The Beautiful Room Is Empty (4 page)

Because she’d been to the University of Chicago and had been converted to its Aristotelianism, she stripped every argument down to its starkest tenets and frequently asked, “What’s your point? Can you put that in a nutshell?” That habit made her unpopular later among New York intellectuals, who seldom feel comfortable in a shell and prefer expanding to contracting their arguments. All those intellectuals who rely on their own prestige or invoke the authority of others filled her with contempt. Name-dropping, except by social climbers, struck her as silly; she forgave the social climbers, since she found them touching, almost novelistic in their pursuit of frivolously minor gods. But those people who thought eloquence could replace logic and considered the essay a transition toward the novel drove her wild with impatience; she’d brush her face with her hand as though rubbing away a cobweb. Not that she disliked make-believe; she read novels night after night, propped up in her single bed, the lamp beating back the darkness, her free hand blindly reaching for the glass of red wine.

My own habit of looking for a personal reason someone might have for holding a particular view (“Her idealism, of course, reflects her Christian childhood”) seemed to Maria a sneaky way of stealing a march. She said my approach was as shoddy and as insidious as gossip and she ascribed it to my early and continued immersion in psychotherapy. Freud she despised as a thorough charlatan and she insisted that none of his views—that there is an unconscious, that sex is a key to motivation, that childhood shapes the adult personality—had ever been proved, nor were they susceptible to
verification. She said these bizarre notions had merely been repeated so often that the cowed public had ended by accepting them. But she forgave me most of my follies, stroked my hair, and told me what a genius-dumpling I was with my chewed-away nails, bobbing head, and surprising bits of knowledge.

Maria read constantly but remembered little. At least she wasn’t very handy at serving things up. When I read I squirreled away tidbits I hoped I’d be able to repeat. I read more and more just to entertain her.

She thought I was brilliant, but my only brilliance was my ability to appreciate her. Not as a woman perhaps, for I dimly sensed there was a passionate woman hidden in this slim body, housing an appetite capable of rapture and even violence. I felt awed by this force, but I didn’t know how to make use of it. The rest of her I understood perfectly, with the best kind of devotion, the wide-awake kind. Nothing in Maria was wasted on me—that was the sole extent of my brilliance.

That spring Maria and I went on long walks together through the grounds of the school, past a pool stocked with fat ornamental carp, up to the Edwardian mansion of the Founders (maintained in sealed-wax splendor), down a hill toward the artificial lake on which the girls’ school was floated. Then up along a wild tumbling brook to the Greek theater where plays were given in the summer. Now it was deserted. Behind the small amphitheater lay an atrium built around a rectangular pool, and there she told me shocking things—that she thought Jackson Pollock was a fraud, that she imagined we’d all be killed by the proletariat, that she considered the life of one African mine worker worth more than the Sistine Chapel.

•  •  •

I didn’t know whether I liked Maria or I loved her. One day in her studio we sat around talking about our futures. The window was open a crack, and just outside a branch of bright yellow forsythia was preening. Maria was wearing an old, tan canvas hunting jacket that had belonged to her grandfather; she wore it over a beige turtleneck sweater. An empty Hills Brothers coffee can nestled sideways in another one which was upright on the ledge under the window. From where I sat I could look into the upper can. Its grooved interior seemed a distillery for changing watery light into sparkling
eau de vie
. Her black pants were bright with daubs of white paint and had fainter comet tails where her hand had smudged them. She’d penciled her plucked eyebrows in very black today, as black as the dots of her small nostrils.

“I can’t believe you actually want to be famous,” she said. “Famous as what? A writer?”

“I suppose,” I said, “or an actor, or a general, or—”

“General!” She unnested the coffee cans and used the top one as an ashtray. “So you’d do anything, anything at all to be famous.” She looked me in the eye suddenly, as though to surprise the answer there. “But why?”

“Freud says the writer writes for fame, money, and the love of beautiful women.”

“Or men,” Maria added. My heart stopped. Was she enlarging the definition to include the goals of women writers or was she suggesting I wanted beautiful men?

“Or men,” I conceded, “though Freud, I’m afraid, didn’t encourage women to be very ambitious.”

“Who does? Certainly no one at this school. My
theology
professor at the University of Chicago was more interested in his women students than the painting instructors here are. I guess they believe the female spirit is earthbound and only the male is creative.”

“Maybe they think the girls will all get married.”

“Not me,” she said.

I asked her why. She threw out one reason after another but none seemed to justify her indignation. When I teased her, as I’d heard other men do a hundred times, and told her she would surrender to the right man, tears of anger sprang to her eyes. Anger, I guess, or maybe she was hurt that I understood her so little. I took her hand and stroked it. I was sick I’d vexed her. “Good,” I said, “because I’m never going to marry either.”

“Really?” she asked, smiling as she slowly pushed the tears away with the back of her other hand. “Will you be famous all alone?”

“No, with you. You’ll have to be famous to encourage the next generation of women painters and socialists and to keep me company.”

She said she preferred reading all night and drinking bad wine. “Honestly, can you think of anything more inviting than fresh sheets and an open book turned face down on the night table? But if I can be famous and lonely with you, I’ll give it a whirl.”

Because I admired Maria, I wanted to be like her—or like the image of me she cherished. She said that I liked everyone so much and entered into everything so readily that life became more exciting around me. “How dull my life seems when you’re away,” she’d complain. But what she considered my enthusiasm for everything was really nothing but my love for her. To woo her I would inject color and motion into accounts of insipid events and sluggish thoughts. Since she was so intellectual, I too led the life of the mind—but with conviction only when I was with her.

Alone, back in my dormitory room, I’d become distracted by the small changes percolating through my body (an itch crystallizing on my knee, a cough scrabbling to get out of
my chest, advancing and retreating armies of impatience and lassitude) and I’d toss aside Bergson’s
Metaphysics
or Santayana’s
The Sense of Beauty
, neither of which seemed likely to become an after-dinner story or a how-to book. My sense of guilt was too pressing to leave me the calm needed to contemplate the sense of beauty. With Maria I could take up such a question, perhaps, because my urge to keep her entertained led me to juggle with whatever I was handed by circumstance. The glamour of intellectual effort was on me. I pictured a dim study in a German town and could almost smell the hard, shaved face and touch the manicured, spatulate fingers of the great thinker as he sat in the glow penetrating the green glass shade of his desk lamp … But the second I was alone, this phantasm faded, the great thinker scratched his leg, longed to be somewhere he’d feel less tense, less empty. I liked to think I was a Buddhist disillusioned with the world, but I was caught in Maya’s strong silk cords. I never doubted the world could make me happy, if only it would give in.

To make it relent, I was refining all the seducer’s skills—his ready sympathy, his tight focus on the prey, his anxiety to entertain, his ulterior mission to lead every conversation toward surrender and conquest. The seducer grows ardent only in pursuit. Left to his own devices he feels shabby, the half-mask cast aside and worthless at dawn, even though last night it had flattered the face it had concealed. In conversation I took my cue from every smile or flicker of exasperation I read in Maria’s face; alone, trying to reconstruct my warmth on the page, I’d turn stupid, lumpish.

Maria laughed at herself, teased me, and liked it when I made jokes at my own expense. The sudden shift of perspective that the long shot of humor required became habitual to me, something I’ve kept, though with less satisfaction than the practice is supposed to bring.

That summer, Maria went to Solitaire, an artists’ colony in the Michigan woods, and in August my father let me join her for a week.

All of June and July I’d worked as a stockboy for my father’s haberdasher—boxing and mailing garments, waiting on customers when things got busy, making deliveries, and endlessly repolishing showcases and restacking shirts and stockings. Now riding a train by myself through the hot, flat countryside seemed a rare freedom. I was free to eat, read, and doze when I wanted, to watch the afternoon light burn on silver grain elevators, to swoop past airless fields of luxuriant green and gaunt farmhouses or dilapidated barns painted long ago with now-faded Bull Durham chewing tobacco signs. The train hurtled through towns where cars waited at the crossing and a collie peered down its long nose at an alley cat and the sun found over there a single small window to dazzle—just as I imagined God, if He existed, might find in a whole crowd only one soul turned at the right angle to reflect His glory. And there, bordering that two-lane highway, was planted a row of signs that, word by word, asked a question, gave the joking answer, and ended with the name of a shaving soap, Burma Shave.

Those were the years, in the late 1950s, when serious literature was teaching the few serious readers that communication between any two individuals is impossible, that we are all isolated and that this isolation is no accident but due to the “human condition” itself. And yet I, who had been isolated, now found such perfect communion with Maria that I couldn’t detect a single gap between us, and I exalted in our closeness. Of course, there were many differences and omissions, but now during the hot windless evening they were forgotten.

We went wandering through the woods, great forests of shabby birches unspooling themselves, until we reached the
dunes, climbed them, and looked out at the late afternoon sun reflected by Lake Michigan. We took off our shoes and sat on the beach, digging our feet down into a layer of cold, root-thick marl so much blacker than the hot surface sand. We stared into the sun and talked, our words overlapping, our laughter ringing out across the still, orange water. A loon flew overhead, then dove for a fish. We held hands. I was wearing my suit for the train (for in those days Americans still dressed up for travel), but Maria had on white shorts, a T-shirt, and sneakers, nothing more, so for once I felt the older, graver one. I was pale from my shopkeeper’s summer, she as tan as she ever became.

When she talked, she squinted as though sighting an idea in the distance. Her squint would even flutter slightly. A small colorless wen was attached to her lower left eyelid and, like a speck in her eye, this slight deformity added—oh, but it’s hopeless for me to work up an inventory of this woman I’ve known now for three decades and whose looks and way of moving have become the argot of my feelings.

That night the summer heat did not lift and I lay naked under a wet sheet in a little cabin I’d been assigned on the edge of the woods. I listened to crickets. The sweat poured freely from my body. I was wide awake. The crickets throbbed louder and louder, as though they were rattles on the ankles of approaching dancers. When I closed my eyes, I still could feel the lurching and speeding of the train. The train would delve into a tunnel, then emerge and flirt with a fellow-traveling river that refused to stick to the party line.

I was so happy. Since the cabin had no closet, my clothes were hung on hangers along the wall or draped from hooks at different heights, and in the moonlight these shirts and jacket and pants looked like a flight ascending the white wall. I pulled on a pair of shorts and walked barefoot through the dew-squeaky grass down to the shack Maria had called the
lithography studio. No one anywhere was awake, not a bird or dog or person. The cabins had no electricity, and even their kerosene lamps had been extinguished.

The moon was nearly full and almost directly overhead, like the hole in the Pantheon. But not an absence, rather a presence I’d call human except that it was nobler, at once tender and aloof—not a speaking presence but an intelligence I could address. Two big wooden lawn chairs, painted green, but looking almost blue-black in this light, conversed with one another sporadically like old people. The water scarcely moved but once in a great while lapped, as a sleeping dog will wake and hugely lick its lips before dozing off again.

Until now, looking at the night sky had usually made me long to be elsewhere, to escape, and had reminded me that I was alone, but here the night had changed and become friendlier. The moon was not the retreating face of a traveler seen through a veil of smoke but a concentrated attention bearing down on these cabins, these sleeping minds. I could picture the moon’s rays as a protractor slowly turning to encompass us all in a perfect circle.

The next morning I had breakfast with Maria at the inn. Solitaire was made up of the paying guests, mostly older Sunday painters who came for a week or two and stayed with their husbands in the inn, and the kids who lived in the cabins for the whole summer and did odd jobs. Maria had befriended two of the older women; we stopped at their table on the way in. I was introduced to the artistic wives and their husbands, obese, amiable: Lots of loud polite talk—the skinny boy at the next table smirked with a thin Voltairian sneer. Maria was teaching a life-drawing class and she promised Marge, one of the two ladies, some extra time this afternoon.