In Partial Disgrace (20 page)

One night I awoke to the creak of the closet door, and I could make out by the light of his lamp a newly beguiling Voo, eyes twinkling like kernels of corn in horsemanure, something very like a grin across his fecal-face. He moved without his usual sluggishness and I saw that he had also acquired a companion. At his feet there sat the cutest monster you ever saw, a three-headed hound, its back covered with snakeheads and the tail of a perfect little dragon. Mooks was stunned silent, obliterate. The monster sat obediently and focused at the end of a velvet rope. I had to give him credit. It was a standoff. The Voo sashayed out into the hall dragging the brute with its tail thrashing behind him. He would not return.

I believed then, if I could only reclaim the dead language of childhood, that the Voo would disappear from my life, or become a mere augury whom I could interpret as I liked. Indeed, I was becoming bored with my fear and less anxious about its source. The Voo, after all, had a certain authority and detachment which seemed admirable. The magic of
in extremis
had always appealed to me. His situation was clearly more interesting than mine. From the demands of the infant, one can come to understand the tyrant’s point of view, because it is we in our stinking bedclothes who are most totalitarian. I had never questioned the fact that I
deserved
to be frightened and judged by this assassin of disfigurement. And I was attracted by a spirit who had the hardness to go to any lengths! In short, I had to summon the honesty to admit that I would have preferred to be very like the Voo, and insert myself into his world, but simply couldn’t muster the wit or will to do so. I had also come to notice that as the Voo was vain and self-regarding, he was basically human, and therefore defeatable. But this in no way made me less interested in what went through the villain’s mind, what it was like to be in his large red shoes. How I missed my absent mute interlocutor!

As the days went on and I became more attached to Mooks, cosseting him without qualms, hugging him until he burped, I began to have other concerns, not the least of which was the wedge which my small companion had put between me and my parents. I also began to speculate about what would happen if the tyrant, cornered, as it were, might alter his routine, then strike out and injure Mr. Mooks, even sic his three-headed monster dog upon him. Mooks was not their match. He had altered our relations by a kind of irrational bravado, not to mention a certain stupidity which would eventually irritate a cosmic presence like the Voo.

This was not real sympathy, only a bloated sense of myself, having less to do with self-confidence than a kind of spiritual elephantiasis, mercilessly requiring enormous amounts of new territory and stimulation. How stupid of me not to have made a pact with the Voo before Mooks entered the scene!

Most disturbing of all, what if the Voo was indeed banished—would Mooks, who had conquered him, not get a swelled head, no longer feel useful, and perhaps disappear? Or would he become, as smug victor, so insupportable in our civil family that I would finally have to hide him out?

The Voo, for all his threats, did not require interpretation; everyone understood what
Vooness
was. But Mooks did, and endless lies. Moreover, as I reached out to stroke his rigid little neck, I came to see that out there where he lay was a little bit of me—less easily satisfied perhaps, but certainly more alert and more real. And that indeed if Mooks saw me in this light, he might be tempted to hold his bravery over me, constantly reminding me of my inferiority, and making me appear ridiculous, talking to an underpedigreed dog, all but invisible.

My insomnia never much improved, though later with the help of kind ladies and fine liquor I was able to enter the closet of total oblivion so necessary to surviving the good life. Buffeted by fate into the most various corners of the world, I have accepted gratefully many a generous and gentlewoman’s easement and aid. But I did not infer even then that as a grown man I would long for those nights of lucid ecstasy, when the door swings open and the madman, the most eternal playmate, punctually presents himself, as you piss all over your insides.

Finally, the day came when I realized I spent more time worrying about Mr. Mooks—that he might be hurt, abandon me, or show me up, that it would all somehow turn out badly—than anything else. And this caused me more anxiety than the Voo. For if the Voo would never go away on his own, did that also mean that Mooks would live forever? And who after all was the more instructive, or entertaining presence?

And so one breakfast morning before Father returned from his walk, I asked Mother to remove Mooks’ plate, and hypocritical tears welled up in her eyes.

“Has Mr. Mooks gone somewhere?” she said. “Is he not feeling well?”

I did not reply, for I had lost yet another language. Mooks had melted away, spot by stripe, blue eye by brown eye, sentence by sentence. My companion had scurried out of my life without so much as a fare-thee-well, a fact much more mysterious than his appearance.

MY THREE SWEETHEARTS

(Iulus)

I spent my days hiding in various caves, sinks, love holes, and other dips and ducks around the estate, playing with bear bones and animal skulls. My favorite was the funnel-shaped cavern which formed the crypt of Muddy St. Hubertus. Here the Astingi had elaborated the ochre and hematite prehistoric cave drawings with their own gold leaf, reddened yellows, and velvety blues, drawing human figures amongst the shadowy staggered mammals and reptiles, while impudently restoring the scene to two dimensions. And here was the best likeness of my parents and our domestic aura, the mezzotint “Dogface, Mermaid and Boy Exeunting on a Dolphin.” It was not historical, not a memory of olden times, nor did it record an event. It was an image of memory before it became history, bathed in a light which came from a world beyond, venerating access to a personality you didn’t have, and a life you were not going to live. Nor was it, strictly speaking, “art,” for it demanded no protection and offered none. No one controlled it, and mercifully, it had no theme. It presented itself as actual creatures cooperating with the painter, people, and animals whom the painters had actually known, though the elaborations of the subjects were separated by tens of thousands of years. It was something which could not exist in the mind, but it took no leap of imagination to believe that these creatures were still very much alive. The paintings had been covered over the eons with layers of calcite, and within this dull sheen one could make out the black soot torchmarks of various observers through the ages. At a certain angle, I could see a boy holding a torch accompanying the creatures coming toward me. The more I stared at him, the harder he looked at me. I had to get away from him. He was posing as my spiritual guide, and the last thing I wanted was to be alone with God. But I did not lack for playmates. Ophar Osme Catspaw was our resident artiste and intellectual gent. He variously claimed origins in both Persia and Oxfordshire, and indeed perfectly blended those regional affectations into a kind of seamless seediness—a donnish ayatollah, fearing death but hating life. He lived for ideas and rode every recent train of thought through our premises, great dirty brown carriages on wobbly axles with all their windowpanes smashed. He was clean-shaven except for a pair of narrow whiskers on his cheeks; his thin hair of a strange greenish-gray hue was parted in front at the temples. He was constantly adjusting the collar of whatever shabby jacket he was wearing, and even in winter he never put his arms into his overcoat, but wore it slung over his shoulders, his hands contemplatively intertwined behind him.

He had come to us during Father’s first flush of enthusiasm, the trainer/ patron’s confidence that he might turn willfulness into talent, mere neurotica into a vital
névrose
. He gave him the Masonic outbuilding for a studio, where in fact he did produce
Der Analom,
which hung over our dining table, a number of watercolors of Mother running, swimming, or shooting, and a not unflattering oil of my deselfed-self, though, as is often the case with amateurs, the hands were wrong.

Had he remained, like most of us, a mediocre surrealist with strong political inclinations, he would have been an instructive companion, if only as a check on conventional wisdom. Indeed, Father ran every investment idea by him, and if he assented, promptly did exactly the opposite—and in this contrarian scheme, Catspaw proved nearly infallible and worth every ducat expended on him. But I too learned a valuable lesson from Catspaw—that human beings seem capable of remembering only one story at a time in its entirety, and what passes for the life of the mind is largely the adolescent search for a single variable which explains everything. Catspaw was my Yale and my Harvard. He became more famous as a pedagogue than artist, for having one student—me.

He was also renowned for his great character roles in local drama groups—the gravemakers in
Hamlet
, the touching fool in
Lear
, Rageneau in Rostand’s
Cyrano
, the demented steward in
Twelfth Night
, and the hierophantic soothsayer in
Cymbeline
. Indeed, he would often drop effortlessly into these roles in the midst of normal social intercourse, delighting in unnerving our many guests. And rarely would he present a glass of champagne without a Faustian riddle,

leaving the guest racking his brains for the source of that ghostly echo.

But my dear parents increasingly lacked the patience to sit for their likenesses, or the vanity to review them, and eventually could no longer afford to purchase his work, which of course made poor Catspaw sullen and moody and even more unkempt than usual. He attended meals sporadically, usually arriving only for dessert, and he spent a great deal of time in the attic trying on the many moldy costumes there. But his most baffling move was his renunciation of painting for the literary life. This proved a great tactical mistake with Father, for husbands have no reason to like modern literature—indeed, it was a pillory for husbands. For years, every wife in every modern novel had walked out.

“Has she a child?” Father thundered. “She walks out. Has she no child? She walks out! Then she experiments, becomes disappointed, and we are supposed to be gracious! The only reason to write a novel,” he concluded, “is to attract women, but then in the writing of it you have to forsake them, so what’s the point?”

But Catspaw was not writing a novel; his was an even stranger form of literature, what the Cannonians call
kritiki
, which took the form of flinging down his napkin at dessert with provocative statements such as, “Dialogue is the anguish of being,” or “Peace is the terror of dialogue,” or “Clothing is the cause of nudity,” and Father would mildly counter, “Yes, even an
X
is only a
Y,
” and then go for a long fast walk. Mother concurred, for why think if it serves only to make you unlovable? And indeed, ours was an era of failed intellectual suicide.

I believe my parents would have terminated him had they not feared that throwing him out to live on his wits would have brought even more grief to the community at large, so they made the brave decision to sequester him at Semper Vero rather than allow him join the ever-increasing band of failed artists who would hijack the century. Mother no longer spoke to him, but communicated only in writing, and Father listened well-manneredly but did not hear, calling him “that aphorism factory” behind his back.

But to be charitable, Catspaw’s temperament would have caused anxiety even to those with lesser nerve. He was religious in routine, philosophic in temperament, historical in nostalgia, and avant-garde by default, though lacking belief, analytic ability, knowledge of the past, or real ruthlessness. He blamed his anxieties on the “metaphysical condition of art,” and his moods on the paradoxes of “being itself.” And he often spoke wistfully of the “externalization of internalization.” In short, Catspaw operated solely in that elegant and apocalyptic space between the banal specific and all there is to be known. With superhuman effort, he had turned himself into one of those intellectuals from whom one often comes away from a conversation feeling actually deprived of knowledge. He was right as long as he was talking, but then the silence overwhelmed everything he had just said. All this was further complicated by the fact that his status in our household was unclear—not quite a servant, tutor, guest, jester, savant, relative, or even presence, but rather an up-to-date irritant—a walking, talking reality check, a case study against tolerance.

Nevertheless, Father took occasional pity on him, inviting him to our Zoopraxinoscope evenings, where Muybridge’s still photographs of animal locomotion were beamed successively upon the wall, Father noting how differently the horse uses its legs in the amble, canter, and gallop, and pointing out with dripping sarcasm how aesthetes—from Altamira cavemen to Leonardo to Gericault—had all painted horses running with all four hooves off the ground, getting the true locomotive posture completely wrong. These evenings always ended with a silent movie of Mother prancing along the diving board as if she were walking the plank.

“All our movements, like our feelings, are stiff, you see,” Father toasted the images. “We do not dash headlong through space. We do not move the way we feel we move,” he nodded sharply to Catspaw, “any more than we write the way we feel we think.”

And Mr. Catspaw could be seen later, with his long, prematurely gray hair and dirty cape, wandering the terrace in the moonlight, his upturned waxen profile lost in thought.

He would be my loyal life companion, batman, and object lesson. For while I felt closer to a cab-horse than an intellectual, no man could ask more from a tutor—one who will try on every up-to-date fashion, regurgitate in your stead the countless mass of new thoughts, so that a boy might cultivate his ideophobia, resist every metaphysical titillation, as well as every stupefying compulsory opinion. In Cannonia, to have a fool attending on you is a mark of great distinction.

The first thing one noticed about Seth Silvius Gubik was his ability to masturbate with either hand. (He could roll each eye independently as well.) This perfect ambidexterity was extended to drawing (he could simultaneously draw double helixes spiraling away from one another), athletics (he could skip stones with either hand across the widest parts of the Mze), and even the keyboard, where he could perform an anonymous canon of his own composition from two separate sheets of music, the left hand playing a tune beginning with the last note, and the right ending with its first note,
recte et retro
,
alla riversa
in the Hebrew manner. He could Germanize the weak and pleasant action of a French piano with a Brahmsian sonority, and with Viennese instruments of delicate touch and bouncing, rolling action he could maintain nuance while adding volume and restless French chromaticism. If no instrument was available, he would beat out a fugue on a log with his knuckles based on the letters of his name. He liked anything in C-minor, and he played with a seriousness which suggested that a new version of the piano would eventually have to be constructed for him. “There’s no use in being envious,” Father said, “it is given to some and not others.” Mother sniffed, “Warm hands, cold heart.”

Gubik’s hands were neither slender nor large; indeed, his fingers were so thick he had trouble fitting them between the black keys. Yet he could not only reach a twelfth but play chords without arpeggiation. His fingers somehow moved independently of each other, so he could play a Bach fugue with three fingers of each hand, and with all ten invisibly bring out any individual note from a block chord. His perfectly split brain thought of his two hands as one, so the sound was of three. He played impassively with his fingers flat; occasionally his wrists dropped below the level of the keyboard. The motion of his hands was always
legible
, as if they were moving in sign language. He sat very low on the stool, and always concluded with a single unsmiling bow.

With such amazing reflexes, it was no wonder that Father preferred him to me, though he did his best not to show it. He was torn between sending him to a conservatory, which he feared would debase his natural talent, and preserving his remarkably intuitive nature at Semper Vero at the cost of condemning him to a life of near servitude.

Gubik was then almost my age but not exactly my friend, and one tolerated him as one tolerates a genius who is always potentially going to throw things out of balance. If one were interested in symmetry, one would have to say that he was everything Catspaw wasn’t, for if Catspaw was always one step from self-destruction and oblivion, Gubik was always in the wings, ready to step forward as a total presence. Apart from his uncommon aesthetic abilities, it might be said that he absorbed and fed off every scrap of authority that Catspaw squandered, a perfect reverse mime. He was his own school, a true original, a boy willing to grab hold of history, make it conform, and kiss every hand he could not bite. He taught me that the hardest thing in painting is to draw a perfect circle, and the only way to do this is to draw two circles simultaneously with both hands, so that concentration and self-consciousness cancel one another out, allowing the form to perfect itself. This was of course the secret to his approach to the keyboard, and later, politics, where he discovered how to play the feminine masses. (As Commissar for Cults and Education, his lieutenants noticed that he could write a chatty personal letter with his right hand while drafting a government document with his left, or hold a telephone conversation while penciling in sardonic asides on some proposal.) Unfortunately, he became interested in the sort of repertoire which suits the performer more than the listener. With his sad, gentle face, he was precisely the sort of man a poor wretch would seek mercy from, and the very last man who would grant it.

Gubik was allegedly the illegitimate issue of a deaf and dumb Astingi maiden and a long gone soldier billeted in Silbürsmerze, incurring both the enmity of her tribe as well as the indifference of the local population. Mother had taken her in, given her rooms over the stable, an easy regimen in the house, and had even acted as her midwife—all the more remarkable since Gubik came into the world only a month after myself.

He was good with animals, all animals, and took to his role as a kind of elevated swineherd, carrying a crook sharpened at the edges like a scythe, diffidently picking up the prized long-haired Mongolian pigs from each village house at dawn, and escorting them to engorge themselves on the fallen fruits and nuts of the forest, supplemented with a mash of beetroot, bird’s eggs, and trout. At dusk they would return in single military file, until each belled pig had turned in at its own gate. For pocket money he would join the gruff and dirty choruses of those who dragged boats upstream, though he did not take well to authority and had a highly developed sense of injustice. Mother once said that he would “not be happy until every king was strangled in the lap of every disembowled priest, every dwarf stretched out, and every beggar enriched.” When he returned downriver, he would go to the empty church to practice on the echo organ, playing with his rope-burned hands behind his back his own renditions of “The Flight of the Bumblebee” or “Ah! Perfido” holding double-thirds or even full octaves in both hands. Opening the full Rückpositiv and Brustwerk pipes, he drew uncomfortable tremolos from a duplex of the vox angelica and vox humana.