The Syme Papers (32 page)

Well, the party began. I accepted a glass from somewhere and drank unlooking and the joyful fizz ran right up my nose; found myself chatting to a rather serene lady, Bunyon’s wife, Marian – a sculptress who worked a great deal in asphalt. An unruffled gentlewoman, with broad, leonine cheeks, little cupid-bow lips,
dabbed pink, plucked brows, and startled blue eyes gently preserved from wrinkles by a slight plumping over the years. She emitted a soft scent of pancake powder. ‘Horrible man‚’ she whispered to me, unperturbed, gesturing towards her husband. ‘Come and talk to me in the shade. I know exactly who you are, by the way. Don’t think I don’t. We’ve met dozens of times. Remind me.’

‘Pitt‚’ I said, pushing out a rotted bench on the patio and easing her into it. ‘Doug Pitt. I’ve been away, all year, on a Fulbright as it happens. Toot my own horn, hey? It’s big enough, ha, ha.’ I confess to you, innocently, happily, how much I love these occasions, and the difficult delicate nonsense they require: the subtle puffing and expanding of our notions and our natures, the broadening, the unbuttoning. Oh, those colourful balloons of conversation we blow up and burst or let loose, to watch them drift above our ordinary lives, pushed this way or that, by the intimate breezes that spring up in a crowd of people.

‘And
who
is Doug Pitt?’ she said, touching a speck of ash from the swelling curve of her nostril. ‘
What
is Doug Pitt?’

‘A Symist‚’ I answered without thinking.

‘And what is a Symist?’

‘Someone who believes’, I babbled, Lord knows why, simply because the words tumbled off my tongue, as they do only when the heart is happy and full, ‘that the one fact indisputably true of every child (and every nation, for that matter) at its birth is this: that all the world is wrong, and we must look for ourselves to see what is right.’ I stopped there, curious to observe the effect of my borrowed speech, curious to discover how an outsider (that is, to speak plainly, anyone other than Friedrich Müller, Tom Jenkyns, Doug Pitt) might be struck by Syme’s braggadocio.

(I could see Susie across the yard engaged in earnest talk with Bunyon himself, the two of them partly obscured by the billows of smoke that sprung up whenever Bunyon prodded a piece of meat between the bars of the grill, or dropped his tongs, or spilled his marinade over the coals. He stood with his back to me, hunched slightly to attend my little wife, who touched his elbow as she insisted upon this or that. Her broad bottom wriggled in what I
always called her
tennis
skirt – a pleated lavender cotton number that fell just to the sweet plump roll of pink above her knees. I have told her, again and again, that she is the waspiest Jewish mother I know, that she buzzes practically and nests in flowers and swishes her striped behind behind her. But she insists, on the contrary, it is all the rage now on the Upper East Side – worn ironically and complemented by a blue hair-band smoothing out her bangs.)

This was the maiden mention of my great discovery, my first public outing, and I felt a queer flutter of nerves – even our thoughts are debutantes once, and want dressing up, and flattery. Marian seemed to ignore me, in her powdered serenity, remarking instead in a heavy whisper, ‘This is the second bar-becue mitzvah I’ve been to this year. We got the idea from the Heinzelmans. The whole thing started in Atlanta, I believe – two law students at Emory who wanted to make a quick buck.’ Then she added, without skipping a beat, ‘My father was a Symist, I believe.’

‘No, no‚’ I began to explain, somewhat taken aback, ‘by which I mean …’ This was a great phrase of mine of the moment – I seemed always to be explaining by sub-clauses and exceptions, adding and qualifying. ‘By which I mean that the great mass of men quite deliberately aim to fail – we don’t fall short, we
aim
short. We are little conscious’ – I was however
quite
conscious of the fact that I had risen to my pompous best – ‘of the extent to which failure teaches us where to look and when to stop – it is the edge of the page on which we write – often the ruled lines, too. We check our stride, and never know till the end of the day how much – until turning home bone-weary. It is a physical fact’ – this seemed to impress me a great deal at the time, and I hoped to impress upon her the depth of my impression – ‘that we tire largely because we hold back, inhibit, rein in. A loose, lengthened stride, shook free, travels twice as far. I beg you to make the experiment. A Symist, in other words, is anyone who walks at his full gait.’

‘That’s just what I mean‚’ she continued, unperturbed. ‘Belonged to a gentleman’s club called the Atalantans, which met,
suitably, I believe, in a bleak basement off 4th Avenue near Grand Central. Had a view outside of the garbage cans from the Korean restaurant next door. They believed in a series of prehistorical civilizations lost in some great flood, and hoped to prove it, too, diving for ruins off the coast of India – only they never got the chance, it seemed, or the money, and got mostly drunk, instead. They were all men. It seems to me there are a lot of Symists about. What are you in for?’

A slight billow of powdered scent, a gentle settling of the bosoms, a sigh, and she lifted her eyebrows at me to attend.

‘I discovered a fellow‚’ I said, breathing slowly, at what proved to be my first public …
admission
of Syme, ‘an old army lieutenant from the 1820s making his way through the ranks – till he gave it all up for science. He spent his life on a moment of inspiration – he thought he could prove that the earth was hollow.’

(Susie was listening to Bunyon now, ducking her head from time to time. Yes, yes, she seemed to say, I know, but what can I do? Then they stood silently together – I liked this least of all. A pocket had formed about them, waiting with an expectant air. Bunyon ignored them and resumed, gesturing widely with a burned stick and rubbing his free hand against his apron. Then he looked round suddenly and fell quiet – there was a general laughter. He began to heap paper plates with ribs, brisket, vinegar coleslaw, summoning the masses with a long flailing arm. He always had an air of talking undaunted, unabated, to inattentive crowds.)

‘I’m working a great deal in brine right now‚’ Marian said, in answer to some question I had no doubt forgotten to ask. ‘Making wonderful progress. I’ve always had this idea that people find sea water soothing. Not the sea, you understand – that’s the common mistake. Sea
water.
Just the smell of it. I’m thinking in fountains – it seems as good a place to think as any. Asphalt and brine. New and old symbols, archetypes in their way, of the open spaces – freedom, that’s the kind of thing.’

I said, ‘Can I bring you a plate of something? A beer?’

She said, ‘Was he right, this Lieutenant Syme?’

Well, I thought, that’s the $64,000 question.

‘He had his … moments‚’ I replied. ‘One
supreme
moment. Yes‚’ I added, warming to my theme, rubbing Pitt’s palms together locked by thumbs, ‘in time, perhaps with your husband’s help, I hope to show – I hope to
prove
–
yes, that he
was
right.’

Marian wasn’t listening much. There was something immovable about her, something grand and immovable, and simple talk couldn’t budge her. She had to get somewhere in her own head first.

‘I suppose there
are
a lot of Symists about‚’ she said at last. And then added, quaintly, enormously girlish, ‘Please, one beer.’

‘Yes‚’ I said, ‘I suppose there are. My own father’, I added, considering the matter for the first time, ‘had more than a touch of … Syme about him. He worked in construction and believed that a great deal of scaffolding was unnecessary, bulky and awkward and beside the point. “Why,” he told me repeatedly, “a
rope’s
scaffolding, anything’s scaffolding, that’s all. There’s nothing wonderful about scaffolding” – and he hoped, some day, to design a sleeker, lighter, lovelier support for the buildings in the world that needed attention. He devoted himself indeed (at some personal cost) to his private speculations.’

‘A beer‚’ Maid Marian said, primping her lips together, as if to say she didn’t mean to insist.

More and more this seemed to me a tale of fathers.

They brought out Chinese lanterns after sunset, until the mosquitoes came in to feast. Someone put on a record and Susie tried to get us all to dance. She was drunk by this time, and whenever she was drunk she became extraordinarily – happy. Bunyon took her up and the two of them trotted through the flickering shadows to great applause. (Susie told me afterwards, ‘It can’t hurt, can it? I do my bit towards your career. I understand what these things are about – people – personal people.’) She had to drop him quite soon, however, when his legs grew dangerous – and I held my ground when she took my hand, and there the dancing ended.

We lost Aaron for a while. He had snuck through the bamboo border into the neighbours’ yard and spent all afternoon on their
leafy trampoline, flinging himself just above the bamboo tops when the bounce rang true, till he could see the fleeting heads next door, a brief vision swiftly swallowed in the scratchy green leaves. Then it grew dark and the girl who owned the trampoline came back from ballet lessons and discovered him, and the two of them went inside to play computer games. Someone must have given Ben a sip of punch or swig of beer, for he began to tap the larger members of the party on the hip (or whatever piece of their anatomy he could reach) and declare, bright and brisk, ‘Look out, tall man, lightning will hit your shoulder.’ Utterly ignorant of the source of this peculiar prophecy, I heard him moving through the crowds throughout the evening, bent on his mission. Perhaps a certain worry over height inspired him (Aaron, for one, towered above him), and an intimacy with afflicted limbs. He never varied the message, considering I suppose that it could not be improved upon; and he never tired of it, either, believing his duty to be sacred, and his victims grateful for such practical advice. Nor did he seem to think anyone could ever be told enough. If someone had been warned before, so much the better; perhaps this time they’d pay attention – though, to do him justice, he appeared to be always on the lookout for fresh prey. Only when he tapped Marian Bunyon on her considerable midriff and called out in the ringing tones of utter certainty, ‘Look out, tall man, lightning will hit your shoulder‚’ did Susie (suddenly out of spirits) choose to bring his evening to a close.

I was never easy to wrench away from an academic party, but Susie gathered the boys about her, and, prying me free at last, offered our farewells. ‘In the morning‚’ Bunyon whispered in my ear, confidentially, almost sweetly, though it sent the blood racing to my tingling fingers, ‘we’ll talk. Stop by my office. In the morning.’

We discovered the rabbi sitting in his car as we stumbled to our own. I tapped on the window to offer my farewells. He lowered it quickly, said, ‘Seventeen-seven’ – the score, I presumed, of the great contest between the Sooners of Oklahoma and the Longhorns of Texas – and raised it again, staring at the motionless road. Perhaps this was not the first time someone had disturbed him.

I knew Susie would be unhappy when we got home, drunk and unhappy, which is always worse than either state alone. Such reminders of ordinary neighbourly Jewish life always upset her, especially such queer and altered scenes, such estranged familiarity – not to mention the sudden return to the solitude of
us,
the four of
us.
‘Who ever heard’, she asked, deliberately slurping her words, letting her insobriety loose at last, after an evening of social restraint, ‘of a bar-becue (fucking) mitzvah? Who ever heard of that?’ she cried (even in her lightened state,
mouthing
the offensive term), as we stepped out of the car into the driveway and the thick of the evening again.

‘Hush‚’ I said, ‘in front of the boys.’

‘Do you ever want’, Aaron asked, lost in his own considerations, ‘to pee for hours? Just to stand there peeing watching the puddle grow?’

‘I will not hush‚’ Susie declared, ‘with or without boys.’

‘I can‚’ Ben whispered, to tease his older brother. ‘I can pee for as long as I want. I can pee for a whole day.’ Ben had a great sense of untruth, which came to him naturally, amused him endlessly by its possibilities. Aaron had a literal mind. The truth never worried him, never seemed to fall short. It was Ben who took after his father.

‘Hush, hush, hush‚’ Susie echoed, mocking. ‘Hush, hush.’

‘I’ll let you watch me, Aaron, if you want to. If you really want to‚’ Ben offered, scratching a tickle in his neck with his crooked arm.

‘You can’t, so that’s that‚’ Aaron said. Isn’t it, Mom?’

Hush, his mother said. Hush, hush.

When we got them to bed at last, I took her hand on the rustling couch while the crickets bowed and bowed outside, sounding like heartache. ‘What did he say to you?’ I asked. ‘What did Bunyon say to you about the Syme Papers? Had he read it?’

Susie was sober again and very tired and somewhat ashamed of herself and took her hand away from me. It was only ten or ten-thirty, but the chime of a hangover rang in her ears already; she suffered the sleeplessness that has missed its bedtime and must wait for another.

‘He hasn’t finished it. That’s not what we talked about.’

‘I didn’t know how much it meant to me, until today‚’ I said, beginning again, following another thought. ‘How common it is. We are all a little given to mad ideas,
contra
mundum
and all that. Anyone, at least‚’ I added, ‘who spends a year alone. Mostly alone.’

‘I said I was worried about you; and he said he knew, he was worried about you, that as things stood …’ The sprinklers came up, and I could hear the sweet hiss in the grass, the gardens whispering to one another. ‘I said I didn’t want to follow you around and around going from bad jobs to worse.’

‘How wonderful‚’ I said, only half-listening, ‘the thought of going anywhere. I got an email, Susie, incidentally, from a gentleman at Barcelona, the University of Barcelona, who said –’

‘I don’t want to go to Barcelona.’

‘Only a thought. Well, it doesn’t matter anyway, after Syme, after Bunyon reads Syme. When he finishes it.’