“I WORK IN SUICIDE the way a sculptor works in metal,” I said. I had begun by forcing my exuberance and ended by feeling a real flow of joyful blood beneath my flushed skin. The preliminary tour of the Academy had started by showing Jewel and Max the administrative procedures. What I was actually doing was playing a secret duet. One melody I spun was the informational one. But there was another theme buzzing in my brain over and over again. It was the notion that they were here, this other duet, for a frightening purpose—what, I did not know. Given these two, there were too many possibilities, all full of dismay and potential disaster for me. The reason I did not protect myself by delegating the tour to Gilliatt or one of the guides on Rest Call was that I had the beginning of a plan. I would contrive to be alone with Max. Then subtly or directly, as the occasion turned out, I would get from him the real reason, using all the tact I had developed in my term of leadership. I chose Max instead of Jewel simply because I didn’t want to test my independence of her. It was too risky.
So far my jovial and brisk persiflage was registering nil. Jewel did not smile, while Max merely grunted and manipulated a light meter. I observed Jewel’s face, a beautiful mask of blondeness. She would not smile, I realized. She had refused to smile when we were married. Smiling made wrinkles; smiling could damage your most important possession, the only thing you could ever really call your own: the face. Wrinkles came from laugh lines. Age came from wrinkles; death came from age. It was all quite simple. One could live without smiling. Undaunted, I continued.
“What I like about the Academy, too,” I said, “is that there’s always something in question. There’s an obstacle everyone here has to hurdle before they can be whole again.” I paused. No response.
“In one sense, that obstacle is themselves. In another sense, it is me.”
Max looked at me with baleful eyes. He had not said a word since arriving. We were at the screening room. Gilliatt appeared from a side door and switched on the closed circuit television set. Jewel, Max, Gilliatt and I sat down. On the screen there appeared the Admissions Office. People were filing in, quiet and orderly. Several of them were already seated at desks filling out forms.
“What are they doing?” Jewel whispered.
“You don’t have to whisper,” I said. “They can’t hear you.
“They’re filling out forms in which they leave money to the Academy if they choose not to go back.”
“Money—” Max muttered.
“Voluntary,” I replied. “Completely voluntary.”
“Oh—?”
Gilliatt stood before them. On his face was the usual expression of challenge. For the first time I tried to see him as others, Max and Jewel, for instance, might. He was something all his own. Not any Negro one might have met anywhere; not a parody of a middle-class American White Protestant either; a third choice, as it were. He had imagined himself, that was it. Faced with one ambiguous but totally unalterable fact, the blackness of his skin, he had created an imaginary being to surround this skin. The materials he had used to create his style were as divergent and unplaceable as his impressive but never phony-sounding accent. Not the “cultured” tones of the Anglophilic Negro (we’d had a number of those as guests) but a unique and personal sound that suggested education but defied placement. His entire manner was that of a man who had created himself so as not to be a great many things. The result was an oddment: a neuter, ironic, detached; impassioned only when speaking of his beloved Jew.
“Voluntary,” Gilliatt repeated now. “What do these people have to lose?”
“Then this is a profit-making organization?”
“No.” Gilliatt was using his patient tone. “The Academy is non-profit. Admission is free. But how could the place run? It costs a fortune just to sustain. It’s like synagogues. Or colleges. The graduates leave money to the colleges in their wills. And most Jews go to Shule” (exquisite little Gilliatt nuance) “once a year—the High Holy Days. They don’t support it all year round. So once a year the Jews charge tickets to get in to pray. It seems barbaric at first. But you can see the logic—if you think about it.”
In the Admissions Office a woman was crying. She was a big crag of a woman, about thirty years old. There was a Guide standing right near her. Two secretaries were just a few feet in front of the woman. But none of them made a move to help or comfort her. She laid her face on her hopeless arms and sobbed. It was an awful sound.
Jewel murmured, “Look—”
We looked until finally, unaided, the woman raised her head and blew her nose and finished filling out the forms before her.
In the guise of continuing my prescribed lecture, but actually being possessed by a strong desire to speak directly to Jewel (O impossible desire: how often had I resorted to a desperate sexuality because speech had failed?), I said: “Our people aren’t unfeeling. Suicides are like children. You have to know when to ignore them. It’s no accident this place is an Academy.”
Jewel turned toward me. Over her shoulder, past her wide, blue eyes, Max was taking shots of the TV screen with a small still camera. He shot them in quick, nervous clicks, like a spy recording some secret site on forbidden film. The simile is not unintended. Max was a likely suspect. I was going to have a job keeping my control with him and Jewel, whether they were innocent filmmakers or guilty film-takers. But my control was not the immediate issue. Jewel burst out crying as I gazed at her.
I moved toward her, my ex-child-bride, without thinking. She pulled away, stood up clumsily, rocking on heels that were too high for our Academy countryside, and swaying, wept her unsteady way toward Max. He, however, was completely taken by his camera madness—focusing, clicking and winding. I nodded to Gilliatt, who gave Jewel his arm. She placed on it her right hand, white as rice paper inscribed with a calligraphy of blue veins, a pale counterpart to the bold statement of Gilliatt’s gleaming black arm. Weeping, Jewel let him lead her out of the room.
Max and I were alone. Two aliens with undefined loyalties.