Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  He said, “It’s half settled. She is willing to put my career first. She’s very intelligent.”

  “I assume she’s good-looking.”

  “She has a fantastic body,” he said with a self-satisfaction that made me think, not for the first time, he was incapable of love. “She does?”

  “Fantastic whim-whams,” he said. “Her legs are great.”

  Then at some point his self-satisfaction ebbed; he sat there, in my absurdly tiny office, a squat Viking, and said with half accusation, half envy, “I don’t know if you‘ll think she’s so great-looking.”

  “If she’s a good wife to you, I will,” I said, staunchly sentimental.

  He said, “You know, Leo, the wonderful thing about her is that she’s not just passionate, she’s also got good sense.”

  I did not believe him, but I envied him his finding such a girl just in case and his having me for a friend; I had only him.

  He said, “You’ve always been flighty about women.” I thought, Ah, he and I are father figures for each other.

  When we flew to Copenhagen—I was to be best man, of course—and I met Inez, I saw a girl, twenty-two, with a heavy coil of dark hair and blue eyes, slender legs, and a pigeony breast; she seemed a bit dowdy, quite proper. Her father was a government official concerned with teaching science or some such thing. But there was in her an astonishing sexuality. At once monomaniacal and pedestrian, she was and is a bureaucrat’s Carmen.

  She has some good sense, much good nature, and her attachments are profound. Ett, neuroses and all, was always quite sturdy, but he has not been able to stand up to Inez’s monomaniacal assaults. Her gaieties can be as earnest and bruising as muggings. Ett has moments of sturdy jollity, but he prefers a smiling, understated gloom. Within two years Inez had reawakened in him his self-doubts. She was a fanatic mother; after their first child appeared, Ett came to see me and said in a defensive, hearty tone, “I’m jealous of my child. I’m going to see an analyst.”

  I was about to marry the second time, and often felt engulfed in music. I said, “Ett, look at this functionally: you have the aphrodisiac torments of Proustian jealousy without having your wife play around with another man.”

  But Inez wanted him to see an analyst. One looks on and wonders about the interplay of judgments, wishes, vengeances; youth falls away, the thumbnails grow ridged, that moral scrofula the young hate so in their elders sets in, that semipermanent, delicately power-mad and cool ambiguity. Age! Age! The body ceases to be an ally when one is twenty-eight or so; the next phase runs sourly, corruptly, on toward thirty-five, when idealism often returns, that or a nervous breakdown, and fates begin to be clearly marked. Ett became well known, his analyst became little more than a sycophant, Ett’s self-approval soared eaglelike and looked down on all the kingdoms of the earth save that of the two molecular geneticists who were better m.g.’s than he. And when he was not grandiloquent Ett was querulous—his insomnia, his diets, his devious colleagues made him peevish, as if he had a vision of himself as a living statue of an eminent and gentle and useful man who was constantly being yanked into ungainly poses, who was de-pedestaled by the envy of his co-workers and the frailty of his physical being.

  But he climbed back up on the pedestal again and again and did good work. It is not easy to admire him: he is absentminded and selfish, and he approves of his own selfishness, perhaps rightly; he and his analyst have decided Inez is an emotional masochist—God!—but one can observe the war in him between the analyzed monster and the gentle Ett, for he is afraid, whenever he is roused from his self-absorption, that he might be treating Inez badly. He cares for her and does not want her hurt or too badly mauled by time and himself.

  She is not much wiser than he. She, too, has been analyzed; if anything, she is more monomaniacal than ever: “I must develop a sense of humor,” she will say, frowning. “I am humorless on both sides, Spanish and Danish.” She laughs self-deprecatingly, somewhat tragically, although whether more in the Norse or in the Iberian mode I cannot say.

  Like paint on a wall, they grow cracked and yellow, those two, but they adhere. Perhaps they are weak and too frightened to change, or lazy; they are certainly not well equipped for adventures; but perhaps also they are good people, and sound in some mysterious way: they have stuck not just to the marriage but to each other. They become elegiac about the reasons they don’t get along. Inez will say proudly, “We have very serious problems, Ett and I.” Ett, who is practicing to be a Grand Old Man and is beginning to experiment with a folk manner, will say, “Logic doesn’t suit women, and a good thing, too. If they were logical, why would they settle for being wives to a man like me?”

  III

  THE FACE I have glimpsed in the park, the girl I have not yet spoken to, has said to me since that day, “Your friend Ett is awful—his attitude toward his wife. He has deformed emotions.” (She has also said, “You’re as much married to Inez as Ett is.”)

  I said, “I enjoy insights. What do you mean, Ett has deformed emotions?”

  “Oh, if you can’t see it!” she said despairingly. “Why do you like him?”—also despairingly.

  “Why shouldn’t I like him?”

  “He’s not the sort of man a man like you should have as a friend!”

  “What kind of friends do you think I should have?”

  “Other men like you, sensitive and with it and sexy.…” She did not look at me as she spoke.

  She imagines my kindness exists; she sought it in someone older—an experienced kindness, which is perhaps only the reflected safety of a bargain with someone who cannot easily afford to hurt her.

  I had made it a rule never to touch a student, and when I heard of a colleague who had no such rule, I thought how fitting it would be for him to be delivered to the wrath and jealousy of the outraged parents. I don’t blame the young. It is impossible for them to check their appetites and still be young; they have their youth to offer, and they will offer it. Sometimes there is love; we’ll pass that by. But when a girl drifts up to a professor, looks at him with wide brown eyes, he must not respond as a man; he holds the title of professor, not of a man. But why be cruel and withhold from the girl the happiness she craves? Because she does not know what she is doing. It is not kind or sensible to imprison anyone in the consequences of a partial lust. But she will learn so much. Too much. Why cannot we be happy animals? Because that is not how happiness works—quite.

  If a girl has been failed by her father and needs to find that strength in someone, or if she was so happy she wants to repeat that happiness, why be puritan?

  Why, indeed?

  The father of the glimpsed face, Mr. Macardling, works for Continental Electric, is an associate vice-president, is a water-worn brook pebble of a man, hard, interchangeable with others of his type, and with tints especially clear when he is in the water that shaped him. He said to me a number of times, “It’s a simple matter.” My affair with his daughter.

  I replied, “Yes. Of course. But it feels complex.”

  “Would you say you were an indecisive man?”

  “I will say almost anything, I fear.”

  “I don’t disapprove,” he said. Of the affair.

  “I do.”

  “Ha-ha,” he said, and grasped my arm. “I like you, Leo.”

  “I find you acceptable,” I reply cautiously.

  “Tell me, Leo, are you pretty much what a New York intellectual is?”

  “Good God, no!”

  “I didn’t think so. What impresses me is your fantastic honesty.”

  “Well, I’m not a businessman,” I say, and pat his arm. He starts to tighten up. “I am under fewer pressures,” I continue. He begins to smile. I smile, too, and say, “I have different tricks up my sleeve.” We both laugh. Then he looks at me with a mock—is it a mock?—scowl.

  I do not know where we stand, he and I.

  He is orderly, and children admire order, and he is cheerful, and children like smiling fathers; he is
open and not weak and he must always be off to business. If he were my father, I would admire him— indeed love him distractedly—I would re-create him in myself or in someone who has a good deal of time and patience or who is indebted to me, and then when I had him where I could hold his attention and devour his time I would pity him and soothe him, quarrel with him at leisure, in pain or with raw delight, I would rebel, forsake him, return to him.… Jeanie Macardling finds no young man so elusive, so orderly, so capable of stirring her imagination as her father. Damn her father!

  I am a great lover. Of respectability. I never saw respectability as a lie or a hard bargain—harder than any other—or a trap: it can be misused, but what can’t? What isn’t? In return for taking heed of appearances, one is rewarded—that’s what respectability means—and, of course, appearances can’t quite be kept up without some reality, therefore sacrifices. When I was a child in the Midwest, there were little centers of sin every so many hundred miles, and men who could not endure respectability much longer went on business trips to Hot Springs or Cairo (Illinois) or Chicago. Respectability never omitted sin but put it in a place—and after all, why not? The worst scandals were when grownups interfered sexually with the young.

  After that Sunday in the park, often in my enormous lecture course when I stood at the podium and looked out at the rows of pale, unformed faces and saw Jeanie’s, I wondered if she was sturdy or neurotic, adept at affection and creating a warm atmosphere, if she was honest or giddy or hollow. It was not at first with anything more than curiosity that I searched out her face, to see if she was indeed in my course—not in simple paranoia but as reflection of something which had been vague and duplicitous in her manner that Sunday, or it could be simply that I was pleased to have had any human contact with one of that vast number of the swarming young.

  There is something intoxicating in lecturing and something corrupting as well, something I spoke of in a speech to the National Conference of English Instructors, a sort of damning mythicization of the self, an overwhelming sense of one’s comparative truth opposed to their comparative error, them, sitting out there, the unenlightened, Babbitts, Antichrists, blindhearts.

  Sometimes it is merely a sense of one’s own beauty, one’s voice pouring out in almost endless profusion words of penetration, images, points, arguments. My second wife accused me of being “a vocal narcissist.” I use my voice. I argued with her once, “Only three things hold people’s attention: money, gaining or enjoying superiority over others, and sex.” So I—oh, what a realist I am—build every lecture about one of those three: the money that might go with clear thought, the superiority that so delicately and firmly accompanies knowledge, and sex. I take sex where I find it; sometimes I supply it by a generic flirtation with the entire class—it is a scholarly device.

  I never dwelled on her face; I merely wondered what I missed in not knowing her; I wondered if I would become as firm as Ett if I were in the care of a woman of the sort he liked. A good woman to steady me.

  Now blur the faces in the lecture hall, whirl them around like a montage turning into wheels, the wheels of a plane; and there I am, in Paris, the summer after that term, delving into documents in the Bibliothèque Nationale, wandering in the Luxembourg to clear my head or to read. There had been an affair that spring, after the day in the park, with a straight-backed philosopher lady whose stinking self-assurance and righteousness had frozen my timid lust—no, not my lust, my heart. One had to cheat one’s thoughts past her, bootleg notions of this or that. She was a relativist and could have easily forgiven infidelity, but never unclear thought. Infidelity is not my problem. It’s belonging to people and yet wanting to think my own thoughts. As everyone knows, an affair or a marriage leaves bruises all over one’s psyche and one’s fantasies, and one wants to be left alone. A man of open and stupid heart, I elevated my condition into a moral style, I was chaste and I was happy, and I credited my happiness to my chastity: one must be moral or suffer. But one day, doused in French prose, pinched and stung by the French sun and by the cries of serious-eyed and somehow gently, interiorly stiffened French children at play—cries rendered haunting by the careful pessimism that seemed to be lodged in the intelligent rigidity of their bones—I plunged into another mood. It was toward three o’clock. Even though I was a tourist, and a tourist is a simpler man than a man at home, I did not at first see any further into my mood than that it was a restlessness—as if French prosody had affected me with a muscular itch. Then at three-thirty the sun clouded over; Paris became misty, became clearly the forest city it is, dominated by Druidical rites of passage (the buildings are like forest rows in stone, the air is both warm and cool with mortality and damp and with faint gradations of temperature that stir the nerve endings in the skin), and I decided I was lustful in a sense. I do not know about other men, but in me a mood is simply a climate in the skull, a quality of light, something quite real but unnamed. Sensibility is not only perceiving; it is attaching names. It was tentatively that I put the label on my mood, saying “tourist’s lust” as I walked up the long allée toward Montparnasse. It was with the first appearance of an argument—“Christianity seems so out of place in Paris,” I began—that I realized how powerful a cramp had attacked me; other men may move more swiftly and surely among their instincts.

  One’s appetites nip at one’s heels, distract one’s senses, until one sets them on the hunt; distracted, resistant, I sat at the Coupole and drank Pernod; slowly the moral level at which I thought it necessary to live sank, until by six I had rearranged my thoughts to fit my loneliness and my body heat. It was shortly after six when in a beret sort of thing and a shiny vinyl, almost stylish raincoat, with coarse-textured hair slightly lifted by the moisture of the evening, Jeanie appeared, obviously by herself, and said with a funny, nervous, broken-breathed laugh, “You’re Professor Hofstedt. You probably don’t remember me. I was in your English Prose and Poetry 804B last year.”

  Before Paris and after the day in the park, one of the teaching fellows brought me among the sample papers from his group a paper written by Jeanie; she had written, “The goal of poetry is to excite and teach. Sometimes it teaches by being shocking.” She used two quotations:

  Poetry marries the mind to voluptuousness and seduces the senses to sense.

  Poetry is about as much “a criticism of life” as a red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.

  In Paris, when I suggested if she was not busy or did not have to rush off and meet her parents or friends or some young man, I remembered her paper and that I had thought, reading it, she was a girl of no extraordinary intelligence but of a passionate disposition.

  THE AWARENESS quickens: the wallpaper in my room, and after kissing her the sudden conviction that I had ought to love this girl or not touch her because her soul was so naked, her kisses so alive, unconcealed, unself-protective, but not unskilled; then the conviction becomes a clouded French sensuousness, a preliminary regret for the loss to come of her innocence—not her virginity; innocence—and with that loss a loss of what in her held me to this line of action so contrary to my customary rules. I spoke in a sex-deepened voice as I undressed her: “You understand, I never go to bed with my students.” She sighed, she trembled, she gazed wide-eyed. “You must never take another course of mine,” I said. In sensual moments even good humor blends indistinguishably into fatuity. What is wise is silence: the nerves will speak. I was immensely grateful to her for being so susceptible to me. I felt I would love her very shortly: she had only to be in essence what she was in appearance—fresh, young, simple, good—and I would love her warmly. Yes. Indeed.

  The important thing soon came to be not to let her talk too much before lovemaking or I sometimes became unexcited; she caught on and was silent while I rambled on, winning her. Afterward was her time to talk: “I hate it in Glencoe, you really see the war between the sexes in a suburb.… Everyone works at being insensitive; I’d help Momma in the kitchen and there’d be a package of biscuit mix with so
me terrible picture on the front and I’d say, ‘Oh, how ugly,’ and Momma would say, ‘Oh, Jeanie.’ Or she’d say, ‘I don’t pay attention to those things,’ but I knew it was me she didn’t want to pay attention to…”

  Sometimes in the woods, in the sunlight, at Fontainebleau or in the Bois de Boulogne, a sweetness would seize her, a gentle lovingness that would terminate in hideous solicitude: “The future must be horrible for you to look into, isn’t it? Maybe I can help you against the shadows.” She meant because I was old. And she said things like “I’m good for you, I make you feel young,” when I laughed at something—say, two dogs running in a circle, chasing each other, bodies, necks, legs stretched like held notes in Mozart: I am much amused by animal exuberance.

  At times she would be bored; she would wait while I worked and come in suddenly to the room where I was writing and say, “I’m going out.” “To do what?” “I don’t know. Something.” And she could not meet my gaze. Tell me what to do, tell me something interesting to do.

  When I was young, I saw people as sheer appetites, fish leaping for flies, smooth, beautiful, and hungry. But I was perhaps appetiteful myself then. I’m older now and I see people as complex things, held in and mysterious, streaked with virtues and ridiculous with vices; I see them perched on time, each on a breaking branch the buds of which are sticky, new always, ready to unfold into green moments.

  Doodling one day, I wrote, “the time and energy it takes to instruct her …”

  I did not want to take her back to New York with me or explain her to my friends or be seen with her: Hofstedes child, Hofstedt’s embodied lust, all my secrets revealed in her reasonable sweet ordinariness.