White Tiger on Snow Mountain (18 page)

He took a breath. He wasn’t sure if he believed even half of what he’d said, but he was desperate and felt he had to make a play with whatever cards were left.

“I just don’t want to do nothing now and then do something worse later,” she said.

“I understand. I think you’re right.”

“You make it sound like we’re breaking up.”

“Aren’t we?”

“No.”

“OK then,” he said. “Good.”

That night, after extensive debate, Jack and Janet will agree to begin talking to other people without telling each other about it, but also not to proceed to sleeping with anyone without further talks. And just as Jack predicted, over the following weeks she’ll receive a staggering amount of eager male attention while he awkwardly attempts to chat up a few women. However, she will also prove the more jealous, jealous even of his (entirely feigned) lack of jealousy, and though he specifically asks her not to, she will tell him all about the men pursuing her and insist on knowing everything about the one poor girl who actually seems interested in a fling with Jack, cyberstalking her and carrying on about what a skank she is until finally Jack will have to tell the girl he can’t talk anymore. They will decide to go back to normal, but normal will be gone, they can’t unknow what they now know about each other, or themselves, and finally Janet will say she needs some time apart, to think, and they’ll separate, though they will still talk on the phone about maybe having kids one day, and meanwhile Jack will try to reconnect with that skanky girl, who will refuse to answer his texts, till at last he somehow ends up as the jealous stalker, tracking her and Janet both, living in dread of the day when she will, inevitably, tell him she has found someone new.

But all of that was yet to come. By the time Jack and Janet finished talking that night, it was very late and they were exhausted. They crawled under the covers, his arms around her
waist, and Jack fell into a deep but dream-troubled sleep. In the dream, he was going to see Janet at her place in Brooklyn. He got out of bed, dressed, walked to the subway, and got on. Looking back, the only suspicious thing was that it was dark and there were no people and no traffic, not a soul in sight, yet the train came right away. He entered an empty car. He rode a long time, rattling through the tunnels, the glaring lights stinging his tired eyes. Then somewhere under the river, the conductor came through and asked for his ticket. He handed over his MetroCard, and the conductor swiped it between the fingertips of his gloved hand. Sorry, he said, you are dreaming. You won’t be allowed to exit. Jack was confused. He was only a few stops from Janet’s. But you’re sleeping, the conductor explained. Go home and try again.

So he got off at the next stop and crossed the platform, where another train was waiting, and rode the empty car back uptown. He walked through the empty streets, passed his snoring doorman, and took the elevator upstairs. He took his clothes off and climbed into bed with Janet, who lay naked and curled on her side, and he cuddled up to her, nose behind her ear, breathing in her scent, which he knew so well but could never describe or even imagine until he held her again and closed his eyes.

Then the phone buzzed and woke him. It was Janet, texting again, asking him to come to her place, and again he got dressed and left. Again the train was there and, rushing through the turnstile, he jumped on just as the doors slid shut. But somehow he must have drifted off, because the next thing he knew, the conductor was shaking him and demanding his ticket. Confused, he fumbled in his wallet and his MetroCard fell out, fluttering like a leaf in midair until the conductor caught it in a
gloved hand. Sorry, he said. You’re sleeping. No one can exit on the other side until they are awake.

This went on, repeating a hundred times, a thousand, one of those dreams that last lifetimes and leave you more exhausted than when you went to sleep, until finally I woke up and was shocked to see that it wasn’t even day yet. Why was I up? Then I realized my girlfriend was awake and sitting at my computer, her face lit in a window of blue.

“What’s going on?” I asked in utter confusion.

She looked at me. She was crying. “What is this?” she asked. “What are you writing?”

Had I left some email open? Some old note to a girl? My mind searched the darkness above me, wheeling over the walls. “What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

“Who are Jack and Janet?” she asked. “What is happening to us? Is this the end?”

“I don’t know,” I said, but as I rushed across to hold her, I knew it was not. This was the beginning.

Retrospective

1

On October 21, 2004, I saved my friend J’s life. Well, maybe not saved, “saved” is a bit strong, but I reacted favorably in a clutch moment and removed her from harm’s path, although as it happens there was no real chance of harm. (Her name is Jenny, by the way, but so is my sister’s, and my dear old friend’s and my recent ex-lover’s, so best to call this semifictional character based on the real person J.) In any case I was happy, happier than I’d been in a long time. I was back in New York after years in Los Angeles; I was just emerging from a painful and exhausting divorce; I was in graduate school, a student again, finishing a long-paused doctorate in comparative literature (at times this felt ridiculous since I was in my thirties and had spent the last decade imitating various sober professionals, sometimes even in a tie, but that day it felt great to be in a place where everyone at least pretended to take books and culture seriously). It was a crystalline autumn day, with superfine white sunshine dissolving in a pure sky and firing the edges of the leaves, and I was accompanied by a beautiful woman, my
friend J. We were pals only, I will make that clear, but it was a pleasure to walk through that air speaking to her, she was brilliant as well as lovely, and we’d just had lunch (a pretty good lunch special at a so-so Japanese restaurant) and were heading back to class, and she had just been teasing me about my terrible math skills and general frivolousness with money (there’d been four of us at lunch, and I’d pronounced a total of thirty-six dollars to be indivisible by four, suggesting we round up to forty for convenience). Anyway we were laughing together about me, which was fair enough, but it was the lightness of it that delighted me, the fact that we were laughing lightly about me, when all I had done for months and months was feel grim and serious about me (I had still laughed then, but grimly). I felt that, against all odds, my life might turn out all right after all. It still wasn’t too late.

The spiritually advanced are always pointing out to the rest of us how only the present moment exists. This is true of course—the past is gone, and so not worth feeling resentful or regretful over, and the future is, famously, unknown, thus not worth fearing or worrying about (unless what you fear happens to be the unknown)—but what I want to point out is a less comforting corollary of this assertion: If only this moment, here, now, exists, then everything, everyone, everywhere else does not. Your childhood, your old friends, the sex you had last night, your husband or wife, your own children, the person you just hung up with when you called into work to say you were running late: all gone. And since you yourself are constantly becoming, reemerging as it were from darkness into the light of each moment, so too the person you were back in grade school, the person you were yesterday, or even a moment ago, is also
vanished, lost to who you are now. You are trapped in the present. Your connection to others, to the past, even your own continuation as a human being (the “being” part, I suppose), it is all a matter of memory really. Slip for a second on the ice of the mind, as when you space on a name or forget where you parked the car, and you might be lost forever.

Thus is each moment a risk, each breath and thought a gamble, a play in the game of fate, and even as one steps off a curb on the Upper West Side, a little late for class at 2:01 on a beautiful fall afternoon, the dice are tumbling, sparkling like diamonds in fortune’s crooked eyes.

That’s when the accident occurred. Right at that moment, when J and I were about to cross the street, laughing at how bad I am at math, two cars collided in front of us, one that had been in the middle of Broadway, trying to turn onto 116th, and one that was proceeding downtown. I didn’t actually see it. I heard it, the scream of tearing steel. I felt it, a shudder in the air, a blurry rush, the blow, and I jumped, my left hand instinctively shooting out to grab J’s right arm and pull her with me back onto the curb. And from inside that tiny split second, due perhaps to some affinity, some analogy or alignment, or else due to the violence, the rift and rupture, I was transported back in time.

2

I did not get very far. I traveled approximately three thousand miles and seventeen months, five days, two hours to Los Angeles, May 2002. I was driving my car, the Volvo sedan that now, as far as I know, belongs to my ex-wife, and she, still my wife
for a little while longer, was beside me. We were in downtown LA. The light was warm, yellow, dense LA light, not at all like the pale fall light of New York. This was thick sunshine, layered like butter across the dusty windshield, dazzling and dancing in my eyes like a constellation of motes. (Of course I immediately forgot where, and when, I’d come from, forgot the future, though I felt a pang, the pull of losing time.) We were smiling, laughing, chatting, but unlike in the New York moment with J, I was not content or at ease. I was nervous and edgy and a little ill. Why? I was on a date. Sort of.

I don’t know if anyone is ever really comfortable on a date, I’m certainly not, but this date was extra awkward, extra weird and disorienting, because it was with my wife. We had been living apart for some months, attending couple’s counseling and trying to see, sometimes desperately, sometimes despairingly, if our marriage was still salvageable. One of the counselor’s suggestions, along with the lists and books and positive mental exercises, was to go on dates, to rekindle the romance by going out to have fun together and relax and, for once, meet without discussing what was wrong with our lives and whose fault (mine) it might be.

For our date, I had chosen a trip to MOCA, LA’s museum of contemporary art, then I believe still referred to as the Temporary Contemporary since its new headquarters was being built. We were seeing the Lucian Freud retrospective. I didn’t really know much about his work at the time. I was aware of him mainly because of his grandfather (Sigmund), his close friendship with Francis Bacon (I admired both Sigmund and Francis very much), and his use of Leigh Bowery (the enormous and thrilling performance artist) as a model. Still I was
intrigued by what I’d heard and it was the sort of thing that my wife had once liked to do with me, so I proposed and she accepted. It was a Saturday afternoon. I drove to our house, where she was staying (alone, I thought, but in fact she was already dating her yoga instructor, a disturbingly muscular blond woman), and we took her car (this being the new car, the Volvo sedan, which had somehow ended up as hers despite the fact that we’d bought it to replace my old Audi), but I drove. I always drove, by her choice and to my relief. I was a much better driver.

The paintings were hung more or less chronologically and, not being an especially knowledgeable or subtle observer of art, I didn’t really get them at first. They looked like pretty standard realistic likenesses, slightly stiff perhaps and with none of the conceptual flash or stylistic personality I usually admired. Also, in my defense, I will remind you that I was distracted to say the least. There she was, my little wife, the source of all my joy and grief, my comedy and drama, for the last seven or so years, a person I’d woken up next to thousands of times, and now I had no idea what to say to her, or even whether I should take her hand. So much for the “date” idea. What the shrink forgot to figure into her scheme was that everyone hates going on dates. The incredible awkwardness, as though you were suddenly dropped from outer space into your own body and didn’t know where your hands went (pockets? crossed? twisting the museum brochure to bits?) or how to stand or what your own laugh was supposed to sound like. (Mine was much too loud now, bursting through the museum like a barking dog.) Maybe
the shrink’s real plan was to scare us straight. Just settle for each other, she was saying. It’s still way better than trying again with someone else.

But in some ways the woman I found beside me was already someone else, as ungraspable as the painted women on the wall,
Girl with Roses,
or
Girl with Hand Around a Kitten’s Throat,
with their oversized liquid green eyes and side-parted hair, their looks of alarm and allure, of hungry curiosity mingled with terror and tears.

Had she always been this small? How could such a little person cause me such big trouble? She wore a light skirt, thin socks, cute shoes, a necklace I’d never seen before, a long chain dangling before her low-buttoned blouse. Her shoulders seemed like a sparrow’s, her head tiny and perfect as a newborn’s. She was very tan, like fresh-roasted coffee beans, from a girls-only bonding retreat to the desert she’d just been on, to help her get in touch with her feelings about me, accompanied by the woman I didn’t know then was already her new lover. I read the names of the pictures from the strangled brochure. She nodded and pretended to look. We talked about the weather and a sick friend. (The friend died a few weeks later after a long, drawn-out battle with lung cancer. I remember our last visit to her hospital room, again as a kind of official or ceremonial couple who no longer slept in one bed. The friend’s ex-lover arrived, yelled at the staff, and then told us, tearfully, “I begged her to get a Jewish doctor. Begged!” No one else present seemed surprised by this medical assessment. I was the only Jew there. Did people in Beverly Hills think we were magic?) In the bright light of the white-walled museum, my wife noticed
fresh veins of gray in my hair. (Now it is the black that runs in streaks through the gray.)

Then we wandered across a threshold and reality struck. Reality in this case was a huge naked man seen from behind, squatting on a red plush stool, a meat mountain fissured at the base by a hairless, chapped ass crack and topped by a smooth round head. (The model was Leigh Bowery, who shaved his whole body for showbiz reasons.) Yet this raw reality, encountered in the flesh, is (in reality) not flesh at all but paint, and that fact is made plain as well: Every stroke, every brush, every line is visible. There is no illusion. Just paint pushing itself as it strains to realize, to understand reality, to register the actuality of flesh, of meat and skin and plenty of blubber, sagging, stretching, peeling, pulsing, beating and bursting, alive and also dying, cracking, flaking, sinking and subsiding into decayed matter. (As it happens, this death was already inside and growing. Unknown to the painter, the model had contracted the HIV that would slay him.) Those organic and biological truths are not the whole, though they are the first and the last, aren’t they? They are primary, and that is why only a very shallow mind indeed considers these matters, these merely fleshly matters, shallow. Why would he need to transcend this? What is more profound than the painter’s mother’s lined and noble brow, her closed mouth set in the thousand sittings he did with her as she traveled toward death, his grown daughters’ vaginas and thatchy pits, his dog asleep on the bare floor, his own naked ghost in unlaced boots, like a tattered veil of splotchy paint that appears in a mirror, holding a palette and knife? But not just those animal facts are attended to (an ass that surely farts and possibly
accepts cocks, shoulders that could bear a world); you can see that bald head thinking. The eyes, in the painting where he is cast back naked on the floor, leg up, thick dick draped on fat thigh, sad shriveled sack dangling like soft walnuts—those blue eyes have another world behind them. What is it? How can the artist know? He can’t and won’t lie, won’t surmise or presume. But he can see it’s there, like a shadow behind a screen if he peers hard enough. He does. He looks hard enough. Many, many times, and for each glance a stroke and for each stroke he mixes his colors fresh. (Every time, he does this. He thinks and plans and tries once more, with each touch of brush to canvas, to get it right.) Ten thousand strokes are ten thousand shots at trying to see what is right there before us right now.