Agnes Mallory (22 page)

This letter came on the Saturday before we left for the Berkshires. The cream envelope again, no return address. That annoyed me a little. That and all the references to people I didn't know, events I hadn't heard of. The point was: she didn't need me to understand. She didn't want me to write back to her. She wasn't even writing to me really. She was writing to the Idea of Me. She was writing to herself. I was sure of this because I'd been planning to have an affair with the Idea of Her before her first letter came; I knew how she felt. But it annoyed me anyway.

The letter arrived while I was at home, and I was glad of that: Marianne never had to see it. She'd been her usual airy-fairy self, all sensitive and accepting, when I'd declined to show her the last one. ‘You don't have to explain yourself,' she said firmly. ‘There are some relationships that are just private, that's all.' Yeah, but I'm no idiot, I knew I couldn't push it too far. Still, and to my own surprise, I found I did want to keep Agnes private. I'd never told anyone about her really. My first lover, Kate, I told her, but no one after that. I just felt somehow it wasn't anybody's business but mine.

So, also, I had to control my curiosity. I didn't want to read the letter this time until I could get off somewhere by myself, and this was tough to do on the weekends. There was Charlie, first of all. I had to play around with him all morning. He was crawling now and smiling with his round, rosy cherub's face and just that little token of humanity had changed everything for me with him. I'd discovered suddenly that I adored him. I thought about him all the time, took time off to buy him presents, blocks, busy boxes, fuzzy blue outfits with bears and bunnies on them. I couldn't hug the guy tight enough, I loved him so much. Of course, he was a bore to actually be with for any extended period of time, but I could overlook even that for love and I spent most Saturday mornings with him when I could. Then, when he went down for his nap, I seized the opportunity to ravish the mystic Missus, toward whom I'd also been feeling very affectionate of late – especially this last anxious week when terror of Manero's corruption investigation had made me sentimental and she and Charlie seemed like the only really good, clean things about my life.

So it was around three in the afternoon of that hot, thick, gray, sooty day before I finally went out on the pretext of buying a novel for the trip. Instead, I stopped into the Greek diner on Amsterdam and plonked myself down at the far end of the counter and started to read the letter there.

Before I was this far, about halfway through, I had noticed several points, at least three points. One: the postmark on the letter was Gaysville, Vermont. I hadn't noticed that the first time. I hadn't cared the first time where she was. But now I saw it and I knew I could find her if I wanted to. How big could Gaysville be? Two: I was beginning to remember her. That is, when I read the first letter, it was so at odds with my fantasy that I was repulsed by it. But now it came to me: she'd never been the sort of girl I'd been attracted to particularly. She'd always been weird. Troubled, deep, crazy. If I kept that in mind, I found I recognized something – I really did recognize something I remembered, something I'd been connected to – in this letter, in her voice. Three: She was falling apart. Mentally, I mean. I could see it coming a mile away. People who are really in trouble are always telling you that a new day has dawned. Spring has sprung, they've had a revelation, they're much better now. It's a bad sign, hope. Healthy, normal people complain constantly.

So she was writing to me because she was slowly falling into desperate trouble. And the strange thing is, this made me feel afraid – for myself, for what I sensed, what I already
knew
, was happening to me. I'm not sure how much of that was the superstitious nonsense again, the stupid oracle business and so on. But I could not somehow entirely separate myself from the poor unhappy woman who wrote these letters. And that made me wonder also, seeing that I could probably find her, seeing that I felt connected to her, and seeing that she was coming apart at the seams, what, if anything, I was supposed to do about it.

What, if anything, did she want from me?

That was the beginning of what I sometimes ever-so-wittily call the Pregnant Pause. A really bad period I had most of the time I was pregnant. I hardly did any work at all, none at all really. I'd decided the worm incident was a metaphor, some kind of sign: there was rot at the heart of my work, you know, the whole concept was misguided. This drove Roland absolutely up the wall. He used to come home sometimes – he was getting more gigs now, and he was doing some studio work for a friend down in Boston – and he used to come home and find me sitting in a chair by the window, smoking a cigarette, drinking a beer. And he'd just go ker-azy. He even got down on his knees once: grabbed my arms, gave me his sincere WASP gaze. Please, Agnes, stop smoking, stop drinking, you're going to hurt the baby. Lucky I didn't tell him I was taking pills again or he'd probably have left me right then and there. Taken the fetus away and brought it to term himself. Why don't you just try to work, Agnes? he'd say. The things you make are so beautiful. We had our first real screaming fight that winter. I told him: that's exactly what's rotten, the beauty of my work. I said, the whole idea of beauty has been the central perceptual ideal of a civilization that has tortured and oppressed and slaughtered my people from its inception. You can't separate those things. The project of creating beauty was inseparable from the project of destroying what they saw as ugliness. Which, more often than not, was represented by the Jews. The Renaissance
was
the Holocaust, I said; they were ultimately the same thing, one inherent in the other. Praxiteles is the same fucking guy who marched my sister to the river side. My father's daughter, Lena. Six years old, clutching her dolly. Shivering in her nightgown. Rodin put the pistol to her head and pulled the trigger and shattered her face and splattered her childish brains. And six million others like her. Six million! A third of all my tribe. If I'm silent it's my father's silence – thus I railed at poor Roland. Because my father
knew
, he was
there
. He knew what the beauty and the ideals and the fantasies of western civilization had been trying all those centuries to suppress. So Roland sort of shrugged and said: So don't make beautiful things. No one cares about that anymore. Isn't that what all the artists are saying now? (I had told him about Joseph Beuys making ‘ugly' art as a reaction to Auschwitz.) And that set me really going at him: They're wrong! They've got it all wrong! Beauty
is
beautiful, beauty
is
truth, it's the only thing that matters – that's the whole problem – there wouldn't be a problem if that weren't true! Anyway, what's the fucking difference? Whatever you make, whatever you say – ugly, beautiful, philosophical, political – you suppress the other thing, the silent, invisible thing that you didn't say, that you didn't make. That's the first principle of the Jewish religion: Thou shalt make no graven images. Thou shalt make no graven images, Roland, because the minute you do, you destroy the part of the truth that's unmade, that's suppressed! (You have to picture this pregnant woman in an
I Lo Vermont
sweatshirt pacing up and down with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other, reciting these things to a wondering six-foot-four son-of-a-horse-breeder who's sitting in a beanbag chair with a guitar in his lap, staring at her, open-mouthed, shaking his head.) No graven images, he said finally. Doesn't that make it kind of tough to be a sculptor? Which was when I started screaming. Screaming, crying. I stood in the middle of the floor jerking my hands up and down so hard the beer foamed up out of the bottle and flew all over the place. That's the problem with you people! I screamed. Whenever you're confronted with the great Jewish truths, you have to negate them to preserve your wretched world view. Our insights drive you mad, you go mad in huge masses. How else can you explain Jung and the atom bomb! And Christianity! And western fucking civilization! I think every brilliant Jewish guy must be followed around by this humpbacked gentile Igor. And the Jewish guy says, ‘Love Thy Neighbor.' And the goy says, ‘Yeah, and let's build huge churches and not let anyone have sex!' And the Jewish guy says, ‘E=MC
²
!' And Igor says: ‘KABOOOM!' I want to carve my father's silence into the tree of life, Roland. And you just
sit
there? With that face? With those boots? Look at those boots! (A piece of advice, Harry: Never get pregnant. It makes you absolutely insane.) Even Roland, the sweetest, calmest human being on earth, started to yell at me. You want to carve your father's silence into the tree of life, go on ahead and do it, he said; I mean, just do something, all right? cause you're driving me up the wall. And I drew myself up to my full five foot six and said, ‘I can't do it. I haven't suffered enough.' Well, you're working on it, he said, and stomped out, boots, face and all.

Shit. Here I meant to write you such an upbeat letter and show you how much happier I am, and all I'm doing is picking over the bones of my poor, dead marriage again. Again and again and again. Over and over and over. And it's not even so bad now really. I really am happier now than I was before, last winter. I really do think I'm pulling out of the gloom anyway. I'm certainly working hard. Anyway, I'm glad that summer's here. Take care of yourself, Harry.

Love,

Agnes.

‘Come,' said Buckaroo Umberman one evening that September. ‘Come fuck with me.'

This was in a little Thai place, right at the point where Chinatown had begun to infiltrate and Little Italy begun to decay. It was an isolated joint on an island at the tip of an asphalt playground; you could see the black guys playing B-ball in the night through the front window. We'd been there for hours – hours and hours – drinking Thai beer first and then wine with the spicy food, and now bourbon. Buck and me, an ambitious mayoral aide named Alvin, and an Influential Chicago Guy named Frank Stain. Younger men on the make, the two others and I, letting Umberman hold court and philosophize. This of course he did at length and we'd been treated throughout the evening to a choice selection of sociological Umbermanisms.

On African-Americans: ‘What are they complaining about? Slavery, slavery, you made us slaves, this, that. Christ, if it weren't for slavery, they'd still be in Ethiopia saying, “Thank you for the grain of rice, Mr Relief-man.”'

On Germans: ‘The bacteria of the western world. Why d'you think they call 'em germ-men? Lookit: who ate the body of Rome? Who caused the cancer of Europe? Every time. Read your history. The Berlin Wall should have a quarantine sign on it.'

On immigrants in general and Slavic taxi drivers in particular. ‘They come here. Why do they come here? To be free, to be Americans, only they don't want America to be like America, they want it to be like their country, which is what they're trying to get away from. I'm in a cab, the guy, the hack, is from Russia, he can't get through Times Square 'cause there's a demonstration. He shakes his head, “Too many demonstrations in dees country,” he says. “Too much freedom.” I mean, fuck you, go home.'

There were also Hispanics, who didn't want us to teach them English so we wouldn't ‘oppress them out of being ignorant.' And Those Who Expressed Empathy for the Muslim World, when it was ‘An entire culture founded on the principle of slaughtering everyone who doesn't agree with you.'

These little tirades, which we mocked, which we disputed, which we waved off, bound us to him because they liberated the mutterings of our own hearts – notions we didn't really believe but which had been so long imprisoned by the tyranny of liberal decency that they had begun to seem like secret truths. He was our id, like I said; or maybe he was our Miltonic Satan, or the B-side of Plato's
Republic
, or maybe just a fat, sweaty, more or less canny New York pol who, from mere boredom or for sheer glee, had offered us a peek up the hot nookie of the city system and now drew us in for the rest of the show. What I thought about him depended on my alcohol intake, and I'd had a lot that night. And now, when we were all feeling warm and at one and in-the-know, he lifted up his hands in beatification, and said, ‘Come. Come fuck with me.'

This was to me in particular. Alvin and Frank Stain were laughing in their sleeves and seemed already to know the drill.

‘Hey,' I said, ‘you're a cute guy, Buckster-man, but pussy is my beat.'

There was much hilarity at this and Alvin shook his head at the noodle-stained tablecloth, repeating it, ‘Pussy is my beat. Pussy is my beat.'

‘I love him,' Buckaroo told the others. ‘I love him.'

I looked from one to the next to the next, smiling stupidly. ‘What,' I said. ‘What?'