Twice Told Tales Page 6

  “Oh?”

  “We live in time. One of the best-kept secrets. Middle-class nomads all. Think of all those cities—and if you’re in a city that is not your one city it becomes a matter of hotels and bars. Now if you’d stayed in Madison, Wisconsin, where—” His sip gave me license to interrupt.

  “Where my father and mother live their lives—their places …”

  “At least Ivan never shows up in Wisconsin. The trouble might never have happened.”

  “It didn’t happen. I did it! I took the money. And it took being kept waiting for a table to make you hit me with it.”

  “No,” Noah said. “No, no, no, I never used it and I won’t now …” But something made me sorry that Noah had told me about the sergeant and the scar. I don’t know exactly why but they seemed connected to the intense words about place and time which had given way to a simple reproach for having become, for a brief moment in a careless way—a thief.

  “I’m just as bad,” Noah said. “What you lose is the starting place. Maybe that’s why it pissed me off so much, Cipriani keeping me waiting—Harry’s was one of my homes—and that’s a stupid confession to have to make, that a bar or a restaurant can be like a true place.”

  He waited long enough for me to contradict him. Or long enough for me to realize that the poor maitre d’ at Chasen’s had received the punch begun in Venice so long ago. When I said nothing he put his glass down and stood up. It was the first time I saw him unsteady on his feet. He looked down at me, somehow disappointed. Perhaps because I’d gone so far away from my starting place. But that may have been only my regret of the night pasted onto Noah.

  “My place,” he said, “is that little Hemingway story. A Clean Well-lighted Place …”

  I was disgusted.

  “Balls,” I said. “You haven’t even got that story straight.”

  “It’s hard to get stories straight,” Noah said. “But at least mine is small, cut down to scale … Four pages … an old, suicidal drunk and two waiters one young and confident, one old and uncertain …”

  “Uncertain, sleepless,” I said. I knew what I was doing. “Because all the men in his family die young. That’s crap …”

  “It doesn’t matter if it is,” Noah said, “my young friend …” His old familiar tone was back for a moment. “It’s all part of my story. Maybe you should get yourself a story.”

  “I thought I was in yours,” I said and moved my hand, almost invisibly, for the check. I wanted this to be over. Noah looked strange.

  He said: “If a story is the only place left, then we sing our songs for ourselves, past present and sometimes there’s more pain in a pop song than a sergeant’s knife …”

  I listened coldly, never having seen or heard Noah out of control before, as if the simple fact of hitting a headwaiter and being in a jail again, even so briefly, had broken the skin of old wounds, wounds I would never know about.

  “… the weird light of Los Angeles,” he was saying, “though I can’t think of a place less likely to invoke angels. Okay, I’ll stop the jokes since you’re not laughing … I’ll talk about your soul … it lives only in bars because its birthplace has been lost and its destination is not known … so instead of a place it has time … a bar has closing time a place does not …”

  “Noah,” I said.

  “No reason to be embarrassed my friend, or to interrupt … I will sleep easily tonight … nothing is nothing tonight … nada y nada pues nada … here in the land of billboards plugging new records by new rock groups … I don’t think it has to do with the making of money or the spending or the very temporary jail … it has to do with the permanent absence of a place in our lives, yours and mine … (Noah’s disjointed monologue was no longer going unnoticed—two young women in hard-glinting metallic dresses were trying not to stare) … time is a desert and one is always thirsty in a desert … and making movies or money or love is all the same in time … and that,” Noah paused and touched his eyelids one after the other in mysterious ritual pause, “… and that is somehow too equal and easy. Something,” he said, “should be wrong …”

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s all right, Noah. It’s over now.” He sat down next to me for a moment, then stood up, restless, nervous again, his face flushed to the tip of his aloof brow. Had I walked in just then I might not have recognized my old companion.

  “Don’t count on that,” he said.

  “I m not.”

  “I know,” he said. “Nada.” I was tapped out of sympathy, the tirade had exhausted my patience, not quite fair since in decades of bar-meetings Noah’s style had always been spare sober, dry as Vermouth. But tonight my body was tired and my eyes ached from looking away.

  Having had my fill of this new fantastical Noah, I stood up and beckoned for the waiter. Okay, I thought, I took the wrong road, I took the money and now I can’t take this any more. And we left that bar with a brief skirmish in which I insisted that I drive Noah to his hotel and the doorman could have Noah’s car brought around in the morning, but Noah said no, he was fine and I drove off first not wishing to see him leave.

  We lost track of each other. I fled to Rome; everything seems distant and muted in Rome. All those ruins. Noah’s Hemingway movie remained unmade. It was a quixotic notion given the nature of movies, of the story, of Noah. I heard that he was now in the U.S. trying to set up an American production company.

  I started hanging out at the bar in the Inghilterra, starting, too, the foolishness of trying to write stories. It was clear I was not going to make any more movies, with or without Ivan. So I haunted the Inghilterra. It was small and dark. The best bars seemed to be getting smaller and darker in spite of Noah and Hemingway. But it was several generations after Hemingway and the consoling darkness of interiors may have replaced the comfort of light, cleanliness, and order.

  The Inghilterra bar was too small, because at that time I wanted very much to hide and observe and small places are exposed. But for some crazy reason, after my time with Ivan I wanted to watch writers like Moravia and Calvino come there to drink and argue with their stout publishers in stiff blue suits, white shirts, and dotted ties, dress they wore even in the summer Roman heat, and to watch the writers being interviewed by skinny, sweatered young journalists with portable tape recorders and cigarettes burning forgetfully down to their fingertips, the young people drinking strange semialcoholic drinks like Fernet-Branca and the writers drinking highly alcoholic ones like Grappa. No solitude here; no matter how early in the day I showed up there were always patrons; but the action was gentle, literary, about all I could handle in my convalescent condition. It was as if I was borrowing strength to learn how to stay with thinking up stories, learning how to live cheaply and ignore the seductions of money and petty power which had gotten me into trouble in the first place, just as Noah had warned me, and I had to borrow this real or imagined sense of integrity in a small foreign bar among people whose fame and authenticity was heightened by their speaking a language I understood little of but whose music and gestures I loved.

  I had money put aside for maybe one year, and after Italy it was going to be France, partly because on a quick trip to Paris I met a woman at the bar at the Pont Royal, where you walk downstairs and it’s all somehow terribly serious and formal though it’s a long time since someone like Camus drank there. (You don’t stay at the hotel upstairs because the hotel people are cold and rude, but the bar is merely cool and there are times when detachment is desirable even essential.) Meeting this woman there—the only time I have ever “picked up” someone at a bar—colored what happened after that. She was just the kind of woman you meet, if luck holds, when the nada arrives and feels as if it will stay. It worked out well until one day she accused me of being disappointed; not such a terrible thing to say on the face of it, but not such a good thing either if you felt the way I was feeling.

  She told me, too, that I was only concerned with the appearance of things, that I had lost all sense of place in th
e world, and I thought My God does everyone know that song now, and she told me that the insomnia I was developing was an affectation and we broke up. She had told me, as well, that I spent too much time in bars and that I was not really trying to learn to make stories, only trying to give the appearance of making stories but by that time it was true and she was not to blame for saying it.

  Bars are, finally, places of appearance, which means illusion and perhaps that is why so much business is transacted in them; theaters in which the unbilled character is alcohol, sometimes a small character part, sometimes a main role—and that is trouble. But I am getting older and have fears that the drinking, which was never what those places were about for me, might be getting more important and I think with some nostalgia of the foolishly old-fashioned bustle of the bar at 21, if bars were people it would be someone living beyond their means; I think of the Ritz in Madrid, gloomy, hushed, poised with a sense of secret sorrow, and I think of the bright and proper bar at the Connaught in London, where one would not dare have a thought which was too personal.

  I think, too, of bars in Hollywood on sunny sad exposed streets, Fountain Avenue or LaBrea, bars with names like the Hopalong or the Tarpit, places in which, even at night, the interior light suggests a depressing late afternoon in which disappointment fills the lines on every face, bars in which miserable men and women sit in stiff and stately failure until drink loosens bones and tongues and evenings end in violence, though sometimes only verbal violence; evenings so many years ago, long before I’d met Noah or myself, when I had lost nothing yet because I’d gained nothing yet, except what I’d brought with me; all that hope.

  And the public spaces in which we encounter each other, glasses in hand like magic talismans, cannot help or harm if what Noah said is true—if we have lost our places and are drifting about, unmoored, in time. And finally it is possible to be quite alone in the busiest of bars and sometimes we return home to sleep or lie awake in beds full of uninvited guests.

  It ended up in one of the bars neither of us cared for, which doubled as a hotel lobby. At one of those unsatisfactory hybrids I learned that Noah had died. Sitting at a table at the Anglo-Americano in Florence, a small bar in that small city, in a hotel which used to be sweet and awkwardly eager to please and is now smooth and plays host to business conventions, I was told by a German producer who had invited me to discuss returning to the making of money via a lovely movie deal. In the middle of the conversation he’d remembered that I knew Noah and he told me.

  To cover my confusion at hearing this from a stranger I said, “Yes, all the men in his family died young.”

  “What do you mean,” the German producer said over his metal-rimmed glasses, “I met his father in New York—he was at least seventy-five and he has an older brother.”

  To make matters worse he showed me the obituary in the International Herald Tribune, which told us all that Noah had “passed away” after a long illness. (He would have been amused at the euphemism—“Which way,” he would ask with bursting bladder at a first-time bar, “to the euphemism?”) I was glad of this last, strangely, because I’d sometimes been afraid of a much more abrupt end for Noah. He had, after all, come apart that night in Chasen’s and had cast himself as the older waiter in the Hemingway story, the waiter who had sympathy for the suicidal old man. But, infantile insomnia notwithstanding, Noah went a draftee not a volunteer into the army of Death.

  The German producer went on and on; he knew Noah well, it seemed. He even knew that the scar had a story; only, after dinner and after being joined by a beautiful young woman, thin-boned arched nose, a woman who listened with intent gray eyes, she seemed as delicate as the man was gross, and after a certain amount of wine it seemed that his story of the scar was entirely different, no anti-Semitic sergeant, something about a poker game and an accusation of cheating and a fight and being sent home before the Battle of the Bulge, the last part matched all right.

  Back in the hotel lobby, formica tables and fluorescent lighting, sterile, successful, relentlessly international, over a fresh, clean-tasting Poire eau de vie, I tuned him out; all I could think to do was recite to myself Noah’s and Hemingway’s parody of the Lord’s Prayer, Our nada which art in Nada, nada be thy name …

  And I felt the weight of years, of months, of minutes whose foolish nature was simply to pass, felt this along with a weird joy at the moments still to come. It was late at night and the woman was gazing at me sympathetically while the producer kept alternating reminiscences of Noah with pieces of the film deal. “I never met your friend,” she said in some accent I could not place, “but I am sorry.”

  I would have liked to have dumped the man and spent the rest of the time telling the beautiful young woman with sympathetic, oriental eyes about my hopeless attempt to write stories so that one of them could be mine and would be my place and how that had not worked out, which was why I was listening to her friend or lover talk death and deals alternately in Florence.

  Instead, before the evening finished I hit the German producer—hit him for no other reasons than that I wished to believe that Noah had refused to tell the sergeant that he was not Jewish, gaining a scar and an end to his war in the process; that I wished to believe that the men in Noah’s family died young and that Noah’s sense of doom had some roots in reality, which did not seem to be so, hit the innocent German producer for no more sensible reasons than that Noah was dead before his time, and that I had lost any place I might have had, and the German producer was in Florence with a woman who looked like a woman I could have been happy with.

  At least for a time, which is not a small point, not nada since apparently what we spend in bars, clean, well-lighted, or otherwise, apparently what we spend everywhere is not money, stolen or earned, not energy, not talent, not love, but ourselves.

  Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster

  a story

  I PUT THE LITTLE book down on his desk. It was hard to find a place for it; there were hundreds of loose manuscript pages, books, bound galleys, copies of Publisher’s Weekly, letters from God knows who all squashed for an inch of space on that desk.

  I noticed how gently I placed it there, even though I’d planned to rage in like a storm. Gideon did that to me; I don’t know why. I didn’t like that in myself, being so careful with a cripple.

  “Why’d you give me that book?”

  “I thought it might help.”

  “If you didn’t think I could write the book why’d you sign it up?”

  “I didn’t! I signed you up.”

  He wheeled around briskly, his round face—an angel’s face except for the shadow-beard that would never go away, always back by lunchtime—ignoring the pushing of those tough, stubby, chubby hands, zipping his wheelchair across the room to the window overlooking Fourth Avenue. He slammed it shut.

  I jumped. Sudden noises get to me. Not that I ever saw real combat. I was always in the back streets of town making deliveries—personnel, matériel—sometimes deliveries, sometimes pickups—but every now and then one of those little babies would whistle by. A few of those and you stay jumpy a long time.

  Gideon turned on the air-conditioning but he kept sweating. Working that wheelchair was work. Now they’ve got these automated ones, electronic, but Gideon’s gone. I don’t think he would have wanted them anyway. He liked resistance.

  “Look,” he said. “This is going to be one very good book and a lot of people are going to buy it. But the funny thing about a book is: somebody’s got to write it. Till that happens nobody can buy it or read it.”

  “Pretty funny,” I said. “And you think I need this little manual here, to write it?”

  Gideon twisted his lips in a weird way; not a real smile and certainly not what you’d call a sneer. It was an internal smile. For all his tough act Gideon was very internal. He was talking to himself a lot when he talked to you.

  “You think you can write this book because you were there? Because of all the right word-sounds—N
am, wasted, gook, whatever, because they were your natural language for three years …”

  “Four.” I loved to catch him.

  “And because you had the experience.” He ploughed ahead as if I hadn’t said anything. “Because you wore that green beret.”

  “Because I was there,” I said. “And you ought to know the difference by now—I was A.I.D. Agency for International Development. They just let me wear the green beret for laughs.”

  He looked at his watch.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

  Gideon knew I wasn’t supposed to drink anymore. But he always pushed you to the limits. He wouldn’t use an expression, “Buy you a coke,” while he drank his whiskey sours. That would have been too gentle, too easy on you. It would have sent the wrong message to himself and his soul. You felt he was always sending messages to himself and his soul. Sometimes I deliberately tried to get in the way. This time I said, “You going to have one of those whiskey sours of yours?” while he struggled, alone, to get his jacket on and then swing his briefcase, heavy with manuscript, onto his lap. I hated to think what that struggle with inanimate objects might be like in the winter: scarf, gloves, overcoat, all to be gotten on with a lower body frozen stiff, forever.

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

  “That drink marks you World War II just the same as my addiction to white alcohol and what the Government likes to call “substances” marks me and my war.”

  He laughed and hit the sidebar of his wheelchair. “This marks my war,” he said.

  We went to the Cote Basque. Gideon always took us to posh places for lunch, drinks, dinner. “Small salary big expense account,” he said. “That’s publishing.” But Cote Basque was his favorite for another reason, as well. Gideon always had at least two reasons for doing anything. But he only told you one. Sometimes he didn’t tell you any. With the restaurant it was simple. They didn’t want cripples in wheelchairs depressing their patrons. Once they made that clear to Gideon they had him for life. He had not been shot in the spine, flown back from Germany to endure eighteen operations, and consigned to a wheelchair, all in order to have some clown in a tux tell him where he could or could not sit in a restaurant.