An Honest Ghost (11 page)

He felt ordinary, but knew that the very fact of realizing his ordinariness made him extraordinary. “Father,” returned Joe, “I know what I say and mean—well, better than you do when you hear me.”

But I reflected that surely I had always known him to be a performer, even if the mechanics of the performance had been invisible to me. It is bewitching. Aloud, I said: “The unforeseen is what is beautiful.”

What I needed in the end was just to love the child. How I long to surrender!

“How did that damned thing get in here?” he asks.

His mother is there. I couldn’t have dressed her up better myself.

“Poor dear, you wouldn’t notice, but I’ve been away.” She stared at him pensively as he exhorted her, pleaded, warned her.

“Don’t kiss me so hard, mother.” His voice had an edge of annoyance that no longer surprised me. A sadist. We were terrified of Joe—and yet we adored him. And suddenly he realized she was crying. He was obviously alarmed. “I don’t like to kiss people.” Joe felt there was no way for him to be completely open with his parents without upsetting them.

Our night had started as such a good night. That time is gone: gone forever.

“Oh, what the hell’s the difference where I am?” Is this a genuine question or the beginning of a speech? She powdered her face. “I have seen enough Americans in America,” she said, “and enough English in England, and I do not believe that the Italians will take much interest in me.” There she stood, trying to soothe herself with the scent of flowers and the fading, beautiful evening. On the other hand, she is fiercely sexual, quite unashamed and untouched by coyness. “Darling, I’m leaving for San Francisco this evening and will be gone six weeks. I feel kind of silly sitting still to read about someone else’s adventures when I could be having my own.”

He held out his hand. For hours they sat together, or walked in the dark, and talked only a few, almost meaningless words.

Up and down the quiet streets under the new moon went the woman and the boy.

The Joe she knew receded, faded, became lost.

She refuses to see things clearly that can only be seen darkly.

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.

37.

The remainder of that same afternoon I spent at the town’s hairdressing salon, where my hair was trimmed and my nails finely manicured by an obsequious little fusspot of a man who, with his own elaborately crimped and wavy locks, was the very image of a barber in a French farce; in the more expensive of its two men’s shops in search of a ‘stylish’ silk tie that might set off to advantage the pale grey, slim-waisted suit I had not yet worn in Chesterfield as it had been bought and set aside for exactly the present occasion; then in a chic and overwhelmingly fragrant flower shop— located, possibly as a result of someone’s drolly irreverent sense of cause and effect, next door to the gun store—where I purchased a vast bouquet of white ‘long-stemmed’ roses.

I watched David to see what he thought of it, and he had not yet made up his mind. Oozing apple pie pessimism. In this large sense, criticism is, as T.S. Eliot observed, “as inevitable as breathing.”

But could I find my way back to the way I was before this all began?

There was a pause—just long enough for an angel to pass, flying slowly.

That night I had some dreadful dreams.

38.

Roy was in a panic. He said very distinctly, and looking at the carpet, “She’s gone.” He was in love; it did not follow that he was loved, or ever would be. He had barricaded himself in his house. He told me his despair was from being misunderstood. As is known, however, a man too carried away by passion, especially if he is of a certain age, becomes completely blind and is ready to suspect hope where there is no hope at all; moreover, he takes leave of his senses and acts like a foolish child, though he be of the most palatial mind. Love is the most profound aesthetic experience in a person’s life. On that note, he took the cap off a bottle of beer. “Gimme a cigarette.” He was ugly, lively, and filled with the spirit of libertinism. There is nothing, he thought, nothing so blissful in the world as falling back into the arms of a woman who is—possibly bad for you. At least he was happy for a time. “I was once a man,” he said, “but now I’m not.”

During the period in my life when I was most unhappy, I used to frequent—for reasons hard to justify, and without a trace of sexual attraction—a woman whom I only found appealing because of her ridiculous appearance: as though my lot required in these circumstances a bird of ill omen to keep me company.

“I think this room is the saddest place I have ever been.” How could anyone live for long in such a place? “Wake up and smell the espresso.” Two or three books had been placed on each shelf, for decoration—exactly what bad designers do to provide their clients with a bogus cultural pedigree while leaving space for Lalique vases, African fetishes, silver plates, and crystal decanters. “Let me guess who decorated this room.”

Sometimes staying in the house can be bad.

“I don’t believe you,” Roy said. I could hear her talking to herself. She did not know what she thought. The alert host at an opportunity lifted his glass to Humanity and, when the toast had been drunk, he threw open a window significantly. “Is there anything here you’d like to put on?” he asked. “If you would step with me for a moment into the bathroom … I’ll be brief,” he said.

It’s creepy, the language of police.

“I am a camera,” I said. “I’m doing a nonfiction novel.” Art, on this view of things, does not result from work. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

Excitement is muddling my thoughts, my face is blazing with heat.

“You’ll succeed at whatever you’re passionate about. But isn’t it dangerous for a girl your age?” Seated, she opened her handbag and used the mirror to look at her teeth. Next he showed some anxiety about the adjective “handsome.” It was difficult to argue with a man whose knowledge of the early recordings of Connie Francis was practically flawless.

By now it was darker in the low-arched room than it was outside. “They never have my size,” he said breathlessly, “and I refuse to tell them it’s for a friend.” Frustration had been puckering his spirit. As the evening wore on I began to suspect that I was in the presence of a desperate man. Her mean, hunted look was driving me insane. His waking hours were spent in a prison of rituals and superstitions, his “mania,” as he called it. I don’t know how he made his decisions in those days. We believe in ourselves, as we do not believe in others.

An hour goes so slowly when someone is talking.

The rest of the day was spent devouring a book by Havelock Ellis.

That night, I wrestled with myself for hours and hours.

39.

I am teaching myself perfect freedom. So far, so good. More or less meaningless. I spent twenty-four hours in reflections, all of which ended by convincing me of my mistakes and making me despise myself. I didn’t understand a thing. Is this the so-called “blue hour”? I was so depressed that, unable to talk about my torment with anyone, I continuously brooded. Played the piano. “You can either resent the way life is ordained, or be intrigued by it,” wrote the critic Denis Donoghue. I remembered that the Hindus—or was it the Buddhists?—taught that a man should lead an ordinary life as a merchant and a father but that as old age approached he should become a monk and meditate and fast and give up the world and even his family and sex. You had your period of civic business, then you withdrew to discover what life was really about and to begin the long process of preparing for death.

I ruminated for perhaps six seconds on the words “get used to” and felt a kind of very slight melancholy that can be expressed only by the image of a pile of sand or rubbish.

Obediently the body levers itself out of bed—wincing from twinges in the arthritic thumbs and the left knee, mildly nauseated by the pylorous in a state of spasm—and shambles naked into the bathroom, where its bladder is emptied and it is weighed: still a bit over 150 pounds, in spite of all that toiling at the gym!

I owe my salvation only to chance.

That night there was a snowfall. White streets, white roofs, all sounds softened. As I walked up the rue de la Chausée- d’Antin, swimming on waves of sadness and grief and thinking about death, I raised my head and saw a huge stone angel, dark as night, looming up at the end of the street.

Yes, I am dreaming aloud. ‘Tis very strange.

Homosexuality does not stem from any dirty little secret. Nothing is abnormal about it except its price. Yes, but what is it? To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? It is when I am masculine that I want to make love to a man. Repression is a cat without a smile in the heterosexual streets, and a smile without a cat in homosexual minds. One ages quickly enough without such complications. There is a proportion of humans, oscillating between fifty and a hundred percent, that carries the desire for the same sex.

This morning, more snow, and lieder broadcast on the radio.

Parenthood, it seems, makes you nervous for the rest of your life.

Across the sky, like a cornea filling with blood, came a fearful darkening.

40.

The inquest concluded that Roy had died of unknown causes, a verdict to which I added the words, in the deep and dark hours of the night.

41.

I got there at three, dressed in black. They were waiting for me, looking expensive; svelte and composed. The house was full of the silence of snow. I urinated, emitted gas.

David’s face assumed an expression of horror. “Put me to the test, I accept it!” cried David.

Does he think he’s in West Side Story or something? It was one of the traits that endeared him to me. “But, David, you must insist on a proper rehearsal.” He got drunk every day, I no longer knew what to do with him. He would never be popular: he saw that. “I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer. You must yield to my ardor without resisting me in the slightest, and be sure that I will respect your innocence.”

“Oh, damn,” said David very softly. “--Suck it yourself, sugarstick!”

Sometimes when I’m at work I find myself drifting off, thinking of the low light by which we dine, how he’s taken to keeping a bottle of my preferred bourbon in the house. But he must also accept the responsibility which goes with my gratitude.

He himself repeatedly said that—except for poetry—love was the only thing that absorbed his interest. Our entire reasoning comes down to surrendering to feeling.

At all events, his somber mood does not appear to have lifted.

42.

Joe was taking the offensive. “Say that I am asleep and tell her to go away. She depresses me.” He knew that her love for him would drown him, that he could not live with such a passion, with the sense of being always emotionally outclassed.

“Certainly not, it would be impolite. What were you doing–praying? Are you allowed to do that? Why would someone go on doing such things?”

“Why not,” he said rather stupidly.

“What are you thinking, boy?”

“Goddam if I know,” he said, his inflection implying that the answer to that question was hopelessly obscure. “It is a way of connecting with something larger than oneself and, indeed, larger than any self. I should like to see the mystery of being. I can’t find myself a second father.”

Exactly.

I like it when he calls me daddy. And yet the victory is not absolute. One who thinks he is a good father is not a good father; one who thinks he is a good husband is not a good husband. I never was very good at getting away with anything.

“What say you, Eleanor? And where have you been—if it isn’t indiscreet … ?”

She wore a blue dress and a white sailor hat. She did not know what to say, or how to express herself more genuinely. She dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat: and in this case she had made up her mind. She reminded me of my mother, her infinite patience and the way she looked like a weeping saint asking to be slapped in the face. I can see her standing at the kitchen sink scraping carrots. She stands on the porch of her fabulous New England inn with her artificial dessert topping, made from lard, engine oil, preservatives extracted from offal and animal screams. History takes a certain course, and it adds up to New England. She highly disapproves of my deficiency (in household matters) and my (pathological) irresponsibility when it comes to heavy lifting, tidying up, cleaning and other domestic divertimenti, which, I admit, I hold in utter contempt.

It began to rain over the woods outside, and a mood of depression and of unspeakable loneliness suddenly felled me like a hammer-stroke. Soon I will be forty-four years old. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.

I have not a desire but a need for solitude.

How often we need to be assured of what we know in the old ways of knowing—how seldom we can afford to venture beyond the pale into that chromatic fantasy where, as Rilke said (in 1908!), “begins the revision of categories, where something past comes again, as though out of the future; something formerly accomplished as something to be completed.” I love the old questions. But if the acutest sage be often at his wits’ ends to understand living character, shall those who are not sages expect to run and read character in those mere phantoms which flit along a page, like shadows along a wall? But I will not philosophize.