by Ruby Namdar
Andrew reached for the faucet, turned up the hot water, and rinsed his face slowly as if removing a mud mask. He felt no cathartic relief. The chill of the tiles was gone, yielding to the unexpected heat. He would have to ask the super to get the air conditioners out of storage if he hoped to get any work done today. Who would believe it: air-conditioning in May! Andrew hated air conditioners, especially the one that took up half the living-room window and spoiled the perfect symmetry of the view.
He straightened up and peered blankly at the mirror, forgetting to dry his face. Large beads of water, as warm and heavy as tears, dropped from his cheeks and chin to the sink. What had happened to his wedding ring? Where had he put it? He last remembered seeing it tucked away in a little box in the top drawer of the living-room chest. It must still be there. You didn’t throw away a wedding ring. Or did you? The antique shops were full of them: old gold rings, smooth or engraved, inset with diamonds or festooned with sapphires, inscribed with the names of those long gone. It wasn’t worth melting them down. The metal had little value. People obviously bought them, perhaps even wore them as wedding rings themselves. Ghost rings. How bizarre: the living wearing the dead. Jesus, it was muggy! A burning lump of sorrow pressed on his heart and chest. If only it could be washed away by clear, living water. A dive into a cold, pristine pond.
The bittersweet memory was working its way toward the surface of his damp skin. His first swim with a wedding ring. Lake Placid, August 1976. It was the closest thing to a honeymoon that he and Linda—loath to do the conventional, middle-class thing—had permitted themselves. The lake was huge, deep, ice-cold even in summer. Curled anxiously, his finger was conscious of its thin gold band. It gave new meaning to the water, now a transparent, semisolid expanse, the clearest matter he had ever seen. He was constantly afraid it would slip from his finger and disappear into the long fingers of eelgrass stretching toward him from the deep. Large water birds skimmed the surface, quacking to each other with wild glee. Linda was swimming gracefully. The cold water rocked her body, which was heavy with child, cradling her in its clear lap. Her wedding ring didn’t worry her. She was used to rings. She wore this one on her finger as lightly as if it were a part of her, an extension of her body.
Where, damn it, was all this taking him? Nowhere! In the end it would all disappear—the angry words, the insults, the memories, the longing—all swept away by the waves. And yet, deep down, it hurt.
3
May 18, 2001
The 25th of Iyar, 5761
Ten a.m. Andrew, naked except for the damp towel still wrapped around his waist, went to his desk. He drank his coffee quickly, afraid to put off the start of the day’s work. At the height of a flourishing career, after years in which writing had come so easily, it had suddenly turned into an exhausting, menacing chore, one whose outcome was uncertain. Even drinking his coffee had lost its cozy, meditative quality. He was too tightly wound to enjoy it. The morning’s Times still lay on the mat outside the front door; he would look at it at lunchtime. He had stopped leafing through it on mornings set aside for work, loath to cloud the clarity of mind that came from proximity to the workings of the sleeping unconscious. The mail could wait, too, including the special-delivery envelope that had arrived from the department yesterday. This wasn’t the time for it. He no longer even liked starting the day with music; it made him feel nervous, impatient. A tinge of anxiety, growing as his coffee cup emptied, colored the creativity he now had to make a daily effort to arouse. Yes, work had become a burden. It had taken a while to admit it to himself—and to himself alone. Despite the pressure to publish as much as possible now that the semester and its duties were over and the fact that he had time to spare before his new appointment and its heavy demands took effect on September 1, 2001, he had been trying for weeks, morning after morning—trying and trying without success—to finish a small article that in better days would have been in page proofs long ago. Music. That would wake him up. Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, of course! What could be more inspiring?
These dreadful mornings had all started out well. Clear, blue, early spring hours had seemed to promise a breakthrough, a burst of productive inspiration. The article, too, had shown every sign of being a good and elegant one. “Woody Warhol and Andy Allen: Representative Antitheses or the Antithesis of Representation” (a working title) took an elusively sophisticated position that was hard to pigeonhole. Rather than treat the crisis in representational art as a springboard for the standard elegy on a forever-lost golden age of symbolic absoluteness, “Woody Warhol and Andy Allen” had begun by examining, using a theoretical model based on a priori aesthetic assumptions, the physical resemblance between New York City’s two great cultural heroes. This visual perspective, it argued, in which both the eye of the observer and the vanishing point it was drawn to kept changing with the descriptive framework and its representational conventions, repeatedly reversed the subject-object relationship like two crisscrossing trapeze artists. The free, inter-contextual flow of the article’s prose was in keeping with its parodic, fetishistic dimension. In short, it was a gem of a piece, its jewel-like concentration an example of city culture at its best. He just had to finish it and send it off.
To work! His open laptop lay on the table like a faithful pet eager to do its owner’s bidding. Andrew switched it on with a casual flick. If anything, it was a bit too casual, as if he were trying to fool it—or himself, or his Muse, or somebody—into thinking he had what it took. The computer came to life with a merry whir, emitting playful sounds of efficiency, perhaps in collaboration with Andrew’s facade of self-confidence, perhaps in mockery of his pretense of being up to the job. It flashed little icons, sent letters and numbers dancing across the screen, and displayed vertical and horizontal application bands. All systems were go. To work! He just had to fight back the urge to check his e-mail. More than one day of work had been lost that way: a message here, a reply there, an urgent matter to take care of—and before he knew it, an entire morning had gone up in smoke. He would check his mailbox at noon, after finishing the morning’s quota of words.
Ten thirty. The room was terribly hot. The air had gotten muggier. Midsummer in May! Where on earth had the transitional seasons gone? His naked body was dotted with small, sticky beads of sweat. He unknotted the towel, still damp from the shower, tossed it onto a chair behind him, and went on working in the nude. Andrew liked to write that way. His deliciously private secret, from which he derived a brazen, almost anarchistic satisfaction, was that he had written several of the major pieces that had won him his reputation and academic standing in his birthday suit. His bare buttocks settling with a sensual intimacy into the burnished bottom of his chair, he took a deep breath of humid air and turned his attention to the screen, searching for where he had stopped the day before—or more precisely, two days ago.
“The object [writes Warhol] signifies itself as object and its representation brands it and establishes the context for its existence.” From here it is but a short step to the figure that steps out of its two-dimensional world as defined by others and off the flickering screen, as in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo. Could one conceive of a more perfect, better-orchestrated visual image for how art and theory break free of the conceptual realm and flood the “real world,” the world of objects, spontaneously annulling the gap between reality and representation, between . . .
The sentence had broken off in the middle. He could almost hear its faint pop, like a burned-out electric bulb’s. Where was the problem? Only the three last words were missing, no more—and they weren’t crucial, either. He needed them more for rhythm and balance than for content. Just write them, for fuck’s sake! Finish the sentence and move on to the next one! But the small, still mental voice that dictated his sentences had fallen silent. And the silence was oppressive, disenabling. It weighed on him like a blanket of lead, like one of those apron-shaped X-ray shields that made you feel deathly feeble.
What was wrong w
ith him? The letters wriggled on the screen like little insects. What, really, was the matter? Was it his doubts whether, apart from a single scene in The Purple Rose of Cairo and a certain physical similarity between the two men, they had anything to do with each other? Was it all just intellectual smoke and mirrors, an infatuation with the sound of his own words? Andrew stared dully at the screen. The unfinished sentence seemed as senseless and indecipherable as hieroglyphics. He searched for his reading glasses and found them perched on his nose. A moment of comic relief! Yes, a lighter touch, that’s what was needed! He didn’t need to sound so serious. Removing the glasses, he studied the screen again. No, it was unreadable, simply unreadable!
Andrew jumped up as though to fetch or look for something. For a moment—he had forgotten he was naked—he stood there, embarrassed, before sitting down again in the chair that was by now warm and damp from his body. What now? The tinge of anxiety that routinely accompanied his mornings was growing, turning into a full-blown panic. What was he to do, how was he to go on? He jumped up again, more abruptly than the first time, as if the seat beneath him were on fire. But what had he gotten up for, what was it he wanted? He wanted . . . ah, yes, of course: to go to the bathroom. He took the towel from its chair, its wet fabric, unpleasantly reminiscent of the sea, making him shiver, and crossed the living room quickly to the bathroom. Leaning over the toilet bowl, he hiked up the towel and managed with difficulty to squeeze out a few drops of urine. He let the towel drop back to his knees, washed his hands thoroughly at the sink as though to purge them of their paralyzing writer’s block, dried them well, rearranged the towel around his waist, and returned to his desk. This time, buoyed by the bright sunlight already bathing the bedroom, he was determined to stay seated.
But the damp, prickly towel, pressed between him and the seat, forced him to his feet again. It was revolting, like sitting on some dead sea creature. And what was this business of sitting naked, anyway? What was he, some kind of Calvin Klein model? It was nothing but a dumb affectation. He had to get dressed at once! And how was he to work with all that music? What a racket! He went to the stereo, savagely turned it off, and strode back into the sunlit hothouse of the bedroom with its south-facing window, whose blinds he had forgotten to shut. Tearing off the damp towel, he tossed it disgustedly on the floor and went to the closet while resisting the clutches of a strange urge to crawl back between the rumpled sheets on the bed like a sick, old animal to its den and let them soak up his sweat while the warm spring light rocked him to sleep. His reflection in the full-length mirror by the closet was mocking, malicious. He halted before approaching it with hesitant steps and staring at its uncomplimentary image of a pale, hairy body speckled with small birthmarks. Its shoulders were slumped, its chest sunken. Its waist was beginning to spread. With its shrunken penis, dangling slightly to one side and half-hidden by its thinning pubic hair, it looked flabby and almost like a woman’s. Yes, he was run-down, not his old, solid self. He had to exercise more and lay off the white bread. But enough standing there like an idiot! Get dressed, right away!
His drying perspiration stung his skin. Should he take another shower? No, not now. Andrew picked up the towel from the floor, wiped himself quickly, and hung it to dry on the hook over the bathroom door. It was too wet and sweaty for the hamper. The warm sunlight soothed him a bit. He opened the closet and surveyed his clothes. Clean and neatly folded and in their proper place, they restored a sense of control and sobriety. What should he wear? Definitely not a grandiose-looking dressing gown or one of his old tie-dyed T-shirts. He needed something serious to put him in a proper, businesslike frame of mind. Picking out a pair of comfortable, loose-fitting linen pants, he looked for something to go with them among the crisply ironed shirts delivered two days ago by the laundry—something purposeful, not too heavy and not too light, conducive to the creative mood he was looking for. Linen again? No, it was too early in the year for that, too strong a statement. White cotton: that was simple, springlike, and nice. And that brown belt would go well with it. Plus a tie? But how could he think of a tie! That would be making a joke of it. He had a long, hard day’s work ahead of him. With a bit of luck, he could finish by the end of the week.
4
Eleven thirty. Andrew returned to his desk neatly dressed and combed, carrying his second cup of coffee. Passing the mirror on his way from the bedroom, he was more satisfied by what he saw. It had been a bad moment, no more. It was too soon to check his e-mail. Perhaps in an hour, depending on how much he got done. He sipped some coffee. His glasses were at hand. To work!
Andrew scrolled upward to the start of the article. When had he written its first sentences? That was easily checked. He simply had to look for the date on which the document was opened. But what did it matter? He had to stop this compulsive browsing! And he didn’t need an exact word count, either, even though it was encouraging to know that he had already written several thousand. They were a good base to build on; he wasn’t starting from scratch. It would be a nice little article. He had published dozens like it during his productive career—it was productive, no one could deny that—many longer and more complicated than this one. Still, it would be better to go back to the beginning and work up momentum. What had he done with his glasses? The title was fine, as was the opening paragraph. The sentences were well turned. You couldn’t say they didn’t have style. Should he have some more coffee to perk up a bit? No, wait, he still had some in his cup that was warm. Page two. The quotations were fine. It was a good piece. What was new in the world? A world war could have broken out and he . . . should he log on for a second to the Times website? No, stay concentrated! Page three. There was a disturbing flicker on the screen. It was hard to focus on the text. Should he print it? That meant increasing the spacing between lines to leave room for written corrections. Yes, it was a good idea.
Andrew looked for the printer jack, plugged it into the computer, switched on the power, doubled the line spacing (he now had twenty-three pages instead of eleven), and gave the print command. Leaning back in his chair, he waited with an odd pleasure for the machine to start working. A few seconds went by. Nothing happened. Then, something began to clatter and click. Springs unwound, cogwheels turned. The printer shuddered on the desktop, coughed, fell still, and shuddered again. Something muttered and murmured inside it. The top page of the stack of white printing paper was snatched from its place and fed into the printer’s plastic mouth. Andrew watched with childish enjoyment. The mechanical workings were calming; they made him feel an illogical contentment. Out came a handsome, printed white page, gradually covered with orderly, symmetrical lines of characters on which he could meditate without feeling responsible for them. In a curious way, he would have liked to be a part of the process, to spend the rest of his life staring idly at the pulsating machine as it greedily swallowed the virgin-white pages and lustfully spat them out as printed matter.
His odd pleasure lasted only a few seconds. By the third page it was spoiled by a feeling of guilt. Didn’t he already have a hard copy of the article somewhere? Every page of newsprint, so they said, was half a tree, half a cell in the afflicted body of a disappearing rain forest. But this wasn’t the real reason for his discomfort. The rain forests, with all due respect, were far, far away. More to the point was his awareness that procrastinating with the printer instead of facing up to the impasse he had been floundering in for weeks as though he were drowning in a warm mud bath was just more avoidance. Hurriedly, as if the appearance of being organized could silence the inner voice telling him it was all a pitiful pretext, a cowardly evasion of the call of duty, he gathered up the pages that still seemed to vibrate from the machine and arranged them neatly. Yet the hope that they might serve as a source of inspiration was crushed the moment the printer stopped its chattering. The familiar anxiety was back. He sat down again, pushed the laptop aside, and laid the printed pages in their place.
It wasn’t going to be a productive day. He might as well go
back to bed or look after other business. Still, he wasn’t ready to give up. What kind of poisoned sleep could he expect to have? Should he try a change of place? Lately, it had been hard to concentrate at home. How about the Hungarian Pastry Shop? Its pleasant bustle had been the setting for more than one original idea and successful article in the past. The thought of his favorite café instilled new hope in him. Buoyed, he unplugged the laptop and the printer. Although ordinarily he would have switched the computer off before taking it anywhere, waiting patiently while it parked its icons and shut down, there was no time to waste today. Snapping its lid shut with a vigor that caused him to feel strong and determined, he slipped it into its leather briefcase and strode to the door. He took his wallet from the metal bowl on the table, extracted a few bills, stuck them in a pocket—the wallet would have bulged there unbecomingly—and took his keys. Remembering his sunglasses, he put them on for the first time that year (after all, spring has sprung!) and left the apartment at a rapid pace that was almost a run. With some luck and perseverance, he could finish a first draft today. Most of the piece was already written. He had to reconnect with his creative self. That was all he needed to do.
5
Andrew was greeted by a fine spring day. The sun shone brightly, optimistically, glinting off the buildings at a sharp angle to the blue sky. What had happened to the morning’s oppressive mugginess? The thick, fresh foliage of the trees erased the gray vestiges of the long, sullen winter and made the city look young again. He walked briskly up Broadway, half-unwillingly glancing at the deserted bench on which he had hoped to spot the fat homeless man, who should have been back by now. He wasn’t there. Although his huge figure’s absence was like a missing tooth marring a perfect smile, Andrew was not about to let it be an omen spoiling the rare mood that had descended on him out of the blue. He would turn up in the end; everyone did. Looking away from the empty bench, Andrew set out with long strides along 110th Street, carried merrily like a little skiff by an unexpected wave of urban euphoria. It wasn’t just the weather. The street had a festive atmosphere. What could it be? Of course: graduation day at Columbia! He had been living in another world. Young, attractive, and brimful with hope, the graduates strolled festively along the wide sidewalks of the Upper West Side. Forever gay and carefree in the heady spring light, their gowns and mortarboards like carnival costumes, they would one day long for these streets without knowing why or for what. But enough of poetic nostalgia! He had reached the Hungarian Pastry Shop.