False Entry (29 page)

How it came about is after all quite simple—amazing that the switch had not taken place before. For I have been sojourning down there for a long time now, on that long skin-dive into the nether regions of myself, learning to move about in that intense, direct element of motive which underlies the upper atmosphere of acts. Most men shift about in partial glee, discomfort, behind the façades they see themselves presenting to others; I differ only in always having been able to reach a minim or two more accessibly behind the façade I present to myself. But one finds—or rather, the exquisite, reflexive sanity of instinct finds for one—that one can parlay that accessibility only so far. Time up for air. The foray is over, not forever, but for now. For in whatever way I am aberrant from the average, I am not, any more than most, a Jekyll-Hyde. My “split”—that cocktail party profundity—is no more than the next one’s, and the halves, if there are such, are quite, quite aware of each other. I have never indulged in much thumb-twiddling over my basic sanity, either in parlor games or in private. Even in adolescence, when the very elasticity of any decent brain—its almost felt growing—is often a wonder and a worry to its owner, I seldom teased myself with that semidelicious question, “Am I mad?” Within the unreasonable limits of my species, and the quanta peculiar to this hour in its history, I am sane. Man is a schizoid animal. And Socrates is a man.

What has happened is that I have been returned to what, for want of a better term, one must call the daytime mind. A misnomer of course—it is rather that part of the mind which moves, according to its own style and accomplishment, at any hour of the twenty-four. Daytime is, however, its quality. It is the part of us that can mock—if it does not wholly mistrust—the midnight phase. I do not mistrust. If a djinn should smoke suddenly from a bottle, offering me two forked paths to the absolute—one bushy with exaggeration, stalked by the hypertrophic banditti of midnight, and one in which the serious is minced down to the companionable, birds in their nests disagree with jurisprudent irony, and melodrama is put out of countenance by the clear humors of morning—I know which I should still have to choose. But for the moment I am removed to the satiric distance. And from it I can see that I am still bound by that insensate word “choose.” As if one could choose between the parts of the whole blood, between the red and the serum, decreeing that only the one shall flow in the vein! Yes, Socrates is a man. And no one seeing only the “I” of these pages might suspect how antic and buoyant he can be on occasion, how reasonable a citizen of the lower-case world.

When I awoke this morning it was, as usual for these past weeks, somewhere before noon. I had been going to bed night after night at about four, stretching out each time in the quiet, sweated relief of a man who is at last at grips with the contretemps which has hovered for years. Each night I had experienced the same seven hours of intense sleep. Normally I dream the good citizen’s mumbo jumbo of the day’s palaver and anxieties, mixed with whatever hints from the vesicles are at hand. But on these nights I slept as if clasped around some chalice that led me from one night’s pages to the next, even the sexual abated in that process, profounder than any autoeroticism, by which I hoped to be regenerating myself. Mornings I awoke into the alert, whole faculty of childhood. City walks by day were no more than sanative plunges from desk to garden, in which passers-by exchanged their dioxides with me as impersonally as flowers and I took my meditation among them as the philosopher takes his to the company of the phlox. Each night, reading back on the work of the previous one, I learned to scan what I found there with surgical joy. And each night found the continuity preserved.

But this morning, awaking with the start of the malingerer, ears uneasy against the practical echoes of the street, I bounded upright, like a man on holiday who hears the business clock give a sudden, loud tick in the heart of sloth. When I stretched my cheek at the shaving mirror I did it intently; I was preparing this face for people, and I drank my coffee in the citizen’s modest twinge of retreat from a not too pedestrian dream. Only half awake, as on the groggy mornings before this account began, I could already feel the lack of that deep supportive reverie on which I had floated for so many days. Being gone, its loss is already difficult to describe. It is a sensation known to the good swimmer, drugged almost to the point of no return from his own amphibian ease, bobbed suddenly to the vertical by his ruthlessly mortal lung. His ear drumming with the depth that has nearly murdered him, he still mourns it; the heavy water of the present drags his garment, and he meets with a shock of sadness the warm, terrestrial pull at his heel. Gravitation warmed me; I felt saved, but empty of what had been snatched away.

Now I felt the familiar urge to lampoon myself, the rising barrage of acrid comment by which a clever man reminds himself he is not a fool. Reaching for the
Times
, nonexistent on the kitchen threshold, I marveled at how many days there had been, almost a month, since I had canceled it, asking myself now if a man of this time, this place, this ilk could be said to exist without. If the
Times
says it isn’t going to rain, this can’t be rain. It was not raining, however, but a brilliant morning, the sun spreading like butter on the front of the house opposite, whose flat, limestone-clay color has always obscurely pleased me. A sound truck went by, braying some exhortation—to the cinema, to the spirit, perhaps, but not to vote—one knows very well that this is not November but April. And it is Tuesday. I ran a finger along the morning’s deposit on the sill; yes, this has the look of Tuesday grit. You know very well who, when, and where you are. Day for the cleaning woman—no, cleaning
lady
, one of the trusty serf-shadows who flit city-wide and only for bachelors, leaving Mehitabel notes useful for breaking the ice at your parties—a shadow vaguely Czech, dimly sixty, whom you have not met in the flesh for years—was it for her that you shaved?

Outside, in the back garden of the house next door, the superintendent, a richly oily Italian, hitched his brigand stomach, chirked at his dog
bac bac bac Baccaloni
, and shook his lovelocks
don don don Giovanni
at the sky—all against your private knowledge that he has a Scottish wife, a red-nosed stick of a child always screaming for “sway-ties,” and was himself born in Throg’s Neck. Despite which, when you glimpse him from the shower, you often switch from “
Freude
!
Freude
!” to “
Là ci darem la mano.
” Yes, this is the morning mind. It has its own diapason. By its wry self-apostrophe a man convinces himself that he holds the reins; with a thousand surface iridescences it lures him back to the representational world. Do not belittle its powers. It too is “the mind.” And its chief power is to deny its own matrix, to laugh at the demiurge.

“Listen,” it says in its cranky, comedian rattle, “we’re not alone. Always somebody under the bed. Whoever told you we were?” “My dear sir,” it says in a clear, eighteenth-century ratiocinative, “may I present my allies—and yours—the city, roaring so gently; the
Times
, always so ready to fill a gentleman’s empty mind with the issues proper to his station; and that entrancing garrulity of your era, the telephone. All at your gate, ready to explode their petards. Let it be a philological joke between us that
pétarder
means ‘to break wind.’” And so to its French. “
Solipsiste
!” it screamed, with the same rancor with which it might have said, “
Sodome
!” And then, in softer, chemise-colored tones, “
Pauvre solitaire.
” Last came the blunt croak of the sportsman it is—“Look ’ere, what’s that pogostick you’re ’oppin’ abaht on, call it your singularity? Picked it to place or show?” And then I stopped, or tried to, for who can hope to prestidigitate as
it
does? As well try to duet with the world’s best harpsichordist, with Chinese back-scratchers tied to one’s hands, and from three feet away. Let it play; you follow. Most manage that way most of their lives. I drew an experimental breath, and yes, the quondam depth I had come from seemed sunk almost to the nonsense distance—all the doggerel of sense dropping lightly to my aid.

“Demiurge” was a word I had borrowed from my painter friend Maartens. Looking through the kitchen doorway, I could see down this long room—the old ballroom of the house, with a musk of conversation still in its linenfold and a ceiling high enough to accommodate the
fin de siècle.
In the dimmest corner—farthest away from the oasis of gaiety in the bay, where drink, music and shadow screens interpenetrate their boxes behind a previous occupant’s sofa (dropped on their modern manner like a Crébillon joke)—is this desk, shyly battlemented beneath the books. On it I could see these pages, arrested—by some silently sliding safety door of the will—before they had come to the incriminating matter. Nothing much was in them as yet except that
peccavi
, common enough since Rousseau, by which a man might subtly work himself over to the demonstrably good side in the course of revealing his bad. Should I burn them then, as Maartens, in an access of overcritical rage, disgust, or fear—whose terms no one could understand but himself—sometimes burned a painting? Or should I do as he, get away before the destruction and take a therapeutic turn with what he calls “people outside”? Of whom, to him, I am one. Those periods are when I see him.

I imagine that there are many outside the arts to whom Maartens is “my painter friend,” kept much as a doge might have his dwarf, a cultivated Philistine “my poet,” an alert politician “my Jew.” He brings the dark, dye-pot range of his artistic difference just near enough for them to dip their fingers in its fascination and congratulate themselves against its dangers. When he tells them—with seeming naïveté and actual insolence—that he seeks their company because of
their
difference, they are flattered to find themselves in possession of what they never knew they had. And finally, he reassures them, since he happens to be an exceedingly ugly man. Maartens, I’m certain, has only a callous, professional interest in his own tints and composition. But as they observe orange hair vying with pink, bladdery nether lip and exophthalmic eyes (whose red-lit brown I once heard him call, in his precise Dutch voice, as he sat for himself, “the exact color of a bedbug who has just eaten”), they are comfortably reminded once again that beneath any exaggerated effort to compose the world in order or beauty, the specific neurosis is plain.

Maartens rests me. I made his acquaintance without guile and he has none, having as little façade, beyond the skin, as is possible. This is in part because words have no aura for him outside their use; he uses them for whatever, by the usual covenants, they can perform. Magic lies elsewhere for him; although he is not physically nervous, I’ve grown accustomed to seeing him wander a room not his own, aligning objects and colors, or cavalierly shutting them away, and except in those periods when he can’t work and is seeking the company of the Philistines for that obverse service he hopes they will do him, I’m rather sure that he sees the human only as another kind of “arrangement.” Nevertheless, it’s at those times, when his power “to make,” as he calls it, deserts him, that he develops a certain uncanny ability to plumb its habit for others, the way a countryman, in the city and sick for home, can speak of it like Theocritus, for an afternoon.

“Yesterday,” he tells me, “I was at work.” Then we sit a while in memoriam, as if he had just said, “Yesterday I was alive.” Fairly soon he will begin to tell me how it happened, but only in order to be able to dwell afterwards on what he has been exiled from, the way an Israelite, to whom Canaan is as much remembered as promised, might haughtily map its milk-and-honey rivers, not to a kinsman, but to some Gentile stranger who has no hope of it at all.

He sighs. “Did you happen to notice what it was like, the day
before
yesterday?” he asks.

I remark that it was thus and so—last time, that it was nice.

“Nice!” he will say. “Superb! Baked by a pastry cook who put on another flourish every half hour.
Cordon bleu. I
noticed,” he says with a certain emphasis. “Wind, girls, buses, everything. I spent the whole day at it.”

Earlier in our friendship, when he first sought me out at such a time, I would have asked “Why not!” receiving the answer reserved for fools: “Not with the upstairs eye!” But now I know that old saw of his and I nod. Suddenly he smiles—Maartens is not witty as we verbal ones class wit, but he has the broad humor of those who, lash about as they may, have an ultimate faith in themselves.

“Cecile says” (she is his wife) “that I always act just the way women do about their monthly—let them cry at a cheap movie, or feel the whole world in the small of their back, or see the pimple in the mirror; still, twelve times a year they will say to themselves, ‘I wonder why.’ And I’m the same—I never see it coming.”

And the next morning or the one after, his lapse comes. In the studio, he does not go as usual at once to the canvas, always faced to the wall, away from all eyes but his own, and turn it about, as one uncovers a child. The room’s happy confusion, ignored these six months, worries him. He spends the morning leafing through what judgment has abandoned or completed, roaming his lifework with a housewife’s sour, prophylactic stare. When he can no longer avoid it, he goes to the last canvas and turns it around. And now, shrugging at me, he throws up his hands.

“Bad?” I unwisely ask, and he gives me another of the looks he reserves for the people outside. Bad would be hopeful. It is nothing, neither one way or the other.

And now he begins what he has come for—to describe, with the sweet roweling of memory, what he has lost. The canvas is the eye, he said once, the eye on a string from the navel. The string one can drop and pick up again. But what he has lost lies behind. Stretching his lips around words, he brings them forth like a dog that, howling for its master, develops human speech. And like the dog, dangling his slack leash, he noses me back to the studio, snuffling at the fled footprint, saying “here” and “here.”