Galatea 2.2, page 16
William tore down the stairs in his new-wave pajamas. “Mom says you’re Reader-in-Residence.”
“I did not!” came the embarrassed denial from upstairs.
“Well,” I wheedled. “Let’s talk about this. What kind of books do you like?”
William shrugged. “I don’t know. I read The Hobbit. In three days.”
“Really? In-credible. Did you like it?”
“The dragon was pretty awesome.”
We trooped upstairs. There, Peter propped up against the bars of his crib. He rocked himself methodically. His hands made curious cupping motions.
“What are you saying, Petie?” I stroked the curl of his ear.
Diana laughed. “Don’t ask.”
William started jumping on his bed. “He’s saying, ‘Read! Read!’” His hands picked up the sign and multiplied it into a mandate.
“Absolutely. What do you gentlemen want to hear?”
“Pete wants the counting book,” Diana said. “It’s his favorite these days.”
She lifted him out of the pillowed prison and sat in a beanbag chair, Peter in her arms. She opened a radiant, pastel portal across his lap. “One,” she announced. “One house. One cow. Petey do it?”
Peter brought his hand down across the page. On contact, Diana exclaimed, “One! That’s it.”
Each page brought one more house, one more cow, one more tree, one more in a circling flock of birds. Diana counted, pointing out each new figure on the page. Then Peter commenced a round of muscular spasms, pointing randomly but intently, while we three clicked off the numbers in chorus.
“He loves counting. He’s so smart,” Diana told me, shaking her head. “You are so smart!” she signed to Peter. Peter curled like an armadillo. Trisomy may have weakened his muscles, but the weights collapsing his human spine were fear and joy.
“So what’s it going to be, my man?” I asked William.
He lay, narrow in his bed. He seemed so slight, such a vulnerable line. A lima bean tendril germinated on damp paper towel for the science fair. He reached a hand up blindly behind him, to the shelf above his head. He retrieved the totem and handed it to me, without looking.
“Na, naw. You cannot do the World Almanac as bedtime reading.”
“It’s what I want,” he insisted. Singsong.
We did World Religions; Famous Waterfalls; Noted Political Leaders; and, of course, the beloved World Flags. More forgone quiz game than story time. William told me what lists to start. Then he blurted out the completion after only a few words of prompting. Every time I shouted, “How do you know that?” William smirked in triumph and Pete threw his hands in the air and gurgled.
Appeased, the boys went down without a fight. Anxiety revived only after Diana and I retired to the living room, alone.
It became a different house then. She became a different woman. She put something timeless on the player—Taverner’s Western Wynde Mass. I wouldn’t have picked her for it. But then, I wouldn’t have picked her for freeze-drying monkey brains either. I didn’t know the first thing about her. This evening’s every note had proved that.
Closeness grew awful. Words had been spent on the boys. I felt the slack of all those who try to live by eloquence and find it useless at the end. I wanted to put my head in her lap. I wanted to disappear to Alaska.
“Their father?” I asked her, after agonizing silence.
“Their father found the drop from Will to Pete a bit steep for his tastes. About eleven months ago. Left me everything. But who’s counting?”
She twisted her hair around one finger. Clockwise once, then counter. She never looked at me. A good thing.
“People have been wonderful. Harold. Ram. The others. It’s work that saves you, finally. I keep thinking I’ll find something in the hippocampus that will explain the man.”
“I take it Lentz wasn’t among the comforters.”
She grimaced. “How do you put up with that creep?”
“He’s building me the greatest train set a boy novelist could ask for.”
“I suppose. It wouldn’t be worth it for me. Nothing would.” She stared off, into the music, the small rain. “I don’t mean his snide remarks. The solipsism. The sadism. I could deal with all that. A woman in the biz learns to put up with that as a given. I mean the sadness. He’s the saddest man I’ve ever laid eyes on.” She chose that moment to look up, to lay eyes on my eyes. “Excepting you, of course.”
“Lentz? Sad?”
“The worst. It chills me. Have you ever been alone in his office with him?”
“Hours and hours.”
“Ever been in there with him with the door closed?”
Never. And it had never struck me as strange until that moment. Diana did not elaborate. She left it to me to run the experiment for myself. I read her silence. Loneliness on that scale had to be measured firsthand.
We sat and listened to the western wind. The intimacy of perfect strangers. Years from now, her boys might by chance recall the odd man who came by one night and added to their shaping thoughts by reading to them. A night never repeated.
I recognized this woman. This family, curled up in advance of the night. I knew the place from a book I’d read once as a novice adult, my own first draft just undergoing revision.
I read the novel in that nest C. and I had made together in B. Mann’s Doktor Faustus, the formative storybook of my adult years. In it, a brilliant German, by blinding himself to all pursuits but articulation, allows his world to pull itself down around him. I remembered the man, already middle-aged, writing a love letter to the last woman who might have accepted him.
But the letter sabotages itself. It engineers its own rejection. It bares a loneliness that it knows will scare off any attempted comfort. I haven’t looked up the passage since first reading it. I will never read it again. The real thing might be too far from the one I’ve kept in memory. “Consider me,” the marriage proposal says, “as a person who suddenly discovers, with an ache at the lateness of the hour, that he might like to have a real home.”
Diana sat across from me, on a comfortable sofa scarred with the destructive industry of small boys. Upstairs, those boys tossed in dreams whose sole task lay in smoothing out the incomprehensibility of this day. Here was the home I would never have. Shaped by a book, I’d made sure I wouldn’t. I’d forced my heart’s reading matter to come true.
Here and there, a cylindrical tube–person or transforming robot made Lego base camp for the night in the plush carpet. Diana pulled the music’s long melisma about her shoulders like a shawl. Christ, that my love were in my arms and I in my bed again.
“Thanks,” she shushed me at the door. She squeezed my hand. “Thanks. It’s been a while since I’ve dined by candlelight.”
I went home to chosen loneliness. To the book I would never be able to write.
PICTURE A TRAIN heading south. The train is full of ill and wounded. This month’s invariable sanitarium patients. Consumption, influenza: fiction’s archaic maladies. Some bodily deterioration for which the reader must invent fantastic, beginner’s referents. Maimed veterans, being shipped from the front.
A moment of mass import, of universal upheaval from the just-recallable past. Populations on the leading edge of panic, stricken by industry. The evacuating train pulls out. It joins the flotilla of time’s lifeboats, plowing the dark.
Cruel, blue, bracing, breaking loose: the only opening vignette worth bothering with. Stretched out urgently, along imagination’s railheads, a book heads south. It signals from the telegraph car. Keys me a message I was supposed to have held on to at all costs. A message that never made it out of childhood’s originating station.
The day is sharp, the air invigorating and crystalline. It is the year nineteen-something. A year ending in a dash, or perhaps two hyphens.
The train works southward, in wartime. It snakes glacially up into the mountains, in perhaps the last clear month, the last week that the mountain passes will be traversable.
The engine climbs. It sniffs perpetually up to the outskirts of the same bombed-out village. Fields drift undulantly beneath its wheels, whose click convinces even Forever to bleed imperceptibly into a standing Now.
Soon, on the itinerary’s second morning, the ground acquires a careless dusting of snow. Vegetation changes along the alpine climb, though the account, the travelogue itself, says nothing about that. Sirens bleat on in the distance, from whistle-stops all along this infant route. Air raids continue steeping this side of the border in today’s random wildfire.
But the wounded in the compartments are exhilarated. They grow convinced: something is about to happen. Just past the next page.
C. AND I returned to U. We managed to live there again for two years. I’m surprised we lasted even that long. How could we hope to make a life in a town where we’d already taken our retrospective tour? C. sought a thing she’d accidentally lost. That thing was not U., not then or ever. But severed from yourself in the press of a crowd, you head back instinctively to the most recent landmark, hoping the lost other will hit on the same idea.
Changed circumstance bought us a little nostalgic grace. C. parlayed her office experience into a position with University Personnel. And I: I’d been granted a wish so outrageous that characters in novels would have been punished just to think it. The political entertainment I wrote for C. appeared and did well. The forgotten attic legacy bridging imaginary Limburg and too real Chicago had readers.
Reviewers evaluated it in print, in the same newspapers I’d once read so casually. Total strangers spent two hours’ wages to buy a copy. People I’d never meet wrote me letters, awarded me prizes.
The impossibility dawned on me: I might be the last person on earth allowed to spend all day long doing exactly what I wanted to do.
Each new book-blown coup produced a burst of sad excitement from C. “Beauie, you’ve done it. Proficiat. I always knew you would.”
Truth was, she was terrified. We holed up in our one-bedroom apartment—one step upscale from the one in B.’s land-filled swamp—under siege from admirers. One night, we sat eating dinner at the pretty green enamel table we’d rescued from the second-hand shop. We listened to the radio as we ate, the cavalcade news. All at once, a voice was talking about the book, telling the story of the boys in the photo. Paraphrasing, as if that life had really happened.
I’d invented those boys to amuse C. I built them from pieces only she would recognize. I sprinkled the biographies with archival evidence, historical truths, the camera-eye witness. I intercut with essays how every historian half-makes the longer narrative, wedding the forces at large to a private address book. Now our private address book had been promoted to documentary fact.
At the account of that boy blown off his bike and rubbed out before the world conflagration cleared its starting block, C. started to cry. I thought at first she was crying out of pride. Writing a novel left me that inept with real-world facts.
“That poor boy,” she mouthed.
I pieced it together. “I’m sorry. C., please. It’ll all be over in a month.” She brightened a little at the thought of recovering the anonymous. Of retreating to a time when our invented tunes formed no one’s dinner music.
Our lives back in U. were like nothing we recognized. U. had changed in all but its particulars. Returning to the town was like clapping the back of an old friend at a reunion, one who turns to you with a look friendly but blank.
U. had forgotten us, while remaining agonizingly familiar. The town had become something out of Middle English allegory. Its lone consolation lay in other people, as bewildered by their abandonment here as we.
For the first time in our lives; C. and I socialized. We learned to pick wines, to crack the dress code, to prepare ourselves in advance of an evening with an arsenal of jokes and stories that answered a suite of occasions. The game got easier the more we played. We might have succeeded at it, had we stuck around.
The Midwestern Dinner Party was not, as our B. acquaintances teased us, a contradiction in terms. Once under way, they could even be fun. Getting ready was the torture.
“I’m fat,” C. would announce, about an hour before we had to go anywhere.
“Sweetheart, you’re a sub-Saharan stalk of desiccated grass. Don’t tell yourself you’re fat. You’ll start to believe it.”
I still pretended she hadn’t already convinced herself.
“Wear the lamb dress,” I’d say. “You’ll knock them out.”
“That dress makes me look fat.”
“Okay. How about the muslin?”
“That one makes me look like I’m trying not to look fat.”
Sometimes C. locked herself in the bathroom, throwing up. Or, sobbing, she’d refuse to leave the apartment. But the cloud usually lifted in time. C. would grow radiant and be the dinner’s delight. People loved her, and she loved them back. The ones she gave the chance.
Those two repeat years in U. might have been a sterile waste if it weren’t for the Taylors. I went to see the old professor not long after we hit town. Taylor welcomed me back with affection. And now, when I teased him about his freshman seminar ruining a promising scientific career, I could point to a turn of events that sweetened the punch line.
After my mother, the man had taught me how to read. Taylor was reading for me. Through Taylor, I discovered how a book both mirrored and elicited the mind’s unreal ability to turn inward upon itself. He changed my life. He changed what I thought life was. But I’d never done more than revere him at a distance, forever the eighteen-year-old student. Now, to my astonishment, we became friends.
Our first dinner invitation to the Taylors’ scared C. witless. She’d heard me gush about Taylor so often that when it came to meeting him, she wanted to flee. “What does he look like?” she asked. As if that would prepare her.
“I don’t know. Slight. Arresting. Immaculate. A face ravaged by intelligence.”
“You’re hopeless, Beau. What color is the man’s hair?”
“I’m not sure.”
I told her about that rainy September afternoon when I’d first seen him. He arrived at the attic dormer in the English Building where the class met. A dozen of us had assembled in nervous anonymity. In walked this close-cropped, fiftyish man in impeccable summer suit. He placed his grade book and our first text on the desk, sat down in one of those reduced, yellow-wood chairs, removed a pack of cigarettes from an inside suit coat pocket, and asked if anyone objected. He lit up, tilted his head infinitesimally backward, then said, “It defies statistics that I’m the only one in a group this size with an oral fixation.”
At eighteen, we kept our fixations to ourselves. At least until the reading began.
“What did you read?” C. wanted to know.
“He started us out on Freud’s Introductory Lectures. Then we applied the dream work to fairy tales and lyric poetry. After a while, we went on to the longer stuff—short stories, plays, novels.”
“Titles, Beauie. I want titles.”
“Let’s see. Ten years ago! Gawain and the Green Knight. ‘Adam Lay Bound.’ ‘Patrick Spens.’ ‘The Miller’s Tale.’ The Sonnets.”
“You remember them all?”
“Like yesterday. Better. You had to be there. I remember the shape his mouth made when he recited lines. Of course, he could recite the bulk of those pieces verbatim. In the dark.”
“Which sonnets?”
“Is this for extra credit? We were each supposed to pick one to present to the group. For some reason, maybe because I’d just broken up with—”
“I don’t want to hear that woman’s name!”
“I must have been looking for a rebound, because I picked Sonnet 31.”
“Which goes?”
“Which goes:
Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,
Which I by lacking have supposed dead,
And there reigns Love, and all Love’s loving parts,
And all those friends which I thought buried.”
“I thought there are supposed to be fourteen lines.”
“I think there were. Before memory got to them.”
“Okay. What else?”
“‘The Sick Rose.’ ‘The Second Coming.’ ‘The Windhover.’ All sorts of Dickinson. ‘Prufrock.’ Frost, Stevens. Arms and the Man. The Tempest. Hold on. We also spent a lot of time on the Bible, right at the beginning of term.”
“Repressed that one?”
“Guess so. The Grave. ‘Petrified Man.’ ‘The Dead.’ That was the one that put me over the top. That made me realize I wasn’t going to lead the life I thought I was going to lead. Heart of Darkness. Light in August. Lucky Jim …”
“So what didn’t you read?”
“Yeah. It was a real lineup.”
“I don’t get it, Beau. It sounds like your basic Freshman Survey.”
“It wasn’t. First of all, this magnificently self-possessed oral fixation sat up in front of the room, telling anecdotes in syntax so decorously Byzantine we didn’t even realize that half of them were off-color. The man spoke in complete, perfect paragraphs. It took me almost a whole week between sessions to decode Taylor’s suggestion that the speaker in ‘Stopping by Woods’ was out there in the middle of nowhere relieving himself.”
“I’m not going to this dinner,” C. decided.
“Sweetheart, you don’t understand. The man is grace personified. And his wife is a National Treasure. Together, they’re hilarious.”
“They’ll think I’m an idiot. They’ll wonder what you’re doing with me.”
“Just the opposite. They’ll wonder what a sexpot like yourself sees in a ninety-eight-pound aesthetic weakling. C.! Everybody feels like an idiot compared to Taylor.”
“I don’t need that, thanks. I have enough of that as it is.”
“But Taylor also has this way of making you feel smarter than you are. We teenagers used to fumble around with one poem or the other. Precocious and brilliant, but juvenile. I felt like a kid with the training wheels taken off. I’d soar for a hundred meters, then crash to the ground. But whenever I said something particularly stupid, Taylor would credit my misses with so much ingenuity I couldn’t even recognize them. ‘Your account of the narrator’s circumvention of the repressed’s return is persuasive in the extreme. But your hints about his real and unconscious motives needn’t be so circumspect.’ Oh, I wish I could imitate the man!”
