by Edmund White
And then my mother would turn her hardworking, always shifting, tumbling scrutiny on me. She and I enjoyed a perfect communication, or so she said. I was a man far more mature than the riffraff she was dating. I was beautifully sensitive to the slightest shift in her moods. If I weren’t her son, I’d be her best friend – or she’d marry me.
And yet (the wheels whirred faster and faster) without a man to emulate I was in danger of developing abnormally. I mustn’t be a mama’s boy, I mustn’t become effeminate. I mustn’t lean on her too much. That was the real reason she was so eager to remarry, to provide me with a suitable male role model. Children of broken homes were known to grow up wounded, their sexuality damaged. “Are you developing normally?” she asked when I was ten.
I told her something that astounded her, though I thought it would please her: “I don’t want to go through puberty.” I cited my sister. “She’s already acting like a nut. I see myself standing on a hill above a lonesome valley I’ll never be able to cross. I’ll probably never be this calm again.”
My sister, my mother and I – three unhappy people, and yet my mother’s ceaseless optimism didn’t even grant us the dignity of suffering. “Kids,” she said, driving us away from school on a weekday, “we’re going on vacation. Isn’t that wonderful! We’re off to Florida! Isn’t that exciting?” In every way we had more fun than other people and were superior to them. At Christmastime Mother would count up her cards as though they were a precise numerical rendering of her worth; if someone neglected to send her a card, she’d worry about it, question herself, seem wounded – and then she’d dismiss the offender from her thoughts, even her life (“He wasn’t much of a friend. I don’t know why I hang around such crummy people”).
My sister and I have been left alone in the hotel room all day. Mother is off on a date after work. We’ve been instructed to take our meals in the dining room downstairs (“I’ll be home when I’m home – don’t worry about me”). I’m ten, my sister is fourteen. She’s interested in being a nurse. She has “sterilized” Mom’s scissors and tweezers under hot tap water. Out of her allowance she’s bought some gauze in a long roll. She convinces me to lie down and play sick. “You poor guy,” she says in a sweet, unfamiliar voice, “just look at this burn!” She is the consoling, sympathetic nurse.
“Yeah, it really hurts. You see, I was boiling some water—”
“Sh-h-h!” she urges me. In real life she’s always shutting me up; in the fiction of the hospital she’s silencing me in the interest of my recovery. “You’ll feel much better once I change your dressing. Please be quiet. I won’t hurt you.”
We’re both bored. It’s six on a December night and the sky outside the filmy hotel curtains (they smell of coal smoke) has long been dark. The phone hasn’t rung all day – none of us is popular, that’s evident. Not my sister, not me, not Mom. “Ouch!” I whine. “That bandage is too tight!”
“It’s not!”
“It is so.”
“It’s not.”
“I’m telling you it is so.”
“Well, just play with yourself,” my sister says. “I don’t want to play with you. You wanna know why? Do you? Wanna know why?”
I’m sitting up in bed now, uneasy, wishing I hadn’t complained about the bandage.
“I’ll tell you why: you smell bad. You do.” My sister sticks her face right into mine. One of her barrettes has come loose without her noticing, and suddenly an unexpectedly adult sweep of hair frames her face and caresses her shoulder. She’s so close that some of her hair grazes my cheek.
“I do not,” I mumble uncertainly. Perhaps I do smell bad. But where is the bad smell coming from? My mouth? My bottom? My feet? I long to creep into the bathroom, to cup a hand over my mouth and nose and test my breath for foulness, then to examine my underwear for skid marks. Or is the bad smell inside me, the terrible decaying Camembert of my heart?
“You do. You smell bad and I hate you. Wherever you go you smell bad, you stink up the place, how do you think I like having people think you’re my brother? And look at your big nostrils. And you’re such a big sissy, you can’t even throw a baseball, you throw like a girl, you can’t even walk right, you’re a gimp. You are. I’m not kidding.”
Now it all seems too true. I’m an embarrassment – to my mother, my sister, most of all to myself. I haven’t a right to take up the space I occupy. I poison every room I enter.
“Look at your nails,” my sister says, grabbing my hand and holding it under my nose for inspection. “You’ve got black gook under there. You’re icky. You really are. It’s probably poop. Do you play with your poop. You play with your poop, you play with your poop, you play with your poop . . .”
I can’t get her to shut up or to release my hand. Now she’s grabbed a pillow and stuffed it in my face. “Whatsa matter, can’t you take it, can’t you take it, play with your poop,” she’s chanting. I turn my head to breathe but she’s right there, applying the pillow to my face in this new position. Her terrible words continue, though the pillow muffles the sound. She’s planted a knee in my chest to hold me down.
Terrified of suffocating, I push her off in a frantic burst of energy. I grab the nail scissors and stab her in the hand. Blood leaps out. I drop the scissors; they fall to the floor. I’m aghast, an Indian hopping around on one foot with horror, hooting a little war hoot of anguish: “Oh! Oh! Oh!” But she is transformed into a scientist, a doctor. She watches the blood pulse, pool in her palm, finally coagulate. “Neat,” she whispers with awe.
By the time our mother returns, I’m exhausted by my tears of repentance. I’ve been sobbing on the bed, sobbing and sobbing with guilt and fear of punishment. When I hear the door click, I look up. “It was an accident!” I shout. “I hurt her, but it was an accident.”
“Oh no, what now! What’s going on here?” Mother shouts, throwing her packages on the foot of the bed. My sister alone seems calm. She has bandaged her hand and pinned back her hair and donned a fresh nightgown. She’s sitting peacefully under a lamp, reading. She’s proud of her wound; it’s made her important.
“My baby!” my mother shouts, rushing to my sister’s side.
The wound is unbound and revealed. I can tell my mother is confused, since ordinarily I’m the one who’s tormented by my sister. I’m ordinarily the sweet soul, too good for this world, too kind for my own good, too gentle, a little lamb. To discover the wolf cub in lamb’s skin doesn’t suit my mother’s preconceptions, the story of our lives she’s telling herself. She sits on the edge of the bed, magisterial, coldly rational, suffering disappointment but resolved to appear fair. “Start at the beginning. Tell me everything that happened.”
My sister and I compete, we try to outshout each other (“You did, I did not, Yes, you did”). Mother opens a bottle of bourbon and calls room service, ordering ice and seltzer water.
At last our anger and my fear and my sister’s spite are spent. We subside into silence. It’s my turn to sleep on the floor; tonight my sister and mother will have the twin beds. Defeated, silent, embarrassed, all three of us take turns in the bathroom. Mother is sad. “If only you kids could behave. Just one night. Is it too much to ask? Why do you hate each other so much? Do you hate yourselves? Do you miss your daddy? I miss him. I don’t see how a fine man like him could have left me for that cheap – that common, that cheap woman.”
As the bottle slowly empties, its brown liquid, like kerosene fueling a lamp, radiates, in words and more words, the intense heat of despair.
The next morning Mother has decided that we all deserve a treat to pick up our defeated spirits, something cultural, something uplifting. My sister complains about her hand and refuses to leave the room. “Well, if you’re going to be such a baby, then I’ll just take your brother. He has an open mind, an adventurous mind. He wants to learn.”
Together my mother and I drive downtown to a museum. On the way we dial in a classical music station. We try to guess the composer; she votes for Haydn,
I for Mozart. Neither of us is right – it’s early Beethoven. She asks me to read to her. “You know I learn best auditorily,” she mentions. The book she has brought along is something uplifting, inspirational. At every insight or poetically phrased generalization, my mother and I exclaim, “Isn’t that wonderful!” “I’d like to memorize that.” “Turn down the page, we’ll come back to that.” “Where does an author find such beautiful phrases?”
By the time we reach the museum we’re both glowing with wisdom and a lofty love of culture and humanity. I’ve forgotten that I smell bad. In fact, by now I smell wonderful, I’m a paschal lamb, but one rendered in cake and icing. We stand in front of a gloomy masterpiece of the Spanish Renaissance, a Christ whose wounds are shockingly deep and black and whose skin is livid; Christ seems less a god and more an addict tossed here, in the public morgue, after a fatal overdose, the puncture marks still open but no longer bleeding.
My mother trembles. “I don’t like depressing things,” she confides, and hurries us to the French Impressionists.
Outside, in the feeble winter sunlight, she grabs my hand and says, “I feel you’re such a perfect companion. When I’m with you I feel such total spiritual union that I sometimes forget I’m with you. I think we’re two halves of the same soul, don’t you?”
I look her deep in the eyes and tell her, “Yes. I’ve never felt so close to anyone.”
*
My calm was restored – but the calm was sepulchral. When a psychologist gave me the ink-blot test, I saw no people in the abstract shapes, only cemeteries, diamonds and ballrooms. I thought I was Jupiter or his disguised and only seemingly powerless incarnation. We lived one year in a suburb so new it was still being built in fields of red clay: a neat grid of streets named after songbirds was being dropped like a lattice of dough over a pie. Up and down Robin and Tanager and Bluebird I raced my bike; in a storm I pedaled so fast I hoped to catch up with the wind-driven rain. As I sped into the riddling wet warmth I shook my right hand according to a magical formula of my own. The universe, signaled by its master, groaned, revolved, released a flash of lightning. At last the imagination, like a mold on an orange, was covering the globe of my mind.
In the sand I built castles that took on a splendor only the sea could fathom. In the winter I re-created my royal residences and processions in the snow. The ruler was an empress – isolated and superb – and she wandered sleeplessly through miles of gray, dilapidated corridors. You see, something new with a mansard roof had been provided for her, but she felt herself drawn instead to the much older rooms that lay behind and beyond, the low-ceilinged rooms lit by icon candles and filled with smoke in which such terrible things had been done, in which history had been born or butchered. Half-numb with the cold, my fingers and toes burning, my nose running and eyes tearing, I hovered over my dingy kremlin for yet another half hour although the light was failing and a stray dog had just yellowed the coronation chapel. The tuppity-tuppity-tuppity of snow chains on passing car tires was the only sound in the evening air. Blooms of mild radiance suddenly opened within the glass globes of street-lamps. Headlights coming around the curve transected me, so crystalline had I become, a transparence dancing attendance on my imperial insomniac. She penetrated farther and farther into the unmapped mysteries of her palace; tuppity, tuppity; she pushed aside a leather curtain, entered the surprisingly small old throne room. There on a raised chair sat a skeleton, bracelets like manacles on its wrists and a gold hat eating its way into the tiny brown skull.
I was three people: the boy who smelled bad when I was with my sister; the boy who was wise and kind beyond his years when I was with my mother; but when I was alone not a boy at all but a principle of power, of absolute power.
FOUR
Like a blind man’s hands exploring a face, the memory lingers over an identifying or beloved feature but dismisses the rest as just a curve, a bump, an expanse. Only this feature – these lashes tickling the palm like a firefly or this breath pulsing hot on a knuckle or this vibrating Adam’s apple – only this feature seems lovable, sexy. But in writing one draws in the rest, the forgotten parts. One even composes one’s improvisations into a quite new face never glimpsed before, the likeness of an invention. Busoni once said he prized the most those empty passages composers make up to get from one “good part” to another. He said such workmanlike but minor transitions reveal more about a composer – the actual vernacular of his imagination – than the deliberately bravura moments. I say all this by way of hoping that the lies I’ve made up to get from one poor truth to another may mean something – may even mean something most particular to you, my eccentric, patient, scrupulous reader, willing to make so much of so little, more patient and more respectful of life, of a life, than the author you’re allowing for a moment to exist yet again.
When I was eleven I started going every day after school to a bookshop which was near the hotel where my mother and sister and I lived. I was fascinated by a woman who worked there. She moved and talked and even sang as though she were on a big stage and not in a very small store. I had seen an overweight and coquettish diva portray Carmen, and this woman seemed just as ready for the role – a peasant blouse worn off the shoulders and so low as to reveal the tops of large breasts; black hair drawn back into a ponytail that hopped almost of its own accord from her back up on to her shoulder, where it would perch like a pet as she nuzzled it with her cheek; a tiny waist sadistically cinched in by a stout black belt that laced up the front; ample hips in rolling motion under a long skirt that swirled in meticulously ironed pleats around her; and small flat feet with painted nails in sandals she remained true to even on snowy days. She bathed herself in a heavy, ruttish perfume that suggested neither a girl nor a matron but rather the overripe coquette, the sort of imposing beauty one could imagine a weak nineteenth-century king taking on as his mistress. This scent, as shameless as her half-naked body, billowed to conceal or shrank to disclose her other abiding odor, the smell of burning cigarettes. She could sit for hours on a high stool behind the counter with an open book and kick her pleated skirt with a dangling leg and stab out one cigarette after another into a small black ashtray from a restaurant in New York. On television I’d seen the host of a New York nightclub introduce the viewing public to celebrities; some of this glamour now attended the woman’s smoking. Each of her butts was lavishly smeared with blood-red lipstick; the growing mound of smoldering butts resembled an open grave, a ghastly trough of quartered torsos.
As she smoked she hummed throatily, then exhaled, coughed, paused; her eyebrows shot up, her trembling upper lip curled back on one side to reveal a big, red-flecked front tooth, her jaw dropped, her spine grew, her massive shoulders shook – and out came a high, high head tone. Then a snatch of nasal Gounod tossed off saucily, scales sung in muted vocalese ripped open here and there to full volume (dark sleeves slashed with crimson silk), then a bit of hey-nonny-nonny . . . . She turned a page in the novel and blindly reached for the smoking ashtray.
The low scabrous radiator that ran the length of the display window clanked and hissed. Someone came in as the bell rang out merrily. The cold air cut the angled, floating panels of blue smoke to ribbons. The woman put her book down and dashed lightly to greet the customer. Her body, which in repose appeared leviathan, in motion took on a balletic lightness. She cocked her head to one side and smiled. In the cold winter daylight I could see the thick layer of pancake makeup covering her face and neck but stopping short of her shoulders. The makeup was so evidently painted on and of such an unlikely hue that I gasped: this woman must be very old, I thought, to need such a disguise.
Everything about her intrigued me and I returned day after day just to be near her. I watched her so hard that I forgot I existed; she provided me with a new, better life. For hours I stood in front of one bookcase or another reading as the dirty snow melted off my boots and left black tracks on the wood floor. First I’d remove the cap with earflaps and stuff it in a pocket; ten minutes
later I’d unwind the maroon scarf. The coat came off and fell in a heap on the floor; then a sweater threw its twisted body on to the coat: clumsy wrestlers. The woman hummed and placed a small nickel-coated pot on the hot plate. The upper third of each windowpane was steamy; as a result, a passing man was striated into blurred and clear zones, his neck detailed down to the stubble but his face an embryo’s still streaming within the caul. Although it was only four the light was already dying; the world creaked from the cold and hugged itself hopelessly. Blue mounds of snow cast bluer shadows, but inside, everything was cheery and animated. The woman, whom the new customer called Marilyn, was laughing at his long, murmured story and her laugh was lovely.
By the third long afternoon I’d spent there I’d fallen into conversation with Marilyn. She made some comment or other on the book I’d been holding for half an hour as I kept stealing glances at her and eavesdropping on her snatches of song and remarks to customers. She said to me. “I noticed you’re intrigued by the set of Balzac. It’s a very good buy – the complete works for just forty dollars. That’s about a dollar a volume. You can’t beat that. And it’s a handsome edition, the titles in gold stamped on leather, which may or may not be real. Turn-of-the-century.”
I was not a fast reader. Months could go by before I’d finish a single book. The project of reading all of Balzac would obviously absorb the rest of my life. Was I prepared to make that commitment before I’d read even one of his novels?
“How interesting,” I said, as I’d been trained to say to everything, even the grossest absurdity. “Who was Balzac?”
She smiled and said, to spare my pride, “Ah, now there’s a good question. We’ll wait till Fred comes. He can tell us both.”
Fred, it turned out, owned the store. He was a tall man with ragged red hair streaked prematurely gray and acne-pitted skin and workclothes that weren’t quite clean and hundreds of scraps of odd knowledge he stored in his head just as he secreted (in the pockets of his faded blue shirt or his baggy chinos or the blue vest from one secondhand suit or the brown jacket from another) tiny slips of paper on which he jotted notes for his stories. The slips were of five different pastel shades; whether this variety followed a system or merely injected random color into celebrations so exalted they would otherwise have been uniformly gray I have no way of knowing – certainly at that age I had no way of judging him, only of gazing at him with awe.