“Genealogy is the indigenous history of the Self,” I told that jerk in passing.
To Virgil, though I know he has no particular interest in ancient heraldic artworks, I confided in a whisper, “Remind me to show you an amazing picture I found of a fourteenth-century boar couchant with wattled neck and the hind legs of a goat. It’s Walter exactly.”
“At least you don’t have to sit next to the guy at dinner,” said Virgil, huffy.
Fielding, meanwhile, crept backward as he filmed, establishing an enlarged perspective — the cinematic space dramatically unfolding, and so forth — squeezing more Max in the frame. Back Fielding went, three feet, five feet, ten, fifteen, steadily across the frayed carpet and onto hardwood floor, as if riding a dolly. I suppose it is inevitable that some youthful humorist would be unable to forgo crouching on all fours in Fielding’s unwitting path.
The prankster this time was Jeremy. I could see it coming because of course I was squinting directly at Fielding retreating across the room and could make out, behind him, the small figure tiptoeing the long way around the ratty wicker chaise and the drop-leaf table holding the cannon glass paperweight collection. Virgil saw, too. It happened fast. Jeremy knelt on the cold floor. Snickering arose from various corners but no one said a word.
Fielding was absorbed in cinematography and wouldn’t have heard anyway.
He panned onto Max. He raised a hand to calibrate focus. Max’s eyes were shut but his mouth was open and his hands by his sides were clenched. Fielding focused on him. He stepped back. Stepped back again. Suddenly Fielding was going down over Jeremy and the camera’s blinding light was zooming upward and away to spray whiteness across ceiling, a wall, the floor.
Equipment crashed and the camera light died. The room seemed to fall momentarily dark. From the darkness came a sound of wrestling and the ominous shouts of the night’s first of three fights.
“You fucker!”
“Take it easy, man!”
“I’m going to strangle you!”
“It was a joke!”
“Are you mindless? Do you have any idea what you have done? Do you?”
“Don’t push me.”
“I’ll push you. I’ll push you if I want to push you, you unimportant fuck.”
“Don’t get mad!” Jeremy cried in a voice that sounded strangled. Then there was a noise: cloth ripping. Something weighty fell and the Doberman commenced barking insanely as Fielding harangued:
“How often do you think a shot like that comes along? How often?”
“I don’t know! I’m sorry. Let go!”
“Never! That’s how often a shot like that comes along. Never!”
Other brothers converged in a circle ringing the fighters. No one was butting in, yet; experience has proved that it is best to let physical disputes resolve themselves on the spot, rather than interrupt and create additional frustration and the lasting grudges that accompany smoldering tensions — unless there is peril of injury.
Fielding held Jeremy in a classic under-the-arm headlock. Close by the two men’s feet lay that camera, irritant to all of us and a heap of parts now. Fielding, seeing it busted, went red in the brain. “You shit!” he yelled while dancing up and down with Jeremy’s smothered head bobbing.
This was inauspicious. Fielding is hardly large, but he is utterly self-centered and therefore disliked, therefore intimidating, and no one wished to challenge him. Who can predict what a narcissist will do in anger?
“Aaaaghhh,” Jeremy managed to say; and Fielding, squeezing him, made this speech: “What do you think? What do you think? I filmed you riding your bicycle and I filmed your sixteenth birthday and you can be damned sure I filmed it when you got back from the hospital and you were in remission and we were all here to celebrate your health and that was no joke, was it? Was it? Maybe you don’t want anyone to care about that. Is that what you prefer? No troubling evidence that you are alive and have feelings and people who love you in spite of the fact that you are an immature child who doesn’t know how to comprehend love? A little kindness would go a long way around here, but I suppose I can’t expect you to have much regard for congeniality because obviously you’re lost in an arrested world of lame jokes and sick tortures. And that goes for everybody!”—peering around the room at the amazed faces, raising his voice to cry above Gunner the attack dog’s savage, intermittent barking—“In my mind there’s a difference between friendly clowning and this kind of malicious assault on a person!” Bark. Bark. Bark. “Mature men ought to know this difference!” Bark. Bark. Bark. “Show some courtesy!”
He let go of Jeremy’s neck. Jeremy, delivered from minor humiliation, collapsed before Fielding’s feet. Fielding was becoming emotional, and, strangely, so were we.
He said to us, “I make documentaries because I love my brothers. Is that wrong? Someone, tell me if it is wrong, because I feel ridiculous for even saying it.”
He bent down, collected the smashed camera pieces. Nobody seemed capable, right away, of speech or action; it was a time for reflection on the complexities of our interdependence and the sorry indignities that pass as currency between us in lieu of gentler tender.
Fielding cradled his camera. Everywhere beneath the obscure light from twenty broken chandeliers, heads were bowed. Virgil laid his full weight on my arm; he leaned on me; and Maxwell, for the moment, was forgotten, though his breaths could be heard, along with Chuck’s dog’s periodic outbursts and Jeremy’s sobs. Not yet seven o’clock and already someone had made someone else cry. The sad function of this — and there is, I believe, implicit in such dynamic enactments of taunting and submissive roles, a manifest, though hidden, function—the function of this is to ally disparate siblings within coherent factions characterized by age or friendship patterns (or some or other preexisting ideological or emotional attitude), and in this way to relieve the stresses that accompany explicitly personal self-presentations in a company as amorphously large as ours. The unconscious drive to assert autonomy through withdrawal into a prejudicial collective is counterintuitive but unexceptional; it can be seen at work during any polite cocktail party, whenever political or philosophical debates erupt, and guests begin either claiming or refuting intimacy with one another by announcing, “Yes! Yes! I agree with so and so.”
Of course this is routine social behavior and everyone is familiar with it. Nor does the comparison with cocktail parties hold absolutely, since, as yet, that night in the red library, no cocktails had been poured.
Battle lines were forming anyway. Fielding in his rage had done Jeremy the valuable service of converting him from playful culprit to injured victim, two qualities practically everybody can empathize with.
Fielding had, in the process, gone too far in two directions. His anger was alarming, his reflexive petition for charity, sentimental. Here was the pathos of a man struggling to identify himself through artistic creation understood as a service, a gift to others — admittedly a beautiful and romantic formulation, though also abstruse and quixotic and, however sincerely expressed (our brother’s earnestness in this matter was not, I think, at issue), difficult to sympathize with in any really tangible way; and Fielding’s violence had without a doubt already made him a distinctly uncompelling object for sympathy or pity; and who among us wants love thrown in his face anyway? Jeremy’s crying was growing louder and louder (he did seem badly hurt, Jeremy, rolling around on bare floor, as a man will when in spectacular pain), so that, in the end, after what seemed a long while, but was, actually, probably less than half a minute’s worth of our standing there self-consciously wondering whom to blame for what and how to feel okay about it — in the end, our brother Fielding, who on any other night might have found twenty or thirty eager to champion his supposedly heartfelt artistic martyrdom — brother Fielding was, this night, pretty much without a prayer.