Twice Told Tales Page 5

  But that was all gone. It was utterly quiet in the night. He sat on the closed commode and leaned his flushed face against the tile of the sink.

  “The top of the ladder,” he whispered. And now it was not some young woman waiting to greet him. It was his father, waiting where vanished fathers wait for sons.

  The disturbing image mixed with the wine in his gut in a surprise of nausea. He vomited into the sink with an energetic heave. It lasted several minutes and then he fell asleep wedged against the sink, the water still running.

  Sharon found him about ten minutes after dawn. He was slumped over the sink. When she touched his shoulder, instead of jumping he woke gradually, her lovely cloud of yellow-reddish hair swimming into vague, then focused view. Her eyes and cheeks looked slept-in, striated, rumpled.

  She had to pee and he tottered to his feet and waited. When she finished she washed the sink and sat him down again and washed his face with her good hand. He had the convalescent’s quiet gladness that she was present, that she had found him, that he had found her.

  She would undoubtedly survive him. That was in the natural order of things. But first, for as long as possible, they would survive together. He would be her loving husband, father, friend, teacher: wise, sensual, patient; knowing that, like all teachers, he was temporary.

  And for himself, he would learn to ward off the inevitable, to slow down the dance of death. It was time to become his own father: forgiving, intelligent, always remembering that he had once been young and lost and now was found.

  A new arrangement.

  The bathroom smelled of vomit and Sharon sprayed something lilac into the air and gave him something mint to rinse his mouth with and kissed him and stumbled back to bed and sleep.

  Dickstein sat there a moment. He had never felt so lucky in his life.

  It was like a dream.

  A Clean Well-Lighted Place by Ernest Hemingway

  a story

  OF COURSE THERE WERE the ones I went back to whenever I was in a certain city, the special ones in which to spend time, like Harry’s Bar in Venice where Marcello Mastroianni had once lazily intruded into a private conversation I was having with an Italian film director, a small bar seating no more than eight, maybe nine, which was forever associated in the mind with success and money and a certain sentimental history of earlier decades. Until one bad night when Noah was kept waiting for two hours by the younger Cipriani, Noah who always offered loyalty and expected betrayal and who when wounded clamped his scarred jaw tighter than usual which was very tight and that bar then became simply a stylish place to be crowded and a place for Noah to order his Bellinis and to reminisce about which table this or that great writer had commanded; angry at himself for being concerned, for being trivial (“That’s what I’ve come to,” he said. “Restaurant tables … percentages of box office revenues—they’re what people like me have instead of battlefields, instead of codes of honor. Ridiculous stuff, boy.” Calling me boy even though I was only six years younger.)

  And years later when I’d gotten into that trouble about the money, which changed everything, and when there were no more Italian film directors in my life, Harry’s was a tourist place because I was now only a tourist in Italy. Unlike, say, the Bar at the Oak Room in New York, which also seated many more people and where I’d left a good part of my hopeful youth, trying out schemes, ideas, running up tabs, breaking up with women before they could break up with me. I was going for a degree at the N.Y.U. Film School, or at least that was the idea my parents had, in Madison, Wisconsin, where the checks came from. But the real idea was to hang out at the Oak Room in the reflected gleam of writers, directors, and film producers like Noah, except there really were no others quite like Noah. And even though it was attached to a hotel which hung out flags when visiting heads of state were asleep upstairs, you could never be a tourist at a place where that much had gone on between the drinks.

  It was where I first tasted the pleasures of bright, bitter-cold vodka hitting on an empty stomach at a clean, dark wood-lacquered bar, sometimes no one but the bartender and me in the mysterious city light of five in the afternoon, different of course at different seasons; that and my own heightened sense of possibility even though I was broke and couldn’t figure out how to go more than ten months with the same woman, still that particular bar gave me the special sense of being freer than other people. Hard to explain, trapped as I was in my helpless youth and confusion, nursing that helplessness like the one drink I could afford. I was austere, too—content to share the space with the bartender, not speaking to him, and I still do not trust people who chat with bartenders, except for Noah. I know, I know there is a grand literary tradition of bartender-conversations but I find something finally patronizing in it.

  So I would hold my silence with various aids, a book, a cigarette, a notebook, or all three, until Noah arrived to sit beside me, drink in hand, evanescent deal pending, perilous film project in the works, Noah arriving with his European-acquired irony, “Vodka on the rocks and no small talk for my young friend,” Noah said and raised his Bellini in a mock toast to my famous integrity. “Small talk can lead to lies and that rhymes with compromise.” At that time he was engaged in a series of warnings about what it might take from me in order to survive the world—if I decided to join it. The world was not the neat university town of Madison, Wisconsin—snow-white and tenured with ski-slopes of professorial parents and a Ph.D. thesis on the films of Jean Renoir. The world was commercial employment in which one was bought and was sold, the world was marriage, the world was The Industry, none of which I’d yet experienced first-hand.

  “You’re not set up for real life,” he told me. “You’re young and you own some time to swim around in. You’d better tread water for as long as you can. Above all, stay away from people who produce movies. They swim by different rules. You just tread water.”

  “How about you?”

  “I’ve told you—the men in my family don’t live past fifty-five.” He had, indeed, told me, at various hours of the bar-nights. It was not something you checked into too carefully at those moments. Something held me back from asking how old Noah was at this moment. Instead all I said was, “I don’t trust your cynicism.”

  “Never use any word ending with i-s-m.”

  Being older, he played the teacher. I played the rebellious student, ready to give up the straight path set out for me since childhood. By his cynicism I meant that he kept things back; there was a hollow beneath his sentences. I put in everything I meant when I spoke. He left things out.

  Also, there was his World War II scarred jaw, which no one dared to ask about and there was his despairing insomnia. One night at that tiniest of bars at La Colombe D’Or in St. Paul de Vence, he told me about the sleeplessness. It was a bar where you sat at the window if you were lucky and got the right seat and could look out at the lovely garden with the formidable Leger built into the wall, and where I was producing an interview for RAI Television in Rome with a very political French movie star—(my first small try at entering The World, The Industry). The star was a man Noah wanted to interest in his obsession, a movie of a Hemingway short story called “A Clean Well-lighted Place.”

  The French actor had said only, “But this is a four-page story. How can it be a movie?”

  “Look at The Killers. Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner. How long is long, monsieur?”

  “What?” the actor said.

  “Nada,” Noah said, “Nada, nada, nada …”

  He was being rude, not usual for him and had not even drunk much. Perhaps he was putting on a small show of bristly integrity for me since I had, in the interval between the bar in New York and the one in St. Paul, started to join the world of buying and selling. The being bought and the being sold were still in the future.

  That night, slowly sipping his last drink—the bar didn’t exactly close since it was also part of the hotel’s lobby but the bartender had long since gone to bed—Noah was guilty at having beh
aved badly but rather proud of having taken a stand on the issue of Scale in Art. He was sad, too, after another defeat for his special project and spoke about his sleeplessness so as not to speak about other things.

  “Can you imagine,” Noah said, “a four-year-old being kept awake night after night by the perfectly perceived sense that everything is nothing—nada? Existential, infantile insomnia. I’ve not slept a night through since. You can see why I fell in love with this smallest of Hemingway stories when I came on it years later.”

  “He hadn’t even read “The Killers”!” I said. “Do you think your not sleeping as a child had to do with what you said about the men in your family dying young?”

  “I never said that,” Noah said coolly. “I said that they didn’t live very long, none of them.”

  I did not make an issue of what he had said or had not said. “Your father?” I said. “Was he alive when you were four?”

  “Oh, my God,” Noah said in despair. “Yes. But not for much longer. Not long enough. And don’t ask me how much is enough.”

  “Unkind,” I said.

  “I guess so. Blame it on your friend the actor. He got to my nerves. Actors!” Noah said. “You and me,” he added, “We’re like the two waiters in the Hemingway story,” and when I pressed him to explain he hid behind his glass. “Remember in Venice,” he said with apparent irrelevance, “how Cipriani kept me waiting two hours for a table?”

  “Why did you wait?” I asked.

  “I had to play it out. He was an old friend and it was one of the places where I’d spent my time and something was up. You have to play things out. It’s part of the game.”

  As soon as I got back to Rome after I deposited my film at the R.A.I. Lab I went to the little English language paperback book store at the foot of the Spanish Steps. I found a copy of Hemingway’s short stories and read “A Clean Well-lighted Place.” It was a fine story, condensed, lyrical, as much poem as story, since the shadows which leaves make against electric light are invoked as image and consolation and since the two waiters who are the main characters talk the way no two waiters have ever talked, especially the older waiter.

  Nevertheless, in it I saw my friend Noah, or at least I saw what he saw in this simple story: in a small café, probably in Spain, late at night, an old deaf man who has tried to kill himself the week before is drinking brandy and keeping two waiters from closing up. The younger waiter is cold and confident, irritated with the old man and his miseries and his comrade’s anxieties about nada—the nothing surrounding everything. The older one is sympathetic and uncertain. Their conflict appears to be about whether they should hurry the old man out of the café—it is two-thirty in the morning—or let him drink for another hour. The younger waiter has a wife waiting at home in bed.

  The older waiter says, “I am of those who like to stay late at the café … with all those who need a light for the night …” The younger waiter does not understand. The word nada means nothing to him. We are left with the older waiter and an unclear dread against which one can only place the need for light and a certain cleanliness and order. At the end the older waiter offers a parody of the Lord’s Prayer and the prospect of grappling with the dread that keeps one awake until daylight. “After all,” he said to himself, “it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.”

  “I’ve read your Hemingway story,” I told Noah. “I see why you’re so high on it.”

  “You’re not supposed to see that,” he said. “You’re the younger waiter.”

  “No imagination … ?”

  “No sense of the danger of ordinary life. But you’re not thirty yet. You can still take it easy for a while.”

  “Tread water?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  Then I told him, “Ivan wants me to do a project with him.”

  We were in Berlin, having a drink at the Kempinski, an awful spread-out, lobby sort of affair, but it was where the Berlin Festival people all stayed. I was on sabbatical; my little film on the French actor had been entered in the festival, had won nothing, but I had been noticed. That felt like winning.

  “Ivan,” Noah said. “My God, he’s going to start with Ivan. You never go by the book, do you?”

  It was an old complaint. I’d never done anything by the rules … I played the piano passably well but only by ear … I went to three colleges which is to say none that I ever completed … I played tennis with the club pros but I had my own weird service and no topspin.

  “Ivan,” Noah said. “I’ve had to do with Ivan a few times.” I was supposed to understand everything from that. And then, “Playing with Ivan the one thing that might be worse than losing—is winning.”

  Years passed, more than a decade, marked by the confusion of work—even of love. I made a good deal of money but kept little of it and was married once and kept little of it, not even a child. Ivan and I had some success. It became important for me to realize how different I was from Noah. I didn’t want to tread water while he swam the mysterious Industry Crawl. I didn’t want to play young waiter to his older one. Yet nada was nothing to me. That part was accurate. I had always slept well. Perhaps because the men in my family have always lived into their eighties. Chronic low blood pressure.

  Even when I got into the tight spot that changed everything—I took money from the production budget to cover personal expenses—even after Ivan found out and the L.A. District Attorney’s office came into it—I slept well. And when it became clear that I was not going to go to jail, even though everything was now changed, my only regret was Noah. He’d borrowed some money from me; some trouble with one of his children had found him short of cash. And I was concerned that something pure in Noah, something clean and well-lighted, might worry that he had unknowingly borrowed stolen money.

  We had it out one evening in L.A. It started over vodka Gibsons at Chasen’s. There was a waiting line even if you had a reservation and I could tell Noah was not at his most patient that evening. I couldn’t tell if it was being kept waiting, or just L.A. itself, in which Noah never felt comfortable. Perhaps it was me and the scrape I’d just gotten out of.

  “I guess you’re not going to have any real trouble about it,” he said.

  “Well, they’re not going to press it hard.”

  “Too many of Ivan’s friends have done worse.”

  “I don’t need a whitewash,” I said.

  “We need a table. But in the meantime let me say that I am glad you will stay free—I cannot envision you in jail—and I am not going to mention it again.”

  An hour and a half later we were both in the L.A. County Jail. Noah’s edge had gotten sharper and sharper as the line got longer. Finally the headwaiter stood an inch too close to Noah while telling him the usual lies about how long the wait would be and Noah hit him. He didn’t push him away—he hit him. We’d both been drinking more than usual—I’ve noticed you drink more standing up than sitting down—and we’d been kept standing too long. Also, I’d been waiting for months to find out if I was going to prison and Noah had been waiting to find the true story and then the line at the restaurant—one delay too many.

  “Well,” Noah said, amused at last that evening, “interesting place.”

  “Unexpected.”

  “Thus interesting.”

  “Ivan’s lawyer was trying to make it quite interesting until we all agreed on things. But here I am in jail, anyway,” I said.

  “But thanks to me, no thanks to you,” Noah said. “I’m used to places like this.”

  “You?”

  “Well, not lately and not real jail—Army jail …” And he told me the story of the snowy weeks in Bastogne before the big German attack and how his redneck sergeant got the fixed idea that Noah was a Jew and that it was important for Noah to admit it or deny it. Noah would not tell the son-of-a-bitch that he was part Indian and part Lutheran and the sergeant found many excuses to jail Noah for this or that offense but finally they had to fight it out the day before the
German attack came. And they rolled on the floor of the latrine and even though Noah was losing—or so he said—the sergeant pulled a knife on him, slashed his face, and at least Noah got to go home.

  By the time he finished the story I was quite sober but he seemed still high, sitting in the stone corner of the cell waiting for my lawyer to find us.

  Something in me, though, was not sober, not quieted. Being white middle-class citizens we were not really in jail. My lawyer was at home when I called, so we were in jail as much as if we had been in a car accident in some ambiguous circumstances. We spent an hour and a half in a vast grimy waiting room—but it wasn’t much different than the big, wooden-benched waiting rooms you see on jury duty. It was not prison to people who might have to know prison. Oddly, the only specific details I remember are a puddle of indeterminate origin at the entrance to the waiting room, the extraordinary surreal height of the judge’s desk, and a man in a grey pin-striped suit with a vest, who read a newspaper with great calm. I assumed he was a lawyer but when he stood up and was taken away I saw that he was handcuffed to the policeman who’d been sitting next to him.

  Later, in the Polo Lounge Bar I said: “Okay, now I know how you got that scar.”

  “Okay, now you know.”

  “That sounds like there’s something much more important that I don’t know.”

  “I’m sorry I hit the waiter.”

  “He wasn’t a waiter. It was very important to him that he wasn’t a waiter,” I said.

  “Don’t do that, boy,” Noah said. “I don’t need any credit for hitting him. It was a dumb thing to do. And I don’t need any credit for being cut by the sergeant in France, either.”

  “My God,” I said. “How did we land there, in such a place?” I shook my head.

  “We didn’t,” he said. “We’re here, drinking brandy.”

  “True …”

  “We never actually land anyplace,” Noah said. His voice was a little too loud for the bar, the evening, the circumstance. “We don’t live in places.”