Little Fugue

by Robert Anderson

  He lay down on the little bed. It made sense that Sebastian wasn’t the kind to talk. He didn’t cry out in thirst. He didn’t ask to have his forsaken-ness explained to him. His silence and serenity caused his enemies’ arrows to miss his vital organs. He hid in his nakedness, in plain sight. Sebastian accepted those arrows as tributes. After a while, someone knocked on the door. He ignored the knocking for as long as he could. He got up and opened the door, and the sight of the undertaker, with the tragicomic, turned-down face and the palsied hand, did precious little to surprise him. He said nothing as the old man slipped by him, plain-wrapped package in hand, homburg on his head, and that big black brolly, like a vulture with its wings pinned, under his arm. The old man sat down at the child-sized desk.

  “Hello,” said Ted.

  “How are you, Ted?” the undertaker said, his speech slurred and slightly out of breath, perhaps having sneaked up the back stairway on the premises undetected. “We met at the café.”

  The undertaker removed his spectacles and took his handkerchief from his pocket. He sat there wiping pink milk from his inflamed, conjunctival eyes.

  “I don’t know your name,” Ted said.

  Without getting up, the man extended his electric hand. “De Born,” he said. “Etienne de Born.”

  Ted left the hand hanging. The old man withdrew it only for a second. When he held it out again, his quivering hand was holding the package.

  “What’s that, then?” Ted said.

  “It is a small gesture of condolences from Heinemann Publishing.”

  “Heinemann?” Ted said, tearing away the bow and unwrapping the butcher’s paper.

  “As you must know, we handled the publication of Sylvia’s novel.”

  “Sylvia’s novel?”

  “The Bell Jar.”

  Oh, yes. Well, hell, yes, The Bell Jar. He was just wondering earlier this morning if that book might kick in any royalties, given that it got a free plug in the Times obit section. The gift was an old volume, slender and bound in disintegrating cowhide, decorated with a diagonal lozenge pattern on the cover. The gilt coating came off in his hand. When he looked, his palm had turned gold. He turned to the cover page. The paper was discolored but the print face was clear. The title of the book was Summarium.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s an early study of Joan the Maid. Compiled and bound at an abbey in Orleans.”

  Ted closed the book. He traced the lozenge pattern on the cover with his finger. “She’s a patron saint of lost causes, as I understand it.”

  “She is a patron of nothing,” de Born said, letting his voice go reedy and castigating. He probably thought that Ted was judging Joan by her clothing.

  “Right, well,” Ted said, letting the antiquarian bribe fall to the bed between them, “I was only thinking of lost causes because your suit is doomed, sir. I’m ironclad with Faber and Faber Publishing and I’m not entertaining any outside offers.”

  “Understood,” the old man said.

  Did he have to give up that easily? “And what’s more, Mr. . . .”

  “De Born,” de Born said.

  “What’s more, Mr. de Born, I do not think that it is appropriate to give out gifts on the occasion of a death.”

  “You handed me a letter the other day,” the undertaker said.

  “I didn’t read it. I have no idea what it said.”

  “It was a letter from a young woman wishing you well and wondering if you intended to publish any work that your wife might have left behind. And I am wondering the same thing, sir.”

  “Are you?”

  De Born reached over and nudged the book called Summarium across the bedspread closer toward Ted. “She is still your wife and she is still my author. She’s paid the mortal debt that goes hand in hand with her immortal gift. The rest is up to us, don’t you think?”

  “It wouldn’t bring her back,” Ted said.

  “It wouldn’t be cheating her out of her due, either. Or yours, for that matter.”

  “My due?”

  “Your inheritance, Ted. I got to know Sylvia quite well. I doubt that she neglected to leave you a legacy to remember her by.”

  Sebastian accepted the arrows as tributes.

  “I guess you did know Sylvia,” Ted said, picking up the book.

  “I should like the world to get to know her as well.”

  “The world?”

  “Joan would be forgotten now had she denied her voices and walked away from the stake.”

  Sylvia could be more candescent than ever in death. So bright that the whole world might make her out. Who was he to stand in her way or in her light?

  “Mr. de Born,” Ted said, “let’s understand each other. How much money are we talking about?”

  18.

  Robert

  The smoke cleared. The sunlight of a blanket amnesty fell across the campus. The old-guard professors, the foremost specialists or the most celebrated academics in their fields in some cases, tried to serve as enlightened muezzins, calling us back to our classes. There were final exams to be taken and theses to be presented. “Don’t let the ruffians win,” our professors warned. “Don’t throw your lives away.”

  The student senate disbanded, having burned its constitution. Many professors abandoned seminars after having been given the taciturn treatment from their students for days upon end. They copped out by issuing passing grades across the board. A great many students did drop out. The draft board swooped in like carrion.

  It turned out that there was a Sabbath, no last name, listed in the Barnard Housing Directory. Her address was indeed on Morningside Avenue. It was a Sunday morning when I visited, with the excuse that I was honor-bound to return her Nikon. The superintendent conducted me up the stairs in his nightshirt. I couldn’t get over the resemblance between her room and the attic crawl space that I had grown up in on Columbus Avenue. Both spaces had stained-glass skylights that attuned the atmosphere to the hour of the day. Her room was completely bare. She had been gone most of the week. He had seen her with some friends, loading boxes into a van.

  “Did she say anything?”

  “She said that she was off to a funeral,” he said.

  “Whose funeral?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She left.”

  It was raining and there was a leak in the roof in the examination room on the top floor of Dodge Hall. The examiner apologized. The drops exploded, one after the other, into the tall tin pail. I waited until others were finishing and handed in an empty blue book. I would go see my dean in the morning. I would tell him that I had not been able to sleep, eat, or study since the night of the melee on the plaza. I would beg to be given another chance. In the meantime, I would go down to Times Square and get myself laid.

  It was late when I got to Forty-second Street. I had spent the day brooding. The Mission, the area between Broadway and Eighth along Forty-second, was one long reception line of girls in micro skirts and tall lace-up boots. They said nothing. They looked away. I took an instant liking to a black girl in fake ostrich feathers with a ratted blond wig like handpicked pollen. She seemed so different from the others. She had a guitar in a vinyl case across her back and the protuberant forehead and elongated jawline of a Yoruban icon. The head of her white poodle peaked out from the travel bag at her feet, staring up with green damselfish eyes. In an island accent, she asked what I could afford to spend. I thought thirty dollars, student aid money, was more than generous. She said to multiply the figure by four. I started to walk away. She followed. We went into Horn & Hardart. She loaded a tray. Sitting close to her, I noticed that her body gave off that boiled hot dog smell of a day or so without a bath. Her green-eyed dog lapped cold cucumber soup from a porringer.

  “You’re from Jamaica?”

  “London.”

  “Where in London?”

  “The seashore.”

  “I’ve just decided in the last
couple of days,” I told her, “that I am going to be a writer.”

  “Really? I’m going to sing.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Snowflake.”

  “For real?”

  “You’ll laugh.”

  She got out her guitar and sang “Strawberry Fields” right there in the restaurant. Her poodle rolled over onto its back. Its fore and hind legs swam the air. When she had finished, the other diners in the cafeteria stood and applauded.

  “We can fuck, plus I’ll pay you back,” she said. “I have to sleep in a bed tonight.” She had untended teeth. “I don’t want to go back out there.”

  “You’ll pay me back?”

  “Yeah, you know.”

  She asked for the thirty dollars up front and I gave it to her. She left her dog and her guitar with me. She said that she was going to the all-night pharmacy down the street. For condoms, she said. Then we walked over to the Saint James Hotel. Blind Isaac Goldovsky turned up a morose face, seeing who I was with. For once, he was speechless. It wasn’t the same room that I had occupied with Sabbath. It had a television without rabbit ears. A box of snow.

  “So, what is your real name?” I asked.

  “You’ll laugh.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “Oma.”

  “Oma?”

  “That’s it, Oma.”

  I laughed. She got a hurt look on her face.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Why do you call yourself Snowflake?”

  “Because I’m about to melt all on your tongue, baby.” It was spoken as a threat. For as long as I knew her, her ethnicity and her sexuality were the chips on either of her shoulders.

  When I came out of the shower, she was sitting on the floor, cooking, by candle stub, a spoonful of clear, caramel-colored syrup. I saw a glass syringe on the floor. She looked up as I entered the room.

  “What’s that?”

  “Want some?” she said.

  BOOK THREE

  Ariadne’s Claw

  London, Devonshire, and Burbank, March 1969.

  New York All Along.

  1.

  Robert

  I lived in Room Ten-Three of the Saint James Hotel on Forty-fifth Street under the superintendency of Blind Isaac Goldovsky, who grew much wealthier in advance of his own grave and whose philanthropy extended, sometimes, to the disregarding of his account ledgers. But Isaac, as I knew, could come up with a legal writ dispossessing a Chihuahua from a mukluk if his temper were engaged. When I worked it was in commercial kitchens along the Deuce. In restaurants such as La Dolce Vito and Steak Stop West. Men such as Chef Orestes Vargas taught me to cook. He nightly took ten fastidious minutes to remove his heat-conducting gold watches, rings, bracelets, pendants, and the corrective dental embouchure that he had been forced to wear ever since he had had that difference of opinion with the apprentice broiler boy who had preceded me. He delayed service nightly while he spoke over the house line in earnest parental tones to his fifteen-year-old boyfriend, residing at the Spofford Correctional Facility in the Bronx. Oma would go out at sundown dressed in camouflage hot pants and a leather bustier. She fussed over her poodle, named La La for the lyricism of her barking. Quite often the dog would climb up and pee strategically on my side of the bed.

  It was a strange time for a pharmacological apocalypse. The war in Vietnam was winding down when I went to live on Times Square. The economy stuttered throughout the 1970s, but we kept hearing that the same technology applied to putting a man upon the moon would transform our lives once the necessary fiscal adjustments had been made and when the Eagle that had flown off into the cosmos finally returned home to roost. At the end of our Manhattan Island, the New York Port Authority was steadily erecting the astrometrical double lighthouse of the World Trade Center, those two monuments to commerce. While some editorialists insinuated that the structures would crumble from penury, others trumpeted the old sky’s-not-even-the-limit spiel. Materialism was once again the ideology of both the moment and the future. You wondered why the drug plague had not arrived amid the hopelessness of the Depression. Why now at the new dawn of Das Kapital Aquarius?

  My own explanation is that heroin was never the death trip that many commentators suggested that it was. The ones who were writing of the dangers of the drug were hardly the same ones who were getting high. What they never understood was that the plague had much more to do with coping with life than with any attempt to achieve the mystique of death. If we naïvely disallowed death from the context of heroin use, we did fully anticipate the ferocity of the addiction, the hard terms of the merger that required the signing away of the soul. We also anticipated the short-lived rapture and the long-term education.

  I took photographs with Sabbath’s Nikon all through my years on Times Square. I thought of them as little candles lit to her memory and petites madeleines that would balance my blood sugar when I started to swoon from regret. Photography was what I had in lieu of love. I have a shot here of Oma sleeping in our hotel room. I have drawn back the bedsheet and I have placed the contoured body of her mahogany Gibson next to her. The fret board of the guitar cross-references the exposed clavicular network of her upper chest. She is in her midtwenties and her breasts have already flattened like miniature hot-water bottles, drained of their duty. She sleeps with her bottom lip drawn in and her expression is adorably guppy-like. You can’t tell from this black-and-white photo, but when she would wake—usually in the late afternoon in time to drink hot-plate coffee and watch the sleepwalkers’ pageants that were those television soap operas of the era—her skin would be a mottled bronze owing to her chemical intake of the evening before. It would customarily take a steaming bubble bath and two or three hours of vertical blood circulation to restore the ebony patina to her skin. The camera’s eye is also not acute enough to capture the topography of her arms. The track scars, if you could see them, would be white and raised, as Oma had by then given up hunting exploitable veins in her arms and was shooting into the relative immaculacy of her buttocks. Her little butt came to resemble two eczematous grapefruits, and if she was going to go outside the neighborhood, she would always bring along a cushion for those hard plastic IRT seats. La La, and I regret now that I never photographed her, behaved much more like a cat than a canine. She never condescended to be walked upon a leash; if she went out at all, she had to be carried along in the interior of Oma’s tiger-skin handbag. La La expired late one afternoon in her corner of the hotel room, having rooted out a reserve dope stash that one of us had hidden from the other beneath a flap in the carpet. Oma wept, but conceded that if her pet had not died, she might have been forced to execute her for her thievery. “Can’t even truss a doom-ass dawg,” she lamented, shifting, as she did, into island patois in times of sorrow.

  I also have a photograph of Isa and Otella Mingozzi hard at work over their foot-treadle, rotary-bobbined sewing machines like sweatshop gals. The Mingozzi sisters were the last of the specialist glove makers at work on the Deuce. Broadway couturiers from the time of Flo Ziegfeld had sought out the Mingozzis, whose lacework was judged to be of a quality above aesthetics. Their shop rated mention in the hip Scandinavian guidebooks of the era, and this was why tanned, blond acolytes always seemed to be hanging around the store, hunched beneath the low-beamed ceiling, auditing the old ladies’ labors like minor participants in the protocols of a sacred Mass. Prospective brides came to the shop as well, and they corroded the spinsters’ old hearts with talk of how superlative their nuptial ceremonies were going to be.

  I have a photograph of several bare-chested children in cutoffs or swim trunks, striking waggly poses in the wet glass of an Optimo cigar store window, following a cloudburst. They are gathered close, and their undernourished limbs form an enchanted forest of sprigs and branchlets. I have a full-faced portrait of none other than the alchemist Ponce de León—as the grapevine attests, now lord of acres upon acres of orange groves somewher
e in northern Florida. When he needed a kidney to stay alive in 1980, local favor seekers lined up outside his apartment on Thirty-ninth Street.

  One night in July, lightning struck northern Westchester’s Edison Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant Number 3 three times in succession. Oma was off on her nightly rounds and I was alone in the room. It was not storming in the city and when the lights failed, I thought that one of the hotel’s main fuses might have blown. I looked out the window and saw something that I had never seen before and never would see again: the Forty-Deuce in total darkness. All of the neons were down, and there was only the light of convergent headlights, car horns shrieking, the drivers disconcerted at the lack of guidance from the traffic lanterns. Shop owners were hastily shooing people from their stores and battening down their goods behind iron grates. People were running up the subway steps and badgering cabbies and private drivers for a lift uptown. Bus pilots with teeming loads were rolling on, ignoring pedestrians who ran alongside pleading with them to fan their accordion doors open. It had been twelve years since the city’s last major power failure. On that chilly November night in ’65, the city had bonded and had pretty much recapitulated the annual New Year’s celebration. People took to singing in the candlelit taverns and invited strangers to tide the night over on their sofas. On this July night, however, with the temperature holding in the mideighties and not an intimation of a breeze in the air, and the denizens of the inner city having waited much too long for the American Dream to open its great overarching udder and rain down the oft-promised shower of milk and honey, everyone seemed to understand that this blackout was to be no midsummer’s night soirée.

  I met a candle-bearing contingent in the stairwell. The hotel was populated mostly by older men and women who were living out what remained of their lives in their bathrobes. They informed me of the act of God inflicted upon the power station in Westchester. They had heard this over their transistor radios, still in vogue in this the Paleozoic era of electronics. City Hall wasn’t kidding itself about the city’s mood, either. It was reinstituting the one warning/one shot law to deal with looters and rioters.