He was holding the kid up. The kid was panting. Ted said, “There’s someplace that I’m supposed to be. There’s this grande dame who’s been writing my management, asking to meet me. She’s supposed to be very reclusive. She’s married to a famous choreographer.”
“What’s her name?” the kid got out, his breath on Ted’s neck.
“I can’t remember,” Ted said.
“Where does she live?” Ted’s killer was the soul of solicitation.
“An old residence here in town. Big as one block, they told me. It has a Red Indian name that I can’t quite—”
“The Algonquin?”
“No.”
“The Iroquois?”
“No.”
“The Dakota?”
“That’s it.”
The inside of the bus had the coloring of a dolphin pond. The city lights swirled by. Out of the rain, he got a good look at his killer. The buckskin coat was not laundered, and the shirt that he wore beneath it had been used to clean the viscera of a conveyer pipe. His nose and his chin were too emphatic, and the flesh upon his face had been skimmed on sparingly with a trowel. Flesh and bone, grafted as they were, had not grown particularly comfortable existing in such close proximity. His face did not fit somehow. It was the face of a desert dweller. A native to the sea of erosion. He could well envision this kid killing him. The redeeming irony of it all would lie in Ted’s complicity, necessary to the operation.
“What’s your name, by the way?” Ted asked.
“Robert.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
They rode the bus down the avenue, and they had to get off in the low eighties to walk the three remaining blocks toward the park. The Dakota building was lit for the abating rain. Its glow lamps were flickering at the entrance, and the light recessed into the tunnels of its dormer and oriel windows indicated only presences within, no more specific than a tissue of shadows. It was a neo-Gothic building—certainly not the least bit at odds with the architecture of Camden Town and Mayfair—with the sort of yellow-and-brown brickwork that caused thousands of structures of its type to be referred to as “breweries.” In former times, domiciles such as this one would house a host of London gentlemen’s clubs, parlor theaters and operettas, assignation chambers, coalitions dedicated to cribbage and oolong tea, and the residences of parliamentarians and exiled former court members.
“Wait here,” Ted told his assassin at the entranceway, “we haven’t finished yet.”
He stood outside the little concierge’s cage and told the doorkeeper who he had come to visit, although not by name because he still could not, for the life of him, remember it. He said that he had been sent for by the disabled ballerina who had been in seclusion in this very apartment house for many years, looked after, sometimes, by her balletmaster husband. The concierge got on the house phone. An attendant in a grandier’s outfit appeared. He took Ted up in the wirework elevator that Ted thought resembled a pigeon coop. Ted played dumb while the man went on about Tanaquil LeClercq, whom he had known since she was no more than a gawky girl. He said that she had been stricken with polio after a performance of Swan Lake in the city of Copenhagen many years before. Ted asked if she was currently active, knowing full well the answer that he would get. The grandier said that she lent her name to various national charities and her pen to the correspondence sections of newspapers and journals, venturing opinions as well turned as her grands battements jetés had formerly been. She had not been seen in public since her final curtain call. There had just been a write-up about her in The New Yorker, he said. “Shadow Dancing,” the piece was called.
The grandier applied the knocker on the appropriate apartment house door. A Trappistine nun answered the door. The grandier asked the nun in a tone of tired subservience if her mistress was expecting company.
“He is distressingly late,” the Trappistine replied, in the very same tone. Then she put her head down and went into the inner chambers to verify whether or not Ted would be received. She reappeared in the corridor moments later, beckoning. The apartment seemed to contain several maze-like hallways with cubbies and closets, something like a rabbit’s warren. There was a dry, scrubbed, disinfected scent to the place as well, reinforcing the impression of an animal pen or maze-like stable long left vacant. He was led into a bare room with cool lighting and parquet tiles so flocculent that he had the sensation of trespassing within a bed of heather. In the center of the room was a circular water tank draped with a Lenten array of red linen with black panels and a black fringe. Mirrors stretched across all four walls, as in a dance studio. Waxen torches, tall as the owner of the apartment had every right to be and was no longer, burned in strategic spots around the room. Jellied, embryonic shadows passed in the mirror. A head with a streaming mane floated upon the surface of the water tank. It seemed that the mistress of the house was receiving therapy from a buxom scuba trainer with breasts the size of pom-poms. The trainer’s waveshape body fishtailed in the lucent water below her neck. She took Tanaquil LeClercq by the hips and balanced her body facedown in the pool. Tanaquil’s smooth marble back with its inordinately curved spinal tail floated on the surface. The trainer turned her over. The water streamed down Tanaquil’s face as though a cosmetic mask of latex was being melted away. The face was unlined, wide-eyed, doll-like. Ted recognized Sylvia’s brittle, elongated frame and the familiar knife handle of her jaw.
14.
Robert
To the east, the white cloud can be seen moving to sea. The lightest of the refuse, the computer sheets, the newspapers, the bits of Styrofoam, and the sheaths of bubblewrap advance in the forefront of the cloud, and they have already gained the airspace above the web of the Brooklyn Bridge. They pass over the river. They move against the wind. Black Air Force jets, silent as seabirds, fly directly into the fanfare. One would think that this is a scene from a majestic parade at the end of a war rather than the cautious patrol at the inception of one. To the south are the firefighters’ white streamers. A scrapple share of the outer casing of one of the towers tilts out of the rubble like the fragment of a crown. Men circle the broken silo. Men with shovels. Men with pickaxes. Men with buckets. Empty-handed men scrambling to the top of the hill of quarry and calling something through cupped work gloves. Men in moonsuits of asbestos climbing down taut chains into the bomb craters. Earthmovers and excavators moving into position. German shepherds in muzzles behind the canework of their kennel trucks. To the west, the National Guard, in deep hiding since the disturbances of the 1960s, arrives in flatbeds to reorganize in the environs of City Hall. Groups of them now high-step toward us to assist in the triage operation.
The pallid American flags, like forgotten laundry on the line, sink, one by one, to half-staff. To the south, Lady Liberty, cut off at the knees at this glancing angle, points her lantern at the airspace where the towers used to be, and the Port Authority copters are airbusing cataclysm engineers and clergypersons into the heliport at Battery Park City. It will not be confirmed until much later in the day that the men who planned this catastrophe indeed intended it as an act of God. The Bush administration’s response, and the entire thrust of the foreign policy of the new millennium, will soon be couched in much the same terms, with the proviso regarding mysterious ways invoked with regularity.
Everyone is asking for water, but the triage volunteers, checking pulses and blood pressures, wiping at irritated eyes, and handing out those M*A*S*H masks, can only suggest that everyone kick a dollar into the kitty, and that someone run and find an open mini mart. Strangers are combing the ashes out of each other’s hair. They are sharing cigarettes and recent experiences. They are exchanging past histories and phone numbers. Some people are holding hands and saying the Lord’s Prayer in circles.
I seem to have lost Blind Isaac in the crowd.
15.
Ted
The trainer with the big bosom floated Tanaquil on her back upon the surface of the water. Ted couldn’t help staring. Her be
lly was not at all heavy; that wasn’t it. It simply lacked any osseous underpinning that would hold it in place, firm and flat. Her skin was sallow and it was not crawling exactly, as one would ascertain in terms of psoriasis or eczema. It was breaking up into seething molecules, the surface of the water itself sibilant with pungent bath spirits. Her body was an image in an old film, fraught with visual static. At any minute now, the trainer and the moony, drugged, and dilatory water sprite would be wiped cleanly from the air. Tanaquil and her trainer both strained in the water, and at last they managed to angle her body into the desired position, that of someone attempting to approximate the curvature of a fishhook by bending backward. The trainer lifted Tanaquil’s body from the water. She took a rasping breath, and the trainer bent her back once more. She had tiny breasts, pert but scarcely making any more impression than a pair of aligned nevi, and long sickly legs that tapered into stunted feet, the little toes S-curled, the wriggling worms that would bait the hook. The craftsman who had labored over her had been agitated at the sublimity that he had achieved with the face—the harlequin jaw and all—and the long, slender, ivory neck, bedeviled by hundreds of splinter-sized sewing needles on the underside of the skin. Her creator had altered his course of action from the neck down. But attempting to beggar his own handiwork, he had succeeded in establishing only a more sagacious beauty in that her body, long, spare, white, and terminating in a startling diminution, resembled the wing of a swan.
The Pegasus bird that Ted had taken for dead now stirred in his bones. Its tendrils pinched at his genitals. She was pure prey, this attenuated dancing lady. She was something larval that lay defenseless in a nest upon the surface of the sea.
Tanaquil LeClercq stood upright in her trainer’s arms. The Trappestine nun was really no nun at all. That was only the uniform that she wore, crowned by the black linen steeple hat. She had lingered all the while in the doorway. Tanaquil, breathing hard, said, “Mr. Hughes, I would like you to meet my sisters, Ivanna Ivanovna and Olya Grigorevna.”
The two women nodded.
Ted guessed that what was going on here was a kind of depraved religious sorority. Their manners were beyond reproach, and the nakedness of his hostess was, by all evidence, beyond shame. The idea of a sisterhood served as a likely enough scenario for someone who had suffered what Tanaquil had been forced to suffer. Faith was the last refuge, usually succeeding hopelessness. It was a likely enough trade-off as well for someone so brutally forced into seclusion. This world in exchange for the next.
“When Mr. B established himself here in America,” she said, “he made arrangements for them to emigrate.”
They nodded again.
She called her own husband “Mr. B.” This was a corrupt religious sisterhood, and quite obviously this Mr. B, or Mr. George Balanchine, choreographer exemplar of the New York City Ballet, was its established deity.
She said, “Mr. Hughes, my husband Mr. B is returning from Mexico tomorrow. He called me on the telephone the other day. He asked for a divorce.”
“I’m very sorry,” Ted said.
“He has fallen in love with the prima ballerina of his company. I’ve known her since she was a little girl. I remember that when I first returned to my husband’s school for a visit, she was taking her beginner’s classes. She politely asked me if I would stand up so that she could take a ride in my chair.”
And now, Ted thought, her husband who is no spring cygnet—the man had to be sixty—wanted to take a ride down the aisle in a baby cradle. What could he say?
Tanaquil seemed to be sulking in her trainer’s arms. Her head found the other woman’s broad cheek. “The first ballet he ever choreographed for me was the Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne. Are you familiar with the myth?”
“Yes,” Ted said.
“Ariadne guides Theseus through the labyrinth and helps him slay the Minotaur. Then he abandons her on the isle of Naxos. In her grief, she turns into a petrified tree. And then Bacchus arrives on Naxos. He weeps for Ariadne’s plight. With that, the petrified tree bears fruit.”
“Was that the first ballet you danced?” Ted asked.
Tanaquil said, “It is the one that I would most like to dance once more.”
Ted took a step back.
“You were speaking at Columbia this evening?” she asked.
“Yes, I spoke there,” Ted said.
“Have you eaten?”
“No.”
The servant Olya Grigorevna now left the room, shutting the door behind her.
“Have you bathed?”
He stood in the lamplight, trying to tie the two ends of his serge tie together. The assassin kid reached with heavily lined saffron hands. Ted offered his bull’s neck. Somewhere the boy had learned the niceties of the slipknot. A droplet rolled from Ted’s hairline. It swept the length of his cheek and spilled upon the boy’s hand. The killer moved away and turned a Hitlerian salute to the empty street. Finally a cab came and stopped at the curb. They got in together. The cabdriver was chewing on a plastic straw. Ted remembered that he had left his pipe in the traveling bag in the police cruiser. He wanted to send the boy for cigarettes.
“Where to?” the kid asked Ted.
He couldn’t remember the name of the hotel that he had been booked in. The reservation slip had also been in the forfeited traveling bag. They moved down Central Park West.
“Well?” said the cabdriver and blew through the straw so that the tassel dangling from his rearview began to dance.
“I live in a hotel on Times Square,” said the boy. “I could put you up.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve got a girlfriend. I just want to mention, she’s black, okay?”
He was gentlemanly submitting his credentials for the kill. A cheap hotel room. A black girlfriend. An amateur kills an amateur.
“Do you have any cigarettes?”
The kid handed him a pack of Pall Malls.
“Could you pull over up here, please?” Ted said to the cabdriver.
The driver slowed the cab.
“You can smoke in a taxi in this country,” the boy informed him.
“Can you open your door a minute?” Ted asked the kid once the cab had rocked to a stop.
He opened the door and glanced back just as Ted’s hand wrapped completely around his too-emphatic desert dweller’s features. Then, shutting the cab door and riding away alone in the backseat, Ted could clearly see what the kid, lying close to the curb, was seeing. The rooftops with the television antennas and the ancient water tanks. The black-and-gold starless sky.
“JFK, please,” Ted said, putting a cigarette into his mouth.
16.
Assia
The book was four hundred manuscript pages long and growing. Despite the physical contact between her and de Born, it was the sharing of ideas that was the truly carnal thing in their relationship. She would violently spurn many of his stated hypotheses, taking to heart only the barest minority of them, and this following the grunting, the grappling, the drawing of blood, the sinking in of the teeth, and ultimately the late-evening truce—the careful retethering of the cabled love knot that linked the alp of his mind to the level gangplank of hers. The theories that she did deign to accept, she duly incubated and returned to him, qualified and abridged. Like a young cad, de Born would only just acknowledge paternity over Assia’s conclusions, however hard he might have worked to inspire them.
De Born said that every book was in fact owned by the pair of eyes that was currently occupying it. The psychology of squatters’ rights held sway, as it would over a mirror or a burial plot. The reader would be looking to see Sylvia, for themselves and in themselves. Thus the strategy, as de Born had outlined it, became to move the Trojan mare ever nearer to the foreground of the mirror. Finally, as in the book of Ariel, the exertion of intimacy would become unbearable. The reader would seek co-conspirator status with the narrator in regard to Sylvia’s ever-nearing demise. At the point of Sylvia’s death, Assia herself would
emerge from Sylvia’s shadow. Into the foreground.
Assia told de Born that he had failed to get her with child as she had requested and now was asking her to deliver his version of herself. His creation myth of her as a twin, a looming twin, a nonidentical twin, an indwelling stranger who had shared the yolk for a term with Sylvia Plath. Until both their waters broke. And even if this was metaphorically true, she said to him, must it always be the function of the truth to indict its teller? What then is the point of telling the truth?
“Now, you know that that is not what I said at all,” Etienne protested. “Not at all.”
Nearing the three hundredth page of the memoir, Sylvia slipped from the story line, just as she had done in life. Even then the book remained starkly a double portrait. They’d gotten the material concerning Assia’s family’s flight from Germany down on paper, paying no small ransom to the bond servant that is memory. Now he was pressuring her to tell him the details of her War for Independence. Did she serve in the same medical unit as her father? Were they in communication? When was the last time she saw him?
Why was he pressing for a dramatic leave-taking between her and her father? He allowed her to allow Sylvia to get away so cleanly.
She now finishes her afternoon session in the oven. She reaches up and fiddles with the gas dials with her head still lying against the cold ceramic tray. From within, the jets make a noise like that of dogs slavering. She stands up and is momentarily blinded by a liquid flag. She picks up the tray of allegretti cakes that she and Shura have baked in Etienne’s honor. She passes through the front room. She sees Shura loping about on the shag rug. Not frolicsome as much as neurasthenic. The television plays silently. A few days ago, she passed by and saw Ted on an American talk show. Whatever it was that he was saying was antagonizing the other guests. Shura, watching, did not seem to react.
“Shura, sit still and play,” she says to her daughter, holding her own head on the tray in her hands as she goes up the stairs.
Little Fugue Page 31