“Didn’t you used to like the Regenzeit girl?” Celeste asked.
I had no idea that she’d known. “Sure,” I said. “I liked both of them.”
“What’s she like now?” asked Celeste.
“Older,” I said, and the conversation went tactfully on to other subjects.
The next morning Marie went for a run and I had coffee with Celeste. We talked about New York and San Francisco, then suddenly Celeste turned to me and with a sweet, sad smile, said, “I remember the first time I fell in love. It was with a Thebes boy, Vaughan Oton, Mo’s son. I don’t think you ever knew him. He was your uncle’s age, and very good-looking. He and Charles used to ride their bicycles all over town. Vaughan! Vaughan! I’d chase after them, but they never stopped. So one day I waited right outside the house, here, and when I saw them coming up the hill, I lay down in the middle of the street. Like I was one of the perils of Pauline. Help me! I might even have shouted. Help me!”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Vaughan ran me over,” Celeste said. “I’d like to think that he didn’t see me, but I’m not sure. I was in the middle of the road.”
“Were you hurt?”
“Not physically. I did become more cautious, though.”
This was the first time Celeste ever voluntarily spoke to me about her life in Thebes. At first I didn’t understand why she had told me about Vaughan, then I realized she had somehow intuited the connection between my mentioning Yesim and the cut on my forehead. The story was her response. A lesson, maybe. Be careful who you fall in love with. I felt that Celeste and I were in rare sympathy. It was like we were really what we seemed to be, more and more, as we got older, not mother and son, not aunt and nephew, but people of the same generation. Two old friends talking in the kitchen on a gray Sunday morning. “Why did Marie fall in love with my father?” I asked.
Celeste hesitated. “Freedom is very attractive,” she said at last. “To us, as girls in Thebes, in the sixties, Richard was freedom. He was the first person who told us it was all right to do what we wanted.”
I couldn’t help noting that she’d said us. “Were you in love with him, too?”
Celeste made a face. “I never trusted Richard.”
“Why not?”
“It’s hard to put into words. It wasn’t how he dressed or what he said, or even what he did. But there was always this feeling of there being something else that we should have known about but didn’t. As if he had cancer, or a family somewhere.”
“Did you find out what it was?”
“I’m not sure there was anything to find out, really. It was just my feeling about him.”
“You didn’t ask him?”
“You may not believe it,” Celeste said, “but I was too shy to interrogate grown-ups back then. Why all these questions?”
Impulsively, I got my father’s letter from the pile of things to keep. Celeste read it and put it down. “I always thought there must have been something like this,” she said. “Where did you find it?”
“In Oliver’s files.”
“How sad,” Celeste said. “None of us could bring ourselves to throw his letters away.”
We went up to her old bedroom. Celeste took Being and Nothingness off the shelf, opened it to the last page, and removed the letter that had been folded there for thirty years. “Kind of a morbid hiding place, don’t you think?” she said.
“I had a strange sense of humor when I was seventeen.” She glanced at the letter, then passed it to me. “You know, when I called you, to ask if you wanted to come here, I think I was hoping you’d find this.”
“I would never have found it. This room freaks me out.”
“Yes,” Celeste said, “it is a little weird.”
THE RICHARD ENTE PERIOD
Happenstance Institute
Denver, Colo.
May–June, 1970
My star,
beyond dearness. You must be wondering why I ran away. I have been wondering the same thing myself. Me, wretched Dick, lame Duck (that’s what Ente means auf Deutsch—some crazy Jew chose it for the family a couple of centuries ago, a man who loved ducks, I guess), not a day passes that I don’t ask myself that question. For a long time I couldn’t answer. Just a voice in my head shouting, Go. Lately my ideas have been getting clearer, maybe on account of the mountain air. Also, I have fallen in with some fellows here who have an institute. They’ve latched on to the old Indian idea that we choose a life because there’s something we want to figure out. Each of our lives, and we have many, is like a book you pick up because there’s something in it you want to learn. I did some sessions with them early on and they told me what my problem is. It’s pride. I want to take all the world’s sorrow on myself. I look back at my life and everything fits into that pattern. Top of my class at Bleak, but a lousy law school. Top of my law school class, but a lousy job. And even that was too good for me; I had to quit S & M (I mean Silberman & Mischeaux), and do two-bit private law and live among bums. I had to find the greatest love I’ll ever know in my life, the only real love I’ve ever known, and run away from it. I look for the darkest spot in the woods and I run right in, hoping to make it less dark. That’s pride. I’m ready to let it go, and right now. Not in the next life, when I’ll probably be a rat or an ant given how I’ve screwed this one up. Getting to this knowledge has been hell, and a long trip, too. You wouldn’t believe some of the places I’ve been in the last four months, the dark spots I got into before I saw which way the light was. I slept in the woods with the Indians back of Jewett and got them so drunk, they agreed to do one of their most powerful curses for me. Together we blasted the whole USA, this sick land, and we begged the sky to take revenge on the bastards who shoot their chemicals into it, beginning with Joe Regenzeit and then all the way out from him. We stuck knives in our arms and bled for it to happen. Then I was on the South Side of Chicago, sleeping at the Y, talking to a disc jockey named A-10, who plays outer-space music from 2 to 4 a.m. because he wants the aliens to feel at home. I told him I was from Mars and he believed me. Apparently a lot of Martians go to Chicago, and all over the Midwest. He was going to take me to a nightclub for Martians but I got pneumonia and checked myself into the hospital and when I got out I left Chicago and drove all night to Santa Fe, where the air is pretty good. Spent some time there with a rabbi named Yoel Hernandez who tells me that half the population of New Mexico are Jews only they don’t know it. I was looking for a way back to the God of my fathers, then I saw it was all wrong, you don’t go backward to find God. God is in front of you if It is anywhere. So I went to Denver, met the institute folks, and here I am. I’m up at 5 a.m. every day to stare at my bellybutton; after three weeks I’ve come to think there might be something in it. I’ve given up pot and everything, even coffee; now I drink tea made from sage twigs and eat rice we get surplus from the US government, with weevils in it. I don’t eat the weevils. With the help of the good people here, I’m moving out of the darkness. I’m unjewing, laying down the ancestral guilt—I could write a book just about that. I sleep four, five hours a night. I don’t talk to my mother in my head. I teach english composition in a school that’s mostly Pueblo kids with bare feet and fantastic hippie hair. If they let me, I’m going to organize a debate team. I’m telling you this so that you’ll know it’s real, what I’m telling you. I hope you can see that. You always saw through me, you see into people as clearly as any swami, you have the magic eyes of serious purpose. I hope you can see me writing this in my little room, outside nothing but bushes and some uncollected litter and the big big night. I won’t promise you anything because promises are for liars, but if you come out here, I know you can trust me not to run. I love you with the real love. Nothing that happens will change that. But hope with me that it isn’t too late to make the wrong things right; hope with me that we can all still be fixed. I ran from you and it was the worst mistake of my life. But you can fix it, if only you’ll f
and then a sq
uare cut from the corner of the page where Richard Ente’s last words would have been. Ollow me.
“Marie gave it to me,” Celeste said. “After Richard died, she didn’t want to keep it. I doubt she even knows it’s here.”
I’d like to say that when I read my father’s last letter everything became clear, and that I knew for certain who Richard Ente had been, but actually what I thought was, Holy shit, he sounds just like Swan! And for a moment, just for a moment, I allowed myself to imagine something so sweet I could barely hold it in my mind, like an atom of an element not meant to exist in this world. What if Richard had lived? What if he hadn’t died in Denver, but had merely stolen away, in the darkness, on foot, and made for the narrow end of America’s funnel? What if after untold adventures he had settled in San Francisco and what if he found there the true visionary powers he had been looking for. What if he had become Swan. What if I had known him. U think? said the Swan in my head. U really think? Then the vision, or whatever it was, fell apart, and I began to think about the letter. “How come she didn’t go?” I asked.
“She couldn’t,” Celeste said. “You weren’t there, you don’t understand. Richard turned her inside out. He was such a fucking liar! He made us all live in a world of lies. But you know, when he left, the rest of us came out of it, and Marie, Marie didn’t. She, you know, she was pregnant, and we knew that, and she was certain that Richard would come back. Then he wrote her that letter, and your grandfather gave it to her, which was not conscionable. Because she wanted to go. Marie wanted to live with Richard Ente in the world of lies! I was the one who persuaded her to go to New York instead. Can you imagine what would have happened if she’d gone to Colorado? Can you imagine what her life would have been like? Living out there, in dirt …”
“Hello?” Marie called. “Where are you people?”
“We’ll be down in just a minute, Marie.” A door closed and we heard water running in the sink. “In the end, I made her choose,” Celeste said. “Richard or me. If you stay, I said, I’ll stay with you always. If you go, you’re on your own.”
Celeste looked at me uncertainly. She wanted me to tell her she had made the right decision, but I wouldn’t say it. Celeste had kept my mother from going to Richard. And then, heartbroken, presumably, Richard had killed himself. I couldn’t forgive Celeste for that, even if, at the same time, I knew that the person I really could never forgive was Richard Ente, who had killed himself and left us all to think about him endlessly. I was angry, and my anger focused itself on the hole in the page. How could Celeste have cut up Richard’s letter, as if it were just material? It didn’t occur to me until much later that the collage might have been more than a simple act of destruction, that for Celeste cutting might have been a way of coping.
“You killed him,” I said.
“No. You don’t understand. You don’t …”
“What are you two doing up there?” Marie called up the stairs.
“Coming, Marie!” Celeste shouted. “We’re coming.”
LOW-FLYING STARS
Weeks later, when I’d left Thebes and gone to stay with a friend in New York, Marie sent me a letter. It was three typed pages long, and I guessed that it had been through several drafts. She expressed her sorrow at what had happened to Richard Ente, and her guilt: if only she’d gone out to Colorado, Richard’s life, and hers, and mine, and everyone’s, might have turned out differently. But at the same time she felt that she had made the only choice she was capable of making. And although Richard’s death was an irreparable tragedy, she believed that she’d made the right choice, and that the consequences, for her, and Celeste, and me, were mostly good ones. You have two loving parents, she wrote, and you had a stable environment as a child. But finally, she wrote, we can never know what would have happened if I had made the other decision. Our lives are what they are, and I hope you can forgive me for being young, and confused, and scared of the unknown. She loved me, and one decision she would never regret was the decision to have a child.
I cut the letter into hundreds of pieces, which I put in a paper bag. I planned to make a collage out of them and send it back to Marie by way of an answer. But unlike Celeste I wasn’t really a maker of collages, and when I moved out of my friend’s house I left the paper bag behind. I asked my friend about it months later, and he said he must have thrown it away.
THE RICHARD ENTE PERIOD
Was my father a lover or a liar? Was he sane or mad? I’ve asked those questions a lot in the last several months, but I still have no answer. My father is dead. What I have are stories. The real Richard Ente is a continent on the far side of an ocean I cannot cross. He is undiscoverable, and maybe he always was.
LOW-FLYING STARS
On Monday morning I drove my mothers to the train station in Hudson. Celeste went to get tickets, and Marie took my hand. “I feel like there’s so much we have to talk about,” she said, but then Celeste came back with the tickets. My mothers boarded the train, and I saw them walking down the aisle, looking for seats. I thought of something that had happened a long time ago, when Marie started work at S. A host of names had joined us at the dinner table: Marcia the intern, Frank the managing editor, Nancy, Marie’s boss, the despot of Quick Styles and Personal Health, Mitch in the mail room. As Marie became familiar with these people, they acquired attributes that were as immutable as the epithets in Homer. Sing, Muse, of Marcia of the striped stockings, who was into Japanese men; and of Frank, whose lover was sick, very sick, Frank, whose lover was dying, Frank, who lost his lover to a long illness; sing of AIDS, or don’t sing, Marie didn’t, and I didn’t figure out what she meant by a long illness until later, much as it didn’t occur to me until I was an adult, looking at the Pacific Ocean on an overcast afternoon, what Homer had meant by the wine-dark sea. Sing of Nancy, that bitch, and sing of Mitch, a nice guy. Later, when Marie had been at the magazine for about a year, one name started to appear with more frequency than the others. Jean-Luc, the photographer, whose attribute was that Marie couldn’t see what all those women saw in him, was working with her on a story about dietary fiber. They went to the supermarket together and shopped for cereal, wasn’t it ridiculous? Jean-Luc was at the launch party for a line of clothing made from actual rags, wasn’t it funny? Marie spent the whole evening talking to Jean-Luc. He wasn’t so bad, she said, and that became his new epithet. Jean-Luc, who, it was true, had dated a lot of women, but was a good storyteller. Jean-Luc, who had been a photojournalist, and had a scar where a bullet had passed through his upper arm on its way from one part of Cambodia to another. Wily Jean-Luc, he had made himself a main character, and from that point on the story went in a new direction.
“I don’t like where this is going,” Celeste said. “It sounds to me like he’s just using you.”
“For what?”
“Don’t be naïve.”
“Have you considered the possibility that I’m using him?”
Celeste snorted. “Don’t let the women’s-magazine rhetoric go to your head, Marie.”
“It’s not rhetoric.”
“Please. The only thing worse than telling lies is believing them yourself.”
New crises arose at the magazine: there had been a small but significant misprint in the fiber story, women in Ohio were giving themselves colitis by eating hundreds of servings of Chex, and Jean-Luc vanished from our conversation for a while. Then he was back, he was flying to Los Angeles and he wanted Marie to come with him, it was a business trip, sort of, they were going to scout designers.
“Actually,” said Celeste, “what surprises me is that you seem to be asking for my permission.”
“That’s not it,” Marie said. “I just want to make sure you’re comfortable with the idea that I’ll be gone for a few days. And to make sure there aren’t any, you know, conflicts.”
“Why, are you afraid of conflict?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“I’m not going to reassure you. In fact, if you w
ere asking my permission, I would say no, because I don’t like the way you’re trying to disguise a romantic getaway as a business trip. If you had said, Celeste, I’m going to California to fuck …”
“Celeste …”
“If you had told me you wanted to fuck this guy’s brains out on the beach in California, at least that would have been honest, and I would have said, go, have fun, just make sure this French creep doesn’t get his hooks in you too deep, because you know where he’s been. But that’s not the situation.”
“No, it’s not.”
“As it is I have nothing to say. You don’t need my permission. Do what you want.”
“Jesus, Celeste,” said Marie. “Why do we have to fight about this?”
“I’m not fighting.”
“We’re separate people. I wouldn’t do this to you if you were going away.”
“That’s because I’m not going away,” Celeste said.
“Well, I am,” said Marie.
But she didn’t mention the trip to Los Angeles again. She did mention Jean-Luc, but only once, to say that he had turned in some photographs late. It was as though he were one of those Homeric sailors whose names are mentioned only as they die in a shipwreck. We talked about ordinary things again, about those morons at the Times, about whose play was opening at La MaMa, about the terrible people on the subway and in the supermarket. Then Marie vanished. The phone rang while Celeste and I were eating dinner, Celeste answered, she said, “I see,” and hung up. “My sister isn’t coming home,” she said.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“Downtown.”
Luminous Airplanes: A Novel Page 20