The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (10 page)

XI Jason

Jason's dreams were as disordered as his days were precise. In dreams he was always trapped in small spaces choked with clutter — attics, chicken coops, cellars, closets. Cobwebs would threaten to engulf him, dusting his face and arms with their light malignant caress. He would thrash around in darkness, knocking over old suitcases, showering himself with mothballs and the moult of ancient eiderdowns and cascades of sepia photographs.

Snuffling breathing from low in the eaves of his dream. Owl? Bats? Frantic, he clambered over packing cases, feeling for a gable, a skylight, a vent. The breathing became louder, there was a shuddering sigh, a cobweb settled around his face like a shroud. In terror he smashed his fists against the low roof and the weak tiles clattered into the night. He cranked his arms rhythmically against the air, gravity shrank away from him like an exorcised demon, his feet rose above the packing cases, an arcane and potent childhood fantasy winging to his rescue. He gulped in the free oxygen beyond the tiles, soared out over the eavestroughing. Steady now, palming the air with regular beats, his legs held taut and together, acting as a rudder. He eased himself earthwards.

Sweating, almost drowning in sweat, he touched down in his bed and jolted into wakefulness to find the sheets tangled around his feet. He could still hear the noisy sigh-strewn breathing. His dreams, he thought, were nothing if not functional, incorporating local sound like an artist working with flotsam.

It was not Ruth. Her sleep in the twin bed at the far side of the room was neat and antiseptic as always. This shuddering was more wanton, uninhibited, lumbering across the hallway. Victoria, he remembered, and lay listening. Like brackish water raking its way across siltweed, her night-breath foamed and staggered in and out of her body.

Jason found it unbearable. He extricated his legs from the ropework of bedding and crossed the hallway Shadowy light in her room: the refracted nimbus of a street lamp. Tory's slack and dimpled torso presented itself in shocking nakedness, a kind of bitter parody of a Renoir, the amplitude there, but not the sense of inviting ripeness, A large woman, forty-six years old, yellowing with defeat and age. Her nightgown was twisted up across her breasts, a balled-up wad of fabric clutched in one hand and held to her mouth. She sucked it noisily, moaning and heaving herself about, her large thighs scissoring toward Jason and trapping his eyes in an unruly mat of pubic hair.

He recoiled as though spat upon, flinging his hands over his eyes, propping himself against the wall in the hallway. He thought he might vomit. Certainly his legs could not support him and he slid his back down the wall until he was sitting on the carpet. It was the travesty that was unendurable, that muffling disguise she ingested with her medication. He could still remember her at sixteen, willowy with skittish eyes, her body unstill as a colt's. Astonishingly beautiful. He could not cope with this sordid metamorphosis. He needed a strong drink.

In his study he poured himself a double Scotch and then locked the door. It was not really necessary, Ruth knew better than to intrude on his moods.
She
called them “his moods”. I am, he thought, a bastard to live with. But considering everything, I do the best I can.

Three of his study walls were lined from floor to ceiling with books. He sat on the carpet and pulled from a bottom shelf the four substantial volumes of
The Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
extracting from the space behind them a shoebox which bulged at the seams, its weakened corners several times fortified by layers of masking tape. With the excitement of a child creeping downstairs around midnight on Christmas Eve, he took off the lid and stared into the rummage of his past. What, he wondered by professional habit, did this furtive poring over hoarded scraps of history release in his brain? And to what extent was he addicted to his own neurochemical juices? He was more ashamed of his sentimentality than of his dream-belief in flying. If he had to choose, he would rather be seen flapping his arms in bed than be caught looking through these memorabilia, this testament of vulnerability to the past.

He overturned the box and sat staring at the pyramid of photographs, cards, old theatre programmes, letters, and envelopes stuffed with sub-categories of all of the above. He felt as though he had simultaneously ingested valium and amphetamines: a manic
frisson
of pleasure zipped around like mercury over a layer of almost infantile peace. Part of the cabalistic thrill came from the clutter of the contents.

Jason was fascinated by clutter in the way a teenage boy is fascinated by a brothel. He admired tremendously people who could live in disarray. He felt that they were of a superior order, akin to Albert Schweitzer or Mother Teresa. This was partly a legacy from graduate school in the sixties, the heyday of Cambridge, Massachusetts, when living in clutter was a necessary political statement. He had tried very hard to live that way.

At the time he had still been married to Nina, but things were going badly, and he was having an affair with a girl named Natalie who lived in a state of clutter so absolute that one could only assume she was gifted with a sort of divine countercultural infallibility. It was Jason's perception that a direct relationship existed between clutter and love — love, that is, as nonexclusive communion, as earthy regenerative force. Natalie's love spilled over as copiously as did her table tops with mounds of books and dishes and left-wing political pamphlets and items of clothing and plates of dried spaghetti. She took in stray dogs and cats along with the many roaming friends and relatives of former boyfriends and the various construction workers and Boston dock hands whom she was busy politicising.

Sometimes, coming in late after a night course (it was his teaching assistantship year) before heading back home to Nina, Jason would have to step gingerly over various human humps in sleeping bags to get to Natalie's room. Natalie was the only person he knew who had a brick-and-board bed. In those days, eveiyone had discovered brick-and-board shelving for books (though he and Nina, living outside of Cambridge, had custom-built floor-to-ceiling oak) but the bed was a refinement on student thrift. It gave a certain piquancy to love-making. On their unsteady brick foundation, the five planks shifted and slid beneath the foam mattress, dragging at an assortment of mismatched bedding garnered from the local goodwill store. During erotic activity the boards made percussive comments and the bricks would sway uneasily and the foam mattress would dip into little hammocks of surprise only to pleat itself with a gasp of expelled air as the planks collided together again with seemingly vicious intent. There were times when Jason felt that the bed itself was an instrument of feminist polemic, dangerous to appendages.

But this was unlikely: even Natalie's ideology was cluttered, subject to caprice and contradiction. She was impossible. She was delightful. She of the madonna face and ingenuous concerns, who used the word “bullshit” in graduate seminars as though it were a seal of academic insight and conviction; she who spoke so fiercely and frequently about sexist oppression, but cooked up meals like some Salvation Army earth mother for the crowd of workmen and students who randomly slept at her place.

Jason felt utterly at peace in her chaotic house during the three or four hours a day he spent there. When he went home to the little Renaissance haven that Nina kept for him, with its Rubens and Rembrandt reproductions framed in old gold, with its mandolin gracefully placed on top of an antique trunk in one corner of the living room, with its butcher-block kitchen table where Nina waited for him with hot chocolate, he would feel tense and constricted and ashamed. Hypocrite! Even at the time he knew it, being passionately fond of some of the beautiful things Nina collected. Especially of a carved wooden figure she had given him. It was sensuous to the touch, its head and body cowled in grief. An Old Testament prophet perhaps. Or a woman sustaining a great loss. It was a sacred object to him, a symbol of Nina whom he loved so ineffectually and destructively.

After he left Nina and moved in with Natalie, he discovered that he was not capable of living with her absolute clutter round the clock. In less than a month he got a small apartment for himself and only visited Natalie in the evenings and for part of the night, as before. Of course he had to give a political reason: he said his presence was interfering with her
conscientisation
of the workers; he said he needed more space for his own project, a series of articles showing how therapy had been co-opted by forces of oppression, how industrial psychologists were being used by management to defuse worker dissatisfaction. They were all very busy changing the world and love was a secondary thing.

In his own apartment, Jason tried very diligently to cultivate a certain amount of clutter. He built brick-and-board shelving for his books. He taped to his walls stark graphics of workers' fists and the silk-screened sayings of Pablo Neruda and Simon Bolivar. He made a determined effort to leave his bed unmade and his dishes unwashed and his books scattered over the floor. He was delighted to have his parents visit during this stage. His father's disgust so pleased him that he was able to persist with the disorder for several more weeks.

Unfortunately the mess interfered with his ability to study and write. And then it distressed him to see the beautiful wooden figure (which he had salvaged from his marriage) slumming it on a packing crate. He began to browse in Boston's antique shops. Just for interest. When he saw a weathered oaken chest he felt that he owed it to Nina to buy a fitting pedestal for the carving. But then the posters on the wall looked tacky and the floor looked excessively bare. He bought a white flokati rug and a couple of small watercolours and a lithograph of an interesting androgynous face. He replaced the director's chairs with a sofa covered in textured off-white Haitian cotton and sat in it listening to Mozart on his stereo. He looked about him and accepted the fact of his bourgeois unregeneracy, and yet he loved to escape for several hours to Natalie's house of pandemonium.

Natalie. He thought of her messy life with affection, riffling now through the contents of his shoebox looking for signs of her. Here she was. A playbill for
Mother Courage,
put on at the Loeb. An excellent production, the Kurt Weill music stridently passionate. Romanticised bourgeois bullshit, Natalie had said. Brecht had committed the sins of cleverness and artifice. By then only Mao was still pure as far as she was concerned and that changed with the table-tennis tour and Nixon's smiling of pure smarm from the Great Wall of China.

But it was not Natalie he was searching for tonight. He shuffled through the pyramid of papers and found an envelope labelled
Victoria
. The photographs were not in any sort of order and some of them dated from before he was born. The first one, in black and white, must have been taken at his grandparents' home in Boston. Both his parents were kneeling on the lawn, arms open, and Victoria was taking what were probably her first steps from her mother's arms to her father's. His mother was facing the camera almost full on, her lips parted, all her concentration on the unsteady laughing child. She would have been in her twenties. She was not ever beautiful, Jason supposed, by any of the standard assessments, but she had one of those unusual faces that delight sculptors and that can beguile with such mobility of expression that the watcher is tricked into adoration.

Tory's beauty was of a different order. Had been. Unambiguous. In the twelfth century, Jason thought, she would have been considered a faery child. A white witch's foundling, of a beauty so stunning that people were almost afraid to look. No one would have been surprised by what happened.

In the photograph, he could see only the back of his father's head and a quarter profile of cheek, brow, and nose, but that constant inner dynamo of rage and dissatisfaction was unmistakable. Jason could read it in the soles of his father's shoes, in the savage thrust of toes into the turf of the in-laws' lawn, in the jut of the thighs, in the backs of the hands waiting to receive Victoria.

What had he been thinking? Had he been bursting with the excitement of his tiny daughter's achievement? Ready to cry out with irritation if she fell? Both, probably. From as early as he could remember, Jason had had an image of his father clanking along in invisible armour, with steel guts and an overwound inner spring.

The next picture startled him. It was in colour. Tory, at about sixteen, was holding hands with some lanky young man and gazing soulfully into his eyes. Jason felt as though a switch had been tripped in his mind, that there was something at the edge of his memory, something bale. His hands were trembling and he took a quick mouthful of Scotch. He had a strong sense that he did not want to look at that photograph any longer, and shoved it hastily back into the envelope.

He pulled out another picture. Black and white again. Tory, about seven or eight years of age, playing mother. She was seated in an armchair with a real baby in her arms, bending over it adoringly. Jason realised with a shock that the baby was himself. For a long time he stared at the wall through tears. Such good care she had taken of him. He had been unable to help her.

Here was another. This time he and Tory and their father were crowded into one of the seats of a Ferris wheel. Yes, he remembered that day. The picture had been taken by one of those photographers who roam around fairgrounds snapping their shutters every time someone moves.

I remember the man with the camera, Jason thought. I remember that ride.

Father is sitting between us. Tory's eyes are huge with nervous excitement. She did not want to come on the Ferris wheel. She was always frightened, jumping at shadows. I was only four, so she must have been eleven, yet I was braver than she was. My eyes are glittering with pleasure.

I remember that the second time we went over the top Tory gave a sharp cry and a thin stream of vomit, dyed dark pink with cotton candy, arced out from her lips like a reddened rainbow. Fascinated I watched it fall, slurping its way across the awnings of seats below us on the wheel, losing itself far under.