Twice Told Tales Read online

“Ah. Juniper berries. I thought you smelled like country.”

  “Clement Greenberg said I looked like an American Modigliani. He wants to have lunch.”

  “He wants you for lunch. They’re going to eat you alive. I didn’t see him there.”

  I’d never seen Greenberg so how would I know? But I was beyond the minor inconsistencies for the moment.

  “And Phillip Rahv said Partisan Review is having a special issue on American Values and would I contribute.”

  “Will you contribute?”

  By now we were probably somewhere down around Hudson Street; a triangular little park, a few benches, less city than Village. She slapped herself down on a park bench, spreadeagled her long arms on the back slats, and called out to anyone who would listen:

  “It is spring. It’s almost three o’clock in the morning. I’ve lost a husband and I thought I would die but I guess I didn’t and I’m sorry I never told you before. But I’m young. I know young people in novels never say that—but I’m young and I’ve arrived here, but I haven’t quite arrived yet and, yes, oh yes, I will contribute, Katherine is here and whatever the question is never mind, because the answer right now is, yes, I’ll contribute. I will contribute!”

  She slipped the shoulders of her dress down with a rush of unsuspected perfume as soon as we were inside the door and the wonderful confusion between sex and art, between giving and contributing, between mourning and success began between us. The bed was low, low, practically just a great mattress on the floor and next to it as we turned and turned above and below each other the beat-up Royal portable typewriter trembled on its little table, trembled as much as we. The insult of a gulf between the Liberal Imagination and the great writers of the West did not seem a pressing issue at that moment. For that moment Katherine was reconciled. She would contribute.

  We turned for hours. Once or twice surprise rang in the air.

  “Wonderful …”

  “What?”

  “You—swallowed …”

  “Is that so special?”

  I was not sober enough to chart the geography of my inexperience.

  “It’s—very nice …”

  She rose on an elbow, a dim shape of delight in the dark.

  “Hell,” she said and suddenly I heard a Midwestern music in her voice. “I swallowed in college. Hell’s Bells, I swallowed in high school.”

  Such, such were the joys which accompanied us to sleep. I woke panicked. I knew only two things. That I was finding it hard to breathe and that I had to get out of there and never come back.

  It sounds theatrical, synoptic, as I tell it to you now. But Katherine’s hunger had become, as I slept, a presence, stifling, terrifying. All that energy dedicated to conquest, without details. It was too general; it blanketed the world. Her grief was too distant for me to handle; her hope was too pressing. Her innocence was worse than my father’s. By yielding to me in the drunken coda to the Trilling party she’d involved me in some extended rape, some violation of which tonight’s episode was only a part. She would swallow and be swallowed up by the great mouth of New York. All those mouths with their eloquent tongues forming language, poems, stories, essays, novels, special issues devoted to Swallowing and Being Swallowed in America—they would devour Katherine while she devoured them. It was a contest of cannibals I could not bear to watch or be a part of.

  I dressed in the dark and was out in the hallway in minutes. That was when I performed the crazy ritual—what I’ve thought of ever since as the “desecration.” I took out a large handkerchief and blindfolded myself. My balance was off and I swayed for a moment, fleeing that low, low bed into the blindfolded darkness. The idea itself was simple enough to be comical. I would protect myself from ever falling back again.

  I’ve told you how complicated the apartment’s location was. I knew that if I groped my way down the stairs and out into the labyrinth of streets and somehow reached, say, Sheridan Square, without actually seeing where I was, I’d never find my way back. There was no phone, we had no friends in common; end of comedy.

  All of which tells you that I knew I’d fall back again if I could. I had little faith in my own detachment. I tripped over a garbage can and dragged orange rinds, wet newspaper, and coffee grounds with me for blocks.

  “Desecration …” To profane that which is sacred. Nonsense! Since when is making the beast with two backs a sacred act?

  Turning into the broad acreage of Sheridan Square I untied the blindfold. Homosexual youths lounged or prowled; female teachers browsed in an all-night bookstore while their Brooklyn or New Jersey dates debated the next move. Overhead the building line swam in a sky of purplish-black; it grew lighter lavender as I watched. A dwarfish woman was selling balloons. She pressed a lighted cigarette against three in a row. Pop—pop—pop! A couple embraced in the doorway next to me. They made noises while they kissed.

  The circus of appetite was in full swing. A dry, fragrant and cool May night breeze condoned everything in the world. I turned around, vaguely in the direction from which I’d come. What a wild yearning I had to go back! Katherine would still be asleep. I could get back into bed without waking her up. I would breathe her breath, berry-fresh. But I had done my desecration too well. I had no idea which way to go. So I went home where the telephone was ringing. It was my father.

  “I didn’t wake you?”

  “No.”

  “It’s only 2:30 A.M. here.”

  “It’s only 5:30 A.M. here.”

  “Listen I want you to help me out.”

  “How?”

  “Talk to your Uncle Harry. He won’t give me the money I need.”

  “For what?”

  “This place is jumping. L.A. loves cars. And the war’s over. It’s going to be foreign cars …”

  “Which foreign cars, Dad?”

  “I’ve got a line—”

  “How’s mother?”

  “She’s asleep. That’s why I’m calling you at this crazy hour, waking you up …”

  “You didn’t wake me up.”

  “Good. Are you okay?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Which job are you taking?”

  I’d forgotten for days, in my Katherine-haze, that I was to decide on one of the directions my life could take, publishing, advertising; a job in a company. At least I wouldn’t be alone. Maybe that’s why they called it a “company.”

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “This is expensive … talk to your uncle … please …” I was asleep seconds after hanging up the phone.

  If there’s a heaven and/or hell with judges and juries, then when my turn comes someone will probably ask me how the hell I could not think of the pain and humiliation Katherine Eudemie might be feeling. To answer in advance: I don’t know. I did not visualize her waking and stretching out a hand and finding the shock of empty space—(you’ve seen that scene in too many movies; no need to see it here, again). No, I did not let myself think about her feelings of being dropped or abandoned. None of this hurt me then; and it is contemptible that it hurts so much to think of it now.

  Feelings are not like buses. If you miss the right one for the right occasion, your ticket is no longer valid. You have no right to the feeling later. It’s just regret and self-forgiveness in disguise.

  I woke the next morning exhilarated, ready for a new life. To show you how dumb I was I actually thought I’d gained, not lost something. I understood all the mythology of the blind truly seeing—all that stuff I’d long assumed to be bullshit. The blindfold was my new clarity. Fake or authentic, I took it as a gift and used it at once.

  I called the editor of the N.Y.U. Press and accepted the extensive copyediting assignment he’d offered: the manuscript on language and sex. What better way to deal with both than behind the disguise of the proofreader’s marks. Publicity and advertising—neither could compete for my detached attention with any authority. I was about to assume the ultimate detached authority: the author’s author,
if you will, though unacknowledged, like Shelley’s poets.

  It was my answer to Katherine and the demi-gods of the night before. They worshipped the god of language. But from that moment on it was I who would tend his temple, see to it that his lamps had oil, that the right sacrifices were made on the right altars. One of my precisely placed periods would be worth more than a hundred of their ambitious statements about art and life, all giddy with self-love, artful but period-less.

  Adding spice to the taste of my choice was the understanding that I would make minimal monies for my pains. It was an answer to everyone in my world at once: my father, my uncle (who’d refused my plea in spite of the imminent explosion of foreign cars on the West Coast) and, most of all Katherine and all of you (though I knew none of you, yet) with all your concerns of language and who and what is central and peripheral.

  The copyeditor is the ultimate bystander: the witness at the accident of literature, testifying: “I saw it happen. The author turned left from the right lane, using locutions long forbidden by written law as well as custom and usage.” On lucky occasions I have prevented the accidents, given a willing and flexible author. It was a new life with a new alphabet to learn. The hieroglyphics of the copyeditor are as arcane as any dead language, but I learned quickly.

  I moved into an inexpensive, rent-controlled apartment on West 84th Street and settled down to my determinedly peripheral life. No need to feel sorry for me. One person’s periphery is another’s center—an endless series of contiguous circles stretching to infinity.

  Think of the secrets I’ve been made privy to. This is not the place to describe to you the extraordinary photographs that came, enclosed by mistake, with the first galleys of a book by a woman writer now being nominated for the Nobel prize. The challenge was for me to get them back to her without appearing to have seen them. It wasn’t easy. And think of the gifted people I’ve been brought in touch with. Though I never write to authors whose books I’ve edited and liked. Not any more. I once wrote admiringly to Rebecca West; she answered me so bitterly that I felt like a traitor. I wrote to Isaac Bashevis Singer and he answered me in Yiddish. Writing fan letters is a mug’s game. Far better to be the invisible, controlling Copyeditor whose hand is everywhere felt and nowhere seen.

  In the late fifties I helped Gregory Corso organize the first coffee-shop readings in New York. That was when he was still a tough street kid fresh from his first readings at the City Lights Bookstore and an editor at Dutton asked me to pitch in on poetry. Poetry was going to be important. Years went by as in a dream. Poetry went back to being poetry again—i.e., peripheral. Publication parties became more elaborate. The network of referral-editors I needed to keep a flow of work often resulted in a grateful invitation. It offered a social life of sorts. Ah, the secrets hidden there! Who trashed whose book in the Times for what not-so-secret motive of revenge, or envy. How much editorial rewriting actually was done on whose Pulitzer Prize nonfiction book. Who was secretly homosexual—when people were still furtive on that score—but enjoyed attacking openly homosexual authors. It was all a whirling cesspool or it was simply the world, depending on how detached or how involved you were. I chose to think it was the world.

  A few years later my father, miraculously, made the Mercedes-Benz the Chevy of Los Angeles. He was rich—no surprise to him. Not having money was a failing which had always astonished him. He immediately divorced my mother and made plans to live forever. The times were ripe for a true believer in money. Money, like art, is made with fervor and luck; but you must have both, one won’t do. My father had both and he inherited the earth—well, California anyway. He died, happy, two years later having finally succeeded as an alchemist. The dreck had become gelt. And I have inherited enough money, barely enough, to keep me cheerfully peripheral for the rest of my life. Not enough to tempt a woman to tempt me. And not quite enough to tease me into wanting much more. The embrace with Katherine was the last authentic one I risked. You didn’t know an embrace could be a risk? Well, I have preferred other desecrations: the sensual expertise which can be bought, with no need for blindfolds afterwards.

  So I stay safely ensconced in my woven blanket of contempt. It gives warmth in the winter. Spring is another matter. On a leafy, restless April night I met Katherine again, at the Random House party for Portnoy’s Complaint.

  She did not seem one hour older. Only a look of secret fatigue at the corners of her bright blue eyes provided a counterpoint, a sub-text to her tale of stories under consideration, of novels optioned, of grants in the works. We walked for a while in the brownstone East Side twilight.

  “I wondered if I’d see you again. I caught a glimpse of you,” she said. “At Joe Fletcher’s funeral. When you spoke.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “People think New York is hard. But it’s so soft on spring evenings. That other evening was as soft as could be.”

  “Ah,” I said. “That was some evening.” I was scared stiff she would plunge right back and of course she did at once.

  “I kept thinking you’d call me …”

  “There was no phone …”

  “Or come by and leave a note …”

  I took a breath. It was the moment to do it, to tell her, to purge myself. I would trade her the silly, terrible story of the blindfold and in return she would laugh, forgive me, and make me young again—young in the way she still was.

  “It was all too much for me,” I said. “I was confused. All those heavy hitters. I kept thinking I’d run into you.”

  Those blue eyes did their clouding-up routine again, much as I remembered.

  “It’s just as well,” she said. “I was falling in love with you. Now I’m married to Jackson Eudemie and we’re trying to have a baby. He was there that night at the Trillings.”

  “I remember. But he’s not Jewish.”

  “Well—he’s in publishing.”

  “Yes. I did a project with him once.”

  I got away with it, but barely. The story of the blindfold was still buried in my chest. I was alone with it, again. She paused on the top step before joining the buzz of self-promotion behind her.

  “You know what really hurt—really got to me—was not your disappearing act. It was a feeling I had that you were siding with them … all the big guys and their awful ideas. I mean have you ever read Eliot and closed your ears to his song? All of them … ? The ugliness, the pessimism, the anti-Semitism … ? For a long time I couldn’t figure out where to place you and your vanishing, Trilling and his questions, my poor Doug—you know, my husband—bleeding to death in northern France where people vacation now when they’re bored with southern France. I read Trilling’s book when it came out … The Liberal Imagination … He felt he had to question everything. But I haven’t changed. My heart is still in the right place. I believe we’re going to do it—somehow. We’re not going to bleed to death until we’re all white and papery. We’re going to make it all work.”

  Now it was her turn to vanish.

  In 1968 I was jammed among Norman Mailer, Robert Lowell, Isak Dinesen—who was too old to be there or dead at the time—and Aaron Asher in front of the Pentagon and I broke my glasses. I borrowed a pair from a nearby fellow demonstrator and suddenly I saw Katherine and Jackson Eudemie a few yards away. She was holding a baby swathed in blue scarves. That was the last time I saw either of them until last week.

  I walked into Jackson’s study. His eyes were rimmed pink but he also wore a velvet smoking jacket out of a Somerset Maugham story; he smoked a pipe and rose from a large stuffed chair at the side of a fireplace blaze borrowed from Dickens. He was reading a book—he put it down to greet me and I could read the title. It was actually called—The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. He was giving me all my cues. No need for us to catch up. I was whatever extreme gesture of detachment I had rehearsed over the years and he was his own parody. Our situation, too, had its own echoes: the widower sending for the former lover. The only original turn here was this
insane request for me to speak a eulogy. We talked for a few moments about many years, telescoping events, getting everything muddled but establishing some kind of contact. I told him how impressed I was that Katherine had stuck out her writing career—even though she’d never published a second book. He opened the door to her study. On a large, strong desk lay five boxes in which typing paper once came.

  “There they are,” Jackson said. His pipe puffed white coded symbols. “Five long serious novels, each with their heart firmly in the right place. Unpublished.”

  I stared at him.

  “She told me—over and again, sometimes laughing, sometimes as if she wasn’t sure who the joke was on—she told me your line about being a writer and the problem of having your heart in the right place …” He closed the door quietly, as if protecting some obscure privacy. The pipe came out of his bearded mouth and into his hand for emphasis.

  “I’d tell her ‘Katherine, it comes and goes. One decade brings revolutions, another one brings war, another brings back the private life. Another one is obsessed with health and money. It all revolves. Patience.’” He took me downstairs in front of his literary props. I drank one of them—a snifter of brandy, as we sat in front of another—the fire.

  “But she wouldn’t have it,” Jackson said. “She thought if you gave up innocence, love, democracy, hope, justice—if you gave them up once—even for a minute—they’d be lost forever.” He sighed. “Now it’s she who’s lost forever.”

  “Don’t be glib,” I said. I had no right to speak like that but I was fighting for myself as well. “She didn’t die of liberalism, she died of cancer. Why do you want me of all people to speak at the funeral?”

  That was when he gave me that awful reply. Recently friends had mentioned that they’d been to this or that funeral—an exiled Cuban poet; a young pianist; a famous woman biographer. And he’d heard—get this—he’d heard that I was good!

  “Good—what?” I said.

  “Good—you know—good.”

  “Good—how?”

  He grew exasperated.

  “For God’s sake how clear can I be? You were good. You did it well.”