by J. D. Landis
“W-u-n G-o-n J-e-w. Jew is a common Chinese name. And yet few Chinese are Jewish.”
“I don’t imagine so,” I respond.
“It’s a joke.” He’s not laughing now. He seems angry with me.
I still don’t get his joke, and I ask him, “Are you Jewish?”
Now he laughs, deeply, almost uncontrollably. I wait for him to stop. At first his laughter hurts me. But then I realize he thinks I’ve made a joke and clearly a brilliant one at that.
“Buddhist,” he says when he can speak again. He actually bows his head slightly when he says the word, in a rather enviable gesture of humility.
“I don’t know much about it,” I say, “except that George Steiner wrote about the Buddhist belief that the soul becomes purified through silence. He named that book Language and Silence, so I gravitated to it like a seed to an egg. It was very comforting to me to read that at the time I did. What do you believe?”
He looks up at me over his glasses. “Believe,” he asks, “or believe in?”
“There’s no difference.”
His eyes narrow. “If I had to believe in the things I believe, I’d die. It’s the difference between faith and resignation.”
I am unconvinced by his philosophizing, but I don’t want to argue with him, out of fear that he will stop talking. So I concede: “What do you believe in then?”
“Salvation.” He seems to like the idea of it. He smiles contentedly. “In this life. Not in the next. Not like you Christians.” I listen for some echo of contempt, but all I hear is the dullness of fact.
“What saves you?” I try to guess. Music. Sex. No longer for me knowledge of anything that comes in through the mind. Rather the breathing of one’s beloved in the sable warmth of sleep.
“Enlightenment,” he answers. “Through the spirit. We say the body is like froth. A mirage. Accept that, and you’ll never see the king of death.”
“I was dead once.”
“Really,” he replies. I can’t tell if it’s a question.
“Are you married?” I ask.
Nothing seems to surprise this man. It’s as if his mind is working like my own, has attached itself to my own. He shakes his head. He smiles. “I’m pure,” he answers.
I don’t understand this. I shake my head.
He leans toward me. “We believe that the suffering in life is caused by desire, and the only way to end your suffering is through self-purification.”
“Oh,” I say, “ascesis.”
Now it’s he who’s puzzled. “What?”
“Ascesis. That’s what I’ve practiced my whole life. Someone once even called me an ascetic priest. Saint Johnny of Ascesis.”
He nods now. He understands what I’m talking about. “In the Dhammapada it says that if you hold a blade of grass wrong, it cuts your hand, and if you practice asceticism wrong, you go to hell.”
“That’s where I am now.”
I expect him to mock such hyperbole, but he is somber when he says, “I can tell. You seem so … so …” For the first time, he falters in his speech. He can’t find the word he’s looking for. His face grows foreign.
“Weak?” I say.
“Fragile.”
He gets up. I’m afraid he is going to leave. But he goes not toward the door; he comes toward me.
He sits down with me on the couch. He takes my hand. His is dry, almost cold.
“What’s the matter?” he asks.
It is such a touching question. It seems the perfect formulation of words.
“My wife is gone.”
He pushes his glasses atop his tiny nose and gazes at me through them. It must be how he reads.
“Marriage.” He looks to either side of me as if to imagine her there. But he cannot see her any more than can I. We are alone together here. “She left you?”
Not in the way he means. “No.”
“Oh. Gone.” He looks stricken, almost ashamed. I am learning to read through the indecipherability of his face. “She’s dead?”
I have no words to answer that. I shake my head.
“Another man?”
I laugh.
He drops my hand. He thinks I’m laughing at him, his naïveté or cynicism or whatever it might be that would cause him to suspect one’s wife would be with another man, when all I was laughing at was the redundancy of it.
“I deliver things,” he says emphatically.
“I’m afraid I don’t …” But then I realize what he means. I picture him in his business, riding up on his bike, carting his greasy food up stairs, let in, paid, and every once in a while, rarely, perhaps, but sometimes, surely, told he’s wanted, told in one way or another, a word, a wink, a gesture, a raising of a skirt and a spreading of legs. I know this goes on in the world. I know it exists somewhere else outside my head. I can see him with Clara, entering her from above, his silver buttocks swimming through the air, her hands alight like sconces on his shoulder blades as she smiles at me from where her head nestles in his neck and calls out to both of us, “Fuck me, Johnny.”
Wun Gon Jew says, “The Hindus say that the fiend of lust takes advantage of solitude.”
“You don’t have to explain,” I answer. “I’m not as naïve as I may look. I knew what you were referring to. When you say you deliver things, you mean you come upon women who want you to fuck them.” I swell proudly over my use of such Paphian language.
“Men.”
“What?”
“Men,” he repeats. “It’s usually men.”
“They want you to fuck their wives?”
He looks at me as if I can hardly be the man who only moments before was grieving over the absence of his wife. He is shocked. He has seen into my mind and misunderstood completely what I have been picturing there.
“They want to fuck me.”
“The wives?”
“The men.” His impatience is manifest, but it is balanced between humor and exasperation.
Life is far worse than I have thought it. His life. Even mine. I had pictured him some ruptuary, nameless, faceless, speechless, come to me with food, and he turns out to know a thing or two, to be able to say, “Shostakovich,” and to take my hand when I am suffering.
Now it is I who takes his hand.
“Please,” he says.
“Please what?”
“Please let go.”
I do. “Sonny, I’m sorry.”
He stands up. He says nothing, yet I know he is leaving. But he is not sure how to make his exit. I remember from my days in the world how hard it was to make exits. Meeting was awkward enough, but how to separate bodies or gazes or even voices on the phone once contact had been made remained a mystery to me. It was probably one of the reasons I went into retreat. I have never learned how to suffer with grace the shock of departure.
“I’ll get your violin now.”
That stops him. He seems either to have forgotten about it or not to have believed me in the first place.
I go into my closet. I know where to find the violin because I know where to find anything at all in my closet. But it takes me some time, for the violin is not so much hidden as buried away. Its associations are, to say the least, painful.
I worry that he won’t be there when I emerge. I worry that he will have left and taken with him absolutely nothing.
But when I come out into the vast room holding the violin in its case with one hand and the bow in its sheath with the other, he is still there, though he’s moved and in fact is moving still, walking along the far wall and looking up at it with his chin in his hand and his glasses down at the end of his nose like someone in an art gallery.
He becomes aware of my presence and turns around and says, “These quilts are beautiful. My grandmothers were seamstresses. They worked machines in the sweatshops. But they would have loved this stitching. It’s so unbelievably intricate. It’s like looking at a score for the first time. I wish they could have seen these things. They went to their graves saying that n
othing beautiful had ever been made by American fingers.”
I put down the violin case and bow on one of the Seymour brothers’ Federal worktables and am drawn to where he stands, though whether by him or by the quilts themselves I cannot say. We stand together silently beneath them. We are directly before the Sunshine and Shadow quilt that Clara bought on a trip we took to Pennsylvania. I look into the spread of its irradiating diamonds of light and color until I become dizzy and have to close my eyes. This has never happened to me before. I grasp his arm and speak.
“This is all Clara’s. All this beauty. She has the most amazing eye.” I keep my own eyes closed. “Everything about me is internal—words, sounds, images of things I can’t even manage to see. I’m a self-indulgent impressionist. That’s what Santayana called Nietzsche. That’s what he called himself. In a letter to a Mrs. Toy. T-o-y. Perhaps she was Chinese. Clara is not like me. There’s a reality to her. Her body is the only thing I’ve ever been able to hold onto on this earth. Even that violin I couldn’t … She has the most remarkable physical presence. That’s what I’m trying to say. I wish she would just come home. I wish she would just walk through that door over there and you could meet her and we could listen to music together. Shostakovich. Steppenwolf. I don’t care.”
As I’m talking, I realize I probably sound like a lunatic going on about my wife and expect to feel Wun Gon Jew pulling out of my grasp to run toward the door toward which I am pointing. But he doesn’t move at all, except to quiver in my hand, and when I open my eyes I find him trying to suppress laughter.
“Steppenwolf?”
“Not the Hesse,” I explain. “The—”
Now Wun Gon Jew pulls away from me, not to run but to execute delicate little dance steps next to me in his horrid sneakers, and as he dances, he sings: “Why don’t you come with me, little girl, on a magic carpet ride.”
“That’s it!” I shout.
He stops dancing. He stops singing. He does laugh now.
“She loves that song.”
“Maybe she is real,” he says.
“Maybe she is,” I agree.
“Do you have a photo of her?”
“No.”
“You don’t have a photo of your own wife?”
I am getting irritated. “I told you no. I don’t believe in photography.”
I have never owned a photograph in my life. I don’t like what they do to people. You see too much in them, the past, the future, a dozen faces frozen into one. This is stasis that shuts off life like a stopcock. Among my mother’s effects were photographs of me. I looked into my pretty, pudgy baby face and saw a bit of her and some of him and gagged, literally. I threw them all away.
“It’s not music,” he agrees.
“No, it’s not.”
“So what does she look like, this wife of yours?”
I try to see her, but, as always, I fail. I can feel her in me, but I can’t picture her.
“I don’t know,” I confess.
“Does she look like that?”
This startles me. I look toward the door, thinking she’s come quietly home and he’s seen her. But the door stands closed, bleak against the night.
I look back at him and see him pointing, not toward the door but toward the eastern part of the northern wall, where some Madonnas hang.
He walks toward them. I follow him. We stand beneath these holy mothers and look at them together. His eyes are up, and yet his head is bowed. His glasses touch his upper lip.
He’s found her image. Not in one but shared among several: the condescending serenity of Raphael’s Virgin of the Fish; the comforting intelligence of Botticelli’s Madonna who closes her eyes so that the urchinlike John the Baptist can engage ours; and most of all van Hemmessen’s sensual, pouting, permed seducer, whose lids are heavy with expended bliss, whose brows are so delicate a snake might have licked them into place, who rests her splendid face upon the caressing fingers of her beloved son.
“I see her,” I say, in a way that I hope adequately expresses my gratitude.
“Who did that one?” He points.
“Botticelli.”
“Look at that boy.”
“John the Baptist.”
“Rough trade.” He reaches up and runs his fingers over the pronounced angles of the boy’s suffering face. He does look like a child who has been, or will be, beaten. “I wonder if anyone has ever changed religions because of the art.”
“I can’t think of a better reason.” In fact, I can’t think of any other reason to change one or even have one. Art and fucking, those most private of divertissements, seem the only transcendences. Everything else just keeps you glued to the procrustean loam.
“So where is she?” he asks.
“There. There. There.” I point to one painting after another.
He turns from the wall. “I mean where has she gone, this wife of yours? You said she’s gone. But she hasn’t left you. She isn’t dead. And she’s not with another man. Where is she?”
He is aggressive in his questioning. He refuses to believe she exists.
“Come.”
I go to the bed. He follows me, though I still cannot feel him through the floor.
I sit. He stands before me. I notice for the first time that his shiny, shapeless pants are held up by a piece of rope. I remain so forlorn at Clara’s absence that I think again of the hangman.
“Sit, please.” I even pat the quilt.
He does sit. Not near me, but at least I finally feel his weight, like some discrete quop of rain on the vast inland sea of my being.
He is the first person, Elspeth aside, who has touched our bed. He is no fantasy, this one, but a real if insubstantial man who’s all I have left. I look at him and want him to be Clara, but I know he’s not. I want to take him in my arms and bury myself within him, my entire being, but I shall not. He is afraid of me, he seems almost to cower. This is so unlike Clara, my malapert, who beckons me with every glance and gesture, knowing, as she does, that I cannot get enough of her and would wither and die if ever I did.
I reach behind me for Clara’s Week-at-a-Glance.
“Come closer.”
He inches toward me, and to mask his fear he says, “This is the biggest bed I’ve ever seen.”
I picture his own bed, as narrow as he, chaste in his purity, but it’s Clara I see in it, naked, knees apart, floating away toward the horizon, watching me disappear.
“What size is it?” he continues.
“Do you know what piece of music first had the cadenza written out?”
He understands, but he seems to find it fatuous. “This is your empire?”
“I live in this bed. I listen to music. I read. I think. I wait for Clara.”
“How long?”
“Nine feet.”
I think he’s going to ask me where we get sheets for it and is it actually square, but he says, each word distinct, as if I were trying his patience, “How long have you been waiting for her?”
I look at the clock beside the bed. “Almost four hours.”
He shakes his head. “That’s all? I thought you were going to say all your life.”
“Almost four hours,” I repeat.
“That’s nothing.”
“It’s not the time.” For it isn’t.
“Then what is it?”
I open Clara’s Week-at-a-Glance and point to the empty space that’s now, this minute we are sitting here together on the bed.
“What the hell is that?” He puts his finger down into the thicket of her words.
I feel him touching her. His eyes follow his fingers over the tortured scordatura of her writing.
“Her appointments.”
“Can you read this?”
“Yes.”
He looks at me with the same perplexed expression with which he’s been trying to read her writing. “So what does it say? Where is she?”
“It’s what it doesn’t say.” I point again to the empty space.
>
I can see his narrow eyes working to avoid being caught within the net of her language. They struggle to escape but cannot. I wonder what he sees. Etymologically cognate here are Oriental and orientation. Mankind looked to the East, as it were, to find out where he stood, to locate the truth.
“There’s nothing there,” he says.
I nod. “‘The depths lie on the surface.’”
He looks up at me, surprised. “Buddha?”
“Nietzsche.”
“There’s nothing there,” he repeats, as if to tell me that he finally understands.
I feel like sobbing. Had I expected him to supply her there, to bring her back to life, manifest within lines pressed from her pencil? Instead he merely corroborates the truth. It’s as if she’s stepped off the edge of the earth. I can feel her gone. I am filled with the absence of her.
How can I make him understand what this emptiness means?
“The Lamas,” he says, “have what are called their elegant sayings. One of them’s about the astronomer who can calculate the movements of the moon and the stars, but he doesn’t know that in his own house the women are misbehaving.”
Why do I take such delight in this? It is so distracting an image: the sky is so vast, it must be the only thing in nature that we may speak of as full and empty at the same time, plenum and vacuum, unless it is the heart of one whose love has gone; the misbehaving woman is so tight before the eyes. I can almost see her.
“Maybe she doesn’t want you to know where she is,” he says. “Or maybe you don’t even have a wife.”
He is frustrated, so he strikes out at me. He persists in thinking I’m some vecordious husband with no wife to his name sitting here alone at the top of the city in the midst of music and the smell of Chinese food that’s colliquating in the sink.
“Maybe I don’t,” I say. “But I did.”
He looks again at the empty space in her datebook. He touches it now and looks up at me.
“Yes,” he says, as if he finally comprehends. “Sometimes people just go away. They disappear. Most people you see you see for the last time in your life. Like me, for instance.”
With that, he rises from the bed.
“Where are you going?”
“You were my final delivery. I’ve got to take my bike back.”