Though she’d come into his story unannounced at a critical moment he did not describe her, for even as he recollected that he’d seen his first light just thirty-six years before the night incumbent he saw his last: that he could not after all be a character in a work of fiction inasmuch as such a fiction would be of an entirely different character from what he thought of as fiction. Fiction consisted of such monuments of the imagination as Cutler’s Morganfield, Riboud’s Tales Within Tales, his own creations; fact of such as for example read those fictions. More, he could demonstrate by syllogism that the story of his life was a work of fact: though assaults upon the boundary between life and art, reality and dream, were undeniably a staple of his own and his century’s literature as they’d been of Shakespeare’s and Cervantes’s, yet it was a fact that in the corpus of fiction as far as he knew no fictional character had become convinced as had he that he was a character in a work of fiction. This being the case and he having in fact become thus convinced it followed that his conviction was false. “Happy birthday,” said his wife et cetera, kissing him et cetera to obstruct his view of the end of the sentence he was nearing the end of, playfully refusing to be nay-said so that in fact he did at last as did his fictional character end his ending story endless by interruption, cap his pen.
* 9:00 A.M., Monday, June 20, 1966.
† 10:00 A.M., Monday, June 20, 1966.
‡ 11:00 A.M., Monday, June 20, 1966.
§ 11:00 P.M., Monday, June 20, 1966.
MENELAIAD
1
Menelaus here, more or less. The fair-haired boy? Of the loud war cry! Leader of the people. Zeus’s fosterling.
Eternal husband.
Got you, have I? No? Changed your shape, become waves of the sea, of the air? Anyone there? Anyone here?
No matter; this isn’t the voice of Menelaus; this voice is Menelaus, all there is of him. When I’m switched on I tell my tale, the one I know, How Menelaus Became Immortal, but I don’t know it.
Keep hold of yourself.
“Helen,” I say: “Helen’s responsible for this. From the day we lovers sacrificed the horse in Argos, pastureland of horses, and swore on its bloody joints to be her champions forever, whichever of us she chose, to the night we huddled in the horse in Troy while she took the part of all our wives — everything’s Helen’s fault. Cities built and burnt, a thousand bottoms on the sea’s, every captain corpsed or cuckold — her doing. She’s the death of me and my peculiar immortality, cause of every mask and change of state. On whose account did Odysseus become a madman, Achilles woman? Who turned the Argives into a horse, loyal Sinon into a traitor, yours truly from a mooncalf into a sea-calf, Proteus into everything that is? First cause and final magician: Mrs. M.
“One evening, embracing in our bed, I dreamed I was back in the wooden horse, waiting for midnight. Laocoön’s spear still stuck in our flank, and Helen, with her Trojan pal in tow, called out to her Argive lovers in the voice of each’s wife. ‘Come kiss me, Anticlus darling!’ My heart was stabbed as my side was once by Pandarus’s arrow. But in the horse, while smart Odysseus held shut our mouths, I dreamed I was home in bed before Paris and the war, our wedding night, when she crooned like that to me. Oh, Anticlus, it wasn’t you who was deceived; your wife was leagues and years away, mine but an arms-length, yet less near. Now I wonder which dream dreamed which, which Menelaus never woke and now dreams both.
“And when I was on the beach at Pharos, seven years lost en route from Troy, clinging miserably to Proteus for direction, he prophesied a day when I’d sit in my house at last, drink wine with the sons of dead comrades, and tell their dads’ tales; my good wife would knit by the fireside, things for our daughter’s wedding, and dutifully pour the wine. That scene glowed so in my heart, its beat became the rhythm of her needles; Egypt’s waves hissed on the foreshore like sapwood in the grate, and the Nile-murk on my tongue turned sweet. But then it seems to me I’m home in Sparta, talking to Nestor’s boy or Odysseus’s; Helen’s put something in the wine again, I know why, one of those painkillers she picked up in Africa, and the tale I tell so grips me, I’m back in the cave once more with the Old Man of the Sea.”
One thing’s certain: somewhere Menelaus lost course and steersman, went off track, never got back on, lost hold of himself, became a record merely, the record of his loosening grasp. He’s the story of his life, with which he ambushes the unwary unawares.
2
“ ‘Got you!’ ” I cry to myself, imagining Telemachus enthralled by the doctored wine. “ ‘You’ve feasted your bowels on my dinner, your hopes on my news of Odysseus, your eyes on my wife though she’s your mother’s age. Now I’ll feast myself on your sotted attention, with the tale How Menelaus First Humped Helen in the Eighth Year After the War. Pricked you up, that? Got your ear, have I? Like to know how it was, I suppose? Where in Hades are we? Where’d I go? Whom’ve I got hold of? Proteus? Helen?’
“ ‘Telemachus Odysseus’-son,’ the lad replied, ‘come from goat-girt Ithaca for news of my father, but willing to have his cloak clutched and listen all night to the tale How You Lost Your Navigator, Wandered Seven Years, Came Ashore at Pharos, Waylaid Eidothea, Tackled Proteus, Learned to Reach Greece by Sailing up the Nile, and Made Love to Your Wife, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, After an Abstinence of Eighteen Years.’
“ ‘Seventeen.’ ”
I tell it as it is. “ ‘D’you hear that click?’ ” I tell myself I asked Telemachus.
“ ‘I do,’ said Peisistratus.
“ ‘Knitting! Helen of Troy’s going to be a grandmother! An empire torched, a generation lost, a hundred kings undone on her account, and there she sits, proper as Penelope, not a scratch on her — and knits!’
“ ‘Not a scratch!’ said Telemachus.
“ ‘Excuse me,’ Helen said; ‘if it’s to be that tale I’m going on to bed, second chamber on one’s left down the hall. A lady has her modesty. Till we meet again, Telemachus. Drink deep and sleep well, Menelaus my love.’
“ ‘Zeus in heaven!’ ” I say I cried. “ ‘Why didn’t I do you in in Deiphobus’ house, put you to the sword with Troy?’
“Helen smiled at us and murmured: ‘Love.’
“ ‘Does she mean,’ asked Peisistratus Nestor’s-son, come with Telemachus that noon from sandy Pylos, ‘that you love her for example more than honor, self-respect; more than every man and cause you’ve gone to war for; more than Menelaus?’
“ ‘Not impossibily.’
“ ‘Is it that her name’s twin syllables fire you with contrary passions? That your heart does battle with your heart till you burn like ashèd Ilion?’
“ ‘Wise son of a wise father! Her smile sows my furrowed memory with Castalian serpent’s teeth; I become a score of warriors, each battling the others; the survivors kneel as one before her; perhaps the salin were better men. If Aeneas Aphrodite’s-son couldn’t stick her, how should I, a mere near mortal?’