Collages (15 page)

“Home?” asked Renate.

“Home, yes,” said Bill. “Lisa lived around the
corner from here when we were kids. We played in this street together. I was
the first boy who kissed her. We had not seen each other for twenty years. She
wanted me to stay in Acapulco and live her life, with all those phonies talking
languages I couldn’t understand. I didn’t think she’d bring all this stuff with
her. I can’t bring my friends here for a game of cards.”

Lisa’s sister said: “We both worked in the same
office. The trouble started when she won a painting scholarship to Mexico. It
all went to her head. She married an oil man. And then a man with a yacht big
enough to sail to Europe.”

And because the paintings, the plants, the
statues, the flowers and birds had been transplanted, not born there, they
began to seem as they talked, like a background for a painting, and Lisa
herself a model hired for one afternoon to sit for a painter, and Bill and
Lisa’s sister like boors who had entered a gallery by mistake, expecting
pictures of horses and trout fishing and found themselves in a dream painted by
Rousseau, a couch in the middle of the jungle.

Would Bill and his card-playing friends be able
to cage Lisa? Her cage now would be the stripes of dusty sunlight falling
through the rails of the Third Avenue Elevated trains.

Bill shut off the record player before the
Mexican song was finished.

Bill had come and awakened her from her dream
of Acapulco with a cigar flavored kiss from the ashcan painting period of her
childhood.

THE BELL RANG. IT WAS DOCTOR MANN with flowers
for Lisa and a cigar for Bill.

He was collecting paintings to exhibit in
Israel. He wanted to borrow some of Lisa’s Mexican paintings.

He had heard about Renate’s paintings and said
he would be proud to take some back with him.

But he was not a painting fetichist. His
particular hobby was quite exceptional.

Once a year Doctor Mann flewfrom Israel on a
mysterious mission. But his leisure time he spent in visiting women writers.
One by one he visited them all. He brought them brandy and chocolates from
Israel, books to sign for his collection of autographed editions, and kissed
them only once on parting.

He boasted of these friendships as other men
boast of sexual conquests.

Many of these visits required patience,
diplomacy and research work. First of all, to find their addresses, and then
someone who might introduce him, and then to obtain an appointment, and, most
difficult of all, to gain the privilege of a tete a tete.

His hair grew grey. His library of dedicated
books was rich in treasures.

Just as Don Juan was always eager to test his
charm on frigid women, Doctor Mann finally encountered the most inaccessible of
all women writers and felt challenged to woo her.

He heard that Judith Sands was not only
difficult to meet but that she avoided everyone related to the literary world.
She led a secluded life in the Village, New York, and it was rumored that she
preferred obscure village bars and anonymous company.

A few bar addicts vaguely remembered talking
with a woman called Judith Sands but they insisted that she talked like a truck
driver and could not possibly have written the poetic and stylized mythological
novel she was praised for.

Those who lived in Paris before the war
remembered a handsome, red-haired amazon in a tailored suit who sat at the
Dome.

A few who lived in the Village knew her, but no
one had anything to say, no revelations, no messages, as if those who knew her
practiced a sick room secrecy, as if she had sealed their lips. There was an
unnatural silence around her, either because she had satirized everyone, which
she was known to do, or because those who respected her work did not wish to
expose a Judith who did not resemble her parabolic work.

Several of the flat-soled women in tailored
suits who walked down Eighth Street could have been Judith Sands. In an age of
glaring, crude limelight, she had been able to avoid all familiarity, and her
anonymity was preserved by an invisible repellent.

It was as if her novel had been the story of an
earthquake by one of its victims; the book once written, and the author with
it, seemed to have fallen into a crevice.

This shadowy figure aroused Doctor Mann’s love
of conquest. He bought a bottle of champagne and rushed to the address he had
been given. There was no name on the bell to the apartment, but he had been
told that she lived on the second floor. Doctor Mann climbed the dark stairway
and knocked on a dark door. No answer.

He waited and knocked again.

Silence.

He paced the frayed rug. He stared with an
ironic smile at the empty niche where the stairway made a turn. When the
Village was Italian, the statue of a saint had nestled there. He sat down
inside the niche and waited. His ear caught a rustle inside, and it was enough
to encourage his verbal gallantry.

He began an interminable monologue like one of
the characters in her novel.

Every novelist knows that at one time or
another he will be confronted with the incarnation of one of his characters.
Whether that character is based on a living person or not, it will draw into
its circle those who resemble it. Sooner or later the portrait will attract its
twin, by the magnetism of narcissism, and the author will feel this inhabitant
of his novel come to life and hear his character speaking as he had imagined.

And so, Doctor Mann, in the same fast liquid
monologue she had set down, picked up his own story in Siberia where he had
been sent for rebellion against the regime, and where there was nothing to
nourish him except books; where his faith in woman’s intuitive knowledge had
made him translate Judith Sand’s book into Hebrew; from there to his American
wife and children in a modern apartment in Israel and his work with a newspaper
which put him in touch with all the plays and books being written.

“You know, my dear Judith Sands, I am not here
to frighten you, or violate your privacy. I am not a man visiting a woman. I am
a man with a profound love of words. In the words of the Talmud: ‘Kaka tuv… It
is written.’ I know you do not like strangers; but, just as you are no stranger
to me, I cannot be a stranger to you because I feel that, in a sense, you gave
birth to me. I feel you once described a man who was
me
before I knew
who I was, and it was because I recognized him that I was able to be myself.
You will recognize me when you see me. I am sure you have already recognized
how I think; this mixture in me which makes me feel my way through experience
as women do, and yet talk even when I do not wish to talk like an intellectual,
a scholar (which is mockery as I do not believe that they know as much as the
poet in his delirium). I have grown grey hairs waiting to meet you. I could not
find your address or anyone who knew you. Then a taxi driver told me he had
just driven uptown a woman who talked as I did, with a man with an English
accent, and he said they were going to the opening of his cocktail party; and
then I knew you were in New York and had been with T. S. Eliot. Every word you
wrote I ate, as if it was manna. Finding one’s self in a book is a second
birth; and you are the only one who knows that at times men behave like women
and women like men, and that all these distinctions are mock distinctions, and
that is why your doctor put on a wig when he wanted to talk about his loves,
and I don’t know why Thomas Mann wrote about Transposed Heads for there are
other transpositions of far greater interest, and your story is the most
accurate in the world.”

No answer.

But there was a creak of a chair, and a soft
footstep on the floor behind the door.

Doctor Mann added: “I am leaving my gifts to
you on the door mat. I hope you like champagne.”

“I don’t drink,” said a low, deep voice behind
the closed door.

“Well, you can offer it to your friends.
Tomorrow I fly back to Israel at nine in the evening, I will come again at five
o’clock. Perhaps you will open your door to a man who is going away. And you
will see I am no stranger. Remember this, it is good for a writer to meet with
the incarnation of a character he has invented. It gives him an affirmation, a
substantial proof of his intuitions, divinations. Here I stand before you,
talking as you said I might, and reminding you that what may have seemed a
ghost in a dream, in your smoke-filled heart at night, is a man who got his
knowledge and his degrees from books in a cell in Siberia, and who translated
you by the light of a candle.”

“Come back tomorrow. We’ll have coffee
together,” said the voice.

The next day he came. But there was no answer
to his knock and so he began his monologue: “When you deny me the presence of a
writer, you really deny me a part of myself that has not yet been born, and
whose existence I need to believe in. I always wanted to be a writer, but I
talk too much, it evaporates, or it may be I have not yet decided whether to
write as a man or as a woman. But you have been my writer self writing for me.
I could talk wastefully, negligently, only because you were there preserving
and containing my spirit. When you deny me your presence, you commit spiritual
murder, for if I have been for years talking with your words, spending them
lavishly, extravagantly, it was only because I believed I could always renew
myself at the source. You may feel this was an imposition. No one should be
forced to carry the unfulfilled self of another. But if you are so skilled with
words and have already written
me,
in a sense you have stolen
me
,
and must return what you stole. You must come out and say: ‘I will go on
writing for you. I will be your articulateness. I gave birth to you and I must
grant you the fullest expansion of speech.’ And you need me, Judith Sands. You
must not stifle yourself behind closed doors. Solitude may rust your words.
Silence is not your element. It will asphyxiate you. We need each other! We are
indispensable to each other. I to your work and you to my life. Without me
spending your words you may not be incited to mint new ones. I am the
spendthrift and you the coiner. We cannot live completely apart. And if I speak
your character on perhaps a lower key than you had intended, even perhaps with
a few false notes, it is because I have never met a writer with perfect pitch.
If you refuse to talk to a plain man like me, your ambiguities will become
intolerably tenuous, like the end of your book, which I do not understand.”

The door opened halfway. Judith Sands appeared
shadowed against the light. Behind her, a chaotic lair, undistinguishable
objects in wild disorder. She closed the door upon her cavernous dwelling and
gave Doctor Mann her strong, firm hand.

“I am not absolutely certain of the meaning of
that end to my book, but I am sure of one thing, that human beings can reach
such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words
cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to
bark
.”

As they walked together Doctor Mann asked: “Is
it true what they say that you have written another book, that you keep it
hidden in cartons, under your bed, that no one has read it?”

“Yes, it is true.”

“Why won’t you let it be read, published? It
will shatter your solitude.”

“No, it will only aggravate it. The more they
read of me, the louder they deny my existence, the existence of my characters.
They say I have only described unique specimens.”

“But I can show you how these specimens
reproduced themselves. They are scattered over the world. I will take you to
the places where I know your book is a perpetual house guest, always sitting in
the library, a guest of honor. You will only meet those who nourished
themselves on it, the descendants of your characters.”

Doctor Mann observed how carefully Judith Sands
had sought to efface in herself all traces of having been the woman once so
wildly loved in her own novel. She had created a neutral appearance, wearing
colors one would not notice nor remember, anonymous clothes, a cape which
concealed the lines of her body, a Tyrolian hat with a feather on it. The
feather, however, had retained its impertinence, from the days when she won
every tournament with her wit.

“Solitude,” said Doctor Mann, “is like Spanish
moss which finally suffocates the tree it hangs on.”

“Don’t you think I have thought of that whenever
someone slips a piece of paper under my door saying ‘I love you Judith Sands’;
don’t you think I ask myself is this another come to love me and also destroy
me? Another one staying out all night and with each step away from me wearing
out the soles of my heart with waiting? Or another come to steal my own image
of me and expose it to the world, distorted of course? Or another come to
resuscitate parts of me which I have already buried?”

“But you and those you loved have children
scattered all over the world. They are descendants in direct line from your
creations. Aren’t you curious about them?”

“How does one find them?”

“You can fly now and pay later. Jet by
Alitalia, Bonanza, Lan Chile, the Comet Service, the Flying Tiger, Slick
Airways, El Israel, Futura. You have your choice of names. Oh, I forgot the
Pink Cloud Flights. We will visit only those who kept your book on the top
shelf hidden from their parents, those who read it in other languages, in
Dutch, Italian, German, Japanese, Yugoslavian, Hungarian, Russian, Flemish;
those who read it and pretended they never heard of it but proceeded to live
their lives oriented by its flow; those who succumbed to its contagion and
searched for a similar atmosphere as if it were the only air they could breathe
in; those who fell in love with your characters and searched for their
counterparts. Those who quoted it to each other as a password to enter a unique
and exclusive world. We will only go where your book is a part of the
furniture.”