False Entry (16 page)

It has been a year now since I first walked into the Mannix household, armed as usual with my store of references. I came there not to know the Judge, although anyone would want to know him, but to know the household
entière
, one of those nucleal households that attract by virtue of their own warm enclosures, whose auras I can always recognize even from afar or second-hand, even as I recognized it in this one when Walter Stern, years back, used to tell me about it. By the time I came to know it actually, Mrs. Mannix was dead, and David, the son whom I was supposed to have known, dead too, but the household still had that
vertu
which does not die until the last arc of such a circle is gone. And Ruth, who must have been half grown when Stern—one of the accessory benevolences that such homes maintain—had first known them, was grown. A year, and for the last months of it, between Ruth and me, that familiar slow affair begun by a man and woman in the name of friendship, the friendship that steals its name from Plato and waits for it to be stolen by Psyche.

She knew this before I did—I do not have to be gallant here. I was unalert to it because I had not come to that household for her. I had entered it, become its intimate under the usual false references, with the usual preknowledge, and, as for some time now, only the slight social risk. For some time now I had risked nothing more serious—a pickpocket keeping his fingers lithe. It might have been thought that I was growing toward society, warming myself down from my cold niche on its fringe. At times I almost persuaded myself that this was so, but in my heart I knew it was not. For, until now, the people I had chosen to enter upon were flotsam, people well out of tone with my daily life or beneath it—people like those in Tuscana that day of the hearing. But this time I had chosen not the random ones from whom one could easily abscond, but persons who belonged to the stratum of my life in New York, who were, as it were, contemporary with what I was now. Why, now, did I choose such a household, something I had never done before? What I came for was the same as always, the same inexplicable sensation. The control that comes from foreknowledge—that is part of it. Detachment—I take my place, specious as it is, in their midst. And in the possession of both these things, a covert sense that although I do no evil, I nevertheless strike a blow. But above all, a sense of the utter secrecy of myself. For when one is among people on false terms, then no matter what emotion one gives them, one really gives nothing away.

Women love the inaccessible in a man; often I have seen them attribute it when it is not there. In any success I have had with them, I have always known this to be its deeper cause, although it is the last thing I would consciously use. When a man gives you his confidence, he does not necessarily ask for a token return; oddly, often he assumes that in giving you his intimacy, he has yours. But with a woman, confidences are the signal for love, and love asks a return. It craves a return in kind, applying endlessly for it, but it will settle for less—as I had often found. For I find it hard to believe that some men are frightened of sexuality. For me it is the one closeness I dare. For me, in the act of love, even without love, dissimulation is at rest, or in reflex. In that profound dissimulation there is a moment of trust.

But this time I dared too close. In my sorties into other people’s lives, it had sometimes happened that I had had relations with women I found there, but they were always, like the others around them, persons of unmeditative mind. Once, in a situation that involved no women, I had however found myself dealing with a person of intelligence equal, probably superior to my own—Belden, the Communist bookseller. But that world, though the obverse of random, is as fixed in its own distortions as a world under water; itself an aberrant, it has little time to ruminate on personal aberrations, and in it even such a mind as Belden’s loses its percipience of people as they are—although I often suspected, beneath his conscious motives, a devious pattern that came near to resembling my own.

But with Ruth I was dealing, first, with a world whose norms were my own surface norms. And I was dealing with a woman. The male imagination is more often extensive, galactic, flings itself robustly abroad. Women are miniaturists. They can imagine anything as possible, whorl within whorl, but they more often focus their flights on their own small field of space. And, finally, I was dealing with the delicate, ciliated intelligence of love.

And now I will let myself remember. It was afterwards, when we were lying together in the small room they call the library in her father’s house. Although I had often had women in my flat, I had never asked her there. Often, recently, she had been waiting to be asked. I did not examine my reluctance to let her see it, or see me there. I ignored the warning—my own alertness muffled, trying to tell me that she was a person to be feared.

I had already, as I see now, ignored another warning. When she first began giving me her small confidences, telling me of her brief marriage, referring lightly to her first jejune experiences of girlhood, mentioning here and there some man she had known, I understood it at once—the old, old sexual plea saying, “This is the way it was. We look back on it together. And now I look to you. We look to each other.” It is the oldest gauntlet, and I responded at once, as most would to a woman like her. As a companion I had already begun to hold her dear. And this was not unique for me either with men or with women; always before, my will and need to be secret had told me when it was time to leave. But this time, simple as her confidences were, I found myself reluctant to hear them. I am never bored with another’s revelations, with the occult thrill that comes from listening. I was not likely to use what she told me; I had richer stores. And yet I wanted to seal her mouth. I did not want to listen to her confessions. I wanted to warn
her—
that I was a person to be feared.

So we approached each other, the guileful and the guileless, and we met. Neither of us said a word.

Lying together, palm to palm, after love, is like lying in another country that some Dives has allotted for ten minutes or more. The voices that speak there are already the voices of paradise lost. I remember what I thought when I withdrew my palm. I thought—I could love her, if it were not for myself. We spoke then, or she did, of how we had met, of all the stages that had brought us to this night, in the way women love to do, exactly as children ask again for a story, secure in the fairy-tale end. Her hair was across my forehead. I was only half listening. The moment, with its treble of voices, was over. I watched it as it sped away, pluming into the gathering distance, leaving one of its voices behind. If it were not for myself, I could love her.

She was speaking of the circumstance that had brought us together, the encyclopedia soliciting her father for an article, the discovery that I had known David after the war, when he was serving with the American Friends in Germany, before the crash of the commercial transport in which he went down. I have of course never been in Germany. The war took me to the Far East, then home. It was Walter Stern who had been there with him, who used to speak to me endlessly of “Diddy” as he called him and of his friends the Mannixes, their house, their habits, meanwhile handing me, across our adjacent beds in the orthopaedic ward, the letters he was editing as a memorial, sitting up to read them to me—I with a leg in traction after a ski spill, he preoperatively spry, with his hump clinging between his shoulders, the night-light hollowing his eager face—that racked, Ancient Mariner face which all such people have. I had done him no wrong, merely appropriated him, what he knew, after his death, as people often must do with the dead, who, if they could, might prefer that to nothing at all.

“You are not listening,” she whispered. I drew her hair over my face. I thought of all those whom we leave for dead, either in the grave or in the past, who grow again between our shoulder blades. I thought of the great hump of memory I had made for myself, of such a shape that I could never hope to lay it down. And then I made the accidental slip. I spoke unaware; I was listening, but not to her. And I found myself with the enemy lying beside me, in the flesh still quivering in communication with mine. I discovered why I had never looked behind me. The real danger walks toward.

When I came back here that night I sat down here at my desk. All she knew was that there was something to be known, but I saw the thinness of the membrane I had always kept posed between myself and others. I wrote her a note full of evasions, another saying I was going away, tore them both up and sent none. “Tell me,” she had said, her mouth at my breastbone. My words until now. The words of the confidant. What I had to tell depended on a long chain of causation, from the beginning. I needed a place to lay it down. And the only safe confidant was myself.

But often, afterwards, in the nights here since then, after I have written and am returned to the present, I think of her, and then I imagine her as still lying naked and vulnerable under the blanket I crept from—immobilized there, as I am here—and I wonder over the nature of my fear. I might have gone on as I was. There must be many who live on with effrontery under strange private burdens. The ordinary, advancing like lichen, protects us all. Yet I did not, because of whatever it is that spins its filament between us, as she lies there, as I sit here. Often, after being with a woman, the pattern of that connection lies like a tracery in the muscles for days; one carries the other person about with one, a silent companion, certain that one’s own impress is being carried also. This is like that—if fear can be like that. I sit here, remembering what I must no longer dare.

I sat so last evening. It is a strange process, this alternation between the present and the past, in which I have deliberately made the present as null and stationary as I can, in order that the past may fill it to the brim. As I approach what I am after, I feel that it approaches me.

Last night, I was thinking of the people called “accident-prone,” those who need to injure themselves. There could be others, I thought, who sought the good accident. And if so, they would fear it as well. Then the phone rang, so late, so unaccustomed in the dead room that I knew, unless it was a wrong number, it would be she. I looked at the clock, almost four, and I understood, as well as if I had lived it, the evening she had lived through, that had brought her naked along the filament, here.

I picked up the phone and listened. If I answer, I thought, I may learn what my fear is.

“Yes?” I said, and our voices collided.

She spoke again.

“Pierre?” she said, and I drew in my breath at the collision of the present with the past. For in the memoir I have not yet come to that name.

T
HAT WAS THE NAME
I chose. At the time it did not seem to me I in the least odd that I, of English and Irish heritage, living in America, should suddenly choose to be known henceforward by the name of a half-French Viennese who had once shown me a brief, putative uncleship, letting me creep into the knee-high circle around him, long ago, on a few brilliant, lost afternoons. Nor that in doing so, in assuming my name, I meant contrarily somehow to preserve my identity, my singularity from the depredations of others. The young act from a pure, breathless logic still ignorant of the conventional barrier between dream and possibility. When a man begins to
act
logically according to others, to try to impose their kind of order on what the worm already whispers to him is an irrational world, then he has left his youth behind. As he begins to concede to the reality of the majority, the instinctual power of fantasy recedes. So, little by little, we bargain our youth away, and can no more quarrel with this inevitable than we can with the slow exchange of life for death. Some do, of course, pushing that earlier logic to the extremities of martyrdom or art, and history is made by them for a time. But I had neither their strength nor their luck. I am only unable to forget it, to let go of the
Heimweh
that remembers what it was once like to have.

I still had it that evening. When I left Demuth, I already knew what I meant to do, with an intent as hot and cleansing as anger. I was going to the courthouse, to Fourchette, to take back—to seize if need be—the petition, and destroy it. Underlying that was another, a new satisfaction that for the moment I thrust aside. It was akin to the satisfaction that comes from leaving, from leaving anywhere when there are others left behind, but it was more complex. Later on I would recognize it often—the faintly corrupt serenity that comes when we have turned somebody down. It too was a sign that I was growing. A child’s hatred exudes, natural as honey, toward those who refuse him, who do unto him. As he is civilized, he learns in his turn to hate others for what he has done to them. Going down Demuth’s stairs was, I think, the moment when I changed sides.

I had dropped another simplicity by the wayside. It glitters back there like a bit of mirror in a hedge. But I had more.

Outside, it was not much more than six o’clock; the night had not really come. It was the long, stationary dusk that at this season held the land for hours in a spider-colored void. Half a mile down the road to Tuscana, I caught a ride on a truck whose driver had picked me up once in a while before. We rode on through the pall as if it were a thicket, seeming to get nowhere except where we were, unless we glanced back at the huge, glazed waves of the dams.

“Sure is some combine,” said the driver. “Sure is some combine.” Ahead of us, on the state road, the wet streaks of the mirages skimmed one after the other under the wheels. Now and then we passed through a pocket of gnats frizzling in the air. Same specks came in the eyes just before the sun hit you, said the driver; one time he had to park by the side of the road for an hour before he was sure which.

“Dead town for sure, ain’t it?” he said, as we drove into Tuscana. In front of the courthouse he set me down. “Hitch along sometime, kid—I’ll carry you to Memphis.”