Interesting, but why—
Except for some Holy Fool at court who is heard lamenting Russia’s fate as the curtain comes down. Lots of Holy Fools in Russia in those days. You get Fools in Shakespeare too but they’re not particularly holy. A Russian Fool is automatically holy. He was drunk, of course.
The Fool?
Martha’s large husband. Sprawled in an armchair in full czarist regalia, dethroned as Boris Godunov, dethroned as Martha’s husband. Because I knew she wasn’t there, not with the house in this condition. Not with him in this condition. I didn’t know opera singers owned their costumes — they don’t, do they? Yet there he was in that heavy tapestry robe and that knitted crown they affected with the jeweled trimming and the little cross on top. He lifted his glass: To The Pretender, he said, looking at me, and then because he hiccupped his arm jerked back and the contents of his glass made a lovely arc through the air and hit his portrait on the wall behind him, splashing over his face made up as Boris Godunov so that the painting seemed to be shedding tears.
Did this really happen?
What?
Your impulsively going to New Rochelle because you’d heard Boris Godunov on the radio and then finding this czarist simulacrum lying around drunk?
I’m not angry at you for asking that question because I hardly believed it myself standing there in that dark living room, which incidentally was unheated, which may have been the reason Martha’s large husband had put on that heavy regalia complete with that watch cap of a crown. And, after all, might he not have been listening with some bitterness to the same Saturday broadcast? I stood over him as he looked at me with bleary half-focused eyes. He had lost weight and was no longer the intimidating figure he’d been. He’d been a big humpy manatee of a man, huge and sleek. No more. The double chin, the wide face, the big head, it was all thinned out now, the physiognomy, with his jawline like a wishbone and the hollow cheeks with eyes staring up at me that belonged to a very sick man. I found myself furious, totally unsympathetic, and spoke to him as one speaks to a drunk.
Where is she, where’s Martha, goddamn you, where’s my child?
He staggered to his feet and began to sing the dying scene in his raspy bass, holding his arms out to me.
I ran upstairs, looked in all the rooms. An empty crib, open empty drawers, empty closet. In the master bedroom a rumpled bed, one closet with just the hangers hanging there. On the floor, some scraps of paper. A folded-up bus schedule. Ras-chee-chev. Ras-chee-chev. [thinking] Listen, I want to correct the wrong impression I may have given you about my feelings for Briony.
Wait a minute — what did you do then?
What?
After you found Martha gone.
I caught the last train back to Washington. That poor drunk had no more idea where she was than I did. He couldn’t even tell me how long she’d been gone. I had the feeling looking around that it had been a while. Of course the kid would be safe with her. She’d left her piano. It was still there in the study. That meant to me Willa was now her life. But there was no rush, this was not an emergency, if I hadn’t impulsively taken that trip I would really have been in the dark. So relatively speaking I was up on things.
And there was a little bit of relief there too, do you suppose?
Well, why not? I’m not ashamed to say it. What is more daunting than a judgment in the eyes of a child? It would come eventually, inevitably. It just wouldn’t be now. But I was trying to tell you something.
Yes?
See, the door was open and there I stood. So to a man, an opera singer costumed as Boris, and seriously drunk, singing the role there in his living room — what could be more reasonable than for Boris to see the fellow standing at the door as the Pretender Grigoriy, with his Polish-Lithuanian army, arrived to take the crown. I had thought he was talking about me, and maybe he was but somehow now also putting me in the opera. I was the false claimant to the throne, you see?
Was he that drunk?
Drunk or not, he was in the play, casting me as the enemy. Some basis for that in my being Martha’s ex. And yes he found just the term, plucked it out of Russian operatic history maybe by way of a deeper recognition. At the root, Andrew is The Pretender, OK? Is that what you want to hear? You’ve interrupted my train of thought. You guys aren’t supposed to do that.
But this is important, don’t you think? Didn’t he make you mad?
Listen, he knew I did cog science. He was not unintelligent. When I left he was singing his heart out to me, following me to the door. So don’t jump to conclusions. I felt sorry for him, to tell you the truth. He kissed me on the top of my head. And then he got down on his knees and begged for my blessing. That’s what Boris does in the opera, he begs for the blessing of the Holy Fool who stands in his mind for all of Russia. So I was no longer the Pretender to the throne. I had been recast as the Holy Fool. Or he might have been acknowledging me as one Pretender to another. After all he couldn’t exclude himself pretending to be the rightful czar. You weren’t there. We were brothers under the skin.
So it was a reprieve, is that what you’re saying? You were absolved of being Andrew the Pretender?
We’re all Pretenders, Doctor, even you. Especially you. Why are you smiling? Pretending is the brain’s work. It’s what it does. The brain can even pretend not to be itself.
Oh? What can it pretend to be, just by way of example?
Well, for the longest time, and until just recently, the soul.
I may have given you the wrong impression about my feelings for Briony. But for that moment in California as we left her parents’ house, and perhaps a few others, my love was as pure and uncomplicated as never before in any attachment I had had to a woman. I haven’t told you about my relationships, some of them seemingly strong. But never uncomplicated.
Before your marriage to Martha?
And after. Trouble with all of them is that I was always myself. With Briony I was the person I’d always dreamt of being. For a person congenitally unable to be happy, I was, with Briony, happy. Happiness consists of living in the dailyness of life and not knowing how happy you are. True happiness comes of not knowing you’re happy, it’s an animal serenity, something between contentment and joy, a steadiness of the belonged self in the world. Of course I’m talking about life in the developed Western world. A modest busyness in the routine of life, a satisfaction with your lot, the deliciousness of sex and food and fine weather. You don’t just love the person you love, you love the given world. A feeling possibly induced by endomorphin, the brain’s opiate. I know, there it is again, the cephalic instruction. But so what! As we crossed the country there were snow mountains for the skiers, white-water runs for the rafters, free rides everywhere you looked. We drove one day along a field where in the distance balloonists had convened. We pulled over to watch this languid flotilla of rainbowed sky ships risen into their own blithe sense of time and space. We discussed the possibility that Americans more than any other people understand what the earth and sky have to offer. At these moments life was what it was and nothing more, it was exactly what it seemed to be with nothing behind it. A presiding belief in the future, all the synapses afire as if to make a metaphysical music and you are blissfully existing in the consciousness of the customary given world as the only reality. And of course the guilt is gone. The fear that was your old self. All that, I say, is what Briony did for me. My delight in everything everywhere on that trip was essentially the joy of being with her, the fact that she was with me — everything about her — her thoughtfulness, how she confronted you with her eyes, her laugh, the simplicity of her self-attentions — she wasn’t much for makeup, never primped, her hair was brushed, sometimes tied behind the neck, sometimes not. Just by the way she casually fixed her hair she suggested the different aspects of her being. When we fell silent during a stretch of straight road that went on for miles, she sat with her arms crossed, or looked for music on the radio. She was in charge of the music and decided I had a lot to learn, which was true, I’d never gotten beyond the Beatles and the Grateful Dead. (Oh, she said, you mean The Dead.) I wasn’t afraid for her, she would never be a victim of The Pretender. I was through with him. I was transmogrified, I was on my way to Holy Fooldom.