Collected Short Fiction, page 833
Within this dismalnesss he had carved an equally dismal nest. A squarish high-ceilinged room with clumsy furniture, patched draperies, simple utensils. A tiny stained power-pack to cook on, a coldsink in lieu of real refrigeration. He didn’t see toilet facilities. Everything in disarray. No housekeeper, she. The bed unmade, the exposed sheets carrying half a dozen layers of yellowish stains—that bothered him, he could guess at the origin of the stains—and books scattered everywhere. On the windowsill, on the floor, even under the bed. So she was a diligent reader. Interesting. You could judge a person’s character by his reading, Macy realized he scarcely knew Lissa at all. What could he say about her? That she seemed fairly bright but had shown no signs so far of having intellectual interests, that she was (so far as he was capable of telling, given the synthetic nature of his available past experience) a passably good lay, that she once had been closely associated with an important contemporary artist. Period. Had she had an education? A career of her own, goals in life, talents, skills? A model is only a cipher, a shape, a set of curves and planes and textures; Hamlin was too complicated a man to have fallen in love with her purely as model, so there had to be something back of the exterior, she must have had some kind of interior substance, she must have done something in the world other than pose for Nat Hamlin. At least until her increasingly more turbulent inner storms had driven her to take refuge in this squalid place. But he knew nothing. Had she traveled? Did she have a family? Dreams of becoming an artist herself? Perhaps her books might tell him something. Helplessly, he surveyed and inventoried her library while she bustled around collecting her other possessions. Immediately he found himself in difficulties: he was no reader himself, had merely skimmed a few popular novels during his stay in the Rehab Center, and whatever Hamlin had read, if he had read anything at all, was of course gone from Macy’s mind. Macy had only the illusion of a familiarity with literature. Dr. Brewster, the literary one, had programmed him with hazy plot summaries and dislocated images and even with the physical feel of some books, so that he knew quite clearly that The Iliad was a tall orange volume with cream-colored paper and elegant rounded print. But what was it about? A war, long ago. A quarrel over a woman. Proud barbarian chieftains. Who was Homer? Had he lived before Hemingway? Jesus, I’m an illiterate! And so, looking through Lissa’s heaps of books, he could draw no certain conclusions, except that she seemed to read (or at least to own) a lot of novels, thick serious-looking ones, and that perhaps a fifth of the books were works of biography and history, not casual light stuff by any means. So she must be a more complex person than she had revealed herself to him thus far to be. Anybody, no matter how dim, might happen to pick up a book occasionally, but Lissa had surrounded herself with them, which argued for the presence within her of psychic hungers for knowledge. He tried to touch up his image of her, making her less waif-like and dependent, less the hapless, whining victim of circumstances, more of a self-propelled inner-guided individual with purpose and direction and a sphere of interests. Although he still had difficulty seeing her as anything other than part of the furniture in Nat Hamlin’s studio, or as a pitiful casualty of modem urban life. She refused to come alive for him as a genuine, fully operative human being. Maybe it’s because I don’t understand people very well, being so new in the world. Or perhaps one of the doctors built his own archaic attitudes toward women in general into me: does Gomez, say, see them only as extensions and pale reflections of the men they live with? Mere bundles of foggy emotion and woolly response? But they don’t just drift from event to event, letting things happen to them. They won’t forget to get out of bed if nobody tells them to. Women have minds of their own. I’m sure they do. They must. They must. And interesting minds. Some commitment to something besides survival, meals, fucking, babies. Then why does she seem so hollow to me? I have to try to get to know her better.
She was filling a large battered green suitcase with her things. Clothes, knicknacks, a dozen books. Something large and flat, maybe a sketchpad. A folder of old letters and papers. She stuffed five more books in at the very last.
A tepid evening, an indifferent night. Dinner at a beanery a few blocks from his place. Afterward, home, a couple of golds, some desultory chatter, bed. No outbursts of telepathy to plague her. No resurgences of Hamlin to bother him. They were free to pursue one another’s innerness without distractions, but somehow it didn’t happen; they talked all around their troubles without coming to any of the main issues. He was surprised to learn she was not quite twenty-five years old, four or five years below his guess. Born in Pittsburgh, no less. Father some kind of scientist, mother an expert on population dynamics. Good genes. They sounded like acceptable types. Lissa hadn’t seen them in years. Came to New York, age 17, to study art. (Aha!) Thought also of writing novels. (Aha-haha!) Turning point in life the 15th of June, 2004, age 18, meets famed artist Nathaniel Hamlin. Falls wildly in love with him. He doesn’t notice her at all, so she thinks (scene is a meet-the-faculty party at the Art Students’ League, everybody wildly stoned, Hamlin—guest lecturer, or something, that semester—urbanely putting on all the pretty girls.) But a week later he calls her. Drinks? Stroll in Central Park? Of course. She is terrified. Hopes he’ll accept her as a private student. Wants to bring him to her apartment (not this present uptown hovel) and show him her sketches. Doesn’t dare. A nice chaste summertime stroll. Afterwards she is sure he found her too trivial, too adolescent, but no, he calls again, exactly seven days later. What a sweet time that was. Care to see my studio? Out in Darien, Connecticut. She has no idea where is Darien. He’ll pick her up, never fear. Long sleek car. Driving it himself. She has brought her portfolio, just in case. He takes her to flamboyant country estate, unbelievable place: swimming pool, creek, pond full of mutated goldfish in improbable colors, big stone house, medium-big studio annex. Turns out he isn’t interested in her as an artist at all, wants her as model: has some ambitious project in mind for which she would be perfect. She is awed. Her portfolio lying neglected in the car. I need to see the body, he says. Of course. Of course. Strips: blouse, slacks.
Thoughtfully omitted to don underwear that day. He studies her carefully. Oh, God, my backside’s too flat, my boobs are too big, or maybe not big enough! But no, he compliments her, good tight fanny, cute shape, will do, will do. And suddenly his pants are open in front. (Oh, you’ve seen it, Macy, you know it like your own!) She is thrown into panic. She’s been laid before, yes, eight, ten fellows, not coming on as timid innocent at all, but yet this is the authentic erection of Nathaniel Hamlin that now approaches her, which is something very special. Admired his work all her life, never dreamed that one day he’d be presenting his mast to her. Can’t take her eyes off it until it disappears into her. In and out. In and out. Nathaniel Hamlin’s authentic thing knows its business. Such terrific intensity boiling within him, and he expresses it with his pecker. She comes a thousand times. Afterward they both run naked around the estate, swim, laugh, get stoned. He grabs a camera and holographs her for an hour. You and me, he says, we’re going to make a masterpiece the world won’t ever forget. Then they dress, he drives her to a restaurant near the Sound, such glamor that it dizzies her, and finally, late at night, deposits her, an exhausted astounded adolescent heap of much-fucked flesh, at her apartment. An unforgettable experience, Then she doesn’t hear from him for three months. Despair. At last an apologetic postcard from Morocco. Another, a month and a half later, from Baghdad. At Christmastime a card with Japanese stamps on it. Then, January ’05, a phonecall. Back in town at last. See you at nine tonight, break all other engagements. And from then on she is more or less his full-time mistress, living at Darien much of the time, naturally dropping out of art school, drifting away from old friends who now seem naive and immature to her. New friends, exciting ones. Even becoming friendly with Hamlin’s wife. (A peculiar marital relation there, Macy concluded.) Early in ’06, after nearly a year of planning, he gets down to serious work on the Antigone 21. Months of toil for him and for her; he is a demon when he works. Twelve, fifteen, eighteen hours a day. Finally almost finished. Almost finished with her, too. He has been talking of marrying her since the summer of ’05, but their relationship grows increasingly tense. Physical violence: he slaps her, kicks her a couple of times, balls her once by main force when she doesn’t want it, ultimately knocks her down the stairs and breaks her pelvis. Hospital. During which time he succumbs completely to the disintegration of personality that has, unknown to her, been going on in him for most of the year, and commits Dreadful Deeds upon the persons of a variety of women. He is arrested and tried; she sees him no more until that eerie day in May of 2011 when she crashed into Paul Macy on the streets of Manhattan North.
And your telepathy problem, Macy wants to ask? When did that start? When did it become severe? But obviously she doesn’t want to talk about that. She will speak to him tonight only of old business, her romance with the defunct great artist. And now she has talked herself out. Silence. Lights out. Two red roaches in the darkness. Pungent smoke rising ceilingward. This would be the sort of moment, Macy thought, when Hamlin would appear. To append footnotes to Lissa’s story. But Hamlin, missing his cue, did not appear. It began to occur to Macy that each of his encounters with Hamlin might drain the other’s strength as much as it did his, possibly more; between colloquies, Hamlin had to lie doggo, recharging. Maybe not so, but a cheering possibility. Tire him out, wear him down, eventually eject him. An endurance contest.
Macy turned dutifully to Lissa, not particularly in need of her but feeling that they ought to commemorate her moving-in with some kind of celebration of passion; his hand slipped over one of her breasts, but she responded not at all, merely lying there in a passive stony haze, and an uncheering possibility struck him: when she makes love with me, is she really only trying to recapture those moments of fire with him? I am Nat Hamlin’s well-endowed body minus Nat Hamlin’s troublesomely violent nature; is that not all she seeks from me? The thought that he might be, for her, nothing but a dead man’s reanimated penis did not amuse him. Of course she said she enjoyed him for his own sake, but of what did his own sake consist? Having loved a genius, could she love a nonentity equally well? Or at all? A young, impressionable art student would of course be drawn automatically to a magnet such as Nat Hamlin, but Paul Macy should have no pull. Who am I, what am I, wherein lies my texture, my density? I am nothing. I am unreal. Hamlin’s shadowy successor. His relict. Macy attempted to check this cascade of negativisms, telling himself that Hamlin was undoubtedly causing it by releasing a river of poisons from his subcranial den. But he could not coax himself just now to a higher self-esteem. Entering her, he pushed the piston mechanically back and forth for three or four minutes, feeling wholly detached from her except at the point of entry, and, since she gave no hint of being with him in any way, he let himself go off and sank into the usual bothered sleep, infested by incubi and revenants.
Many sympathetic glances at the network office the next day. Everybody tiptoeing around him, speaking in soft tones, grinning a lot, sidestepping every situation of potential stress or conflict. Obviously all of them afraid he might flip at the first jarring stimulus. It was a regression to the way they had treated him weeks ago, when he had first come here, when they thought a Rehab needed to be handled as carefully as a barrel of eggs. He wondered why. Was it because he had called in sick yesterday, and now they assumed he had been suffering from some special affliction of Rehabs, some slippage of the identity, that required extra-cautious handling? Their excessive kindness, implying as it did that he was more vulnerable than they, irritated him. After two and a half hours of it he cornered Loftus, Stilton Fredericks’ executive assistant, and asked her about it.
He said, “I want you to know that what kept me home yesterday was simply an upset stomach. A case of the runs and a lot of puking, okay?”
She looked at him blankly. “I don’t remember asking.”
“I know you didn’t ask. But everybody else around this place seems to think I had some sort of nervous breakdown. At least, that’s how they’ve been treating me today. So fucking kind it’s killing me. So I thought I’d let you spread the word that I’m all right. A mere internal indisposition.”
“You don’t like people to be nice to you, Macy?”
“I didn’t say that. I just don’t want my fellow workers making inaccurate assumptions about the state of my head.”
“Okay, so you didn’t have a nervous breakdown. So why do you look so strange?”
“Strange?”
“Strange,” Loftus said.
“What way?”
“Look in the mirror.” Then, a moment of tenderness breaking through the steel: “If anything’s the matter that any of us could fix—”
“No. No. Honestly, it was only an upset stomach.”
“Uh-huh. Okay, if anybody asks, I’ll tell them. Nobody’s going to whisper behind your back.”
He thanked her and made a quick escape. Executive washroom: amid all the electronic gimmickry, the sonic shavers and the klein-bottle urinals, he found a mirror, standard variety, silver-backed glass as in days of yore. A fierce, bloodshot face looking back at him. Furrowed forehead. Nostrils flaring. Lips compressed, mouth drawn off to one side. Jesus, no wonder! He was Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll both at the same time, his features all snarled up, reflecting the most intense kind of interior agonies. And this without a buzz from Hamlin for the past eighteen hours. This double existence, this squatter occupation of the lower reaches of his mind, was corroding his face, turning him into an ambulatory flag of distress. Of course they were all being sweet to him today; they could see the signals of imminent collapse inscribed on his brow. Yet he felt relatively relaxed today. What must he look like when Hamlin was near the surface and prodding him? Macy ventured an exploratory sweep. Hamlin? Hamlin, you there? My private permanent bad dream. Come up where I can see you. Let’s have a chat. But no, all quiet on the cerebral front. Feeling snubbed, Macy set out to repair his face. Stripped to the waist. Sticking his head into the hot-air blower. Loosen the muscles, soften the scowl. A little humidity, maestro. Ah. Ah, how good that is on the tactile net. Thrust noggin now into whirlpool sink. Round and round and round, bubble bubble bubble, hold your breath and let the lovely water work its magic. Ah. Ah. Splendid. Back to the hot air to dry off. Now pop a trank. Blow a gold. Survey the map. Better, much better. The tension draining away; a lucky thing, too, they wouldn’t have let you step in front of a camera looking all screwed up. Macy was still refurbishing himself, putting his clothes back on, when Fredericks walked into the john. A hearty phony laugh out of him, ho ho ho. “Interrupting you in a moment of relaxation, Paul?”
“No. All done relaxing now. And feeling much better.”
“We were all quite concerned when you phoned in yesterday.”
“Just a jumpy stomach, was all. Much better now. See?” Flashing his rehabilitated features at Fredericks. “I appreciate the concern, but I’m really pretty tough. Stilton,” he added reluctantly. A hell of a name to carry through life. Fredericks addressed himself to the task of unloading his bladder. Macy went out, working hard at looking loose. The effort must have been worthwhile; people stopped pampering him. At half past two he picked up his script for the day, ran through the visuals four or five times, rehearsed the audio. A two-minute squib on the coronation in Ethiopia, surging throngs, lions marching on chains through the streets, a herniated corner of the fifteenth century poking into the twenty-first. Macy wondered how Mr. Bercovici, he who had selected him at the Rehab Center for this job, was making out in Addis Ababa. Was that him at the edge of the crowd, picked up by the trusty hovereye, that plump white face among the hawkfeatured brown ones? Here and gone; probably the South African consul-general, or whoever. Macy carried off his voice-over nobly. “Amid the pomp and glamor of a medieval empire, the former Prince Takla Haymanot today became the Lion of Judah, King of the Kings of Ethiopia, His Excellency the Negus Lebna Dengel II, newest monarch in a line of royalty descended from King Solomon himself . . .” Beautiful. And then home to Lissa through thin rain.
She was in bed, reading, wearing a tattered green housecoat that looked old enough to be one of the Queen of Sheba’s handmedowns, nothing at all underneath it, pinkish-brown nipples peeping through. One quick look and he knew, as if by telepathic transmission, that she had had a bad day. Her face had that sullen, pouty look; her hair was uncombed, a wild auburn tangle; the stale smell of dried sweat was sharp in the air of the bedroom. He felt strangely domesticated. Hubby coming home from hard day at office, slatternly wife about to tell him of the day’s petty crises. She tossed aside her book and sat up. “Christ,” she said. Her favorite expletive. “An all-day bummer, this was. Rainy weather indoors and out.”
He kicked off his shoes. “Bad?”
“The anvil chorus in my head.” Shrugging. “Let’s not talk about it. I was going to whip up a fancy dinner, but I didn’t get up the energy. I could put something together fast.”
“We’ll go out. Don’t bother.” He eased out of his overclothes. Fifteen seconds of dead air. Despite her saying she didn’t want to talk about today, she seemed obviously waiting for him to start questioning her. Gambit declined. He was tired and fretful himself: Hamlin beginning to clamber toward the surface again, maybe. He looked at her. She at him. The silence continued, dragging on until it had attained a tangible presence of its own. Then Lissa appeared to tune the tension out; she disconnected something in herself and slumped back against the pillow, sinking into that brooding withdrawal that she affected about half the time. Macy got himself a beer. When he returned to the bedroom she was still eighteen thousand light-years away. A curious notion came to him: that unless he made contact with her in some fashion this very minute, she would be wholly lost to him. Her closedness annoyed him, but he hid his pique and, going to her, pulled back the coverlet to caress the outside of her bare thigh. A friendly gesture, loving, almost. She didn’t seem to notice. He touched his cold beer to her skin. A hiss. “Hey!”
