Cast in Doubt Read online

  I was blank and yet I marched, in away even happily, toward Helen’s house. I have thought about this often since and decided, retrospectively, that I was emptying myself, though I did not know that at the time. I was not truly blank, I realize. Can one be? I was readying myself for an experience as fulgent as one of Blake’s epiphanous poems or paintings of such. Laugh if you will. But it seems to me now that I wanted to experience mystery and not just to write it.

  On the way, quite near the harbor, actually just behind it, I pass a wake. The village style or ritual for death is to set a table or two outside the front door of the home of the bereaved upon which are placed flowers, a large basket of bread, and a tray of cakes, and above this hangs a piece of cloth, a tapestry, with a religious figure woven into it. The walls here are so old and crumbly that wakes are ancient and exotic tableaux and have an especial appeal to me. I believe it was the baker’s mother who died, though I am not sure. I did not take this as an omen since death here never takes a holiday; it is a most regular part of life. But as I remain a foreigner, I am uneasy in the face of it. I hate it. I despise death. It is the only natural aspect of life that I detest. Because I have no faith, Alicia would insist.

  When I turn the corner and round the bend, to walk along the harbor, which is a singular joy, always and in all situations beautiful—it never fails to surprise and delight me, even now, as anxious as I am—I spy Gwen sitting at a table in front of the restaurant. Were it not for my alertness, I might have come face-to-face with her. She is at my restaurant, seated at my table, looking at my harbor, but looking at the water and the scene with her look on her face, that inimitable expression. From the way in which she is sitting, so relaxed, it is now her restaurant as much as mine. Dear, dear Gwen, how quickly she takes possession—of me, too, for how can I not talk to her, yet how would I tell her where I actually was intending to go when I do not want her to know. I do not want her advice. So I rush on as if I had not seen her and madly hope, hope jarring hope, that she has not seen me. Her look of concentration is unbroken; so great is it, quite likely she has not noticed me. I decide she has not, and even if she has, she hasn’t made contact with me, and I have a right to be miffed, if I am. I’m not. In fact I hope she will be just where she is after I have finished my business at Helen’s house. For who knows, I think to myself, again and again, what I will find there?

  I move in haste around the wide Venetian harbor and nod my head in greeting to shopkeepers who know me and even to some who don’t. Then I take my favorite shortcut, along the most narrow passage, which joins with the street I desire. Then I walk up the wide, flat concrete stairs that lead directly to Helen’s house. I listen to a canary sing from its cage—I do not find their music particularly pleasant—and from a courtyard I hear the sounds of domestic bickering, muted enough that the subject of their argument is unclear to me. I am not aware of being tired, or arthritic, not aware of my body at all, though I had spent days in languorous semi-retreat, I believe, from nearly everyone.

  But I exaggerate. I did expect to find something, just one thing, to be honest, and that was Helen’s diary. Not expected, but hoped, I desperately hoped that it would be there, and in a way, because it was my certain hope, the predictable one, the one that anyone would have hazarded as Horace’s hope, I knew, in my heart of hearts, that it would not be there. In the natural course of things, she would have taken it with her. A girl’s diary absolutely would be carried with her, a precious object, faithful as a dog. Helen would never have left it behind. Apart from that, I did not have any particular hope.

  The corroded iron gate to Helen’s house is hidden in shadow which I take as ominous, a warning, if not an omen. I stare at it before ringing the bell Bliss had fixed there years ago, though I know no one is at home. Or at least I hoped no one was at home. Suddenly Chrissoula appears from across the lane, having seen me approach, and greets me warmly, as if everything were normal. Helen? I ask. I have not seen her, I explain in Greek, in a long time. Chrissoula nods her head up and down and then from side to side, indicating she is dubious about her young charge. She then places one finger at her mouth as if to say she cannot speak or is not supposed to. And promptly Chrissoula shuffles off, her skirt swinging about her ankles. She disappears across the lane and enters the door to her house. She takes such good care of Helen. But her behavior is odd; usually Chrissoula is garrulous.

  I do not ring the bell. I walk through the exterior gate to the front door. I am enormously light-headed and, in the moment, unconscious of any specific worry. Blank, as I have already said. I push open the centuries-old thick wooden door and glance around the small ground-floor room. The house is remarkably narrow, a sliver of a house. It still has no floor. Then I ascend the equally narrow stairs which are in almost complete disrepair and most likely dangerous, so I step lightly. I always say to myself when stepping lightly, why should this matter? Am I not the same weight?

  I arrive at the second floor. It is sparsely furnished and obviously disused. There are many books in Bliss’ bookcases; they are in poor shape. There is a broken chair as well as some insignificant ceramic pieces. Unimportant pieces, I tell myself, ruing the fact that Bliss, though a painter, has no eye for decor and the decorative arts. I continue the climb and reach the top floor, which I know to be Helen’s space, as she had called it such.

  I put my hand to my nose. The smell is overwhelming. At first I think, it must be death. Someone has died, I think nervously. Helen, oh no. But it is not an awful, disgusting smell that one associates with decay and a body’s rotting, just an overpowering one. Sweet and sickly, like a cheap commercial perfume. I do not appreciate most perfumes; but I love the natural scent of flowers, of roses and camelias, of course, or of cut grass on a summer’s day, or newly mown hay pitched next to a red barn. I even have liked the earthy stench of horse manure. The smell of sex is incomparable.

  Helen’s room reeks of distress, if distress may be said to have an aroma. But the first response that bubbled inside me and then formed into a word was, Insanity. This is insane, I say to myself. Perhaps I uttered it aloud. The room is not messy in the usual sense. It is out of order, entirely. The Greeks have a word for it—chaos. Could Helen have lived like this?

  First, all the walls are painted black. It is dark in here, the windows having been covered over, and I cannot find a wall socket. When I do, I flip the switch but nothing happens. There is enough light to see shapes and images fuzzily. Clothes and rags have been thrown everywhere, bits of torn paper are piled in odd shapes, unusable paintbrushes left in strange places, and on the black walls daubed in what I take to be shocking pink are ragged forms that Helen must have drawn when beside herself. Her bed—there is no bedspring or backboard—is littered, covered in stuff—clippings, pins, beads, odds and ends, junk. The mattress, which has several cigarette burns, is on the floor. There are no sheets in sight and worse, no pillow, which reminds me of something John had said about Helen’s not having pillows on her bed when he knew her in New York. This did not jibe with my idea of Helen. I can’t remember why John mentioned it. It will come to me, undoubtedly.

  Papers are everywhere, books—Bliss’, I am sure—strewn about as if a great wind or hurricane had blown through, wreaking havoc, concocting this strange disorder. Hundreds of what I take to be photo-booth portraits of Helen and her friends lie in a box next to the bed. Holding some up to the light, I can just barely see them, but am able to ascertain that her friends are in all manner of costumes, making funny, ridiculous faces—pulling a face, my mother used to say—and Helen herself is posing archly, this way and that, with hats, makeup, props. There are Polaroid pictures as well, of long-haired young men who are sullen but attractive. One or two is nude. One of them is or must be John.

  Cups of half-drunk and moldy coffee on the floor are a discordant note among many discordant notes—in my presence Helen never drank coffee. Or did she? I bend over to sniff one of the cups; this may enable me to tell when she left. I do so virt
ually in the style that cowboys and Indians are shown doing in movies when they search for their man and study the tracks of his horse. This seemed entirely silly to me a moment after I’d done it. There are dead flowers in filthy vases and magazine pictures—primarily of politicians and celebrities—thrown about in no discernible pattern.

  And that is what I am searching for—a pattern. Just as I become cognizant of this, I look up and, as if it were fated, the wind blows through a broken window and stirs some of the papers on the bureau, which is also painted black. I walk to it. The mirror above it is covered only partially in paint. Revealed by the breeze, under one piece of paper on the bureau is another. I peer at it intently. I see my name. It is written in bold block capital letters, HORACE, just that, and under my name a few blotches or stains, and some lines crosshatched over what may have been other words. Stuck to this piece of paper is yet another. On it is writing, again in bold capital letters but more shocking: FUCK EVERYTHING. OEDIPUS WRECKS. Beneath this is a drawing of what looks to me like a duck, of all things, but it may be another creature. On the back of this piece of paper is pasted a map of the southern half of Crete. A large glittery dot has been placed on it, close to several small towns, yet not at the towns precisely, rather beside or in the middle between them. But it is really too dim in here for me to tell. I delicately take up the pieces of paper, precious and strange, and hold them in my hands. Then I walk out through the French doors—whose windows have been covered with newspaper clippings—onto Helen’s terrace, where I had often seen her ensconced, had watched her from the restaurant or from my windows. Now I look toward my windows, but see nothing. I am happy that Yannis is not spying on me.

  I thrust the papers up, holding them at arm’s length to the sun, to benefit from its natural light. I thought I might see through them another message, a code that could not be read on first glance, especially in her room. It was dark as a cave in Smitty’s room. But I see nothing, just that the paper is cheap stationery. I scratch my brow and walk back into her room, look around furtively, to see if, with another stroke of fate, some other bit of evidence would make itself known to me. I wait in silence. I am not sure how many minutes pass. But I wait, conscious of time whiling away as I stand in near darkness. And then it happens, again, a stroke of luck or good fortune: a streak of light pierces the darkness through a crack in the French doors and settles on one of the black walls. I walk over to the lighted area and scrutinize it. I discern that the forms Helen has painted are rather crudely drawn cartoons of male and female genitalia. I stare at these for a while, shocked, I suppose, by the girl’s boldness—and wit. Yes, wit. They are witty drawings in their way, now that I can see them. In shocking pink—chalk, I believe the medium is. Chalk. Then I become sensible again of the stench and decide to leave, to return another day, perhaps, should it be necessary. I have no idea what is producing the smell.

  I am satisfied, even fulfilled, for it seems to me clear that Helen has left all this for me. It was her way, I told myself, her young way, to leave abruptly, to split, not to explain but also not to be truly angry, as I had feared and expected. Helen is not really obvious, though she may appear vulgar or crude to one less accustomed than I to the terrible power of the imagination—and to its necessary excesses. It is true I was shocked by some of what I found. The disarray could be understood merely as disarray as poor childhood training even, as youthful revolt, but I am determined to find its sense and reason. And I am assured that she understood that I would recognize this, it, and would have gotten it—felt, as John put it the other night, the groove, or gotten with the groove, I forget which. But most important, and with this I breathed deeply and exhaled fully, surely I knew where she had gone, which had been the intention of my mission. The dot on the map signaled the spot she’d traveled to or, I ventured inwardly as I descended the rotten staircase, it is where the Gypsy woman has taken her—to her home, there to initiate Helen into the mysteries.

  Yet, and this is a strange matter, I who am so curious, I who desire nothing if not to know every secret, I was suddenly not certain if I ought to pursue her and whether I ought not to be a little afraid. Of Helen, that is. Though I was certain I would detect an underlying structure, if I thought hard enough, even in her abysmally messy room, there was still evidence of a mind and a life that was foreign to me, more foreign to me than the Greeks. While I knew that Helen was a member of a new breed, that realization, which I’d had early, had been an abstract idea in many ways. When we were together, though we often disagreed, or rather, though I talked and she listened, so that I often did not know her opinion, I did not doubt that I had made an impression upon her. And I also believed that in our souls we were in deep and profound unity. Why I thought this I am not sure, but as I have written elsewhere, she was, I assumed, like me. And again, her youth was an advantage all to itself, her youth and that special androgynous quality of hers that I find and found so compelling. Like that of an angel.

  Still, however I regarded her, I had new information. Helen with the Gypsies, Helen living like a Gypsy, as my father would have put it, Helen living in filth and in a kind of insane condition, Helen drawing penises and vaginas in pink chalk on black walls. FUCK EVERYTHING! OEDIPUS WRECKS! And I suppose I must admit that Helen’s being female was a new element in the equation or puzzle. It is not that I had not already noticed and regarded her as a young woman. That was and is obvious. But she was acting in ways that I did not expect from a young woman, as free of that particular bias as I had conceived myself. Thinking this, I began to feel, with some anger and anxiety, that I had more in common with Alicia than I had imagined.

  Perhaps Helen’s relationship with the Gypsy woman, for instance, was one that was essentially feminine in nature, which I would have scant access to. But this mental perambulation smacked of magic, witches and superstition, and I rejected this idea quickly, for if Helen was anything, she was not a woman in stereotypical ways, nor would she attend covens. Unless it was a club. I did know this. It must have been the thoroughgoing extent of her wildness that confused me momentarily. Yes, her wildness.

  But I realized and had to laugh to myself about my own peculiar and old-fashioned ideas about women, hidden and buried though they were, in the way that what one learns early usually is. Consciously I didn’t accept any of this trite or pernicious thinking any more than I believed that blacks were an inferior race. Still, certain responses are atavistic, and because they are recessive and deep inside one, when they emerge from places that are untouched by reason and education, they are revelatory and must be considered.

  But ought I go south? I would never under any circumstances mix with voodoo practices, for instance, not because I believe in voodoo’s power, but because I don’t. That may be a paradox.

  Order out of chaos, I tell myself, as I contemplate my return to the harbor—as I’ve said, I always imagine where I am going before I set off—for if one looks rigorously, one finds meaning even in chaos. One must be able to envision in chaos an emergent and eventual form. That is, one must be capable of divining an inspired plan; there is always a plan, a map, beneath the most inchoate formlessness.

  I place Helen’s messages in my shirt pocket and look about as if I am being watched. But I am not being watched, at least not by creatures I can recognize; later I felt foolish that I had carried a knife with me. A kitchen knife at that. I march out the door, through the heavy gate and toward the restaurant, to look for Gwen, who, I still hoped, would be at my restaurant, to be my ballast if not my oracle or sphinx. For surely the interpretation of OEDIPUS WRECKS in regard to Smitty called for the wisdom of a sphinx.

  Chapter 13

  Gwen was sitting at my table, drinking my white wine. That doesn’t call for a sphinx, Lulu, she interjected wryly. Maybe a shrink. Sphinx me another drink, Gwen went on, or I may shrink right here in front of you like the incredible shrinking man. Gwen had been reading an out-of-date New York Times, amusing herself with the horrible news, she said. I refille
d her glass, as she had asked me to do, and continued to tell her what I had seen.

  I was shaken, more shaken even than I knew. I must have looked pale, white as a ghost—I am never robust though I take the sun—but Gwen didn’t seem to acknowledge my shattered state. I know I was shattered, devastated, but perhaps I did not communicate that—one wears masks, after all. I wrote about it not long after.

  Gwen claimed that she had not seen me walk around the harbor, the untruth of which I discovered later, to my chagrin, but that is Gwen. She does not ever simply react. She chooses her time. It was probably not the right time for her in many ways, and it certainly wasn’t mine. With Helen’s notes in my pocket, over my heart, I experienced an uncanny sensation—that my chest was on fire, or that my heart was burning inside me, and that racing so quickly, it had turned to flame, pure heat. My head was hot, my arms and back cold, and I longed to jump into the sea with all my clothes on. I tried to pay full attention to Gwen, but all the while I had to restrain myself from leaping into the cool waters, to quench that inner bodily fire.

  Rather dramatic, I think now, more in keeping with Zelda Fitzgerald than myself, but perhaps I chose, consciously or unconsciously, to be Zelda when I wrote that, and from time to time it—the desire to be a flapper—pops up, dimply, giggly, and bee-stung, and finds its way onto the page. About choosing, Gwen quipped some years later, on my visit to New York: History chooses us like a virus. We’re all chosen people. She laughed when she said it; she was speaking about being caught in time as well as being taken hostage. It was at the end of 1980, and President Carter was wrestling impotently with the hostage crisis. It was dragging on. He was a lame duck, truly. Agonizing in public, Carter became in my eyes a familiar and sympathetic creature; his pathos won my sympathy, but it was the thing the public despised him for, his weakness. November 4, 1979, Gwen pointed out, when the American hostages were captured in Iran, was the same date that the Soviets entered Budapest twenty-three years earlier. Gwen always looked for occurrences like this. She called them the puns of history, and herself, the pundit queen. She once named herself—I think I remember her doing this in Boston—yes, she dubbed herself the pundit Negro. I quoted to her from Horace, my namesake—which is a joke between Gwen and me—Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur. “With the change of names, the story is told about you.” Sometimes Gwen went on and on changing names, as she was never satisfied, though on that occasion she sashayed, verbally, that is, around hysterical puns and history’s pawns. Even history’s prawns, but that was when, in New York, we were in a Chinese restaurant. We were, she noted then, the shrimp boats of history. I was nearly seventy.