HER FACE GREW on me. Either because I knew who she was or because there really were features in common, I came to see many similarities between the moving image of her face and the framed phgotograph of Billy on top of the TV set.
Billy was sixteen in the photograph.
When she was sixteen, Billy was two.
I didn’t know her name. I didn’t know where she lived. I didn’t know if she was now married or not, with or without children of her own. I didn’t even know if she was still alive. People die. And sometimes they die senseless, random deaths. The pages of the New York Times were full of stories of random bullets and random victims and there was no guarantee that this epidemic of randomness had not claimed her as well.
It was all I could do to keep myself from calling Cromwell’s Brad in LA and getting all the information I needed about her, or at least enough to allow me to find the rest for myself.
As the crisis of what I should do intensified, my response to it was to let my beard grow. If this was not exactly dealing with the crisis, the sight of my hairy face in the mirror every morning was a useful visual reminder, lest I forget, that I had a crisis on my hands.
When Dianah called me, my scraggly beard was approaching its first full week of existence.
She had just returned from her spa. It was wonderful. Truly wonderful. They had both had such a wonderful time, especially “poor Jessica” who seldom got a chance to go to places like this.
We decided to meet for dinner that Saturday. Although I did not feel like seeing her, it seemed like a good idea to discuss with her in person the details of my dilemma. The least I could do, before I did anything about Billy’s mother, was to inform Dianah about her existence. My personal feelings about Dianah aside, she had been a good mother to Billy and deserved to be consulted.
The French restaurant where Dianah and I go to discuss our divorce is located not far from my office, on Fifty-eighth Street.
The restaurant, when I get there, is packed. The din is pleasantly deafening. We agreed to meet there at eight, but I am early as usual. Dianah, I know, will be late, as always.
The maitre d’ is a man named Claude who greets me warmly since I am an old customer, then apologizes that my table is not ready yet. He inquires, as he always does, about Dianah, and I tell him, as I always do, that she is fine and will be along shortly. Claude is aware of my scraggly beard, but in the best maitre d’ fashion he manages to convey the impression, without saying a word, that a scraggly beard is just what I needed.
He leaves to greet other customers. I go to the bar and order a drink to pass the time while I wait for Dianah to show up. I have three bourbons in a row. I chug the first two. I sip the third. But the drinks have absolutely no effect on me. It’s like pouring lighter fluid on myself, only to discover as I strike one match after another that I’m completely fireproof.
Dianah finally arrives. She is wearing a striking blue dress dotted with lifelike images of little endangered elephants. Whether African or Asian I’m not qualified to say, but there are dozens of them, all over her blue dress, beautifully replicated, tusks and all.
Although we’ve spoken on the phone, we haven’t seen each other in person since the McNabs’ day-after-Christmas party at the Dakota. She looks at me, and then she looks at me again and bursts out laughing.
“A beard!” she cries out and claps her hands. “My poor darling,” she says, “it looks like a swarm of flies landed on your face.”
We kiss. She pulls back. She strikes a pose. She is convinced, as she has told me on the phone, that her stay in that spa has done her a world of good and that as a result she now looks entirely different, younger, more beautiful, radiant. She looks exactly the same to me, but the sheer horsepower of her conviction that she has been rejuvenated overwhelms my perceptions. Who am I to say she doesn’t look radiant?
“You look wonderful,” I tell her. “I’ve never seen you look so good.”
“I feel good,” she says.
Claude appears. He leads us to our table. Dianah follows him. I follow her. If there’s one thing at which she excels, it’s the way she walks through a crowded room. I genuinely admire the way she does it. A kind of runway walk.
On the back of her blue dress too there are little doomed pachyderms. Her gleaming platinum-blond hair shines above them like the merciless sun over the defoliated, drought-stricken plains of the Serengeti.
We sit down at our table and check out the people at the tables around us. They return our gaze. We order drinks. Dianah, confident of her radiance, radiates. I light a cigarette.
The drinks arrive. We toast each other. I chug mine and light another cigarette. She sips hers and tells me about the wildlife conference she attended at the spa.
The natural habitat of countless species, she tells me, is being systematically destroyed.
“At least there’s a system to it,” I tell her.
She frowns.
“This wildlife expert from Seattle pointed out to us that once the natural habitat of a given species is destroyed …”
I drink my drink and smoke my cigarette and wonder, as she goes on, if I myself have ever had such a thing, a natural habitat.
The Eskimos have the Arctic. The Pygmies have their jungle. The rain-forest Indians have or have had their rain forest.
My co-op on Riverside Drive is very nice, very spacious, the maintenance is reasonable and the view is quite pleasant, but no, I wouldn’t call it a home and I certainly wouldn’t call it my natural habitat.
Maybe white people no longer have natural habitats.
“There are over eight hundred and fifty endangered and threatened species,” Dianah tells me, “not including plants. If the list included plants, there would be over one thousand and seventy. In the past twenty years alone, over three hundred species were declared extinct while awaiting government approval to be on the endangered list. At this rate …”
Our waiter comes to take our order. Dianah falls silent and listens to the specials of the day. Some items on the menu are, it would seem, endangered as well. There is only one sea bass left. A couple of other selections are unfortunately extinct tonight. No more Dover sole. Ditto for brook trout.
We place our orders. It’s absolutely pointless for me to keep drinking, but I order another bourbon and a bottle of wine.
The waiter takes our menus and departs.
Dianah, deeply concerned, admonishes me for drinking too much. She reaches across the table and places her beringed hand on top of mine.
“You must take better care of yourself, darling. You really must.”
“Why’s that?”
“Oh, Saul,” she sighs.
My bourbon arrives.
I don’t need this drink. What I need is to get drunk, but since I can no longer get drunk, it would be very easy for me to give up drinking altogether. Although I no longer love Dianah, I haven’t got the heart to hurt her. And it would hurt her if I stopped drinking. She has invested so much time and energy popularizing the myth that it was my alcoholism that was responsible for our wrecked marriage, that to give up drinking now would almost seem vindictive. For me to show any personal improvement after our failed marriage would border on being spiteful. Although I am riddled with diseases and reprehensible traits, spite is not one of them. So I know that the best thing I can do for her is to uphold the myth that I am a hopeless drunk. I feel I owe her that much.
So I drink my drink. She is both concerned and reassured.
Our wine arrives.
I start in on the wine.
Our salads arrive.
Over salad, while I wonder when to bring up the subject of Billy’s mother, Dianah launches into her lament. Her lament spills over from the salad to the main course, which is lamb chops for me, sea bass for her, with a side order of creamed spinach.
She interrupts her lament to inquire how I like my lamb chops. I in turn inquire about her sea bass. We’re both delighted with our selections and then her lament continues.
Actually, “lament” is not the right word for it. It’s some new genre. A divorce dirge? An oratorio for a long-lost marriage? I don’t know what to call it.
She marvels at herself for having survived our marriage intact. Other women, she is sure, would have been completely destroyed by being married to a man like me.
“When I think of what I’ve been through,” she says, shakes her head, and goes on.
I drink my wine and eat my lamb chops and listen to her version of that marriage of ours. She’s in brilliant voice, absolutely brilliant. The story of our marriage is broadcast to diners beyond the immediate vicinity of our table. They become as enthralled by her telling of it as I am. Although I was married to her for all those years, I remember no such marriage as the one she is describing at the top of her lungs.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” she says, “there were moments of bliss. Conjugal bliss. We had more than our share of bliss, I suppose, but for the most part, correct me if I’m wrong, for the most part, our marriage was one long bloodbath in which we tore at each other. We tore each other to shreds time after time, and only then …”
I remember neither the bliss nor the bloodbath and although I am invited to correct her, I don’t. It would be needlessly cruel of me to insist now, over lamb chops and sea bass, on the truth that our marriage was neither blissful nor bloody, but merely tedious.
There is an innate sense of fair play in me. Having lied to her for all those years, the least I can do now is not contradict her and let her lie to me. There is something else, too. Her need to lie moves me.
“I suppose,” she goes on, “we were always closer to being a couple of wild animals than a man and wife. Our claws sharpened, our teeth bared …”
When a woman lies to me, as Dianah is doing, it’s as close as I get to feeling loved. Whenever one of the women in one of my many short-lived love affairs faked an orgasm, I was always deeply moved by such a selfless act of generosity, genuinely moved to think that she actually cared enough about my feelings to go to the trouble of faking. Their occasional real orgasms were not nearly as moving.
Dianah’s description of our marriage is not just a fake orgasm but a fake orgasm in public and as such even more appreciated. Hearing myself described as a wild animal with sharp claws and bared teeth, and knowing that those at the tables around me can hear the description, helps me to feel again like a burly six-footer with a manly beard and not someone whose spine is contracting and bulk is expanding as he sits there gnawing on his lamb chop.
A cake with candles goes past us, carried by a waiter, and a moment later we hear the “Happy Birthday” song.
Our waiter brings us the dessert menus. While I ponder what to have for my dessert and while Dianah ponders what to have for hers, while we read and reread the selections listed on the menu in both French and English, I listen in to the conversation of the four people, two couples, at the table next to ours.
They are talking about a recent event that to me seems like something that occurred years ago. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall. A woman at the table is telling her three tablemates that she was there at the Wall to witness the event for herself. People hugging each other. Crying with joy. History in the making. A multinational audience listening to Leonard Bernstein conducting a multi-orchestral performance of Beethoven’s Ninth. A man sitting across from her remarks how strange it makes him feel, although he wasn’t there, that a whole city once called East Berlin is not east anymore. In his opinion, there is hardly any east left in the world. A bit of south to be sure, and a bit of north, but in the main “there is only the West now. The West and the rest,” he says.
Over coffee and dessert, which is a peach tart for Dianah, a heroic slice of gateau au chocolat for me, I intend to bring up the subject of Billy’s mother, but at the last second I change my mind and bring up the subject of my father’s camel-hair overcoat instead.
I tell Dianah how I saw an old homeless man on Broadway wearing my father’s overcoat, several Saturdays ago.
“I told you,” she tells me, “I warned you repeatedly that if you didn’t come to get your father’s things, I would give them away. I’m not a warehouse, darling, for the living or the dead. I have my own life to live.”
I don’t know why I’m telling her this story, unless it’s to avoid telling her another, more pressing one. I continue. I tell her how I followed the old man uptown. The turtle pace and which he walked. His overall turtlelike appearance. I tell her how I spent an hour or so sitting on a bench next to him, with my dry-cleaning bag draped over my lap.
“You are sick, darling,” Dianah tells me. “You’re a very sick man. A complete neurotic.”
“I may be sick, but I don’t think I’m neurotic in the least.”
“Of course you don’t think you are. That’s because you’re neurotic. Neurotic people never think they’re neurotic. That’s one of the side effects. Don’t you understand that a man who goes around the city following his father’s clothes is somebody who is totally out of control?”
“I wasn’t out of control in the least. I knew exactly what I was doing.”
“You always think you know what you’re doing. You have this image of yourself as someone who’s always in charge. But you’re not. You’re just a marionette, sweetheart, that’s all you are, responding to the tugs and pulls of the strings from your subconscious mind. How many times have I urged you, pleaded with you to go see …”
She’s off again. The people at the Berlin Wall table are all ears, and being unusually candid about being so. My kind of audience.
“The subconscious mind …” Dianah goes on.
She believes in the subconscious the way hard-line Catholics believe in the Trinity and the doctrine of transubstantiation. To her, the subconscious explains everything and it allows her, therefore, to issue recriminations and dispensations on subconscious grounds. You can be both doomed and redeemed by the same source, depending on the mood of the issuer.
“All your problems, darling, every single one of them …”
According to her, all my problems, every single one of them, are caused by the turmoil in my subconscious mind. My drinking. My faithlessness in marriage. My sorry record as a father. My constant lying to myself and others. My pathetic, scraggly beard. My disregard for the feelings of others. My lack of respect for the way I look.
“Look at yourself,” she exclaims, and I feel the eyes of the foursome at the Berlin Wall table turning to look at me. “You’re getting fat, darling. You are, you know. You really are. You’re not just overweight anymore. You’re fat, sweetheart. I can’t even see the chair you’re sitting on. For all I know, there is no chair. For all I know, you’re just crouching there with your elbows on the table. And that miserable-looking beard you’re growing isn’t fooling anyone. All men who’re ashamed of their appearance grow beards. Especially fat men. At this rate, God forbid, you’ll soon start wearing black turtleneck sweaters as well. And why? Do you know why? Do you want to know?”
She knows. And she tells me. Lodged deep in my subconscious mind is a desperate need for self-expression that is constantly frustrated and aggravated by working as a rewriter on other people’s scripts. This constant frustration leads to anger and hate. According to her, I am full of both.
“You are, darling. You really are overflowing with anger and hate. You’re a potential madman with an assault rifle, who bursts into an all-night convenience store and guns down a dozen people in a fit of rage. What you need is professional help to help you to come to terms with yourself. Because if you don’t …”
Her analysis of my problems is so sweet, so innocent of the true and terrible nature of my many diseases that I can only wish that she were right. I could cure myself completely in a matter of days, if all it took were coming to terms with myself.
If I am a madman, as I very well might be, then I am some new improved madman, with a new and improved madness that allows me continually to come to terms with myself. The millstones of my mind constantly grind and reduce to powder whatever disturbing matter enters its territory.
The matter of Laurie Dohrn is a good example. In a few days after that dinner with Cromwell I came to terms with what I had done and allowed to be done to her.
It was all for the best. It was a good thing I had done. Her attachment to me, had it continued, might have arrested her emotionally and caused her to feel an overdependence on me for the rest of her life. This attachment, although very flattering to me, was not in her best interest. As her father figure, I had performed a final act of selfless love by setting her free from my influence. Some day, when she was old enough, she would realize that … etc., etc., etc.
The last thing I needed was professional help in helping me to come to terms with myself. If anything, I have a nostalgic craving for that time in my life when terms existed that I could never come to terms with.
“Listen,” I finally begin, as the whole dinner is coming to an end, “there is something I need to tell you. I need your opinion on this matter. It’s something …”
And so I begin.
“It’s about Billy’s mother.” I make the mistake of blowing the punch line of the story right at the top and then wave my hands stupidly as if trying to erase it. I begin again.
“I was asked, this man I know asked me to take a look at the first cut of a film he produced, to see if there’s anything I can do to …”
Once again, I make a mistake and start getting sidetracked by telling her about the film itself. How wonderful it is. I’m not only talking about something that’s not germane to the subject at hand, I’m doing a bad job of describing the film in question. I’m making it sound like any other film. So I light another cigarette and begin yet again.
I tell her about the video.
About the waitress.
About her laughter.
“As soon as she laughed, I knew, I mean, I really knew that she was the same …”
I stop in midsentence because I suddenly realize that although I told Dianah about my telephone conversation with that fourteen-year-old girl all those years ago, I didn’t mention anything about her laughing on the phone. So I backtrack hurriedly and insert that piece of information into the narrative. I also try, because it’s crucial to the story I’m telling, to describe the quality of her laughter that made it unforgetable. But try as I might, my description of her laughter is not successful. I’m doing a bad job of it. I feel like a nightclub performer who’s losing his audience. Out of desperation, I bring up examples of actresses whose laughter has the approximate quality of the girl’s.
By the time I get back to the subject of Billy’s mother, I discover that I have nothing more to say on the subject. That I have said everything but somehow managed to leave out everything.
I worried all evening about the impact my story of Billy’s mother would have on Dianah, and now that the story is over, I realize that it seems to have no impact on either of us. Neither on me who told it nor on her who heard it. The significance of the story is no more or less significant than anything else we said to each other over dinner.
I sit there puzzled, unable to tell if the story’s lack of impact is the result of my having told it badly, or if its lack of impact and significance accurately reflects my current state of mind. Perhaps I waited too long to tell it. Perhaps by viewing that scene in the restaurant over and over again, I used up whatever significance it had to offer. I feel exactly as I felt when I pitched my Ulysses in Space movie to a studio executive and, in the process of pitching it, managed to lose not just his interest in my story but my own as well.
I light another cigarette. Dianah sits across from me, watching me smoke. She is scrutinizing me in silence, as if waiting for some further elaboration. I have none to give.
“You are worse than I thought,” she finally says. “You really are. You remembered her laughter? You? After twenty years you remembered the sound of her laughter? Is that what you said?”
I nod my head, but not with conviction.
“You can’t even remember to call your own son once in a while and you expect me to believe …” She leaves the sentence unfinished and sighs.
“Oh, Saul,” she says and shakes her head. “You’re a sick man. Much sicker than I gave you credit for being. It doesn’t really matter if you actually believe in this fantasy you told me, or if you made it up just to hurt me. What it shows, all it shows, is the extent of your decline into some mental illness I’m not equipped to handle. It torments me to see you like this. It really does.”
She sighs. Her lovely hand, with her lovely long fingers, flutters in the air and comes to rest gently on her chest.
“You know the way I am. You, of all people, must know that if I am anything, it’s nurturing. Overly nurturing, in fact. It torments me to see suffering of any kind, but especially suffering which even I can’t alleviate. You remember what it did to me, how devastated I was, when that seagull crashed into the windshield of our car on the way to Sag Harbor that summer. We stopped at that fish restaurant afterwards and you, you were fine …”
The people at the Berlin Wall table, having drifted away during my story, are back with us again. They’re listening to every word Dianah says. They seem to know the restaurant in Sag Harbor. Perhaps they’ve eaten there themselves.
“You were perfectly fine. The poor dead seagull meant nothing to you. There you were, eating those crab cakes and your clam chowder and I, if you remember, I was so shattered, so devastated by its death, that I couldn’t eat a bite. Not a single bite. And then, later on that evening, when we went to the McNabs’ party, it was their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and we drove over to Southampton? Remember how both George and Pat thought that I was ill? They both commented on how pale I looked. How distraught I seemed to be. And that was over a seagull. I don’t even like seagulls, and yet I was devastated by the incident, completely devastated. Don’t smoke anymore. Put it away. Do it for me. Please. So, what I’m saying is this, a time comes when even I must admit defeat. It’s not that I’m giving up on you, Saul, it’s just that I have no choice. I wish I could nurture you back to health. I’ve tried. God knows, I’ve tried. I’ve spent the last couple of years of our marriage, while we were still living together, doing nothing but trying …”
I am enchanted by the fiction she is spinning, moved by whatever is moving her to tell me the lies she’s telling me. In a way, I feel unworthy. Do I really merit lies this good?
“And I probably would have gone on trying, if you hadn’t left. It was you who left me, Saul. It was you who moved out, and now look at yourself. You’re worse than ever. Instead of taking some positive step forward and trying to come to terms with yourself, you’re running around with that unattractive beard on your face, following your father’s overcoat around New York, and now this. Either making up some fantasy about a girl who laughed on the phone or believing in the fantasy yourself. I don’t know which is worse. All I know is that if I, with all my nurturing nature, can’t nurture you back to health, then nurturing is not the answer. This is a job for professionals. You should commit yourself. There are many fine, reputable psychiatric institutions in the city and you belong in one of them. And don’t think that I wouldn’t visit you there. I would. Every day. But I just can’t bear to go on seeing you like this, watching helplessly from the sidelines as you fall further and further apart. Don’t you understand what it does to me to see you like this? I can’t … I just can’t … Excuse me.”
Tears well up in her eyes, she rises and departs with great dignity in the direction of the ladies’ room.
I turn in my chair to watch her and admire, yet again, the dancelike way she has of crossing a crowded room. The stately swing of her shoulders in counterpoint to the sway of her hips.
The cigarette I had meant to light earlier, but which she had pleaded with me not to light, I now light.
My conviction that the actress in the scene in the restaurant was Billy’s mother is no longer with me. Perhaps, I think, Dianah is right. Some kind of fantasy on my part. The chances of my remembering that fourteen-year-old girl’s laughter seem very slim. We play tricks on others, memory plays tricks on us. It now seems highly unlikely that the waitress in the movie was anything but some poor actress in a bit part. There are so many of them in that age bracket. Mid-thirties to early forties. The conventional wisdom says that if they haven’t made it by their mid-thirties, they never will. You’re either a leading lady by then or, for the rest of your life or career, whichever ends first, you’ll be acting in bit parts, in scenes that belong to others.
It’s true, I’ve invested a lot of hope and time in thinking about her, and through her, as Billy’s mother, in the prospect of my own redemption. Now that the whole central premise is in doubt, I have no idea what to think. I am temporarily in between thoughts until some new mood comes along to trigger a thought into being.
I turn my attention to my colleagues at the Berlin Wall table. They have been kind enough, with a few understandable lapses, to listen in on the melodrama at my table, and my sense of social responsibility bids me to return the favor.
They are discussing hate crimes at the moment.
A woman at the table says that hate crimes are on the rise. She offers statistics. Racial crimes are up sixty percent. Religious, overall, are up forty percent, but hate crimes against Jews are up a whopping ninety-two percent. Crimes against children are even worse. Crimes against children are up over two hundred percent. She is ready to continue, but the man opposite her interrupts. He does not think that crimes against children can be classified as hate crimes. And why not, she wants to know. Because, the man replies, crimes against children are a separate category. This doesn’t mean that he doesn’t deplore such crimes, it simply means that as a category … This time the woman interrupts him. What else but hate, she wants to know, can explain crimes against children? Is he also aware of the fact that children have become the victims of choice of most Americans? Yes, he is aware of that fact, he is also aware of the fact that children have become the victims of choice of other children as well, but that still doesn’t mean such crimes should be included in the category of hate crimes. Hate crimes, in his opinion, and not just his alone, are crimes that …
My waiter comes. He brings my bill, bows, and leaves.
I have an account here and all I have to do is sign my name. I leave huge tips for anyone on the staff who so much as comes near me.
Dianah returns, fully composed, tears gone, hair brushed. She is Ms. Sisyphus incarnate. Ready to resume her unending toil of trying to roll me up the steep incline to the summit of health and happiness. She knows that it’s a hopeless and thankless task she has set for herself, but she can no sooner turn her back on me than she can on those doomed elephants that adorn her beautiful blue dress. It’s just the way she is. A nurturer at heart.
We leave together. I stagger a little, to keep up appearances. I lean on her for support, doing one of my better imitations of a hopeless drunk.
There are no hard feelings between us. None at all.
It’s neither warm nor cold outside. It’s March, but it feels like May. It’s been May since January.
As in some huge illuminated aquarium, Sixth Avenue is full of cabs moving past us like schools of goldfish.
I hail one of them.
I open the door and hold it open for her. She slides across the seat, making room for me to come inside.
“I feel like walking,” I tell her.
I light a cigarette and head uptown. My beard feels like a dog that I’m taking for a walk. It precedes me, as if it knows the way back to my apartment.
Lincoln Center is letting out as I go by. Hundreds of people with Playbills in their hands. They run, hurtling themselves off the sidewalk, arms desperately waving at the taxicabs. It’s like a scene from one of those disaster-at-sea movies. Only so many lifeboats to go around. The able-bodied men run on ahead to secure a taxicab, while the women and children and the infirm remain behind, huddled together in little groups. They can only hope and pray now.
A new mood is beginning to rise slowly inside my head.
Dianah’s contention that the woman I thought was Billy’s mother was just a fantasy or fabrication no longer disappoints me. The doubt I now feel about the woman’s identity seems liberating. Whereas I had serious moral qualms in contemplating my pursuit of her when I was certain that she was Billy’s mother, I now have none. I’m now free to set things in motion, should I choose to do so. To make my phone calls. To find out her name. Her address. To befriend her. To insinuate myself into her life. To find out who she is.
An ever-so-fine drizzle, so fine that it almost seems a mist, starts to fall.
Seventy-second and Broadway. Tomorrow’s Sunday Times are stacked up outside the news vendor’s on the corner. A steady stream of people are buying them, leaving with the papers in their arms.
The sidewalks are crowded with people. Heading home. Away from home. Homeless. All kinds.
The old man in my father’s overcoat is nowhere to be seen. I pass the corner where I first caught sight of him, and the bench where we sat. I have not exactly been looking for him, but I have expected to see him again, as if we had made an arrangement to do so. I now recognize this idea for what it is. It’s the Hollywood hack in me at work. A rewriter who sets up minor characters early on so that they can then reappear for the payoff. Nobody in the scripts I’ve rewritten appears just once. The only reason they exist in the first place is so that they can reappear for the payoff. Their whole reason for being is to be somebody’s payoff.
I know, of course, that there is a big difference between real life and the scripts I rewrite. The lives of most people are neither character-driven nor plot-driven, but driven by random currents, trends, and moods. Lives that are moody rather than plotty. I’m well aware of this, but the rewriter in me wishes that life too could be rewritten at times.
It starts to rain for real.
Despite the rain, there’s a line on the corner of Eighty-sixth Street to buy the Sunday Times. Those leaving with their papers clutch them to their bosoms to protect them from the rain. The image is almost maternal, or paternal, depending on their sex. It brings to mind, at least it does to my mind, an image from an old movie. The townspeople in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers leaving the distribution center where they picked up their pea pods and hurrying away, each holding the pea pod of his replication tightly in his arms.
I pay for my Times and, clutching it to my bosom like the others, I trot on due west toward Riverside Drive.
It’s a little after midnight when I get to my apartment.
I stick the videocassette into my VCR and fast-forward to the scene in the restaurant. I light a cigarette and watch the scene yet again. My eyes go from her face to Billy’s photograph on top of the TV. Whatever resemblance I saw between the two before, I now either don’t see anymore or do see, but it no longer matters in quite the same way. I hear her laughter. It’s either the exact same laughter as the laughter of that fourteen-year-old girl on the telephone, or it’s not. The crisis I had about what to do with this woman on my TV screen is gone. I’m no longer aware of having any crisis.
I strip off my clothes and head for the shower, making a sudden executive decision as I get into the shower stall to shave off my beard.
The hot water feels wonderfully soothing in both the tactile and acoustical senses as it falls on my shoulders. Steam rises inside the shower stall. The steam covers the glass door. What had been transparent becomes opaque.
I have an office on West Fifty-seventh Street, but in many ways this is my office. It’s in the shower that I resolve conflicts, gain insights, come to terms with whatever terms are left to come to terms with. It was in this very shower that I conceived of my Ulysses in Space movie, and it’s in this shower that I return to the subject from time to time to embellish the conception.
I do so now.
I see the solar schooner with a mile-high solar sail sailing through space and time. I see the scene with the sirens as something from MTV. Ulysses, tied to the mast, gets to see videos of what he has missed by being away from home for all those years. He sees the scenes he could have had with his son Telemachus but can never have now. Or can he? The tantalizing images spun into being by the sirens’ songs torment him with what could have been. He tears at the ropes that bind him to the mast.
I shave.
Having shaved, I move on and shampoo my hair. The shampoo I use is made especially for frequent users like myself.
I feel so relaxed that even the iron grip of my prostate loosens and I pee freely for the first time in a long time. I think of Dianah.
She was wrong to call me a potential killer who is full of anger and hate. I am angry at no one. I hate no one, not even Cromwell, whom I want to hate. I have never caused premeditated harm to anyone.
On the other hand, I do lack the willpower to stop myself from hurting others in passing, in the day-to-day living of my life, in the mere process of being who I am.
My ability to cause harm has been limited up to now only by my limited opportunities to do so. I know, because I know myself, that I’m capable of causing much greater harm than I have, perhaps even killing somebody, should such an opportunity arise. It’s not that I want anyone’s blood on my hands, it’s just that I would be unable to keep myself from spilling it.
This character trait of mine is cause for concern, and I concern myself with it. It kicks around inside my head like a chunk of carrot inside a Cuisinart. But even as it kicks around, it gets smaller and smaller, until finally it loses all significance. It joins the list of other concerns, thoughts, and insights in the psychic soup of my mind.
My former crises and concerns are now indistinguishable from one another. There is a great sense of freedom and peace in knowing that I can do neither right nor wrong, because in the undifferentiated broth of my mind there is no difference between right and wrong.
The hot water continues to fall from the showerhead. The steam rises and thickens. In the egalitarian democracy of my mind, there is tranquillity and total equality. All is soup.