Quarrel & Quandary

by Cynthia Ozick

  1.

  Once, when I had already been married for a time, I went to a friend’s wedding and fell in love with the bridegroom. It happened out of the blue, in an instant, as unexpectedly as a sneeze. I was not responsible for it; it came upon me; it was an incursion, an invasion—a possession, like that of a dybbuk. Or it was what diplomats call an “intervention,” an intact sovereign tract subjected without warning to military fire. Or it was a kind of spell, the way the unearthly music of a fairy-tale pipe casts a helpless enchantment, so that, willy-nilly, you are compelled to dance and dance without surcease.

  The bride had a small head and a Cheshire-cat smile. I had known her since childhood. Together, under the heavy-hanging trees, we had gathered acorns and pretended to dine on them. But we were not confidantes; we were not close. We had differing temperaments. She was humorous: her jokiness cut with an icy ironic blade. I was naïve and grave and obtuse. She was diligent at the violin and played it well. I hid when the piano teacher rang the doorbell. She was acutely and cleverly mathematical. I was an arithmetical imbecile. She was tall and I was short: we were seriously divided by our arms’ reach. Often I felt between us a jealous tremor. I was jealous because she was almost two years younger, and even in girlhood I lamented the passing of my prime. At eleven, I scribbled a story and appended a lie: “By the Young Author,” I wrote, “Age Nine.”

  The bride was standing under the wedding canopy in a white dress, her acorn head ringed by a wreath, when lovesickness struck. The venerable image of arrow or dart is crucially exact. Though I had met the bridegroom once before, in the long green darkening tangle of a meadow at dusk—it was a game of Frisbee—I had been unmoved. His thighs were taut, his calf-sinews thick; he had the inky curly hair of a runner on a Greek amphora. The white plastic disk arced into a blackening sky, along the trajectory of an invisible yet perfect night-rainbow. He sprinted after it; his catch was deft, like the pluck of a lyre. He was an Englishman. He was a mathematician. He was nothing to me.

  But when I saw him under the wedding canopy next to my childhood friend, I was seized and shaken by a dazing infatuation so stormy, so sibylline, so like a divination, that I went away afterward hollowed-out. Infatuation was not an added condition: it was loss—the strangeness of having lost what had never been mine.

  The newly married pair departed for England, by sea, in a sluggishly churning vessel. A shipboard postcard arrived: on the one side a view of the ship itself, all serene white flanks pocked by portholes, and on the other an unfamiliar script. It was the new husband’s. I studied his handwriting—examined its loops and troughs, the blue turns of ink where they thickened and narrowed, the height of the l’s and d’s, the width of the crossbars, the hillocks of the m’s and n’s, the connecting tails and the interrupting gaps. The sentences themselves were sturdy and friendly, funny and offhand—entirely by-the-by. Clearly, composing this note was a lunch-table diversion. “You do it,” I imagined the new wife telling the new husband. In a minute and a half it was done.

  For weeks I kept the card under my eye; it was as if the letters of each word were burning, as if the air above and below the letters were shuddering in an invisible fire. The words, the sentences, were of no moment; I hardly saw them; but the letters crazed me. They were the new husband’s nerves, they were the vibrations of his pulse, his fingers’ pressure, his most intimate mark. They were more powerful than the imprint of his face and shoulders, which had anyhow begun to fade. What I remembered was the hand leaping up into the dark to snatch the Frisbee out of the sky. That same hand had shaped these intoxicating yet regimented letters. A mathematician’s letters: as upright and precise as numbers.

  Infatuation has its own precision. It focuses on its object as directly and sharply as sunlight through a magnifying glass: it enlarges and clarifies, but it also scorches. What we call lovesickness, or desire, is deliberate in that way—the way of exactitude and scrupulous discrimination—and at the same time it is wildly undeliberate, zigzag, unpremeditated, driven, even loony.

  What I finally did with—or to—that postcard was both meticulously focused and rapaciously mad.

  It was the hand that my desire had fixed on—or, rather, the force and the brain that flowed from that hand. I wanted to get into that hand—to become it, to grow myself into its blood vessels, to steal its fire. I had already felt the boil of that fire under my own hand: the phosphorescent threads of the letters, as blue as veins, bled hotly into the paper’s grain.

  And I knew what I would do. I took my pencil and slowly, slowly traced over the letters of the first word. Slowly, slowly. The sensation was that of a novice dancer mimicking the movements of a ballet master; or of a mute mouth speaking through a ventriloquist; or of a shadow following a light; or of a mountain climber ascending the upward slope of a t, stopping to rest on the horizontal shelf of the crossbar, again toiling upward, turning, again resting on a ledge, and then sliding downward along a sheerly vertical wall.

  Letter by letter, day by day, I pressed the point of my pencil into the fleshly lines of the sea-borne bridegroom’s pen; I jumped my pencil over his jumps and skips, those minute blank sites of his pen’s apnea.

  In a week or so it was finished. I had coupled with him. Every word was laboriously Siamese-twinned. Each of the letters bore on its back the graphite coat I had slowly, slowly laid over it. Breath by breath, muscle by muscle, nerve by nerve, with the concentration of a monkish scribe, with the dedication of a Torah scribe, I had trod in his tracks and made his marks. Like a hunter, I had pursued his marks; I had trapped and caged them. I was his fanatical, indelible Doppelgänger. And a forger besides.

  2.

  All this was done in secret: lovesickness is most often silent, private, concealed. But sometimes it is wily and reckless, thrusting itself into the world like a novelist on the loose. To wit: I once observed an illustrious young professor of philosophy swinging a small boy between his knees. The child was rapturous; the man went on teasing and swinging. He had a merry, thin, mobile face—not at all professorial. And yet his reputation was dauntingly fierce: he was an original; his famous Mind crackled around him like an electric current, or like a charged whip fending off mortals less dazzlingly endowed. It was said that his intellectual innovations and uncommon insights had so isolated him from ordinary human pursuits, and his wants were so sparse, that he slept on a couch in his mother’s apartment in an outer borough. And here he was, laughing and swinging—himself a boy at play.

  The blow of lovesickness came hammering down. I had no connection of any kind with this wizard of thought. It was unlikely that I could ever aspire to one.

  But I had just then been reading Peter Quennell’s biography of Lord Byron, and was captivated by its portrait of Lady Caroline Lamb, a married flirt who had seduced and conquered Byron (or vice-versa—both were mercurial and inclined toward escapades). Quennell described Lady Caroline as a volatile woman in search of “some violent, self-justificatory explosion, some crisis in which she could gather up the spasmodic and ill-directed energies that drove her.… The fever of Romanticism was in her blood.” She delighted in spats and subterfuges and secret letters delivered to her lover by a page, who turned out to be Lady Caroline in disguise. It was she who invented Byron’s most celebrated epithet—mad, bad, and dangerous to know. This would do admirably for Lady Caroline.

  Certainly Byron found her dangerous to know. When, exasperated, he tired of her, he discovered she was impossible to get rid of. He called her “a little volcano,” and complained that her fascination was “unfortunately coupled with a total want of common conduct.” In the end she became a pest, an affliction, a plague. In vindictive verses he pronounced her a fiend. She was a creature of ruse and caprice and jealousy; she would not let him go. She chased after him indefatigably, she badgered him, she burned him in effigy, she stabbed herself. And she wrote him letters.

  The fever of Romanticism was in my blood; I had been maddened by a hero of imagination, a man who c
ould unravel the skeins of logic that braid human cognition. Byron had his clubfoot; my philosopher was still spending his nights on his mother’s couch. Byron spoke of his pursuer as a volcano; I could at least leak quantities of epistolary lava. And so, magnetized and wanting to mystify, I put on a disguise and began my chase: I wrote letters. They were love letters; they were letters of enthrallment, of lovesickness. I addressed them to the philosopher’s university and signed them all, in passionately counterfeit handwriting, “Lady Caroline Lamb.”

  3.

  But what of lovesickness in reverse? The arrow not suffered but inadvertently shot? The wound not taken but blindly caused?

  The Second World War was just over; the college cafeteria swarmed with professed Communists, grim veterans on the G.I. Bill, girls flaunting Edwardian skirts down to their ankles in the New Look style, and a squat square mustached fellow who, when anyone inquired after his politics, insisted he was a monarchist working for the restoration of his dynasty. There was, in addition, an aristocratic and very young Turkish boy, a prodigy, whose father was attached to the United Nations and whose mother wore the veil. The Turkish boy and I studied Latin together, and sometimes spoke of amor intellectualis—but intellectual love rooted in a common admiration of Catullus’s ode to kissing was too heated, or not heated enough. In the cafeteria I was often ambushed by spasms of bewitchment—over a green-eyed sophomore, for instance, with a radio-announcer voice, who was himself in love with a harpist called Angel. I waited for him at the foot of a certain staircase, hoping he might come down it. I cultivated one of his classmates in the expectation that I might learn something intimate about my distant love, and I did: his nickname, I was told, was Beanhead. “Beanhead, Beanhead,” I would murmur at the bottom of the stairs. All my loves at that time were dreamlike, remote, inconclusive, evanescent.

  But one afternoon in winter, a foreign-seeming young man (I had noticed him in the cafeteria, curled over a notebook) followed me home. What made him appear foreign was his intensity, his strict stride, his unembarrassed persistence; and also the earnest luster of his dangling black bangs, which shielded his eyes like a latticed gate, and freed him to gaze without moderation. Following me home was no easy journey—it was a long, long subway ride to the end of the line. Despite that curtained look, I saw in his face an urgency I knew in myself. Unaccountably, I had become his Beanhead, his Byron, his bridegroom. I pleaded with him not to undertake the trek to the northeast Bronx—what, I privately despaired, would I do with him?

  He filled an underground hour by explaining himself: he was a Persian in command of the history and poetry of his beautiful country, and with my permission, because at this moment he was unluckily without a nosegay (he was prone to words like nosegay, garland, attar), he would offer me instead a beautiful poem in Arabic. He drew out his notebook and a pen: from its nib flowed a magical calligraphy.

  “This is my poem, my original own,” he said, “for you,” and folded the sheet and slipped it into my copy of Emily Dickinson, exactly at the page where I had underlined “There’s a certain Slant of light / On winter afternoons.”

  “You don’t really want to ride all this distance,” I said, hoping to shake him off. “Suppose you just get out at the East 86th Street express stop and go right back, all right?”

  “Ah,” he said, “will the moon abandon the sun?”

  But the third time he demanded to come home with me, it was the sun who abandoned the moon. I had had enough of lovelorn importuning. He accepted his dismissal with Persian melancholy, pressing on me yet another poem, his original own, that he had set down in those melodious, undulating Scheherazadean characters. At the entrance to the subway, forbidden to go farther, he declaimed his translation: “There is a garden, a wall, a brook. You are the lily, I am the brook. O wall, permit me to refresh the lily!”

  No one is crueler than the conscious object of infatuation: I blew back the black veil of hair, looked into a pair of moonstruck black eyes, and laughed. Meanly, heartlessly.

  4.

  And once I made a suitor cry. He was, I feared, a genuine suitor. By now the war had long been over, and nearly all the former G.I.s had gladly returned to civilian life. My suitor, though, was still in uniform; he was stationed at an army base on an island in the harbor. He had a tidy blond head on which his little soldier’s cap rested; he had little blunt fingers; everything about him was miniature, like a toy soldier. He was elfin, but without elfishness: he was sober, contained, and as neutral as khaki. He put me in mind of a drawing in a children’s coloring book: those round clear pale eyes anticipating blueness, that firm outline beyond which no crayon would ever stray. He had a kind of blankness waiting to be filled in. On weekends, when he was free, he came to call with a phonograph record under his arm. We sat side by side, sternly taking in the music. We were two sets of blank outlines. The music was coloring us in.

  One Sunday he brought Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration. The jacket supplied the title in German, Tod und Verklärung, and a description—tone poem. But it was “transfiguration” that held me. Transfiguration! Would the toy soldier be transformed into live human flesh and begin to move and think on his own?

  When he returned to his island, I put Death and Transfiguration on the record player and, alone, listened to it over and over again. It colored the empty air, but I saw there would be no transfiguration. Stasis was the toy soldier’s lot.

  The next Sunday, I piled all the records that had been his gifts into his arms. “At least keep this one. You liked it,” he said dolefully: it was Tod und Verklärung. But I dropped it on top of the farewell pile and watched him weep, my marble heart immune to any arrow.

  5.

  Not long afterward, a young man whose eyes were not green, who inspired nothing eccentric or adventurous, who never gave a thought to brooks and lilies or death and transfiguration, who never sought to untangle the knots in the history of human thought, began, with awful consistency, to bring presents of marzipan. So much marzipan was making me sick—though not lovesick.

  Ultimately the philosopher learned the true identity of the writer of those love letters; it was reported that he laughed. He is, I believe, still sleeping on his mother’s couch.

  I never saw the bridegroom again. He never sent another postcard. I suppose he is an unattractive old man by now. Or anyhow I hope so.

  The marzipan provider? Reader, I married him.

  How I Got Fired from My Summer Job

  The summer after graduate school, when I was twenty-two years old, I wanted to get a job. I had just come back from Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, at that time a hotbed of the New Criticism, where I had completed a fat M.A. thesis on the later novels of Henry James. In those distant days, an M.A. was like a mini-Ph.D.; I had even had to endure a grilling by a committee of three professors. It was important not to go after a Ph.D., though, because it meant you were not in earnest about becoming a writer; it was, in fact, an embarrassment, a cowardly expedient that could shame you. The models for the young of my generation, after all, Hemingway and Faulkner and Willa Cather, had rushed straight into life. Yet when the chairman of the English Department summoned me into his office, I was certain that he was going to urge me to continue. To forestall him, I instantly offered my confession: I was not planning to stick around for a higher degree. I expected him to say, “But you did so nicely with Henry James, so you must stay.” Instead he said, “Well, right, you should go home and get married.” I was hurt; I didn’t want to marry anyone; what I really wanted was to write a metaphysical novel.

  But first I wanted a summer job.

  Even though I was not serious about a Ph.D., I was very serious about the New Criticism. Its chief tenet was that you could pry meaning out of any sort of mysterious parlance, especially if Ezra Pound had written it. Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were the New Criticism’s archbishops (and faith and mystery were what kept it going), but A Theory of Literature, by René Wellek and Austin Warren—“We
llek-and-Warren” for short—was its Bible. Piously, I carried Wellek-and-Warren with me everywhere, and it was on my desk the very first day of my summer job. I had answered an ad by Margate, Haroulian, a firm of accountants. What had attracted me was its location: a short walk from Bryant Park, the green rectangle behind the Forty-second Street Library. I plotted lunch hours on a bench under a hot and dreamy city sun, eating a sandwich out of a paper bag and inhaling the philosophical fragrance of Wellek-and-Warren.

  The man who interviewed me was neither Mr. Margate nor Mr. Haroulian. He introduced himself as George Berkeley, Mr. Haroulian’s second-in-command. Disciplined blond wisps were threaded across his reddish scalp, and his mouth made a humorless line. He was dry and precise and acutely courteous. Though I had no previous office experience, he seemed pleased with my credentials.

  “So you’ve got a Master’s,” he said. “What in?”

  “English,” I said.

  “That’s fine. That’s all right,” he said, and asked if I could type. I said I could, and he explained what the work would require. I was to copy lists of numbers onto different printed forms, with three sets of carbons. He showed me my desk and the forms, each with its vertical rows of small oblong boxes. He opened a drawer filled with carbon paper and staples. “That’s all you’ll need,” he said.

  “But your name,” I marveled. “It’s so thrilling to have a name like that!”

  “I don’t see anything special about my name.”

  “George Berkeley—Bishop Berkeley, the eighteenth-century idealist! He said no existence is conceivable that isn’t conscious spirit. He believed in Universal Mind. He’s the one that infuriated Samuel Johnson so much that Dr. Johnson kicked a stone and said ‘I refute it thus.’ ”

  “I don’t think we’re related,” George Berkeley said, and disappeared into an inner office. It was Mr. Haroulian’s office. I never saw Mr. Margate, who seemed to have no office.