It’s clear, though, that this is a great-grandmother with Views. I believe she is harming Lenore, and I believe she knows that she is, and I believe she does not really care. She has, from what little I can gather, convinced Lenore that she is in possession of some words of tremendous power. No, really. Not things, or concepts. Words. The woman is apparently obsessed with words. I neither am nor wish to be entirely clear on the matter, but apparently she was some sort of phenomenon in college and won a place in graduate study at Cambridge, no small feat for a woman, in the twenties; but in any event, there she studied classics and philosophy and who knows what else under a mad crackpot genius named Wittgenstein, who believed that everything was words. Really. If your car would not start, it was apparently to be understood as a language problem. If you were unable to love, you were lost in language. Being constipated equalled being clogged with linguistic sediment. To me the whole thing smacks strongly of bullshit, but old Lenore Beadsman quite definitely bought it, and has had seventy years to simmer and distill the brew she pours in Lenore’s heat-softened porches every week. She teases Lenore with a certain strange book, the way an exceptionally cruel child might tease an animal with a bit of food, intimating that the book has some special significance for Lenore, but refusing to tell her what it is, “yet,” or to show her the book, “yet.” Words and a book and a belief that the world is words and Lenore’s conviction that her own intimate personal world is only of, neither by nor for, her. Something is not right. She is in pain. I would like the old lady to die in her sleep.
Her daughter is in the same Home, over twenty years younger, a beautiful old woman, I’ve seen her, clear brown eyes and soft cheeks the color of a gently blooming rose and hair like liquid silver. An absolute idiot with Alzheimer‘s, unaware of who or where she is, a drooler out of moist, beautiful, perfectly preserved lips. Lenore hates her; both Lenores hate her. I do not know why this is so.
Lenore’s great-grandmother’s hair is white as cotton and hangs in bangs and curls down on either side of her head nearly to meet in points below her chin, like the mandibles of an insect.
Often we’ll lie together and Lenore will ask me to tell her a story. “A story, please,” she’ll say. I will tell her what people tell to me, what people ask me to like and allow others to like, what they send me in their brown manilas and scrawled stamped return envelopes and cover-letters signed “Aspiringly Yours,” at the Frequent Review. Telling stories that are not my own is at this point what I do, after all. With Lenore I am completely and entirely myself.
But I get sad. I miss my son. I do not miss Veronica. Veronica was beautiful. Lenore is pretty, and she has a quality we’ve decided is game-related. Veronica was beautiful. But a beauty like a frozen dawn, dazzling and achingly remote. She was cool and firm and smooth to the touch, decorated with soft, chilly blond hair wherever appropriate, graceful but not delicate, pleasant but not kind. Veronica was a seamless and flawless joy to behold and hold… exactly up to the point where one’s interests conflicted with hers. Between Veronica and all others there lay the echoing chasm of Interest, a chasm impossible to bridge because it turned out to have only one side. The Veronica side. Which is, I have come to see, simply another way of saying that Veronica was incapable of love. At least of loving me.
Physically the marriage went from being a horror to being nothing at all. I cannot think, much less tell, of our wedding night, when all manner of shams were exposed. Finally Veronica came to accept and even appreciate the situation; it saved her effort and the tangy embarrassment of being embarrassed for me. To my knowledge she did not go elsewhere. Her existence, like her beauty and real worth, was intrinsically aesthetic, not physical or emotional. Veronica would be most comfortable, I remain convinced, as a human exhibit, motionless in the cool bright comer of a public hall, surrounded by a square of red velvet no-touch ropes, hearing only whispered voices and heels on tile. Veronica is now living on my support checks and preparing, I am told, to marry a quite old and thoroughly likeable man who owns a New York company involved in the manufacture of power-plant instrumentation. Go with God.
I miss my son, though. Which is not to say that I miss an eighteen-year-old Fordham aesthete whose long nails glitter with transparent polish and who wears pants without pockets. I miss my son. My child. He was a magical child, I’m thoroughly convinced. Special, special qualities. A special and hilarious infant. Veronica drew the first of many lines at changing diapers, so I would usually change our baby. I would change his diapers, and often as not, as he lay on his back, with little legs of dough kicking, as I removed soggy old hot or ominously heavy diaper and manipulated crinkly new plastic Pamper, he would urinate up onto my hanging necktie, a pale, sweetly thin jet, and there would be smells of powder, and my tie would be heavy at my throat, and would drip, and we would laugh together, toothless he and sad, sleepy I, at my urine-soaked tie. I still own some of these ties, stiff and hard and dull; they hang on little toothed racks and clunk against my closet door when the winds of memory blow through the dark places in my apartment.
This was a boy with an intimate but strange relation to the world around him, a dark-eyed silent boy who from the age of independent decision and movement reflected the world in his own special, wobbled mirror. Vance was for me a reflection. Vance would act out History and Event inside his own child’s world.
At a very young age, very young, Vance would choose dark clothes, tie string around his head, put candy cigarettes in his mouth, and launch sudden, stealthy raids into rooms of the house, breathing hard and whirling, beating the air with his fists, finally diving behind furniture, crawling on his belly, clawing the air with a hooked finger. A lightning raid on the kitchen — the cat’s food would disappear. A silent assault on my den — in the leg of my desk would appear the vertical scratch of a pin. A careless squad of patio ants would walk into ambush and be efficiently obliterated via tennis-ball bombardment as Veronica and I looked on and at each other over gin-and-tonics. We were puzzled and frightened, and Veronica suspected motor dysfunction, until we noticed Vance’s eyes one night during dinner as on the evening news, correspondents brought us another installment of the death throes of the war in Indochina. Vance’s unblinking eyes and soundless breathing. And as Kissinger left Paris triumphant, a home in Scarsdale demilitarized.
Sometimes in those days too we would find Vance alone in a room, facing the blank comer in which he stood, both arms stiffly upraised and two fingers of each hand out in Peace-signs. It began to become clear that, through the miracle of televsion, Vance Vigorous enjoyed a special relationship with Richard Nixon. As Wa tergate wore on in brilliant color, Vance took to furtive looks, pinched whiteness around the bridge of his nose, refusals to explain his whereabouts or give reasons for what he did. My tape recorder — admittedly tapeless and not even plugged in but nevertheless my tape recorder — began to appear places: under the dining room table at dinner, in the back seat of the car, under our bed, in the drawer of the mail table. Vance would, when confronted, look blankly at the tape recorder and at us. Then he would pretend to look at his watch. After the resignation, Vance was sick in bed for a week, with very real symptoms. We were frightened. There followed years in which he silently but with formal expression forgave every apparent wrong done him by us and the world; would fall and cover his chest with his hands at the slightest criticism; would flip backwards off the couch in the living room and land nicely on both feet, putting cracks in the ceiling each time; would wear his tiny suit to school and enlist a follower to carry the tiny briefcase he insisted we give him for Christmas; would walk blindfolded through rooms littered with torn drawings of the flag. Who knew what most of this was. This was the world the monadic Vance Vigorous received and mirrored through himself. I preferred him to the world, really.