Collected Short Fiction, page 877
“From Claude, Professor Guermantes.” That sleek devil. He knows everything. “Look, what are you doing right now?”
“Thinking about having a shower. I’ve been working all morning and I stink like a goat.”
“What kind of work do you do?”
“I ghostwrite term papers for Columbia men.”
She ponders that a moment. “You sure have a weird head, man. I mean really—what do you do?”
“I just told you.”
A long digestive silence. Then: “Okay. I can dig it. You ghostwrite term papers. Look, Dave, go take your shower. How long is it on the subway from a hundred and tenth and Broadway to your place?”
“Maybe forty minutes if you get a train right away.”
“Swell. See you in an hour, then.” Click.
I shrug. A crazy broad. Dave, she calls me. Nobody calls me Dave. Stripping, I head for the shower, a long leisurely soaping. Then I pick up the Updike book. I get to page four and the phone rings again. Lisa: she’s on the train platform at 225th, wants to know how to get to my apartment. This is more than a joke now. But okay. I can play her game. I give her the instructions.
Ten minutes later, a knock on the door. Lisa in thick black sweater, the same sweaty one as Saturday night, and tight blue jeans. A shy grin, strangely out of character for her. “Hi,” she says. Making herself comfortable. “When I first saw you I had this intuitive flash on you: This guy’s got something special. Make it with him. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you’ve got to trust your intuition. I go with the flow, Dave, I go with the flow.” Her sweater is off by now. Her breasts are heavy and round, with tiny, almost imperceptible nipples. A Jewish star nestles in the deep valley between them. She wanders the room, examining my books, my records, my photographs. “So tell me,” she says. “Now that I’m here. Was I right? Is there anything special about you?”
“There once was.”
“What?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” I say and, gathering my strength, I ram my mind into hers. It’s a brutal frontal assault, a rape. Of course, she doesn’t feel a thing. I say, “I used to have a really extraordinary gift. It’s mostly worn off by now, but some of the time I still have it and, as a matter of fact, I’m using it on you right now.”
“Far out,” she says and drops her jeans. No underpants. She will be fat before she’s thirty. Her thighs are thick, her belly protrudes. While I inspect her flesh I savagely ransack her mind, sparing her no areas of privacy, enjoying my access while it lasts. I don’t need to be polite. I owe her nothing—she forced herself on me.
I check first to see if she had been lying when she said she’d never heard of Kitty. The truth: Kitty is no kin to her. A meaningless coincidence of surnames, is all.
“I’m sure you’re a poet, Dave,” she says as we entwine and drop onto the unmade bed. “That’s an intuition flash too. Even if you’re doing this term paper thing now, poetry is where you’re really at.”
I continue to loot her mind like a Goth plundering the Forum. She is fully open to me—I delight in this unexpected return of vigor. Her autobiography assembles itself for me. Born in Cambridge. Twenty years old. Father a professor. One younger brother. Tomboy childhood. Measles, chicken pox, scarlet fever. Puberty at eleven, lost her virginity at twelve. Abortion at sixteen. Several Lesbian adventures. Passionate interest in French decadent poets. Acid, mescalin, psilocybin, cocaine, even a sniff of smack. Guermantes gave her that. Guermantes also took her to bed five or six times. Vivid memories of that. Her mind shows me more of Guermantes than I want to see. Lisa comes through with a tough, aggressive self-image, captain of her soul, master of her fate, and so forth. Underneath that it’s just the opposite, of course; she’s scared as hell. Not a bad kid. I feel a little guilty about the casual way I slammed into her head, no regard for her privacy at all. But I have my needs.
I lie there picking her brain and accepting the gift of her lips. Covertly I feed on feedback, tapping into her pleasure-responses. But then a funny thing happens. The broadcast from her mind is becoming erratic and indistinct, more noise than signal. The images break up in a pounding of static. What gets through is garbled and distant—I scramble to maintain my hold on her consciousness, but no use, no use, she slips away, moment by moment receding from me, until there is no communion at all.
She is caught by surprise. “What brought you down?” she asks.
I find it impossible to tell her. I remember Judith asking me, some weeks back, whether I had ever regarded my loss of mental powers as a kind of metaphor of impotence. And now here, for the first time, metaphor blends with reality—the two failures are integrated. He is impotent here and he is impotent there. Poor David.
“I guess I got distracted,” I tell her. “Let’s just rest and maybe I’ll come back to life.”
We rest. Side by side, stroking her skin in an abstract way, I run a few tentative probing efforts. Not a flicker on the telepathic level. Not a flicker. The silence of the tomb. Is this it, the end, right here and now? Is this where it finally burns out? And I am like all the rest of you now. I am condemned to make do with mere words.
I try again to probe her. Zero. Zee-ro. Is it gone? I think it’s really gone. You have been present today at an historic event, young lady. The perishing of a remarkable extrasensory power. Leaving behind this merely mortal husk of mine. Alas.
“I’d love to read some of your poetry, Dave,” she says.
MONDAY night, about seven-thirty. Lisa has left, finally. I go out for dinner to a nearby pizzeria. I am quite calm. The impact of what has befallen me hasn’t really registered yet. How strange that I can be so accepting. At any moment, I know, it’s bound to come rushing in on me, crushing me, shattering me. But for now I’m surprisingly cool. An oddly posthumous feeling, as of having outlived myself. And a feeling of relief—the suspense is over, the process has completed itself. The dying is done and I’ve survived it. Of course I don’t expect this mood to last. I’ve lost something central to my being and now I await the anguish and the grief and the despair that must surely be due to erupt shortly.
But it seems that my mourning must be postponed. What I thought was all over isn’t over yet. I walk into the pizzeria and the counterman gives me his flatly cold New York smile of welcome. And I get this, unsolicited, from behind his greasy face:
Hey, here’s the fag who always wants extra anchovies.
Reading him clearly. So it’s not dead yet! Not quite dead! Only resting a while. Only hiding.
TUESDAY. Bitter cold. One of those terrible late-autumn days when every drop of moisture has been squeezed from the air and the sunlight is like knives. I finish two more term papers. Judith calls after lunch. The usual dinner invitation. My usual oblique reply.
“What did you think of Karl?” she asks.
“A very substantial man.”
“He wants me to marry him.”
“Well?”
“It’s too soon. I don’t really know him, Duv. I like him—I admire him tremendously, but I don’t know whether I love him.”
“Then don’t rush into anything with him,” I say. “Besides, if you marry him, he’d probably want you to give up Guermantes. I don’t think he could dig it.”
“You know about me and Claude?”
“Of course.”
“You always know everything.”
“This was pretty obvious, Jude.”
“I thought your power was waning.”
“It is, it is—faster than ever. But this was still pretty obvious. To the naked eye.”
“All right. What did you think of him?”
“He’s death. He’s a killer.”
“You misjudge him, Duv.”
“I was in his head. I saw him, Jude. He isn’t human. People are toys to him.”
“If you could hear the sound of your own voice now, Duv. The hostility, the outright jealousy—”
“Jealousy? Am I so openly incestuous?”
“You always were,” she says. “But let that pass. I really thought you’d enjoy meeting Claude.”
“I did. He’s fascinating. I think cobras are fascinating too.”
“Oh, shove it, Duv.”
“You want me to pretend I liked him?”
“Don’t do me any favors.” The old icy Judith.
“What’s Karl’s reaction to Guermantes?”
She pauses. Finally: “Pretty negative. Karl’s very conventional, you know. Just as you are.”
“Me?”
“Oh, you’re so damned straight, Duv! You’re such a puritan! You’ve been lecturing me on morality all my goddamned life, wagging your finger at me—”
“Why doesn’t Karl like him?”
“I don’t know. He thinks Claude’s sinister. Exploitive.” Her voice is suddenly flat and dull. “Maybe he’s just jealous. He knows I’m still sleeping with Claude. Oh, Jesus, Duv, why are we fighting again? Why can’t we just talk?”
“I’m not the one who’s fighting. I’m not the one who raised his voice.”
“You’re challenging me. That’s what you always do. You spy on me and then you challenge me and try to put me down.”
“Old habits are hard to break, Jude. Really, though—I’m not angry with you.”
“You sound so smug!”
“I’m not angry. You are. You got angry when you saw that Karl and I agree about your friend Claude. People always get angry when they’re told something they don’t want to hear. Listen, Jude, do whatever you want. If Guermantes is your trip, go ahead.”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.” An unexpected concession: “Maybe there is something sick about my relationship with him.” Her flinty self-assurance vanishes abruptly. That’s the wonderful thing about her—you get a different Judith every two minutes. Now, softening, thawing, she sounds uncertain of herself. In a moment she’ll turn her concern outward, away from her own troubles, toward me. “Will you come to dinner next week? We very much do want to get together with you.”
“I’ll try.”
“I’m worried about you, Duv.” Yes, here it comes. “You looked so strung out on Saturday night.”
“It’s been a pretty rough time for me. But I’ll manage.” I don’t feel like talking about myself. “Listen, I’ll call you soon, okay?”
“Are you still in so much pain, Duv?”
“I’m adapting. I’m accepting the whole thing. I mean, I’ll be okay. Keep in touch, Jude. My best to Karl.” And Claude, I add, as I put down the receiver.
WEDNESDAY morning. Downtown to deliver my latest batch of masterpieces. It’s colder even than yesterday. The air is clearer, the sun brighter, more remote. How dry the world seems. The humidity must be practically zero, I think. This is the sort of weather I used to function in with overwhelming clarity of perception. But I was picking up hardly anything at all on the subway ride down to Columbia, just muzzy little blurts and squeaks, nothing coherent. I can no longer be certain of having the power on any given day, apparently, and this is one of the days off. Unpredictable. That’s what you are, you who live in my head—unpredictable. Thrashing about randomly in your death throes.
I go to the usual place and await my clients. They come. They get from me what they have come for. They cross my palm with greenbacks. David Selig, benefactor of undergraduate mankind. I see Yahya Lumumba like a black sequoia making his way across from Butler Library. Why am I trembling? It’s the chill in the air, isn’t it, the hint of winter, the death of the year?
“You got the paper, man?”
“Right here.” I deal it off the stack. “Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Six pages. That’s twenty-one dollars, minus the five you already gave me—makes sixteen you owe me.”
“Wait, man,” He sits down beside me on the steps. “I got to read it first, right?”
I watch him as he reads. Somehow I expect him to be moving his lips, to be stumbling over the unfamiliar words, but no—his eyes flicker rapidly over the lines. He gnaws his lip. He reads faster and faster, impatiently turning the pages. At length he looks at me and there is death in his eyes.
“This is shit, man,” he says. “I mean, this here is just shit. What kind of con you trying to pull?”
“I guarantee you’ll get a B+. You don’t have to pay me until you get the grade. Anything less than B+ and—”
“No, listen to me. Who talking about grades? I can’t turn this thing in at all. Look, half this thing is jive-talk, the other half is copied straight out some book. Crazy shit, that’s what. The prof is going to read it, he going to look at me, he going to say, Lumumba, who you think I am? You think I a dummy, Lumumba? You didn’t write this crap, he going to say to me. You don’t believe Word One of this.” Angrily he rises. “Here, I going to read you some of this, man. I show you what you give me.” Leafing through the pages, he scowls, spits, shakes his head. “No. Why the hell should I? You know what you up to here, man? You making fun of me, that’s what. You playing games with the dumb nigger, man.”
“I was trying to make it look plausible that you had written—”
“Crap. You pulling a mindfuck, man. You making up a pile of stinking Jew shit about Europydes and you hoping I get in trouble trying to pass it off as my own stuff.”
“That’s a lie. I did the best possible job for you—and don’t think I didn’t sweat plenty. When you hire another man to write a term paper for you I think you have to be prepared to expect a certain—”
“How long this take you? Fifteen minutes?”
“Eight hours, maybe ten,” I say. “You know what I think you’re trying to do, Lumumba? You’re pulling reverse racism on me. Jew this and Jew that—if you don’t like Jews so much, why didn’t you get a black to write your paper for you? Why didn’t you write it yourself? I did an honest job for you. I don’t like hearing it put down as stinking Jew shit. And I tell you that if you turn it in, you’ll get a passing grade for sure—you’ll probably get a B+ at the very least.”
“I gonna get flunked, is what.”
“No. No. Maybe you just don’t see what I was driving at. Let me try to explain it to you. If you’ll give it to me for a minute so I can read you a couple of things—maybe it’ll be clearer if I—” Getting to my feet, I extend a hand toward the paper, but he grins and holds it high above my head. I’d need a ladder to reach it. “Come on, damn it, don’t play games with me! Let me have it!” I snap. He flicks his wrist and the six sheets of paper soar into the wind and go sailing eastward. Dying, I watch them go. I clench my fists—an astonishing burst of rage explodes in me. I want to smash in his mocking face. “You shouldn’t have done that,” I say. “You shouldn’t have just thrown it away.”
“You owe me my five bucks.”
“Hold on, now. I did the work you hired me to do and—”
“You said you don’t charge if the paper’s no good. Okay, the paper was shit. No charge. Give me the five.”
“You aren’t playing fair, Lumumba. You’re trying to rip me off.”
“Who ripping who off? Who set up that money-back deal anyhow? Me? You. What I gonna do for a term paper now? I got to take an incomplete and it your fault. Suppose they make me ineligible for the team because of that. Huh? Huh? What then? Look, man, you make me want to puke. Give me the five.”
IS HE serious about the refund? I can’t tell. The idea of paying him back disgusts me and it isn’t just on account of losing the money. I wish I could read him, but I can’t get anything out of him on that level—I’m completely blocked now. I’ll bluff. I say, “What is this, slavery turned upside down? I did the work. I don’t give a damn what kind of crazy irrational reasons you’ve got for rejecting it. I’m going to keep the five. At least the five.”
“Give me the money, man.”
“Go to hell.”
I start to walk away. He grabs me—his arm, fully extended toward me, must be as long as one of my legs—and hauls me to him. He starts to shake me. My teeth are rattling. His grin is broader than ever, but his eyes are demonic. I wave my fists at him, but, held at arm’s length, I can’t even touch him. I start to yell. A crowd is gathering. Suddenly there are three or four other men in varsity jackets surrounding us, all black, all gigantic, though not as big as he is. His teammates. Laughing, whooping, cavorting. I am a toy to them. “Hey, man, he bothering you?” one of them asks. “You need help, Yahya?” yells another. “What’s the honkie doing to you, man?” calls a third. They form a ring and Lumumba thrusts me toward the man on his left, who catches me and flings me onward around the circle. I spin—I stumble—I reel. They never let me fall. Around and around and around. An elbow explodes against my lip. I taste blood. Someone slaps me and my head rockets backward. Fingers are jabbing my ribs. I realize that I’m going to get very badly hurt, that in fact these giants are going to beat me up. A voice I barely recognize as my own offers Lumumba his refund, but no one notices. They continue to whirl me from one to the next. Not slapping now, not jabbing, but punching. Where are the campus police? Help! Help! Pigs to the rescue! But no one comes. I can’t catch my breath. I’d like to drop to my knees and huddle against the ground. They’re yelling at me, racial epithets, words I barely comprehend, soul-brother jargon that must have been invented last week. I don’t know what they’re calling me, but I can feel the hatred in every syllable. Help? Help? The world spins wildly. I know now how a basketball would feel, if a basketball could feel. The steady pounding, the blur of unending motion. Please, someone, anyone, help me, stop them. Pain in my chest—a lump of white-hot metal back of my breastbone. I can’t see. I can only feel. Where are my feet? I’m falling at last. Look how fast the steps rush toward me. The cold kiss of the stone bruises my cheek. I may already have lost consciousness—how can I tell? There’s one comfort at least. I can’t get any further down than this.
XX
HE WAS ready to fall in love when he met Kitty, overripe and eager for an emotional entanglement. Perhaps that was the whole trouble—what he felt for her was not so much love as simply satisfaction at the idea of being in love. Or perhaps not. He never understood his feelings for Kitty in any orderly way. They had their romance in the summer of 1963, which he remembers as the last summer of hope and good cheer before the long autumn of entropic chaos and philosophical despair descended on western society.
