Cast in Doubt Read online

  Wallace plops down at my table, uninvited, pulling along his Dutch girlfriend, who understands his Afrikaans. I ought to feel pity for Wallace, in and out of mental asylums and jails, this last time for indecent exposure, which could have gotten him thrown out of the country, but someone—probably Roger, he plays chess with one of the judges—interceded. Wallace’s parents own one of the major newspapers in South Africa, and all of this must have been trotted out—Wallace’s respected books of poetry along with his mother and father, whom Wallace despises for their politics and so on. On the basis of this, no doubt, he was set free. And here he is. I wish I’d been on the beach last week when he ran into the water wearing a red net bikini bathing suit. Not the thing to do here, even if men expose themselves, and certainly touch themselves, regularly. They do it furtively—but not Wallace, he’s a flaunter. I ought to have sympathy for him—committed to a mental institution when he was just a boy of sixteen, deemed insane for opposing apartheid. He was sane then but has over the years lost whatever marbles he had, I think, though occasionally he’s lucid and amusing. I find it hard to tolerate him. He talks so much, in that annoying accent.

  I cut my fish, lifting the flesh away from the bone. My hand is steady and as usual I wonder if I oughtn’t to have become a surgeon, since I enjoy doing this so much. I always think this when I cut flesh, exactly the same thought, and always wonder, in precisely the same way, if others have the same thought when they do simple tasks over and again, and then what would it be like, if that were so, to be working in a factory, on the line, doing the same job daily, repetitively? I do a good job with my fish and feel satisfied. Little things please me. My mother could never serve fish that was not riven with bones. I hated fish, the way most children do, and it took me years to develop a taste for it, and if I hadn’t I couldn’t have made my home in Greece.

  At the moment I seem to be invisible at my own table, which is to my liking. Wallace and his friend chatter away in Afrikaans. I’m sure his Dutch girlfriend is kind but I have an antipathy to the Dutch and may be the only non-Belgian or non-German so inclined, or disinclined. Years ago I visited Amsterdam and had a most dreadful time. I stayed a few months, it rained constantly, and I met no one and found the Dutch barely civil. Everyone says they’re so nice, so I never interject that I think they are dull. Actually I don’t know if they are, but I nurse my secret dislike, my prejudice, and allow it to develop unhindered by scrutiny. The Dutch, I want to tell Wallace, have given tolerance a bad name.

  I don’t know how Wallace held up in court, if he did, or whether he had to face the judge at all. What does his girlfriend find appealing about him? This is a man who is never at a loss for the ladies, to be euphemistic about it. He’s had more lovers than one would ever guess from looking at him; only a distorted notion of sexual freedom could have allowed this outrage, this flourishing of a lunatic Don Juan. Wallace professes to adore the female sex and has set many poems in bedrooms where his beloved lies déshabillée on a bed, which allows him to describe in fanatic detail the beauty of the female body, the pearl he nuzzles with his nose and licks with his tongue, that sort of thing. Of course the French have a word for poems celebrating the woman’s body—blasons. But what do women see in him? Perhaps when he was young he had a certain je ne sais quoi….

  But now? He has a paunch and is disheveled. He has the worst set of caps I’ve ever seen. He whistles through them when he speaks. His eyes protrude like mine. And he tends to leer when he looks, projecting a mad intensity; I suppose someone else might say it signaled genius but to me it is most hilarious, signifying nothing like intelligence. His girlfriend’s not laughing. Oh dear, Wallace is reading his poetry aloud, in English, something about a dog. I’m barely listening. Where the hell is Roger? Roger might relieve me of the burden of seeming to listen to Wallace. I know Roger plans to relieve Wallace of some of his money, to pluck it from him for some scheme or other, to buy property here through a Greek lawyer, to open a café. Roger always has something on the boil; he’s one of those kinds of people who keep things moving by concocting ideas—for money, usually—which other people ought to invest in or become involved with. A magazine he’d edit or a property he’d administer. Sometimes they do give him money, but I never have. It’s a point of pride with me.

  Wallace has stopped reciting his poem. Now he’s defending Pound to the Dutchwoman. She must be completely uninterested. He’s whistling on about T.S. Eliot, being fierce as usual about Pound, about whom he’s ambivalent. Whatever sympathy he has for Pound was aroused because he—Wallace—and Pound are both considered traitors by some of their countrymen. I think Pound’s support of Fascism was a type of temporary psychosis, to which Wallace is no stranger either, I might add. Wallace is more paranoid than I could ever be; and he is rabidly heterosexual. Though, again, I can’t see why any woman would want to sleep with him.

  I’ve often noticed that even the most unpleasant men attract reasonable and kind women; these women put up with and serve these men for ages. They cook and clean for them, tidy up their social messes. And what for? The love of genius. It’s not likely that genius could be attached to so many miscreants. Sometimes the women are masochistic, but then so am I, I should think, in some ways, and I’d never want a man like Wallace. He’s unbearable.

  He seems to think he saw Pound in St. Elizabeth’s, insisting that he did visit him and even hid behind a tree to watch him after he was supposed to have left the hospital grounds. I hope Wallace was sane when he did so, although it doesn’t sound as if he was. Imagine how Pound must have felt being incarcerated in a mental hospital, locked up with and surrounded by manic depressives and schizophrenics, and then to have an ambulatory lunatic like Wallace pop up, scot-free, raving as wildly as any in there with him! I don’t believe Pound was truly insane. He was an arrogant and disagreeable man but an important poet, nonetheless. In this I agree with Wallace. T.S. Eliot was playing possum, Wallace now declares. Wallace has dropped to the ground to imitate a possum, and his girlfriend is urging him to stand up or sit down. This is tiresome.

  I look away. Helen has returned and is now on her terrace. The sun has almost entirely set, leaving behind glorious slashes of red and purple in the darkening sky. She’s turned one light on; it’s hanging above her head but she’s not reading. Drawn to the light as I am, Wallace looks in Helen’s direction and says that he met “that young woman”—he knows her name—at the market and asked her if she ever intended to marry and would she consider him if she did. Wallace says that he dropped to one knee to ask her for her hand and that Helen laughed and told him to get up and relax. Wallace’s girlfriend is not amused. What is her name? Something guttural—Brechje, I think. Wallace explains that he asked Helen to marry him only to make her feel better, for surely a woman on her own is lonely. The life of a spinster is barren, he warned Helen. I can just picture Wallace doing that and imagine Helen’s disgust. He seems to have a penchant for dropping to the ground.

  Once, when he was in Paris, Wallace trotted about the city wearing a pith helmet and dunked his head under the cascading waters of several stone fountains. He filled his pith helmet with water to throw over himself. It was a hot summer. He showered in the street and lay on the ground next to Notre Dame until the gendarmes removed him. That was the summer his mother came to Paris to see him, to rescue him from the Beats and so forth. But Wallace was not for rescuing. He enjoyed the bohemian life and also enjoyed throwing himself at his mother’s feet, accusing her in a loud moan of driving him crazy. When he tells this story he always notes: My mother shook and so did her gold jewelry. Wallace loves making a scene.

  Roger is approaching, affecting his usual manly gait, and I spy a peculiar little smirk on his lips that I’d like to rub off. Or rub out, rub him out. I must be drunk or Helen is right and I hate him. He kisses the Dutchwoman’s hand elegantly and Wallace sits up, like a well-trained dog, to pay attention to him, as if to a teacher. To my eye Roger is in no way commanding. He can be pedantic,
though. They all chatter together aimlessly for a bit and Roger asks how my book is going and if I didn’t finish a big chunk the other night. My work is progressing, I lie, and yours, dear? I’m past the hurdle, he says. I act as if I believed him. Then he goes on to talk about his novel, its structure, as if all one wanted to hear about were his artistic trials and tribulations. It is one thing to discuss a literary subject, it is quite another to complain endlessly about the difficulty of writing. These things, I believe, ought never be the topic of discussion. Would a carpenter take up the dinner hour telling all assembled how hard it was to finish this or that job? No, he’d get on with it. If he were intelligent he might talk about an aspect of carpentry from which all assembled might learn something. Carpentry affords many metaphors.

  You’re airing your clean laundry again, I say to Roger. In this you and I have no meeting of the mind. Unhappy with my castoff, he responds and points to Yannis, who’s dying of boredom, I assume, at another table. Oh Roger, I retort, in mock horror, you strain credulity. You are tres transparent. And you, Horace, he answers, are in no position to talk. I am sure Yannis has heard Roger’s remark; this bodes ill for the rest of the evening.

  The evening ends as most do. It blurs into a watery mass of colors, amorphous moments and words, the night’s palette. Helen’s light is still on but she is no longer on her terrace. Her curtains are drawn. I wonder if she is making love. I want to make love, though that is not what Yannis and I often do. He sometimes permits me to love him and occasionally he responds to or services me. I content myself with the past. There was a love of my life, years and years ago. He and I shared a bed and a home for fifteen years, and it ended finally and suddenly, broken off mysteriously and mutually after a petty quarrel, and I’ve never understood it. That was many years ago, and he’s been dead for ten, and I never again truly shared my life and lived with anyone that way, so profoundly, not after him. I was involved with a few, but none like him.

  Yannis is no grand passion, not even a small one. He’s a comfort to me, and sometimes he is not, as when I am irritable from drink and he is sulking about some wound that is probably self-inflicted. I do have a sharp tongue and say things I don’t mean, most of which I’m sure he doesn’t understand, but the boy has a terrific capacity for dark moods, which sometimes frighten me. I try to cheer him up with gifts and small trips. I don’t understand him and he certainly doesn’t understand me. He thinks I putter about and just type, for example, and I think—I don’t know what I think. I am too old to expect more. I am ridiculous. My body is decaying, the flesh literally weakens and drops from the bone, gravity is pulling at me. I grow old, I grow old. Alicia says it’s the drink and perhaps she is right.

  T.S. Eliot understood decay, I’ve often said that was his métier. But need and lust, in me they have not weakened and from me they have not fled, even though my body shrinks, grows tired, and my flesh loses its hold, its grip on life. It doesn’t matter—matter’s not the matter—and more’s the pity, because my thoughts are the same, and if I allow myself these—primitive, primordial, and ageless—they make me young again, in my mind, and I feel a blast of lust, of full-bodied, young desire rising up from my darkest self. Furiously it rushes into my mouth and then to my genitals where it settles, only to become cold and solid and still. I can taste it, my desire and lust, like Proust’s madeleine. I can become terribly sad, despondent. I want to rage against this inevitable fate, to rage like so many men before me. Sometimes I want to die.

  I often picture my funeral, even when I’m happy, especially when I’m happy. I see the faces of friends, back in the States where I’ll be buried, of course, in the family plot, just beneath—in the row below, that is—my father and mother. My parents visited their future gravesite once a year, to place flowers on their mothers’ graves—their mothers knew each other well—and I was taken along, my spot pointed out to me with pride. At my funeral—I can see it very clearly—friends who haven’t heard from me for years and years will remember me and my antics in prep school and college. Then my publisher will say a few words, and some of the New York crowd, whoever’s alive, will make the trip, and say how charming I could be, and so forth. I will leave the world in relative anonymity. It’s unbearable to me. I drink until I can drink no more.

  The magnanimous black sky is bottomless, fathomless like death and life too, and it comforts me in a way Yannis can’t, which is not the dear boy’s fault. He’s asleep on the bed, a body made tender by unconsciousness. I am looking out at the harbor, still as death at this time of night. Nothing is moving but the water and the clouds. Even the wind blows silently. The air is cold and startling. The night gods have chilly breath. Whatever paradise is, it must happen when everyone’s asleep, when there can be no complaints, and that must be why night gets so dark, so that we cannot see any imperfections in our world, and there can be nothing to complain about. Pound wanted to write paradise at the end: “Let the wind speak, that is paradise.” My enduring, stubborn passion must be written on the wind. And there it goes, there it goes, blown away by an indifferent blast of black and silent night air. Helen’s light is finally out.

  Chapter 5

  It might be a policeman’s flashlight shining on my puffy face. It could be the police. But it is not. It is sunlight. I’m groggy and Yannis has gone to make coffee, I suppose, though he may not have, depending on his mood. Each day is different and in some ways the same. What an awful truism with which to start this one. I feel oddly light-headed and well. The day, for no reason I can perceive, begins brightly, like a newborn babe, all pink and naked, and the sun is a marvel, amazing, burning so fiercely, lighting up this part of the world. Were I consistent, I would become a nudist, or some sort of nature lover, or at least a sun worshiper, and walk every morning to the end of the to watch the sun rise, or go to the beach, with suntan lotion and blanket, and lie near the ocean and let the sun bake and warm me. Perhaps I ought to sing songs to it. I don’t know why I don’t. For no reason at all, except that I am alive, and awake, and can’t remember my dreams, or my dreams have decided to let me forget them, I feel optimistic today. Hopeful as a clear blue sky, with no clouds at all, no signs of trouble. The coffee is terribly hot, brewed to my liking, and Yannis is not sullen. The small blessings of life make it bearable. I am a lucky man. I have never been arrested, and I ought to have been.

  I hand Yannis some drachmas and tell him to go buy something for himself, for the house, and to have a good time. With each sip of coffee, traces of last night’s debauch slide into view, as if my eyes were binoculars—no, not binoculars, what were those things that Mother had in which one put postcard slides? A stereopticon. Yes, it’s as if I were seeing portions of last night through that optic antique. Indeed I may be that optic antique, but just now, lying here and looking out at the harbor, which I can see even from my bed, I don’t mind. I remember more and more of the night’s debates and ludicrous Wallace. Did I dance with him or was it the Dutchwoman? I believe Roger and I even kissed good night. Was it Roger? Well, no matter. This is a day to embroider upon, but why should it feel so? A wonderful smell wafts in the air, aromatic yet not too sweet, redolent of youth, my youth of course, and youth must be served. I will visit Helen’s John today, I really think I will, after I have gotten some writing done. By meeting him I’ll sort things out, see what’s what.

  I walk to the window and wave to Helen on her terrace; she waves back. She has no idea what I’m planning, of course, and I feel a bit like one of my furtive characters, a confidence man or a CIA agent investigating domestic matters, spying on oblivious American citizens.

  My detective Stan Green always feels furtive, so keeping secrets comes naturally to him. Secrecy fits him like a glove. I make it fit him like that. Green’s girlfriends know nothing of the real world he inhabits, and his wife suffers silently and plots her revenge. I haven’t decided whether it will ever be enacted. In the book I’m writing now, the young, rich murderer, whom Green pursues, thinks, like Leopold
and Loeb, that he has committed the perfect crime. This book is a thinly disguised attack on would-be geniuses like Roger, men who think they can get away with anything, murder included, because they’re so damned superior. I am smarter than most of them and will receive no recognition whatsoever for my acuity, in part because I don’t lord what I do know over lesser lights. How can one have a meeting of the minds with people whose minds are concocted more of ego than anything else? I thought I’d left that problem behind in Cambridge and New York, but it surfaces here often, even in this obscure part of the world.

  When Roger first arrived, I thought, he’s a good man, we can talk. We shared Faulkner, Forster, Joyce, Firbank, of course, and Plato, and even some obscure English writers he and I both knew and loved. He doesn’t appreciate Gertrude Stein the way I do, and that was perhaps our first great disagreement. Her Making of Americans, I believe, is a masterpiece, and she is the godmother of Household Gods, so to speak. A vast subject. I can’t bear to think about it just now.

  As the years passed, Roger’s peculiarities emerged. He has a strange expression these days, his face having set a bit—he’s ten years younger than I, I think. He never troubles to look one straight in the eye. He has the disconcerting habit of peering at one through half-closed eyes, as if one were under suspicion of a great crime. There is something sinister in him, something that I cannot quite comprehend, but sense. It is as if his suspicions of others were only the reflections of his own dubious nature. I don’t mean to dramatize, but one doesn’t ever know what to expect from Roger, especially because he appears so pulled together and chipper, so in control.

  One worsens with age; at the least our failings graduate with us, with age, and some become exaggerated. I’m sure I have gotten worse, although the truth is I’m not sure in just which ways. I’d never admit my failings to others. Obviously I drink too much and lose patience quickly and can be petulant. There’s no one here I trust enough for the kind of dissection I ought to undergo. I almost trust Alicia enough, almost, but her secretiveness produces greater discretion on my part than I truly care to employ. I would like to reveal myself more fully to her. There’s Gwen in Manhattan, though it’s been ages since I’ve seen her. An extraordinary, singular person.