Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (12 page)

At the entrance he calls out and a porter comes, welcoming him as if he is expected. The lord of the castle, Sir Bertilak, another gigantic man, though with a red beard rather than a green one, greets him warmly and has his servants show him to a luxurious bedroom with all the latest conveniences, including a curtained four-poster bed. After he has washed and changed he is brought to a feast in a hall with a roaring fire. On learning his name, the assembled guests go into little ecstasies of flattery. He has a reputation, he discovers, for fine speech, and the guests declare themselves thrilled at the prospect of such a paragon joining them for their Christmas revels. He will tutor them, they chorus obsequiously, in the correct use of words, and by his example he will teach them love-talking, “luf-talkyng”: the language of flirtation and Courtly Love, in which he is also, so he learns to his surprise, a renowned expert. (I remember an early email from Nasreen in which she mentions she has heard I have a reputation as a ladies’ man, with lots of “wild girls” in my past. Since she knew nobody from my past, I understood this to be pure invention, part of her campaign of flirtatious ego massage. It didn’t occur to me to wonder whether her cavalier way with the concept of “reputation” might turn out to have a less benign side.)

No sooner is the theme of “luf” announced than Gawain glimpses an attractive young woman: his host’s wife, as it happens, on her way into midnight mass. He follows after her into the castle chapel. During the service she turns from her private pew to glance at him, and you can feel the electric jolt pass between them as she lets him gaze a moment on her delicate beauty.

The next day is Christmas, and he sits beside the young woman at the banquet. The two take a keen pleasure in each other’s company, talking quietly together in a private exchange that the author describes as a sweet dalliance, a “dere dalyaunce,” though he also assures us, with only the lightest touch of irony, that it is irreproachable: “closed fro fylthe”; a minor paradox that captures perfectly the ambiguous nature of any flirtation in its early stages, where nothing unequivocal has yet been said.

Courtly Love, that elaborate medieval attempt to reconcile raw desire with the smooth running of the social machine, is in fact a deliberate exercise in such ambiguities. Under its rules a young knight may fall in love with a married woman and enter into the steamiest of flirtations with her, in which everything is permitted except for the ultimate consummation. The beauty of the formula is that it appears to acknowledge both the force of lust and the virtue of fidelity. Like all codes of sexual conduct, it is fatally flawed, the state of deferred gratification being naturally unstable, and therefore highly likely to culminate in tragedy or farce. But it has an appealing realism about it, and at least tries to recognize the human psyche in all its contradictory totality.

The Green Chapel turns out to be just two miles from this castle, which means Gawain can stay on in comfort until New Year’s Day. To pass the time till then, Sir Bertilak suggests a game: he will go out hunting with his men every day while Gawain stays behind, relaxing at the castle, and every evening they will exchange whatever each has gained during the day.

And so now the story begins to close in on its true quarry, shifting its hero away from the familiar clarities of valor and physical action into the more treacherous realm of psychological and moral combat.

The first morning, while Sir Bertilak hunts deer, Gawain is woken by the sound of his bedroom door being quietly opened. Glancing through the curtains of his four-poster, he sees his host’s wife, lovely as ever, coming into the room. Locking the door behind her, she lifts the curtain of his bed and, to his great embarrassment, sits down beside him. A long, comically erotic scene of attempted seduction follows, in which the lady, full of jokes and teasing flattery (
eshveh
,
kereshmeh
,
naz
), tries to persuade Gawain to overcome his scruples and take advantage of her husband’s absence. In very candid language she offers him her body to “take his pleasure with” on the silk sheets of his bed. For all the lightheartedness, the stakes of the situation are high: declining a sexual advance requires great tact if you want to avoid giving mortal offense, while to accept it, however strong the temptation (and we can assume it is intense), would, in this instance, irreparably violate Gawain’s sense of himself as an honorable human being. He acquits himself well, maintaining impeccable charm while getting the lady out of his chamber without yielding anything more serious than a single, chaste kiss. This, as the game requires, he passes on to Sir Bertilak, in exchange for the venison his host has butchered that day.

But when an attractive person makes you an offer like this, she or he establishes a powerful link with your own psyche, and whether or not you are interested in pursuing it, a whole new world of erotic possibility has become, as I realized that morning, latently present in your imagination. Out of this virtual world arise the sweetest of dreams but also the succubi and demon-lovers of folklore and literature: Lilith and Lamia, Heathcliff and Peter Quint, all the phantasmal femmes fatales of Keats and Coleridge and the Pre-Raphaelites, and these visitants can be much harder to keep at bay than flesh-and-blood human beings, no doubt because their substance, such as it is, originates at least partly in oneself.

On the second day she comes again to his room, his roomette, her presence seeping in like a scent, only this time what is at stake is not just his self-regard, his image of himself as a Man of Honor, but something more like his soul; the author carefully recalibrating his description of the lady’s softly insistent verbal blandishments to usher in the suggestion of a motive beyond love or even lust, namely the graver mission of “winning him to wrong.”

And this time she seems stronger than before; bolder, more laughingly insistent, the labyrinths of her conversation as she begs him to take her on as his private student (“teach me,” she says, “while my husband is away”) more elaborately carnal, as if that single kiss the morning before, chaste as he had believed it to be, had provided her with some vital nourishment. Again he resists her, but you can feel his pleasure in her nearness working on him, filling him with a dangerous confidence in his ability to have it both ways: enjoy the situation (he is much more wittily poised in his repartee this time) while keeping it under control, which he does, though this time he rationalizes the yielding of not one but two kisses before the session comes to an end, and one knows, by the logic of trifold escalation common to all such stories, that something fateful is going to happen next time she comes to visit.

*   *   *

It is nighttime now, and we have just crossed the Kansas River. In Kansas I fall into a deep sleep, rocked by the rhythms of the train, and in the morning we are still (such is the scale of things here) in Kansas.

But the green has gone from the country and the plain looks seared brown. For a long time it is flat and absolutely featureless. I eat breakfast and wander on down to the Observation Lounge. It is crowded despite the early hour: people staring out of the windows, others hunched over electronic devices, the machines tweezling and winking alertly, the humans bleary and rumpled.

An industrial dairy operation goes by with thousands of Holstein cows penned into brown dirt feedlots. Some of the lots have artificial mounds in them, on which the cows lie curled up asleep like ungainly black-and-white cats. Soon after that we come to Dodge City, where a group of scouts boards the train. One of them sits next to me, a boy of sixteen or so, gray-eyed, round-faced, lividly acned. With a congeniality that seems precocious even in this land of easy openness, and downright defiant in one so incandescently spotty, he immediately strikes up conversation. He and his troop are on their way to New Mexico for a camping trip in the mountains. He himself has never left Kansas before and never seen a mountain. He speaks with a long-ago twang like a farm boy in an old movie:

“Ain’t never seen a mountain before…”

He’s adopted, grew up with his cousins, a family of nine kids.

“There’s a lot of us so we don’t have much money,” he informs me, another of these diligent self-spokespersons, strongly conscious of his place in the American epic. The family used to have a big farm where he would ride around all day on horseback. Now they have just fifteen acres and some livestock. He breaks the horses, a dangerous business.

“I lost count how many bones I’ve broke.”

Every time he finishes talking he purses his lips as though literally, thriftily, closing up some coin-filled purse.

A small rise appears in the distance. He turns to me.

“Would that be considered a mountain?”

“No.”

Farms glide by, with pale green irrigation circles on the brown dirt and trailers for the workers. We follow a creek, its banks lined with what I am guessing from the hairlike stuff in their branches must be cottonwoods. A wrecked barn stands alone, broken beams angling frenziedly skyward.

“Tornado done that,” the boy says, pursing his lips.

Long miles of empty sagebrush pass, then a squat, windowless building, surrounded by razor-wire fencing. The boy grins:

“Prison.”

One of his brothers is a prison guard. Not in this particular prison, but it would seem all prisons are looked on fondly as a result of the connection. The family likes to amuse itself by asking this brother what he is going to do when he has to lock up a relative.

“He says he’ll just slam the door on ’em a little harder than he usually does. Couple of our cousins might be landing there pretty soon I reckon.”

Another bump appears on the flat plain.

“Would
that
be considered a mountain?”

“Not really.”

“Highest thing I ever seen.”

I look at him, wondering if he’s putting me on, but he seems sincere.

Later in the day mountains do finally become visible in the distance, but by then he has gone off somewhere, so I miss his reaction. A person crosses your path; briefly their story intersects with yours and then diverges again, leaving something of itself with you and maybe taking something of yours in return, and they’re gone. These days I have to remind myself that encounters with other people can be both interesting and inconsequential.

Adobe churches and farm buildings appear. The train groans uphill to the Raton Pass, highest point of the trip. Soon after this we come to Lamy, the Santa Fe station, where I get off for my detour to D. H. Lawrence’s ranch.

*   *   *

In the old East Germany a person who helped others escape over the Wall was called a
Fluchthelfer
—“flight-helper.” If you read naïvely, as I mostly do, to make sense of your life, rather than for more sophisticated aesthetic or scholarly reasons, then certain writers inevitably become your own
Fluchthelfer
, helping you over your own walls, whether to escape reality or, as I prefer to see it, to find your way into it. For me D. H. Lawrence has always been such a writer. His best works, mainly the novellas and short stories, have the same imaginative audacity about them as
Gawain
, and give out the same exhilarating sense of old things—stale sentiments, defunct notions—being slashed and smashed as quickly as new things are being created. His statements about life and death, good and evil, men and women, all tossed out with a casually apocalyptic grandiosity, still stir me long after I have stopped “agreeing” with most of them. “Man must find a new expression, give a new value to life, or his women will reject him, and he must die.” “Man, as yet, is less than half grown.” Man this, man that … not the kind of language we appreciate anymore, and his reputation has accordingly suffered badly during the past decades. With my own recent interest in the processes by which reputations become tarnished (another of Nasreen’s many legacies), I have begun to find this aspect of Lawrence almost as fascinating as the writing itself, but back then, as I stepped out of the air-conditioned train into the furnace heat of the New Mexico June, it was simply as an admirer of his work.

I pick up a rental car in Santa Fe, and drive into the mountains toward Taos. It’s too late to get to the ranch today and I spend the night in Taos itself, at an inn that was once the home of Mabel Dodge Luhan.

It was Mabel Dodge Luhan who brought Lawrence to New Mexico in the first place. There are books about both of them on a shelf in the lobby. After dinner I look through them, and before I know it I seem to be seeing yet another version of my own circumstances unfolding before me, projected through their intertwining lives.

She was in her early forties then, a wealthy heiress and patron of Native American art, with a colorful past that included several husbands and an attempt to commit suicide by eating figs mingled with broken glass. Having read a few of Lawrence’s books, she had decided she needed him in her life—“I wanted Lawrence to understand things for me”—and she set about enticing him to Taos. The yearlong campaign featured letters filled with native American herbs, the gift of a supposedly enchanted necklace to Lawrence’s wife, Frieda, and a determined effort of telepathic attraction: “I’d sit there and draw him until he came” was how she remembered it. He resisted at first, traveling instead to Ceylon and Australia, but eventually the effort paid off, and he and Frieda arrived at Lamy station in September 1922.

Mabel, who had a husband of her own on the premises, immediately set about attempting to seduce her long-awaited visitor. She tried to convince him that his marriage had gone stale—“You need something new and different…”—and after a while she persuaded him to work with her on, yes, a novel that she was trying to write.

Was he attracted to her? The books don’t say, but by the time of this proposed collaboration he had committed the indiscretion of criticizing his wife to her, complaining about Frieda’s “heavy German hand,” and this sounds to me like a man declaring himself available, at least theoretically, for a lighter, non-Germanic touch. Add to this the aura of scandal surrounding his name ever since his elopement with Frieda, a married mother of three, not to mention the contents of the books themselves with their celebration of the senses and emphasis on spontaneity in human relations, and you can easily imagine how Mabel might have thought an affair was a possibility.