Little Fugue

by Robert Anderson

  He awoke hours later with the receiver still lying there at his neck. He asked the switchboard lady to dial the number again. Desdemona said that she didn’t mind that he had fallen asleep. She appreciated what he must be going through. She asked if she could read him some of her poems. They were so numbingly bad and they so confirmed her precocious faculty of self-deception that he actually asked to hear her read them again. When she had finished with the second read-through, she told him that she would certainly love him forever. He told her that she had no way of knowing what hearing that meant to him.

  Ted woke up the next day and showered, regretting that he had forgotten to bring along a shaving kit. He went out to cash the check that the BBC had given him. He bought a notepad at the chemist’s shop. He signed up for another day at the hotel. He sat in the room and wrote nothing. Hours passed. He went out for a bite at the same American-style luncheonette on Greek Street. He ordered the identical meal. The undertaker with the halved face came in as he was eating. He sat at the counter. He had not changed one stitch of clothing, but this time he bore in his hand a little brown paper package wrapped with a bow. They began their accustomed game of cat-and-mouse glances. The undertaker got up and started across the dining room floor. Ted stood up, his meal halfway finished and unpaid for, and walked right past the man and out of the restaurant without a word. His soup had arrived at the table cold in any case.

  The girl had asked him over to her father’s flat. She said that the two of them would be alone, but he didn’t trust the situation. She was only a child, after all, and he already had a reputation. Court Green in North Tawton was available. Sylvia hadn’t been there for months previous to her death. Maybe her ghost had forgotten the route to the manor. He had no auto, though. Abdiel had a van that he could readily borrow, no questions asked. He was always taking students and protégés around on nature walks. But Ted couldn’t very well pick up this Desdemona in Abdiel’s battered old motortruck. Assia’s Aston Martin was available. He would have to go back to the apartment and come up with an excuse. He called Desdemona once more. He asked if he could pick her up outside Covent Garden in three hours’ time. She agreed. She said that she would be the one wearing a scarf. He said that he would be driving a blue Aston Martin. He told the concierge in the lobby that he might be back later tonight.

  He took the train back to Primrose Hill. Assia was bathing his children. He stripped off his shirt in the bathroom and lathered himself for a shave. She sat at the edge of the tub, watching him in the mirror. The children did not react to seeing him. He told her that he had decided to appear at a symposium at Trinity College. He thought it wise to maintain a low but dauntless public profile. He had their future together to consider. He needed the loan of Assia’s auto. She didn’t say anything, signaling that she knew that he was lying. She got up and walked away with water dripping from her hands. The willow reeds that he had hung on the wall, the ones that Sylvia had countenanced all through their separation, had been taken down.

  He circled Covent Garden three times over. The only one wearing what might be called a scarf was a diminutive Middle Eastern woman in a caftan and an abaya, only her eyes peering out, the ensemble quite conspicuous even in this fog. She looked, for lack of a kinder description, like a displaced little pile of washing that housed a stowaway. He finally stopped the car. She walked over to the curb and got in. Ted was thinking that it had to be a mistake or a practical joke. He wondered who it was that hated him to the extent of doing this in the wake of his wife’s death. He didn’t know whether to go ahead and get on the highway that ran out of the city. She began to speak. Hers was the same voice that he knew from their phone conversations.

  She had taken the veil largely in order to annoy her father, she readily told him. Her mother had died of a fever years ago while they were living in Cairo. In Cairo, street courtesans wore the abaya while rendering fellatio, their clients’ backs flat against the brick city walls. The veil to her was a personal hegira. It was her way of journeying toward and away from herself. Had Ted not had to seclude himself to write his poetry?

  “Is Desdemona your real name?” he asked her.

  “I don’t know yet,” she said.

  In a little over an hour, he pulled onto the rock ridge spine of the only artery fronting his North Tawton property. Desdemona was talking of nothing at a clip too rapid to be absorbed. The former owner of Ted’s estate was a parliamentarian who had neglected his property taxes. The authorities waited until after his funeral to implement the tax auction. They had published their intentions in The Times of London. Ted had rushed in from the city with a willingness to mortgage his lifetime to that manor house and those meager few acres of not virgin but rather spinsterish land. Sylvia loved and feared the place. She thought the property too weighty a bauble to be tied around their necks. They fought. She relented. “Maybe it will bring us closer,” she said, the same words that she used when informing him of her pregnancies.

  Desdemona was steadying herself, both hands on the dashboard. Ted, next to her, was sublimely grateful for each body blow. “Thunder Road,” he teased her, looking over. She let down her veil. She flashed her teeth gamely. She pinned her veil back up. He took the pill bottle from his pocket. He opened it and sucked down a few tablets. He thought it safe to do so because the journey was now almost over. He checked her eyes through her abaya. It was then that the manor house began to speak to him.

  There you are. You’ve brought . . . I see. Has she something contagious? . . . Of course, forgive me. I wear curtains over my windows as well. Don’t think that the dead fret. What is there to be gained in death if not perspective? The dead become like architecture. Stabilized and stabilizing. Welcome. Welcome.

  You can come under my wings now. Come in through the faux-naif church door with the raised grape clusters and the wildfire vines. Walk in along my flagstone tiles. Through the kitchen with the blackened cast-iron bulwarks dangling down. Past the walnut-and-brass brazier that served as the cinerarium of your great-uncle Edward, whose remains did not amount to enough to bother to bury once they had sifted through the silt of the collapsed mine for him. Your William Ford sixteen-bore boxlock ejector with the twin blue barrels. The bestiary of secret pelts that you were keeping in the cellar until I would grow used to the idea of the recreational kill. Maybe the kill will bring us closer . . .

  Come inside and I will close around you with the nightshade embrace of an eyelid. You will take with you the blemish of your last image of yourself and your last memory of me. Then, little by little, you and I and she will go away.

  I’m sorry that I only have scalding cold water today. You are neglecting my furnace in favor of your own. I can almost see your breaths. You will huff and you will puff. I think that most of them sleep with you in order to explore the enigma of their attractions. Your looks and your Cambridge accent do not readily explain the symbiosis of the twin urges to mother and fuck you. Like when they check you out of the library, Ted. They seek you out in order to find themselves. In ersatz moments, eyes closed and mouth open, they think that they speak your language. In tongues.

  She’ll roll out of bed thinking that she has found some new form of iambic pentameter. But when she is in your arms you are reaching past her. You are holding yourself. Too, too tightly. You are falling through your own fingers.

  Ted?

  She is so composed in only her skin. Was I ever like that? I don’t think so. I don’t think I was ever so sure. She is a dance partner. I was your rival in bed. I thought that was what you needed me to be. The way that she rears her head and her shoulders gives her pouting breasts a solidity. The way that she locks her hands behind her head and offers you the peach-stone fragments of her nipples. Your cheeks puff like a glassblower’s. Her armpits are almost fuchsia. Bare and nubbled. There’s a moistness breaking out between her breasts. Milk and honey.

  Ted?

  Downstairs. Right now. Through my faux-naif church door with the raised grape clusters
and the wildfire vines. Across the cold flagstone tiles. There is Abdiel. He has my daughter in his arms. There’s your other whore, holding my son. Here you are. Here she is. Here I am.

  See?

  Ted stood up out of the bed, naked. “What’s wrong?” Desdemona asked, rising on her elbow and covering her breasts with her forearm.

  13.

  Robert

  I took the subway uptown to Columbia, anxious to make the classes that I had been missing the past few days. I was looking forward to my Eliot seminar that morning. I wanted to review his irony and causticity from the perspective of true love. I carried Sabbath’s Nikon, strapped around my neck like a talisman. She had inserted a new roll of film. When I got to the campus, I found that all classes had been canceled. There was a riot going on.

  Legend says that the Columbia disturbances of 1968 were provoked by student opposition to the Vietnam War. It is true that the war permeated all other issues. A map of Hanoi hung upon the wall of the Student Senate, and students strolled the grounds and showed up in classrooms in camouflage Vietcong pajamas. Strictly speaking, however, the original point of contention wasn’t the war, but the administration’s plan to erect a new gymnasium in Morningside Park. The rib structure of a Doric temple suddenly loomed out on the greenery, and reporters from the Spectator ferreted out the shocker that a spare million or so had been appropriated under the noses of the radicalized student government for a new sports complex. In those days, you could cross the park directly into central Harlem. The pot on Saint Nicholas Avenue was cheap and serviceable, and Levon and Sugarboy, and the other black boulevardiers in their golf hats and their polyester jumpsuits, like geriatric Captain Marvels, would divvy up to buy us mugs of warm lake-water-tasting beer in red-lit lounges. They would say things like, “Don’t you let ’em burn you all up in Buddhaland like they done my nephew Odell,” Odell being the poor relation of many uncles. The new gym would be so massive that it would impede the silk route that ran onto 125th Street, or at least everyone was saying that it would, and no one relished the idea of squeezing past the monolith just to go get high. Our college tuition dollars had been burning babies in Vietnam, or we assumed that they were, hook or crook, and now they were building smug hockey halls here in Upper Manhattan while poor black children went hungry.

  Every major black lib group in the country had an uptown franchise in New York. You had the Panthers, the Young Lords, the Five Per-centers, and numerous street gangs who had gone political with the tenor of the times, and who were known to offer a proverb from Mao before getting down to the business of stomping heads. Out of some sense of lofty noblesse, the black leadership did not choose to engage on the issue of the new gymnasium. It was instead taken up by Sundial, an East Coast campus disestablishmentarianistic umbrella group, overwhelmingly white and incredibly onerous by today’s standards. The Sundialists brought up the subject at their daily rally on Low Plaza while the ROTC, drilling nearby with dummy rifles and itching to get into the green grass of ’Nam, caroled, “One, two, three, four, what do those longhaired pukes want to stay alive for?” The outrage of a new Columbia edifice in the shadows of the rotting tenements virtually sold itself. Five hundred kids immediately crossed the plaza and entered Hamilton Hall, the main administration building. It was near five o’clock, and the bureaucrats and their secretarial staffs were just finishing up for the day. They handed over their keys without an argument. They told the students to clean up after themselves before they went home and not to invite their friends in while the adults were gone. Everyone was on their honor. “Try not to throw your lives away,” they admonished the intruding students and left them to have their political slumber party.

  The students barricaded the doors and called the police on themselves. The police sergeant who answered the telephone happened to be a black man. When told of the racial outrage in Morningside Park, the sergeant thanked the caller for his concern. The very soul of cordiality, the cop then asked if the students wouldn’t oblige him further by trooping, single file, hands in the air, down to the precinct house to be booked and held on charges of criminal trespass. He and the boys had a card game scheduled, and the kids could save them the trouble of a trip to the campus. “Don’t worry,” the sergeant said, “we’ll treat all of you just like we would niggers.”The rebels vowed to die rather than give up the siege. He wished them luck in their endeavor and hung up. They hunkered in for the night.

  Staff members began arriving by way of the underpass at seven the following morning. The insurrectionists had forgotten all about the intercampus tunnel system. They had swaddled themselves in the office drapery and were sound asleep on the desks and on the floor. They had managed to unscrew the Plexiglas panels of the vending machines and they’d feasted on Baby Ruths, Cheez-Its, and Royal Crown Colas through the night. Some rector or other tallied the damages. He promised to append the amount in total onto the students’ tuition bills. The weary insurgents exited the building laggardly, each one showing a student ID and receiving a hastily scrawled bill of particulars and a kick in the ass at the door.

  Most of them called it quits after that night in Hamilton Hall. They had done their bit for the cause and now they had finals to study for. Thirty or so among them would not be put off so easily. Early the following morning, they knocked at the entrance to Low Library. A night janitor let them in and congratulated them on their dedication.

  They overran the premises, ransacking the rare-book room for those precious de Sade manuscripts, written in the disappearing ink of his own jetsam. They made a moral point of dialing The New York Times and not the PD this time. The board of trustees, customarily apperceived and not heard, like the Politburo or the Elders of Zion, characteristically took a hands-off policy. The splinter Sundialists were allowed to meet the press in the inner ward of President Grayson Kirk’s Epicurean, teak-paneled suite of offices, billeted within the library. The rebels demanded racial equality across the board of society, implemented immediately. An end to the Vietnam War was essential, as was a scholastic reassessment of the American Revolution. A council of blood was going to have to be convened to deal with the current war’s criminals, as well as those of all the other armed conflicts since the inception of independence. They wanted twenty-four-hour, on-campus, on-call Reichian therapists and the assemblage of an “orgone pavilion.”They requested a guest shot for Ho Chi Minh on the next scheduled Bob Hope Christmas special as a gesture of good faith from the media cabals. They called for the total suppression of Richard Milhous Nixon and the sterilization of his offspring. Organized daisy chains and folk sing-alongs should be implemented on the occasion of the solstice at the stroke of sunrise and sunset. Also a Justice Department inquiry into the Kennedy assassination was urgently needed in order to confirm the students’ thesis that neither John Kennedy nor Lee Harvey Oswald ever in fact existed and that both were phantom diversions put in place by the CIA to distract us from the buildup in ’Nam. Construction on the new gymnasium in Morningside Park, the students decreed, was most definitely going to have to be halted. Lastly, would Grayson Kirk be good enough to donate the use of these palatial offices to a random welfare mother as a gesture of compassion, and this prior to terms pertinent to ending the siege being discussed? And could someone send up sandwiches? Thanks a lot, guys. Peace.

  President Grayson Kirk—“Captain Kirk” as the students affectionately had taken to calling him—was currently on vacation. Ever the pacifist, he was moose hunting along the Canadian border. Surprised with the news of the student occupation while in a reedy blind that smelled forcefully of wapiti urine, he looked down the sights of his rifle into the camera and apologized for withholding comment until he had spoken with his press secretary, and returned to civilization with a set of antlers secured to the roof of his Buick.

  Another day passed. At a few minutes before six the following morning, the insurgents were awakened by a lacrosse wicket that came wobbling through the library window. It was only the second day of the
siege, but the ROTC infantry had already had enough and they had seen fit to deputize the football and lacrosse squads into their private army. The coalition linked brawny arms in a circle in front of the building. They were intent on starving and dogging out the longhaired opposition in full view of the news cameras. They didn’t want everyone in God’s own acreage getting the idea that every kid at Columbia was candy-assed and afraid of a little thing like ritualized disembowelment, or tripping a land mine and experiencing an independent anatomy lesson prior to death. Nonpartisans among the student body were instantly politicized by the bullyboys’ muscle flexing. Classes had been called, and untold masses gathered to form a human chain behind the “jock and Sergeant Rock” contingents. They mocked the soldiers and the athletes, making use of what they had learned in paleontology studies concerning telltale skull structures. Agitators, thinking outside the box, rushed into businesses and apartment lobbies bordering the campus, screaming out, “Which side are ya on?”

  The students in Low kept petitioning for food, but the ROTC and their athlete brothers-in-arms intercepted the bag lunches sissy-lobbed by compatriots in the direction of the library. They scarfed up the homemade sandwiches on the spot. Someone appropriated an ice cream truck in the name of the insurrection and attempted to drive it up the library steps so as to reward the kids in Low for their bravery. An enterprising lacrosse specialist, however, stuffed his spiked twelve-inch Converse up into the truck’s exhaust pipe, and its engine sputtered and died on the spot. There was a break in the action while both sides cooperated in breaking the lock that secured the rear hold. They sat together in the grass of the plaza and communally shared the trove of Softieboy Creamwich bars and “banana fudge dildos.” The soldiers showed everyone how to make malteds by regurgitating the partially digested ice cream bars and then passing them in liquid form through their nostrils.