Cast in Doubt (3 page)

She is a trusting soul. Of course that is the way to get hurt. Presumably she has been. Even a girl that age—twenty or twenty-one—could be indelibly marked by painful events and circumstances, blown by misfortune and regret this way and that. Or bounced this way and that. I don’t know which I prefer. The coffee is cold and my hands are numb. I don’t feel the cup between them. A bad sign. Not like chicken entrails spilled on one’s front door, or whatever, but a bad sign nonetheless.

I don’t know why everything seems so funny to me this morning. I suppose I dreamed something that delighted me, some absurdity, some revenge. Perhaps I murdered Roger and got away with it. The perfect crime. He will figure in my next crime story—the unsuspecting victim. He won’t be Roger completely—Roger is not unsuspecting—but a writer on an island who finds out something he isn’t supposed to know, and before he does, is embroiled in The Situation, from which he can’t extract himself except by spilling the beans. I will model him on Humphrey Bogart as he was in
Beat the Devil
, a favorite movie of mine, in which Bogart’s character is something of a joke but still knowledgeable, savvy. Death by garroting, I think, Roger with a rope around his neck. Old-fashioned but mean. I prefer it to knives and certainly to guns. The sky is so blue today I can scarcely bear it.

The post has fallen with a thud at the front door and Yannis, penitentially, leaves the room to run downstairs and fetch it. Probably he will gossip with Nectaria. From the force of the drop, I’d say magazines and newspapers have arrived as well as a book or two. Now I have time to look at my face in the mirror. I am embarrassed to engage my narcissism in front of Yannis, for he must know I find myself ugly or he must find me so, even though he is, by no stretch of the imagination, a Greek god. Not at all. His nose was broken in a fight, one of his eyes crosses and seems to seek his nose, and he walks oddly because he is so bowlegged; but it doesn’t matter at all. He is better-looking than I ever was at his age, though I’m not sure why. Perhaps it is just that he is not me, and that is enough. I drink all the coffee even though it’s cold and leaves a flat, repellent coating on my tongue. I’d like to spit it out but I’m too lazy to leave my chair. Helen hasn’t left hers. What taste is on her tongue?

The post brings a pleasant surprise, a droll événment. Alicia has invited me to tea. She must not have minded my mood of the other evening, last week. Was it that long ago? Time races so. I too am repetitive, my little habits and eccentricities, even my bitchiness, are so well known to Alicia and Roger that they may even be appreciated. I don’t really feel judged by them. That would be intolerable. Alicia’s invitation is clever and charming. She says we will be alone. She must have something up her sleeve, prosaic as that sounds. I will pen a note, a charming response, and give it to Yannis to deliver by hand. She’ll appreciate that and invite him to tea, and he’ll be flattered to have small cakes served to him by a lady. He’ll be there an hour or so during which time I can collect myself, shower and wake enough to take Helen and him, if he wants, for a drive. I’d like to show Helen a small village where I know one of the peasants. He fought the Turks and is, as Yannis would put it, “strong like bull.” of course, I write to Alicia in my best hand, I’ll be there. I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I can see her fluff her hair, her long fingers coiling rapturously around her thick curls—no gray yet. I see her smile to herself, containing the secret within her until she has me alone in her lair.

Generally I like women. Roger says that is because I am part woman, whereas he, he implies, is not, since he doesn’t enjoy their company as I do. I think that is pure foolishness. And besides, we are all part male and part female. I don’t like all women, naturally. For a time I loitered on the fringes of a group—in college and after, around Cambridge—which was united not just by its love of literature and each other, but also by its contempt—even hatred—for women. I didn’t and don’t feel this, not at all. I like women but I am glad to be a man. I identified strongly with my mother when I was very young, and even as I grew away from her, I maintained an atavistic sympathy for her, oppressed as she was by my father, who was the classic cold and distant patriarch, absorbed in his business—trains.

In company with them, Roger pretends to like women, to flirt with them, to seek their approval and admiration, and I’m sure that the wiser ones see through him as if he were a flimsy curtain. I could have Roger murdered, in the book I’m planning next, when he is living in a dreary, rented room decorated with cheap curtains. The curtains could be a filmy nylon, reminiscent of the lingerie Lana Turner might have worn, in the movies, when she beckoned to her gangster lover. In a sordid hotel room. In the forties. The forties. A wonderful, terrible time, but a time of right and wrong. We all knew where we stood, even if we were all a bit anti-semitic. Roger, I believe, is half-Jewish, and Harvey is not his real surname, but his stepfather’s name, and for the life of me, or his, he won’t tell me with what name he entered the world.

The fishermen are calling to each other. They’re sailing into the harbor with their catch, and they’ll disgorge the octopus and squid they trapped pitilessly. The creatures are flung onto the concrete and lie there grotesquely, like bulbous sacks of wet clay no one wants. The octopuses’ slimy gray pockmarked tentacles are disgusting to me as they cook under the hot sun. They’ll lie like that, the fishermen passing the time, smoking and talking, until the restaurants have taken their pick of the catch. I vomit at the merest taste of octopus, almost at the sight. But I perversely enjoy looking at them as they die. I am fascinated after all this time. Watching the octopus is a habit of the day. And sometimes, much as I hate them, the sight of them lying there, those ugly beasts, makes me want to cry.

I open a
New York Times
that Gwen, my best friend in Manhattan, mailed months ago by boat, along with other magazines and clippings, news items culled from diverse sources. Watergate is dragging on even now; Nixon is supposedly anguished about the men who were sentenced. President Ford, who pardoned him, has formed a commission to investigate the CIA’s spying on citizens, domestically, under Nixon’s administration. It is vile. I find Ford’s naming Nelson Rockefeller as the commission’s chairman entirely dubious, even though he is Vice President. I’ve always disliked Rockefeller. The story goes—Alicia told me this—that years ago he was at a meeting with some of his employees, and one of them mentioned “take-home pay.” Rockefeller asked, What is take-home pay? And this man became governor of the state of New York. And then there was Attica. A horrible man. A small item catches my attention. A man has been found strangled in his Upper East Side apartment—no sign of struggle, no forced entry, no robbery. There is a story there. I clip the article and put it into my story file.

Tea with Alicia tomorrow. A drive with Helen today. It’s all right that I’m not working. I can take the weekend off, and if I don’t drink much at dinner, I might get something done tonight. What does Alicia want to chat about? Wouldn’t it be strange if Helen were Alicia’s given-up-for-adoption child? There was one, years and years back, I am almost certain of that. Perhaps this is why Alicia dislikes Helen. She might be her child, the child that represents a rebuke to Alicia, and Alicia may be more like a mother cat than a human being who, finished with the child/kitten, wants nothing more to do with her. Helen has never mentioned her mother. Never her family, not really, now that I think of it, maybe something about her parents once, the source of many of her problems. Of course. I am so glad not to have children and not to be a father. Except to Yannis but that is different. I don’t even know if Helen has siblings. I’ll try to ask her this afternoon.

Helen is wearing leather flats, with slippery soles, and the shoes are entirely unsuitable for climbing. In some ways she has no sense. But I say nothing to her when she gets into my car. Yannis has stayed home. So be it. He’s in a bad mood. Helen is less than talkative, and to draw her out, I ramble on about Roger. He is, I tell her, no bon vivant. He’s not rich enough. His Greek is better than passable and he lords that over the passersby, the tourists, to make himself a bigger Roger. She asks if I like him at all. I love Roger, I say, surprised. He is like a brother to me. This is not precisely the truth, and as I don’t particularly like my own brother, nor have I actually ever felt that any other man was one, in the spiritual sense, I am dissembling. Or, as they say, lying through my teeth. But why do I? I want Helen to think I am a good person, I suppose. I don’t want her to know that I can be mean, even monstrous. I’d like her to think I am above all manner of pettiness. But obviously, since she thinks I hate Roger, she has already discovered the truth, or part of it. I sense she has already known bad people, evil ones. Why else would she have such an enigmatic smile and be so uneasy with her laugh, clapping her hand over her mouth just as she begins to chortle. Not chortle. I don’t know what to call it.

She’s looking out the window now. The donkeys dot the rough landscape. The women who walk on the side of the dirt road and whom we pass rapidly, though I drive slowly, are wearing black and carrying bundles, faggots, on their backs, as if they too were donkeys. Beasts of burden. They are solid women, of the earth, whom young Helen must view with as much sense of mystery as I. I ask her, Do you have anything in common with these women? She tells me that she has made contact with a Gypsy, a woman who recently came into our town. Contact? I wonder aloud. Daily, they pass each other near the baker’s shop. And they stare at, Helen says, look at each other. The Gypsy knows something about her, Helen thinks, and she knows something about the Gypsy. That sounds mystical, Helen, I didn’t suspect you went in for that sort of thing. She smiles and claims that she doesn’t.

How Helen’s young skin glows! It is so clear and clean, unsullied, without a sign of adolescent disruption. A smooth, cool surface. I had terrible skin as a boy and always thought it had to do with evil thoughts or how I reached for my secret part much too often, to stroke it and comfort myself and bring myself to what pleasure I could. My dog, I called it, because I wasn’t allowed to have one. Will you lick my dog? I once asked Yannis. I was drunk, of course. Nowadays people are much more liberal about masturbation, but all of us then were in desperate conflict about its odious consequences.

Helen is clear and clean. Her dark-brown, nearly black, hair stops just short of her chin and is thick and straight, and her hazel eyes are sometimes more green than brown, even yellow, like her cat Maybelline’s. Her sunglasses—black frames, dark-green lens—perch on the middle of her nose and just now she reminds me of Jean Seberg, as visited by Monica Vitti. I must keep my eyes on the road. I don’t need to look at Helen, she is my tabula rasa. There is absolutely no reason in the world for my feelings for her, but somehow I identify with her completely and feel her as if she lived inside me. It is so odd. My fascination with her is deeper than for the octopus lying, dying, on the wharf. I shoot a glance at her from the corner of my eye, as if she knew how I was comparing her—let me count the ways! Were she to hear my thoughts, would she laugh or be insulted? Would she care at all?

Perhaps she is something like the girls I went to school with who terrified me with their self-possession and indifference, but in those days they did not hang out in discos or nightclubs or spend nights with men in bars or take men back to their apartments and make love with them. I guess some did but I didn’t know them. Helen makes casual remarks, now and then, about such events, as if they were only in the past and did not enter her life here, as I know they do, as I know men enter her life, enter her door, enter her. Have you any siblings? I ask. Yes, she answers, but then states that she doesn’t really like to talk about her family. I’m sorry, I say.

There’s a boring silence and she looks out the window again. I feel I have done something terribly wrong. Or she has done something terribly wrong. But what could that be? Finally she insists that we should just forget it, or drop it, as she puts it, because it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t want to think about the past. It’s bad for her. “Bad for me, Horace.” She pronounces my name in two distinct syllables, for emphasis. I love it when she uses my name. From her lips it sounds like an interesting one.

To mollify me, she tells me that she dropped out of college in her second semester, which is indeed precocious, I remark, but she continues as if I hadn’t said that. Then, in New York, she worked as an artist’s model, posing nude four times a week, three hours each sitting, for students from an art school and also for some private classes. Helen frequented clubs and bars all during that time—Max’s especially. She dyed her hair orange, wore flat white powder on her face, and painted dark red lipstick on her naturally blush pink lips. She acquired a series of musician boyfriends who had apartments; she lived with each for about a month, until it wasn’t cool anymore, as she puts it. But, she states definitively, she’d never do it for money. I am slightly shocked, to hear that she might even consider doing it for money. She’s not romantic, she admits, which I can almost grasp, though it’s difficult to accept from one so young and, in a way, delicate. She is in another league altogether. I think of that—other leagues and other clubs. Twenty thousand leagues under the sea dwell those fascinating and grotesque octopuses. Why do they disgust me so? Has she read Jules Verne? I think not.

When she and I walk together in town, men watch her move—women too—and I can’t tell if she’s doing something with her surprisingly round bottom or if it’s just the shape of it and her general demeanor. She’s not classically beautiful, but pretty and appealing, I think, and sexy in an awkward, almost androgynous way. She is also knowing, but then that’s an appropriately cool pose. As we get out of the car, having reached the village, which is just a few cottages, she rushes to explain that I don’t have to tell her anything I don’t want to, ever, that that ought to be our rule—no rules but that—our friendship must be different, unique. She says this so earnestly I want to embrace her, but feel that would be more common than unique and not at all hip. I respond pensively and formally, given the gravity of her statements: One should never have to say anything if one doesn’t want to do so. Helen tells me that she knows I want to be a mystery. With her, she asserts, I don’t have to try. I am one. I think quite the same thing about her, but would probably never tell her.