First time I noticed Harry was because he had a copy of The Rebel balanced on the ledge next to his table at the café. It was the same paperback version with big orange letters that I had read in college. We all read Camus in college but I’d never seen a middle-aged man with a copy. Turned out we were Rulli regulars. I generally sat with a different crowd, though there were overlapping, smiling acquaintances with shared aptitude for the lifestyle. We came for the caffeine but mostly to participate in ongoing conversations that had no goal.
One morning I was up and out early and Harry was there at the café alone, dividing his attention between Cliff Notes (!) for Steppenwolf (Hermann Hesse), a cappuccino, a notepad where he made notes, and roving judgmental blue eyes all over each person who came through the door.
I was compelled to comment: “Cliff Notes?”
“Short and sweet,” he tossed me the yellow and black striped pamphlet.
It landed in my creamy pastry.
He gestured that I should eat the cream.
I scooped a mouthful off the book then licked my fingers.
We smiled.
According to Cliff Notes, Steppenwolf disdained all evidence of human hunger and violence, hated beastliness, and especially abhored its presence in himself. He preferred to see himself as refined, like the denizens of Emporio Rulli. We knew better than to bring unseemly problems here, into space reserved for esoteric discourse. There was to be no talk that required taking sides or resolution. Gripes between used-to-be friends, over business, money, car deals, divorces, etcetera, were left outside. Though on any given day our reliable ease could be jarred (shockingly) by the appearance in our midst of a beast. The gracious upbeat intellectuals would quiet down for long staring moments as we reckoned with its uninvited presence: a crying baby, who doesn’t understand the etiquette for making gross needs known. Or toddlers, who won’t sit still, and like to climb walls. Teenagers dressed too sloppy (the guys) or too skimpy (the girls). Someone curses, too loud, another spills coffee all over someone’s pressed beige suit.
#
One afternoon Steppenwolf came in wearing a blonde wig under a Giants baseball hat. (I recognized him: I was reading the novel.) The beast was in a good mood, snapping his fingers, whistling. He wanted another glass of red wine, more, wine for everyone here. He moved to kiss a woman who didn’t want to be kissed, dropped a glass and broke it, picked up a shard and made a gash across his wrist. Then he was bleeding in front of us and said something about heartache, bellyache, boredom, futility, fear, what else (fill in the blank…).
Harry noted, “Jewel, look up from your book, this is a true moment.”
I looked around.
“You like spilled guts in public?”
Harry swept his arm around the room, gesturing at the bleeding man amidst the marble, mural, mirrors, coffee, cakes, and conversations, saying, “We love our pleasantries…. But we’re also self-loathing saps and cruel brutes who commit atrocities.”
#
Harry and I chatted at the cafe for months and never discussed our work, marital status, children, or where we came from; only our deepest literary tastes and thoughts on philosophy, art, music, sports, beauty, politics, and other trivial matters. Acquaintances, we only knew the stories we told in public and what we could guess because we read the same books. We weren’t lovers. We were not even friends. But when I ran into Harry at Emporio Rulli we talked. One day I suddenly felt like telling him my cliché and we had this dialog about Lee.
“My husband wants a divorce,” I said.
“Your husband is suffering,” Harry was certain.
“I doubt it,” I was equally sure.
“He has terrible guilt.”
“He should!”
“He has no choice.”
“Of course he has choice!”
Harry said affairs were no more than the “uncontrollable urge to flee.”
“I love Lee. I thought I knew him.”
“We never really know anyone.”
“Not even ourselves….”
“We fall in love to love ourselves.”
“So, all the mirrors in Steppenwolf?”
“He sees himself in every one; every character he meets shows him a different side of who he is.”
“Jung says we have a thousand selves….”
“More.”
#
Harry would sit down, say, “tell me a joke,” and I’d say, for example, “I was having dinner with my father when I made a Freudian slip. I meant to say, Please pass the mashed potatoes. Instead I said, You motherfucker, you ruined my whole life.”
Harry would laugh, loud enough that Freud would have been pleased. Freud says the kinds of jokes we laugh at expose our repressed wishes and longings.
“Did your father ruin your whole life?” I asked.
“No, I think it was war.”
“This word, I’ve never heard at Emporio Rulli.”
“Should I tell you a story?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m out on this hill in the dark with a bunch of soldiers. My buddy and I are trying to locate a target, where the shooting is coming from. He can see it and he points into the blackness, but I see nothing. He lines up his rifle, puts his cheek against mine, and tells me he’s going to shift his head a little to the left and I should look. He moves his head, just a little, to the left, and at that exact moment … comes the bullet … that kills him….”
Harry looked into my devastated eyes. “It was stunning, Jewel, so quick, no suffering.”
#
I didn’t want to go out on September twelfth. The day after 9/11, like everyone else, I was in shock. I went to the café because it was my habit. How else were we to behave, now that Americans were revealed as vulnerable, not invincible but targets, in the sightlines of a many-tentacled beast?
Harry was reading the New York Times at an outside table. I was stopped still on the sidewalk by the stacked photos of before-and-after skylines, showing where other large buildings surrounding the World Trade Centers had also collapsed, a striking record of the scope of the change. Harry was sitting with a very tall blonde wearing a red shawl and white turtleneck, lots of bracelets, a silver cross necklace. Her eyes were that clear, clairvoyant blue of the pure-at-heart. Of course they were talking about terrorism. She was supplying platitudes while Harry was knocking holes in her willingness to be comforted by notions such as spirit that cannot be broken, or government able to step up and represent our best interests, that the best in human nature was bound to prevail, especially in the face of surprise attacks from invisible evil.
Harry proposed (quoting Nietzsche, maybe) that total destruction might be necessary before good could re-emerge. Elsa disagreed, arguing that the world’s goodness remained intact.
“Yes, but it will have to strike back, commit murder, and that goes against the nature of goodness.”
I brought over my cappuccino, sat with them, and listened. Others came, drank coffee, contributed to the dialog, went on their way; we remained. Finally, Harry introduced me to Elsa, noting that we both had written books about the death of a child. Mine an infant with extreme brain damage, hers a two-year-old with cancer. Our stories entered the café on the same day war was declared. A young woman wearing skinny white jeans and high-heeled sandals, newly arrived, sat next to Harry unspeaking while Elsa and I went blow by blow with our experiences: diagnosis, responses, treatment, the law, the challenge of making ethical decisions in the face of such enemies.
She had killed her daughter with “a morphine bullet.”
I had gradually withdrawn mine from artificial feeding, “starved her to death.”
We had justifiable reasons.
We were both merciful.
We were both murderers.
We had waged war, learned the enormity of what we were fighting, taken action. Our goal was peace, via death, in our arms, at home.
Harry said this conversation was depressing, while his young mistress quietly pondered whether such a thing could ever happen to her.
In the face of the next war Elsa and I were veterans, calm, knew what to do.
Resist and surrender.
Be still and keep moving.
Love everything enduring and impermanent: music, talk, the beasts, the café, life.
#
Next time I saw him, Harry wanted to lend me a memoir he thought I should read and invited me to follow him home. He located the book then showed me around, downstairs to his grand piano. I was wearing my yoga sweats, mandala tee shirt, spa sandals; he had on tennis shorts and sneakers. He seated himself at the piano and played. I studied the book cover, his hands as they stroked the keys, and the strong muscles of his legs as he pumped the foot pedals. Music filled the sunny morning air and there was no evidence of beasts. They were either in lockdown, vanquished, or we had learned to live in peace with their presence among us.