Chapter 17
For a while after we had Sid I didn’t know what you were supposed to do with him, and when Ary was asleep I would sit by the crib watching to be sure he didn’t stop breathing or anything. When you thought about it, it was terribly precarious, breathing, and I wasn’t sure a baby could do it. And the heartbeat! Something pulsed feebly in the fat region under his neck: what if it stopped? I went on standing watch this way for about a month. Then I began to see he could breathe by himself, and after that I went to sleep at night and let him take care of his own physiological processes. I still wasn’t sure how I was supposed to act around him, however, and it was a long time before Sid and I found any use for each other. I accepted his value in the abstract as a bearer of chromosomes, somebody to pass along the baton to in the cosmic relay race, but it wasn’t easy to be friends with someone who seemed so blase and so unimpressed with all the affectionate remarks made to him. Then one day when Ary was out of the house I had to change him. I went to work at this and it was a clumsy and heavy-handed business, like shoeing a horse. How could you fasten a rectangular piece of cloth on a bifurcated animal, especially if he wouldn’t hold still, the fat worm? When he felt the strange hands it startled him and he began to screw up his face in indignation, then he opened his eyes to see who it was and looked at me quite calmly: oh, it’s you. He recognized me! After that the normal instincts began to assert themselves and I even got, I think, a little fatuous. When nobody was around I would look at him covertly and think: my kid, look at the intelligence in the face, and he’s got a chest like a brass boiler. The proud progenitor! What next? It was the last conformity. It was the winter of 1945, then Christmas and we had to buy a new calendar. I had lived in this place for three years. I was a commuter, a proper papa with the evening paper under his arm like the ones in the funny papers, and Ary was different now too, or rather the rest of her was still the same but the irregular polyhedron had taken on yet another side. (It was about this time that I learned that if you went on adding sides to a polyhedron eventually it became a circle, the shape of absolute simplicity, but that didn’t make it any clearer.) It was not so much that age could not wither nor custom stale the infinite variety of her charms, but that she was so inexplicably adept at disembarking from the Nile and turning in five minutes into a competent nursemaid, complete with talcum powder and brisk no-nonsense manner. (“If you spit it out once more I’m going to put the bottle away. You’ll get hungry eventually, I imagine.”) I wondered if I seemed as complicated to her. Probably not, since she never showed any surprise at anything I did. But then, I reflected, I never showed any surprise (outwardly) at anything she did. We were a couple of artful deceivers, ideally cast in our parts: she Garbo or rather Katherine Hepburn (long legs, slightly coltish manner), I George Raft with scars. Various supporting players: Cagney, Kelly as Zazu Pitts, Maurice as a slightly spurious Leslie Howard, Leo as Wallace Beery, etc. This was life? Pass the popcorn.
One day a postcard came for her in the mail, and she read it and handed it to me with a funny smile. On one side, in gaudy colors, a square lined with medieval buildings: Grenoble, Place Victor Hugo. On the other side was a finely-written paragraph in a spidery hand; I couldn’t make much out of it because I couldn’t decipher the French script very well, even if I had known French. It was apparently intended as a Christmas card, a month late, and it said something about Noel and “les meilleurs voeux pour la nouvelle année, de la part de vos amis de la Pension Fleurie1.” Then there was more I couldn’t read, and at the end I made out, “. . . nous avons toujours regretté que vous avez dû partir si précipitement2.” I handed it back to her.
“Why did you depart so precipitately?”
“Oh, something came up.”
“It was when you were a student?”
She nodded. “It was a good boarding-house and they were nice people. Almost the only friends I made in France, really.”
It occurred to me now that this was a part of her life I had never really thought very much about. I knew she had studied in Grenoble but now for the first time I began to wonder about the year she had spent in that town among people I didn’t know, made friends, taken courses, sat in cafes probably in that same Place Victor Hugo arguing about Rimbaud and Lautreamont—when was it? 1938, around the time I had sat for my license. It was odd that I had never really imagined her as being a student and learning things, or thought of her as ever having been any different from the way she was. She was the land it was hard to imagine as a child, the kind who seemed to have been born adult and mature and a little ironic.
But now I had a funny curiosity about it. “What happened in Grenoble?” I asked her.
“What happened? I went to school.”
“No, something else happened. Something about your having to leave suddenly.”
She looked at me for a moment. “Well, you are keen today, aren’t you?” Then after a pause she remarked, as though it had some kind of a connection with what we were talking about, “Grenoble was a very dull town. There was really nothing to do there.”
“Then why did you go there?”
“I don’t know that there was any particular reason. They had a special course at Grenoble for foreigners, and most of the American students went there. I came through an international foundation for exchange students, and they decided where I would go anyhow. They arranged for my passage and the course of study and everything, and found me the boarding-house. Of course I was very young. The Foundation thought it was better for girls not to go to Paris because they might get in trouble. They never actually said this, but you got that impression.”
“Didn’t any get in trouble in Grenoble?”
“A few.”
Here she made one of her serene pauses, and after a while she went on. “I was trying to be very French; I had my hair cut straight with bangs over the forehead and I always carried a pack of Gauloises around with me when I went to a cafe. Girls that age are rather affected anyhow and I think I must have been a particularly silly child. I went around speaking my third-year college French, very correct, with audible accent marks over all the vowels. I thought I was terrifically sophisticated, and of course the very first thing I did was to fall in love with a soldier.”
I grinned.
“Well, it wasn’t funny at the time. He was an officer from the cavalry barracks, and he was almost as young as I was. But he had had a lot more experience; he was French and he came from a very old family, and it seemed tremendously romantic to me at the time. Probably I was mainly in love with his riding boots. The trouble was that from the beginning we were having a slight misunderstanding. I thought we were going steady or something, the way you do in America, and he was under the impression he had a mistress. He immediately began making passionate Gallic overtures, and of course I was quite virginal and confused by all this. It was all an international misunderstanding out of Henry James. I was like Daisy Miller and he played Giovanelli or whatever his name was.”
“So he took you to the Roman ruins by moonlight, and you caught a fever?”
“No, he took me to the circus. I don’t know what a circus was doing in Grenoble at that time of the year; it was a silly little provincial circus anyhow, with two old lions and a skinny elephant. But the acrobats were remarkable. They were Italians and they were about as young as we were. They looked hungry and their costumes were coming out at the seams, but they did incredible things, and always with a wonderful kind of desperate grace, as though you thought every time they weren’t quite going to make it and then they did. At the end the ringmaster came out and announced with great pomp that there would be a salto mortale—I suppose you would translate that a death-defying leap. When I saw what this crazy Italian boy was going to do my heart almost stopped. They brought out a ring no bigger than a barrel hoop, and soaked it in gasoline and set it afire high up in the air. The Italian got up on top of the trapeze and stood for a while biting his lip and looking at the burning ring, and then he simply swung out into the air and let go. He turned over three or four times and doubled up to go through the ring, and it seemed he just barely caught the trapeze on the other side with his fingernails. The whole audience gasped and my heart flopped completely over.”
She picked up her pack of cigarettes, found it was empty, and set it down again. “Anyhow, after the circus we—he and I—started talking about Nietzscheism and risking yourself and living dangerously. I told him I thought the Italian was out of his mind. He asked me ‘Why does he do it then?’ I said for the money, but he was still crazy. He said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ He was very serious and I could see it somehow meant more to him than just a stunt in a circus.
“Finally I asked him why he thought people acted this way, and he told: ‘Parce que, à l’autre côté, c’est soi-meme.’3 You have to make the leap at least once, because on the other side is yourself, and this is the only way of finding out what it is. It wasn’t just a matter of proving your courage to yourself or anybody else. The important thing was letting go of the bar when all your instincts were against it. I think he meant you would never know what you were until you let go of everything that was comfortable and secure—your family, your background, everything you had been as a child—and went out into empty space. The thing was that you had to have faith there would be something on the other side—another bar to meet your hand—even if you didn’t know what it was.”
For the first time I realized that what she was saying applied to me as well as to her, and I wondered if this was in her mind too as she said it, but I couldn’t tell, even when she stopped at this point and waited for just long enough for me to have spoken if I had wanted to. I didn’t say anything, and after a moment she went on. “Well, it was just a good line, perhaps. At any rate it worked. Of course it was that night that he took me to a hotel. Actually it was just a little inn outside of town, a few miles down the river. We went there quite often after that and it went on for three months, all the way into the spring. I didn’t go to lectures or prepare for my exams and I hardly ate. I felt as though I had a fever during the whole time; I never thought about anything else even when I was asleep. I didn’t expect it to last, and I knew he wouldn’t marry me. He was perfectly honest from the start. He had known a lot of girls and when he was eighteen or nineteen he had an affair with an older woman, a friend of his mother.”
“And what happened?”
“Nothing, it just ended. It wasn’t much of a mortal leap, and if it was I sort of slipped and fell on my face. I suppose the real salto mortale in my life was something else. But at least after it was over I was entirely different from what I had been. As soon as Leo saw me, when I came home that summer, he knew what had happened. I walked and talked differently, I thought differently, I even sat in a chair differently. The reason I came home was that the Foundation got wind of what was happening from the other students and packed me off on the first train. Their precautions hadn’t worked; the might as well have sent me to Paris. It didn’t really matter anyhow because it was 1939 and the students were all sent home that summer the war started in the fall.”
“And the officer?”
“I never heard from him again. But I hadn’t expected to and after a while I got over it; I wasn’t a child anymore. Then, afterwards, I began to understand a lot better the things that he had told me. About leaping and finding yourself on the other side, for example. I hadn’t quite made it that time, but the next time I had to leap I would know better.” She stopped, thought for a moment, and then said in another, quite matter-of-fact voice, “Anyhow that’s what happened. Do you care?”
I didn’t know whether I cared or not. It was a new and disconcerting idea, that she owed something I thought of as uniquely hers— something that seemed almost her very nature—to a Frenchman whose name I didn’t even know. (For some reason I had begun to think of him as George.) Perhaps I was a little jealous, not of the officer but of her, because I had never been lucky enough to be in love when I was nineteen years old. Or perhaps I already half understood what she meant by saying the real salto mortale in her life had been something else. And if so, perhaps, it was George who should be jealous of me.
“Was he the one who taught you how to make sole marguéry?”
She smiled. “No. We didn’t eat very much. Neither of us had very much money, and we spent it all on rooms at the inn. Usually we would just buy some cheese and wine there, out in the country where it was cheap. To tell the truth he wasn’t very much interested in food. He was rather limited in his way and actually he was only interested in one thing. But he was very good at that.”
For about a week I brooded over it and tried to imagine her Frenchman, George with the riding boots, and the inn where they had gone to eat cheese. Did it rain while they were in the room, and did they drink the wine out of glasses or just take turns with the bottle? Did the room have a window over the river? It was the first time in my life I had ever really thought deeply about anybody’s life but my own, and after a while I began to see how much Europe, or Grenoble, or George, had had to do with making her what she was. I began to realize too that whatever it was I had discovered this house, something that had changed me and made me more aware of myself and others and the nuances and vividness of everything, was something like the Europe she had discovered that year when she and George spent all their money on inn rooms, except that she had been younger and so it had made deeper changes and fixed her the way she was going to be for the rest of her life. But Europe wasn’t exactly the right word; it was a way of looking at reality, or rather feeling it, and you could discover it in Des Moines or Ogden if you happened to be lucky. Anyhow, I saw now that whatever it was that George had learned from his mother’s bridge partner he had given to her, and then she had passed it along to me. I could think of several words for what this was, but most of them were sentimental and the rest dirty. It wasn’t important what you called it anyhow; the important thing was that being alive was all there was, and the more deeply you could savor and know things, the roughness of sand or the smell of rain or making love, the more fully you were alive. Probably it was not a very profound discovery and other people had made it before, but at least I saw now it was she who had taught me.
Anyhow George, the salto mortale, Grenoble and the rest of it must have started some kind of a ferment in my head, because that week all sorts of funny and hitherto unprecedented things started going on inside it. One night when we were going to bed I did a queer thing. The bedroom, the dim light, the clothes I was taking off, everything was the same, and yet for some reason that night I broke into the chain of habit and did something impulsive and a little irrational. Like most people I had a habitual sequence for taking off my clothes: first the shirt, then the shoes, then the pants. The shoes were loose and I could kick them off without even bending over. They were the same tan loafers she had brought to the hospital room in the suitcase, three years before. All the other clothes had worn out and been thrown away, and the loafers were all that was left. I hardly ever wore them. They were good shoes but they had always been a little large and I didn’t like them; they had a way of half coming off when I lifted my foot from the ground and this annoyed me. This time I took them off and looked at them there on the bedroom floor, and then I picked them up and dropped them in the wastebasket.
“What did you do that for?”
“I don’t like them. I never have.”
She looked at me, mildly curious, “They’re hardly used.”
“Besides they don’t fit me.”
“You never mentioned it before.”
“Why should we get into a quarrel about a pair of shoes?”
“Why indeed?” She turned away indifferently to brush her hair as though she didn’t think it was very important either. And yet it still hung in the air; we both sensed that there was more to it than we had said and that if we went on it would lead us into a region that was unknown to both of us and perhaps perilous. It seemed to me that she didn’t want to do this, that she preferred to brush her hair and let sleeping dogs lie, or even that she wanted to warn me by her feigned indifference that there were some things you didn’t have to look at, like Orpheus who was forbidden to look back at his wife but turned and looked anyhow, and lost her for good.
But I went on. “Let’s put it this way. Why do you want me to wear them?”
“Why do I? I don’t understand.”
“Yes, you do.” I was calm and yet I felt a kind of recklessness, as though I was finally going to do something I had always known I would have to do but had refused to face, out of a kind of fear that was perhaps really only laziness or rationalization. “Let’s forget the shoes; they’re not important. But there are other things that are. You know the things I mean; we both do. You’re no good at pretending you’re stupid when you’re not, and we’re both too old to play games. Besides telling lies is too much work. How old are you now, twenty- six? And I’m even older. We’ve got to live the rest of our lives together; we’ve got to become old, old people until we wear away all the sharp comers and have no more secrets between us.”
“We don’t have any now.”
“I can tell you one we have. My shoes don’t fit.”
For the first time in my life, it seemed to me, I looked straight at her. She met the glance steadily but there was an uncertainty in her expression; I had never seen her like this before and I watched as she thought what she was going to say next.
“Then why don’t you throw them away and forget about them?” she said with a casualness that rang a little false.
“If they were mine I would have thrown them away a long time ago, but they’re not.”
“Then whose are they?”
“You know that better than I.”
She hesitated for a long time and finally she smiled, the small and half-reluctant smile of someone who is finally confessing something she had thought the others didn’t know.
“Yes. You see, I knew from the first he was dead. I didn’t believe it when they said he wasn’t, because he wasn’t the kind who was capable of amnesia. Ben—the other Ben—always knew thoroughly who he was. He was a bit fatuous about it, I’m afraid.”
“And yet you went to Hawaii.”
“Yes, I went. I don’t know if I can explain it. I knew he was dead, and I had accepted it. When the photographs came from the hospital I knew it was all wrong and they were making a mistake. And yet I had to go; I had to see for myself, to be sure. It was a way of ending it, don’t you see, of wiping out the last of the uncertainty. So they put me on a plane and I went, and all the way over I wondered about that nameless man in the hospital bed and who he was. It was a sort of a riddle, and I felt that somehow I had to find the answer. Then at the moment when I walked in the hospital room it suddenly came to me that it didn’t matter. And then I finally knew what he had meant, in the circus in Grenoble, about finding yourself on the other side. Those were strange times, those months, and I think we all lost our grip on reality a little. It wasn’t that I thought the matter out; I didn’t think at all, really. It was just that somewhere below my thoughts there was a logic operating, the logic of life itself. I understood simply that the man I had given my life to was dead, and that in this room was a man who was nobody, who would be whatever I had the courage to call him. If I turned and left him, went out of the room, he would have no name and he would die.”
So she had known even this too. I watched her now steadily to see what she would say next.
“And so it was simply a question of which I wanted to choose, life or truth. Anyhow we never have time; it was a matter of seconds. In those seconds it was perfectly clear to me what I had to do; I chose life. But this meant that we both accepted a lie, and we had to work back toward the truth only very slowly. It was harder for you, because you were doing it in the dark, but I knew what we were doing.”
“And what was I doing? Impersonating a ghost?”
“I thought so for a while. Now I don’t know.”
I began to remember a look I had seen on her face in those first months, sympathetic and yet a little ironic: it was the expression of a director watching an inept pupil from the wings, a pupil playing a part he doesn’t really understand and making small clumsy mistakes as he feels his way through it.
“And did I succeed?”
“Not very well. But perhaps it wasn’t worth doing.”
“Wasn’t worth doing? How?”
“It’s just that—to tell you the truth he wasn’t particularly worth modeling yourself on. You see, I was still quite young when I married him and I did it rather in a rush, and it didn’t work out exactly as I had expected. He was very attractive in his way, but he was weak I soon found out. And he was vain, and a little priggish.”
I thought of the picture in the ebony frame, the picture I hadn’t liked, and how we had put it away in the drawer and never taken it out again.
“I don’t mean that I didn’t feel grief, real grief, when he died. I was still young and I loved him terribly, or I thought I did, the way we love people even when they have weaknesses. But later, with you, it seemed simpler to start from the beginning. Probably you had faults of your own to get rid of. There was no point in piling all of his on top of it. I didn’t see that at first; it took me a little while to think it out. But after I got to know you a little I realized that, whatever it was that you were trying to make, it wasn’t the other Ben.”
“Then what was it?” I asked, more than anything else out of a kind of curiosity to see what she would say as she tried to put into words something I had known for a long time.
“I don’t know. Something that you yourself had to make, I suppose. It was strange; I myself didn’t know what it would be until it happened. And I felt that this human being that was taking shape existed, really, only as long as you and I believed in it. And you felt that too; I could sense it.”
And I knew she was right; we had both believed in it. And I saw now for the first time that what we had been making was not one human being but two; I had been necessary to her as she had been necessary to me, all those long months we had been clinging to each other so we wouldn’t drown. And all that time we had gone on pretending to each other that one of us was someone else and the other didn’t know it. I smiled. “You told me a hell of a lot of lies.
“Because we couldn’t have both life and truth, you see. At least not for a while.”
Then something else occurred to me. “And Leo?’
Again she was uncertain and it was a moment before she spoke, with the same tentative smile. “It’s odd, but I simply don’t know. I went away to Hawaii and came back with you, and we never talked about it. He’s a funny father in a way; he’s always been more like a friend than a father. Even when I was very small he would never scold me or reprimand me, he would just let me go on doing things my own way. When he met us at the station that was the time for him to say something; I was watching him. But he just gave you one look and then he picked up the suitcases and walked off. I never knew what he thought. And yet there was something he said once that I thought about afterwards. It was a week or so after you had come home—I was going to bed, and when he kissed me he said, ‘You know, I never did trust guys with kiss-curls.’ ”
“What did he mean by that?”
“I wasn’t sure. But you see he, the other Ben, had hair that was straight like yours except that there was a wave over each temple. Actually it was attractive in a kind of a Byronic way, but the trouble was that he knew it, and after a while it became a little affected. He had a gesture he made of patting the two curls into place when he combed his hair. I often wondered whether he didn’t roll them up on curlers after I had gone to bed.”
“While you waited?”
“I would go to sleep. Because the truth was, you see, that there wasn’t very much to wait for.”
So this was what I had been imitating, those queer spooky days on the ship and in the hotel in San Francisco, when I still thought I was the Master Impostor. I smiled, and so did she a little. It was nothing very much to smile at, perhaps, and yet I knew she could tell me this now only because it was something that no longer mattered very much, something that had happened a long time ago and might have happened to somebody else. It seemed to me I knew more about her now than I had ever known about anybody, even more than about myself, but it didn’t mean that I knew what she was, or finally saw her stripped naked down to the soul the way you see people in novels or in the case histories in psychology books. If you went on adding sides to a polygon it eventually became a circle, and a circle was harder to grasp, perhaps, than anything else in geometry. But I no longer felt it was so important to grasp this, because I knew that even she herself was helpless to sort out all the complexities and contradictions in her own life and see the pattern that lay behind it, and that everybody else was the same way. Know yourself! It was easier to understand a spiral nebula a million light years away. You could tell what happened to you on Wednesday and how you felt on Friday but when it came to making any sense out of the thing or saying what it all really meant you might as well ponder over the Mystery of the Trinity or how many angels can stand on the head of a pin. It was an ontological problem, and like all ontological problems it was insoluble.
Thinking over all these weighty matters I had fallen into a silence, and finally she said almost blithely, “Well, don’t you have any more tremendous questions?”
“I’ve never been very inquisitive. Besides questions are pointless anyhow.”
“Pointless?”
“When you ask a question you think that when you have the answer you’ll see something, and instead all you have is a fact.”
“What do you expect to see? If you close your eyes it’s hard to remember the shape of your own face.”
“Even if you wanted to remember it.”
“And don’t you?”
“Not very much.”
“Sometimes I can’t decide whom I understand less about, you or Leo.” And then she said, not smiling anymore now but with a kind of gnomic, almost clairvoyant calm, “That afternoon when you were sick, and lay on the floor in this room. Are you afraid of that now?”
“No.”
“You talked to somebody. I think it was somebody you used to know. Somebody out of your past.”
I didn’t say anything, and waited for her to go on.
“Who was he?”
“Myself.”
“And who is that?” she asked quietly.
It was the first question she had ever asked me, and I knew it would be the only one, and if I didn’t answer she wouldn’t ask it again. I had got beyond that foxy shallow cynicism when I thought that revealing anything inward about yourself was a sign of weakness, and I knew there was no point in concealing anything from her now or telling her anything but the truth. But the truth was an infinitely dark and complicated thing; it was not merely a name she wanted to know because she already knew that, and if I had known the answer to what she asked I would have known the answer to everything and I would have been God. But I was not God and I had never felt so human and so mortal, and all I could do was to stand there naked before her with my hands turned out like a saint of Piero della Francesca showing the stigmata: “I don’t know.”
