Little Fugue

by Robert Anderson

  Yoko held a bowl of berries at arm’s length. “Have some,” she said, in her girly voice. Ted took off his shoes and sat, cross-legged, upon the rim of the carpet. The berries were thimble-sized, as small as raspberries, but they were flawless in shape, and the precise armor of the atom-sized seeds specified the definitude in miniature best represented in the insect kingdom. The tartness of the fruit did not correspond to their ripe coloring. They tasted as though they had been bathed in rubbing alcohol.

  “Thank you, my dear,” Ted said to Yoko.

  “They want me as a witness at the Manson trial,” John said, through his nose, the words coming through the pipe like the music of an anxious flute.

  “Character witness?”

  Lennon smiled.

  “I have to be on stage in less than an hour,” Ted remembered to say, before the conversation got going.

  “Lucky you,” John said, managing to put a certain reserved sharpness into an absolutely oblate pattern of syllabication. “We’ve got a limo on call.”

  “I’ll be going in a police car.”

  He lifted his eyes and looked at Ted through his round, rimless glasses. Ted realized then that his statement contained an implied menace. It followed that he would be leaving in a police car only if he were to harm or kill one or both of them.

  “Because the police commissioner here in the city is concerned for my welfare,” he added. “I hear it’s a partisan crowd at the college.”

  “Two’s a party; three’s a partisan,” Lennon said and smiled shyly at his own witticism. The strawberries had been dipped in gall.

  “So, they want you at the Manson murders?”

  “Can you believe it? Manson’s claiming that I aided and abetted him. He fancied that song ‘Helter Skelter,’ you know? And McCartney wrote it.”

  “If they start in indicting rock and roll,” Ted said, “you boys’ll have plenty to answer for.”

  “I take it that you’re no fan?” The man’s nasal passages were atrophying.

  “You fellows are the drum corps that marched in and took over our utopia.”

  “You fellows,” Lennon replied, “should not have been so silly as to leave the gate wide open.”

  “Touché.”

  “But that’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Talk to me about what?”

  “I’ve been reading your wife’s poem ‘Daddy.’ ”

  Manson fancied “Helter Skelter.” Lennon fancied “Daddy.”

  “ ‘Daddy’?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “What does ‘Daddy’ have to do—?”

  “It’s my favorite poem going.”

  “A lot of people say that.”

  “And Manson says that he sees me as a father figure.”

  “Well, you didn’t have to have me up here to talk about ‘Daddy.’ You could get out your Ouija board and ask Sylvia for yourself.”

  Lennon said, “Don’t you think I’ve tried that?”

  “Could I ask you something? What is it with these berries? They taste like camphor balls.”

  “Special recipe.”

  “Oh, you grow your own?”

  Lennon said, “Can I tell you something?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’d venture to say that Yoko and I have one thing going for us that you and your wife never had.”

  “Really?” Ted asked. “What would that be?”

  “Chemistry, Ted.”

  Yoko started giggling.

  8.

  Robert

  We walk out into the black cat’s hour, Blind Isaac and I. The neighborhood that was once Washington Market is now called Tribeca. Isaac has retired here. I trail the single taillight of his hovercraft. The vessel purrs robotic. He favors plaid Bermudas and remarks upon his blue, sprigly legs as belonging to his own eight-year-old inner child. The neighborhood felines run up the painted drainpipes. They seek the lairs of the fat pigeons. We find severed feathers on the walkway like Choctaw tracings. Car beams. Brief glimpses of front rooms. Blue curtains. Wainscoting. Television vigils. Sonatas for unaccompanied slumber. Isaac points his cane to the sky and draws the constellations that the lights of the city eclipse.

  He retains me for these early mornings. He does not like to be touched, but he insists on being inventoried. I open his attaché case pill-box. We go over the contents. We accessorize for the advent of rain. We bring along a miniature library in a storm bag. He won’t be touched, but he will, sometimes, be read to along the shore. He carries a tinny old radio with a hanger wire antenna. He thinks that he might catch a foreign ball game on the maritime channel. Or, in clear weather, maybe an oratory from another time.

  We cross the cobblestone streets. We go down to the abandoned docks. The wood of the overhanging boardwalk is rotting. Well-to-do residents don’t wish to have it replaced. They find it “real.” At dawn, the gulls sleep in the meridian of the sky, dreaming circles. Pavlovas sail by on their lily pads, their periscope necks turning once toward us.

  The sunrise begins with burgundies. Collective wounds.

  Isaac rubs his chest, but that’s not an uncommon gesture for him to make. He has trouble believing how much his heart has had to tolerate while, as he has been known to say, never knowing the consolation of true love or blind faith. I am walking ahead, into the tide. The wind is high. The day is bright. There’s a roaring in the sky. The tide bears down. It turns me around. Isaac is waving his cane. He is shouting something. A winged shadow appears on the water. I am looking up and can count the ribs on the jet’s belly. The silver-frame countinghouses, eight blocks south of this shore, rise up out of the ground like two unlit candles. I am pointing to the plane in the sky.

  “Look how low,” I call into the wind.

  9.

  Ted

  Outside a blue-and-white police vehicle was waiting. Ted put his traveling bag atop the cruiser’s hood and tried the back door. It would not give. He waited for the passenger-side cop to reach around and dislodge the lock. The cop didn’t move. A lever was activated from the front seat without either policeman having to stir. It sounded like the bolt of a rifle being thrown. The door popped open, knocking Ted back. He got in the backseat with the bag. The two cops had persnickety folds in the backs of their necks. The bolt that secured the door snapped loudly back into place, fastening Ted’s spine to the upholstery. The policemen turned to look at him through the glass partition.

  One of them said, “We take you to Columbia, you read your stuff, you answer questions, you are out of there in one hour, and you do not agitate. You ken?”

  Ted smiled. Old Scotsmen said “Ya ken?” to each other. The cop must have an uncle or auntie from the Highlands. “I ken absolutely.” The twin heads turned around.

  “He says he kens,” one of them muttered, anticipating exasperation, getting himself in the mood for it.

  They must have known that he was running late as well, but they were trained for emergencies, not punctuality. They went down the avenue at a processional pace, their beef-slabbed, freckled arms bowed at the windows. In Northampton, Massachusetts, they had called this “bird dogging.” You rolled by, serendipitous as you please, leaving onlookers to guess at the amount of horsepower beneath your hood. In England, autoing was connubial sex, steady as she goes. A weekend pastime and always the same old scenery. When you turned over a Bentley, you heard only a yawn. In America, autoing had become a mating ritual, no holds barred, no speed limit observed. Sexual etiquette had been left in the dirt.

  There was a stalk of rye or else a baby swallow’s wing flickering just above his left eyelid. Nerves, he told himself. Deep-sea headache coming on. The taste of camphored strawberries still strong on his tongue. The traffic slowed and then stalled. A hoi polloi of chrome and pedestrians with shopping bags scooching along between front and back bumpers. Women and men alike turning sideways and tobogganing their buttocks along the hood of the cop car. The chrome nose of the auto inching forw
ard, a beast on a dry trail. He was sucking on a sponge of Novocain now and panting within a plastic, halitosis-reeking mouthpiece. The middle part of his face was swallowed up by that condition that the North Tawton physician had attempted to explain to him once, trying to explicate Assia’s “fits” and chafing visibly as he diplomatically submitted the case for her unfitness as a mother. Scotoma, he called it. Selective blindness. The doctor reiterating the words “Don’t misunderstand me,” and “Don’t think that I don’t know how you feel,” although, as far as he was concerned, Assia was the memory and Sylvia was a living presence, and thus feeling anything at all toward Assia had become a liability.

  The roots of Ted’s jaw and the hollow of his left temple were taking the brunt of a drilling. He had to put his fist beneath his chin to keep his head from agreeing with the remonstrations of the horns.

  Cops were never partial to crowds. These guys had had enough of this one. They’d turned their cherry siren on. It was the vamp of a gaming bird. The hunter fowl circling the empty sky. It was not a mating call at all since a mating call had a much more legato pitch. This was a summons for blood. The multicolored wings of the gaming bird were flapping on either side of his head. He felt the hot knives of the bird’s scapular claws digging for traction in the base of his neck. He looked out the window. The buildings were dissolving like bars of soap. They were turning to neoimpressionistic drapery, tactile, furling, and yet diffuse. As though this weren’t enough, the sand that was being shed by the towers was gathering into pyramidal dunes in the sprawl of the street, much brighter of color than their parent structures. The cars came out of the other side routinely cylindrical, as though their fourth plane were an umbrage to the laws of Euclid, and the pedestrians would emerge with a third walking leg or a spare bone protruding through their backs. The wind had picked up. He now had to regard the world through the rainbow sand grains, lacerating the window in waves.

  Ted strongly suspected that death was at hand. Why the visions? The dramaturgy was too superlative to ignore. These Praetorians, always chafing to impose history rather than to merely chaperone it on its journey, would deliver him up, newly dead, to his academic enemies at Columbia University. He would leave no valedictory. His latest poems were veiled responses to Sylvia’s death. He had been too preoccupied with hers to reflect upon his own. He didn’t want to go out as a man caught blind-sided. Twice in one lifetime.

  The police cruiser left the aviary lights of the city behind. A light rain had begun to fall upon Central Park.

  He tapped at the hard plastic of the partition. “Excuse me, fellows,” he said, “do you have a pen and paper handy?”

  Neither of the cops turned.

  If he were going to answer Sylvia, last breath for last breath, then he would have to locate some symbolic fragment that yet linked their lives as their wedding bands had once served to bind them. How about their mutual sense of loss?

  He rapped at the partition once again. “Officers, have you got bloody writing gear?”

  Nothing. They stared straight ahead. Was Ted already dead?

  The bird of prey who had been singing from the topmast of the auto was now burrowing its way down into the hood of Ted’s collar. He could feel its claws along his spine. Its cold breath at his neck.

  10.

  Robert

  11.

  Ted

  The cops parked the cruiser at the foot of a concrete stairway. They left the engine running and the siren singing. The campus was erected at the top of a bluff. The policemen flanked him on either side, their hands upon their billy clubs and their walks constricted, emphasizing groin difficulties. He realized that he had left his traveling bag in the cop car. He stopped and turned back toward the auto. One of the officers read his mind.

  “Leave it,” he said, “you won’t be long.”

  Oh, yeah. Ted had momentarily forgotten that he was about to die.

  Out on the green, the children were running in the rain with their streamers and balloon clusters. The girls wore head scarves and silver disks on their foreheads. Some of their hands had been dyed with blue henna. If the boys hadn’t been bare-chested, he would not have been able to designate them as boys. They had been allowed to pitch tents. Guitars were tuning aimlessly like an orchestra at pre-curtain. A black-bronze Alma Mater sat at the midpoint of a plateau of stairs with a scepter in her hand and a book of judgment open on her lap. One of the cops pointed to a flat-topped structure that had to be the gymnasium that he was to speak in. Kids were queuing outside.

  One kid in ripped jeans darted in as Ted and the policemen stepped from the last stair and onto the pavement. He had a ranchman’s buckskin on and wore his hair in a Mongol braid. “I gotta talk—” he got out before one of the constables thumped him cleanly in the heart with the flat of his meaty hand. The boy gulped directly from his abdomen and looked ready to spit his guts out. The policemen prodded Ted forward. He had no recourse but to offer “Sorry” over his shoulder as he passed, the kid still standing there with his eyes closed and his mouth open.

  “He says he’s sorry,” said the cop who had pounded the boy in the chest.

  Ted realized that he had just offered his first public apology.

  They ushered him toward the auditorium, down a peeling and fetid corridor, and most incredibly into a storage room just off the stage where athletic equipment was stockpiled, a net of basketballs hovering over his head. He knew now that the only apology anyone, including himself, would be willing to accept from him would be his own combative and competitive death. In a marriage both partners must make mutual choices. Sylvia had chosen a quick death for herself and a lingering one for him. Now it was his turn to choose.

  It was Sylvia, after all, who had put him on the defensive. She and her minions did not want his excuses; they wanted and needed a sharp curve in the story line, an unforeseen development. The thing that they were least expecting was Ted’s total vindication.

  But, he thought with a heartskip of panic, he had no idea what he would say on the stage. The flesh was willing and the mind was absolutely vacant.

  “Could I have a glass of water?” he asked, avoiding eye contact with the stagehands and the phlegmatic greeting committee who were coming in and out of the room, pretending not to see him.

  An Oriental girl stopped and turned to him. She was brittle and had a silver bracelet light upon the quill of her wrist. The roots of her dyed-red hair were starkly black.

  “Water?” she asked him.

  Ted nodded. One of the policemen lifted a cricket bat from a rack. He took a practice bowl in the air.

  “Please,” Ted said.

  “Hello!” someone on stage boomed into the sound system, his vehement breath detonating a bomb of air. “We have with us tonight a poet . . .”

  “You would like a glass of water?” the Oriental girl asked, shooting him sympathetic eyes.

  It was much too late to write a poem for the occasion. He would have to go upon his figurative knees to the muses. Just this once. Just this one last time.

  “Get the guy a glass of water, would ya?” said one of the cops, figuring that his jurisdiction extended even to matters of etiquette.

  The announcer on stage said, “. . . one of the leading voices of his generation . . .”

  But the muses, make no mistake and never mind the advances that civilization had made in the last millennium, still operated on the old sibyl system. Something was going to have to be sacrificed before they would speak. Something sizable. What could they possibly want from a dead man like Ted?

  “All right then, let me get you a glass of water,” the pretty Oriental lobotomy victim said.

  His life. That’s what the muses wanted from him. They wanted his life on their terms. They wanted his life as opposed to his death. They wanted him to return to the loveless household in Devon and live in utter misery with Assia and Shura. They wanted him to live up to the fact that he was honor-bound to live out his life’s mistake. They wanted him
to rise from the dead and go and grovel in the mess that he had made of this life. The muses had been on Sylvia’s side virtually since the day he had met her. They had adopted her as their daughter on the day she died.

  The Oriental girl walked to the far corner of the storage room. There was a small spinet in the shadows that Ted had not noticed before. Perhaps it was wheeled out for dance sessions and pep rallies in the auditorium. She lifted the spinet’s sparrow’s wing. She removed the glass of water that was kept in there to keep the inner atmosphere moist and the octaves at normal pitch. He remembered finding Sylvia sleeping in the oven after that night spent fucking with Assia atop the water organ in the British Museum. He remembered sneaking a look in her final notebook, anticipating not so much a suicide note as some sort of romanticized explanation. On the last written-on page, he found the most consciously primitive poem that his wife had ever written. He had been fucking with his mistress on top of a water organ, and his wife, at that moment, was fucking with him atop her hurdy-gurdy grave.

  The Oriental girl held out the glass of water.

  “I’d rather die,” Ted told Sylvia, distractedly from the cellar of his day-dream.

  “That’s just what I had in mind,” she said and she threw the glass of water in his face.

  There wasn’t any applause as he walked onto the stage, mopping his brow with his handkerchief as though he was sweating. There wasn’t any hooting or catcalls, either. The overhead lights stunned him. He turtled his head into his collarbone. Inexplicably a few among them started to applaud at this. He straightened his neck and looked into the lights.

  “Good evening,” he said into the microphone. “I would like to recite a poem.”

  He closed his eyes and reared his head back. He said: