Lying in Bed (33 page)

A key taps against the lock. Go away! I want to scream. I'm reading!

What a luxury this is. Not since college—perhaps not since the dawn I crept to my room from Cosima's and curled up with
Zarathustra
, in which philosophic argument is rendered, as George Steiner has demonstrated, musical—have I been so lost in words, so blissfully obliterated.
Time has not merely flown; it has disappeared. Silence is not merely golden; it is lyric. There is no music now. There is only her voice in my head.

Again the key taps. Someone is frustrated. The key isn't going into the keyhole. It's either a stranger come with Clara's keys to kill me or it's dear old Elspeth come to clean and still too vain to put her reading glasses on to fit her key into the hole.

It is, after all, I believe, Thursday now. But surely it's not 10:00 A.M.! As absorbed as I have been in my pernoctation over and within the verdant covert (she even picks my words for me!) woven from her pencils, I cannot have read through dawn and breakfast both. And if I have, then the world has ended, for I see it's dark outside and would be darker still if the city didn't rage all night.

I look at Clara's clock. It's barely after two. The key keeps tapping. I know it's lax of me not to see to it but I can't help it—I read. inside me. I'm so wet. Go ahead. Do it.” I never saw a man get so excited in my life. “Stop!” he screamed. But it was too late. Which was fortunate for me because I didn't want to keep Zach waiting. “Ah” said the Professor when he could talk again. “The power of

It's in! The key I mean. I hear it turning in the lock. Can't you see I'm reading!

I don't know if I'm afraid for my life or of it. Hoping that it is and isn't Elspeth, whom it would pain me terribly to chop in half in a case of mistaken identity (though it occurs to me, as I rise and trod stiffly through the loft, that there is no diagnosis more universally accurate), I carry
with me the 2-Pound Camp Wonder. And when I reach the door, I think to smash it in, until I realize I'm the one inside.

I can hear the key slide slowly out of the lock. I can feel it like a knife withdrawn. I can see the doorknob turning in a ghostly, disembodied way.

The door opens. I grip the axe just off my shoulder and wait.

It's a woman. A very beautiful woman in a black dress.

I recognize her but I don't know who she is. Or I know who she is but I don't recognize her.

She is, in either case, a familiar stranger.

I have never seen her before. But I remember everything about her.

She's got a package in her arms. She hugs it to her like a child. I recall so well her impatience on going through a door. She fumbles with the key because she will not take the time to put her package down. She has always hated that about herself. She has said she wants to be more like me.

She steps into the loft and opens up her arms to me. The package falls. It's something soft, I note; it doesn't break.

I raise the axe and bring it forth against the back of her neck.

Actually, I don't. That's why I won't bother with fiction. You can't believe a word you read. Or you shouldn't. In my case, however, I do. So I don't. Read it that is. (What! Can it be that I'm dropping my commas just like her!)

Yet here I am standing before her, entering her arms, and I scarcely can believe she's real. She seems the very coinage of my brain. I had thought she was gone forever. And now I feel her feeling me and in her feeling me feel me. Long, I hear quodlibeting in my head, have I been
away from you.

But I do want to kill her. Is this so strange a desire in a husband? (Viz., her notebook with the Tree of Temptation cover.) I think not. No matter how much you love someone, and how deeply embedded she may be in your life, in your very being, there must be times when you want to erase her from existence. In most cases this would be a means of self-preservation, not because she might kill you, though she might (viz., ibid.), but because you fear that in the midst of marriage you will yourself be erased, not through murder but through the fact of being married in the first place.

In Clara's case, I have a further motive.

She is a witness.

Not to my crime; to my life.

Men were called “free,” said Nietzsche, so that they might be judged and punished—so that they might become guilty.

And if I kill her, if I kill what is closest to me so as then with fresh desire to go shuddering after it and cry out with the pain of solitude, then it is only to get her in my grasp, to hold her once and for all and to retire finally to that solitary cell, that hut where I might no longer be tormented by questions that bring my very
self
into question. Marriage causes a struggle not between captivity and freedom but companionship and solitude. No other woman, no other person, can exert so strong a desire as the wish to be alone. But we have, have we not, in Rilke's description of a good marriage, appointed each other the guardian of our respective solitudes.

I have read her diary. I know she loves me. This alone might justify the succor of oblivion if I only were who she believes me to be.

“I have so much to tell you,” she whispers. “Put that
thing down and hold me.”

Just like that, I let it go. It falls beside her package.

“Careful,” she says. Then she laughs. “What were you doing with that, anyway? It's a little late to be planning a camping trip.”

“Late how?” I try to pull away, but she won't let me go.

“Late in the summer,” she says, completely free of metaphor.

We embrace by the front door. She presses her face into my chest and says nothing but my name, over and over: “Johnny … Johnny … Johnny … Johnny …” I cannot distinguish its sound between relieved greeting and elegiac farewell. Is this hello or goodbye?

When I feel her arms begin to loosen their grip on my sides and her hands on my burning back, I hold her all the more tightly myself, for fear that I will be embracing nothing but decomposing air and the very sight of her will be taken from my eyes. But even as she twists and slides away from me, her right hand journeys down my back and around my waist and finds my own right hand and knits them both together as she bends for her package and then starts to walk and pulls me deeper into home.

“Let's go lie down,” she says, as if there's any doubt where we are headed. “But first … do we have any champagne?”

“Of course.”

“Is it cold?”

“I believe there's one bottle.”

“The green one with the etching?”

“No. But it's a nonvintage from the same producer.”

“Great. You go open it. Then bring it to bed. I'll meet you there.”

If it were possible to open a champagne bottle with one
hand, I'd insist she stay with me. When her hand leaves mine, I wonder if we'll ever touch again.

“So what did you do while I was gone?” she says as she walks away. “I'm sorry I took so long,” she chatters. “I did call you but of course you didn't answer. How come you don't have any music on? Oh, my gosh, were you playing the violin? I can't believe—”

The cork explodes from the bottle in the same moment she screams my name. My hand is awash in prickly foam by the time I reach her.

She is sitting on the bed much as I imagine I had been, fully clothed, fully conscious, volumes of her diary cracked open and asleep between her legs.

“Did you read it?”

Her voice is husky. So I clear my own before answering. “Yes.”

Each of us seems to be waiting for the other to speak.

Finally she can bear it no longer and asks like some writer who calls his editor six weeks after handing over his lifework, “So what did you think?”

“Do you really want to know?” I ask, imagining myself into the role but at the same time flattered that she would even ask.

“Do I really want to know!” She reaches out to pull me down next to her. But I prefer to stand. I even move around to the end of the bed so I can talk to her as I did when I told her of Gerald Duckworth's violation of little Virginia Stephen.

“There are no facts,” I proclaim, “only interpretations, so you mustn't take what I say as truth. Consider it merely elucidation. In that spirit, allow me to tell you that while I am proud of how you succeeded in getting every name correct from our drunken, wonderful first-anniversary
dinner at Bouley and the Latin too except for
Nuptias
, Pepys spelled it P-e-p-y-s, not, as it sounds and as I suppose they would spell it on one of your Howdy Doody cartoon shows, P-e-e-p-s. And, hello yourself … you were not spelling
philogynist
correctly—the second
o
should be a
y.
You also have no concept of how to punctuate end parentheses or how to use single quotation marks. Not to mention question marks, though I am willing to concede a strange logic in your avoidance of them. I could actually hear your voice as I was reading your words, and I realize you have a way of asking a question that is as much statement as question. It's very much like a question that contains its own answer. But most people will not appreciate such subtlety, if that's what it is. And heaven help you if you want to publish these, for then you'll surely be required to temper your punctuational anarchy. Though I should think it would be worth such compromise, given the commercial value of your confessions, not that I know much about such things—commercial literature, I mean. As for the difference between
ingenuously
and
disingenuously
, it's the difference between innocence and guilt. One more thing—you really should not use the variant spelling
of
vise
when you describe being entered from behind. And before I forget—”

She has risen on her knees, crushing her diaries in the process as she moves toward me upon them, reminding me of Cosima on hers as she had approached my ingenuous member. But the reason I have stopped talking is not her attack but her laughter, which keeps either of us from being heard until finally, with her arms around my neck, she takes a deep breath and says, “Maybe you really fucking are a born diaskeuast.”

I pretend to be aghast, to have my father's accusation repeated thus, but the fact is I'm rather proud of myself. There are worse things to be born, I have come to realize, than a diaskeuast, particularly for those of us who are forced to admit that for all our love of the art of language, we are not artists, only, as it turns out, interpreters.

“Now what is it,” she says, her lips at my ears, “that you didn't want to forget?”

“To ask you what I should call you now.”

“How about Mommy.” There's a perfect example. She says something in the form of a question that I feel quite comfortable in absorbing without a question mark.

“I meant, shall I call you Clara or, now that I know your given name, Carla?”

She hooks her hands into my lapels and pulls me down with her onto the bed. “Johnny,” she breathes into me, “I'm pregnant!”

We dance. She has gone to her closet and thrown down her dress and underwear and put on her nightgown. On her way to me she chooses the music, and, as John Coltrane begins “Like Someone in Love,” she enters me, my arms, my skin, my brain. The music fills the world, and we are alone in it. We dance as one must dance—we dance away over ourselves.

This is how we celebrate, not with sex or champagne. Given her blessed condition, I am wary of the former, though she tells me it is only the lateness of the hour that keeps her from dispelling my fear, and will not permit the latter, not to her or, because we are married and must thus share sacrifice as well as God's beneficence, myself.

She is my queen of angels, queen of confessors, queen of virgins. There was snow upon the hills of Aspasia, but how was I to know? And what does it matter now? I have never wanted her more. Or less.

And what am I to her?

“You are my grave,” she answers in acknowledgment that I have endured in the triumph of the sacred
kartería
of Epictetus, both quoting her diaries and providing herself transition into what she's no doubt been dying to ask: “Why did you read them?”

I tell her the truth: “Because when I looked in your datebook you had left a blank for tonight. I thought you were gone forever.”

Rather than accuse me of invading her privacy—of which there is none in marriage, secrets and lies notwithstanding—she holds me all the more tightly as we dance.

Or perhaps she is thinking not of me now but of the life that grows within her.

“I was afraid to write down where I was going. If I wasn't pregnant I didn't want to look there and see his name and be reminded.”

“Whose name?”

“My lover's.”

I begin to laugh so hard I stop dancing. My feet adhere to the floor as the rest of me quivers joyfully. She tries to maintain a raunchy composure but cannot and laughs too at her own wicked joke.

When she's able to speak again, and we're able to dance, she says, “Dr. Leslie was so happy for me he paid for everything. Not the appointment, I mean. The food and the wine. He made me eat cervelle. He said it would make the baby smart. I told him you're my cervelle.”

“Does that mean you want to eat me?” I ask and marvel at how she's taught me how to talk and freed my tongue.

“Any time. Any place.”

She leads me to the bed. But it's not me that gets unwrapped. It's the package she'd arrived with.

“Help me,” she says, and we open it together.

It's the Broken Star/Carpenter's Wheel quilt that she'd shown me on the day we met.

“I went to the shop after dinner to get this. I had to repair it. It took longer than I thought it would. That's why I was so late. Do you remember this quilt?”

“Of course. I also read about it.” I nod toward the volumes of her diary still strewn around us on the bed.