Cast in Doubt Read online

  At the restaurant by the harbor, I report in as much detail as I can what I had seen at Helen’s—the chaos, the writing on the wall, as it were, the cryptic notes to me, and, without a moment’s hesitation, Gwen advanced the theory that (a) Helen had not left any of this for me, or on my behalf, and (b) that I must not go to find her, because she did not want to be found. We engaged in a lengthy and confusing, to me, discussion of the Oedipus complex as it applied to Helen and her psychiatrist father. Gwen comically played both shrink and even sphinx, and asserted, with great moral seriousness, that if Helen knew or suspected that her father had loved her older sister better and more than her, her sister doubled as her mother—who was a shadowy figure in this scenario anyway, as no one ever mentioned her, and so perhaps she too was dead?—thus Helen might have murdered her sister, accidentally, or, more likely, merely desired her death and suffered from guilt. Of course this is—accidental murder, not mere desire—what I had originally speculated and dismissed as outlandish, not that it was accidental but that Helen had had a hand in it, that it wasn’t a simple suicide, if suicides ever are.

  But why, I ask Gwen, would John lie to me or concoct the manner of Helen’s sister’s death? At this Gwen states, waspishly, John knows nothing. Really? I respond, implicitly begging for further information. Gwen smiled strangely but knowingly. Our food arrived and she didn’t immediately divulge her news.

  But I knew it: Gwen had gotten the story, at least pieces of it. In addition she had gotten caught up messily with John. Alicia would be a witness to, if not a participant in, the mess. I could tell, intuit that. In the old days John would have been mincemeat to her, and Alicia, whom she doesn’t respect, a small obstacle if anything at all. In the old days Gwen would have sliced through John like a hot knife through butter, as Mother was wont to say. And I began to suspect that things were amiss, that things had gone awry with Gwen, that she was anxious, perhaps even desperate about something and even in some type of big trouble. It was possible that she was running away from New York, that she was not merely on vacation, needing a respite, having taken up my invitation, but had had to leave the city, forced out by something much bigger and more calamitous than bad vibes, as John would put it. She might have become entangled in a net of intrigue with dangerous characters such as the dealers and druggies she occasionally hangs out with for local color, as she likes to say. Looked on this way, Gwen was caught in a vise or had fallen into a trap. That it was of her own making, I had no doubt, though she herself might have insisted, as I’ve said, upon being a dupe of history, its plaything—I believe she’s called herself a Barbie Doll of fate.

  Inwardly I castigated myself for having neglected Gwen over the past couple of years. I had not been much of a correspondent; I had received better than I had given. In my mind’s eye, I conjured what had befallen her here. While I had been lying groggily in my bed, losing time, Gwen and John had entrapped each other, had fallen into each other’s arms, but not into love. Because, I told myself, Gwen was out of sorts, not herself, and because John was a passive lad, so easily led, they had succumbed to each other. It was easy for them to wind up in each other’s arms, though they were uneasy lovers; they were both at loose ends. In any case, Gwen was wound up, about something. So they had coupled. Alicia must enter into this somehow, but I didn’t expect ménage à trois to be the right term for the involvement. Three Americans could never become a ménage à trois, to me. Frankly I can’t imagine the three of them in bed together. No doubt the failure is mine; I lack a certain type of imagination. I am a bit of a prude. Perhaps they employed a bundling board?

  Gwen interrupts my mental meanderings, my wandering mind.

  He’s Billy Budd, Lulu, really, Billy Budd. You see, he’s good and means well but he is deeply stupid. Naiveté oozes out of him. He’s like butterscotch syrup. He’s almost a drugstore sundae. Bittersweet naiveté—he drools it. He’s sweet but thick—and of course, you know, drop-dead gorgeous. When we left you at your door—you were out of it, Lulu—I’d already slapped him. You probably don’t remember, you never remember the vicious moments, Lulu. He went limp, like a kitten, and I saw the scene immediately. You know, one of those masochistic Catholic boys who wants his mother, anyone, to treat him like dirt, to punish him, to tell him to clean up his room—that must be why he followed Helen here. I’ll take bets she whipped him and chained him to his bed. And he loved it.

  At this I went pooh-pooh, involuntarily, a reflex, and then lifted my eyebrows, the way she usually does. Gwen just snorted, the way she does. In any case, according to Gwen, John’s not sure who Helen is, or what her history is; she’s told him things, but he doesn’t know what to believe. John met up with her again in Athens by chance; they’d had a scene in New York, but nothing heavy. Anyway, he thinks she’s incapable of saying anything straight. So he’s not sure what’s what. Helen first told him her sister died in a bathtub in a college dorm, but when Gwen questioned him, John admitted Helen said something else later, about the sister nearly dying. It may have been a nervous breakdown but Helen is very secretive, especially about it, because she has a shrink for a father, Gwen suggests. The sister may have nearly died at home, of an overdose of pills the father stored all around the house, like candy. Gwen calls it an occupational hazard. John and Helen traveled to Crete together from Athens, but she never wanted him as a boyfriend. He did try to kill himself, that’s true, but it wasn’t about Helen. John was adamant that he didn’t really care about her; it was because his mother wrote him a letter saying that she’d finally seduced the parish priest back home, and his father knew and was going to have her committed. Isn’t that too much? Gwen exclaims. He’s impotent with Alicia, Lulu, which makes sense.

  Instead of blurting out, again, But why would John lie to me? I ask, but what about Helen’s abortion? I am impatient. Gwen never inquired.

  I can’t imagine he’d care, Lulu. Or if he cared, he’d never admit it—he’s too cool, rehearsing hard to be cool. He’s a lapsed Catholic, after all, and it’s his mother he’s in love with. And she didn’t abort him, at least not in the usual sense, n’est-ce pas? Alicia is the perfect mom but that’s why he can’t get it up with her, it’s obvious. Quel obvious. With us, anyway, it was a long night and then day and then night. He was all right with me, not for long, but he was able to, as we say, enter, to do it, and then he cried. It was bad and sad. He collapsed on me and whimpered like a puppy. I don’t think I could go through it again. We talked. Or I talked.

  Gwen galloped on. She reminisced about sex with the mentally sick musician she loves, for eternity, it seems, how great it and he were, how disappointing bad sex was, then she backtracked and recalled that Alicia had been waiting up for John, so that she—Gwen—was a surprise, yet Alicia took it all gracefully, at first.

  We had civilized conversation, Lulu, some laughs for a while, we drank ouzo and ate bread and cheese, that mestizo—your get-your-goat cheese—fabulous. The evening was pleasant, if a night like the one I finally had could ever be considered pleasant, even in retrospect, or if any night is pleasant, Lulu, considering the peculiarity of modern nights.

  Ultimately I believe Gwen segued to pictures. I suppose it had to do with her conjuring pleasant images after describing the pleasantries between her and Alicia. Gwen finds art restorative simply because it isn’t life or even like life. The more artificial it is, the better Gwen likes it. She admires Warhol precisely because of the falsity of his work, which actually makes it true, to her way of seeing and thinking, which is not mine. To her Warhol is the modern-day equivalent of Rembrandt, doing precisely what the Dutchman did in the seventeenth century—painting the rich and advertising them and their possessions. She’s rather adamant about all this. I don’t see it her way. Gwen next expounded on “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe”—perhaps the three of them, Gwen, John and Alicia, had had a nude picnic on Alicia’s floor?—and how that painting made Gwen crave, to eat ravenously or to make love, because in its center was an empty space as
great as lost love, a hole that the figures created through their position, they encircled it, and had I never noticed it…?

  But the mention of absence made me think of Helen and about whether or not to leave immediately for the south. The phrase—the south of Crete—had a resonance it had never had before. The South. I was lost in thought for a moment or two, and then, as if a heavy curtain had been pushed aside roughly, I perceived an expression on Gwen’s face that alarmed me. I had never seen it before. At least I was not aware that I had.

  Are you all right? I ask her, furiously turning my attention to her, to focus on her, on her pain, her putative trouble, her fugitive absence from New York. I believe this surprised my dear friend. This sudden intensity may not have been like me. Or perhaps it was irregular for me to admit such concern.

  Gwen assures me she is absolutely fine and insists grimly that it is because she can laugh. But she was not laughing when she spoke.

  I can always laugh, Lulu, and as long as a person can laugh, a person can survive, in a manner of speaking, even as one is peaking, which I am. Peaking, peek-a-boo, here comes another gray hair. It is funny beyond endurance, n’est-ce pas? Sometimes I laugh myself to sleep. Sometimes I laugh so hard I begin to pant and lie panting on the floor, hysterical. Completely hysterical. In the best sense of the word, of course. This is the flip side to my unhappiness, ordinary or otherwise. It can always be said of me, Gwen maintained her sense of humor. It could be a badge, a badge of honor, or it could be engraved on my tombstone: she’s grave here but she laughed until she died. I have fun, Lulu, I really do, in spite of my misery. I am determined to stay amused. I hate to be bored. To liven things up—this will horrify you, Lulu—I even smoke grass occasionally, though rides on subways, which I avoid as much as possible, subway rides are très treacherous. When I’m stoned, people look like so many different kinds of animals. And I can’t stop myself from laughing. People’s faces are très bizarre, aren’t they? We’re all jammed together—one great jam in New York. Here, the faces are so boringly similar except for what colonialism the cat brought back. You could call that the return of the oppressed. For me, alcohol is the superior high.

  With that Gwen drains her glass of its wine and eyes me expectantly. But, I ask, is there anything objectively wrong? Are you being hounded by landlords, drug lords, have you done something unspeakable, is there something appalling, so awful that you’re not able to break it to me? I guffaw nervously, so that neither of us has to take the question seriously. She chuckles merrily, then again looks glum, her lips turning down to that fateful position, the grimace, which is her natural pose, her normal expression in repose. This guise of normality quiets me, and I feel at ease. I refill her glass and mine.

  We look at the harbor. The moon is resolute and unshaken above the horizon line. The night is eerily peaceful, and for a long while we hear only the slap of the waves against the wharf and the strains of bouzoúki music in the distance, probably emanating from the sole disco in town—one of the young Greeks had opened it, though bouzoúiki music wouldn’t have come from there. I don’t know where the sounds are from.

  Lu-lu, Gwen pronounces grandly, even portentously, letting the two syllables linger, nearly languish, on her tongue, Lu-lu, of course someone’s after me, someone’s after you too—Mr. Death, and he’s carrying a big scythe, swinging it in huge strokes across the landscape, he’s wearing a gray gown—I adore gray—and he’s marching across Atlanta, the city’s on fire, like Watts, or he’s coming in from the wheat fields. Save me, it’s a Grant Wood painting. It’s titled: Death doesn’t take it on the chin. Death isn’t on the lam, or death goes out on a limb, death’s limber and portable…

  Stop, stop. All right, all right, I command, laughing. I exhort her that, yes, death is certainly marching nearer, but to me, not to her. You are still a child, I tell her, just one of your tots, an amazing, adult child. To me, you always will be. And in the natural course of things I will pass on to my reward before you, and you will dance at my funeral. I want you to, I implore her, in addition I want you to wail. That is my plea. It will even be in my will! Then I take Gwen’s hand in mine and hold it tight.

  Gwen’s hand was like ice in my own. I will never forget that moment or that sensation, her small, icy hand in my hot puffy one. As the moon, implacable in its unearthly place and as perfect as an illustration in a fairy-tale book, shone down, Gwen made light of death with more of that invocatory talk of death’s riding in from a fiery Atlanta, but I think this time she improvised upon another theme—Mr. Death was traveling Greyhound and absolutely everyone on the bus wanted to die.

  It was my belief that that night Gwen and I invoked—no, provoked—death, woke him up, that we stirred that specter of mortality. He had been sleeping quietly above our heads. Death needn’t take the shape or form, or need the time, one thinks it will. Gwen taught me that. For instance, she had often insisted that it was an act of hubris on man’s part to have created perspective, to have placed the eye, and by dint of that to have placed human beings, in the center of a series of lines and planes, in the center of being. I remember well that Gwen scowled exaggeratedly at my use of the words natural and human nature. She mocked the idea of the natural order, which she did, and had done, over the years in conversation with me.

  Pointing to the stars ironically, Gwen contended—no, contested—with the sky and with me yet again. The so-called natural world existed only as a reproof, only to taunt us human beings, to tease us, for weren’t we the ones to conceive of Nature to begin with? Hadn’t we invented it? Innate is inane, don’t you think so, Lulu?

  Then, under the imperturbable sky, Gwen metamorphosed. She became stunningly solemn. She whispered into my ear, as if there were someone else sitting at our table, someone who ought not hear her confidences, that it was not so long ago when she had realized that she had been waiting, but she had not known that, waiting for someone or something, and now that seemed ridiculous. Life did not have meaning or purpose, she knew, but perhaps it required an investment, an act of faith. But she had so little—and here she grimaced—of that tender capital. Gwen claimed it was too late for that, for her. I denied it. I told her she had all the time in the world.

  All the time in the world, I pontificated. What things I pronounced and with what surety! As much as I didn’t hear Gwen, I didn’t hear myself. But I am racing ahead now. When logic is no longer a comfort, it’s hard to keep orderly the sequence of events. But I suppose she did know then what she faced, what had to be done or confronted, and had come to visit me in order to tell me, but she didn’t, not then, and instead, perhaps, Gwen involved herself with John and Alicia, in some grotesquerie calibrated to stymie the ugly and the ineluctable. She referred to it, their affair, as a grotesquerie, and I suppose it was—one meant, I assumed, to frighten away malign spirits. Which ones precisely, I hadn’t a clue. Whatever clues Gwen dropped for me were laid much too subtly and well, or, as she might put it, were dropped down too deep a well!

  Chapter 14

  I dreamed last night I knew precisely how to finish Household Gods. I was at the fourth and last part, which meant that the book was in that many parts. Its design, the whole, had been revealed to me. But I could not actually see what had been revealed, for the writing was faded or always, somehow, illegible. I was continually frustrated. Because travel was involved—I was moving from place to place—the dream seemed to imply that I had to find something or someone, Helen, I presume, before I could finish my book. It was most assuredly the strangest dream I’ve ever had. There was something about death in it, my mother’s death, I think, but it may have been my own. While I accept the Greek version of destiny, or fate, as in tragedy, when one’s end flows from one’s flaws, from hubris, I abhor the idea that one’s life is fated. Fate in its Californian manifestation—horoscopes and astrology—is anathema to me. So it struck me as bizarre that my dreamworld was invaded by something like a fate. But then I was engrossed in the Gypsy book. And doesn’t Freud say
, if I remember correctly, that dreams are concoctions, condensations, of what happened during the day.

  With Gwen, the evening and its events dangled delicately from a string, twisting this way and that. There was no plan, no plot, and one seemed not to have any intentions at all. Time always behaves like that with Gwen; it is stretched and fuller than with others, with whom time is less substantial, less rich. Time is more intense in Crete. It is unfortunate that we were interrupted—first, and rather rudely, by Roger. Then by others.

  Life is interruption, a series of interruptions. In fact, The Interrupted Life could be my memoir’s title. I jot that down in my notebook and reach for the Gypsy book once more. But I am disquieted. I have to act, to take action. I know what I have to do. In a sense and inwardly, I have made my decision. I have just not yet moved. But I know I must and that I must persevere; I must not perseverate. Agitated, I call out to Yannis, Please come here and bring the heavy bond paper and envelopes and the party list; I’m disinviting everyone. The party was supposed to have been held in two days. I had vacillated long enough, primarily about whether to cancel it and risk offending Gwen, in whose honor it was being thrown, or to go ahead with it and delay my search for Helen. Somehow, all along, I knew I would put it off. It is a funny thing, human nature. One knows and yet pretends one doesn’t. But why?