Passion and Affect (6 page)

Anwar Soole was out more than he was in, but we frequently collided. He called me “Filipo” and made me help him hang his paintings. Once in a while he would cook a huge Middle Eastern meal to which he would invite several of the more luscious students from the girls' college at which he taught, or some elderly specimens of Italian nobility. He had two kinds of friends: dull but opulent girls and Europeans in New York on business. After he had been teaching for several months, the girls turned up, elegant in silk, rustling like expensive leaves and leaving the apartment faintly scented with their perfume. If I was home, they were brought into my study to admire my French vases and glass paintings. Then Anwar made a pot of sweet, acrid coffee that we drank in the living room and watched Anwar drape himself languidly over the tiger skin.

With his girls he was hyperanimated, lithe, and springy. He did parodies, imitations, little dances. He acted out hour-long comedies, taking all the parts. At parties he danced wildly, almost ridiculously I thought, until one of his more intelligent consorts said, “He looks silly, but he's actually graceful. He has the best balance I've ever seen.” She was right, of course: Anwar could stand on one foot for ten minutes and almost twist his other leg around his waist.

Once in a while he would turn up at the apartment with a really magnificent girl. The more beautiful they were, the less English they spoke. One of these was an extremely tall, catlike German and I was produced to help him out. Anwar spoke Italian, French, Arabic, and English, but no German, so he was helpless. Since you cannot translate manic charm, the evening was a waste for him, and the girl, who was quite nice and fairly intelligent, was leaving for Munich the next day.

After a ferocious night at a party, blasting out all his energy, he would spend the next day painting in the studio he had created of the pantry rooms, getting it back. Several times during the winter, after weeks of frantic activity, he would get sick, so sick that I had to bring his food to him on a tray. Sick, he looked tiny, dark gray against the white sheets, and when he slept his features assumed the meek austerity of a child's. Without his energy he was puzzled, frightened, and torpid. After a week ailing, he was up. The girls were in, or he was out. After a week of being out, he was domestically in, badgering Minnie, the maid who came in twice a week, or cooking his elaborate meals, or rearranging his studio. Since we both had social obligations to repay, we had a formal party during which Anwar drank from the silver punch bowl, danced nonstop for three hours, threatened to throw a dish of salad at the girl who had told me how perfect his balance was, and stood on his head. This went mostly unnoticed because there were about seventy people there. He was like a man racing on a tightrope, stumbling but never falling. The rhythm of his life was energy, dissipation, sickness, and recuperation. When his ancient Europeans came to dinner, he was grotesquely correct.

There was no pattern to Lilly's visitations. I am not a bad-looking man but I am hardly the sort of person women crazed with lust pursue. Nothing like Lilly had ever happened to me, and the women I had known, several of whom I loved—a girl I had lived with in Heidelberg, an American girl in Paris I had wanted to marry, were rather like me; mild, scholarly, cerebral. “Intellectual sensualists” is the term the girl in Paris invented for people like us. But here was Lilly Gillette, stolid, silent, bland, standing at my doorway, Monday afternoon, Thursday at two in the morning, Friday at lunchtime after my class. She never spent the night. She never drank so much as a glass of water. We barely talked at all and it was my fault, I often think, because I was so baffled, so buffaloed, and although I did not allow myself to know it, so disturbed that I simply
couldn't
speak. How was I to start a conversation with a woman I had been to bed with fifteen, twenty times? Lying next to her, in the few minutes she gave herself for lying next to me, sentences blurted their way to the beginning of speech: elephantine sentences, all of which began with why. Why are you here? Why did you start this? Why me? Her whole presence said: there is nothing to say—so how could I ask? Sometimes a week would pass and I would see her only at Alden's. No Lilly at my door. Those nights I would lie half asleep, the possibility of full sleep disturbed, waiting for the doorbell to ring. A key would turn and I could hear Anwar's feet, sometimes two sets of footsteps, go quietly down the hall to his room, hear muffled laughter. Those nights I wondered how to start a conversation about something that had been going on for months. Each time she saw me, she said my name, Phillip Hartman, identifying me in the way one might classify a moth or bug. She never called me by name, except when she saw me; but then, how could she? We never spoke.

Twice a week, Minnie Hoskins came to clean. If Anwar was around, she got almost nothing done. He turned up the portable radio Minnie carried with her everywhere she went and danced with her. She was a large, pecan-colored grandmother. If I came home and Anwar had been in, there would be Minnie, holding her broom, giggling.

“That Anwar. He do make me laugh,” Minnie said.

“Minnie,” I said to her one day, about four months after Lilly's first visitation, “when you dust my books, be sure to put them back in order. They're all out of place now. I can't find anything I'm looking for.”

“I vacuum your books. I never take nothing off the shelf,” said Minnie.

“Well, it's very perplexing,” I said. “None of them are where they're supposed to be.”

“You ask that Anwar,” Minnie said. “Maybe he been foolin' in your room.”

I asked him.

“Filipo,” he said. “You have nothing in your room I would ever want to read.”

“But the books are all out of order,” I said.

“Perhaps you are in the middle of a nervous breakdown and know not what you do,” Anwar said. “Everyone in New York has a nervous breakdown. You could be having one yourself.”

At four o'clock in the morning, the doorbell rang. It was one of Anwar's nights out, so it could have been Anwar. But it was Lilly, smoking a cigarette. She was wearing a raincoat, a shirt, and a pair of jeans.

“I don't understand you,” I said. “I don't understand what you want.”

“I don't want anything. I just came over.”

“At four in the morning?”

“The pipes burst in my building,” she said. “I don't have any water.”

It was the first time she ever spent the night. The next morning I made her a cup of coffee and brought it to her. She held it for a moment, and then put it on the night table. She watched me as I got dressed, immobile and disinterested.

“I'm leaving,” I said. She nodded her head slightly in acknowledgment.

When I got home the bed was made. The cup on the night table was full of cold, untouched coffee. The milk in it had curdled and shredded on the surface. The books were out of order.

Lilly was listed in the telephone directory. I had never called her, never, in fact, had known where she lived.

She picked the phone up on the fourth ring.

“Do you put my books out of order?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I look at them and forget where I got them from.”

“I see,” I said.

“Goodbye,” Lilly said.

I put the telephone down, invaded by a kind of despair. People are abandoned by their lovers, their spouses, their parents—and despair, lose their jobs or loved ones, and grieve. What had abandoned me was explanation. Perhaps it is a disease scholars suffer when reason deserts. It seemed to me I had been incorporated into an event for which there was no explanation, a vacuum that sucked in misery.

If I had been held up or robbed, I felt I would have understood a progression of circumstances: someone was hungry or withdrawing from heroin and I passed by and was therefore mugged. But I felt I had been vandalized maliciously, gratuitously. Although my books stood gleaming on their shelves, none of them missing, they were out of order.

On his petulant days, Anwar referred to me as Fra Filipo, and called my room “the cell.” He claimed I lived like a monk, although I had told him about Jane Pinkham, the American girl in Paris, whom I wanted to marry and who was coming back to New York. I wondered what Anwar would say if he knew that sometimes nightly, sometimes weekly, in the mornings or afternoons, a girl appeared who seemed to have no further interest in me beyond a couple of hours in bed. I carried this fact around in a little sling of smugness.

Two days after the telephone call, I came home from a morning of work with Alden to find Lilly in my bed, staring at the ceiling.

“How did you get in?”

“Your roommate let me in,” she said.

A sense of spoilage came over me, as if someone had sprung my plans for a surprise party or had taken the trump card from my hand and revealed it to me, smiling.

“I don't understand you,” I said. “Why do you keep coming here?”

“If you don't want me around,” Lilly said, “just say.”

“Would it stop you if I did?”

“I don't know what would stop me from anything,” said Lilly Gillette. In novels, in movies, in plays, the hero looks deeply into the eyes of his girl and the audience sees that they have blundered into an understanding that changes things between them. I looked into the eyes of my girl, but she wasn't my girl, and she did not look back. This was no novel or movie—it didn't even seem to be life—and there was no audience. She looked at the ceiling, her head tilted toward her left shoulder. Some unsettled feeling caught me, some point where rage and tenderness fused. I wanted either to strike or comfort her, but, so paralyzed by a situation of forced silence, I did neither.

Anwar, over coffee, read from
France-Soir
. “The victim,” he translated. “A Swede in the coffee business in France for two months said that his car was wrecked by a girl with whom he had a casual liaison. He described her as a dangerous French mistress type. When pressed for explanation, M. Bø1strom would say only that she was an extremely emotional and volatile person and had taken his car after an argument. The woman, whose identity has not been made public, is a French Canadian student, M. Bølstrom said.”

“That's what you need, Filipo,” he said, “a nice dangerous French mistress type, cut from the pages of
France-Soir
.”

I looked at Anwar, whose face was feline and puckish. He lapsed into an imitation of the Swedish coffee man and his interviewer from the newspaper, until he got the laugh he wanted out of me. As he washed the dishes he said, “Cheer up, Filipo. You don't even have a car.”

The days went by. At night I slept with the windows open, struggling into sleep, waking out of dreams. It seemed that any sound sleep I got was pierced by the doorbell: Lilly, the ends of her pale hair wet with rain, or soft and cottony with mist. If this had been happening to someone else, and had been told to me as a story, if this thing with Lilly had been described to me, if I could
see
it, I would have lit a cigar, smiling as the smoke trailed out the window, and said: “Things like this happen in books and movies, not in life.”

My life, which had a comfortable, likable, productive shape to it, had incorporated something—someone—I didn't understand. But it must have fit, because it had happened, and kept happening. One afternoon I asked Lilly if she would like to come to Alden Marshall's party with me. She didn't answer and when I asked again, she said no.

What was there between us? And if I didn't know, how could I ask her? I racked my brain for a starting place, thought of sitting her down to ask what this was all about. Instead, it just went on, erratic visits, one after another. The months that had unraveled between us made the search for a starting place inappropriate, grotesque. If she stayed the night, which she did infrequently, I came home to find my books out of order, and once, one of the French vases turned on its side. There had been flowers in it and some petals lay scattered on the dark spot where water had seeped into the rug.

I had never been to Lilly's apartment. I didn't know how she lived, what she read, what pictures were on her walls. Nothing warm or recognizable operated between us. After what I now realize was a long and anguished time, I thought she was pursuing me, but I was pursuing myself. I put my books back into order, sopped up the wet rug with a cloth, and put the vase upright. There were days when I came home from a morning or afternoon of hard work with Alden, or from the ease of dinner with him and Hattie, expecting to find my apartment ransacked, my vases split and shattered, the glass paintings splintered, the photographs ripped from the wall, my books pulled from the shelves, lying on their broken spines. Boris Godunov says: I cannot sleep, yet I have nightmares. My waking dream was of coming home to this landscape, and in the corner of it was Lilly, smoking in my chair, Lilly the vandal who would say nothing, explain nothing. She would walk over the broken books to the bed and sit upon it, and I, mute uncomprehending walrus, would follow, since I could not find any appropriate place in our silence to ask her what she'd done.

But it never happened. The vase on the rug might have been knocked over by her raincoat as she threw it over her shoulder. The books misplaced and upside down might have been the result of uncaring, blind, vacuity. Still, mornings, afternoons, twilights, dusks, the bell rang, I answered it, it was Lilly and she got, presumably, exactly what she came for.

What I did not know at the time was that on her first visit, it was not me, but Anwar, she was looking for. A few of the nights on which she did not ring the bell, it was her set of footsteps I heard behind his, trailing down the hall. The afternoon I found her lying in
my
bed, she had wakened that morning in Anwar's. He had gone to school and she had simply transferred herself to me, so she had not lied when she said that he had let her in.