by Lucy Ives
As far as possibility one was concerned, I wasn’t going to hold out hope. I realized that Will to Beauty, Alice’s biography, had been written less as an entertainment than as a work of feminist history and I was fairly sure its author must also at some point have come to this realization. Of course, the book had been marketed how it had been marketed, complete with a totally unbelievable but nevertheless happy ending. But it was essentially about a woman whose family wanted her forgotten. Mabel Styke, Alice’s secretary, would have needed to do a lot of legwork if she wanted her hapless employer’s records to end up in a public archive.
I was therefore left with option number two. This was when I remembered The Four Seasons, one form of CeMArtian institutional memory—of gossip, really—that was less easy to alter or erase. Unrelated to the hospitality arts, this was an early curatorial bulletin circulated exclusively within the museum proper before the advent of the Second World War when issues with staffing and other resources had caused numerous extraneous activities to cease. The Four Seasons was jokingly named after a set of nonexistent statues that should be included on the front façade of the museum, but which, due to exorbitant cost, were never carved, and which appear as four pyramids of unfinished blocks resting serenely atop columns, even to this day. They are eyesores, but somehow no one notices them. I happened to know that the CeMArt library had a bound set of this niche mag in two volumes, and I rushed downstairs to try to get hold of the relevant one. I even knew where we kept them. I was standing in front of the shelf where they were stored, and I could already see the gap, mocking me. Bells went off in my head.
I performed the fastest walk one can possibly get away with within the museum’s library, which is mostly just a regular walk, up to the circulation desk.
“Dani,” I hissed. “I have an emergency.”
Dani, who was a millennial with hair dyed an impressive gunmetal gray, pivoted. “Really?” She was not eager to become involved.
“I can’t find something!”
“Is it in the catalog?”
I was holding up the available bound volume of The Four Seasons, which covered the wrong years for my purposes. “I don’t need the catalog. I’m looking for volume two of this guy.”
Dani squinted. “Perhaps another patron is using it.”
“Dani,” I said, “there’s no one in here.”
Dani lobbed her gaze around the room. “You are correct,” she said.
“Are you telling me that this has to be missing?”
Dani blinked. “Oh no, not necessarily. Senior staff have borrowing privileges, just within the museum, of course.”
“So can you tell me if it’s checked out?”
“That I can do.” Dani tapped away. Her face came back. “Checked out. Not missing.” Then her face went back to the screen. “Oh,” she said. “Hmm.” She seemed perplexed. “I’m not sure what we do in this case”—she was sort of speaking to herself now—“if the person is, um, not ever going to be able to return it? If there’s a communication procedure.” She sighed. “Like because he’s dead.”
[ 25 ]
The problem was that once out of the library there was nothing preventing this set of journals from ending up anywhere one wanted to take it. I ran back upstairs, panting, to Paul’s office. I already knew he had nothing on his shelves, so I am not sure why I bothered.
“Jesus Christ,” I said to no one in particular, now fearing the onset of a bloody nose. I sort of waved my hands in the air and tried not to jump up and down from rage. “Ugh, ugh, ugh,” I grunted and stomped back to my office, not caring who saw me coming out of Paul’s door. The Four Seasons, volume 2, could be anywhere right now, I kept trying to remind myself. I was feeling a sick mix of dread and delight. I went into my email and searched around until I found Paul’s email containing his home address. I stared at it and then shakily wrote it down. It was in the East Village. I cleared my browser cache. And left the museum.
—
PAUL LIVED IN A WALKUP. In some ways this made things simpler. It would be easier to avoid neighbors and to disguise where I really was going. I tried to open the front door nonchalantly, as if I did this every day of my life. I did not succeed. I spent maybe two minutes jostling the key around before the lock on the steel door finally gave in. It wasn’t a great building. Probably there was rent control. I mean, I would have killed to be able to live in a place like this. Was that morbid of me? I really didn’t think so!
I went up the interior stair wondering if at this point I was technically already doing something illegal. I mean, I was definitely already doing something illegal, but how bad would it be if I were caught at this point? Would it be tabloid level? Alice Gaypoole Wynne–level public humiliation? I’d definitely lose my job, unless, of course, I could convince the authorities that Paul had given me his keys, told me I had access. But the problem would be, then, that I had not revealed my possession of Paul’s keys even after the revelation of his demise. Maybe I could claim grief? A form of temporary insanity? I wasn’t sure. I was already in the building, so there was no use turning back now, or so I had decided to permit myself to think.
Paul lived in apartment 5B. I let myself in and was greeted by an antiseptic smell. I didn’t really know much about what happened around death and its aftermath, so I had to assume that decay became a problem in almost no time at all, which was incredibly gross. I slipped inside and shut the door behind myself, gagging softly. I felt very young. It was palpable to me, when I walked into Paul’s place, that I was entering a bygone era, but this was different from studying the more distant past, because you could actually interpret the fact that your own existence had not been foreseen at this (the past) time. It was relevant to you. And I felt the year of my own birth weirdly implied by Paul’s classic 1980s apartment, with its twitching, rhinestone-encrusted cat clock in the kitchen and its venetian blinds and clip lamps and ashtrays and spare, sort of deco, masculine disarray. There was a living room with ceiling-high built-in bookshelves, and I dreaded the possibility that The Four Seasons had been fitted in someplace here, among myriad titles it could take me days to hunt through. I sort of whimpered to myself and looked around for Paul’s desk. There was no desk forthcoming. I realized that it must be in the bedroom, which was also, presumably, where Paul’s body had been, and so I was not particularly eager to find said desk but knew I needed to do so.
The bed was just sitting there, made. There was also a worktable with lamps clamped to it and rolling cabinets underneath. I inched over. Above the table hung several architect’s renderings of what I understood was the original plan for the American Objects galleries. And below these framed plans I saw something and didn’t even want to pray that it might be what I needed, but oh it seemed the world was occasionally kind, and it looked as if this book bound in red buckram could very well be the book I wanted, and I took hold of it, just as I heard, with a feeling of consternation I cannot describe for you in human words, the sound of a key being fitted into the lock on the front door, turned.
There are two classic responses in this scenario. The first of these is, of course, to hide under the bed. Knowing, however, of the probable recent presence of a corpse on this particular item of furniture, I nixed this route. The closet, then. I thought, nonsensically, of R. Kelly’s early aughts operatic film Trapped in the Closet. Blue Velvet’s slightly more hysterical take also crossed my mind. Did Paul’s have the requisite slatted door? It did. Oh God, it was tempting. My heart fluttered, got very hot. I actually had no choice. Someone was already moving in the entranceway. I let myself into the closet, which smelled like cedar and the inside of a shoe and cough syrup, which was altogether a bracingly male perfume. If Paul hadn’t been so recently deceased, it would not have been so bad an odor to have been smelling. Mostly, I decided to pretend that Paul was alive.
The individual who had let himself into Paul’s house was moving around. There were some sighs. I was able to determine that this was probably a woman, bas
ed on the clicking of footwear. The person, I could also tell, had just seated herself in an armchair in the living room very close to the door of the bedroom. I wasn’t sure what she was trying to do but I was definitely scared that the reminiscing session, or whatever, was going to take a while. Perhaps it was his sister. Maybe she was living here now, in which case I was pretty much absolutely fucked. I thought a little bit about possible outcomes: Perhaps I waited until she fell asleep, then snuck out. Or maybe she would go out for food or something else and I would have a window. In any case, I would need to wait.
I settled in. I mean, I did not move, but I allowed my body to become accustomed to the fact that it was going to be where it was for a pretty long time.
The person in the living room was not doing anything.
I waited.
Now the person in the living room began to speak.
“Paul,” she said. “Shit.”
For a while there was nothing.
“Shit,” she repeated. “I remember we used to be so loving. Do you remember that, how it was? Do you remember when I was teaching at Iowa, and you came into my room with a daisy after class? It was over the summer. I was teaching and you were there for that reading. I had never experienced so much kindness, and now you are dead. I’ll go on living, but I don’t know if I can ever explain to anyone what it is like to have you dead, Paul. We aren’t even married anymore. It’s been so long since we were married, but I can go on talking to you, because of what you meant to me then. I know you understood that, what that meant to me, for us to be together as we were. But you didn’t understand anything else about the life I was trying to live. You thought you wanted something for yourself, but you could never come around to the idea that I was not the one who was keeping it from you, I was not the one keeping you from your authentic self. My fictions did not prevent you from becoming the author you believed you were. Your failure to appear in the world in the way you desired to appear had nothing to do with my writing. I don’t know what that failure was. I was so glad when I got free of that, Paul, when I got free of that blame. Self-deception made you live a bad life sometimes, Paul, and you tried to drag me down to your level. But I could never hate you for that.”
Someone texted me.
I don’t have an elaborate tone or anything like that, but anyone who is not a moron who hears my minimal tock! as of a tiny mallet striking bamboo knows that someone else—who may be a moron—is nearby.
The female person who was sitting in the chair exclaimed, “What!” I could hear her get to her feet. It wasn’t that she was scared, exactly, but more I think that she had not been prepared for there to be an additional outrage so close to the other outrage earlier on this week. “Who is that?” she demanded.
It was interesting, because she did not run out of the house, which is what I would have done. This indicated a different relationship not just to physical threat but to the notion of the worth of life. This person had already accepted the fact and/or inescapability of her own death, which was not something that I, personally, had done.
But it was, in some sense, helpful. She could take the lead.
I decided to step out of the closet and introduce myself to Ella Voss.
—
“HELLO,” WAS WHAT I SAID.
“Oh, thank God you’re not a man,” was what Voss told me. “You’re also tiny and I could throttle you, what a relief.”
Ella Voss was in her fifties and gave the impression of always having said exactly what was on her mind to everybody. She was a sturdy woman who had not been fated to be thin but who had lived in a city long enough to train her body to approximate the ideal. She was also successful and maybe even rich, and there was no way her author photo was doing her any kind of justice.
“Have a seat,” she told me.
“I’m really sorry about this,” I said.
“Paul’s dead, so I’m not worried. Anyway, you’re not his lover.” She considered me. “You’re someone he knows from the museum. Right?”
I nodded.
“How amazing! What brings you here?”
There was something about her manner that inspired absolute calm. She couldn’t have cared less if I robbed Paul blind or vandalized the apartment or even, as I may have mentioned, attempted to do harm to her.
“I needed a book.”
“Ha! And now you have it?”
I nodded. “I think so.” I wanted to look down and ascertain whether the book I held in my hands was in fact The Four Seasons but really I felt that it was of primary importance that I continue gazing deep into Ella Voss’s turquoise eyes.
It was beginning to grow dim in the apartment and Voss reached over and switched on a light. “Now you have your book, well. And yet I imagine there is something more.” Again, she wasn’t aggressive. This was an extremely pleasant conversation.
“I read your novel!” I burst out.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Which one?”
“The new one. Actually, last night.”
“So, then, you and I are somehow in the same boat.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“I just mean, I think I startled you, and now you have startled me. And each of us is still trying to understand Paul, though I suspect for very different reasons.”
I made some sort of involuntary noise.
“Yes?” Voss wanted to know.
“I, I just mean, is he there?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” I could only say, “there.”
“I’m sorry?”
“In your novel.”
Voss considered my statement. “What causes you to pose that question?”
“I mean, it’s horrible!”
“I’m sorry,” said Ella Voss. “You’re very vehement. The thing about Paul you need to know was, he suffered from block. That really bothered him more than anything else. He never did what he imagined he should do, and this was extremely bothersome to him, debilitating and maddening, really, and it caused him to make assumptions about other people, particularly those he was close to. I wasn’t always like I am today. I used to be capable of being hurt.”
I didn’t know what to say to her. I tried, “I wanted to take his advice.”
“You have no idea how much a person can change in one lifetime. I am not even talking about Paul, here.”
“I didn’t always feel like Paul cared about work,” I told her, feeling strangely young again.
“He probably didn’t.”
“I didn’t know what Paul was doing.”
“Well, Paul was unusual. He didn’t care about art history as much as your average art historian and he didn’t care about poetry as much as your average poet. It’s difficult to say where that left him.”
“Alone?” I asked.
“I don’t know about that. He was a miracle for a while. As I was saying, Paul didn’t really care about history, at least not in a narrative way. There’s some honor in that, but then you also run into problems.”
“Such as?”
“Honesty,” said Ella Voss.
saturday
[ 26 ]
I left Paul’s apartment soon after this exchange. It felt in the end like I’d been paying him a long-overdue social call, like we finally knew one another a little better, much as he’d always wanted.
I went home and got into bed in my clothes and went to sleep. My overworked brain had become uncommunicative, and it had been so long since I had slept in this manner, just dead to the world.
The next day it was Saturday, and I awoke and knew I was ready to attempt to read Paul’s files again.
I went back into the folder named “etc.”
I now had two options: I could read either “work.txt” or “morework.txt.” I thought about skipping perversely forward to “morework.txt,” but then I thought better of it. I would just look at whatever Paul was calling “work.”
I opened the file. It beg
an, in medias res,
Should I, too, begin to publish under a pseudonym? I think about a possible ancestor. Her name is a long, bunchy name, a bag in knots. Her name is Brunhilda Wunsch. When she composed her novel, she easily Anglicized. She was G. G. Hennicott, taking part of her husband’s name. This is smooth. Doubtless I am a weak person. I could not travel where she went. I know what I know and want to live it in another way but never quite get there. I never quite get to being other than the person who I am. I know too much. I live in too many houses.
So Paul had read Lorelei! And he had known about Brunhilda’s double identity and perhaps wished that he were capable of something similar. But this was a short text, possibly a foray into the novel detailed in “PLAN.txt.” I turned to “morework.txt,”
Some people here around me are lovers. I am not opposed, but this environment is not so good for that sort of thing. Better by far to concentrate on the work we’ve each set ourselves. Look at F. and S. What can they hope for? F. has no heart, and S. no eyes. It makes sense that a blind person would like someone who can’t feel, but she can’t understand that what he doesn’t feel is not the same as what she doesn’t. He sees all too well, and additionally the world rewards him for it. To a writer they’d seem like characters.
But am I a writer, given the modes and results of my research? Is this how I am to learn that I am not a true writer, that I do not see even these two in this way, as characters? And they are so often in the house! I should be able to do something with them, refine it all as a new work, but I remain exhausted, impotent. What can his advances mean? What is the meaning of her acceptance? I’m already an old man. I go around these rooms and everything could be a harm to someone somewhere. Put in some footnotes if you care about fact now. Try to say what happened. There is a playing card for Ella, the painting for myself. A print for Stella and a mirror for Lorelei. But do I now come to a wall? I have worked as hard as I felt myself capable and more, yet I cannot seem to walk backward. I am numb nearly always, as in a dream. My hands hurt.