They reach the end of the street and his father makes a left, to continue driving, now parallel to the dazzling beach, which is comfortably crowded with people taking the sun or moving into the calm waters to wade or swim. “You can keep your fabled New Jersey,” his father says, looking at the beach. Among the people at the water’s edge are, surprisingly, a number of men who are fishing, casting their lines as fishermen do everywhere. He says to his father that it seems a strange place to fish, since whatever fish may possibly have been in the water hereabouts are most certainly gone, driven away by all the splashing and clamor. His father replies that these fish are used to noise and people and don’t mind a bit, they come close in to shore to eat the leftover food that the people invariably cast into the water, “actually, surf,” his father says. “Don’t be surprised, by the way, to learn that the construction worker back there is really a famous movie star.” Just then, one of the fishermen’s lines goes taut with an obvious strike, and he finds that he is very pleased.
They get out of the car and sit under some trees at the edge of the beach farthest from the water. He says that he remembers that his father landed the largest blue marlin ever caught off the Florida coast, and his father smiles and nods, delighted that his son has remembered this. He says that he told one of his students about his father’s catch and that she was very impressed. His father is looking at him with tender, impossibly tender love, and he feels, at that moment, overwhelming, crushing sadness and loss, deep and irremediable, and he begins to cry and wakes, crying.
— XLI —
Al’s wife had left him for a casual friend, the owner of a chain of bathroom-furnishings stores in the Midwest—a man whom Al had always casually despised. He was unprepossessing in every way—short, dumpy, with thick-lensed glasses, a high, whining voice, bow legs and acne scars. His sense of humor was so perfectly blunted that it seemed as if he had been born with an “a-comedic” gene. To make his lack of graces and charm even more pronounced—at least to Al—he had, as a Jew, no sense of or interest in his putative religion, yet had become a passionate, even slightly crazed defender of Israel, as if that state’s fortunes and security had something important to do with his gray life. To listen to him “on Israel,” was, according to Al, to be trapped in a weird Jackie Mason monologue, sans timing or even that performer’s weary shtick. Al thought of his rants as “enoughness already.”
After Al and Ginny’s divorce become final, it became clear to him—or, let us say, he admitted it to himself with qualification, that she had married Norman Shin Bet for his money. That he had earlier refused to consider this seriously, as they say, may reveal the “credit” that he gave his wife’s motives; perhaps she really did love the grotesque? But no, it was the money, it had to be the money. Her—Al’s and her—two daughters were now attending private schools in Westchester, they took riding lessons and were both on a brilliantly snobbish swim team that practiced in an Olympicsize pool when they weren’t sneering at everything and pretending not to be Jewish. As for Ginny, the last time he had seen her, when she’d come to pick up the girls from his rattrap apartment on Avenue A, she was wearing a tweed coat as beautifully tailored as it was exquisitely soft and elegantly draped, and a pair of knee boots of dark-brown velvety suede. How he loathed her, how he loathed her coat and her boots and her goddamned smug, suddenly different, rich face.
His attitude became darker and more acidic as time passed. He no longer cared that he’d lost his bitch whore of a wife and his two snotty daughters, nor did he care that she’d left him for the Frog King, the fucking Jew bastard, the sweaty kike whose family, Al knew, had smelled of stale sweat and fish before the money rolled in. What he cared about was that she had got the money and he’d got nothing! And yet he’d been ordered to pay child support to her and Norm, miserable Norm! They must have laughed themselves sick whenever his pitiful check arrived in the mail. “The measly check is here!” he’d no doubt say, the fat little prick! “Ha ha ha! How will we ever spend it all? Shrimp lo mein?”
One day, Al bought three gallons of the darkest green paint that he could find in Kamenstein’s, Forest Green, although it was truly the color of hell. Over the course of two or three days, he painted his entire apartment, including the ceilings, this sepulchral green, a green so gloomy and bleak that it seemed the representation of utter despair, a suicidal color, if one can call it a color, for it was somehow blacker than black. Those friends he had left—those few who could tolerate his rantings about the goddamn Jews this and the fucking kike bastards that—made no mention of what was this anteroom of insanity. A remark here and there by Al seemed to indicate that he had stepped into that state, although he said that he had “changed” his apartment to assure himself that he was not yet mad; for if the rooms filled him with dread, that dread was, so he said, a sign of hope that he would one day come to terms with the hurt that had been done him: if he could stand living here, he could stand anything. He suggested that the vile darkness of his place gave him a frisson of—what?—life, perhaps. Nothing could be worse than the wretchedness that he had constructed to enclose him. He was not yet dead if he could survive this tomb.
— XLII —
Here is a man, placed, when he was but eight years old, into an orphanage by his father, a man overwhelmed by the necessity of raising, alone, three children, while denying, for a year and a half, the fact that his wife had gone totally insane. The boy was selected, so to say, by his father, on what can only be called a whim. And so off he went to the orphanage, while his siblings lived on with their father in the small frame house in Troy. He was more or less ignored by his family, and after a few years, forgotten.
In 1942, he was permitted to leave the orphanage, a year earlier than decreed by law, so that he could join the army, which he discovered to be very much like the orphanage. He fought through Europe with the Second Armored Division of Patton’s Third Army, was wounded three times, and was discharged early in 1945,on points. After holding a job as an assistant manager in a relative’s floor-covering business, he enrolled, for some wholly obscure reason, in a Baltimore art school, and the moment he put a brush to canvas, knew what he was meant to do with his life, his time, with everything. The paint would occult, with color and texture, his family, silently; perhaps even kill them. And so he became a painter.
His relationships with women were ephemeral and unsatisfactory. He wanted to be humiliated, embarrassed, shamed—he wanted to be dominated, but his desires were far removed from the carnal. He wished to be erased. It was, or so he must have thought, all he was good for, as hopeless as he was, as unhappy as he was, as useless as he was. In the orphanage, ignored by his father and his hateful siblings, and unremembered by his crazy mother, he had seen the routine sadisms of the institution as small deliverances. But in the army, through the years of blood and agony and horror, the severed limbs and shit and pus of ceaseless death, he had not even been present enough to be killed, to become another cipher. That he became a good painter, a very good painter, meant, of course, nothing, insofar as his happiness was concerned. He was a very good artist choked with misery.
He could not ask the women who passed through his life to shame and debase him, he had no words to ask these things, and, perhaps, he had no true sense of what he wanted. He did not avail himself of professional women who could have relieved him, for that would have been different, grossly erotic; he needed someone who cared for him, however fragile that caring might have been, to insult and demean him. He wished to be humiliated by a friend; a gentle friend.
Perhaps with the knowledge that he was sublimating his deepest desires, addressing and satisfying them in some vague and peripheral way, or perhaps not, he chose—this was long before he had a regular dealer or gallery—he chose to make a living by working as a waiter. He complained to everyone he knew about how terrible a job it was, how he loathed it, how he would get back to his studio too exhausted to paint (this was not true), how he’d rather do anything else, and so on
. But he loved the work, loved being shouted at by the chefs, the head waiters, the bartenders; he loved being treated contemptuously by so many of the diners, whom he thought of as foul, slobbering pigs, their money earning them a place at the expensive trough and the absolute right to insult and harry this cheap-tuxedo-wearing slave, this lackey, this zero. When he watched them eat, his stomach would turn over with nausea, and he would be obscurely delighted that these swine had power over him.
He loved it, he wanted it. He needed it. It was precisely what he was worth, it was all he was worth. It was a wife and a mistress, troops of luscious whores, all of them waiting to carry out his depraved, self-abasing orders. To be humiliated. To be embarrassed. To be shamed and shamed again to the core of his being. To be salvaged at last and forever.
— XLIII —
Deny it to himself as he would, his work had begun to bore him. Well, he had been at it for fifty years, a little more, really, than fifty years, if he counted apprentice work; he had a shelf of books to attest to those wearying yet absorbing labors, to those thousands of hours, millions of words, and, he was chagrined to recognize, the slow but absolute fading away of what had at one time been a small but definite critical attention to his books. Fifty years. It was indeed wondrous, so he often thought, that he had managed to live at all, to walk and talk and eat and laugh, to love women, to father children—how had that happened?
Perhaps most unsettling—beyond the nagging sense that he had lived but in his spare time—his books, whenever he took one down at random, out of curiosity or to refresh his memory as to how he had managed a specific formal problem, invariably shocked him in that nothing in any of them seemed in the least familiar, but looked as if—read as if—written by a stranger who had secretly invaded his mind and absorbed large quantities of his memories. Worse still, every book—and there they were, with their familiar titles, with his name on jacket and case—every book seemed too good for his talents, such as they were, such as he considered them to be. Who had written this paragraph? these pages? these chapters?—some of which struck him as so artistically authoritative, so perfect, so sublime, that he felt as if he had plagiarized, word for word, the work of another, much better writer.
And so his current work, beyond its somewhat mischievous, even malign capacity to fill him with an ennui so profound as to exhaust him, appeared to him to cast a shadow on his earlier work, to demean it, sully it, in a sense to sabotage it. With every sentence he wrote, it seemed, an earlier sentence, a glittering and suave sentence, decayed a little. But this was all he knew how to do. He wasn’t much good for anything else, and what he did know how to do—even when, he smiled ruefully—even when he knew how to do it, proved nothing, changed nothing, and spoke to about as many people as one could fit into a small movie theater.
And so he continued to do it, correcting and revising each newly made page with a feeling of weird neutrality, with a feeling that he was simply passing the time: this or solitaire—all right, this. Surely, the other old writers he still knew felt precisely this way. Did they? He surely wouldn’t ask such an impertinent question.
He had recently received a letter from a dear friend, who, it so turned out, died soon after. He took the letter from his files one morning, before he started what he now thought of as “work,” scare quotes flaring, and found in it what he was sure he had read. The friend had confessed to him that his last book was, indeed, his last book, that he had given up or lost—it made little difference—the ability and the desire to write another word. His friend lamented the fix that he was in, but his frustration seemed forced, it seemed a position taken because of proprieties, the old truisms about art: a writer who cannot write, how sad, how tragic. It was a role his friend was playing. So it seemed, so it was.
He sat as his desk, and read the letter again. He wished, oh how he wished it wasn’t so, but he was choked with envy of his friend’s sterility: not to be able to write, not to want to write, to be, as they say, “written out,” or, more wonderfully, “burnt out”—lovely phrase! But it was a gift that had not been given him, and, he knew, despairing, that it would never be given him. He was doomed to blunder through the shadows of this pervasive twilight, until finally, perhaps, he would get said what could never be said.
— XLIV —
He’d stopped abusing alcohol years ago, although he disliked the word “abusing,” and used it only with people he didn’t know or didn’t care to know. He thought it a spurious word, a kind of self-help, onward-and-upward, simperingly Christian word that conjured up an image of a frenzied drunk assaulting a bottle of whiskey in a perverse madness. He hadn’t “abused” alcohol, but had spent almost four years sitting in a chair drinking jug wine around the clock and looking, variously, at the wall, the window blind, and the TV screen. Now he was sober and had been for more than five years. What he discovered was that being sober meant no more than being sober: he certainly was no more content, no more serene, nor had he found anything wonderful to fill his “leisure” hours, no God, in whatever costume. He went to work, came home, ate his frozen dinners, drank tomato juice with a lot of tabasco in it, and watched television. He smoked less, but that was because his salary was pitifully low at the prussianly anti-union retail outlet he worked at.
He lived alone, as might be surmised, his three failed marriages having taught him nothing about women or sex or give and take or, for that matter, anything at all. He had no children, thank God, and now, at sixty-eight, fantasies of erotic adventures in which the ex-wives lasciviously collaborated, or substituted for each other, or were blurred together with other insatiable women, real or invented, were his entertainment. Who performed what perversion and when, and how did she do it and where were they all when it happened? It was pitiable entertainment, of course, but he didn’t care one way or another; he was concentrated, obsessively, on his self, his actual body and flesh, and he accepted the knowledge that he was sick, not of any disease, but sick of himself, of his self. It surely must be a common ailment, so he thought. How to reach one’s late-sixties and not be self-loathing?
He had considered the possibility that he might actually be ill with some spectacular, malignant, fatal disease, lymphoma perhaps, or something even more devastating. Yet the thought of going to “see” his doctor filled him with a boredom and unease strong enough to bring on nausea. For a few years, soon after his last marriage had imploded in slow-motion misery, he’d gone regularly to his doctor, and to other doctors referred to, had tests and more tests, blood panels and urinalysis, examinations and biopsies, for a pain here, a twinge there, irregular bowel movements, fluttery heartbeats, shortness of breath, difficulty sleeping, weak urine flow, and on and on: he had become, that is, an official patient, whose responsible job it was to worry about his health and juggle doctors’ appointments and ask questions about his medications and their possible side effects (there was one drug that could, it was thrillingly advised, cause a fatal reaction after just one dose!). It was a job much more fulfilling than the one he made $12.43 an hour at, where nobody would look seriously into his face and suggest that he might have chronic prostatitis—or worse.
But one day he realized that no matter how militantly—or weirdly—obsessive he was or would be about his health, he was, at sixty-eight, good for (a nice phrase) maybe ten more years, if that, and then oblivion. It was the neurotic and worried people between thirty-five and forty-five who thought that diet and exercise and meditation and the avoidance of cigarette smoke and excessive alcohol use (alcohol abuse!) would keep them from death; and that industrious and puritanical attention to their aging bodies would take them into their happy nineties, their euphoric hundreds, into a deathlessness as groggily sweet as a California chardonnay. Their bodies would repay them for their scrupulous care.
He knew better than this, although he considered that he might well be wrong, but, sick of himself, bored with himself, there was no regimen of health to which he could subscribe without embarrassing himself deep wi
thin his psyche, or what was left of it. He of course, like any reasonable human being, considered suicide, for who would miss him? But he refused the idea when he thought that perhaps one day an actual terrible, serious, rampaging disease would enter him or awaken within his body where it had been dozing all these years, a disease that he and his doctors could “battle,” or, better, “bravely battle,” but to which he would at last grudgingly succumb. In the meantime, he decided to start drinking again, to abuse alcohol, and with abandon. Christ knows that he’d wanted a drink every hour of every day for years. If he was sick of himself and waiting for the possible declaration within his body of the presence of some malignant destroyer, why not wait drunk?
— XLV —
There once was a man who coveted his friend’s wife, and even though he was an Evangelical Christian, complete with closed eyes, raised arms, enraptured visage, and a well-burnished hatred of Satan, and in despite of the ninth commandment, his lust grew and flourished. So much so that he set about, with much sweaty praying in the night for his pal, God’s, personal assistance in his travails, seducing the woman. This was not as hard as he thought it might be, for she had a touch of the whore about her. And so he violated the sixth commandment: in for a nickel, in for a buck. After a time, the man had become thoroughly obsessed with the woman, mad for her, as they say, and wished no more than to be inside of her day and night. The woman’s husband was oblivious to this sexual carnival. He was the perfect cuckold; he no longer desired his wife, so believed her undesirable to others.
The Abyss of Human Illusion Page 6