Lying in Bed (10 page)

I thought that might make her halt her self-guided tour of my home, but she just kept on going. “I'd like you to tell me about it. I assume the bedroom's back here?” she asked.

She went on down the long corridor that led to the bedrooms and various bathrooms and the maids' quarters and
whatever else might be back there in some room I hadn't slept in and so perhaps had never bothered to open.

“All the bedrooms are,” I answered.

“I meant yours.”

“I sleep in different rooms,” I confessed.

“No wonder,” she said with utter lack of condemnation as she opened one bedroom door after another. “I don't know how anyone can live like this. All these rooms. All these walls. Everything cut off from everything else. Did you know there didn't used to be bedrooms? People slept right in the middle of the house. In the great hall. They didn't go off into private chambers. They didn't try to hide. They even entertained there. Their guests would walk around the bed in what was called a
ruelle
. But what about you? Don't you have a room where you usually sleep? Don't you keep your clothes somewhere?”

She had finally stopped and had turned to look at me. She was lost. She needed help. The apartment had defeated her as it had undoubtedly defeated me.

“Not really. There are closets everywhere. I hang my suits in one room and keep my shirts in a linen closet outside one of the bathrooms. They smell so clean when I take them from there and put them on. I really don't have a room of my own here. I didn't grow up here. I inherited this place from my mother.”

“Then this can be your room,” she said as she opened the door to one of the bedrooms and looked in.

I followed her into my new room. It was a room in the cracks of whose walls I had sometimes tried to sleep. Like most of the rooms in the apartment, it was furnished with antiques, mostly American like the Federal cherrywood chest of drawers made by Triphem Gorham in Connecticut at the turn of the eighteenth century and the simple Chippendale
maple blanket chest made in Rhode Island about a quarter-century earlier, though the bed was a Charles X mahogany
lit en bateau
, chunky and substantial but not, thank goodness, a four-poster like the beds in some of the other bedrooms, with their pleated canopies and pencil posts or fluted columns and not at all suited to the night of love I could feel crawling up through my thickening blood as she pushed the claw-footed brass doorstop against the door to hold it open and went to the bed and pushed off her short black boots and lay back against the square white pillows and I prepared to follow her because I didn't know where else to go when she pointed to the Irish fools chair opposite the foot of the bed and said, “Sit there, I want us to be able to see each other,” and I sat there utterly in her thrall.

I looked at her. She looked at me. I was happy to be exiled to this chair against the wall, for I was afraid of my desires, or at least of my being able to fulfill them in some way that would fulfill hers also, and at the same time I wanted to leap across that space between us and bury her beneath me until she might try to claw her way out into the peach light that melted into the room through the frosted globe held aloft on the tiny muscular hand of the naked male figure of the spelter lamp on the table beside the bed.

I knew she sensed both my fear and my desire. I was grateful to her for this more than anything, more even than for being there with me in the first place: for recognizing my ambivalence.

“Somebody sure mixed the woods in this place,” she said.

I was amused at the thought of my mother so painstakingly collecting all these valuable pieces, only to have the
first girl I'd ever brought home point out so casually how they were inharmonious. I felt that I had somehow been put together in the same way, with my unearned muscles and my careful woolens and my guarded spectacles on my pretty face and my vetust mind.

“So talk to me,” she said. “I love to hear you talk. I loved your story about the violin. Tell me about how you stopped talking.”

“One day I just stopped.”

“Just like that,” she said skeptically.

“That's how it seemed. One day I was reading about the death of rhetoric and how it coincided with modernization, with rationalization replacing religion, and when I saw the word
axes,
the plural of
axis
and a word I'd been reading in book after book because it's the kind of word that language people love, I read it as
axes
, the plural of
axe.
And no matter how many times I read that word over and over and over again, all I could hear was
axes, axes, axes
in place of
axes, axes, axes
.”

“So is that when you stopped talking?”

I nodded.

“Say something.”

“Yes.”

“So you were chopping off your head to spite your mind.”

It was an image so clear, and so clearly accurate, that I found myself bending forward as if there were literally a blade at my neck.

“You might say that.”

“I'm glad you didn't.”

“Didn't what?”

“Chop off your head.”

“I, as well.”

“You do have such a beautiful face.”

I touched my face.

“But you're not gay.”

It was only half a question now. But it disturbed me. “Why do you keep asking me that?”

“Because I was in love with a gay man.”

“How can that be?”

“How can it not be? It was. He was the most beautiful man I've ever seen.”

“Who was he?”

“My boss.”

“What happened to him? Did he die?”

“He left me.”

“How can that be?”

“Thank you for asking. I destroyed his life.”

Please destroy mine, I wanted to say. I will never leave you. “Do you want me to be gay?” I asked.

“All men are gay.”

“Well, I'm not.”

She smiled as if the whole thing had been a big joke. “But you do admit that it was a homonym that made you stop talking, that gave you—”

“No,” I interrupted.

“—your epiphany,” she went right on. Then she held up her hand to stop me from contradicting her again. “Sorry. Bad pun. But that is the right word otherwise, isn't it?
Epiphany
? I always wanted to have an epiphany myself. Not the religious kind. Religions are repressive. They crush women like
this
.” She crossed her arms over her chest and flattened her hands upon her breasts. “A revelation,” she went on. “Where everything comes together and you feel you know the truth about things. That's never happened to me. On the other hand, I do have the most incredible
orgasms. Maybe some people are given epiphanies and other people are given orgasms. Can you imagine what it would be like if you had to choose for yourself? It would be like
Sophie's Choice
, except instead of choosing which child of yours was going to live and which one was going to die, you had to choose between two ways of knowing the truth. Epiphany or orgasm. Which would you choose?”

“Epiphany.”

“Figured.” She smiled and wiggled against the bed, under her hands, which she had kept on her breasts but were now cupped gently over them, as if to protect them from religious persecution.

I found myself reverting to pedantry as I looked at her long, thin fingers unable quite to cover her breasts beneath her shirts and whatever undergarment she might be wearing.

“It wasn't a homonym,” I explained.

“
Axes
and
axes
isn't a homonym!” She sat up and opened her eyes wide in mock horror. “Hundreds of tax dollars wasted on my education!” She took her hands from her breasts and, with them still crossed, reached down and grasped the bottoms of all three shirts and pulled them up over her head. I noticed first how this disheveled her short, auburn hair, which fell across her face over one eye and made her look like a child taunting me with a naughty smile. Then I let myself look down and saw she had been wearing no undergarment at all. From across the room I could feel her breasts burn the skin of my palms. “So if it isn't a homonym, what is it?”

“A homograph.”

She looked at me doubtfully.

“Homographs,” I went on, “are words that are spelled the same but are pronounced differently and mean different
things. Homonyms are words that are spelled the same and are pronounced the same and mean different things. And then there are homophones. Homophones are—”

“Homophones?”

“Homophones are—”

“Homophones! Give me an example.”

“
Freeze
and
frieze
,” I said. “
Autarchy
and
autarky
.”

“Oh, that's a big help.”

“Homophones,” I elucidated, “are words that are spelled differently but are pronounced the same and mean different things.”

I knew that what I was saying was correct, but I felt that I didn't know what I was talking about. I was defining language at the same time that language was once again losing its meaning for me. But I wasn't frightened this time. I wasn't alone this time. I was with a strange, unfathomable woman who was stripping her body naked as she seemed to expect me to do with my mind.

“Tell me what happened,” she said as she lifted her hips from the bed and pulled her tiny skirt up around her waist and hooked her thumbs under her green tights and pulled them down and raised her legs in the air so the tights would leave her feet, which they did, taking with them the gold socks, which clung to the tights and hung over the bed's footboard like a ballerina's slippers in the fourth position
croisée
. “Tell me about how you were undone by your … homograph, right?”

“Homograph,” I repeated, wondering what it meant. “I read
axes
and heard
axes
. Everything just fell apart at that moment. I had spent years studying rhetoric. It was all so orderly—my life, my studies. Apollonian, if you will. I loved rhetoric for its order. I read Aristotle and Quintilian
and Cicero and Longinus. I learned to love all the rules that governed the way words are used to try to arrive at the truth.
Inventio
and
dispositio
and
elocutio
and
memoria
. Even
actio
. I used to go around chanting them in my head like a song. It must sound stuffy and dry and foolish, perhaps even sciolistic … excuse me, superficial … but it is really about the power and beauty of language, and language, aside from bodily functions and the termination of bodily functions, which is to say death, is the only thing shared by all human beings. And language was the only way I knew to understand the truth and to try to express the truth. And the truth is all I ever wanted. What is truth? Nietzsche asked. I asked. What does it mean that we ask what it means? I went looking for the metaphors of things. I dived into language, I went far beyond rhetoric. I studied linguistics and psycholinguistics, semantics and graphology. I analyzed conversational implicatures with Grician exactitude. I examined the great medieval trivium, which added dialectic and grammar to rhetoric.
Philosophus grammaticam invenit
—it's the philosopher who discovers grammar. I thought I was a philosopher because I thought I was in the process of uncovering the truth. But the truth itself came under attack, or at least the means to get to the truth. Rhetoric was attacked and destroyed. Kant attacked it. The Romantics attacked it. People in our own time, Roland Barthes and Paul Ricoeur and Tzvetan Todorov, they attacked it. Even my beloved Nietzsche. Wittgenstein moved from the worship of language to the belief that it actually bewitches our intelligence. I realize now that I believed they were attacking me, my life, my meaning. One day I was in a bookstore up on Broadway near Columbia and bought a book, and when the clerk gave me my change, I counted it, as I had always done,
because that's what rich people do. And I saw that one of the coins had been rubbed completely smooth. There was no writing on it, no picture. I slammed it down on the counter and screamed at the clerk and accused him of trying to cheat me. ‘This is worthless,' I said, ‘worthless!' I don't think I had ever screamed before in my life. I was lucky—”

“You screamed for your mother,” she said.

“No, I didn't. I didn't scream for my mother. How would you know? You weren't there.”

Unperturbed by my contradicting her, she explained, “You screamed for your mother when you couldn't play the chaconne on your violin.”

“The sarabande,” I answered. “It was the sarabande I couldn't play. But yes, I did—I screamed for my mother.”

She smiled at me, not smugly but sympathetically, though she seemed already to have a greater hold than I upon the facts of my life. “You were saying,” she prompted, gratifyingly eager for me to continue.

“I was saying I was lucky I didn't get arrested. For screaming, I mean. I actually pictured myself getting hauled before my father in court and hearing him say, ‘Make him invisible.' The clerk looked at me strangely and shook his head and unlocked the cash drawer and took out another quarter and put it down on the counter next to the blank one. I could see he didn't even want to put it into my hand. So I left it there. I left both of them there. That's what rich people also do. I walked back here to this apartment trying to put the whole strange incident out of my mind by concentrating on what I was going to read when I got home. But all I could think of was that coin, the emptiness of it, the evidence of time passing and reducing it to a kind of unseen dust, the illusion of its value. And suddenly
I knew where that coin had come from. I remembered that very image in a book by Nietzsche called
Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense.
Nietzsche said that language had lost its sensual power and compared it to coins that had lost their image and were worthless. They were an illusion. Language was an illusion. Truth was an illusion. It was that day that
axes
became
axes.
So I did what seemed to be the most natural thing in the world. I stopped talking.”