Cast in Doubt Read online

  Yannis enters my room, agitated. His disturbance has something to do with Roger and the blond boy who was with him nights ago. Yannis is so angry I can’t apprehend what occurred. Sigá, sigá, I say, to quiet him. Just tell me, slowly, what happened. Yannis reports that he was fishing with the blond boy, the friend of Roger, as he puts it. Roger came upon them and accused Yannis of stealing his fountain pen—a beloved object inherited from his father—and perhaps some money, too. Yannis became, and is still, infuriated by Roger’s attack upon his character. Rightly so. Roger must have been drunk, I explain to Yannis, he could not have been in his right mind. I make circles with my index finger, next to my temple, to emphasize Roger’s alleged craziness. I will write him, I continue in a consoling tone.

  Right then and there I take out my best-weight letter paper and begin the salutation. I intend to handle this unappealing matter directly and with speed, but I will also invite Roger to the party for Gwen. Two birds with one stone; one bird to take the sting out of the other, for it is possible that this mild rebuke may be unnecessary. Yannis may be concocting the story, or something else may have transpired, which he has been canny enough to cover up through the invention of this tale. I look at Yannis, who seems earnestly angry. I don’t want an all-out war with Roger; our nightly sniping is mission enough.

  The door opens. Gwen has emerged from her beauty sleep. Naturally Yannis is not delighted to see her, being in a sullen mood. I too am a trifle agitated. I hate these kinds of bizarre disturbances. Also, I am anxious that what occurred among Roger, the blond boy, and Yannis may be revealed to be of a sinister nature, much darker and more convoluted than what I’ve heard, though for Yannis to be accused of theft is dark enough, for him. Still, my guess is that a piece is missing from this puzzle.

  With Gwen present I don’t want Yannis and my unpleasant conversation to proceed. I place the letter paper under the blotter. Yannis stands by my side, still looking over my shoulder, though I have stopped writing. I halted mid-sentence—didn’t René Daumal die mid-sentence when writing Mount Analogue? Standing thus, Yannis surely is an ominous figure, or at least an unfriendly one, to Gwen. Though Gwen must be accustomed to surly and unruly types—bouncers, rock-and-roll musicians, scenemakers and the like. They probably do not disturb her, whether or not they offend her. Incivility is unnecessary. People ought to behave, to attempt first to be polite, to respect each other, simply to make the world a less disgusting place to exist in—for oneself if nothing else. Otherwise we are mangy dogs.

  After a definitive gesture—I cross my hands over each other several times—I stand and look directly into Yannis’ dark, angry eyes. When he seems as if he is not going to give ground or relent, I brush past him, insisting, in an aside, Telos, telos, endáksi, okay? He turns abruptly and stares at Gwen, glowers at her I think, then retreats into his room. I’ll deal with him later.

  Telos, she repeats. Quel droll. To know the end now, Lulu. Wouldn’t that be marvelous? The puffiness and dark circles beneath her eyes cast her as the sophisticate, a moody one at that. She could never play the naive ingénue. They never go, she says, touching the soft skin beneath her eyes, the area she designates as her pillows of tormented pillow talk. I brew some coffee; she stretches out on the chaise longue and lights a cigarette. She is about to spin a tale for me, I can tell, and I get as comfortable as I can, hoping that my bones won’t ache from sitting and that my fingers won’t go numb. I treasure Gwen’s stories.

  In New York, Gwen was caught between two friends who had become lovers and who were fighting like mad and drawing her into the fray. Daily telephone calls lasted for hours, first one of the furious lovers, then the other, to tell his or her side of it, the recent split-up, and there were threats of suicide as well as indiscriminate pill-taking by both parties. Mandrax was the drug of choice; an orgy drug, for some, she adds, waiting for me to react. I don’t. Gwen was not beyond reproach from either of the lovers, since when they made up, which was as often as they split up and as impermanent, both would vent their fury upon her. Why had she said this to that one and so on. Comical and boring, a miserable situation. One of the pair had slept with the enemy of the other, and the question was: Was her sleeping with him a deliberate attack on the other’s career? Quel drag, Gwen intones.

  Then there were her own intimate relationships. She was still seeing the Hunk—Gwen has a nickname for everyone—the married man. It was abundantly clear he wouldn’t leave his wife, and it was also clear that Gwen’s remaining close to her friend, his wife, was entirely untenable. Untenable for ten years, I remark, not without some acerbity. She ignores me as only she can.

  The New York scene was appalling. Tacky. The boys were becoming younger, and she’d slept with two girls, both of whom became serious about her, the older woman, much to her chagrin. Life was dreary. The seventies were boring to her, in one way, and outrageous in another, and they were half over. This too was depressing. She was unable to get into punk. She was tired of the clubs, none was what it used to be. I’m not what I used to be, she says. She feels old, but can’t stop herself from devouring whatever’s around, tawdry remakes of the un-original. Rebellion had reached new lows. A teenybopper punkette spat on Gwen’s neck at a club called CBGB’s. She wasn’t sure at first what it was—perhaps a leaky roof. She looked up but saw nothing. It happened again. Finally Gwen turned around in her seat to find the idiot child smiling at her as if she’d given Gwen a gift. Gwen was too drunk to respond. Small indignities reminded her that the times were truly silly. Quel zeitgeist.

  She was drinking too much, sleeping with too many kids, or tots, as she calls them, staying out until all hours, not getting anything done. She hadn’t accomplished any real writing in months, almost nothing on her script, Dark Angels, nor had she done any research in ages—she’s exploring the relationship between Emily Dickinson’s spare poems and some nineteenth-century American painting. For money she was editing manuscripts for several publishing houses and was doctoring one low-budget movie script. She has written several dissertations in her time, earning doctorates not only in art history, which is her field, but also surreptitiously in American literature, sociology and German history. Gwen considers herself a ghostwriter with range. Her only release and comfort is in reading. She visits with some of the old crowd from Cambridge, but there are new friends too, who come and go.

  My life is a revolving door, Gwen says, not the door itself but the spaces in between. Lulu, she opines, we’re all stale as week-old white bread. We are not vrai gay.

  But Gwen’s eyes light up gaily when she talks about him, the great passion, passion criminelle, of her life. The leather-jacketed rock-and-roll singer still invaded her dreams and bruised her life. He was around, as she puts it, a vague expression to match his vagueness, around even if around meant only late-night telephone calls which woke her from tortuous dreams of him. He might appear at her apartment at 2 A.M., eat a peanut-butter sandwich and complain of problems with his group. She might meet him at an after-hours club where they’d talk and drink and then she’d find herself alone again, alone and high. That was all. Her feelings for him were not at all vague. They were, rather, pitched at a high frequency and quite romantic for someone as cynical as Gwen claimed to be. She is feverish about him, in fact, after all these years. I am always true to him in my fashion, she laughs dryly.

  Gwen is a dry martini, shaken briskly, with a small onion, no, an olive—the green and red go well with her skin. The rock singer’s habit was more for heroin than for heroines like Gwen. She knew she wasn’t his type: she was too bookish, not sexy enough, too small. Perhaps, we both speculate, he likes boys better. Gwen interjects that she likes boys better, too. Maybe, Lulu, she speculates dispassionately, I’m a faggot like you. Gwen looks down at herself, taking her own measure or casing her body as if it were merely clues to herself. There is wan dismay on her thin face.

  Dramatically I exclaim, I’m a Victorian faggot. Then, bending from the waist to produce a small bow
, I pour us more wine. No, you’re not, you can’t be, Gwen goes on tipsily, there weren’t any faggots then. Wilde was a homosexual, which was very avant, but he was no faggot. If he had been, he wouldn’t have sued Lord what’s-his-name. Gwen drags on her cigarette. Lulu, let’s think of you as the Sugarplum Fairy. She chortles and finishes her glass of wine. Sugarplum indeed! Hummph, I respond, much like a foppish Father Time. I finish my wine too. I’m an Edwardian faggot, I utter finally, or I am no faggot at all. Terrible word really for us, I insist, bunch of sticks on peasant women’s backs. I’m thinking of course of my day with Helen in the country and the peasant women in the road, but Gwen doesn’t, cannot know this, and she arches one eyebrow.

  A faggot might indeed sue Lord what’s-his-name. Mightn’t he? I wonder. I feel quite ill at ease, truth be told, with some of the young gay men who come here from the States from time to time, given my address by Gwen. This might be because they are so very young, chic and high-spirited, but it may be other things too. I was raised in a much different time, after all, and though I am sympathetic to the cause, still they sometimes strike me as bumptious and nearly patriotic, in a sense, to their newly fashioned identity and freedom. Their fervor I do not completely or comfortably share. I wouldn’t admit this to Gwen, although she may agree, being herself no patriot about anything. Roger calls people such as these enthusiasts. I would argue with him to the death about such a term, if he used it pejoratively in relation to our brothers. For I feel I ought to experience such—a brotherhood—and yet I am disquieted by it, with the notion itself. Camaraderie has never been easy for me. In any case I am an ambivalent enthusiast. I am also too old to mend my ways, if indeed they need mending. I am not sure that one ought to be proud of anything, though I do take pride in some things. On the other hand, I do recognize that self-esteem is important.

  But I am stunned by Gwen’s admission—that she feels old, too old for punk and the clubs. Of course this makes her more like me than ever, and ought, in a way, to please me. But it doesn’t. To me she will be—and I suppose I need her to be—eternally, even prosaically young, forever at the age I met her. She is the outrageous art history student, the life of every party, and so forth. You’ll always be young, I exult, impassioned. No, no, she demurs. As if she means it, she repeats twice, I’m over the hill, Lulu. Then she laughs at herself, more for using the phrase “over the hill,” I think, than for anything else. A second later, she is pensive again.

  Gwen rarely smiles; she laughs but doesn’t smile. I’d nearly forgotten that too. Instead of a smile, her lips might straighten into a narrow dash, a printer’s em-dash—she’s a literary type—or move into a grin that is more nearly a grimace. This is especially obvious, I remember, when she meets people for the first time. She is in her own way shy, I think, though most people would think her arrogant. She’s terribly afraid, I think, of being in new situations and is enormously vulnerable, quite easily given to feelings of rejection. As I stare at her now, I wonder if this has to do with her being a woman, black, or both. I think I wonder this now somehow because of Helen. Helen is bold about being female, her own kind, and almost aggressive about her differences from others. She had no problem telling me that the Westerns I loved bored her. And then there is the way she snapped at those Greek men. Years ago I hadn’t ever reflected seriously or thought too much about how different Gwen was and might be from me, our backgrounds and so on. Years back I didn’t think about it. Perhaps it is only distance that allows true reflection.

  Gwen is lounging languidly on the couch; still she’s quite contained at the same time. Her feet are plugged under her bottom, her black pumps strewn on the floor. Her fitted gray suit—she often wears mannish suits—gives her a there’s-no-foolishness-here image, but the wineglass balances flirtatiously and contradictorily in her hand. She has painted pale purple polish on her short nails. Lavender-blue, she calls it.

  My unsmiling Gwen. It’s as if she proclaims to the world, I may be masochistic with men but I’m damned if I’m going to be servile as well. Or that may be the way it is with me, what I, Horace, would say to the world had I as much courage as Gwen. For though she is terrified, she moves about and into worlds I myself shrink from. She dares herself constantly not to be afraid. Perhaps the most courageous people are the ones who are most afraid. Imagine, I think to myself, the fear of a mountain climber. Or a social climber. It is really difficult to sift other people’s feelings from one’s own. Especially when one feels close to the other.

  Gwen has picked up one of the books I borrowed from Alicia, the one titled, simply, The Gypsies. She is leafing through it, reading a bit here and there. She looks at me quizzically. I tell her they’re Alicia’s books. Gwen met Alicia a few years ago, but Alicia and she didn’t take to each other. Actually I think Alicia liked Gwen, but Gwen didn’t give her the time of day except to talk about opera. At one time Gwen devoted herself to opera and ballet, one of those people who knew the best cheap seats at the Met, very disdainful of those with season tickets who didn’t attend, leaving their seats vacant. Years back I told her she ought to be grateful, for she could move from her cheap seat to one of the better ones. Gwen reproached me in no uncertain terms: being grateful was not a feeling she easily owned.

  She inquires if I am killing Gypsies in my next crime story. Certainly not, I assure her, nothing of the sort. It is research for myself, for a special project inspired by Helen. I explain that Helen is most likely off with a young Gypsy woman, and that I have become interested in the subject. It is Gwen’s turn now to harrumph, Quel exotic. She brings up a letter I once wrote her in which I went on at considerable length about some Gypsies here, who I thought had stolen from me. I am forced to admit that I am prejudiced against them, but find this a failing in myself, I tell her, and then I go on, no doubt pompously, about how, if one studies a subject, or engages it in a serious way, it becomes impossible to hold on to the same prejudices. Gwen contends that my belief in the power of reason ought to be examined, that prejudice is not reasonable. Though I wouldn’t know about that, she expands listlessly. She laughs again. She is nothing if not ironic; and I ought to take her up, I know, but I have launched into a train of thought that leads to the conclusion that we study what we hate as much as what we love. Yes, Gwen says, we study our demons. And our demons won’t let us go, Lulu. For a second Gwen appears desperate ,, at a loss when she is never at a loss—for words at least. I don’t know what to do or say. She tells me to forget it. She says she’s quite all right, just a little tight.

  Did I look stricken? I wonder. How I hate being given away by my eyes, by myself. I offer her some cheese and bread—the bread is a bit stale, like that metaphor she offered about her group. She eats a bit and complains that I am in no way a Jewish mother. Perhaps I’m a Greek mother, I say. Does that mean I am a father? We laugh together and some of the tension passes. Then I announce, with no little anxiety, that John, a handsome young musician, an ex-beau of Helen’s from New York, will be here tomorrow to see about building bookshelves. Gwen and he will certainly meet, and in anticipation of that meeting, I must explain his presence beforehand, I believe. I don’t want any more unruly surprises. Gwen shoots a knowing we’ve-been-here-before look at me. I expected this. I can keep nothing from her, at least nothing that is about love or lust. To deflect her curiosity, I remark, rather more loudly than I want, You’re making quite a name for yourself, dear. John knew who you were. Gwen grimaces, inhales deeply and sips her wine. She asks rhetorically, because how would I, out-of-touch Horace, know if she ever slept with him. You know how forgetful I am, she says; then inquires disinterestedly, he’s staying with Alicia? Such a woman. She emphasizes woman. Clearly Gwen remembers that she doesn’t like Alicia, but I don’t remind Gwen that that aspect of her supposedly bad memory has not suffered injury. Also I don’t repeat that John referred to Gwen as old. I have no desire to hurt her.

  Perhaps Gwen grimaces because she is nearsighted. She refuses to wear glasses. I have learned
to accept the fact that she subscribes to Parker’s “men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.” As I said, I do believe she is very much like Parker. Gwen is vain. Often she cannot recognize friends on the street or at a party unless they are right in front of her. She uses this to her advantage—she can shun people and seem not to and can always say, I didn’t see you. I’m as blind as a bat. Then she might wink. The literary line which divides her face cryptically, or critically—it is doing so now—allows her the liberty of ambiguity, or rather the solace of ambiguity.

  I’m throwing a party for you, dear. I’ll invite everyone. Tout le monde. Gwen smiles and grimaces. She hopes that I serve food, so that people don’t retch all night and the next day, as they did in Cambridge that time, our last and most infamous New Year’s Eve party, which ended in a near-riot. Recalling it makes me laugh uproariously. I twist or roll in the chair and hold my sides, then lose my breath and begin to hiccup. Gwen watches me steadily, with some concern. You don’t laugh enough, Lulu, you’re out of shape. When the hiccups stop and I catch my breath, I explain that memories have come flooding in. Of our friends vomiting? she asks, deadpan. I shake my head and start to laugh again. I was also thinking of much more pleasant things. Remember Peter collapsing into his lover’s arms? Pleasant, Gwen retorts. I ignore her. Remember George, absolutely blotto, collapsing, after much Scotch and many pills, remember how he crashed upon the table like a giant redwood cut at the stem? Timber, we shouted. Timbers we called him afterward, for a long time. He’s gone, Gwen notes cryptically.

  Perhaps it is the mention of death itself that is cryptic. Or those times at that café, I go on, I forget the name of it now—and our arguments about New Criticism with the social realists. This in turn reminds me of a recent argument I had with Roger. He believes that a work of art’s greatness can be measured by the difficulty with which it can be copied. Gwen finds this viewpoint hilarious, as do I. Roger claimed, repeatedly, as if speaking to a dead man, that a Vermeer couldn’t be copied. But I won the argument by insisting that a Jackson Pollock would be much harder to copy, as it was executed not by the careful application of paint but by employing randomness. How, I said to him, my voice mounting in vehemence, just how would you copy, exactly and precisely, a splat? A three-dimensional splat at that? Gwen salutes me.