Mysteries of Motion (29 page)

It was true, as Wolf saw at once, a comment worth more than the design it had smudged. Agony without genius was gaucherie. Between elephants and boys, between himself and the world—and whose tragedies?—his poems had foundered in that all-embarrassing slough where, for real seriousness, he should have shut up. By the end of the day he’d had his own revisionary attack, of grand mal this time. Just before he fell, he saw the book squarely and himself holding it, the way a runner who hasn’t placed dangles his track shoes, walking back. The words were nice, like a collection of gems all of the same size. The poem was the perfect product of his training. He was secondhand all through.

On that score, he found himself more interesting to an American doctor on the staff than to the English ones, whose society engendered the problem quite regularly. “Happens often,” one of these said harshly. “You are what you are. You had better get used to it.” The American, who was a Jew also, smiled, overhearing this, and beckoned the patient into his office, closing the door.

“We
never do,” he said. “And I’m not so sure they.” Fact was, their caste system actually helped them handle it. “Meanwhile, fella, you’re just as much a victim of the death camps as if you had the mark on your wrist, only you’re second generation.”

In a low voice, the patient had whispered back,
third.

He was ultimately told that the stifling bourgeois Berlin household which his parents had replicated behind their Bloomsbury shutters could have been their own repression of inner damage done. “But they had you, on whom to focus forward.”

And I don’t
—
do that,
the patient said, low.

“Ah, come now. We’re very much interested in the problems of art, back home.” The doctor collected paintings, satisfying his passion at the flea markets in Hampstead and Camden Town, though last week he’d seen a find at the Leicester Galleries—described with ardor—but the salary paid him here was low. “We lead a more random life over there in the States, you know. Art is a way to cohere.”

Other people’s art,
the patient said, stronger, though he still stuttered, or did what he did—more like an occlusion of the lips.

“People who have all the sensitivities of art, the intelligence—but no talent for it,” the doctor said sleepily, his chestnut eyes half closed. He had a fine hooknose, thin and avid, a beard as curly as one of the prophets and two advanced medical degrees over his desk, all at the age of thirty-eight. “They’re one of the negative problems of art, that’s all. How do they find their audience? Or become audience. In order to live. For that’s your problem, isn’t it?” The patient gasped—at having an all-over sore flicked like that. Though it was a help, to be recognized. He broke down.

“I’ll tell you what some do,” the doctor said, when that was over. His eyes again were half closed. “You find yourself another audience, quite cynically. One where your sensitivities can work out, never forget that. Often such people make remarkable progress. More stable than some artists.” The patient kept his eyes on the doctor’s powerful stub-tipped fingers, the fore and middle ones stained bright yellow from the butt always burning there. “And in time,” the doctor said, “you’ll find little places
you
can bear to be audience.” His beard vibrated with energy. Or false prophecy, the patient thought. “Or you can stay as you are, Wolf.” They had never yet told him what that was. “You can keep your pathological honesty about the state of things. Schizoids have the same. No, you’re not schizoid.” The doctor took a puff, which he did rarely. “But it will make you just as unacceptable.”

I’d prefer that,
the patient said.

Nobody said anything for a spell. The butt smoldered down. “So you got rid of all those lovely books Angela’s boyfriend printed,” the doctor said then. “How?”

I burned them,
the patient said.
Like Hitler.
He watched the butt. Matches weren’t issued to patients in this wing; the doctor would know where he’d got them. The butt was flipped away.

“In that case, my wife has the copy you gave her, Wolf—remember? If you want, we’ll bring it to your plane.”

That will be honorable, the patient thought, but didn’t say. But not so important now as doctor thinks. For patient was over and done with that now, and had already made plans to teach, as well as to emigrate. Otherwise, except for a mended head and the medicine provided in case of another attack, which they somehow doubted would occur, he was just as he’d been when he entered—the world still black and swelling in his heart, brinking at his lips. He will just have to find another way—to the tragedy.

“We’re all secondhand,” the doctor said, pleading. Just then the dustbin caught fire. The two of them beat the fire out. Over the drenched basket, patient and doctor faced each other. Clearly the doctor already hated the sight of him. “You…are…very acceptable,” the patient said.

To the plane, the doctor’s wife, a small, dissatisfied, pretty bundle with a very sharp eye, did bring the last copy of the slim green, too elegant book. Patient had brought the picture from the Leicester Gallery, purchased with his mother’s insurance. From now on, if he didn’t save as his parents had done, the authentic might come nearer, though not in that picture—as he could tell from the wife, who worked at the Courtauld and had done classes at the Slade.

“Oh, Larry—to make
him
buy it,” she'd said crossly, turning away toward the patient. He
had
been made to. She knew what she was about. “It’s music Larry knows; did you know? All too well—the prodigy. But we don’t have a piano now…Here’s your volume, Wolf.”

Before the plane left she snapped his picture, fixing on him her glittery currant eyes. She’d never expected to be a painter, he thought; she lives free of such things. Yet, older than the doctor, she was bored with him, as she had confided, adding that to have that happen with ever younger men might be her fate. The doctor, after a flurried
You shouldn’t have
was offside with the picture; he was one of those whom possessions helped.

“You reach your cousin?” she said in a whisper, though there was no need.

“Yes.” Lievering was en route to San Diego, where he would live at first with the cousin—whose wife had been put away—and work at the lecture job the British Council had found for him. She scribbled off a note and slid it into the book. From the gangplank he saw that the picture taking had been an excuse; she was storing up his face. Though he would have liked to return the compliment, he couldn’t; he’d never been able to store up faces. Once aloft, he’d opened the book, oddly thin in his hand—and yes, she had done it for him; she’d torn out the pages. Instead, there was a note. “Larry’s sicker than either of us, but stable. You knew you were being bad for him; that’s why you bought the picture, wasn’t it? I think the way you speak is in tune with what we all know—why cure it? He says that though you may be a shining light of something or other, people can’t take it. And that all we’ve done is to move you on. I’ll be leaving too, one of these days. Send me your address.”

He hadn’t, but she’d got it somewhere. For as many months as Shakespeare wrote sonnets—which extended through his jobs in Mexico City, Bogota, Costa Rica, Valparaiso and Jamaica, only ending just before he got to Barbados, he continued to receive her forwarded envelopes, each containing one of his own sonnets on a single page. Each he destroyed, but not before reading it again. She never wrote her own address, though by the postmark she was still in England. When the envelopes stopped, he was sorry. Somewhere, in her own way, she, too, was the stutterer.

Why should this tram ride to the corridor remind him of that long-ago plane ride which had got him out of Cuba? Because he is cargo, once again.

“We’re taking you to Paris with us,” the American kids had said, leaning flush-faced over him, their ready-made icon. He’s lying on one of their sleeping bags, in the old mess hall to which they’d carried him from the field. Lucky he hadn’t fallen on the sharp cane stubs, they said.

“You fell so light,” a boy says, bending from skyscraper height a baby face nested in fluff beard, “you chew peyote?”

He can smell the boy’s sneakers. On the path, he fell, they say. When his fake bride ran from him. As yet he has no sense of what they refer to. He tests his tongue—not bitten. So far as he can feel in his still levitated state, he has no bruises. Never any thrashing about, none of the harsh side effects. He falls silently, dance-relaxed, returning charged, as if from flight. He’s a secondhand epileptic, too.

“No, he fell like he was smote,” a girl says, huge-thighed over him. There’s a snicker from behind her. He can smell the girl’s crotch. Sitting up, he feels surrounded by kindly, foolishly nodding sunflowers. They have a charter flight out of here; they’ll arrange everything. Two of the richer kids will pay for him at the other end, if need be.

“No sweat,” the same boy says, encouraging. They mistake the stony face he has after an attack—and to all accounts, before—for refusal. “We’ll demand you.”

He sees they’ve already chartered him for themselves; he’s now their cause. He’s so often been somebody’s. Still, it’s staunch of them. His first words try to warn them. “I’ve already—flown,” he said.

In the plane he dreamed muzzily, tended dotingly by that girl. The others chaff her now and then. Barbados sinks back, a gem-fruited paradise tainted by England, like William Blake’s. He will not even cable it good-bye.

In his room in the hotel back of Saint-Sulpice where they all landed, he came to his full senses just as the girl, chap-lipped with love, babbled toward him in her great stolen sleeves, otherwise naked white from the waist down. He’d never beaten a woman before. The girl adored it, but didn’t get her just deserts afterward. Holed up in the
salle de bain
down the hall, he checked his wallet’s small contents, his returning self—that solitary pensionnaire—and his British-schoolboy knowledge of the warrens of Paris. He could always make himself lost to people anywhere, imitating that hunted need to run which he should have had.

This underground ceiling, traveling with his trolley gaze, is broached with slender pipes that remind him of the old
pneumatique
tubings in the Paris department store his mother had taken him to on their first trip there. Fat brass cartridges had zizzed overhead in constant tic-tac-toe, one finally zinging down into the cage beside their clerk, with a magnetic goosing she acknowledged by a plump sidelong hand—the very soul of French commerce. Shortly after his arrival in Paris from Cuba, the French language was to furnish him a livelihood, as a translator of whatever of their own books might require an Oxbridge tone. Still later their medicine, breezier than Britain’s, would dismiss his disease: “You don’t have a disease, M. Cohen, but a philosophy.”

He had taken the new name in order not to have his real one on any book. The name had belonged to the little cousin crushed by the elephant. This way he could at least keep a connection with what his own life had not yet imposed on him. At the local
boîte
off the Place des Vosges where he brought his work of an evening, he knew he was regarded as one of those boulevard intelligences who ate little but a roll now and then plus ambiance, all on credit—the sort whose luck now and then cashed in. His ability to live so minimally was at first admired by the others there, who assumed him merely adroit at hiding what he must be hooked on—if not art or perverse sex, or film, then at least the ordinariness which was clearly denied him—each of the other patrons interpreting him in terms of his or her own cravings. He was too clean to be one of those secret layabouts who merely preferred filth—and besides, they saw him every evening. Once his neighborhood circumstances were known, it was proposed that in spite of his provocative looks he was one of those scared, sexless creatures who preferred to live in boardinghouses rather than either full-bloodedly in the family, or in one of the torturesomely calisthenic love relationships now become fashionable. When it was finally plain to them that he could live even as he did, yet not diminish the dignity of what he was, they were infuriated. What insult, to do without what they could not dispense with—how dared he lack interest in the good things of life?

Ultimately the bar, like most, accepted him pridefully as one of their mysteries, a testament to what a century exhausting itself in explaining things had almost forgotten—that there were wells of personality which couldn’t be bottomed out. One of which, after many removals, had settled off the Place des Vosges.

Lievering was sensitive to the progression of all this. His relationship with himself was that of a man who kept a domestic animal which must someday rear and sink its teeth in him—or might not, fooling nobody but him. He took patiently all the explanations of himself now and then offered by itinerant girls, psychologists, experts on the refugee syndrome, and the other authorities which any good bar was heir to. The regulars had turned their back on him.

Once in a while he did venture into the bookshops and cafés of the more crowded arrondissements, but there his face was still too much his fortune; one day a sneaked flash-shot of it had turned up outside a famous tourist brothel, inside which the male candidates sat illuminated like the girls in Amsterdam—though only at the groin. His publisher informed him of this, with that interested French tolerance no church could keep them from. “We thought you were celibate.” He was. After this he kept to his district, where his landlord was his reference. He never went near the universities, knowing enough by now to mistrust his power over the young.

Actually he had a room with a fine, scholar-attuned brother and sister whose quarters were as minute as his own. At dusk or some portion of the day, it was merely manners, or the compassion of the like-crowded, to leave them to themselves. At the three home dinners per week for which Lievering had contracted, M. Aaron, a second-generation mathematician whose father in his own
bachot
days had known Einstein, fed Lievering wine “to make the words come.” Lean as some medieval apothecary too enlightened to take his own potions, M. Aaron wore his white hair navy-cut, over an eye flawed from the time of his compulsory military service as a youth, and scrawled his nighttime equations on the sheets. Their kitchen was draped with these, waiting their turn to be transcribed. One which had never been deciphered waited grimly, a faded battle flag of the intelligence. Mlle. Elise, the elder sister, has all these years washed Wolf’s handkerchiefs. “Nephew,” M. Aaron called him. “Everybody’s nephew, all your life. I know your trouble.”