Hours later, she says, “Carry me . . . down now.”
6.
Robert
In the New York Public Library collection, I found a copy of a snap of her, Ted, and David and Assia Wevill standing together on a porch, crowding together into the frame. She wasn’t smiling in the photo. She looked like she had spleen to give away on the street. She seemed a whiner when I got down to researching her life. A tantrum thrower. A constant critic. As much as she had grown laterally, she had never grown up.
There were late nights in the library. Fifth Avenue, the graveyard of Edith Wharton and the robber barons. Most of the merchandise on display in the shops possessed the durability and purpose of a fruit fly. What was really for sale was the numinous weightlessness of wealth itself. Like death, wealth channels the weight of its inscrutability. Along Fifth Avenue wealth was a jabbering poem to excess, written in beryl glass, glazed brick, and vertigo. I saw an eyeglass tree of gilded wood growing in the façade of an optician’s treasure stead, dripping its glacial, biaxial fruit. Fellini’s attic in the Verona Arts Antiques shop. The blue glass orb of a globe, overlain with the delicate dribble and splatter pattern of a Fabergé egg, and with fraudulent continents designated with the obscure Latin genera of arthropods. A bridal shop with its window upholstered in aphasic lemon chiffon—a lemon iceberg for the licking. A traveler’s outlet with a room-sized mobile project—dangling peat chips, some of them painted red, suspended like an arrested avalanche—juxtaposed with a video camera craning full circle atop a tripod. Freestanding sweatbands, hosiery, and glissading jogging outfits in the Benetton window like the bone structures of seraphim. Soap-carved robot mannequins in the Pangean boutique, all of them augmenting their ivory nakedness with a single article, an encrusted brassiere, a lathery feather boa, a cocktail toga lying in a lacy puddle at one spacegirl’s ankles. The backdrop of Ottomite flowers and leaves and displaced Maltese crosses, perilously close to the shape of swastikas. The icy corona of the chandelier in an Edwardian hotel bar, a hovering bouquet of crystal moths.
One night, I came upon a bronzed window that was not in the least reflective. I looked for my face and saw only the ruddy and impenetrable glow of the alloyed glass. The window bore the title of the Atman Foundation with the logo of a mariner’s compass. The decorative photographs in the façade had not been laminated onto the glass; rather, they seemed to have been developed, and even overfocused, in the bronze’s molten essence itself. Black-and-white photographs drifted across the window in a vaguely genealogical pattern. One of them was of a female torso, indistinct and elongated, lying beneath layers of diaphanous wedding veils, flowing over the pale form and across the clapboard floor like a tributary river.
This image was one of Sabbath’s departing efforts. It was hanging in her gallery show in the basement of Low Library on the night that I first met her. I had not seen it or purged it in thirty years.
I returned to the store the next morning at the start of business hours. I came through the door and the clerk looked long and hard at me without getting up from his desk. I knew who he was right away. I almost extended my hand. I wanted to say, all right, let’s talk. Let’s sit down and let’s go back, and let’s go through everything. There was no need. Every assimilated lesson on the learning tree had rotted on the vine long ago. I remembered well how socially complex and caste-oriented the ninth grade was. We were all rebels, but not to our own never-spoken tenets. Ostracism was always the consequence of acting uncool or out of one’s station. He did not seem transformed so much as many times more fragile. His close ’fro was ebbing steadily away. He wore wire glasses and the flower bud of a bow tie. He had the same tranquil manner. Like a chess player or a tea attendant.
“Are you looking me up?” he asked.
“No. What have you been doing all these years?”
“I’m in sales.”
“What is this Atman Foundation? What do you people sell in here?”
“Do you think that I would sell it to you?” he said.
I wanted to remind him that he was the one who had killed one of us so long ago. At the time, he was too young to be condemned. Now he had grown too old to be forgiven.
“Should I be grateful for that?” I asked.
He said, “You should be in a hurry to get out of here, my man.”
We were thirteen and few of us were over five foot eight. We all called each other “my man.”
“Why’s that, Otis?”
“Because you might learn what you don’t need to know.”
But he knew where the photo in the window had come from. He wrote down Sabbath’s name on a slip of paper. He gave her address as the AIDS annex of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.
“So long, my man,” I said.
“So long.”
If his information were correct, our two paths, Sabbath’s and mine, would have likely almost crossed only a few months previous. After all those years of assuming her dead, it was now next to impossible to accept that she might be dying. Still, this new development made it much easier for me to feel a sense of forgiveness toward her. Given the staggering void that she had left behind, a goodbye would have been superfluous and out of character. I could remember talking to her in the inaugural hotel room of my lifetime. She had seemed to be saying that death was something that would happen to the two of us continually, while we lived. She was set to shape her life around dying, continually, on her own terms. Would it be so much now for me to forgive her, under my own terms, for not being dead?
The AIDS hospice was on a separate tract of land from the hospital complex. It was laid out like a mineral springs hideaway. A retreat. There were several smaller cottages surrounding a larger central care facility. Patients sat beneath afghans in their wheelchairs, watching as the sun set in crimson. The grass needed tending. Squirrels scampered out of the long brush.
Pervious plagues, the Spanish flu and the cholera, had been acts of God. Hearts were embittered and faiths abandoned. But aside from half-whispered diatribes against “immigrants,” it had proved next to impossible to politicize previous large-scale epidemics. AIDS was different. Old phobias were vindicated and aberrant lifestyles were certified to be deadly, after all, to the community at large. Given the climate of irrationality, it was understandable that Columbia Presbyterian Hospital had done their best to make this hospice seem not like home, but like a faraway place. A Neverland.
In the main building, the wards were decorated for an early Christmas with bunting, and tinsel, and paper-cut Santas with wedged snow-cone bodies and mushroom heads. The health-care workers with their white uniforms and their brusque manners struck me as Santa’s clinicians. The thermostat was kept high. Nurses wore moistened towelettes beneath their paper hats like nomads in the sun. The atmosphere was very like the old lifeboat or foxhole exigency. People from all walks were hunkered down here, waiting for a miracle. Internal organs and last hopes were desiccating persistently in these wards. Heads, hands, feet, and eyes seemed to be hopelessly enlarging. There seemed to be little conversation. In the dearth of interaction, they read books. They lined the sofas in the dens, hard by the faux fireplaces, reading crinkled paperback classics salvaged from cellars and yard sales. Pages turning. Eyes glazing.
The nurse’s assistant who escorted me checked my ID against my word. She confirmed that there was a patient named Sabbath under care. “When was the last time you saw her?” she asked.
“Years. I’m prepared.”
“You’ll have to wear a mask.”
We walked through wards and crossed over into a precinct cordoned with a plastic yellow tape. Patients slept or watched tiny televisions in their plasterboard cubicles. The nurse’s assistant rapped upon a plank of gypsum. “Sabbath,” she called, “you decent?”
“Who wants to know?” an octogenarian’s voice answered.
If the nurse’s aide hadn’t remained standing squarely in the doorway, I might have turned around and run. The most startling thing, among an
array of startling things, was that her eyes had turned color. She had viridian snapping turtle’s eyes. They were as green as I have always imagined Assia Wevill’s eyes to be. She had the full-body tremor of a shock victim. She had always been so thin that I wouldn’t have thought that she’d had so much flesh to lose. But it was gone now, and her bones were so prominent that she seemed to be losing skin as well.
“How did you find me?” she asked.
“You know, rumors,” I lied.
The nurse’s aide decided to let us get reacquainted. She uncrossed her arms and stepped out of the doorway. I took my mask off. I could hear her breath coming, short and tortured, through her nostrils.
“Your eyes have changed,” I said.
“I saw the sea.” She pronounced the word saw as sawr, just as she had always done.
“Did you? Where did you see the sea?”
“In my Gerber’s jar. It doesn’t matter; I’ll be crossing soon.”
“Don’t say that.”
“What does it look like to you?” she said.
It looked like she was burning. The ripple of her body. The fixed stargazing look in her new set of eyes. I know this because heroin was, in its way, a low-grade fire. In a death by fire, it is the interior life that swims in slow detail before the victim’s eyes.
Her breath came harder and shallower. She was trying to tell me something. With great effort, she raised her tongue from the vault of her mouth. It was not something that she wanted to tell me; it was instead something that she wished to show me. There were two partially decomposed tranquilizers under the fading pink carpet of her tongue. The two capsules in her mouth had coagulated into the image of Sabbath’s yin and yang iris and teardrop. Her monogram.
“Do you want me to call for a nurse?” I asked her.
Trying to smile, she motioned for me to sit down on the bed. She chased her own breath until she finally caught and subdued it. I put my hand to her chest. The little bird sang in its cage.
She whispered, “You left kinda quick.”
“It was you that left.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, agreeing.
“What happened?”
She said, “I think they let me out of jail and I got on the wrong bus.”
“Right.”
“You lay off ?” She was asking if I had quit using heroin.
“Yes, I laid off.”
“I did, too. Just a little too late is all.”
“What about the name change?”
She tried to answer, but couldn’t. It appeared as if she was going to choke. I took my hand and put it over her mouth. She spit the pills into my palm, along with a chunk of hard vomit, apparently the sole contents of her stomach. I wiped my hand on the bedspread. I dabbed at her mouth with the sheet. “Sabbath?” she said, finally. “I just liked the name.”
“Did you ever know anyone named Sabbath?”
“A few years ago.”
“Where?”
“Share sublet downtown. It was nice. Quiet.”
“Did she take photographs, this girl?”
Oma said, “She left photographs. A whole pouch of photo negatives. Left them behind instead of the rent. I sold them.”
“She was alive a few years ago?” I asked.
She pouted. “I guess you knew her, too, huh?”
“Do you remember what year that was?”
“One. It was the year one.”
“Why do you say that?”
“With me, it’s always the year one. I don’t want any dates on my stone. Fact, I don’t want any stone. You know something?”
“What?”
“I don’t want no grave neither.”
“Is there anything that you do want?”
“Stay while I sleep?”
But she did not sleep. She lay for hours, holding my hand, staring up at my face. At last she said, “I ever tell you about that one night a long time ago on Dog Island in London?”
7.
Ted
He came directly from the airport, the cab smelling of tandoori spice from the driver’s evening meal. The driver, a tall Sikh who sat slumped backward as though at home in his hammock, and who kept cutting his eyes in the rearview, needed no directions, but Ted read them from his Michelin in any case. Two East Fifty-fifth Street. He recited the entire entry, absinthal in its praise.
“Lucky you,” the driver said with a London inflection.
This was to be the first of three social engagements of the evening. The second one would be farther uptown with a hostile audience of fifteen hundred to two thousand. A police escort would be required to take him in and out. Ted’s agent expressed his gratitude to the police commissioner’s representative. The man said that there had been disturbances in recent times at Columbia University. If things got too hot, Ted might have to forget about the speaking engagement. The kids used any old excuse to run amok.
His London agency had received not an engraved invitation but an embroidered one, prevailing upon Ted to come by the Saint Regis Hotel at the hour of seven. He was to meet a bandleader and his wife. Ted was staying at another hotel; he could not remember the name and didn’t bother to go by and drop off his bag. There was no resisting this summons, and it would be poor form to show up late. The lettering on the invitation, one secretary couldn’t keep herself from gushing over the wire, was done entirely in organzine. The bandleader must have had scribes with long needles in his cellar. His stated aim, made plain in some of the most popular songs of our age, was to save the world, and the use of necromantic embroidery seemed a proper starting point, a stitch in time.
The Saint Regis was an old Beaux-Arts building, lit for climactic effect like Covent Garden. In front of the main entrance stood a bubble-shaped cab call, golden and curtained like a sumptuous old livery coach. As Ted exited the taxi, a Buckingham guard with the toy soldier’s overturned beach pail upon his head tromped up and held the car door for three middle-aged women who wore candy lime, candy peach, and candy pink leggings and stood tightly together like varieties of licorice in a display case.
The invitation didn’t bother with specifics. He had little idea of what this bandleader and his wife would want with him. The man and his musical group seemed like a merry enough bunch, though, judging from what he had heard on the radio these last years. Though no poets themselves, the lads, through mass appeal, had rendered archaic the poet’s traditional retreat to the garret. The artists’ hitherto healthy terror of life had never seemed to apply to them. Now that Ted thought of it, the BBC had served as both his and their stepping-stone. He’d climbed to the summit of the high chair. They had vaulted to the tower. They were the fools not on the hill but of the belfry. Their rhymed dear-diary odes, embellished with a Shangri-la sound coloring like that of Peter and the Wolf, and their own calibrated alpha-wave harmonies, had flattened the call to arms of the zeitgeist and had banished refinement straight into hell. For this reason, the band had inspired revolutions in fashion and social conduct rather than in thought. The group’s genius for confessional self-indulgence was unrivaled by anyone in recent times save Sylvia Plath. And their self-indulgence had inspired roughly the same amount of self-destructive behavior.
The Saint Regis’s lobby was assembled from prefab pearled glass. The chandelier’s light welled across the floor. Paste porcelain vases sat perched in discreet corners, abounding with primroses and lady’s slippers. Louis XVI chairs were meted out in exact spacings across the lobby as though for an impending parlor game. The long row of phone cubicles alongside the main desk had been refashioned from the ticket booths uncannily imported from the old Aintree Track near Liverpool. The wood was stenciled with the names of the first of the famous steeplechasers who, although not Arabian ponies, bore Moresque titles such as al-Hijaz and Sassanid. The clerk at the desk, a Brit, recognized Ted at once and spoke his name in a hush so that no one in the lobby would hear. He signed Ted’s visitor card and directed him to the lift. The bandleader’s suite was on the se
venth floor. He bypassed the elevator and approached the winding staircase, which was made entirely of glass and inlaid with a pattern of spotted and blocky cubes, inspiring not vertigo but out-and-out airsickness.
Ted expected to see a security detail as he stepped into the seventhfloor hallway, but there was none. There was also the prospect of a groupie circus such as he had heard hung around all hours outside the EMI recording studios on Abbey Road in London. The aficionado army would seem to have stayed home this evening as well. Ted found the door with the number specified on his guest card. He knocked, and a ten-year-old girl’s voice called for him to come in.
The two of them were sitting there in front of the bed on a prayer carpet. Yoko Ono had the flat and winsome features of a South Seas girl. Her ebullient smile held no warmth. She might have been grinding popcorn seeds between her molars. She had brushed her dark, matted hair forward. It completely covered the right side of her pale face while the left side peeked partially out, an ashy moon in the old crescent stage. She was like a child taking sanctuary behind her tresses to stave off her bedtime. Oriental porringers of tea and strawberries had been placed upon the carpet. The rope of Lennon’s hair furled into his lap. He was engaged in plaiting a whorl between his bare toes. He had a rabbinical beard, and his skin tone was a match for his wife’s. Ted had known mine workers with healthier pallors. But for the doughy complexion and the aboriginal coiffure, Lennon, with his rudimentary eyeglasses, his air of self-possession, and his long, discerning nose, slightly melted at the tip, could have been a Florentine croupier in a Ghirlandaio portrait, sniffing out the bloom of the Renaissance from the ovum of its inception.
Lennon was holding off on speaking, postponing the initial jolt. He knew, of course, the power of the oracle of his voice. Ted had heard him speak many times in films and on those telly news spots wherein reporters were always soliciting him to rationalize his politics, his lyrics, his haircut, his wardrobe, his marriage, and in general to account for the enigma of his own titanic popularity. If he had an answer, it was hardly ever an answer pertinent to the question, and his voice burned with the causticity of the schoolmaster who, try as he might, cannot shake the provincialism of his beginnings from the rug of his tongue.
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