Cast in Doubt Read online

  Next, two postcards of the harbor here, as well as some addresses of friends who are scattered around the States—California, New York, Arizona. There is a scrap of a page torn from a book: Jacqueline Susann’s Once Is Not Enough.

  Linda looked thoughtful. ‘I agree. There must be some conversation before you leap into bed. And when a man invites you to his apartment, it’s for just one thing. Somehow it’s different if you invite him up for a nightcap to your apartment. You’re in control…’

  On the opposite page, in her own hand:

  Diploma: Emblem of knowledge. Proves nothing. Orgasm: Obscene term. Radicalism: All the more dangerous that it is latent. The republic is leading us towards radicalism. Dictionary of Received Ideas.

  She has now definitely arrived and settled in Crete. The postcards are evidence of that; in addition the definitions from Flaubert indicate Smitty’s having read Bliss’ copy of Bouvard and Pécuchet. I do not believe the Susann novel is in Bliss’ library. If it were, would Helen have torn a page from it, destroying Bliss’ property? I have never read a book of that kind, to its conclusion. She has found it compelling enough to clip and preserve. Surely Helen realizes the thoughts in it, though in some oblique way relating to her experience, are idiotic, and the writing boorish. Yet she places Flaubert and Susann side by side, which is most peculiar.

  She made her sister cry and didn’t help her because her sister made her cry and she even felt good and then felt guilty of course of course but later she saw she was just a bastard too just like her. I’m the bad one, I’m so bad, I’m being so mean to her and him.

  I assumed she had guilt feelings in regard to her sister. But who is the “him” in this instance?

  More pictures of friends. Another postcard, a charming view of our harbor. Another list of things to do. More visual embellishments, including pictures of rock-and-roll musicians who are called The Talking Heads and The Modern Lovers.

  Twenty one today. NO one knows. Feel like the oldest person in the world. Went to the mountains. Later saw Kostas. We fucked. Letter from parents, happy bday happy bday, come home, finish school ETC. Telephoned W. She says everything is great. No TV. Would watch anything. Even the Waltons.

  Was it her birthday the day I drove her to the mountains? And she said nothing, not a word. Which Kostas? Helen is a strange girl.

  Detective Electric announced a short circuit we might blow it so they stopped at the doorway to destruction. Call the exterminator—not a weird electric woman if you don’t WANT AND NEED STRANGE CHARGES and she put her finger in his socket and up went the rocket, and they became an old flame.

  On the page opposite, in bold letters again: DO THE OBVIOUS and STRAIGHT FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS. In her normal script: “I miss my dog.” I assume Helen is Detective Electric. She misses her dog. Her family must have had a pet, a dog. I wonder suddenly what became of the kitten she was taking care of here. I pour another Scotch and turn the page, to discover:

  Most of our sentimentalists, friends of humanity, champions of animals, have been evolved from little sadists and animal tormentors. Freud

  Of course it is not strange that one finds Freud cited in her diary, as Helen is the daughter of a psychiatrist; also Bliss has, I know, several volumes of Freud in his library. Following the quotation from Freud is a color photograph of a transvestite, in high drag. There is also a picture, captioned “Marvin Gaye”; he is dressed in a tuxedo and singing. I have never heard him sing but in this picture—his arms are outstretched and his palms up—he seems to be a crooner. Underneath his picture are what appear to be his lyrics: “Love just comes and it goes. That’s the way love is.” And, on the next page, “What’s going on?” Gaye’s name is cited again. Is he gay, I wonder.

  During one short phase in my young life, I liked to play dress-up and wear my mother’s clothes. I believe it was when I was six years old. But Mother discouraged me. I was, in any case, quite content to dress as a boy. I am not sure that I completely understand transvestism and the desire of some men to masquerade as women. I did enjoy, from time to time, though, the secret drag clubs our crowd frequented years ago. We were influenced by Christopher Isherwood; no doubt some of us liked to imagine that we were night-crawling in Berlin in the twenties.

  Can’t stop frightening thoughts. Some angel came to visit me and I was scared because I don’t believe in angels and she said that’s why I need your help. She was carved in stone but she could move and in the background there were millions of graves.

  What are her most frightening thoughts? Is this a dream? A story? I want to race through the journal—not really a journal, a jumble—to find something definitive, something that is her own interpretation of an event, perhaps, something that is explanatory. I do not know what it might be. But there is more of the same, odd phrases and lists, names that I have never heard of. A calendar with the dates of her last periods, I determine, and a list of colors—blue, lavender, gray, green, just a list, which makes no immediate sense to me. Unless it has to do with her stab at watercoloring.

  Then Dr. Brodsky said: Delimitation is always difficult.

  A Clockwork Orange

  Burgess is certainly in Bliss’ library. Bliss knows him. Orange is a cult book. Burgess was most likely influenced by Finnegans Wake; I thought it remarkable that his book found such success with the young. But didn’t Helen once tell me something about this issue of delimitation? I pour myself another drink. I think someone demanded of her that she delimit. Who was it? Her father? She rarely if ever mentioned him. I remember now. Her college guidance counselor did, when Helen was called to her office for a consultation. It must have been just afterward that Helen left school. The woman insisted to her: Delimit, you must delimit! But when did Helen tell me this story?

  W wants to be me and I won’t let her. She hates me sometimes. I hate her. I love her. She loves me. The way I don’t know her I always won’t know her and she knows me in the way I think she knows me, to really know—

  I abhor split infinitives. This passage must refer to her complicated relationship either with her sister or with a friend. A rather different kind of writing, I think. Were she beside me now I would explain to Smitty that one’s family—and one’s friends—plagues one throughout life. Near to this entry is a picture of a rock or punk band called the Ramones; Gwen mentioned them in a letter. They are a motley crew of unhappy-looking boys, with long hair and small dark glasses. Surly types. On the opposite page is a picture of a dog. I suppose the dog is hers. Is she cunningly commenting upon the Ramones?

  J makes me sick, the liar, he’s a total fuck up—

  This cryptic assessment of John is accompanied by a single squiggly line and then a list of words: “punk junk gag hag lag jag did dit dot dope hope mope hip yip yippies.” And so on. I wonder if this might be labeled graphorrhea—a mental illness marked by the writing of a long succession of meaningless words.

  I’m at a picnic and she won’t speak to me and I try to be nice but she’s in a disgusting mood and I can’t really do it whatever it is I’m supposed to do and my parents ignore me. My friends too. What did I do wrong this time? Later I phone Iggy Stooge but he’s busy.

  HELL WHERE DOES HERPES COME FROM ANYWAY?

  In the water there’s a rock it’s huge and it has the profile of a man but not the same man as before and nobody else sees it. Then everyone goes for lunch and there are different rooms and bigger and smaller ones and everyone knows everyone else but I’m an outsider. I say to someone I’m going to make movies but they don’t believe me, and the place is a movie set and then Crete, and me, I’m just trying to find a place to live and no money and some awful guy I slept with is on the set too but I’m standing next to the director and feel okay with him, very close to him. The Who is playing loud and some woman is singing, not Daltry or Townshend, and I don’t even like them anymore, and she’s screaming something about her mother who’s famous.

  The first may be a dream or a real event. Does she have herpes? I had gono
rrhea once but never syphilis. I have been lucky. Surely the second paragraph is a dream. The boulder may be the one in the harbor which does jut out, but does not, to me, look like a man in profile. I am unfamiliar with the Who; the name is amusing. Is Helen’s mother famous? I think not. Unless she is using her maiden name. Practically speaking—and this problem has more than once vexed Stan Green—it is much harder to trace women if they assume their husbands’ names. Divorce is a further complication.

  Next, there is a news item and a picture of another group—whom I have heard of—The Jackson Five. Gwen interviewed them before they made a trip to Ghana with other black American musicians. I believe it was Ghana.

  You want evidence I want ecstasy.

  Beneath this is a photograph of five men in white laboratory coats. One holds a device of some type, the others are studying it intently.

  I did poison him. I can tell cause he’s looking at me now. Phoned N in the city and told him and he said he never knew I was like this and I explained that certain things are for me alone and I know they’re probably just in my mind which isn’t mine in a way and I don’t act on everything anyway. Always feel like a hypocrite. S is really funny, really out there. He read to me and told me these weird stories about his family, crazy, I don’t believe everything but it doesn’t matter—I thought mine were nuts but his are the worst, it’s amazing the guy is still alive, and he also told me a fable—he’s into Aesop—about the jackdaw and the eagle. The jackdaw wants to be an eagle and tries to do what the eagle does but can’t. The jackdaw gets his claws stuck in a sheep’s fur and he can’t fly and then a shepherd captures him and cuts his wings off. S says it’s about how you realize who you are only after you aren’t that thing anymore. He crashed on my floor.

  Might I be the person whom she imagines she has poisoned, but why? That cannot be the case. And surely I was right about her and Stephen having become friends and his staying, or crashing, with her. Who is “N”? I once studied cryptography, hoping to serve as a cryptographer in the war. I wanted to work in Intelligence and decode messages, but I was not accepted. I did very much want to go, though war and violence terrify me. Still I would not lie about my sexual proclivity. That would have been insulting, and why go off to war, perhaps to die, to fight for what one holds dear and true when one’s person is unacceptable? That I could not and would not do.

  Isn’t that great

  Isn’t great great

  that isn’t great

  what’s great

  great isn’t what it used to be

  great isn’t so great

  what’s great?

  Tell the story. She told the story. It put a gun to her head. Can you tell the story is being told? No, she put the gun to its head and it blew her brains out. And can you tell the story is the end. The END. To Be Continued

  This is followed by a list:

  Do laundry

  buy glue

  meet S

  phone W

  toilet paper

  tampax

  That was all. There are a few blank pages, but I had come to her last entry. I turned the book over. I had read the diary through once and desired to read it again, even more slowly, now that I knew what was there and knew what to expect. Rereading allows one the opportunity to free oneself from one’s initial anxieties and fears. I wanted to pore over and study each page as if each were a palimpsest; I was seeking something beneath Helen’s words and the hastily thrown together captions and pictures.

  Helen’s artlessness can be deceptive. Her crudeness and vulnerability make an impression. She is often harsh; I knew her to be blunt. I was unaware of the fact that she hoped to be a filmmaker. Perhaps she once mentioned it. I am now assured that her sister did not kill herself; although I cannot be positive. But why would John have indicated that she probably did? Perhaps, like John, Helen’s sister tried and failed. Still, I do not know.

  I look about the room furtively, even despondently. I experience no immediate relief. I thought I would. Curiously, my guilt about having stolen Helen’s diary returns. But I push worry aside to consider the meaning inherent in it, what is essential in it and to her. There is such a mixture here; she moves toward and then away from clarity. She is angrier than I supposed her to be. Her eclectic sources—many of which are cunning, others, merely silly—are launched and land as if all were the same; all are set and settled on the same plane. It is interesting, I think, as well as enervating and confusing. Obviously Helen is confused; she is a confused young person, young woman. She exhausts my resources. I feel frustrated. Helen seems to make few or no discriminations between things. To what end does she apply herself and her thoughts? I ask myself.

  I am tired, tired even in my bones. Weariness has descended upon me as if it were a drug I had swallowed. It invades every part of me. I struggle out of the chair and walk to the door. Nectaria has left my dinner outside, in the hall, on a tray. Though covered, the food will be cold by now. I didn’t hear her knock, and she must not have wanted to disturb me. I was hungry, but now I am too tired even to eat. I nibble at everything so as not to insult Nectaria.

  I am also disheartened. Like Helen I kept a diary when I was young. It was nothing like Helen’s. I tried faithfully to record the events of the day, to describe what I was reading and thinking, and to scrutinize and explicate my reactions and so on. She does little or none of this. But further I am disappointed. Certainly I did not find in the south the real Helen, certainly not her person, but having found her diary, perhaps I have found out too much and too little. For I have both more of a sense of her and less. I hoped, glimpsing her secret yearnings, I would encounter her true self. Yet she eludes me. Of course, I remind myself, Helen was not in any way attempting to create art, to invent, to make order out of the chaos of her young life. Still, and in any case, what I have discovered is not what I was looking for.

  And Helen is not what I thought she would be. That is the short and the truth of it. Upon what basis can I judge her writing, these fragments that are not meant for other eyes? Read this and die, indeed!

  I hold the purloined book in my hands. Sometimes I find her person unappealing. In her diary she seems not at all like my Smitty, the Helen I conversed with and spent time with. Perhaps not time enough. But is there ever enough time? No, there is never enough time, and I have wasted time, chasing after her. I feel embarrassed and old. I despair of my foolishness. “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.…”

  I undress and change into a pair of freshly laundered flannel pajamas. This act in itself consoles me; the soft cotton material next to my skin reassures me. The smell of clean flannel is as sweet as the fragrance of the sweetest and ripest peach. Actually I prefer nectarines. Absentmindedly I realize that Yannis has not yet come in. But I am too distracted to bother much about his absence. He wouldn’t have expected me in any case, since I had said in my note to him that I might be gone a week. He is probably with his mother.

  I lie down on the bed and pull the covers up to my neck. Like a child I place my arms beneath the quilt. As if waiting for something, I lie still as a stone in the darkness. I will discuss this episode with Gwen tomorrow. I will figure a way to tell her I have the diary. She will offer a view different from my own, surely, and it will illuminate my position. How events turn one about and construe effects so different from what one expects from time to time! What did I wish to find? For surely if I truly wanted to, wouldn’t I have been able to find it, once I had set my mind to it? I close my eyes and also, as best I can, shut my mind to these disorderly and disruptive questions. To sleep, “to sleep, perchance to dream.” Alas, poor Horace!

  Part 4

  The Interrupted Life

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  Chapter 18

  Some years have passed, long years and short ones too, since I began recording my impressions and experiences during this particularly intense and revelatory time in my life. It has taken me a while to return to th
is journal, but with the munificence of hindsight—which Gwen refers to as “thinking with the behind or through one’s ass”—I decided to plunge into it once more. I have tinkered here and there with the material, but it is basically the story as I lived it. I did go south, I did meet some Gypsies, and Roman, it was Stephen I found, and so on. It is in most respects revealing, to me at the very least.

  For less than a year, much energy and thought centered on Helen. Was it an obsession akin to Humbert’s for his nymphet Lolita? Did Helen represent my last chance for freedom, my lost youth? Gwen humored me and humorously observed that my rabid voyeurism was much akin to her raging hormones. Then, from rabid voyeurism she pulled out of a hat the original concept of rabbit voyeurism. This, she contended, was the most difficult voyeurism to deal with, for every time one saw a rabbit one stood still, mouth agape, and because rabbits multiply so rapidly, there were so many, and soon the world would stand still, and so on. How she made me laugh! Especially at myself.

  In the past and over the years, my voyeurism was something Gwen never failed to remark upon. But then we writers have generally acknowledged that in ourselves. She contested, rather too directly I thought at the time, for I myself had not thought of it, if you had wanted to see Helen, why didn’t you casually ask Stephen if he knew where she was? She might have still been with him. It hadn’t occurred to me at the time, on the beach, but I recognized instantly, and not without embarrassment, when Gwen confronted me with it, that my not asking it demonstrated some error in my approach. It struck me—though I dismissed it quickly and buried the thought—that I did not want to find Helen at all.