Whenever you’re faced with the dead and forced to speak in a voice not your own.
— John Domini
An Encounter
Did you tell him there were heavy tornado warnings? Did you tell him snow was expected? Did it ever make it? Did you describe the coastal hurricane? And the high pressure, could he relate to that?
Did you tell him you had read all his books? Did you tell him you had understood all his books? Did you confess to not understanding one? Didn’t you have one read to you? Does it make it any easier to understand? Did you tell him it doesn’t?
How well do you smile? That well? Did this communicate?
Did he respond to the new oil problem? Did he suggest old oil? Mention India? New Orleans? Was it, in his opinion, murder or democracy sales? That is, good for democracy sales? Isn’t he opposed to democracy sales, quivering excitedly when it’s mentioned, like someone hitting the old oil again? Did he demand you take down a call, his call to the people? You told him to get himself some other wimp, didn’t you? “Fetch Bas!” for example?
Did you tell him your father invented the pedal steel guitar? Did you tell him your mother read in her sleep? 85 % retention? Did you try the brother business? Did he think it was important? Did you mention your sister, who never — not once—made an irrational decision? Whose family is interesting? Did you ask him that?
And then did you tell him you liked sex? Did you like sex? And now? Did you mention that thing about ribbed, button-up sweaters? How well do you smile?
Was God invoked?
Or only the famous? Handel, Abba Eban, Dorothy Day? Did he make a response? Botticelli? Or no games? Did Gustave Flaubert find a place? Was the difference between the number of famous you could summon up and the number he could summon up sufficiently exciting? Painful? Is pain still the only form of excitement in social encounters? Did you relate the meaningless advice of Erasmus’s fool? Is Erasmus still broad enough to block further progress down a conversational route?
Did you tell him you harbored his books? What was his response? Did he appear creative, as the long afternoon of his life drew to a close, still creative, bowling everyone over, corrupting the waiters and bartenders, menacingly creative? Did you ask him when he was going to write his second book, now that he had written his first one four times? He wasn’t yawning then, was he?
Did you tell him he was a wretched goon-pig, as the hostess’s look trembled? Did you take the rings off your fingers and heave them in his face, crying, “There, that’s what you Yanks like,” crying, “Eat gold, Judas,” while the host gestured to his sons? Did you explain at the top of your lungs that he had stolen everything he had ever written, while he removed his glasses and with a white hand tucked his hair behind his ear? Did you continue explaining, “His work is so full of a borrowed cup here, a borrowed cup there, that if you dropped one of his books you would hear the sound of breaking porcelain”? Did you hurl him into the cold, unlit fireplace? How did you do with the host’s sons? And the hostess — into the fireplace?
What was his response? What happened? To five of the people with whom you discussed this encounter, did it seem rewarding? To three? Why bother about response? Most people were kind, weren’t they, rationalizing, saying, “It’s hard to talk in a snowstorm,” that sort of thing? Can response be categorized at all? Isn’t his response to your opening tip of the head a completely separate world from his response to your final goodbyes? Can there be such a thing as an entire response, certifiable as a receipt, or are there merely unrelated manifestations of a very simple, unconsidered awareness? And what does it matter? How many friends simply said you were left with a horse on you? Did you say there was another point they had left lying around, unnoticed? Did you take up this point, the point that the important thing is making an impression? Remaining unforgettable? Don’t these so-called “friends” realize how exciting, in his eyes, you might now be? “Watch out — this new one, needs polish — but so young! Devastating moves!”—could they relate to that? Could you? What point then, noting his response? What point caring? How subtly do you smile? What point, unless…you began with some idea in mind? Did you have something like that, some little personal device you wanted to leave him with? One of those? Can you or your friends pick this apart? Some little thing, like a coin going from your pocket to his, only the transaction wasn’t made, and you blame yourself, don’t you? You look at it, still in your hand, still in your pocket, burning its hole there, so to speak, you look at it there, known to only you alone, and you wonder, “Won’t it ever move?”
Some Numb Commitment
“What I have in mind,” Mr. Challait said, “is for you two kids to live in the house next door with my son Robbie. Robbie, well. Well I don’t want to mislead you.”
Robbie had gone mad, some years ago. Since then Mr. Challait had taken the case to a half-dozen institutions, had talked with doctors of every stripe and leaning, people from as far away as Tokyo and Buenos Aires. But at last he’d lost faith in professionals. “Any idiot can get a degree,” he said. So the father had decided instead to try a good diet, a place to live where Robbie would feel like part of the family, and a couple of guardians who wouldn’t come in with a lot of half-baked ideas they needed to work out even if it meant putting Mr. Challait’s son through Hell in the process.
We nodded. Or rather I nodded, ignoring Erin, who I’d glimpsed trying to catch my eye. Mr. Challait rang the engraved brass bell beside his place-setting at the dinner table. When the maid came, he asked to have his son brought in. Erin meantime was keeping her chin raised, her neck-muscles tensed more than ordinarily, trying to get my attention. But I went on playing the Young Man At An Interview. I wouldn’t look at her.
The son lumbered down from overhead somewhere. I remember that first visit as quick and obscure, the top of his lowered head sinking between his poor shoulders like one sketchy oval sinking into another, larger, sloppier one. He was no more than a few chalk lines melting together on a wet blackboard. I barely understood that he was an older person, in his late twenties or possibly even older.
But Mr. Challait, Senior — he was there in the flesh. After Robbie was ushered out again, his father’s natural attractiveness became that much stronger. Erin and I agreed later that he reminded us of the Headmaster at our school. And we, of course, still suffered vertigo from finding ourselves so unexpectedly on a mountaintop of obvious old money. When Mr. Challait twisted his body to speak with the maid, the inner lining of his vest glimmered like antique silverware. Even his speech rolled out of him with the dignity of brass beds on casters. The way he suspended his name before us so we wouldn’t miss the pronunciation: “Shall-I.” The way he spoke the word “maybe” with the accent on the second syllable. And in every room we’d visited there had hung another mirror at least a yard square, framed in scrollwork that had been burnished mahogany, or trimmed in red and ocher, or left alone as simple fierce gold.