Cast in Doubt Read online

  How does one escape from these awkward social patches—should I stop beating around the bush and reveal ingenuously: I want you, John, or Gwen wants you, or let’s be adults, or let’s be children, as we are anyway, inevitably, all children. Surely, I caution myself mentally, to do so—that way lies madness. I drink another glass of retsina. Such a vulgar wine, so raw and crude, so right, so shocking. Retsina is blatant, not reticent, and how I wish I were capable of a flagrant display! Silence, ordinary sweet empty full silence, is intolerable in the moment. Anything would be better. A scream, a cat in heat, an off-key tune…

  What is happening back home? I ask, innocently enough. What horrible events am I missing, what terrible things has Ford done lately? Who is this man Carter? The Peanut farmer has found favor with John, it seems, but Gwen refers to him as a cracker. They are off on a discussion of the Mafia, and how Sam Giancana was slain. He was tied to the CIA, and his murder, Gwen says, happened fast upon the heels of the revelation that the CIA was spying domestically, under Nixon’s orders, and so forth, so Giancana must have been implicated. John seems impressed by Gwen’s deduction, which I too think is clever, as I hadn’t thought it.

  I once remarked to Roger, when he and I had—and it is a rarity—the same thought: Great minds think alike, Roger. He quickly countered: And small ones. Even now that makes me laugh. Roger isn’t all bad. No one is. Perhaps evil despots, but they…I am muddied by drink, muddled, that is, I can’t focus and think. I study Gwen, who absorbs me into her and absorbs this scene into her as if it were already seen, and I think I understand better the term scenemaker. Suddenly I realize that since she’s arrived my thoughts have been mostly taken up with her, and with John, and not actively with Helen, which is all right, I know, and perhaps wholesome. And yet, I have been thrown off the track of Helen, with whom I was engaged in something lively and new, I think, and I know she is angry with me, disappointed or whatever, like my mother, and she has disappeared. Helen has. My mother is dead. I would have hunted her down by now had Gwen not arrived.

  I must find Helen. If she is not out of town, why did she not answer my note?

  Drunkenly I think: Gwen stands in my way. She may have arrived here, she has arrived here, perhaps, in order to disrupt the progress of this story, its particular chain of thought, and its fascination, though that may be to the good. Or it may not be. But that is much too teleological. And why is it either one or the other, good or bad, with purpose or without? An old friend comes again into one’s life and one must adjust to the changes she brings. After all, I wanted her here. And now, in a way, I don’t. Is it because of John? John is captivating; it is hard for me to take my eyes from him, as from a mirror that reflects dully so one keeps staring, and still one can’t perceive one’s image with any exactitude.

  If I were to arrive with him at Helen’s door, wherever that may be, she would not like it. In a thousand ways she has made it plain that she doesn’t want to see him, and how or why could I think otherwise. I must go by myself. But if I do leave, I know that Gwen and John will be thrown together, left to their own devices, and certainly I cannot count on Alicia to stand in their way. Gwen is cunning and may be treacherous. John is not mine, surely, so how could her desire for him be construed as a betrayal of me? Unless she were my enemy—a horrific thought, one of the saddest I have ever had, or ever had in a long, long time. It’s the wine dementing me, demeaning me, soliciting demons to play louche tricks. They soak in a senseless alcohol-sodden brain.

  In reality, though reality is, especially in my condition, debatable, Gwen deserves John. She can—ought to—have him; age before beauty. No, no, the other way around; in our case, beauty before age. Though Gwen is not quite beautiful but handsome. Also she is my guest, and I intend always to be a good host. It is an image I hold of myself, the gracious host, which must be maintained, I feel, as if civilization itself depended on it, and it may, actually.

  Even now I am neglecting my duties. Hurriedly I open another bottle and pour us all more to drink. I have no food to serve them which I’m sure Gwen has already registered—Horace is starving us, she’s thinking. I laugh out loud; it’s amusing to think I might be purposely depriving them and that I wish them to die of starvation. They are quite thin already. It wouldn’t take much to starve them. It is an interesting idea, one that might be useful. Someone could be holding them prisoner, they might be sex prisoners, love slaves, that kind of thing. Perhaps captives of a de Sade-type character, who lives in New Jersey or Connecticut, some unlikely locale, and they are bound together by his insanity, even manacled together in his faux-medieval fort. The neighbors never suspected, they would say, clucking nonsensically as they viewed the bodies being wheeled out from the dungeonlike cellar. I must for that down later.

  Now John and Gwen are discussing Jackie Onassis and Angie Dickinson, and the Andrews Sisters, of all things, molls, and their gangsters. Can Jackie Kennedy Onassis really be thought of as a moll? I ask. Such a well-brought-up woman? Gwen makes light of this, having seen many too many well-brought-up young women go to pieces, all the crowd around Warhol—Drella, she calls him—and she knows how these women trade, on a grand scale, their sexual favors and beauty, jockeying for better position and greater financial security. Gwen reports that the just-married Jackie Kennedy, when asked if she was madly in love with then Senator Kennedy, answered the newsman, No. Incredulous, he asked her again, and she repeated, No. Did she really, Gwen, I ask, did she really say that on camera? Yes, she did, I have it from a good source. Gwen has good sources.

  I must admit I’m shocked, I rather like Jackie, and even approved of her marriage to Onassis. I can see how she’d like an older man. I am an older man, I’m thinking. I may be slurring my words, but what does it matter. What about Callas? John asks. Jackie marrying Onassis screwed her up, right? I’m astonished. This can’t be my rock-and-roller John speaking, not about the diva Maria—it is Alicia speaking through young John. She is mad about Callas.

  Hungry? I ask them. Shall we dine? Or dance? I mime a tango and mince around the room. Gwen joins in. I love Gwen. I hate myself for ever thinking her a disruption. Though she is. And so are John and Helen. Life disrupts life. I am getting little to nothing done, it’s true. But the dance is life, and life is a dance, and life is a short dance, and oh, I am silly, and on and on. I whirl wildly about the room, as if I hadn’t a care in the world, and right now I don’t feel I do have a care in the world, only what I wish to care about. I do not wish for anything to care about. I am shockingly free. Free. Fancy-free. I come to a halt, throw my head back and pretend to strip off long evening gloves like those worn by Rita Hayworth in Gilda. Gwen roars with laughter and curtsies before me, her king or queen. It is as if she had been presented before royalty countless times. And even to think of countless times, of the ages of human existence, makes me sigh. I feel weak, I weaken before that august history, weaken before Gwen. I return her curtsy, and her courtesy, and snap the long invisible gloves in the air for emphasis, as if the gloves were designed as punctuation marks—periods or exclamation marks—and were oh so necessary to the sense of my performance.

  John probably has no idea what I’m doing. For his sake I ought to have imitated Mick Jagger. It is for his sake I am dancing the tango of the gloves, is it not? For whose sake then am I dancing? Does one commit mischievous acts for oneself or another? Murder, a tango, a striptease. How I wish my body were beautiful! I toss myself here and there, hither, thither, and yon. My ecstatic positions are ephemeral, sublime, ludicrous, but they do have a logic, even if it is only internal. They make sense to me.

  I stop prancing just as suddenly as I started, mentally patting myself on the back for bravado, nothing else. I offer to treat them both to a wonderful meal at the only restaurant on the harbor. John hesitates. Is he thinking of Alicia? Gwen notices his hesitation or reluctance. Damned hungry, she declares and grabs me by the hand, pulling me toward the door. This action leaves John standing alone in the middle of the room,
with the empty wine bottles on the floor about him. They look like sinking ships.

  We must go, I declare to John. John’s hands dangle foolishly from his long thin arms. He himself is in some way dangling foolishly, even dangerously. Ah, I muse waggishly, a pretty boy is considering his options. He must soon come to a decision, having weighed the pros and cons of doing this or that, I suppose. He blinks, clears his throat, but says not a word, and then follows after us penitently, nay, passively. He’s a young man easily led.

  Will I be the leader or Gwen? Am I in any condition to lead? Actually the idea of Gwen and me as leaders is marvelous; in our present state, we ought to be inflicted on the public! To Gwen I bellow, in a mock English accent, Where will it all end? Hell, she mutters, just hell. O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I, I answer. I recite this line in the manner of Olivier, I’m almost positive of that. Dear Gwen, perverse Gwen. Perverse me. To dinner we three!

  Chapter 11

  I am losing too many nights, if nights can be lost. How do I love thee, let me count the nights. They do count, whether or not they are lost. Perhaps Gwen and the boy have scooped it up, whatever it was that was lost. I must have been asleep for a generation—accounting for the generation gap—and they have taken my—that—night from me, sharing it between themselves. What a foul idea. I don’t even remember if Roger made an appearance at the restaurant when we three were there. If he did, I think he and Yannis were scowling at each other, quite ferociously. I can see their contorted faces before me. How ugly anger is! John must have deposited me at my door. Or Gwen. Or both. Though for some reason I believe it is unlikely they were together. Something happened between them, I think. Perhaps it will come to me as the day goes on.

  The sun glares into the room. The curtains were not drawn. Yannis forgot to do it. I don’t want to open my eyes. Not yet. But even though I think that, I do open them, just to demonstrate to myself that I can think one thing and do another. My small world comes into view—bureau, slice of sky, books on floor, and so on, and I ask myself again: why has Helen disappeared? What is the reason? There must be a reasonable explanation. But I cannot, for the life of me, find one. I am, I decide, obsessed by this, and I know it’s weird, as John might put it. I think he did put it that way, the other day, come to think of it, when I talked to him about Helen. John thinks me strange, I think. Yet I must find the bits that I do not know and join them together into a reasonable, a functional whole. This makes me a sort of quilter on the order of Great-Aunt Sarah, a loathsome woman, but most talented in her homely way.

  I am reminded of an unfinished piece of writing about Helen. But where is it? If only Yannis acted as my secretary. I get out of bed and shuffle through some papers and come to it.

  We were at the restaurant, at my table. Helen was rubbing her foot. Then she began tapping her foot on the ground in an arrhythmic pattern that annoyed me but I did not complain. She asked about my past, friends, college, Boston, New York, as she did from time to time, and very easily did I relate anecdotes and tales that I believed she enjoyed and which I would not so willingly tell others. Helen was a wonderful listener. One simply felt her appreciation. I told her about a fatal disagreement between two artists, both of whom developed a certain kind of technique or effect. They fought about who did it first and who could claim it. Each was adamant. It ended their friendship. Helen was astonished. What did it matter, she wanted to know, who did it first? I explained that it had to do with originality, with thinking up something first, with being the first to have fostered a new idea, to have changed definitively a field—in art, in science—to have produced a theory or form, which established a new way of thinking, in writing, even a locution, and that that ought to be credited. Helen thought it was funny. She declared that she would never care about something like that. Why did it really matter who did it first; didn’t it only matter that it was thought or done, she wanted to know. I was hard-pressed to get to the heart of it, to why it mattered ultimately. But I elaborated that it was important, for instance, in science, to mark the link from one idea to another, and to give credit where it was due. Human beings strive for immortality, for recognition and acknowledgment, to make their mark, to encourage progress, and to move civilization forward, I went on. Later, we laughed about the fifteen minutes any of us might be given in this regard, but my sweet young Smitty accepts this short span on the stage more readily than do I, I think. Indeed I was winded by the end of my short speech. I waxed and waned with it.

  I never finished recording the events of that day and night which we spent together. What did we do that day? I cannot remember now. It’s so odd what one forgets and what one holds and stores inside one, good memories as well as bad ones. The oddest occurrence of all is when a friend remembers much too well an event you have no memory of and yet it struck the friend as worth preserving, consciously or unconsciously, and in the friend’s memory you are a vivacious actor in the scene.

  I reread the page. What did it mean really, that conversation with Helen? As a piece of writing it doesn’t seem to fit anywhere. It may not. It does not explain anything to me. But I am not sure. There may be clues in it that are hidden from me. I put it away again but this time place it in a clean new folder which I mark, Questions about Helen.

  In the great scheme of unknowable things, Helen’s absence is unimportant, a speck of dust in a vast and unseemly, filthy world. Still, a mystery is a mystery. I rub my eyes; they are coated, a film over them. I cannot see properly. While this may be a metaphor, it is also true that my sight has bothered me for years, and as I age I worry more and more that one day I will not be able to read, that I will go blind, and end life as one of those poor souls with a white cane who is forced to walk the streets waving it in the air about him, a spectacle who cannot see what kind of spectacle he makes. I am susceptible to humiliation, while the people I admire most are indifferent to how they appear to others. Could I, like Milton, train young people to read for me, and would I be as cruel—to teach them to read without understanding? I have no daughters. I nearly thought, I have Helen. How comic, how predictable. Now a pang—a kind of hole—lodges just under my heart, a register of longing or emptiness, which may be the same. This hunger I experience—to be full and whole. Do terribly obese people suffer this in the extreme? Still, why shouldn’t one long for eternal life? Why shouldn’t one crave immortality? Or is this pang an intimation of heart disease?

  Immortality is one thread in the quilt. I try in all matters to find the significant thread—or theme—that if pulled would rip apart the sweater, unravel the yarn. It’s why I enjoy writing stories based on real-life crimes. People usually have motives for what they do, foolish ones, perhaps, ones spurred on by the least attractive qualities in men and women. Jealousy, greed. Ignobility. There are always motives in the crime stories I’ve written. Thus I can move from event to event unselfconsciously and with a degree of fluidity: someone wasn’t named in a will and took revenge; he stole his girl; she took a lover and her husband found out, then murdered them both; and so on. A murder is committed or two murders, the second to conceal the first. There is a chain of events, a series of links, and one need merely trace the links back or begin at the beginning, moving forward to the penultimate event, to understand the ultimate one. Increasingly, life is not like this.

  Yannis arrived home late last night, his tail between his legs. He is sporting a ghastly black-and-blue eye, a shiner, we used to say, and is terrifically vague about his lost days and nights. Lost to me, not to him, I suppose, as he knows what he was doing and I do not. Yet because of the palpable presence of John and the comfort of inimitable Gwen—at least in some respects—I’m indifferent to his evasiveness. I do not press him as I would have in the recent past. I refuse to react to his shenanigans. I do not cajole and barter. Yannis is startled by the change in my attitude: my lack of reaction has sharply shifted things for him. He doesn’t know what to do to catch hold of me again. I see him thinking, plotting how to do it. It is th
e same look that overcomes his normally placid features when he is fishing at the harbor and something tugs on his line. He snaps to with a mixture of stealth and cunning, a tiger about to pounce, then he jerks the rod to fix the hook in the poor fish’s gaping mouth. Thus is he thinking about me, with the same determined expression on his face. One day Yannis may find he’s lost me, that I have not been adequately hooked. That I have not taken the bait. Look, I am saying to him, I am swimming away. You cannot catch me. You do not have the right bait and lure. And soon, I say to myself, seeing his power diminish, he may leave me—I can sustain this thought—and that will be all right. Nothing is forever, after all, except common death.

  Distracted—or perhaps in order to distract myself—I choose a book from the night table, one of Alicia’s, entitled The Gypsies, and I turn to the index, where I discover a citation for Death. Under the subheading, “Death and Funeral Rites,” I read that “a Gypsy does not die in his bed…no more than birth, may death pollute the home.” “On the announcement of death, the whole tribe begins to weep or cry out, even yell.” I should have liked to have witnessed such behavior at my mother’s funeral. My brother would never wail; even the need to wail and cry out would be beyond his comprehension. Actually he would be incapable of wailing, I’m certain. At our funeral rite for Mother, there were some wet eyes, and several cheeks were damp with tears, the teardrops pressed into or blotted onto the skin with handkerchiefs.

  But oh I have wailed, I have brayed at the moon, I have found myself on my knees, howling. I have seen the best minds of my generation…and really I disdained the Beats then. Yet even I, in that funereal group, was contained, tight. In fact, I was tight. How else to get through such a sad ceremony, surrounded by the living dead.