Testimony and Demeanor (11 page)

She said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have. I’ve been depressed in some dumb way, and I seem to have misplaced my sense of humor.”

And I—like the fairy-tale princess under a spell who when she opens her mouth to speak emits a toad—said, “Oh. But it wasn’t meant to be funny.”

But in some way Antoinette felt herself to blame, and so finally this short embarrassment of which she and I each held an end turned into an odd sort of intimacy. The outlaw bond (outlaw because Bobby had no vanity—neither my pretension to art nor Antoinette’s prickly reflex about her looks) was only
part of it. We found we had several subjects in common. Antoinette was a great one not only for keeping up with contemporary goings on but also for classical self-improvement. Having gone to Wellesley (she spent her junior year in France) and worked hard, she was already literate. She practiced no art and pursued no single scholarly discipline, but she would take up small subjects with cranky zest that might last several months. The history of the papacy, Turkish rugs, the Gulf Stream, Yeats, Vikings, Elizabethan lyrics, New York real estate. All these in addition to a steady interest in fashion (her job), fine arts (her college major), and French literature (her college minor).

I was her literary consultant. We went to whatever was playing in New York—there was always something—but the field on which we met with equality was Molière, a playwright to whom she was temperamentally sympathetic. It was also to Antoinette that I owed my instruction in La Rochefoucauld and Chamfort.

But our main subject was always Bobby. I was her consultant in that case too. She continued to make sure that Bobby and I got together at least twice a year. I once suspected that this was one of her hobbies—a kind of gardening of two sympathetic crops. But as well as her cool assessment and administration, there was also a feverish tenderness. Sometimes when Antoinette and I first saw each other, she would seize my hands and speak in a rapid monotone, saying how glad she was I’d come, how worried she’d been about Bobby, about her father. As she spoke, her fingers would move over my knuckles and wrist bones, as though my joints were the knobs of an instrument transmitting her real message.

When I first went to their apartment this Christmas break, she went through this nervous telegraphy at the door. Then, soothed by her transmission, she took me into the living room and relaxed into an armchair by the window. She gave a little
laugh and started talking about Bobby as though we’d all seen each other the day before and an amusing addition to our conversation had just occurred to her.

She said, “I’ve just figured out how it works with Bobby and his girl friends.”

The pattern she mapped out was this: Every so often Bobby would meet a young woman who’d recently arrived in Manhattan and was overwhelmed by small difficulties. For a month or two he would spend his spare time solving her problems—perhaps helping her find an apartment, explaining the subway, recommending a doctor. After that he might let himself into her place with his spare key to leave a house plant, to install an extra lock, or thumbtack a useful magazine article to her bulletin board.

Bobby and his
ingénue
(Antoinette’s term) would go out twice a week. Once in a while he would spend the night. Antoinette was sure that they weren’t in love because she could see nothing but amiable good moods in either of them, and only slight wistfulness toward the end. The end began when Bobby introduced the
ingénue
to men and women who he thought would be likely friends for her. Since almost all the past heroines of these interludes remained friendly with Bobby, the latest
ingénue
usually met one of her predecessors. This introduction marked the very end.

They were not desperate women. They all had jobs or plausible competences or enough money to go back home. What bothered Antoinette wasn’t that this was a vice—at least not in the sense that it did any harm to the woman. But she didn’t like the fact that Bobby was so expert at the little problems that inevitably repeated themselves each time. She said that it gave the whole operation the aura of a hobby. I thought it an indication of how close we were that “having a hobby” struck us both as a phrase for an unworthiness in someone we cared about.

Antoinette said, “I wish it wasn’t so boring for him to make
money. Or maybe I wish he’d take one of these women seriously. He’s just taken up with the best one ever, but he’s not even trying as hard as usual. If he’s not going to fall in love, I wish he had some other devotion. I sometimes wish he’d worked things out the way you have—what you do all day and what you like are one thing.”

I said that there was still a lot missing from my life.

She said, “But you’re getting somewhere. You’re adding to what you know, not doing the same thing over and over. Bobby repeats everything. His books, his making money, his girl friends.”

I asked how Bobby’s life was different from her own. She chose not to hear this as a rude question.

She said, “I may not be doing any better, but I keep planning to do better. Bobby seems half-heartedly content.”

I agreed that it was certainly true that Bobby lacked the divine discontent.

But when we went out to dinner, Bobby showed up with his friend. It turned out I knew her—not an
ingénue
at all in my view. She’d been one of the stars of graduate school in comparative literature when I’d been working on my Ph.D. in English. Elizabeth Mary Chetty. She’d come from India in the first place, but after much traveling had passed through Europe and ended up at Harvard. She surprised me now by recognizing me. I thought she’d been too hard at work to notice anyone, though she herself was well known as the darling of the most difficult seminars.

When I’d known Elizabeth Mary—or, more accurately, observed her—I had even come to dislike her in a petty way, the way one falls into disliking anyone who’s the center of attention. Now, as she greeted me with a tone of pleasant surprise, of course my feelings immediately fell at her feet.

Elizabeth Mary still had traces of Indian accent—not the exuberant quasi-Welsh singsong, but a fluid hurdling of each emphasized word. Hearing one of her spoken paragraphs was
like listening to an expertly run quarter mile of intermediate hurdles. Her whole voice neatly tucked up its lower register, skimmed over, then was in full stride again, gathering its silky rush and hum for the next flit of emphasis.

I was so taken with the laps her voice was making that I lost track of the subject. I remember her saying that Americans had humor but no wit and my not wanting to argue. Then I was admiring her narrow dark gold nose, when there was a silence and I realized she’d been asking me something about Iowa. While I was trying to think of something to mumble, it came echoing back to me that she’d just said she was going to teach there for a term. I guessed that she must be asking about either the faculty or the students. I said, “Well, there’s a spread. It’s hard for me to say; you may find something quite different.”

“Oh, Oliver,” Elizabeth Mary said. “Come right out and tell me the worst. I am prepared for any kind of illiteracy.”

I gathered it was students she was after. I said, “There are a few who are eager.” And I told her several Honorée Hogentogler stories.

Walking back to the Morses’ apartment, Antoinette slipped her arm through mine and slowed us down so that we lagged behind Bobby and Elizabeth Mary.

Antoinette said, “I’m afraid Bobby is introducing you to her. I’d hoped he was completely serious about her. She’d be so good for him.”

I said that I thought Bobby just wanted me to be polite to her for her one-term visit. I added, “When I’m out there I’m devoted to Miss Hogentogler. And when I’m here, you’re my ideal.”

Antoinette wasn’t much of a flirt. She said, “Oliver, that’s like loving your nanny.”

It was in this foursome that I had a pretty good time until it was time to fly back to Iowa. Each of us knew enough about a variety of arts and entertainments and about the taste of the
others to be able to make something of a week of afternoons and evenings.

But as soon as I drove out of the parking lot of the Cedar Rapids airport, I was despondent. It wasn’t the three weeks of the fall term trailing into January. It was the first tremor in my major hopes. I had felt until then that all I had to do was keep up with my program of cultural and spiritual progress and I would inevitably reach way stations where there would be other people into whose clarified sensibilities I would be able to see. I had felt that all the efforts I had made toward the fragments of the past (including those whole works I loved most) would be rewarded in the future by whole sensibilities. As every idea anyone had ever formulated about a work of art fell short, was a weak caged specimen of the power of the art at large, so art itself fell short of the power of sensibility in its highest state.

And if one wished to dismiss this idea, one would have only an idea about an idea, which would be devoid of even the caged power of an idea. So this core of belief in progress toward communion had always been at a safe remove from thought.

But of course the danger of belief removed from thought is that it may recklessly add to itself or be added to (who could tell?). At that moment there was certainly some unbalancing or corroding element in my belief.

I had just told stories about Honorée Hogentogler—her laughable tumbling eagerness. Driving through the countryside, I thought that I might be laughable too; Honorée and I might be sisters under the skin.

There was a dull twilight, the rising moon behind a scrim of clouds, the setting sun curtained off by thicker clouds, the light spread about unevenly by the snow incompletely covering the ground. The farmhouses, buildings, and machinery visible from the highway looked makeshift, and only half in use, as though a city had toppled and these were the farthest-flung pieces reassembled.
Turkish goat pens made of the ruined stubs of Ionic columns. This regressive and mean vision passed before I pulled into my driveway. In my mailbox was a card from Honorée. A New Year’s card. It was a picture of her coming into a room wearing a white gown and a crown of lighted candles. She wrote: “My father used this for his bank’s calendar. I’m January and my sister is February. See you soon. Love, Honorée.”

She looked embarrassed and very pretty. A birthday cake too pretty to be cut.

I went into my office the next day and at lunchtime went to the Huddle. Honorée was there. She came around the counter and kissed me on the cheek. She seemed stronger and more expansive—I’d been thinking of the picture on the New Year’s card, in which she seemed delicate.

She said, “I wouldn’t have done that except it’s my last day here. I get to quit my job. My dad said I’d showed I could do it and now I’ll have time to work on a movie. I’ll tell you about that in a second. Did you get the card?”

I nodded and said it was very pretty.

She said, “That was taken last year. My mom’s so corny about that stuff. She came from Minnesota.”

I looked puzzled.

Honorée said, “They do more of those Swedish things there. Anyway, things have been hectic. You know my roommate, Miss Quist? Well, she told me before vacation that she was going to room with somebody else next term and so the dorm supervisor’s letting me live in a single room in approved housing. That’s just one thing. And then I got into the acting class and there’s this TA who’s making a movie. It’s just a little farce but he got a grant to do it and I get to be in it. It’s silent, but anyway the main thing is the theater crowd here are so nice. I’d heard—Karen Quist told me—that they were snobby, but they’ve been terrific. This TA said I could be in his improv group. It’s the same crowd he’s making the movie with. Last
year they did the experimental one-act that won the student contest. It’s their own technique; it’s very practical—sort of avant-garde Marx Brothers. A lot of physical clowning. Last term the TA substitute taught body movement one time and that’s where he saw me. He said it was good the way I did falls. The secret of good farce is really precision that surprises, and he said it was surprising that I could move so well.”

I said, “I hope this doesn’t take too much time away from your work.”

“Oh, no. I had good grades at midterm. If I do as well on midyears, I’ll have a three point six.”

I found all this news, or rather Honorée’s exhilaration about it, hard to fit in. After she’d come out to visit me and I’d driven her back to her dorm, I’d been afraid I would have to have a talk with her. She’d seemed innocent and helpless in her aspiration to what she thought of as college life—the whole corny turmoil that I’d skipped but which I was afraid she hoped to find in me. And I’d been troubled by our kiss. I’d had a clear sense of Honorée by sight and sound, and then these two known languages had been complicated by the third, as though I’d turned the Rosetta stone and found a hieroglyph which I wasn’t sure I wished to translate.

And I’d had other ambiguous thoughts about her when I hadn’t been busy assessing my New York life. One of these unbidden visions of her was particularly persistent for all its absurdity. The plot was that Honorée had been left on my doorstep as a child and then suddenly grown into a lovely pliant child who kept me company. This Silas Marner fantasy was as embarrassing to me as any of the other moments of embarrassment that popped into my head from my real life, dumb things that I’d said years before—for example, some attempted elegance that had failed and which could still make me suck in my breath with shame.

And yet this guardian mode was the one that kept floating to the top. I’d entertained the idea of heartlessly abusing her
trust, of accepting what pleased me from her affections while remaining free to shake her off. I had no absolute scruple—certainly not a notion of an eternal father sending a thunderbolt or shower of frogs to punish my lust. I could easily imagine that there was such a plausible mode as the carefree rake, a jolly scoundrel who could take pleasure because he gave pleasure, no cobwebs of feeble piety. But I knew that was not my sensibility. That essentially comic role would take either more energy or less energy than I spent in my life, but certainly a different kind of energy.