Then, in a different tone, his clumsy jocular tone, Are you the sort of person one should be kind to? he asks. Somehow you don't give that impression.
Graice says, hurt, What do you mean?
I mean that there are some people, men and women, more often women, who give the impression of not requiring anything from anyone. Who seem impervious, detached. Like works of art that are simply there and don't re quire anyone to confirm their worth. He pauses. He's breathing audibly, flexing and clenching his fingers. Graice thinks swiftly, He dislikes women. When I first saw you the other day, after hearing so much about you from my mother, I wasn't prepared for your beauty, I must admit! You have a Botticelli face, the face of Venus or one of the faces of Spring, such strange dreamy detached faces set atop their bodies their incongruous fleshy bodies.
Graice's eyes are brimming with tears but she begins laughing suddenly, and her laughter is harsh. Is that how I seem to you! she says.
Alan Savage stares at her in astonishment. A glimmer of oncoming headlights illuminates her contorted face.
* * *
Next day, Graice Courtney is on her way out of the house at 7:55 A.
M.
when the telephone rings in the front parlor, and the call is for her: Alan Savage calling to apologize.
He's a poor judge of character, he says, his eye is mesmerized by surfaces.
Graice? Will you give me another chance?
How happy HOW HAPPY I AM. You didn't think, did you, that I COULD BE SO HA PP Y He touches her, they're lovers. If not completely.
His touch is caressing, lingering. something melancholy in It. In the midst of talk of other, more personal matters, he'll break off to tell her about one of the subjects of his professional research: Marcel Duchamp, for instance, who turned from art to chess and became so obsessed with chess he wanted to transcend mere winning in order to comprehend the phenomenon of chess.
Or he tells her of Man Ray, who, when his mistress Lee Miller left him, revenged himself upon her by breaking her up : that is, fragmenting visual re presentations of parts of her body and using them in his art.
Of course, says Alan Savage, seemingly with utter conviction, the artist's supreme re venge is his art.
Sometimes as if in frustration he grips her head in his hands, frames her face between his spread fingers, kisses her, shyly yet hungrily.
It's as if he is kissing a work of art, a work of exquisite beauty, his face so close to hers Graice Courtney can't see it, has no need of seeing it.
One evening Alan says, I'm very attracted to you, Graice. but you must know it. His downcast gaze, his faintly reddened face, throat.
missis Savage once chanced to re mark that her son had her sensitive skin: he's susceptible to hives, rashes, wheals that mysteriously flare up and as mysteriously subside.
It's as if this quick witted man has been presented with a puzzle, a riddle of sorts, and can't comprehend it. Thus there is an undercurrent of accusation in his voice, subtle yet to Graice Courtney's ear unmistakable as the melodic southern accent beneath the harsher nasal vowels of upstate New York.
Graice smiles; Graice says brightly, Well. I feel the same way about Alan Savage says, No, you don't.
What of your mother, what of your father, what was your life before we met? Like any lover, Alan Savage is curious about his beloved's life, the vision of the world from her perspective when it excluded him. He listens avidly, frowning, smiling, often stroking or grip ping her hand. As ifto say, to urge, yes, yes, and then. ?
He doesn't ask if she has been in love before, nor does he volunteer such information about himself.
When she speaks of the past, particularly of her childhood, Graice Courtney's eyes are often damp but her voice is poised and un hesitating as if what she tells him is true, or contiguous with truth; her primary concern, of course, is that the life of Graice Courtney as it is conveyed to the Savages is consistent, seamless. So Alan Savage is told that Persia Courtney died of cancer of the liver at a young age: thirty eight. That she'd faced death bravely as she'd faced so much in life, shielding her daughter from her own pain and apprehension.
That she'd chosen not to re marry after an early divorce because she wanted desperately to be financially and emotionally independent of any man. That she was a loving mother, a remarkable human being, and kind and patient and funny and uncomplaining, never asked favors of relatives worked at a succession of low paying jobs: hosiery clerk, typist, librarian's assistant Graice has an amusing anecdote or two about Persia's stint in the Hammond Public Library, her steadfast refusal to acknowledge the lovelorn glances sent her by a middle aged bachelor who came virtually every evening to the library to sit in the reference room pretending to re ad the Encyclopedia Britannica.
She liked to sing. By herself, doing household chores, in the shower, on the street. Humming, singing under her breath, Blue skies smiling at me, yes and she'd been a wonderful dancer too, before life caught up with her.
Alan Savage says, She sounds like a remarkable woman. Do you have a photograph of her?
Graice says, Not here in Syracuse.
As for Graice's father, still living, apparently in California now, this mysterious man whom Graice hasn't seen since she was five years old: mister Courtney was a complex, idealistic person who allowed the insoluble problems of the world to break his spirit, problems of evil, of selfishness, of brutality, of poverty, of injustice and hatred and blindness, a man whose very health was affected by his deep moral disapproval of mankind yes, and he reobjected the practice of law, and his involvement with politics, after being betrayed by associates in Hammond so Graice tells Alan Savage in a breathless rush of words, so that, though she says otherwise, it's clear that she loves and respects her long absent father very much.
She says, I don't take after him in any way, people tell me. I take after my mother.
She says, One thing I do re member about him: he loved horses. Maybe he still does. He had a true love of horses.
Really! says Alan Savage. Saddle horses, or race horses?
I guess I don't know. Just horses.
In her journal she has re corded a re mark of Man Ray's quoted to her by Alan Savage: The tricks of today become the truths of to morrow.
He's a re served, perhaps secretive young man, with the faintly arrogant air of the self effacing; the facts of his life must be indirectly assembled. In any case, Graice Courtney isn't the sort of person to ask direct questions except as a mode of conversation.
He'll be thirty two years old in January 1964.
He received his B. A. from Harvard, his Ph. D. , in art history, from Yale. He has traveled frequently in Europe, has stayed for extended periods in Rome and Paris, has received postdoctoral awards and fellowships, has been offered the aching positions at Yale, Boston University, Columbia, Cornell It's Cornell of course that the elder Savages are urging Alan to accept. Only an hour's drive south along 1
81 from Syracuse at the southernmost tip of Lake Cayuga.
For too many years, by his own account, he's been are stless.
That is, since the age of nineteen when, between his sophomore and junior years at Harvard, he traveled alone in Europe for the first time without his parents. And there, in Europe, discovering freedom.
And quite loving it, reveling in it. for a while.
Indeed, for more than a decade.
But: You do get homesick, for your own language especially.
And: You do come to feel sometimes that you're unraveling, like a loose thread that gets longer and longer.
And: You glance up one day and see that your contemporaries are all so much older.
So he has re turned to the United States and is surprised at how happy he is to be here. Of course he misses Paris, he misses his life there, certain of his friends. but he can always re turn for brief visits.
But never again to live there. He plans to live in America without in the deepest sense living in America but in a world of his own work and
imagination.
For Alan Savage's work is his true home. His life is his work.
So he explains to Graice Courtney: who is quite sincerely interested in the Modernist art in which Alan Savage has specialized; she's enraptured by the several original artworks Alan has acquired by Man Ray, de Chirico, Magritte and by his ambitious plans to collect more, much more, once he's settled into a permanent household.
Art is a world overlaid upon this world with the power to obliterate this world. thus its enormous attraction.
So Graice Courtney is coming to see. So Alan Savage explains.
And because his life is so much his work, his work so much his life, he isn't political: doesn't have time.
What is politics but the folly of the ephemeral, the pursuit of the futile?
Though of course he's perfectly well aware of contemporary
American issues, he's liberal minded, nearly always votes Democratic when he votes at all. He supports the Kennedy administration's aggressive efforts to re construct the racist South, he's sympathetic with the new civil rights bill, and with Martin Luther King, and it was certainly a pity about Medgar Evers, and the four young girls just killed in the church bombing in Alabama; yes, something certainly has to be done, for in a sense you can legislate morality, you can and you must, though it isn't in Alan Savage's nature to quarrel about such things for politics is after all the folly of the ephemeral, the pursuit of the futile.
In Paris, it's true, he had apolitical minded friend, quite aclose friend, a brilliant freelance writer historian, and from this man Alan Savage had learned unsettling things about, for instance, the re cent escalation of American involvement in Vietnam the number of military advisers has risen from 2,000 to 15,000 in two years! , and the NATO pact, and nuclear weapons testing, but he has no strong opinions of his own; his temperament simply isn't political.
Nor is he religious, though baptized Presbyterian and respectful of the church, of Christianity generally. Never quarrels with religious believers and certainly never with his mother, to whom belief is crucial.
Of course, when Alan Savage is home, he sometimes attends church services. At Christmas, at Easter, for weddings, funerals, accompanying his parents. A way of honoring his parents. He supposes too he'll be married in a church ceremony one day, should the prospect arise.
He doesn't believe in God: anthropomorphic self delusion.
He believes in the human will, in human possibility, human imagination.
In principles of certainty, moments of exquisite clarity. Like Cezanne for whom the rock hard stratum underlying mere impressions was the organizing element in his art. The intractable reality beneath the playful shimmer of light.
And he believes in love. Romantic love.
A belated discovery.
* *
Do you have any questions about me, about my life before we met, he asked, and I saw the worry in his jace, I saw but didn't see,' in any case it was a casual conversation, nothing intense or profound, I made a joke of it remarking that his life before we met was virtually his entire hfl, how could he be held to account for it?
So sweetly so shyly he has asked me several times if many men have been in love with me, and finally he asked after great afficuliy have I ever been in love with anyone anyone in the past and I made a quick joke of this too,' I said, If nothing came of it, what does it matter? and a little tatey to tease, to shock him a little the Savages love to be shocked.
mildly , I said, I think, Alan, you're asking in a roundabout way am I a virgin? and he blushed crimson and denied it and I poked his arm lightly and said, Since I've never loved anyone seriously I guess the answer is obvious.
With his enigmatic smile, Alan Savage quotes Magritte to Graice Courtney: I detest my past. And anyone else s.
A night in late October 1963, gusty, rain lashed, when Alan Savage drives Graice Courtney home from a semiformal dinner at the Savages' where there'd been lavish talk of Europe, specifically of Paris, and Graice says in a neutral voice, I've never been to Europe, as if this were a fact Alan might not know. And Alan says, I'll take you sometime soon, Graice, shall I? as casually as if they were already engaged.
That night Alan accompanies Graice upstairs to her room on the third floor of the shabby re d brick house at 2117 South Salina Street instead of saying good night to her in the parlor as he has always done: Graice Courtney's clean neat sparsely furnished $30 a month room.
She isn't quite sure if she has invited him but once he's inside, and the door is shut and locked, she thinks, Yes, it's time.
I do love him. It's time.
Through this young man's nervously quick darting eyes she sees that her room, ordinarily invisible to her, is a cozy place, a secret sort of place, twilit, charmingly feminine, with lumpily wallpapered walls in an old fashioned floral design of purple tulips and ivy, and a narrow bed with a purple corduroy spread, and white ruffled curtains at the single dormer window overlooking the street.
Her small desk is pushed into a corner made cavelike by six foot bookshelves of synthetic pine; on the battered unpainted floorboards there's a shaggy oval rug in greens and beiges; on one of the walls there are a number of striking photographs, framed, under glass, given to her by her Uncle Leslie: the largest, a constellation of hundreds of children's faces in the shape of a Christmas tree.
Says Alan Savage with a strange smile, So this is where you live!
And, stzring, Somehow I didn't expect He stands in the center of the room, turning slowly, glancing about as if searching for something.
How curious a man he is, how naturally inquisitive: it's the eye of the professional decoder.
Graice wonders with a stab of resentment if her friend is contrasting this modest room, its dimensions, its textures, its diminished signs and symbols, with the rooms of his family's mansion: if he is, perhaps not entirely consciously or voluntarily, assessing the relative powerlessness of one who would inhabit such a room. And she shares a bathroom with two other tenants on the floor. what of that. But she dismisses the thought as unworthy of Alan Savage and of herself. He loves and respects me, she thinks. He has become my friend.
Graice Courtney's closest, most re liable friend in all the world.
That evening, at the dinner table, she'd observed Alan in the company of his parents, seeing how, in the weeks since his arrival at Lake Skaneateles, he has become politely deferential to doctor Savage: wouldn't be drawn into an exchange when doctor Savage wittily denounced the Abstract Expressionists, murmured only a few words in defense of other artists with whom, in doctor Savage's eyes, Alan is associated.
And of course he's genuinely warm to missis Savage, quite clearly loves, admires, respects her Watching him, Graice thought, How good he is. How good, how decent, how kind.
Now he's saying, oddly marveling, It's a lovely little hide away.
Lovely.
Hideaway? Lovely?
The interiority of your outer being. Bearing not the slightest relationship to your outer being.
Graice laughs, startled.
Alan had recently described to Graice the way in which Man Ray designed his mistress Kiki's face: the artist had shaved the young woman's eyebrows completely off, drew on artificial brows, painted on her a masklike face of stylized beauty, with eerily enlarged eyes and prominent darkly stained lips. Graice thinks at this moment of Man Ray and Kiki.
Alan helps Graice take off her coat, re moves his own slowly, distractedly. He's excited. He's nervous. The space in the room is so cramped, such gestures seem outsized and overly intimate.
In the oval mirror above Graice's bureau Alan Savage's face is not one Graice might recognize, it's so intense, so absorbed in seeing. In three quarter profile there's something hawkish about it, but she thinks it attractive.
He's drawn, of course, to the photographs on the wall, examines them with his usual frowning interest. How odd! How.
quaint! Wherever did you find these! he exclaims. He's particularly intrigued by the
Christmas tree comprised of hundreds of children's faces with the caption CHRISTMAS 1946: And the Light Shineth in Darkness, and the Darkness Comprehended It Not. It's dated 1946, he says, but the technique is re ally quite old. As early as the 1860s photographers were doing things like this: collage, double and over exposure, duplication, bizarre things with light.
Wherever did you find these?
At the very peak of the tree is Graice Courtney's tiny face, her four year old's face; it's duplicated several times elsewhere. So tiny, scarcely re cognizable. Graice says, Oh, I found them in a secondhand shop. In Hammond. She pauses, her brain for an instant struck blank.
Do you like them, Alan?
Alan Savage merely laughs. Of course, Graice. How could I not like anything of yours?
Joyce Carol Oates - Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart Page 35