Testimony and Demeanor (23 page)

He stood there awhile. He finally said, “I must say, I really can’t say. And what an opportunity gone by. An occasion for a Lord Chesterfield letter to his son. ‘On choosing a present for … an older woman.’ There must be some general principles.”

I said, “An example or two would do.”

He said, “As Sir Philip Sidney may or may not have been the first to say, ‘Let your heart be your guide.’ Actually, I don’t agree with that. There should be a tension between feeling and cleverness.”

“What did you give her last Christmas?”

“Hmm. A book. A book about French furniture.”

I said, “I don’t think she needs any more books.”

He said, “I’m not prepared. There is an essay here, but I’m not prepared to give it.”

I said, “That’s O.K. I’m not in a rush.”

He said, “The moment has come and gone.”

I said, “She once went on about a book of blank pages, but whether she meant a sketchbook or a diary, I don’t know.”

He said, “I couldn’t say.”

I suppose it was inevitable, or at least obviously probable, but the issue always seemed to me in doubt, or at least unforeseeable in any detail.

I suppose there was even some fear on my part that somehow, in spite of my being attracted, there would be something unattractive, some sign of age that would put me off. But when I kissed her it was exactly like kissing a girl.

I don’t know why I always believed everything I heard about sex. From a very early age I took the most preposterous things on faith, in spite of the fact that I was otherwise skeptical and inquisitive. I suppose there was very little that was sensual in my life. My mental taboos just fell in with the obvious physical ones—don’t touch, don’t think. I remember at a bus station once I watched a three-year-old boy handle his mother’s breast, and I thought something had happened. I mean something upsetting for everyone there. Nothing had.

Someone told me that John Locke had said, “I owe my powers of logic to the fact that I have never loosed a drop of semen.” I didn’t question it, although I didn’t buy half of what he said about politics or money. Everything else I’d heard and accepted re sex seemed as absurd, but true. No. Maybe just not to be considered. Not to be tied in with anything else.

I remember in college a guy down the hall slept with a professor’s wife who was much older, and the whole prospect of it seemed so beyond anything thinkable that I thought at first, along with everyone else, that it wasn’t true. I think there was something that shocked the guy who did it too, so that he had to minimize it by telling his dorm buddies. It took him a while to convince everyone that he really had. Then finally someone asked, “Hey, well, what was it like?” The guy said, “Applesauce!” Mainly to get back on top now that we believed him. It was about that time that I read in a history book about the Donner Pass cannibalism, and the two stories seemed equally well reported, equally verified, but equally unthinkable in terms of anyone’s real flesh. In fact, the only thing I remember as creating any recognizable connection between my flesh and the flesh in the Donner party was cold. For about a week whenever I went outside I’d trudge through the
snow thinking of the Donner party’s flesh. It didn’t occur to me that they might have cooked it.

However, nothing has changed between Ann and me in terms of the proportions of my sentiments. By that I mean that what still interests me most about her is my interest. In a sense, all that has happened is that although she had my complete attention before, and still has my complete attention, it’s expanded.

It’s odd, but one of the responses I have to her is very much like being called on my first year in law school and not being quite prepared. After a long while of dreading this feeling, I grew to look forward to it. It struck my whole system like a shot. Sudden jolts of clarity. A struggle to hold them against the oppression of the silence that followed my name being called. A struggle to hold them against the inevitable contentiousness of all the big-mouths who happened to be primed for that class. At least there’s not that aspect. But there often are the jolts of clarity out of a half fear.

And perhaps there is a fear of change. That I will change in a way that I myself will not be able to follow. That, too, was a first-year-law-school fear. An almost physical sensation that a professor would fit a wrench to a part of my mind and give it a quick half turn. And then everything would change in a way that would leave me behind. Of course, I was wrong about that; there was nothing that mysterious going on. And I got over it. But I grew to like the fear of being called on; I grew to use those jolts almost like flares to light up that part of the case that I hadn’t got by myself.

But what am I lighting up when I get these jolts from Ann?

Ann changes the sheets on her bed every day. I’m sure of it not just because of how it feels but because the sheets are often different colors. Some of them are striped.

• • •

Yesterday (Sunday) Ann and I took the day off. The feeling that we should have been with the usual gang plus guests made the time seem more valuable. At least concentrated. Even though we didn’t actually do anything. We got up late, ate breakfast, played music. Ann gave me dancing lessons. Different old-fashioned dances—Charleston, tango. A lot of clowning around. We sat down tired out.

Odd conversation No. 1: She said, “What is your dream career?”

“You mean like being President?”

“Oh, well, that. But I mean something more specifically dreamlike. You don’t dream of being President. Do you? Something like winning the World Series.”

“Yeah, I used to dream of being discovered by a Red Sox scout when I was in high school. But I couldn’t have been too serious, I didn’t even play freshman ball at college. What about you?”

“Oh, endless lists. Dancing with the Bolshoi. Going to the moon. Stealing the Hope diamond. Starring in a movie. Playing the organ in a cathedral.”

“You could get that all into one if you tried. Star in a movie about a lady who plays the organ, steals the Hope diamond, and stashes it on the moon. On the way back you crash-land in Siberia and get discovered by the Bolshoi. I could arrive on a baseball tour, and it ends with us looking at the moon trying to figure out a way to get the diamond back.”

She said, “You don’t have much feel for dreams. They can’t have denouements. They have to stop in the middle. At the fullest moment. There has to be a feeling of risk still clinging to the dream even when it’s over. You really should think more about your dreams.”

I said, “It’s just another word game. This way, I mean. I don’t have anything against real dreams.”

She frowned and went off to change, since we’d talked about going out for lunch. When she goes to change, it can
mean anything, including taking a bath and reading the
Times
. I turned on the Giants-Packers game. I started to turn it off when she got back, but she wanted to watch it. At half time she got up and did an imitation of the drum majorettes. She can be very funny clowning around. But for some reason in the middle of it she must have thought I wasn’t laughing, or was laughing too much. I don’t know. She stopped and I got up and without saying a word we were somehow squaring off over nothing.

She finally said, “I’m sure it’s ridiculous. I’m sure you think I shouldn’t make a fool of myself.”

I didn’t say anything, and she kept on glowering at me. I still didn’t see why I had to say anything. Then suddenly she went into her bedroom. I went in after a bit and she told me to get out. I went back and watched the rest of the ball game. I felt lousy, but I couldn’t apologize over nothing. When the game was over I went in again and said, “I’m sorry.”

She said, “It’s terrible, but I can’t do it. I hate to deprive you of it—I mean that sweetness of a first quarrel, and the relief that it’s—but there it is. I don’t feel anything but bored with myself.”

That left me to solve the problem, and I realized that she expects a lot. More than whatever conventions she’s used to—sort of super-conventions, meta-conventions. But then maybe it will just turn out that she wants everything left up to her.

We finally got around to lunch, which was a relief. And then she began to giggle over how hungry I was. I am no impediment to whatever mood she wants. There are no principles governing her change of moods. There is no control that I feel I have, whereas she can make me feel, for example, desire in such a concentrated form that it is almost grim, and all the while she can keep on talking, laughing, knowing that she is drawing me, and not the other way around.

And yet this arrangement is in no way draining or degrading.
We are equals, taken over all. At least that is my impression.

Later in the day she said, “I suppose the reason I have dream careers and you don’t is that I have a real regret that I haven’t really done something. Something absolutely apart from myself. Something that other people use. Isn’t that why you work so hard? Of course, Charles worked hard, and he still wishes he’d done something else.”

I said, “Mr. Pelham’s a little bit nuts.”

She said, “I must say, Charlie, you’re getting awfully disrespectful in your old age.”

Later that evening she was smoking in bed. She smokes like a chimney. She wants me to too. She says it would make her feel very intimate to lie around and contaminate our lungs together.

She said, “What exactly is your vision of your ambition? I mean, what form does it take symbolically? Do you count the names over yours on the letterhead and imagine yours moving upward year by year?”

“I’m not on the letterhead. The youngest partner is just forty.”

“Ah. But what do you think of concretely? Your name on the door of some massive office? Some particular person deferring to you?”

“No.”

She waited for me to say more. She nudged me. “You’re like a hostile witness. That is the phrase, isn’t it? Well then, what feelings do you have about yourself ten years from now?”

“I don’t know. It’s not that clear. I sometimes get a feeling of weight, thinking about being the only person qualified to take on a certain kind of problem. That’s not the answer, is it? You want me to have a plot of some kind to make myself number-one something or other, but that’s not it. I’m not playing, I’m not making a movie of my life. I’m just working. I know you’d like to hear something more exciting.”

“I stand rebuked.”

“No. I don’t mean it that way. But it does make me feel strange when you bring up that idea, the idea that I should have some vision, be able to hover above it all, ready to swoop down for the prize. In fact, I don’t know but that all bird’s-eye views aren’t wrong. The world laid out to plan. It’s not. Even if it were, it wouldn’t be made up of stories. The only way you can be sure you’re worth something is when someone thinks you’re necessary, when someone needs you to make something work. Then you know.”

“And all the unnecessary people are just … unnecessary.”

“I’m talking about what I know, about what I
can
know. The rest is just emotion.”

“I must say I find you very exasperating in this mood. I didn’t realize you were so self-centered.”

“You’re missing the point. I’m just using myself as an example of the only way it makes sense to look at a career. You asked the question about me in the first place.”

“It really won’t do, you know,” she said. “I mean, every time you find yourself … in any way touched, you rush back to your office and start arguing. It just won’t do. You’ll never grow up to be a real live boy, Pinocchio, if you act like that.”

We lay awake, and much later she said she was sorry. I said I was more exhausted at the end of that day than if I’d worked all day. She said she was glad. Then she said she was so tired she couldn’t sleep. She went and took a sleeping pill. Just as she was dozing off she said, “I wonder who you’ll marry—what she’s like.” That woke me up completely, but Ann dozed off with her pill.

III

I wonder still about what sort of feelings she has for me. I’m sure it is more than just reassurance. Certainly the feelings I
have for her vary, but at their most intense they are real spurts of admiration that fuse all my other feelings.

Last Sunday I went to the group meeting with her again. There was a foreigner there who had come with Professor Keller. The man was even fatter than Herr Doktor Keller (as Ann calls him) and came from Central Europe someplace. Not Hungary, but somewhere near it. Now an American citizen. He was being treated very respectfully by everyone. Alleged brains? Influence? Still don’t know. He told the following story:

“In 1937 I visited—in my capacity as private economist—the head of one of the oldest families in Hungary. I do not mention the name, but you may imagine. I went to one of his several country estates. As we traveled over roads which you in this country cannot imagine—almost impassable—I said, ‘Excellency, how far to your estate?’ ‘My friend,’ he said, ‘we have been on my estate for an hour now.’ We traveled for another hour, passing several villages which were more squalid than anything you have in this country. Squalor and penury beyond anything you can conceive, I assure you. We arrived at the hunting lodge, which was palatial. There was a vast courtyard, however, which was a bog, solid mud up to the thighs. I started to descend from the car, but my host stopped me. Two servants rushed from the nearest door and floundered toward us. They carried us on their backs to the steps of the lodge. They struggled through the mud like beasts of burden. It’s not something that you in this country can easily imagine. That evening I took my host aside to speak with him. I said, ‘Excellency, you have asked me to advise you. I may, however, be overstepping the bounds of my service when I say to you something from my deepest convictions. The conditions of life in this country are by modern standards unbearably harsh. It is no longer the nineteenth century. You have already experienced a first upheaval, which I assure you was more than the effect of losing a
war. There must be either reform or upheaval. You are in an exceptional position. I beg you with great earnestness—I implore you, before it is too late—invest what you can of your fortune in the American market.’ ”