Dressing Up for the Carnival (18 page)

For a moment it seems the vision is about to collapse, but he manages to draw it back to life. Onward. A new, freshly furnished story rumbles into view with its defining line of phosphorescence. And next . . . and then . . . and finally . . .

The rest of Titus’s day passes in what seems a moment. In no time he is ducking through the doorway of his parents’ house, where the smell of soup greets him. He can’t wait to tell them what he has discovered. He makes them sit down and listen carefully. He can dream in the daytime as well as at night, he says. He can dream with his eyes wide open, never for a minute losing his concentration on the silly sheep.

“A day-dream,” his father says, full of wonder. “I must try this out for myself.”

“You have chanced upon something of great value,” his mother says, and she touches his shoulder with respect, understanding at once that this new form of consciousness will bring creativity and salvation and grace where before nothing but dullness had been.

No wonder I feel fortunate to be a humble leaf on my family tree. This tree thrives, its energy flows into the world making its offerings and inventions. The fact that I myself lack inventive fervor is not a cause for sadness, you must believe me; I know perfectly well that if the spirit of invention were too widely distributed, the world would implode.

Some of us are needed who merely keep the historical record. We count, we describe, we make our small forays into the archives. We keep track of our findings.

We interpret, we analyze, we speculate. And sometimes we risk our small emendations. Perhaps this too is part of invention.

DEATH OF AN ARTIST

The old man is dead.

At least he appears to be dead, lying there,
nested
there in oaky repose, relaxed under a demi-coverlet, the coffin lid tufted and ribboned and stuck with flowers. People shuffle by and stare down at him, remarking how like himself he looks. His last disguise.

In fact, his face is fleshier, angrier, than it appeared on the screen, knobbed and prehistoric with its thug’s nose, long bony white-tipped ears, thickish lips, and a tongue that now and then deceived him on the tube, wagging and twitching while he thrust about for one of those Anglo-Gallic witticisms of his, Oscar Wilde with a dash of maple syrup, always playing the role, the wimpled satyr. Now you see him, now you don’t.

No one knew him, really knew him. The history of his choleric, odd, furiously unproductive, and thoroughly unsatisfying life is most clearly set out in his diaries, eight plump volumes, but difficult to decipher because of the red crayon he affected, and the cheap lined schoolboy paper. These “undiaries,” as he himself once called them, are best read in reverse, that is, you should begin with the final entry and work your way backward.

Never mind the smiting, toxic scrawl. Begin. Observe him, then, at age eighty-eight, the infant’s tongue lolling and speaking his need. His weepy red script holds the glare of old regrets and fresh insights. “This has been the most remarkable day of my life,” he writes after making his desperate and theatrical journey, actually hoisting himself onto a train one June morning and going back to that country crossroads where he was born.

As a pilgrimage it was heroic, he with his tick-tocky heart and plugged lungs, playing the hoary sage, the native son. He required two canes, if you remember, to move himself along, wheezing and wiping the tears from his eyes. That was a side of him that perhaps only Emily knew: his sentimentality, his foundering in the folds of memory, those long sighs and leaky snuffles, just barely audible in his broadcasts.

The two canes, of course, were part of his getup, his self relishment. In his left hand he grasped the aluminum rod, spare and modern, government-issue; in his right, the burnished sycamore wand owned by his putative grandfather, former choir member and townsman. Between these two symbolic props he balanced himself, blinking at the camera, a tottery old paradox, eliciting sympathy while projecting scorn, disdainful of the particular but committed to the whole. Wink, blink. “Well, yes,” he barked into the microphone. The sun shone down. His beard was handsomely stiff and speckled. It was said that before his public appearances he shampooed it with the yolk of an egg, and that he considered it a mark of virility, though probably only Emily was entirely privy to this remark.

His seventies were his best decade, when, as he himself said, he was most nearly himself. The pension helped, also the milder climate. Often he strolled in the park of an afternoon, for the sheer pleasure of its symmetrical flower beds and settled statuary. During the whole of this era his only shred of posture was a Victorian parasol, printed with poppies, bought for ninepence in a north London market. “Forgive this artifice,” he said to a reporter who asked why he carried it. “But one must protect one’s self from one’s self.” The same reporter inquired as to his political views (and he admitted to a rather filthy vision of the future). And about his costive use of semicolons; and his opinions on his fellow “artistes”; and why he now referred to himself as “one.” A photographer captured him forever, standing by a singing fountain, his parasol raised, fending off not sun but rain, and uttering one of those off-the-cuffers which we now know to have been laboriously prepared and memorized and repeated. “One is ultimately faithful to one’s infidelities,” he twice uttered.

So much for his seventies, his sun-strewn seventies, when even Emily appeared to be taken in by his little affinities with nature, his ornithological potherings, his urban botanizing. “
Les mauvaises herbes,
” he sniffed, returning home from his afternoon strolls and tucking away the parasol for another day.

In his sixties he was in his full strength, or, to quote from his “anti-journal,” at the zenith of his weakness. He roared and whimpered, bellowed and bled. It was said he perfected the grunt. Made it his. He bought a ruff to wear around his neck and a pair of tights for his not-yet-completely-withered shanks. Emily has left a suitable account of this period, in which she submits her theory of possible drug dependency, Valium to be precise. Just to see him before the medicine cabinet was to feel an unstitching of certainty, says she. Chemical tranquillity brought an instant alias, transported him effortlessly into his other selves. When he drooped and sighed, he did so with authenticity and vigor. She worried, though, about his predilection for Turkish toweling (the term
terry cloth
was anathema to him) and speculated with her usual perspicacity that a thwarted sexuality was at the core. He received during this decade several mysterious phone calls, generally late in the morning, and worked tirelessly on his telephone mannerisms, cupping the receiver in a malevolent fashion, and glancing upward at the ceiling tile as though the ultimate tabulation of those acoustical squares might bring about the onslaught of popular acceptance—something he both courted and feared. He was, Emily says, an afternoon aristocrat and a twilight prole. Suppers he took in silence, like a monk.

His fifties were another matter. Some biographers suggest that it was during this period that his masquerade became the most elaborate and self-defoliating. He once, for instance, borrowed (stole) a child’s wagon, filled it with bedding plants, and went door to door through the western suburbs, offering his wares, gratis, to anyone kind enough to accept. No one did; doors were slammed; he wrote abut this experience later in his “neo-diaries” (vol. 6), calling it a national disgrace and a symptom of global paranoia. It was not a happy time. More than once he threatened retirement—“one wearies, one wearies”—but something hammy in his thundering brushed close to truth. In short, he made the mistake of becoming picturesque, forgetting that subterfuge requires more than consistency.

In his mid-forties he fell in love. Emily, of course, a case of feminine predicament and masculine opportunity or perhaps the reverse. May and December, one of those doomed unions, but one that was also blessed. “Entirely glandular,” he blustered to his public, “and also deeply spiritual.” They were snapped in a discount store by the paparazzi, she pushing a cart with her look of benighted luster and he playing the fool with a clutch of credit cards. At the checkout the girls winked, but at the bank there was trouble. He was forced into a radical reassessment during which his persona received a touch-up job, almost a replating. “I am at heart an average person,” he sincerely announced at a small ad hoc press conference in the vicinity of his neighborhood.

In his thirties—his chimera period, he called it—he was a sought-after dinner guest, and it was his habit, during this epoch, to carry a set of car keys in his hand. They gave him a sweet jingle, a certain cachet, becoming a trademark or, if you like, a kind of statement to the world. These keys, he seemed to say, spell evanescence. Transience. Fleeting grace.

An apocryphal story from the same period has him traveling about town carrying a mandolin, the origins of which are unknown but much disputed. On buses and streetcars, generally sitting toward the front, he rested this instrument across his knees in a lateral position, and frequently tapped its varnished frame with his fingers, creating a rhythmic effect.

And of course there is his toque, acquired in his twenties, that remarkable chapeau of knitted wool with its famed double tassel, worn throughout his life, tilted over his left or right ear. Often, once or twice a day, he lifted his hand and touched it lightly in a kind of ironic salute to the unhatted universe. “Hey, do you sleep in that thing?” a cheeky radio reporter once asked him, stopping him in the middle of his midday walk.

Throughout his teenage years he visited, not surprisingly, country churches and sat beneath any number of trees. “Were you starting to get self-aware during this period?” is a question often posed, and the probable answer is: perhaps. Certainly he was assembling the philosophy of non-merciless adaptation we find today limned in his “crypto-diaries.” His around-the-house costume in those teen years consisted of a rough cotton robe (forerunner of his Turkish toweling period?) and a pair of comfortable slippers said to have been presented to him by his mother on his thirteenth birthday. A coming-of-age gesture, perhaps. Ceremony has always figured importantly in his rubric, and a pair of slippers at such an auspicious age cannot have been without meaning.

No serious person pays attention to his childhood, he is said to have said, though evidence points to the contrary. A small set of building blocks, for instance, cannot be discounted. And a spinning top.
Spinning!
A silver cup with his name misspelled at the lip. And of course the red crayon, without which his name would be only a name and his life less than a life.

“I am utterly alone,” he wrote (in red) across the top of the final page.

There has been no mention of an inquiry.

THE NEXT BEST KISS

Todd and Sandy had been friends for just a few weeks, and Sandy knew they were about to say good-bye to each other.

This thing between them was an episode taking place on a small screen. A mini-flick, as Todd would say, a scenario, a sketch. A million words had flown by, but nothing had been promised or declared, and Sandy could sense the way she and Todd were using each other up minute by minute, one talky voice drinking the other dry.

Both of them loved to talk—or, more accurately, they felt compelled to talk. A hyperverbal compulsion was what they shared, way up there on the glottal thermometer, and that was putting it kindly. This talkiness might be genetic, or it might be what was expected of them. They were both professors, he on the West Coast, she on the East; she was in history, he was in sociology/film studies/cultural exegesis. (“Professor of et cetera”—that was one of Todd’s little jokes on himself, almost his only joke.)

Friends introduced them to each other at the reception that launched the 1998 Darlington Conference, in Detroit, devoted to the subject of
fin de siècle
crisis. Todd gave a paper titled “End of the Self,” about the instability of the self, the self as the sum of incalculable misunderstandings, and the selfishness of even claiming a self. Todd confided to Sandy that the text for his talk might eventually find its way into the
New York Review of Books,
although the editors were asking for substantial changes, which Todd was questioning—and quite rightly, he said.

Sandy presented an afternoon seminar, “Diatribe and Discourse in the Twenty-first Century,” prophetic in its pronouncements, spacy, brilliant (she hoped), loaded with allusive arrows (Lacan in particular), and followed by a vigorous Q-and-A session, with Todd, seated out there in the audience, contributing a number of thoughtful comments and reservations.

“He’s an asshole,” Sandy’s colleague Chloe said afterward.

“No,” Sandy countered, “not an asshole. Just an ass. One of those silly, old-fashioned asses.” She said this with a fond smile, all the muscles in her face and body relaxed for once. “Like our fathers were. Or our uncles. Total asses.”

“He talks in clauses, Sandy. You’re not supposed to
talk
in clauses. And especially not with semicolons intervening. I can hear those semicolons coming at me. Little squash balls hitting the wall.”

Sandy was still smiling; she couldn’t help herself. “There’s no law against semicolons.”

Since their first meeting Sandy’s jaws and Todd’s jaws had not stopped moving. They had a verbal Ping-Pong game going, a monsoon, unstoppable. Sexually, they seemed to belong to the same nation—the strenuous, the informed, the adventurous, the currently unattached. On the other hand, anyone could see that they were far from being matched linguistically. Todd’s ruminations tended to be speculative, Sandy’s narrative.

For example: “We’ve probably said farewell to the world of sermons and to the clenched piety of holy pilgrimages,” Todd said in his lecture, question marks hovering over his words like a jangle of surprised coat hangers. “We may soon be surrendering our sacred objects and perhaps the practice of prayer—even the notion of prayer.”