by J. D. Landis
“The literal meaning of diaskeuast,” I explained, feeling very much as I had when I was a graduate student trying to inspire freshmen to abandon their Frisbees for forensics (at which I lasted only a week when my own frustration caused me to decline swiftly into gibbering glossolalia), “is someone who interprets things. Which in a way is true of me. But it’s come to mean something else. An editor, specifically. Someone who revises things, repairs them. But I don’t do that. That’s not what I do. I don’t touch anything. I leave everything just as I found it. That, to me, is the least destructive way to live. I like to let everything wash over me, and as it does, I absorb whatever I may come to love. And then it’s mine forever.”
She tilted back her head and looked at me over the bottom rims of her purple irises. It was a most unsettling and welcome scrutiny. “That sounds like the most wonderful life.”
If she believed that, perhaps she could make it that. Perhaps she could transform not my life (for one’s life is one’s inner life, and that is immutable) but my belief in its value and thereby in myself.
“My father described my life as utterly worthless and me as abjectly murcid—his word, not mine. I would have preferred he call me merely languid, such an expressive word, so utterly stretchable into its own very meaning. He said that when I die, I should have a headstone that will be completely blank, not even my name, to signify that I’ve done absolutely nothing with my life. My father believes that the world is divided into active people and passive people, and passive people are without meaning. He was fond of quoting Wittgenstein quoting Goethe: ‘In the beginning was the deed.’ But for me, in the beginning, as I am sure will be the case in the end, is the word. I turned out to be a passive person. I ceased to have any meaning to him.”
“What does he do?” The disdain in her voice was endearing.
“He’s a lawyer. A judge. Criminal court. He’s not unknown. You may have read about him. His nickname is Too Good. That’s not a reference to his virtue, though he is a virtuous man. He received it when he was a young judge on his first murder case and the killer came before him for sentencing, and he said, ‘Execution’s too good for this miscreant.’ Then he pronounced his sentence: ‘Make him invisible.’ That’s all he said. He got up and left the bench. Nobody knew what he meant until they got a written copy of the sentence. ‘Make him invisible’ meant he was giving him life without parole. That’s what he’s given every convicted murderer if they haven’t worked out a plea bargain with the prosecutor. My father doesn’t believe in plea bargaining. And he doesn’t believe in parole. He was always quoting Judge Torres: ‘Your parole officer ain’t been born yet.’ He believes in evil. He believes in putting evil people away forever. That’s what he means by making them invisible. He just erases them. He’s an outspoken conservative, but he confuses people because of his adamant opposition to the death penalty. He thinks the death penalty is lenient. He believes there is no worse punishment in creation than to be locked up in a room with nothing but your thoughts. I don’t agree with him. Sometimes I dream of being locked up forever in a room.”
I can remember going walking with my father, before he’d given up on me. There was no part of the city we didn’t visit together. He’d make me look at bums and prostitutes and drug addicts and what he called sharpies in their big cars and parents who were slapping their offspring and raging black people and jaundiced gamblers in Chinatown and strutting rodomantades on Wall Street. “Epictetus is wrong,” he would say to me. “People are evil. They are vulgar and hideous. And they breed. So generation follows generation poisoned with hatred and self-interest. No one is not guilty. If it were up to me, I’d wipe them all out and start again. Paradise would be an empty world except for you and me.” Then he would buy me a hot dog from a vendor who would inevitably wither under my father’s scrupulous gaze.
She stepped closer to me. I thought it was because she was feeling sorry for me. I told her I was sorry.
“No.” She moved her hand toward me but did not touch me. “I like it. I told you: I’m sick of people who are always moving around and think they want to find a place to rest but don’t really because they can’t bear to stop and look at what they really are. They look at the back of a quilt and admire the intricate stitching because they can’t imagine anyone could sit so long to do that. They buy a quilt and ruin it by looking at it with their restless eyes. I detest them.” She stepped back from me, still without touching me. “So what would you do in that room of yours?”
“Listen to music.”
“Is that why you’re wearing those headphones around your neck?”
“Yes.”
“What about your career as a rhetorician? Did you work for one of the top firms?”
Her little joke was really quite witty, the idea of firms of rhetoricians competing with one another for business throughout a city where the formal beauty of language has been sacrificed to the polyglot elisions of the hearing deaf.
“Language failed me,” I explained and wondered if she would recognize the echo from her own notebook.
“Sometimes words fail me,” she said, absolutely echoing herself and watching me intently as if to see if I had heard the echo and thus could read her writing. She was devious and direct at the same time, which I found enticingly confusing. “Words fail me,” she added, “after I’ve had sex.”
“Words fail me before I’ve had sex,” I responded and knew even before she’d burst out laughing that I’d made perhaps the first spontaneous joke in my life and not at all the sort that I and my fellow students of language, all of us having had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the eighteenth century, used to make in college and that generally involved intentional catachresis, which is of course the misuse of words themselves.
“You’re a funny man. You talk funny. You think funny. You dress funny. You have a funny haircut and funny glasses and funny shoes. But you do have a beautiful face. Do you know that? You have the most beautiful face I’ve ever seen.”
“My mother used to tell me that.”
She put her hand to her mouth and turned around and walked away from me. I had not seen her from behind or noticed what she was wearing. She was dressed in many overlapping layers of colorful clothes: perhaps three shirts whose sleeves were of different lengths, a tiny purple skirt, green tights, droopy gold socks over the bottom of the tights, and short, black boots. She was like a quilt herself, harmonious, inviting, distinct.
I had never understood the importance of the rear view. In my wandering through the streets I had turned not to watch women but to watch other men turn to watch women and had wondered why they’d turned and if there was any bond between us or was I not, with my peculiarities, a man like other men?
The significant things were in the front, after all—the voice, the eyes, the sex. But as this woman stood now with her back to me, I realized that validation was somehow effectuated in the backside. It was the final place for desire to stamp its approval.
Hers was held within that tiny skirt a round and perfect planet. I could only imagine it halved, atop those thin, green limbs.
Under her influence, like some new emotion to which I had been dead all my life, fantasy was feeding my blood.
She turned around. Her hand was still at her mouth as if to hold in her words. “So are you gay?”
No one had ever asked me that before. I was surprised no one had ever asked me that before. I was highly educated. I was something of an aesthete, within the confines of my continued asceticism. And, yes, I was fair of face and hard of build. Perhaps, they would say, he’s not a heterosexual, but he’s certainly a heteroclite. I would have assumed that I would be assumed by some to be a homosexual, so superficially is judgment rendered in this sophistical culture of ours. But as was said by the sign my father kept at the very edge of the desk in his chambers, right in the nose of those who sat facing him across that huge span, ASSUME NOTHING.
I had sometimes thought I would have liked to be gay.
At least it would have been to have been something. But I could not do it. I could not even imagine it. It seems no easier to become homosexual if you are not than it must be to become heterosexual if you are not.
In answer to her question I scoffed and pretended to be offended. “Just because you like my looks you think—”
“Looks have nothing to do with it. The world is full of ugly gay men and straight men so pretty you want to ask them who does their lashes. What I want to know is do you fuck women?”
The bluntness and vulgarity of her question confounded me enough to make my answer stupidly equivocal: “In a manner of speaking.”
“‘In a manner of speaking’!” she mocked. “Give me a break.”
“I told you. I’m married. I—”
She looked toward the ceiling as if she expected to see hovering there the spaceship that had brought me here from my planet, Naïveté. “Almost all my male customers are gay, and half of them are married. So tell me: do you or don’t you—”
“Women,” I said. “Only women. Yes. But it’s been awhile.”
She finally walked back to me. “How long?”
I had no idea how long. I had, at that time, no memory of sex whatsoever. I might have been a virgin, for all I knew.
So I didn’t know what to answer. But I sensed from the way she was looking at me, hungry for my innocence despite the bravado of her own talk, that I would not embarrass myself by claiming the truth. “I can’t remember.”
“Maybe you really are married.” A wicked glee danced in her eyes.
“Maybe you really are a cynic,” I responded. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Camus said that cynicism is the temptation shared by all forms of intelligence.”
“But you aren’t.”
“Intelligent?”
“Married,” she said impatiently. “You’re not married.”
I didn’t know how she knew, but I confessed quite happily, “No, I’m not married,” for I had been worried about how I would tell her that in fact I had no wife.
“I’m glad …”
What relief her words brought to me, what hope.
“… because now I won’t have to sell you my Broken Star.”
If she was going to play with me, I was going to play with her. “Are you afraid that if I buy it I’ll kill it?” I quoted her notebook.
I couldn’t catch her. Did she know? Did she know I could read it, or did she think it was just another coincidence that my words came close to her words?
“You lied to me,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me the truth. But don’t lie to me. Understand?”
The truth. What did she know of the truth? I had spent my whole conscious life trying to understand the truth. There was so much I could tell her. “Nietzsche said that the truth—”
“Do you lie in bed too?”
I knew what that meant. I knew what she was seeing: the two of us in bed and her heels riding my ass all the way to Jerusalem. How could I lie to her? How could I find her not beautiful or desirable?
“The only thing I do in bed is listen to music.” That was certainly the truth. I slept against a crack between walls.
“Did you ever play it?” she asked.
I knew what she meant, but to see how she would respond I said, “I play my tapes every hour I’m awake.”
“Did you ever play it actively?” she said pointedly, and I was glad she seemed to know me well enough already to know just what to ask.
What harm in telling her? I had no idea whether I would ever see her again. I was waiting for a customer to walk in and render my companionship redundant or for her to decide even while we were by ourselves that I was too strange or weak or inexperienced. She might as well understand that from my point of view I had become, in my search for the truth and through considerable pain and confusion, one of Nietzsche’s free spirits, one of his new philosophers, an investigator of myself “to the point of cruelty,” as he said, a night owl in broad daylight, pedantic, incapable of being born into either the incomprehensible or the irrational. And what I called the world would be, Husserlianly, created only by me—my image, my reason, my will, my love would thus be realized.
“When I was a little boy, my father bought me a violin. It was a great extravagance, like most of what he did. He was a very generous man. He believed that a person could be overwhelmed into performance. So he bought me a violin made by Carlo Bergonzi toward the end of the eighteenth century, though its fittings were modern. And a bow that was even older. He then hired me a very fine teacher, from Juilliard. I studied the violin for seven years. That’s a short time in the life of a violinist but a long time in the life of a boy. Sometimes I loved that instrument and hated to play it, and sometimes I hated that instrument and loved to play it. During that whole time, I was waiting for when I would be ready to play Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin. There was no music I loved more. I would listen to them for hours on LPs. The more I listened, the more I came to love them. Even when my teacher said I was ready for them, I refused to study them. But then one day I gave in, or gave up, and bought the score. I wasn’t so foolish as to think I might be able to play the chaconne, at least without embarrassing myself and my teacher and my father and the already long-suffering ghost of Carlo Bergonzi. But what I wanted from that same suite was the sarabande. That was my dance. That was my favorite. But I could not play it. Its great ornamentation and its high polyphony eluded me. I had never loved a piece of music more or come to hate a piece of music more. One day as I sat before it I became paralyzed, or at least my arms and hands did. I screamed for my mother, but it was my father who came into my room and took my violin and bow from me. I’ve not played since.”
She reached across to me and put her hand on my wrist and moved her fingers up beneath the sleeves of my suit jacket and shirt, where they rubbed the sensitive skin on the underside of my arm. “Where are they now?”
“In a closet. At home. In my apartment.”
“I’d like to see it.”
“The violin?”
“Your apartment.”
I looked down at her hand on my arm.
“Say something,” she said.
I was so overwhelmed by her directness in saying she wanted to come to my home and by her touching me that I could think of nothing to say that was my own. I watched the back of her hand move further up my sleeve and said, “You have uninhibited fingers.”
Her breathing quickened at my words. One of her fingers pressed into my skin as if I were a violin myself. “You have no idea.”
“I was quoting Nietzsche,” I confessed. “One of the attributes of free spirits is what he called uninhibited fingers for the unfathomable.”
“I’m a free spirit,” she said.
I could imagine she was. “He was talking about people who sacrifice everything in their search for the truth. He called them the new philosophers.”
“I didn’t think he was referring to girls who went around swinging their underpants over their heads.”
She was the first person I had ever wanted to hold in my arms. I wished I knew how. It is such a long and dangerous journey out of emptiness.
“Stop laughing,” she said, “and take me home.”
10 P.M.
I press the pillow once more to my face, smelling her though being careful not to speak to her, before I throw it back against the headboard and reach in the darkness for the console on Clara’s side of the bed. There I find the rheostats that control the entire rectangular track of lighting along all four walls of the loft.
I push one slowly up. The far wall emerges in the light breathing with color.
I am enveloped by quilts. Clara has hung them all with great care, stretching each one over a wooden frame so its weight will be distributed evenly. The quilts in her shop, on the other hand, are hung by Velcro or are folded in piles, though once a month, wearing latex gloves, Clara refolds each one.
She has taught me to love quilts and their
creation as I have taught her to love music and its creation, beyond her own fancying of Led Zeppelin and Steppenwolf and Madonna. And as I feel my human connection most to those who have died and left their music behind, so Clara feels joined to those women who pieced or appliquéd scraps of fabric into entire designs of great beauty and durable life. She has read to me of, and imagined aloud for me, the great quilting bees of the two centuries before ours, and we have imagined together the life of a young woman beginning the traditional thirteen quilts in the days of her maidenhood—twelve for quotidian use and the thirteenth her bridal quilt—and then the bee itself, which could not be held until she had betrothed herself to her beloved, when she would be joined by her friends and they would back and interline and finish her bridal quilt, and through their very gathering announce to the world that she is to be married.
I have joined the life of my country through these quilts around me and ended what I realized was a lifelong exile in the culture of Europe. As I lie here on the Double Wedding Ring that covers our bed and was Clara’s wedding gift to me, I am the true, evolved American man, beyond action, beyond provincialism, beyond greed, ambition, destructiveness, and the illusion of omnipotence.
Surrounding me are a Stair-Steps Illusion quilt from Kentucky, a Friendship quilt from Ohio, a Mennonite Light and Dark from Pennsylvania, a Sunshine and Shadow also from Pennsylvania, a Beloved Flag from Hawaii, over near the kitchen a Broken Dishes quilt from Indiana (which Clara gave to me on our first wedding anniversary and to honor the fact that we had broken no dishes, had no fights, as if it were conceivable to me even to raise my voice at her), a Stairway to Heaven (one of Clara’s favorite songs) quilt from Ohio, and next to that Jacob’s Ladder, also from Ohio, a Maze or Labyrinth from Kentucky that puts me in mind of Pope’s “Love in these labyrinths his slaves detains” (far better a line than those he wrote so poor Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater could be sung in English), and above, toward our immensely high ceiling, Birds in the Sky from Massachusetts, a Log Cabin Streak of Lightning from New York, and another anniversary present, a Star of Bethlehem from Maine on whose points I sometimes picture Clara’s hands as I lie on my back on this bed with my penis in her mouth and the straight furrow of her ass at the tips of my fingers.