“More than two?”
“Now why would that be, you ask. The answer is simple. After I brought home my high school girlfriend, Mother sat me down in the parlor — she still calls it the parlor — with the most aggrieved expression on her face. ‘You are a man now,’ she said, ‘or soon will be. And you may do with your days, and you may do with your nights, as you must, and as pleases you. You do not have to explain yourself. Neither to me nor anyone else, ever again. Beyond that I cannot advise you of much. There are, however, things about life you have not yet learned. As you do, you must take them in stride, without complaint. I only hope you are in all things jealous of yourself, and your time, as I am of mine.’
“I looked at her,” Davidson continued, “not knowing what on earth she meant, until she said, ‘I do not need to meet any more of your young ladies, except the one you intend to marry.’”
“She wanted you to become a serious man,” I said.
“She was insane about time. If we were going to the store and I was five minute late she would leave me.”
“She wanted you to know what time is?”
“I was seven. But that’s what I thought too, until she died and I found a box of letters in her closet, with a bunch of things from her girlhood.” He paused. “Things normal people throw away, old perfume bottles with the evaporated residue of their scent, decades-old boxes of uneaten chocolate, ruined pantyhose, every little luxury she’d ever received was there for me to sort out and make sense of. And then I came upon a box wrapped around with ribbons from old gifts. I started unwinding it slowly, feeling I was opening something I should not. When I finally opened it I remembered two stories. Once, when we were sitting at an outdoor café, up by the museum, some kid runs by and snatches her purse from the table. I took out my phone to call the police, and the waiter rushed over making a fuss, but she was perfectly composed and just said, ‘Don’t call the police. If he stole because he was hungry, let him eat. If he stole because he is bad, God will punish him.’ The other was when she wouldn’t let me go on a school trip to the zoo, no matter how I cried to see the damn pandas. Finally, she slapped me. It was the only time in my life she ever put a hand on me. I was stunned. ‘Nothing in this world belongs in a cage,’ she said, shaking her head in a staccato way that I will never forget. Now can you guess what I found inside that box, in the middle of all that crap?”
I shook my head.
“That she had survived the Holocaust. She was interned at a camp called Eschershausen with her parents when she was a girl.”
“I have never heard of it” was all I could say into the stunned silence.
“You’ve never heard of most of them. It’s not your ignorance. There were more than anyone knows — thousands and thousands of them.”
I fell quiet, thinking of how she must have wanted to protect him from knowing, from carrying her burden. “I always thought of the Holocaust as people’s grandparents” was the only thing I managed to say.
“The past is never as far away as you think,” he returned, implacable to the point of nonchalance. “Her real point, or part of her point I think, was to understand the difference between passing emotions and situations, and the steadiness of what lies behind them.”
“What is that?”
“Every day Zuigan called to himself, ‘Master.’ And he would answer, ‘Yes, Master.’ ‘Become sober.’ ‘Yes, Master.’ ‘And after that do not be deceived by yourself or others.’ ‘Yes, Master.’”
“It is beautiful. What is it?”
“It is my koan, since I was a boy.”
“Do you follow it?”
“We both know I am too vain to go all the way with it. Still, I like to remember it is there.”
“Why not follow it all the way, if you have followed it so long?”
“Once you begin to grasp it there will come the question of how sober you wish to be.”
“How did you and Elsa meet?” I asked, changing the subject, as I tried to parse whether it was only something he had read, or Davidson actually knew something serious and true.
“Ingo,” he answered breezily.
“Seems right.” Ingo was one of Davidson’s aristocratic investors. “What does she do?”
“Give away money.”
“To whom?”
“Orphans. Museums. Needy politicians.” He lowered his voice. “You know, she’s the tenth wealthiest woman in Paris. She has a title, too.”
“She won’t anymore if she marries you,” I whispered back.
Davidson continued undaunted. He was never daunted. Even in the throes of a nervous breakdown he had greater magnetism and power than most people in their primes. Not just worldly power to work his will, power from faith in his abilities and himself as a man, no matter the company. In his own personhood. That was his security and his charm. “Can you imagine keeping a fortune that size intact that long?” he asked.
“Where did the fortune come from?”
“I believe it marched its way from the frigid, ungiving North Sea into the open-hearted embrace of her Monaco bank.”
“How so?”
“Why don’t you ask her, if it worries you?”
“It is not my business.”
“Then why ask me?”
“You brought it up.”
“There was a reason.”
“Which was?”
“You still have the didact in you.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Sure you do. Not five minutes ago you liked her. Now here you are sitting in judgment, wanting to know if her grandfather was the Antichrist. What if he were? Would you then be curious to know what is available to her besides shame, denial, or capitulation, and how she obtains it? So long as she is fully within herself, it does not matter.”
“It matters.”
“To what? To her character, or to your own particular hypocrisy that you do not see.”
“I’m not a hypocrite,” I said.
“As I said, it is not your fault, but whatever politics they whipped up for you as a boy do not describe the human world, just a momentary politics of relative power. But kings give way to presidents. Priests to painters. Painters to entertainers. Presidents to industry. Paupers to billionaires. All in their turn. The money and power only project whatever picture show is already playing inside the people. Vanity, deceit, insecurity, greatness.”
“That is the same as to say what we do does not matter.”
“That is to say what matters is exactly what we ourselves do. When you come to Hollywood you will see it everywhere, people who think when the world knows who they are, they will be happy. Only to reach their aim, and turn to see themselves unhappy all over the newspapers every morning. The green-hearted ones look and see partway what’s going on, and turn gleeful to keep pulling them down, because they refuse any kind of world but their own misery. They look and all they see is imperfection, and they hate it, which is the same as hating beauty. But they do not know that. No one does. We all just sit sharpening up our different hates and hurts until we can point it all back at the world, thinking it is a sword, while calling it virtue. But tell me what you judge and I will tell you what you fear.”
“I was talking about discernment of meaning, which is a high thing.”
“It certainly is a high thing.” He poured us more wine. “It ain’t the highest. Sometimes discerning shows what’s there; sometimes it veils it from you.”
“What’s the highest?”
“You know what it is.”
“Do I?”
“Of course you do. At least you have the ear to hear it. The question is, do you have the faith to trust what you hear?
“If you like, I will find out who her fathers were, back as far as I can, because fortune like that is not a single instance of luck, but a second and a third; refigured each time history shifted to obliterate them, but did not because of the sheer refusal to die. If they did something in the past I dislike, or that threatens me, should I break with her? Before I have given her a chance? Somebody went to bed one night and decided there in the dark to try for a dynasty, and did not figure she would be on the other side of it all. Maybe she has a mind and will of her own. This play is for the living. Those who do not grasp that are puppets of the past, and the strings are whatever they have been told; and whoever it was who told them that’s the way it is, aims to be puppet master. If you wish to live in that mirage, fine, stick to the didactic. But, if you want to be in the present, it will keep you from the brass ring.”