Little Fugue

by Robert Anderson

  That in itself seemed fair. At the time. Assia hadn’t begrudged Sylvia her death scene. The two of them had a bit of a honeymoon in those early days of Sylvia’s death. Things were very different now. It was clear at this moment that red was supposed to be Assia’s message all along. Assia had lived much more deeply in red. She knew its ins. And, O, God, yes, she knew red’s outs. She was living in Sylvia’s country house, and she was being supported, albeit with reservations, by Sylvia’s husband, but the fact of the matter was that Sylvia had usurped Assia’s death warrant, and Sylvia had lived Assia’s life out from under her.

  Her head was throbbing and Shura was deadweight in her arms.

  How would you fight a ghost? Easy, you would cut off the ghost’s supply line and destroy her popular appeal at its source. You would steal a tactic from the ghost’s own war plan and reinvent it so as to make the ghost herself appear arcane and haunted.

  You would report to the scene of the enemy’s abdication. You would reenact her guileful passive aggression, but you would do it in such a way as to implicate your enemy in your surrender and her ultimate defeat. You would make it look as if it were her hand that was forcing yours. In this way, you would bond with your enemy in her own blood. You would say red for all of the world and yours would be the last voice to say it.

  They had mourned the death of Sylvia’s innocence. Well, Assia’s had died first. And Sylvia had left children in the world. She had left them to lose for themselves the residue of what their mother had already deprived them of.

  Assia must show the world how gravely Sylvia lacked Assia’s sense of mercy.

  Sylvia’s ghost had been easy prey all along. She was vulnerable even in her most formidable means of defense. Her heartless silence. Assia could be silent, too. She could be silent deeper and longer, living out in isolation up to three times the span of Sylvia’s aborted existence on earth, withholding all her experiences to cheat the world out of the harrowing details. Allowing the cup of contrition to pass each time it was offered to her, for her contrition would implicate the entire human race, if once she let her lips light upon that cup. She would be killing Sylvia utterly off with the mystique of her continued existence. Going Sylvia one better by burying herself alive.

  She did not want to live or to die on Sylvia’s terms. She couldn’t pass Sylvia’s forward momentum on to her daughter. Her daughter who had never spoken. Her daughter who was born knowing that she had no need to avail herself of communication. Too much had been said and done previous to her arrival in the world. Her daughter who was born to serve herself as a means of communication.

  The little girl now burrowed her forehead into the crux of her mother’s neck. Her plump arm was stiff in the air. Her finger was pointing at Etienne de Born’s lifeless body. “Daddy,” she said.

  21.

  Robert

  Handing over the newspaper, Abdiel says, “It says that she was a Barnard girl. And quite a renowned photographer. Apparently, she once did a portrait of my old friend, Heathcliffe Hughes.” He laughs his half-suppressed Peter Lorre laugh and moves toward the bay windows. A moment later, I hear the windows creaking on their girders, and I am expecting him to regain something of his sanity with the flush of the night wind. But no, he folds his arms and bends at the knee, and waits at the opposite end of the room, saying nothing. The abdication of his mind is prophetic. It turns out that a second lost treasure happened to be extant until early this morning. I’ve seen Leela Aimee Silvert’s portraits in magazines, and I have suspected that the name was a pseudonym. It sounded as though it had been purloined from Trollope. As far as I could tell, she wasn’t out to seize upon the individualities of her photographic subjects so much as she wanted to make clear the perversion of their fame. Her point was not to capture the identity, but the dereliction of the identity. One and all, her subjects seemed fugitive and, by differing degrees, truant from their own portraits. Leela Aimee, to my knowledge, never photographed herself. Until now.

  She had been visiting friends on a Massachusetts farm. She was returning to Los Angeles to meet with a photo editor. Unexpectedly, the plane and her life terminated in Lower Manhattan, and I, who have not seen her in thirty years, am now a witness to a final parting, hers and ours. Time has curdled the skin of her upper lip only a little. It has carved tiny asterisks onto either tuck of her eye sockets. She retains her fine bone-work and her long, silken Pre-Raphaelite tresses, untouched by gray. She has aged so much more gently than I that looking at her now is like regarding myself in a deceitful mirror. Perhaps time hasn’t really passed at all.

  Significantly Sabbath did not try to capture the scene aboard that airplane or the hijackers’ identities. She must have known that history would expect her to serve it, even in the face of death. But she demurred. Someone as ageless as she could apparently afford to tell history to go to hell. She shot herself, with a soap-bar-sized Nikon, standing alone in the plane’s aisle, with empty seats behind her. She fed the image into her Palm Pilot. She e-mailed it to several friends. She said her goodbyes and then turned away out of the eye of history.

  Her chin is raised up. Her hair falls around her shoulders. Her smile is steady. She wears a belly blouse that rides up her sternum. The tattoo above her navel shows a fiery cat’s eye and a teardrop, drawn slantwise, set into the ovum of a spherical egg. This is her last work. She has signed and postdated it.

  I am reading the account when Abdiel lifts his right foot from the ledge. He seems to tread air for a moment. He says, “Well, come on, if you are coming,” but I can’t, at the moment, connect the poor man with his own speaking voice. To me, it’s as if Sabbath has spoken those words from her newspaper photograph. Abdiel doesn’t wait for an answer. The curtains billow in the space that he has just now vacated. Almost immediately there are shouts. Then, once again, the sound of sirens and the colored lights.

  I walk out of the lounge. I climb the stairs to the roof.

  22.

  Assia

  She gave Shura a cold capsule. That should have provided her with ten to twelve hours in which to make up her mind or change it all together. It was her child and it was her prerogative. The little girl slept, Assia thought, like an aria spinning on a scratched disk. She blinked and hiccuped without losing the tremoring pitch of her slumber. Assia’s migraine had been ebbing since the afternoon, and the slow seepage of gas fumes from her aging Aston Martin’s engine had cleared her head entirely. She carried the child through the door and inhaled the dust. She had always itched in this apartment. She would torment Ted during their arguments by saying that Sylvia had imparted her psoriasis. The dust not only itched, but also stung upon her skin like frost.

  Was that something she actually said, or something that she had occasion to hold on standby for her next battle with Ted in which he would charge, once again, that Assia was no writer, and could never have been a poet, and that her imagination never quite crossed in from the bedroom. While his previous wife’s had obviously breached clear to the kitchen.

  All the money that had been made and this ruin of a flat had not been abandoned, except, intermittently anyway, by Sylvia. It was as if they were following a reverse wish in Sylvia’s will. They were refusing to take her at her word for what she had wanted.

  Assia opened the oven and turned on the gas with Shura still in her arms. This was a provisonary action. The dust was crawling up her nose, and it could flare up another migraine any second. She no longer felt the proprietorial rights that would allow her to open up one of the windows. She went into the living room and turned on Ted’s old radio. The hooped banding heated up slowly to the color of cream. She heard orchestral music. It was too Slavic. Too close to home and too far afield. It wasn’t only her life, but her bearings that were at stake here tonight. She dialed the round cracker of the tuning knob. She found voices. A panel deliberating on the state of the world. There were peace talks in Paris. There were wars and famines here on earth, and strictly limited opportunities upon the fac
e of the moon. Mother’s milk contained four times the amount of DDT permissible in cow’s milk. VX nerve gas killed more than six thousand sheep worldwide last year.

  It was cold in the apartment. What with Ted having been in America these last months and Ted’s other children having been farmed out to family, the steam bellows hadn’t been opened in ages. Shura’s body was pleasantly warming Assia’s breast and she didn’t want to let her go, although her flabby arms were tiring. She carried her into the nursery. Ted had upgraded the room by buying a pair of kiddie cots. The one that she was looking at had snow bunny sheets beneath a fringed, snowy bedspread. The bottom sheet had a faded jam or a picked-scab stain. Or maybe one of the children had gotten a nosebleed from the figurative altitude. Sylvia had made certain that her children would live, no matter where and how they chose to live, atop a totem pole. Mommy had put them out of everyone else’s reach.

  Assia put Shura down and stripped one of the beds. She left the sheets and the bedspread rumpled in the far corner of the room. She dragged the weightless mattress across the epidermis of the living room carpet and onto the new linoleum in the kitchen. She knew that it was new because it glowed white in this dark whereas the linoleum that she remembered was a ripe shade of tooth bacterium that had always refused to brighten beneath the bleaching mop. The new tiles had a subtle, recessed design, almost like a series of chain-linked watermarks. You needed to be nearly vertical to read them. She went back to the nursery and picked up her daughter. She had to squat for traction and to shift her weight back and forth several times in order to sit down upon the mattress with the child in her arms. When she managed it, her spine felt strained. If her back had given out and she were unable to move, all her options would have deserted her. The idea of losing control at this interval held no small measure of appeal. The giddiness of her migraines had taught her the protocols of helplessness. What a blessing in excruciating disguise they had been. The migraines had fended off all the permutations of thought for hours on end. When she would pull her head from out of the volcano at last, there was only the relief at the lack of pain and the sweet anticipation of falling asleep.

  She put Shura down on the mattress. The smell of the oven’s gas grew ever stronger. What if the smell were strong enough to wake Shura after Assia had exited the flat to drive to the central station house of the Metropolitan Police Force? Well, to plant a garden, you had to get your hands dirty, right? But the idea of her daughter waking in the dark in a strange place like this without her mother near had less to do with dirtying her hands than it had to do with cutting them off completely. And just because Sylvia had died six years ago did not mean that Sylvia’s plans were not operative at this moment. It did not mean that Sylvia’s own amputated hands were not still busy. Sylvia did not lie in a grave, but in a gauntlet. She was daring Assia. She was asking Assia how much her own plotted revenge was worth to her. Was it worth the prospect of her daughter’s dying terror?

  She turned her head into the darkness of the room. She said, “I guess that there are lines that neither of us will cross. After all.”

  Sylvia, six years dead, was, yes, taunting, but yes, she was also beckoning. She wagged one finger. She crooked another.

  It would constitute the most enigmatic act of her lifetime. More poetic, say, than spending the remainder of her lifetime in the limbo of a jail cell, as she had planned to do, waiting for a natural death to come along. Writing flat letters of refusal to discourage book writers and thrill seekers, as though she were death’s amanuensis, and the relationship did not work the other way around.

  The gas was pouring out of the grotto of the oven.

  All right, she had been tricked, but never fooled. It was still hers to choose between life and death. She could sit here and she could play the submissive role of the asphyxiated Jew. She could walk out the door and make a run for her trifling life, thus playing the part of the Wandering Jew. And she was the one who had participated in a war for a land base so that her people could forever after choose their own identities.

  Assia lay back on the mattress beside her daughter.

  She had participated in that war. Sylvia had won it after the fact with her nonparticipation. They had lived parallel lives, she and Sylvia. The battles that Sylvia had won were the ones that she sat out.

  But it was over now, any way you looked at it. It was all over.

  Over. She would like to turn over. That gas was quick. Like sleep to the wicked. She hadn’t thrown the dead bolt on the door. Had she even locked it?

  She crossed her arms in formal surrender. Upon their first meeting, Sylvia had asked, “Are you a model?” Assia thought that she was asking in code if she was a whore. What she really meant was “Are you a copy?” “Are you a counterpart?” “Are you a duplicate?” “Are you a next of kin?”

  The answer is no. And yes. She should have locked the door and thrown the dead bolt. That metal kiss across her lips.

  Over.

  She must turn over. They mustn’t find her smiling like this.

  23.

  Ted

  The flight’s landing was delayed on account of the fog. They milled in the air for an extra hour with the captain apologizing and the passengers good-naturedly swapping stories about getting lost amid the London miasma, entering the wrong flat, and sleeping with the erroneous spouse.

  “The Mister’s had the sack over me head for twenty-five years anyhow,” a charwoman’s voice joked from the economy seating.

  When Ted had finally landed and hailed the last taxi of his journey, he thought about surprising Assia and Shura with an impromptu visit to Court Green. It would be the only way to know if the journey to the other end of the ocean had narrowed the distance between them. He wanted to see how they would react if he walked in and began to act totally at home. But he couldn’t really pull that off without a rest, could he? One night’s rest in the flat on Fitzroy Road.

  He turned the key in the lock and opened the door. He smelled that wuthering carport smell. He heard voices and peeked his head around the corner of the entranceway. He saw the glowing halo of his boyhood radio. He shut the door and threw the security bolt.

  He thought that he could sense something crawling toward him on the floor. He removed his coat and then pried loose his spinal column. He hung his spine up on the hook of a hanger. It jangled like chimes. He wriggled out of his pelvic girdle. He kicked it into the hold of the closet. He broke off his legs at the hips and propped them, like canes, against the door. He seeped into the other room.

  LITTLE FUGUE

  Robert Anderson

  A READER’S GUIDE

  A Conversation with Robert Anderson

  Q: So, why a novel about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes?

  Robert Anderson: Actually, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and their circle serve as points of departure for what the novel is actually getting at. The way that I understand it, Little Fugue is an example of psychological fiction that concerns itself with the second half of the twentieth century.

  The twentieth century was an era of unprecedented self-creation. Postwar affluence, not only here in the United States, but in Europe and other industrialized regions as well, provided many with the means to become what they wished to be, while the littérateurs of the world kept imparting the appropriate caveat, that we should all have a care concerning what we were wishing for. Quite tellingly, the salient technological accomplishments of the period were the developments of atomic and nuclear energy, and these achievements served both to aggrandize and demoralize the human race. At the outset, one idea that strongly attracted me was to somehow use literary history as a microcosm for what was taking place in the larger world.

  Around the time of the millennium, when I began writing Little Fugue, I thought, Why not greet this strange new century by portraying the former one through the prism of literary minds, through the psyches of men and women who have actually become world-weary in part owing to their chosen exclusion from what you might call “
normal life,” and their cloying dissatisfaction with their relationships with one another? This is the perspective of either the sibylline college or the leper colony, and to my mind these would be the sole body politics able to provide an answer to the core question raised by the book.

  Q: And what is that core question?

  RA: What now constitutes heroism, what constitutes cowardice, and where exactly does the line blur? It would qualify as the latest in a long series of vindications for Sylvia Plath if what I suspect to be true turns out indeed to be true: That, at least in the field of literary fiction, anguish, specifically anguish over the unfulfillable craving for aesthetic beauty, has come to replace courageousness as a force of motivation, the specters of Freud and Eliot having displaced the specter of Caesar. The consequence of this would then be that the hard break between anguish and courage in literature is itself no longer in place. This changes everything.