The Hours (7 page)

Here is the Italian coffeemaker she bought for him, all chrome and black steel, beginning to join the general aspect of dusty disuse. Here are the copper pans she bought.

Richard, in the other room, sits in his chair. The shades are drawn and all six or seven lamps are lit, though their feeble output barely adds up to the illuminating power of one ordinary desk lamp. Richard, in the far corner, in his absurd flannel robe (an adult-size version of a child’s robe, ink-blue, covered with rockets and helmeted astronauts), is as gaunt and majestic, and as foolish, as a drowned queen still seated on her throne.

He has stopped whispering. He sits with his head thrown back slightly and his eyes closed, as if listening to music.

‘‘Good morning, my dear,’’ Clarissa says again.

He opens his eyes. ‘‘Look at all those flowers.’’

‘‘They’re for you.’’

‘‘Have I died?’’

‘‘They’re for the party. How’s your headache this morning?’’

‘‘Better. Thank you.’’

‘‘Did you sleep?’’

‘‘I don’t remember. Yes. I believe I did. Thank you.’’

‘‘Richard, it’s a beautiful summer day. How about if I let in a little light?’’

‘‘If you like.’’

5
7

Sh
e goes to the nearest of the three windows and, with some difficulty, raises the oiled-canvas shade. A compromised day-light—that which angles down between Richard’s building and its chocolate-brick sister fifteen feet away—falls into the room. Across the alley is the window of a peevish old widow, with its glass and ceramic figures on the windowsill (a donkey pulling a cart, a clown, a grinning squirrel) and its venetian blinds. Clarissa turns. Richard’s face, its hollows and deep, fleshly folds, its high glossy forehead and smashed pugilist’s nose, seems to rise up out of the darkness like a sunken sculpture hauled to the surface.

‘‘Awfully bright,’’ he says.

‘‘Light is good for you.’’

She goes to him, kisses the curve of his forehead. Up close like this, she can smell his various humors. His pores exude not only his familiar sweat (which has always smelled good to her, starchy and fermented; sharp in the way of wine) but the smell of his medicines, a powdery, sweetish smell. He smells, too, of unfresh flannel (though the laundry is done once a week, or oftener) and slightly, horribly (it is his only repellent smell), of the chair in which he spends his days.

Richard’s chair, particularly, is insane; or, rather, it is the chair of someone who, if not actually insane, has let things slide so far, has gone such a long way toward the exhausted relinquishment of ordinary caretaking—simple hygiene, regular nourishment—that the difference between insanity and hopelessness is difficult to pinpoint. The chair—an elderly, square, overstuffed armchair obesely balanced on slender blond

5
8

woode
n legs—is ostentatiously broken and worthless. It is upholstered in something nubbly, no-colored, woolen, shot through (this is, somehow, its most sinister aspect) with silver thread. Its square arms and back are so worn down, so darkened by the continual application of friction and human oils, that they resemble the tender parts of an elephant’s hide. Its coils are visible—perfect rows of pale, rusty rings—not only through the cushion of the seat but through the thin yellow towel Richard has draped over the cushion. The chair smells fetid and deeply damp, unclean; it smells of irreversible rot. If it were hauled out into the street (when it is hauled out into the street), no one would pick it up. Richard will not hear of its being replaced.

‘‘Are they here today?’’ Clarissa asks.

‘‘No,’’ Richard answers, with the reluctant candor of a child. ‘‘They’re gone now. They’re very beautiful and quite terrible.’’

‘‘Yes,’’ she says. ‘‘I know.’’

‘‘I think of them as coalescences of black fire, I mean they’re dark and bright at the same time. There was one that looked a bit like a black, electrified jellyfish. They were singing, just now, in a foreign language. I believe it may have been Greek. Archaic Greek.’’

‘‘Are you afraid of them?’’

‘‘No. Well, sometimes.’’

‘‘I think I’m going to talk to Bing about increasing your medication, would that be all right?’’ He sighs wearily. ‘‘The fact that I sometimes don’t hear them or see them doesn’t mean they’re gone,’’ he says.

5
9

‘‘Bu
t if you don’t hear them or see them,’’ Clarissa says, ‘‘you can rest. Honestly, you didn’t sleep at all last night, did you?’’

‘‘Oh, a little. I’m not so worried about sleep. I’m much more worried about you. You look so thin today, how are you?’’

‘‘I’m fine. I can only stay a minute. I’ve got to get the flowers in water.’’

‘‘Right, right. The flowers, the party. Oh, my.’’

‘‘I saw a movie star on my way over here,’’ Clarissa says. ‘‘I think that’s probably a good omen, don’t you?’’

Richard smiles wistfully. ‘‘Oh, well, omens,’’ he says. ‘‘Do you believe in omens? Do you think we’re taken that much notice of ? Do you think we’re worried over like that? My, wouldn’t that be wonderful? Well, maybe it’s so.’’

He will not ask the name of the movie star; he actually does not care. Richard, alone among Clarissa’s acquaintance, has no essential interest in famous people. Richard genuinely does not recognize such distinctions. It is, Clarissa thinks, some combination of monumental ego and a kind of savantism. Richard cannot imagine a life more interesting or worthwhile than those being lived by his acquaintances and himself, and for that reason one often feels exalted, expanded, in his presence. He is not one of those egotists who miniaturize others. He is the opposite kind of egotist, driven by grandiosity rather than greed, and if he insists on a version of you that is funnier, stranger, more eccentric and profound than you suspect yourself to be—capable of doing more good and more harm in the world than you’ve ever imagined—it is all but impossible not to believe, at least in his presence and for a while after you’ve left him,

6
0

tha
t he alone sees through to your essence, weighs your true qualities (not all of which are necessarily flattering—a certain clumsy, childish rudeness is part of his style), and appreciates you more fully than anyone else ever has. It is only after knowing him for some time that you begin to realize you are, to him, an essentially fictional character, one he has invested with nearly limitless capacities for tragedy and comedy not because that is your true nature but because he, Richard, needs to live in a world peopled by extreme and commanding figures. Some have ended their relations with him rather than continue as figures in the epic poem he is always composing inside his head, the story of his life and passions; but others (Clarissa among them) enjoy the sense of hyperbole he brings to their lives, have come even to depend on it, the way they depend on coffee to wake them up in the mornings and a drink or two to send them off at night.

Clarissa says, ‘‘Superstitions are a comfort sometimes, I don’t know why you so adamantly refuse all comforts.’’

‘‘Do I? Oh, I don’t mean to. I like comforts. Some of them. I like some of them very much.’’

‘‘How are you feeling?’’

‘‘Well. Quite well. A bit ephemeral. I keep dreaming that I’m sitting in a room.’’

‘‘The party’s at five, do you remember? The party’s at five, and the ceremony comes after, at eight, uptown. You remember all that, don’t you?’’

He says, ‘‘Yes.’’

Then he says, ‘‘No.’’

6
1

‘‘Whic
h is it?’’ she asks.

‘‘Sorry. I seem to keep thinking things have already happened. When you asked if I remembered about the party and the ceremony, I thought you meant, did I remember having gone to them. And I did remember. I seem to have fallen out of time.’’

‘‘The party and ceremony are tonight. In the future.’’

‘‘I understand. In a way, I understand. But, you see, I seem to have gone into the future, too. I have a distinct recollection of the party that hasn’t happened yet. I remember the award ceremony perfectly.’’

‘‘Did they bring your breakfast this morning?’’ she asks.

‘‘What a question. They did.’’

‘‘And did you eat it?’’

‘‘I remember eating it. But it’s possible that I only meant to. Is there a breakfast lying around here somewhere?’’

‘‘Not as far as I can see.’’

‘‘Then I suppose I managed to eat it. Food doesn’t matter much, does it?’’

‘‘Food matters a great deal, Richard.’’

He says, ‘‘I don’t know if I can bear it, Clarissa.’’

‘‘Bear what?’’

‘‘Being proud and brave in front of everybody. I recall it vividly. There I am, a sick, crazy wreck reaching out with trembling hands to receive his little trophy.’’

‘‘Honey, you don’t need to be proud. You don’t need to be brave. It’s not a performance.’’

‘‘Of course it is. I got a prize for my performance, you must

6
2

kno
w that. I got a prize for having AIDS and going nuts and being brave about it, it had nothing to do with my work.’’

‘‘Stop this. Please. It has everything to do with your work.’’

Richard draws and exhales a moist, powerful breath. Clarissa thinks of his lungs, glistening red pillows intricately embroidered with veins. They are, perversely, among his least compromised organs—for unknowable reasons, they have remained essentially unharmed by the virus. With that potent breath his eyes seem to focus, to gain greener depths.

‘‘You don’t think they’d give it to me if I were healthy, do you?’’ he says.

‘‘Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I do.’’

‘‘Please.’’

‘‘Well, then, maybe you should refuse it.’’

‘‘That’s the awful thing,’’ Richard says. ‘‘I want the prize. I do. It would be far easier if one cared either more or less about winning prizes. Is it here somewhere?’’

‘‘What?’’

‘‘The prize. I’d like to look at it.’’

‘‘You haven’t gotten it yet. It’s tonight.’’

‘‘Yes. That’s right. Tonight.’’

‘‘Richard, dear, listen to me. This can be simple. You can take simple, straightforward pleasure in this. I’ll be there with you, every minute.’’

‘‘I’d like that.’’

‘‘It’s a party. It’s only a party. It will be populated entirely by people who respect and admire you.’’ ‘‘Really? Who?’’

6
3

‘‘Yo
u know who. Howard. Elisa. Martin Campo.’’

‘‘Martin Campo? Oh, my lord.’’

‘‘I thought you liked him. You’ve always said you did.’’

‘‘Oh, well, yes, I suppose the lion likes the zookeeper, too.’’

‘‘Martin Campo has steadfastly published you for over thirty years.’’

‘‘Who else is coming?’’

‘‘We’ve been over and over this. You know who’s coming.’’

‘‘Tell me one more name, won’t you? Tell me the name of someone heroic.’’

‘‘Martin Campo is heroic, don’t you think? He’s sunk his entire family fortune into publishing important, difficult books he knows won’t sell.’’

Richard closes his eyes, leans his gaunt head back against the worn, oily nubble of the chair. ‘‘All right, then,’’ he says.

‘‘You don’t need to charm or entertain. You don’t need to put in a performance. These people have believed in you for a long, long while. All you have to do is appear, sit on the sofa with or without a drink in your hand, listen or not listen, smile or not smile. That’s it. I’ll watch out for you.’’

She would like to take him by his bony shoulders and shake him, hard. Richard may (although one hesitates to think in quite these terms) be entering the canon; he may at these last moments in his earthly career be receiving the first hints of a recognition that will travel far into the future (assuming, of course, there is any future at all). A prize like this means more than the notice of a congress of poets and academics; it means that literature itself (the future of which is being shaped right now) seems to feel a need for Richard’s particular contribution: his defiantly prolix lamentations over worlds either vanishing or lost entirely. While there are no guarantees, it does seem possible, and perhaps even better than possible, that Clarissa and the small body of others have been right all along. Richard the dense, the wistful, the scrutinizing, Richard who observed so minutely and exhaustively, who tried to split the atom with words, will survive after other, more fashionable names have faded.

And Clarissa, Richard’s oldest friend, his first reader—Clarissa who sees him every day, when even some of his more recent friends have come to imagine he’s already died—is throwing him a party. Clarissa is filling her home with flowers and candles. Why shouldn’t she want him to come?

Richard says, ‘‘I’m not really needed there, am I? The party can go on just with the idea of me. The party has already happened, really, with or without me.’’

‘‘Now you’re being impossible. I’m going to lose my patience soon.’’ ‘‘No, please, don’t be angry. Oh, Mrs. D., the truth is, I’m

embarrassed to go to this party. I’ve failed so terribly.’’

‘‘Don’t talk like that.’’

‘‘No, no. You’re kind, you’re very kind, but I’m afraid I failed, and that’s that. It was just too much for me. I thought I was a bigger figure than I was. Can I tell you an embarrassing secret? Something I’ve never told anyone?’’

‘‘Of course you can.’’

‘‘I thought I was a genius. I actually used that word, privately, to myself.’’

‘‘Well—’’

‘‘Oh, pride, pride. I was so wrong. It defeated me. It simply proved insurmountable. There was so much, oh, far too much for me. I mean, there’s the weather, there’s the water and the land, there are the animals, and the buildings, and the past and the future, there’s space, there’s history. There’s this thread or something caught between my teeth, there’s the old woman across the way, did you notice she switched the donkey and the squirrel on her windowsill? And, of course, there’s time. And place. And there’s you, Mrs. D. I wanted to tell part of the story of part of you. Oh, I’d love to have done that.’’