I FOUND JEWEL AT the edge of the frigid sea. It was a ten-minute walk past the Sick Rock down through a half-mile of well-tended formal gardens and into a wilder section of the Academy grounds. The way down, down, the way out: I didn’t know but I was moving toward whatever it was I was moving toward. Yesses and noes also moved within me canceling each other out, giving the lie to Max but no comfort to me as I moved. Landscape changes gave some comfort; the skeletal formality of sculptured bushes and long, shadowed allées fading to sea-scape and scrubby clumps of grass with peculiar shapes. The air was still; clouds were gathering to announce the ascension of twilight over day covering the other white circle, leaving only the proper sovereign circle that gave light and no warmth.
I walked with whatever rhythm the soft snow underfoot allowed. Was there a center of balance for me to discover? Could I discover it by rhythmically walking toward Jewel? Had I been losing it all this bitter day while helping Jewel to find hers?
Why was I going to see her when so much else was painfully suspended? Because, like any creator, I wanted to see if what I had created was alive and might go on living. If I had betrayed my vocation, at least let it be for the intended cause.
In my cold fever, whether due to the heightening of my fears or to alcohol, I saw the landscape as a calligraphic wonder. The thinning line of trees casting elongated shadows on the snow, like a prayer book in a foreign language, but which one knew by legend to hold a famous and beautiful verse; the long line of uneven rocks scattered in a shaky hand, stretching from grass’s end to the shore. First larger then smaller, light-burnished colors then blackened gleaming shades all straggled with seaweed, strophe and anti-strophe, unfinished statement of stone and sand. And the flights of sandpipers hurled at the sibilance of shore-froth hissing them back then enticing them to return to the edge, fragments of alien texts, sacred letters whose meaning had been forgotten, old feathered prophecies, creations of inspired astrologists of earlier generations. In the midst of these winter hieroglyphs I found Jewel, calm as stone, clearly resolved to live, or at least not to die this day.
I told her, then, of my reading the landscape the way I had read the sky when I was a child. Stuck with logos from the start, that was me. The world as untranslatable language. Her laughter lingered in the declining light as we walked the beach. Why had she come there? After teaching me to dance she had remembered herself as the young Princess of Malibu Beach … dogs chasing driftwood … the long waves; everything at the Academy points backward, both in positive and negative form. Memory is the characteristic art form of those who have just decided to die and those who have just decided to live. How it all flies back to you when your guard is down: the wet slippery evenings on the basketball court, knowing you were staying too late and fearing home reprisals, but full of the sweat and stink and the delicious lonely feel of the echoing wood floorboards, the great distances of the yellow-lit court. Or the first eating of non-kosher food (the kashruth was one of the few laws the Fellowship took absolutely straight:) succulent pork and the strangeness of moist clams. When I was caught, there was the horror of having to endure the minyan chanting in my own living room a ritual that until that day had been my favorite of the many chants invented by the Fellowship. (I told Jewel, as we walked, my arm around her shoulders, my frozen nose trying to breathe a hint of her perfume.)
It consisted of the cantor saying: Who is he?
And the minyan would answer in unison: He is the one who has sullied his mouth with unclean things.
Who is he?
He is the one who until today was the pride of his father and of the Fellowship of Jews. And on and on, usually leading to a happy ending, improvised, as was all of it, on the spot.
Who is he?
He is the one who will return to the righteous ways and find more pleasure in purity than in uncleanness.
Thus, myself, moving along the sea’s edge, moving with Jewel buried in the crook of my arm, moving from past to present, from the hot suns of Florida and Malibu Beach to the cold sun of the Academy.
Who is he?
He is the one who stands guard over the sacred snow and sees his own face melting away in it.
Who is he?
He is the one who struggles out of bed in the cold dawn to wash dishes for those whose appetites have faded to the vanishing point.
Who is he?
He is the one who memorizes his lines and then believes they are his own.
Who is he?
He is the one who swallows the past but cannot digest the present.
Who is he?
He is the one who reads the ocean’s waves like an ancient but remembered language.
Who is he?
He is the one who smells the gathered leaves burning in the park’s basket and disputes with his memories.
Who is he?
He is the one whose morning erection and evening prayer are both erased by the sun at noon.
Who is he?
He is the one who remembers the combs in his mother’s hair sandy with Sunday excursions though she died when he was two.
Who is he?
He is the one who cries Jew and listens for his own reply.
Who is he?
He is the one who realizes too late that elegy means praise.
Who is he?
He is the drawer of maps for places that would prefer not to exist.
Who is he?
He is the one who learns to dance so that she may learn to walk.
Who is he?
He is the one who asks the question: Who is she?
Who is she?
She is the one who sees the world in a strand of yellow hair—her own.
Who is she?
She is the one whose recurrent earaches, backaches and headaches since childhood have fed her self-love.
Who is she?
She is the one who made love with Wolf once very carefully and delicately because she was raddled from head to toe with poison ivy.
Who is she?
She is the one who goes with Wolf in the anarchy of the dying afternoon to his rooms.
Who is she?
She is the one who arranges for it, gently, carefully (as if still poison-ivied), the slipping-in, leg folded over leg, the wetly spreading and contracting, a machine-like flower of flesh in which Wolf hides.
Who is she?
She is the one who, afterward, asks him why, why this place is all-important to him? Then remembers long courtship afternoons between the matinee and the evening performances when he told her of his sheltered youth, a Jewish Buddha in a cellophane world freed of death and pain and sickness and then the flowering of blood on his father’s temple—and she remembers and she is the one who does not understand—but neither does she not not understand.
Who is she?
She is the one who replies to his murmured words, “I can’t marry you, Wolf. I’m married to Max.”
Who is she?
She is the one who admits she lied before—but claims she tells the truth now: that she needs Max’s madness the way Wolf needs the despair of the people he works with every day.
Who is she?
She is the one who leans on an elbow, slightly rising from the bed, and reports that, in the darkening winter twilight, fire is eating away at two of the buildings next door.
Fire at the Suicide Academy. It was unthinkable! There hadn’t been even a little blaze in the four years I’d served as Director. Arson! It was the only answer. But, unlike accidental fire, arson is not an answer but a question.
I dressed hurriedly, crouching into my pants, shamefaced before Jewel. It was as if the fire were punitive, a flaming raid on guilty lovers. Jewel was calm. As she carefully enfolded those whitest of breasts with their pinkest of nipples into a yellow brassiere, gone was the ice-bound visionary baking a new kind of human being in her thirteenth-month womb. She quietly asked, “Is there any danger?”
“No,” I said. “It’s all planned for.”
When we were both fully dressed it was as if we had put on disguises. We faced each other at the door, en masque. She began to say something but I rushed past her and found Max shooting film furiously, ankle-deep in red snow.
The mystery was solved. Barbara! She had promised Max he could film her suicide. Only she’d chosen an epic rather than an intimate form. None of us was the spy. It was grief, simple grief over a dying child, that had been the spy all along.