Time Travail by Howard Waldman
#3
The first time I met her was by accident. You hadn’t even told me she’d arrived. Why all that secrecy? I happened to drop by with books I thought would interest you. You hadn’t come back from your CCNY classes yet. I didn’t know your schedule. Your mother was there. She had hazel eyes and a mole on her right cheek. She told me about her, how her father was a famous mathematician. I should never talk to her about him or about her mother. She’d brought one of her father’s books with her but couldn’t understand it and was always asking you to help her with it. I was surprised at that. I hadn’t seen her as a scientific type like you. Your mother went upstairs and coaxed her out of her room. I could hear them. I stayed in the living room. She came down with a book and that cat. She was shy and didn’t talk very much although her English was good. You came back. She started asking you questions about equations, don’t ask me about those questions, it’s a language I’ve never understood. After a while I went back home with the books. They hadn’t interested you. I’d come over for nothing.
(I stand there in the middle of that other living room waiting for them to come down. In those days I’m on the friendliest of terms with mirrors and am prepared to see myself reflected in glory in her face: the tweed jacket with the bully-boy padded shoulders of the time, the buttoned-down collar with the laboriously double-knotted necessarily blue Sulka silk tie, keenly creased cream flannel cuffed trousers, correctly breaking over black shoes coaxed to soft shine. The book money is for clothes mainly.
My smile, rehearsed a hundred times, is winning. Her smile is shy and brief. Later Mrs Morgenstern mentions extensive dental work as well as the obvious other things to explain the limits of it. I get the prologue to smile plus great brown eyes for a second. Then the cat gets her mouth and gaze as she kisses its round head.
We are introduced. She has to leave the cat. I initiate the handshake, a European gesture, I know. It’s for the contact. The table is next to her but she doesn’t relinquish the book and pencil to free her right hand. She shifts them to the other hand awkwardly. Also full of awkward grace, the slight recoil of her slim body in compensation for the surrender of her hand briefly and passively in mine. Out of this. She reclaims her hand quickly. Mrs Morgenstern says that Harvey will be back any minute now. She’s wrong. I know his schedule. She praises me inaccurately to Rachel and leaves us together in the living room. She has shopping to do.
Rachel is involved silently with the cat again. I’m involved with her plain mysterious averted face. The girls I go out with never avert their faces. They give you everything in minutes and it’s nothing. Rachel keeps what she has and what she is. I’d seen that immediately on the second photo she doesn’t suspect I have in my wallet.
For the next fifteen minutes I present her with an image of myself fashioned to correspond to the image of her I’d fashioned on the basis of two photographs, one blurred. I parade Central European names and titles I’ve memorized.
She sits stiffly in her chair as though undergoing an oral examination. Oh yes, Grillparzer, Kafka, yes, she murmurs as I go on not just for the sake of my image but because that way I take her away from the cat, monopolize her docile eyes. And of course Hugo von Hoffmanstahl, I say, identifying him as the librettist of Der Rosenkavalier. Richard Strauss, she says positively, identifying the composer of the opera. That gets us (gets me) onto arduous modern Central European music I’ve listened to a few seconds on WQXR. It turns out she’s vaguely heard of Schönberg, not at all of Alban Berg. I pretend to have conquered both of those unscalable bergs.
To break the silence I fall back on easier and authentic things. I ask who she prefers, Schumann or Schubert? I think they are both very great, she says respectfully in her low voice. I have the strong impression that she doesn’t care for music any more than she does for literature. I’m left with that carefully constructed and conveyed image of myself, corresponding to nothing.
I ask about her plans and extract from her that she’s going to attend Monroe High which I’m still struggling to graduate from because of geometry. If you like, I could help you with Shakespeare, I say casually, in poor command of my heart. You’re going to have to study Shakespeare. You could help me with German. She’s politely evasive.
Now I try to construct a new more effective identity. I invite her to a baseball game at Ebbet’s Field. I say that for the naturalization test of course you have to know all the presidents of the United States chronologically but also they ask questions about the national game and they turn you down if you can’t explain “double-play” or “steal home”.
She looks very serious at that last term and her lips repeat it soundlessly. To make her laugh, the necessary first stage for contact, I pantomime the stealing of home there in the living room and nearly break a vase. Why do I clown? Does she define me as a clown? Does she define me as anything at all? She’s gone back to kissing the stupidly indifferent cat.
Now for the first time her face awakens, the inner light of the photo in my wallet, as she looks up beyond me at the doorway where Harvey is standing. Sharp, he says, taking me in. I’ve brought you books, I say. Dressed to kill, he says. Dressed to kill, he repeats, much louder, staring at her, wanting response to that. He’ll do that constantly with her: use slang expressions she can’t possibly know. Her English is very good but of the British variety. He’ll stare and stare at her for response until she has to confess her ignorance. This is the first time before me.
Dressed to kill? she confesses her ignorance now. Kill the girls he says with heavy patience. Jerry’s a girl-killer. If you’re a girl you’d better be careful. Her lips silently form the insanity in bewilderment split by a fractional second of a quick polite smile, and her plain lovely face returns to bewilderment. Then smiles a little, nods, clearly hasn’t understood. I imagine he’ll be explicit with her later. But I’ve already defined myself with Arnold Schönberg as an intellectual. Or as a clown with the theft of home.
May I show you this, Harvey? she says and abandons the cat and shows him a formula she’d worked out and says more to him in thirty seconds than she had with me in thirty minutes. I can’t understand a word she’s saying. He looks bored. He glances at me seated in the armchair and at the books on the table. He interrupts her. “Jerry’s my book-procurer. But he’s procured the wrong titles.” I know that. I pretend I don’t.
When I leave I say: “Auf Wiedersehen, Rachel.” She says: “Goodbye.”)
The new year started jerking by monotonously like an escapement-wheel. Rain-bound, I spent the days upstairs dredging up memories, paid-for written ones, also unwritten ones, paid for too, differently. I started going down to the cellar again from time to time but taking precautions. I was careful not to stay there for more than an hour at a time. I positioned myself as far away as possible from the lead-plated wall, up against the cinder-block wall. For comfort in peril I straddled a chair, crouched forward. A good part of my body was shielded by the back of the chair and half of my face by my crossed arms.
The fifth or sixth night my mother came again, supposedly. It had been very short, he said, a few seconds. She’d been in the same position, in the same striped armchair facing his mother in the flowered one. But it might have been years before the first capture or years after, he couldn’t tell. They’d always been in that position when my mother visited, saying basically the same things year in year out, he said. Anyhow I’d missed her. I must have been dozing. That week I did see fragments of his mother several times, more Christmas dinners, a cat, his father, Harvey himself in his early thirties judging by the duration of the image.
One night I brought the old Morgensterns up with me to my room once more and endured them for the sake of those five seconds of total restitution. The next morning I sensed the co-dwellers in the rooms and corridors again. But I didn’t feel my mother there. I felt the cat and Harvey’s father but not her.
Even when the physical symptoms began to set in I told myself it was just for a
I made constant efforts not to think of another, prodigious, sum of money which couldn’t be dated. I’ve always had an unsatisfactory relation to money. I recorded my outlays for each day. Certain golden days the expenditure was zero. To economize on restaurants I’d taken to bolting down what Hanna left moldering in the refrigerator. I had no idea where I would be going. I thought vaguely of a Florida beach, far from the parts where childishly clad seniors herd themselves.
But April was four thousand dollars away. Sometimes I had to get out of the house. The co-dwellers were invisible but suffocating. I felt occasional nausea and attributed it to intestinal flu picked up jogging in a snowstorm. For relief (I told myself) I went over to the other house twice a week for what Beth Anderson called our “talking sessions.” We’d created a miniature classroom situation in her living room. It had developed out of that unannounced Saturday morning visit of mine with Frost. Every week I gave her something to work on and we’d discuss it over drinks. She always dressed up for the occasion. I supplied the liquor. It was my major expenditure. For a slight woman she could put it away.
For the sake of variety the sessions sometimes included music as well as literary appreciation. Between chapters I exposed her to classical music, one movement at a time. I’d glanced at her collection of records and tried to bridge the gap with easy spectacular things like the Mahler First in Solti’s 1964 version. It lost out tremendously on her little stereo outfit. “You should hear it on my machine,” I said after the final movement. “Blasts the roof off the house with absolutely no distortion.” At the expression on her face I added: “Never after 10:00 pm, of course.” I explained to her in some detail the unique technical features of my audio system.
But mainly it was literature. I gave her short accessible things: after Frost, Winesburg, Ohio. As a joke I said I’d chosen that book because the author’s name was the same as hers. She wasn’t really an Anderson, of course. Her maiden name was hard to pronounce. She insisted on writing it out for me. It bristled with Z’s and Y’s. She was proud of her pope. Her father had come from there. Oh yes, I said, my mother too. We were practically landsleute I said. She didn’t understand the Yiddish word for fellow-countrymen. Or was it German? She thought it was Polish. Do you know Polish too? she asked.
I’d had worse students. At least she wasn’t brand-new. She brought her experience to the texts. Sometimes though this raised difficulties. Purely pedagogic difficulties, I thought at first. She tended to read her own problems in the stories. The warning signal was: “How true that is …” A musing silence. Then: “It’s like once …” And then we were out of turn-of-the-century Winesburg and into end-of-the-century Forest Hill and her husband and her son.
Sometimes the confidences were a little embarrassing. Once a scene of extramarital involvement in the book brought up: “But she’s married!” With her mid-western nasalization the word came out: “Mary-ed,” which made me think of my second ex-wife. I had been Mary-ed once too. “I never understood how a married woman could possibly do a thing like that. I was always faithful to Jack.” Then, as though I doubted or had designs, almost defiantly: “And I always will be faithful to him, no matter what. I know we’ll be together again one day.”
As the literary sessions went on, the anecdotes on her married life multiplied and seemed less and less to be digressions from the text. B. Anderson’s stories ended by blending in perfectly with S. Anderson’s. By the time – necessarily very long – we finished Winesburg, Ohio she and her husband had somehow become characters in that book of grotesques. It turned out he wasn’t a professional photographer at all. He didn’t seem to have been a professional in any field except evasion and fraud. In eighteen years of marriage he’d briefly run through scores of fragmentary occupations: car-washer, encyclopedia salesman, waiter, embalmer, diamond-pusher over the phone, clerk, I can’t remember what else.
For her it wasn’t instability but a spiritual quest. He was trying to find himself. She recounted her exploitation with indulgent nostalgic tenderness. It was outrageous, the way she wasn’t outraged about it.
For instance: how when he’d started talking about moving out she’d advanced him out of her mother’s inheritance enough money to buy a slum flat on 9th Avenue in Manhattan for meditation a couple of days a week. That way she had him the rest of the week was the idea but soon he stopped returning to Forest Hill. She couldn’t stand the idea of his living in a dirty slum. He was so hopeless with things that she’d had to come over (with take-away Chinese food) and clean up the flat and paint it for him while he lay on a sofa. To protect him against drippings while she was doing the ceiling she’d had to put a sheet over him.
“Meditating?” I asked.
“Why yes, he was,” she said. “Of course he was meditating. I did my best not to disturb him.”
Then he disappeared. When she came back from her summer holiday with her ill sister in Phoenix the flat had been sold and he had disappeared. A spiritual crisis, she supposed. She’d been worried sick.
“Did he ever give you back the money you advanced for the flat?”
She blinked. She was visibly offended at the implied blame of the man she loved. So I stopped asking questions about him even when she told me the story of the junk-jewelry she wore. The Golden Galaxy supposedly crafted them. They radiated spiritual force. He mailed them to her at irregular intervals. She sent the money to him at post-office addresses that changed quite often. Once she went to the Akron, Ohio address he’d given and stood in front of the post office all day for three days but didn’t see him even though the money was waiting for him. She wept a little telling the story.
“Did he get the money in the end?” I asked.
She blinked and didn’t answer. Couldn’t she see that, like her son, her husband was a villainous exploitive shit? She wasn’t too bad at analyzing fictional stories but F minus when it came to analyzing her own. I felt a certain pity but mainly annoyance at the way she let herself be devoured. It was also getting to be a bore. When alone with a woman in a room I wasn’t accustomed to another man barging in as he did all the time.
Finally one evening she broke off in the middle of a story-inspired confidence. Maybe my comments on Jack had been becoming too critical or else she’d observed that I wasn’t paying attention. I often had absences in that room and maybe my gaze had wandered a little. She apologized. “I must bore you. I’m always talking about myself. Not like you. You never do that. You’re a real mystery man.” And waited, expectantly. “Oh me,” I replied disparagingly and laughed and tried to steer her back to the story. She blinked and obeyed. I got to know that rapid blinking. It was a sign of something wrong: something I’d said or hadn’t said. Finally she stopped her personal digressions.
Still, she couldn’t stay confined to the printed page. “I admire her,” she exclaimed about a character one evening. “Do you mind if I ask you? Who are the ten personalities you most admire?” And without giving me a chance to say “Mozart, ten times,” recited her list. Her pope, J. F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were well positioned. Then she returned to the fiction for a second and repeated, “I really admire her. She’s so, oh, human. What are the qualities you admire most in a human being?”
Once again, before I could sidestep her question, she gave me her list. “Sincerity” came first. “Compassion” was a close second. I forget the oth
The paper characters were suffering friends for her. She prescribed remedies for their loneliness and despair. I’d listen to her for a while then try to return to what the author had written. I thought I did it gently and jokingly but she’d blink in confusion or hurt so I finally relaxed and allowed her to play her games. She just wasn’t able to take fiction as fiction. She said she felt like shaking the Winesburg characters to make them get out of themselves and live.
“A good shaking and good advice, and, oh, lots of love, of course,” she said as though she had the infallible recipe for others. She delivered lectures to them on the best way to solve their problems and asked me what I would say to so-and-so.
I felt like telling her that her approach was a heresy in terms of literary analysis. But I ended by playing her game. I had no one else to talk to that winter. The thought occurs to me now that maybe she hadn’t either. So I gave sound theoretical advice.
Sometimes I was even tempted to give her sound advice for herself, say in a detached voice so it wouldn’t seem intrusive that maybe she ought to try to cut down on the tranquilizers. You found them everywhere in that impeccably ordered house, practically in every room, as though recourse had to be instantaneous, the trip to the nearest pink-lit cabinet-chest impossibly long.
Certain evenings we did no more than three pages in as many hours. She couldn’t stay cooped up in fiction. She had her own fictions. The stories were launching pads for wild tangents to vaster things: other worlds and invisible presences. A one-line description of a starry sky and she was off there herself, into the possibility of other inhabited planets and visits from them: all those unexplained UFOs. Her husband was back with us.
Clouds, birds, aircraft, alcohol and hallucinations, I said, refuting him. I reminded her of the distances involved, so immense that they congealed into a time barrier. She nodded almost eagerly, like an attentive student when I expressed my negative certitudes. “Oh I agree, I agree,” but she ended by saying, more to herself than to me: “But there must be something.”
The death of a character in a story was a starting-point for conjectures about afterlife. When she asked me what I thought, I arrayed the scientific reasons that militated against that consolation (or horror). Again she nodded in apparent agreement but came out with a terminal: “But don’t you think there must be something?” Once she ventured a timid reproach. “Gosh, you’re not a very encouraging person.” I told her I was irrationally disturbed by the irrational.
My remark didn’t discourage her. Over the weeks I had to parry extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, “attested-to” apparitions, out-of-body experiences, telepathy, clairvoyance, the whole pathetic catalogue of yearning and abdicated intelligence. She’d apparently visited her husband’s part of the bookcase. Each time she carefully listened to my counter arguments which systematically demolished her husband’s witless utopias and nodded in unconvinced agreement.
Sometimes I got a little impatient with her digressions until I remembered that after all this wasn’t a real classroom, she wasn’t a real student and when you got down to it I wasn’t a real teacher.
So to make up for my impatience I sometimes played along, even initiated childish games myself when I’d drunk enough. Once I asked her what country she’d like to live in if she had the choice. It’s one way of measuring people, but did she have to be measured? She said: right where she was, the good old USA, but otherwise Switzerland because of the mountains, the cowbells and the cleanliness. And you? I said Italy because of the cities and the dirt. She said, of course Italy too. I guessed it was for gondoliers and her pope again. He popped up everywhere.
Another time in all innocence I proposed: “What would you do if you had a couple of hundred thousand dollars?” At first I was prepared for things like Alpine travel, horticultural splurges, a gold-plated Ouija board. Then I realized that she didn’t go in for gifts to herself. She’d give the whole sum to her husband in exchange for a truckload of mystical machine-manufactured junk jewelry.
Her face remained perfectly immobile for long seconds as in deep reflection and then disintegrated. Money couldn’t buy what she wanted, she managed to bring out and then apologized very briefly and definitively. She reached over and refilled my glass with whisky as though I were the one who needed fortifying.
I said I understood that. What I really wanted couldn’t be bought with any amount of money either. She didn’t take it up. She changed the subject like shutting a door.
What annoyed me a little about the incident was her quick apology, as though she regarded her loss of control as some sort of violation of the rules of an imposed game, a transgression of an implicit agreement between us to remain on the safe surface of things. Somehow I must have conveyed the impression that confidences were distasteful to me. I thought I concealed it more expertly. Or maybe she imagined there was an implicit obligation for reciprocity in confidences.
The incident was exceptional. It wasn’t hard to make her laugh at classroom-style quips. I still got pleasure out of making women laugh, particularly if they closed their eyes and threw their heads back doing it as this one did. It’s like a kind of surrender on their part. I could make most of the women I’d known laugh at will at the beginning of our relationship if not at the end.
Once she said I was funny for such a sad man. She said I reminded her of her grandfather. He’d been like that, funny and sad. I wasn’t pleased at the generation aspect of the comparison. For maybe the past fifteen years half of the younger women I found myself involved with stressed my resemblance to their dead fathers. It was a role that had to be accepted as the price for access. Apparently, as a grandfather figure, I had entered a new and terminal phase in my relationship with younger women, even with a woman like Beth Anderson, basically non-desirable except maybe a little, very briefly, when offering her throat in laughter or seen kneeling in a flower-bed in hot weather from the right angle.
***