Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  “Ulrich is a German,” Avram said.

  “Ah,” said Annetje. “So that is the story. I am sorry for you to have to spend an evening with that one.”

  Avram smiled shamefacedly at her. She was not clear-minded yet. “Shall I call you after they leave?” he asked.

  She looked up quickly, knowingly; she saw him, he was certain. “No, no,” she said. She was ashamed, he thought, of having called on him, of having fallen so low. “I think tonight I will sleep.”

  “You will be careful? No more tranquilizers? You won’t do anything to yourself?”

  “No, no,” Annetje said. “I am the kind who survives.”

  * * *

  AVRAM LISTENED to her snap the locks on her door. Survives. In the elevator, an elderly man and woman cast uneasy looks at him as if convinced he could not mean them well.

  He hurried from the elevator; he reached the sidewalk; as he strode toward Lexington Avenue it seemed to him he startled the air. He was thinking. He did not expect simple goodness from himself or a simple anything anymore, but a minor integrity would have been nice.

  He halted at the corner; he breathed in the wet, pewter-riddled dark. Louise. Annetje. For them, each living moment was muddied by rain from dead landscapes. They received spectral instructions from cemeteries. But no rain fell for him from his well-audited sky. He bent his head, thinking he ought to be depressed. It was no good—he was amused.

  He thought, I am spiritually coarse. He made up his mind: I will bawl out Louise and Ulrich; I will say, “A little kindness toward people we differ from will improve the world. We mustn’t shut all the doors.” Louise will have all the money in the room, and I will have all the heart and niceness.

  He smiled, he surrendered. He turned then and broke into an easy, boyish run up the avenue. He ran with resigned self-approval.

  HOFSTEDT AND

  JEAN—

  AND OTHERS

  I

  THIS IS what happened when one forty-five-year-old professor (of English) slipped into an affair with a twenty-year-old student. Whom he did not quite manage to love. I will try to make it edifying.

  The narrative will be colored like a map, according to the geography of my spirit, the prickliness of my temper, my perversity, which I am told I possess to an unbearable degree, my lunges at and occasional capture of intelligence, that armored and fatal lizard, and by those other elements of my desert—sand, rock, sunbaked stone, which surround and protect the oasis, the nerve in the tooth, the exploitable ores of my spirit. Can a man indicate and not vindicate his own geography? My long-dead mother inside the glass museum case of memory is bitter with me still, as she often was when I was small: “Why are you such a fool, Leo? Why do you let people take advantage of you? Why don’t you use your head?” I use my head, Momma. She saw my character as having at its center a place where I became the victim, a witless servitor, not clever, and unable to get the best of any bargain.

  * * *

  II

  I was bicycling in Central Park with my friend Ettringhelm and his wife one Sunday in April just a few weeks after I separated from my second wife. It was too early in the year for New York to empty on weekends: is it possible a million people were in the park that day? Beneath the watery April sun, an occasional police car or jeep cruised slowly, watchfully, among the bright shoals of cyclists who floated, flushed, moist, openmouthed, above wantonly pumping legs, curiously disowned, jumping knees, and the transparent whir of wheels. While in the glens and glades and on the paths visible from the roadways a whole other crowd moved, and everywhere there was the delicate dull gleam of skin, among the bicyclists and pedestrians, in the yellow-green shrubberies, and on the black paths and roads: chests and shoulders made block forms among the slyer flickers of necks and legs. The hint of nudity enlivened this catalogue of races, life styles, hair lengths, adolescents in indescribable costumes, this example of urban swarm—cynical, carnal, mixed in degree and grade, and tautly, warily festive. Perhaps, as forty years before, as in the twenties, our national life was a party; money lit up faces and shining legs and made them Japanese lanterns for the celebration of our prosperity. God bless Technology! The clannishness, the new solicitudes, the fragile and tentative anxiety for brotherhood, reminded me of a high-school dance. So much was in abeyance, the future pivoting uncertainly in front of us, the past askew or lost, and in the present ambiguously happy disorder any emotion might emerge, any presumption occur.

  “When you use a word like that—” Ett said. I had used not “presumption” but another word, some word like “quaint” or “picturesque.” Ett is a molecular geneticist, the third-best in the country—“the best American-born one,” he has said to me with an earnestness that softened the boast and made more patent the disappointment; we were, as I said, bicycling. “When you use a word like that,” Ett asked, “is that camp?”

  “You feel I can’t use that word normally? That the word no longer truly refers to anything real?”

  “Why?” persisted Ett. “Why do you use words like that?”

  His wife, Inez, bicycling on his right, Inez who is half Spanish, half Danish (Ett is American-Swedish by descent and marvelously gloomy behind his fair, high coloring), Inez who has large breasts, is short, almost dumpy, who is unremittingly devoted to Ett, who blankets his back and sides with warmth while he stares out into the cold molecular reaches of his discipline—Inez said, “Leo feels old.”

  She was already puffing a bit from the unaccustomed exercise, although we had been bicycling only a short time; she had pinkened; she pedaled industriously, but she was trailing slightly behind. Ett did not slow to match his speed to hers—she was his handmaiden—and my mind, which is often somewhat out of control and never more than at a time like a divorce, watching her legs pump dutifully, thought, Rotary votary.

  “Yes. Leo feels old,” I said, and speeded up slightly; we were ascending a slight grade not far from the Seventy-second Street crossing, heading north, I believe. I set the pace a little faster because it is my nature to instruct, and at this headier speed they might soon see that time had made us cousins; they, too, ought to feel old.

  Ett and I are friends of such very long standing. One keeps one’s pike leveled when one is with him and Inez. Ett is a science-fiction, universal-rule-desiring sort, he is both New Left and New Victorian—worthy, self-approving, blind to his past, quick to use the condemnation “outmoded,” anxious to substitute for any pragmatics his adored science, science being a mother whose breast teems, a father whose brain will bring us a corrected politics, tranquil psyches, and teach us useful and accurate methods for apprehending reality and fending off death: Ett’s science has the attributes of Rosicrucianism. Inez is of the genus of wives who blindly uphold a husband’s inanity. I say inanity with affection.

  We met at Harvard, Ett and I, he a prodigy of fifteen, I a less prodigious prodigy of sixteen; we were drawn to each other with an almost audible thud, rosy-cheeked freshmen, dazzlingly new-brained and younger than everyone. But I had been adopted by half a dozen boys in my hall as a mascot, whereas by November, when Ett and I finally began to speak—I had noticed him often enough before, he was so short, so blond, so rigid-looking, so young, and so clean—he still knew no one by first name except his two roommates, both of whom he held in contempt, and a boy from Minnesota he had gone to school with and did not much care for, either. Which is to say my loneliness was transcendental—I wanted to be an effectual male, not a mascot— and his was real. Our first conversations were at passionate cross-purposes, Ett complaining in a dry, logical tone of Harvard’s backwardness, of the uselessness of most of the studies, of the aged futility of the ideas the professors so proudly, ironically, in clumsy Massachusetts Anglophilia, offered, while I spoke of certain emptinesses that oppressed me, a murderous atmosphere of heartless ambition. I wanted no more splendors of an ambitious kind, no more heroes, but only open and active hearts, while Ett wanted to be a superhero, the superest hero of all—he was
a Scandinavian with Persian tastes, a boy who spoke of relativity with absolute force—and when I realized this, for I listened to him actually once the initial nervous glare of making friends died down, it was too late for me to disregard him. He was my friend; the train was in motion.

  I have a rather terrible drive toward teamwork, which fits into my notion of friendship, and for a while that year I was Ett’s team and followers: he was coach, father figure, brother figure, Beau Ideal, and perhaps even Lady of the Lake to me. I went so far as to take chemistry to be near him, and rather self-consciously, like wearing a brother’s ruffled shirt, I took to the notion of an Elite; I, too, saw Harvard as a reactionary bastion of daydreams, dead at the core. But not much in my nature runs entirely through me—indeed, my life can largely be defined as pauses and rebellions: no state endures. Ett and I, it appeared, were ranked at the top of our class, and Ett insisted we were rivals; he disbelieved me when I said he deserved to be top man, that I was merely facile, and that I wanted him to be top man. He disbelieved me! He thought me ambitious! I had been seeing a maternal and overweight Radcliffe girl, but at that time I shifted to a thin girl from Yonkers, who had what seemed an incurable fever blister: we kissed around it, as around an externalized conscience. She egged me on against Ett, saying with angry Freshman Percipience that I was under his influence. Under her influence I belabored Ett with sarcastic revelations: he was maladjusted; in any Elite I would be a more useful member than he because I at least would be able to get along with the other members. “Here comes Lionel Coldheart,” I would say when he entered the room; it was the usual masculine antagonism, but with that faint early-adolescent sob in it that fills so much of our fiction, for I had been cast out of Utopia and was bitter at my exile.

  He believed my sarcasm, his sense of assurance began to crack, and he took to reading treatises on human psychology, especially when my grades began to inch ahead of his, which they did because I spoke to everyone, and “everyone” supplied bits of such scholastic lore as which professors liked foreign-language quotes in papers and which ones thought them precious. Also, I listened to the professors, and Ett did not. I admired his integrity, his thoughts were his own; I was intellectually corrupt, and quite thoroughly at the head of the class. Ett could no longer treat me as the first of his disciples, and he had no equipment for dealing with an equal; his solution was to look up to me briefly, then down at me, and to treat me—with averted eyes—like a mascot. It was then that I discarded any predilection I had for a notion of an Elite.

  We settled into a pattern that has endured with parenthetical irruptions of simple and intense affection until the present day, a pattern in which—aha—many threads are woven. He will say, “Fiction is outmoded. I only read fact. When I read novels, I skip and read only the sexy parts.”

  “Ah,” I reply, “I never do math at all.… You know, sex is to a modern-day novelist what social ethics were to Dickens. Sex is what we study, it is the area of our competence.…” I keep on until Ett cannot miss the point, which is my claiming a sexual experience and expertise greater than his. Inez says I am good for him, I wake him up. A blow launched by a comparative realist, of my sort, strikes him like a kick in the back of the knee; he looks staggered—by the new shape reality takes for him, for all realities are shaped, and a new thought, a new jog in the structure of the life of a man he knows, of the life that man might be living, shakes him.

  He does the same for me with such scientific pronouncements as “It is proved that life is an electrochemical accident.” He crushes and instructs me, and I require it. In me still, the peculiar adoration of Ett that began nearly thirty years ago continues with adolescent passion, in some floating park out of time, free of sequence; it is as fierce as sunlight, as self-love. Ett is a somebody. It is partly a joke: his father burned with ambition in the Minneapolis grain business, and said to Ett as he tossed a softball at him in the twilight, “You can be for science what Charles A. Lindbergh was for airplanes.” His father managed to embody himself in Ett like a wasp laying an egg in a spider, or a sculptor working in transient bronze, or someone mailing a thought to coming time; there are ghosts in Ett, and they enlarge him somehow. He may save us all. Or a few of us. But I like the feeling I have when I part from him; some of the dust rubs off on me, that traveler’s dust he has picked up while edging in his crablike—and crabbed—way through adult years toward a perhaps ill-conceived but still stirring hope (no more defective births if his experiments work out). I do not feel lessened by sharing his sensibility: he has been married only once and been faithful. When he works, he leaves behind this world’s fairer aspects—fields, faces, seductions—descends into a dark where he forces his intelligence to pinch ever inward, where he is ever more and more cramped and alone as he steals toward a microthought no one has come upon before. It is not what I do at all.

  I PEDALED harder; he caught up, kept up; Inez slipped a bit more behind. Ett and I are fitness-minded; Inez is, too, but chiefly in her mind. I turned and said over my shoulder, “Inez, I think your husband and I are having a race. We’ll wait for you farther on.”

  As I turned, I briefly saw beside the road a not entirely familiar girl, her face set inside coarse-textured wavy brown-blond hair.

  Ett said, “We aren’t racing.” His honesty has areas of clouded interference.

  “I was joking,” I said, for no reason that was yet clear to me, and settled back and pedaled alongside him; we were on an upward slope, and when he slowed I did not, but maintained my speed and pulled somewhat ahead, whereupon he kept up. I increased my speed modestly; he kept up. He muttered, “You’ve stopped doing isometrics.”

  I am moved by fashions in exercises as in everything, and while I was in my isometric phase my wind and stamina were far less than Ett’s; however, I had in the meantime switched to aerobics, and my lungs and heart were correspondingly mightier. Ett had grown used to a noticeable superiority as a bicyclist—which is why, to cheer me during my divorce, he had suggested we go bicycling.

  He is short, very muscular still; once, in a dream, he appeared to me as a general and as a dessert, a sweet Napoleon. He strengthened his leg thrust, moved faster, pulled ahead; I pulled even and passed him toward the crest of the hill, saying—untruthfully—“I’m out of breath—whew!” and sailed on downhill. He passed me halfway down; he was not coasting, he was secretly pedaling: I caught him out of the corner of my eye.

  It has always been true between us that his long-term determination—one marriage!—is greater than mine, while for anything short-term my will and fruitfulness in tactics can beat him; so it was best to avoid racing openly—and he had been the one to deny we were racing—until we were both tired and then to set a short sprint. I am at my best when I am in extremis, which my second wife once remarked was very tiring for everyone and gave one an entirely new attitude toward the question of whether excellence was worth bothering with or not.

  I am not competently competitive; like most verbal men, who become judges, after all, or newspaper editors, or politicians of a certain type, I keep avoiding argument by pleading, “But it is obvious”—that is, past argument. I put everything past argument if I can. So a race is a bit difficult for me. My mind wanders. To help myself concentrate, I thought of myself bicycling to win the hand of Inez. It was a mental game. I increased our average speed but frequently said, “God, let’s slow down! I don’t want to have a coronary.”

  Our minds interflow, his and mine; we wear each other’s thoughts.

  I began to practice yoga breathing, something I had learned during the winter. Near Harlem—or rather as one turns to leave Harlem behind—the road becomes very steep, with a symbolic aptness. It was there that I said, “I’ll race you to the boat lagoon.”

  The speed with which I pumped up the long hill, the way my wind lasted, the ferocity with which I kept on without looking back, attest, I think, to my jealousy that Ett was not getting a divorce. And to my wish that he love me, since he, like most of
us, loves best someone he can look up to. His mind is on the stars. In beating Ett, I practically insured a weekly or even twice-weekly dinner invitation. I could hear him—his breathing is distinctive—a very short distance behind me. I saw again, somewhere on my left now, that slightly familiar girl—her face.

  I BEAT Ett by a great many yards, slowing down in the end in fear that I had overdone it. I halted on the concrete bridge. The trees around me were in new leaf, shyly pointillist, but I hardly noticed. On the boating lagoon, a carefully landscaped spoon of water partly ringed with picturesque and miniature cliffs, moved an enormous regatta: a da Vinci enclosed a Guardi, multitudes of prows and figures on gray, dancing water, a democracy’s shabby mock-festival, crowded, sordid, and beautiful.

  I briefly glanced at, largely ignored the extraordinary scene.

  Will someone one day soon build a model of a human personality—soul, heart, spirit, mind, shifts, magnetic eccentricities, perverse connections? As they build models of molecules? Would such a model show how a victory led to the adoption of certain traits possessed by the defeated, a spiritual cannibalism? To cannibalize—can you imagine such a word? “I’m going to cannibalize two of my essays on Rilke and do a monograph,” Malcolm Glick said to me the other day. Never mind.

  Ett met Inez during an International Science Congress of some kind, in Copenhagen, and when he returned to New York he came to my lair (I was an assistant professor then) and said, “I have met someone.”

  I was newly divorced—the first divorce. It pains me now to remember suddenly how young I was. My hands, my God, my hands—I was a great one for clasping my hands in front of me on my desk in those days—my hands were not thin. How stupid I was; how cakey, sugary, ill-nourishing, and doomed that last rim of youth is. He said, “I think I’ve found the right girl, Leo,” and there was a glimmer of cakey satisfaction in his handsome, Viking’s face. I had, of course, just been parted from a wrong girl. Ett said pseudoscientifically of his find, “She seems sensible.” My first wife had not been sensible. I said, “You poor ass,” and began to question him, mimicking a cold-minded dean: who were the girl’s people, what was her schooling, her attitude toward religion, was she giddy, sexually up-to-date, had he committed himself to her?