Something had gone wrong. Still, I knew that if I had been betrayed it had been by my own hand; the doctor had as much as told me so. If the symptoms I felt, the disturbances of my peace like the violences of terrorists, were psychosomatic, as the doctor had more than hinted, then it could only mean that I had mislived my life, that all the time I had thought I was doing otherwise I had been working overtly against my own silent nature. At my age this was unthinkable; that only now my nature, whatever oriental a thing it might turn out to be, was taking its revenge, was outrageous. It was like being damned without warning, like being condemned to Hell because one was an ignorant pagan. Why didn’t you tell me, I felt like demanding of my nature. Why were you so silent, so demurring all these years? Evading with no comment and sometimes even with approval all those things you privately condemned? You were my God, I thought, I had no other. Why didn’t you love me?
Now it was simply too late; I would not reform. This was the record for a heart attack and there was no cure. I would have to sing the tune the way I had learned it. If one of us had to give in, it would have to be my nature, my self-righteously taciturn and conspiratorial true self. Had ever a true self been less true?
If I had no genuine disease now, why, one day I would. One day I could bring the doctors a real cancer, a recognizably diseased heart. I warned my pain that I could live with it, my nature that although I would never understand its treachery, I could live with it as well. My pain had confused me, but now that I knew the awful thing it stood for I could resist it. In three days, I told myself, I would be better. I closed my eyes and slept better than I had in days.
The phone rang. “It’s Roger. Did you get the medicine? I let myself in and put it by your bed. You were sleeping.”
“Yes, Roger. I see it. Thank you.”
“You know,” he said, “you were right.”
“Was I?” I asked sleepily.
“You certainly were. I can’t say very much about it now, but it looks as though you were right about him.”
“Was I? About whom?”
“That doctor — Mefwiss. I asked the doorman at Number 36. Mefwiss used to have his office there. He’s mixed up in some stuff. There’s talk of a malpractice suit over his head in another state.”
“Fixing beyond fixing.”
“He sure fooled me,” Roger said. “All his talk about a virus going round, cigarettes and cancer, men with heart conditions leading normal lives — just a front.”
“Fixing beyond fixing.”
“You really spotted that guy.”
“Fixing beyond fixing. Thank you, Roger.”
I leaned back. The pains in my chest were just as severe as ever, but I was untroubled. Roger had helped me. Another doorman in my life, I thought, another gatekeeper. There was something Elizabethan about it. The old democracy between king and fool. But I knew pleasantly that if I were inside the walls now it was in body only — not spirit, thank you. There was still something in myself reprobate and unreconstructed. If it was not, as I had just learned, my soul, then it was something better than my soul — my will perhaps, the glands of my need. Fixing beyond fixing, even within myself. Here I was in civil but civilized war with my own nature, the two factions outwardly like gentlemen who still behaved courteously toward one another, but deeper and more importantly, wheelers and dealers who cynically kept the trade routes open.
Later I called Roger and asked him to bring the newspapers.
“Which ones?”
“What difference does it make? Fixing beyond fixing, eh, Roger? Scratch a hero and what have you got left?”
“Nothing,” Roger said.
“Right. Men are hollow. It’s easier to keep the trade routes open that way.”
“You can’t trust anybody,” Roger said.
“The truth shall make you free,” I said.
“So long as it doesn’t make too free with you, eh, Jim?”
“Jackanapes!” I roared when I replaced the phone. “Man in motley! Clown!”
I wondered where Margaret was.
Toward evening the telephone in our room rang (to make David feel more at home we had given him his own telephone) and I got out of bed to answer it. It could have been Margaret. People rarely called us; mostly we used the phone to call each other. When I picked up the receiver the person on the other end of the line listened to my voice without answering. “Margaret?” I said. “Is that you? I’m a sick man, Margaret. What have you been doing with yourself, kid?” I hung up.
Back in David’s room it occurred to me to call my son. I dialed the Fifth Avenue salon where David worked. “May I speak with Mr. David, please?”
“Who is this, please?”
I experimented. “A friend. He’ll know.”
“Mr. David is very busy.
“Bitch,” I said.
“Look, if this is the party that’s been bothering him, he’s asked me to tell you that he’s very upset and that you’re not to call any more.”
“Get him. It’s his father. Get him,” I shouted
David came to the phone. I could imagine its being thrust into his hand and him taking it as though it were a microphone into which he was expected to sing while people fled a burning theater. He would be turning his head now, looking around him with that special, sly confusion he affected. “Yes?” he said uncertainly.
“David, it’s Papa.”
“Oh,” David said. “Oh. How are you?”
“Why do you spite me, David?”
“Is something wrong? I’m sorry, is something wrong?”
“Forget about it, David. Cut your losses and try to live. Where are you?”
“I’m working.”
“Where are you? I’m home for a few days. I haven’t seen you.”
“Oh,” David said. I knew what he was going to say next and when he actually said it there was nothing more I could do for him. “You were gone so much,” David said, “I thought it might be because of me. I didn’t want to put you to any trouble. That’s why I left.” Then he added, “I’m in the Village — with a friend.”
“Look, Telemachus, you’ll never catch me. Give it up. Do something you’re good at. I didn’t know it was going to be you when I screwed your mother. Forget about it. Look at it this way, what happens when I die? You’ll just be left holding your lousy bag of spite.”
David didn’t answer. I sighed. “Where’s Margaret?” I asked finally.
“Isn’t she with you?” he asked happily.
“You’re a rotten kid, sonny. I disinherit you for the second and last time. Goodbye.”
That was the way to do it, I thought. The cutting of one’s losses was an art form. I had never allowed David to drain much of my spirit, but it was useless to pretend he hadn’t gotten something. He wasn’t entitled to it, but what he got away with he got away with. Already I felt a little stronger.
I called Roger and asked him to pick up some things for me in the room on Fifty-eighth Street. I had been neglecting The Club. The strength I had won back from David I would put into the arrangements that had still to be made.
Now that was the way to live, I thought. Simply. Why, the world was a Walden if you knew how to look at it. Madness and method were the strengths of the true champion. For the first time in many days I forced myself to think of the great. For the first time in my life I allowed myself to say “we.”