Cast in Doubt Read online

  I prefer Picasso to Pollock, though Gwen doesn’t. Quel stupid is your Roger, says she. How do you stay here, she asks again, if you have to engage in boring arguments like that? Please, Gwen, I answer, with more annoyance than I mean to show, let us decide that this subject is off season, shall we? I am here, that is all. You are in New York and from what you report, it is not so marvelous there either, and we will not have a pleasant time together if you keep harping on this place and its obvious inadequacies. I enjoy these inadequacies. And why not, I think to myself, enjoy them. All right, Lulu, Gwen nods, and studies me in her inimitable way. All right, Lulu, you win. You witness the demise of a scold. She suggests that we drink to our inadequacies, which we do. The matter is as much as resolved. An understanding has been reached on the subject.

  The rest of the night speeds away. Somehow, attempting to envision it now, I see an image, myself lying on the floor absolutely still—I am pretending to be a log. This may have had to do with Gwen’s wordplay about letting sleeping logs lie, and so forth. I seem to recall something like that. Or it may have had to do with another mention of our dead friend Timbers. Or it may have been produced when I was laughing and rolling like a log.

  In the morning Gwen’s pumps are still on the floor under the chaise longue. She is nowhere in sight and Yannis too has disappeared. With her shoes there, it’s as if she’d melted into thin air, like the city of Oz or, more ominously, like the Wicked Witch. Melting has a mysterious and fluid quality to it that attaches itself to Gwen, who has a wonderful plasticity to her. She can fit herself into so many scenes, as John might put it. But Gwen is not magical in the way that Helen is, I mean, not as mysterious to me. Mystery might have its roots in magic. Gwen has her feet on the ground, even if she abandons her shoes. As for Yannis’ absence, about this I experience some trepidation. On the other hand, John will come soon, and would I really care to have Yannis hanging about being surly?

  Part 2

  The Strange Disorder

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  Chapter 10

  It occurs to me that part of this story transpired before certain revelations, before some events occurred which disturbed my peace and the pace of this narrative, such as it is, which I was in no way able to predict or even to imagine. Looking back on it, the life I lived and am recording had been orderly and relatively contained. But at the time I lived it, I sensed myself, inarticulately, to be not quite in it, holding on rather tentatively, threatened by something, a presence or other who might be waiting in the wings, and who might make me lose my way, lose my grip. I was always at the brink of that, staving it off. Dante expresses it so elegantly: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / chè la diritta via era smarrita. Yes, “In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to my senses in a dark forest, for I had lost the straight path.”

  I did not see Helen as an impediment, but took her for a miracle, my Beatrice, if you will. She existed outside my world, and so was a delicacy, an entity delicious in it, drawn into it but separate from it. I embraced her without reservation. To me she was unaccountable and yet, within limits, delightfully unmanageable. Now I see that my habits were designed precisely to control my world. And that I deigned to do so was typical of my approach to life before a certain dramatic break in my thinking, perhaps not dramatic, but one of import to me, and one which necessarily affected my daily routines. And surely one might—I will—call that dramatic.

  John is due to arrive at noon. Yannis is nowhere to be found. I have already spent most of the morning writing, which included invitations to the soirée for Gwen. Yannis has not been home for several hours, not counting the evening hours. Yet this is not terribly unusual. He must have gone home to visit his mother, a widow. I believe he shares with her some of the money I give him, and that is perfectly all right with me, though he never tells me precisely what he does with his allowance. Nor do I ask. I assume he thinks I would not like it, were I to know, but in fact I do, very much, as I feel my largesse supports those who need it. This in turn supports me in feeling worthy and virtuous. After all, I am the scion of Calvinists and Puritans, an upbringing that still adheres, in some respects. In addition I have heard that Beauvoir and Sartre support the people around them, their adopted family, and I admire that greatly.

  John appears. He is late but he looks beautiful. I would say as usual, but this afternoon he has a glow on. That is how my English friend Duncan might put it. Duncan would sleep with him right off, without so much as a by-your-leave. He would know just how to seduce a supposedly non-homosexual lad into his bed and into imagining that just this once made no difference whatsoever, that, no matter what, he was as good as new, still a man, that life goes on, and in fact it may not make a difference and life does go on. Duncan with his lime-green eyes and catlike cunning—Duncan would simply charm and charm and then pounce. But Duncan is younger than I, and even when I was younger, I never pounced. I am not the pouncing type. I am cautious, unless I am drunk, and then I don’t care, and no one else does either, I should think.

  John glances about my rooms with no hint of self-consciousness. He takes them in and I drink him in, a rich brew, a heady tonic. Some such idea wafts playfully in my mind. He is quite playful too; I am sure he is flirting with me in earnest. He measures the wall against which I want to place two bookcases. He moves gracefully and with assurance. He is a lissome lad, I think contentedly. And he seems to know what he is doing. He is even direct when it comes down to it—the nuts and bolts of daily life, the practicalities. We discuss the size of the shelves and whether I would want them all to be of equal height. I decide to have the top ones built for oversized books. John even appears interested when I explain how my library will be ordered and how it will differ in plan from that of the Dewey decimal system. Libraries reflect their collectors, and each library, I tell John, has a life and mind of its own.

  Naturally talk evolves from shelves to books and to other subjects and at one moment to Helen, which is not a surprise. I am prepared for this. We are sitting on my couch, having tea. John discovers that I have not seen her for a while. I reveal the whole truth—that she and I may be on the outs—because now my subterfuge would be almost callous and surely unnecessary. John becomes alarmed, which surprises me pleasantly; his entire demeanor had excluded the possibility of his being shockable. He could not be just “a liar,” as Helen had said, but a delicate young man, more complex and sensitive than she allowed. I keep reflecting upon how odd it is, how peculiar, that someone as hip, probably as groovy as John, in his colorful terms, should manifest alarm. His rationalizations for it are feeble, to the effect that it has nothing to do with him, but everything to do with her. Though I have my own doubts, I attempt to calm him, assuring him that no harm will come to Helen, who is willful and remarkably resilient. He now exhibits a grave scrupulosity, but says nothing. His expression, easily called up in my mind’s eye, is full of meaning, yet ambiguous, even opaque.

  I am still extremely curious about Helen’s sister, and whether she was a suicide as I had surmised, and whether they were twins, which I have less belief in of late, especially now that Gwen is in town. With Gwen around I am more aware of my feelings toward her, twinnish feelings. In fact, I was in the process of writing something to that effect when John knocked at my door.

  Long ago, I imagined Gwen and I were fraternal twins—man, woman, heterosexual, homosexual, black, white. But in a way these supposed oppositions meant nothing to me except as qualities that added to our specialness. The point was we were originals, that was what was most important. Nothing could really separate us. Gwen and I were two sides of the same precious coin. As Alicia might put it, we were each other’s anima and animus. But I really don’t subscribe to Jungian theory. It was true, though, that I idealized us, and perhaps I will always. From other sides of the tracks but on the same track, we were, and are, our own club. Gwen has often commented upon how discriminating we were in those days, how exclu
sive, no one was good enough for us. She was a greater snob than I in many ways.

  She must have acclimated quickly to being the only black person in our group, and often the only female. She never let on what her feelings were, if any, about being singular in those ways. I knew then, and know now, very little about her other, earlier life, with her family, and little in regard to her attitudes toward or even her experience of race. In New York there was a black piano player she liked, but he too spent most of his time in white society. On one occasion I attempted to ask her. She uttered something rather abstract about being more about sex than race and disallowed, through her laconicism and gestures, I recall, any further questions, direct questions of that nature, anyway. It was a less strange remark then—to be about sex, not race, in a way—than now, although maybe not, since it was at the beginning of the sixties. I accepted her answer, as it neatly coincided with my conception of her. But in any case, I was not and am not one to press, even though I am unusually curious—this is often said of me. I have the urge to pry. Can this truly mean, as Freud suggested, that I am always seeking to discover my parents in flagrante delicto?

  Gwen never wanted to talk about her family; it was as if anything said about families at all was childish or beneath contempt. She seemed to hold them in contempt. But all of us did then. She seemed, and still seems, not to think about herself in any of the ways one might imagine. This may be true of original people generally. But while she never made pronouncements about race, as if it didn’t occur to her, and therefore ought not to others, I have now more than a sneaking suspicion that nothing escaped Gwen, that she always knew where she was and where she had come from. Very little escaped from her that she didn’t want others to know, no matter how close one was. But this never occurred to me then. Gwen must have suffered the way one does when one lives a crucial aspect of one’s life in secrecy, in the closet. She must have suffered in silence. Perhaps she still does, even in these more open times. I felt a chill and shivered involuntarily. I walked to the open window and shut it decisively. The cold air had blown in from some distant, terribly remote place outside me, outside us. Actually, I felt a bit like Rebecca in Daphne du Maurier’s novel, which Hitchcock most successfully brought to the screen.

  I was not terribly happy with the passage. It was likely I had not gotten it right, for no matter how I looked back at Gwen and myself, to recapitulate our past and to examine my perceptions of her, then and now, she and it—the past—slipped away, seemed just out of reach. I was too clumsily grasping at it, whatever it was, and it slid through my puffy fingers. Indeed even recent history was difficult to remember with precision. I wasn’t quite sure precisely how long it was that I hadn’t seen Helen. At first it seemed Gwen had arrived instantaneously, right after my telephone call to her, but now I believe more time had passed. But I was unaware of it. Time does that; I do that—refuse to acknowledge time’s passing. I let it slip through my fingers. So, as often happens, I was glad to hear John’s knock upon the door, interrupting my meditation and labors.

  Now, gazing at John, my mind wanders to Helen, from Gwen to Helen, and to John, back to Helen, then to Gwen. I may be clumsy, inadequate, even unequal to the task of grasping Gwen and my relationship with her. Perhaps I am no longer an expert judge of Gwen. I feel, at least temporarily, unable to delineate her character and the quality of our relationship. The essential eludes me. As I watch and listen to John, I imagine too that Helen, like the grains of sand which measure time, has passed through and by, and that she may have slipped figuratively through my arthritic fingers. Though I mustn’t blame my ineptitude solely on age, I suppose. I might have fumbled the ball when I was young. In any case, there is still time.

  After some initial reticence, John is forthcoming. It is not hard to pry from him the secret he alluded to in the hospital, about Helen’s sister and her past. He is a trifle skittish. But after discussing the shelves for a while and sitting on the couch, and after I poured us tea and observed the obligatory conversational gambits, he relaxes entirely.

  It’s beautiful here, he remarks, looking toward the window. I am always touched when young American men notice beauty. Especially beautiful ones. I offer him a few biscuits which ought to be fresher, but he seems not to notice. Then I mention my visit with him in the hospital and then, first putting my cup to my lips and pausing, I ask him what he meant by saying “not like her sister, man.” John nods his head up and down several times, and it seems to me he is eager to divulge this information.

  He speaks with an air of casual authority. Everyone thinks—and Helen indicated to him, at least obliquely—that her sister was a suicide. She was four years older than Helen, was finishing college, was obese, and very miserable. Helen and she got along all right, but not terribly well. Helen’s arrival in the family was a disruption for the older one; and she was, like most children, jealous of the attention Helen received as an infant. Still she was, according to many, her father’s favorite. To myself I note that, like Helen, I am the baby of my family. Helen’s parents fought a great deal, and it was rumored that the noble father—for so he was viewed—was engaged in an affair with a woman not much older than the older sister at the time of her alleged suicide. There were no brothers.

  The dark events were matters of great speculation, involving some rather shocking questions about the psychiatrist father and the sister and the effects upon the sister of the illicit coupling of the father and his lover. It was very nasty business. John thinks the sister was found in a bathtub. That’s what he heard, but not from Helen. I didn’t ask—discovered by whom?—for even I felt the need to expunge the ghoulish image that “found in the bathtub” elicits.

  In my family, I remark to John, determined to be as forthcoming and open as he, we are two brothers, sons. He is older than I, I continue, and we do not get on…But just then Gwen pushes open the door and enters the room, in medias res, so to speak, as she did when Yannis and I were engaged in our troubling conversation.

  Are my shoes here? Gwen asks; then Gwen sees John. They recognize each other. I perceive it in a flash, a charged flash. That special expression of chagrin passes over Gwen’s face ever so fleetingly, and I am sure that she must have wanted to sleep with him, as I do now. A shadow hovers over my heart, an emotional storm cloud looms. It has been ages since Gwen and I longed for the same man. I think about this for no more than a second, though. I push it aside and study them. They are young. They are chatting. They are absurdly young.

  Actually I am also disconcerted by having had confirmed what I suspected—that Helen’s sister was most probably a suicide. It is just the kind of grotesque fact that sets my mind to work. As if from nowhere, an idea plants itself inside me and grows. I think the idea locates itself first in my head, which seems heavier and more diffcult to balance on my neck. But then it flies downward, toward my heart, which palpitates in shadow. It is a simple idea; and my heart beats to its rhythm: I must find her. Helen may be in harm’s way. I must go to her. My heart beats fast, fast, faster, faster. She may be in trouble, it goes. She needs you, Horace, it says, find her. Find her, Horace. This kind of thinking, I tell myself, must induce heart attacks. I place my hand on my heart. It ticks. I walk about the room and sit down again.

  I say nothing of this to my guests, for even in such a condition, I am conscious that the assumption of Helen’s need, produced as it were by and in my body, derives from a great anxiety that may have little to do with Helen. Yet I feel that it does. One can easily hold such contradictory ideas and emotions and still pour drinks for friends, I have found.

  They have not noticed my anxiety. They talk to each other aimlessly, effortlessly. They are gossiping, discussing bands and clubs. I am both relieved and annoyed. Why does one always want to be noticed, in some way? I open a bottle of retsina and place three glasses in front of us and pour each full to the brim. Let us toast—to the three of us, here in Greece together. Gwen can barely contain herself. She is almost gleeful at my inarticula
teness, at my witless toast, innocuous enough for all occasions. She winks at me and John. I gulp down my drink and pour another.

  I had nearly forgotten John. He of course must be as anxious as I am about Helen. Thinking this makes me suppress my anxiety about her, and I realize once more the strange situation I am in, with Gwen and John. It is as if we are framed and constrained by an uncertain and unspoken desire that lingers in the air like a perfume distilled from electricity, not flowers. I look at both of them, fixing on my visage a patient smile to indicate that I am calm, even sanguine, which of course I am not, as I never truly am. Why should one be? In the next instant, I decide that John and I should make the journey together—to find her, to find Helen. John would want to, I am sure of that. But that would mean leaving Gwen on her own. This plan could wait until after the party. I dither internally and drink.

  But I wanted Helen at the party. And first things first. It—the party—can wait, first things first. Helen must be found. I glance at Gwen and wonder if she has been reading my thoughts, since I believe she can and that she is, in some sense, my twin, and don’t twins know instinctively what the other one is going to do next? Don’t they dress alike without planning and so on? For her part Gwen is impassive, waiting for someone else to speak, to do something, anything, and it is clear she will not be the one to take charge, make the advance, parry and thrust. It is more in keeping with Gwen that she not be the one, but be the one who bides her time, who waits. The one who waits, a rather clever title, I think. But for what Gwen is waiting, actively waiting, if that is possible, and John is also waiting, discomforted but keeping his cool.