False Entry (54 page)

Since then he’s come regularly to our Thursdays, making no overtures beyond them. I’m quite sure he finds them as laughable as I do. I am also quite sure he comes for something, and goes away each time to a point satisfied. To a point, whatever that is. One can only go as deep with a man as he has gone with himself, and how far
he
has is what I don’t yet know. If I were reporting on him to the others, I should say ‘Honest, in respect to
something.
The appearance of a quite different honesty on top. Between the two—a devious middle ground. For us, as temperaments go, the best combination that exists.’ But this is my report to myself. I am both worried—and drawn. The highest level, yes, in himself—no worry there if he also belongs to ours. I’m all but sure that he does. But if he does not, but if he does not—then I am still drawn. And that is terrifying to a man like me. To find a man of equal mind, to whom one is tempted to speak
fully
, and to find it not inside our circle, where I never have, but without. Age makes no difference between us. Or rather, I sometimes feel like a father before a son who has inherited his talents. An odd thing occurred after yesterday’s meeting, he already gone. His voice still in my ears together with my own, I suddenly placed his accent. The hair rose on my spine. My accent is its own mixture. And his? It was mine—precisely mine.

I shall find some way of remarking on it, next Thursday.

But the next Thursday, I did not come back.

Now is it clear, the mechanism of what I did, and continued to do? Is it clear that the two accounts above, written last night, though imagined by me, concern true events which happened, which were made to happen by the man who moved, in a double way, through them?

And from above, behind, comes the verdict—from the owl on my shoulder, that ex-human pocket-of-outer-space which makes us human: “So. Still trying your somersaults, even in the confession box. You did better when you spoke
ex tenebris
, ‘as a child.’ No, it is
not
clear. Your business is not to make it so, but to speak. Speak then. And point the pen a degree nearer the skin.”

So, here then is the secret as plainly as I can say it. With the Aiellos and Belden, I first began my practice of visiting, from the mists of preknowledge, other people’s lives. In each little world I remained for a time, trailing my mists but warmed, always in the end moving on. As I grew more practiced, these excursions formalized themselves, developing their own little habits, easements, even a code of manners, all of which I came to recognize. There were times when I merely “visited” as it were for an evening, dipping into some environment that teased me to know it casually, satisfied to stay there like some tourist with a personal introduction he never disclosed, watching the people there in the light of it, never making himself known. For more complicated excursions, where it seemed likely that my stay would be longer, I rehearsed my disguises more thoroughly, sinking myself well in the role beforehand, like an actor with a two-hour make-up to apply. Such wigs and grease paints as I used were of course always “mental”; as I saw how, when skillfully applied, the barest hints furnished me by memory and predilection could turn into life-size effects, I began to appreciate, in the true spectrum of their possibilities, all the delicately japanned pigments of the mind. That range forever widened as I used it. At its farther end (though to be avoided) are illusions which can become as concrete as the whirling atoms which compose a stone; at its nether point are all the thin, common glazes used every day by the least calculating, the least shrewd. My difference—or so I told myself—was only in degree, and in control, for it was my pride, of course, that I never lost sight of my artifices, precisely because they were more conscious than other people’s, more formed. By means of them, I should never step into that web where the artifices become the man. These were to be my tricks of leisure, my avocation, my hobby, kept for myself as others kept more displayable connoisseurships, my trick of defense—beneath it all, the self, that naked contemplative, safe in his grove!

And what then was the general “shape” of these excursions? Essentially, all the elements of those in the long list to come were already present in the two episodes tangentially described above. I have a sentimental fondness for the Aiellos as my
first
, and as the simple sensitives they were. With them, I made all the predictable slips of a novice—telling at one time too little, at another too much. Being simple, their peasant clairvoyance at once apprehended a mystery (making of me more of a one than I had intended), and at once, with peasant practicality, set about making use of it. One of my slips had been to drop the name Serafina. This was the name of old Aiello’s wife, the mother, now dead, of the young Dominic I had seen die of scarlet fever. Why did I drop it, not quite unconsciously—partly for its charms (such syllables for a woman with gothicked eyes!), partly for its dangers and curiosities (was there a “snap” of her?) and perhaps partly for a godlike wish to give them, by wires scarcely vibrated, a message from their dead boy. The experience taught me never again to give in to such temptations unless better planned. The old man was certainly far from base, out on a promontory of yearning, the girl not dull but fresh from a land of omens and portents, sprites in the milk and saviors in goatherds, herself one of the swart creatures of which her race once made sibyls—together, what did they make of me to themselves? I dared not stop to see, poor, dear, wretched conspirators that they were, fond as I had grown of them—once I’d got wind of it. Was I Dominic reborn to them, blonde as a Milanese? My flight from that seraglio was an ungainly affair, an impostor just not caught in his closet, all flying pantaloons. I did them no harm, I think, and certainly meant none—this too is an essential part of the “form.” But the experience taught me to have well in mind beforehand who I “was” or pretended to be.

The episode with Belden, not so laughable, taught me that complex people, hoist in their own ambiguities, are the more eager to be deceived. Although I rarely recall in color, I always see Belden so. (Normally, black, white, and gray are still the tones of that egocentric composition, tones of voice and posture—and words of course, every word.) But Belden, whom I had anticipated as all vellum veined with ink, a crabbed little counterplot of a man, emerges, as he did that first day from the back of his shop, like a 1910 illustration of Richard Coeur de Lion, a large man, heavy-maned, as rich in tints of gold and red as those apples from which were extracted his brandy and his passwords—a lion in a bookshop, attended always by that persistent anti-nibble of intellect, his mouse. For a person whose business dealt him men, one after the other, like shadows, I never saw anyone less like a shade. The shop was not only a “front,” but, by contortions too ridiculous to trace, a double front; above its base of rococo plots brewed for the acolytes who sneaked,
opéra bouffe
style, into that tiny back basilica every Thursday, there might be sensed, dotted in much thinner air, an austere circle of cardinals’ hats. It’s possible that, had I lingered long enough, I might even have been brought to meet those, for although Belden was cautious, Belden was brilliant, after forty years among his revolutionary shades, he hungered more than anything in life for a man with whom he might have a “personal” talk. I decamped for both reasons. I wanted no more organizations of any kind; the truth should not trump me up to serve it, in any such guise, ever again. And Belden’s monstrous, famished mouse was a warning. Even if Belden refused to see a possible resemblance between us, I did not.

These, then, were two typical “devices” from the long chapter of them which was interrupted—in the midst of one not yet terminated—the night I came home to this desk, from Ruth Mannix’s side. Over the years, I had kept to my code. As time went on, my accumulating heap of the histories of others began to hump almost as heavy between my shoulder blades as my own—but I never used my knowledge for conscious harm. Whenever, in a place where I might be sojourning, affections were embroiled on either side, I eventually did us both the brief harm of leaving, but it never seemed to me that anything in us was more scotched by this than if left victim to the undirected processes of life. If change was the tragedy, then it was not one I had invented, any more than I had invented death—the only other unity we could all be sure of. As for love in its various forms—sexual, maternal, fraternal (more than one of which my century seemed to think it had invented)—I had experienced them in their transient beauties, but was not the man to forget that they
were
various, not excluding those vaguer religious diffusions that took in everybody. No one kind of love, it seemed to me, had enough unity to stand in triumvirate with those other two great ones.

So I had reached my forties, that halfway climacteric by which time a man is expected to have settled for a brand of reality at least as conclusively as on his cigars. I seemed not to have done so, still naming myself in private, far better than anyone else could, a vicarious man. But I had my rationale for this also. In the early years of my hobby it had shamed me, brought me periods of guilt during which I abstained. Like a drunkard, I always came back to it, knowing my own strength and in the end glorifying it. My talent was to remember, and in my fashion I had not wrapped it away. This at least was my own. In a world that regimented a public personality from me, meanwhile exhaustively researching the private and demanding that I scramble up enough conscience to serve both, I’d “adapted” as Darwin had predicted I would, thereby gaining an intermittent release from a certain soreness for the absolute with which I still strove—and from which I sometimes feared I would die. In a pluralistic world, as they now told me it was, under all heavens and philosophies exploding, the “real,” slipping a pinfeather, flew on. But by means of my devices I was managing very nicely thank you on the teeter-totter, able to be both up and down, in and out, with an endless supply of people and at the same time intractably alone. Voyeur indeed! As I sat at breakfast in convocation with the rest of the air-wave-washed world, all of us at our light repast of pic-post agony and joy, could I not quite reassure myself that the world had come round to the brand of reality that was mine? And if our mutual systems showed signs of managing us, I could shrug my shoulders in company. Company was the thing. A teeter-totter takes two.

All lies, public lies. So I told myself them on the one hand, and the next minute
told
myself, this being my curse. I needed no diatonic silence to hear that other voice,
chaste et pur
:
Each man is responsible for his own chronicle.

So, you may see me, as for fifteen years I sit in my grove, emerging at intervals, my own ambassador to the uncertain real of other people, like those kings who sat in Venice, sending their Marco Polos in search of Chinas, fearsome but rich, that might or might not be there.

But what we do not do persists, classic and perfect, beneath what we do. The final admixture is the judgment. So now, you may watch me there, naked and sore in my cell, on that day when, bearing their disturbing treasure, all the expeditions came back.

I
’VE CALLED HER.
As soon as I had written the above, yesterday, I did so. When I finished, it was about six o’clock of a pre-summer Saturday evening, the side streets advancing tawny toward the avenues, on one of the longest days, which all the afternoon must have been gilding toward this perfect, light-blent fall. A day out of my gloss, but in my own way I had not missed it; the secret had been wrenched onto the page, the surgery almost done. From the open window the blue breeze invited itself forward, the sounds strung along its duskiness softened to bangles on a scarf. While I dialed it brushed me, solicitous. If she was there, she would be just going out.

Anna answered. Yes, Miss Ruth and her father were home—from London, that is—but they’d gone down to the country for the weekend. Anna had opened the place for them the week before. Then that 4 A.M. call a few nights ago, which I had not answered, could have been she.

“You want the number down dere?” Anna’s voice was cool, a reminder of how many weekends I had spent there last summer.

“No thanks, Anna, I have it.” It felt strange to speak, healthful to be reproved. I wanted to prolong the sense of her, firm and starched in her alcove, theirs, behind her the amalgam I knew so well, chairs flowering silent in their covers, German mantel clock swathed, in the library the audience of books stiffened primly for the winter concert—the whole old-fashioned sense of a house half closed for the summer, a coffer, mysterious with camphor, which its owners have left ajar. In the shaded library, above the couch, the Chinese horse burned blue-green in his niche, one heavy hoof raised. “Did you—give her my message?”

“Yah. I give it.” There was a silence, no invitation to dinner. “Vwah-l,” she said, “I go do my packing. Tomorrow I go on holyday.” Her “holydays” were always notable providing sagas for the year, but tonight she would not chat about them. I wished her well. At the last moment she relented. “That Pauli Chavez—” she said. “He’s down dere with them along.” Then she suavely wished me good-by and rang off.

I sent no smile after her, though I might have. Anna knew as well as I that Paul Chavez was no rival. One of Ruth’s cronies from her dance-world days, he was linked also, through her mother’s family, who had been music publishers, with their collection of friends from the music world of Fifty-seventh Street. A long, lean exquisite of a man, silver-haired and mustached at only a little past forty, he often put me in mind of his namesake in
Fathers and Sons
, Arcadi’s uncle, Pavel, “any of whose nails could have been sent to the Exhibition.” Somewhere Chavez kept a small, gouty-voiced Frenchwoman, frog-shaped as retired ballerinas often are, who either would not or could not marry him, and this fact, together with sympathies as delicately articulated as his ankles, gave him the almond-eyed quiet, the sad, silvered aspect of the perfect friend. His was a company ideal for the times in a woman’s life when there were no rivals, or he would be the comfort, special but still male, to which she might bring her troubles with another man. As for letters abroad, I thought, some never reached their destinations—I knew of one. Others might reach too many. Is he there with her, hanging over mine, now? I think not. Nor is it Pauli Chavez I fear.