. That was when Ted noticed that the top half of Sylvia’s face was darker than the bottom part. The forehead, the eyes, and the areas around both cheeks were shaded in with a bad banana’s bruise. With her mouth open and her head reared back, she looked quite bird-like in profile, and with the discoloration, she appeared to be wearing a falcon’s hood. He surmised that she was daring him to aviate his way out of this one and laughing as the gravitational pull of her liftoff wrenched him into her grave with her. Thinking about it now, the joke seemed more Sibylline than that. The falcon is a born killer. The human animal is the only beast that is not celebrated without reservation for its ability to kill in the wild. In his poems, Ted had addressed this discrepancy by way of simple omission. Now, in death, Sylvia had done the same. She had held back on the punch line. She had left him to live his life weighing out which of them had been born to kill the other.
Greek Street. Ted enjoyed the insidiousness of the name and the coincidence that such a place existed in the heart of cosmopolitan Soho. Like the worm in the apple, Ted thought. This fog and the carte blanche of a day all to himself, more than one day, a month if he wanted, had him seeing things that he had never noticed before. London was a city of countinghouses, always taking stock. The city liked to have a laugh at its own expense from time to time, or age to age, one might say. The joke of the moment was this “mod” culture business. He hadn’t really ever gotten what the designations meant, but he knew that there were such subgroups as Teddy Boys, mods, and rockers. The lot were obviously shop lads. Skulky, malarial-eyed shop boys and scooter teamsters with their costumes mortgaged via their certificates of employment, and the residual faith that young Englishmen were the most industrious fellows in the world once they had set their minds on something. As he passed one young couple, their fingers interlaced and their pouts matching quite flawlessly, they asked him for half a quid in unison. Always a sport, he dug into his pocket. The apparent male wore a crepe collar of patch velvet, the full-length pleated jacket of a gypsy chieftain, jackboots braided with lanyards, and the loose, tapered trousers of a boatswain. The female wore a big floppy hat of the sort that the apple shakers of his boyhood used to wear, a cashmere that was amply cut up top and rescinded at the belly, a portion of her father’s nightshirt for a skirt, micro-penciled black eyeliner much like Theda Bara’s, and white vinyl brook boots that climbed up to her knees. He handed them all the coins that he could fish out of his pants and they cheersed him with expansive smiles. Then they swanned off down the street, hand in hand.
He found an American-style café on Greek. There were more and more of these popping up. They were coming in with the American rock and roll and the American aboriginal dances. He sort of missed the Massachusetts luncheonettes and the daily social rite of matrons passing the time of day and various complacencies through their noses over sandwiches and coffee. He sat at a table and ordered heartily: chowder, kidney pie, sausages, and a tall stout. There was an undertaker at the counter, sipping tea and watching him out of the corner of his eye. He thought that he had left that lot back at the morgue, but he supposed they got around just like people. The undertaker wore a dark suit with a topcoat that he hadn’t taken off, although it was warm in the café. He kept trying to catch Ted’s eye, and the meal degenerated into a coquettish tournament of cat and mouse. After a few passes, Ted made out that the man had suffered a stroke or else was afflicted with Bell’s palsy. He felt genuinely sorry for him and additionally so for himself, to have such a sad case quite obviously intent on getting his autograph in the most polite manner possible. He was leery of the thought of reading the newspapers, so sure was he that his name was about to be blackened in print. Sylvia’s nerve medicine was beginning to take its toll. He felt hungry and full and revved up and sleepy, and quite capable of knocking out a hundred poems full of overdressed juvies and old debilitates. The waiter brought the bill and Ted paid and tipped him off, and then remembered to ask for a glass of water. He took several more pills in plain view of everyone in the restaurant and upped the waiter’s tip, smiling. He was keeping his wallet in the same pocket as the packet of sympathy letters. On the way out, he impulsively handed the letter on the top of the deck to the old ghoulie at the counter, thinking the gesture more kindly than an outright snub and suddenly filled with the longing to somehow acknowledge the man’s suffering, one grieving man to another. “Here you are, governor,” he said, passing the letter.
The man reached out with his palsied hand. “Thank you, Ted,” he said, almost inaudibly, out of the corner of his broken mouth.
On the street, a boy with a guitar was singing about a train journey. Ted dropped one of the letters into his change pail. The boy, apparently thinking that he was receiving fan mail, attempted and missed a jubilant high note. He abandoned another in the postal bin on the corner, boomeranging it back to the radio network. He saw a baby’s hand, frail and pink, grasping air in the shadow of a perambulator’s hood. He fought the urge to slip the baby one of the missives. Passing a flower stall, he slipped a pair of them into a bun of waxed peonies. He came upon a blind ma
n bowing to no one in particular. He told himself that he wasn’t going to, but he did it anyway. He inserted a letter into the beggar’s brass pencil cup. The last envelope in the deck was made of sawtooth-edged crepe paper, a pleasing shade of violet. The person who had sent the letter apparently answered to a romance novel cognomen. Above the return address she had written the name Desdemona Dauphin. Sylvia had released her silly roman à clef The Bell Jar under an arch pseudonym as well. Victoria something. Desdemona Dauphin lived nearby in Saint James. He couldn’t help but be curious. He stopped in a little auberge. Ted was out of breath and wanted to rest or possibly sleep a few hours. His room had a small bed, a table and a chair, and a full-length mirror that he attempted to take down from the wall while avoiding looking into the glass. The mirror was bracketed and it would have to be endured. In order to come to terms, he dared a glance at his own reflection. He had raccoon eyes and a face that was as blanched as that of a gaslight player. He lay down on the bed. He opened the little violet letter. Desdemona Dauphin was so disconsolate at the suicide of Ted’s wife that the thought of killing herself had crossed her mind. She went on in that vein for three succinct paragraphs. She ended the letter by providing her telephone number.
He picked up the phone and requested the number from the switchboard person. A child’s voice answered at the other end. She wasn’t taken aback at all that Ted had actually called. She didn’t say so, but it seemed almost as if she had been waiting by the phone. She said that she recognized his voice from the radio. She was seventeen and her father was with the Foreign Office and currently out of the country. Her latest governess had decamped the day before, leaving her alone in the flat. She attended school every day, came home, and wrote poetry and played phonograph records. Ted had never met her, but, by her own admission, she was the third party in the triangular misadventure that involved himself and Sylvia, loving them and hurting for them both. She had even adopted a song that exemplified the tragedy. Would Ted like to hear it? He agreed to give it a listen, and she held the receiver to the speaker of her record player. Ted endured the song, complimented it, and assented to her playing it a second time. He relished the girl’s loquaciousness since his own tongue was growing thick from the medicinals. After a couple of hours, he could feel himself falling asleep. He tried to excuse himself several times, but she wouldn’t accept his promise to call her back. She kept talking until he fell asleep.
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