Class Warfare (11 page)

On the peak of a heat wave, in mid-afternoon, he followed Isobel to the zoo. The Lesser Panda watched them without visible interest. “I know how you feel,” Jamie said to both of them. “I wish there were something I could do about it. Something
you
could do. What can I tell you? One cage is very much like another, sometimes, and love can't spring the lock. At some point the heart must break. At some point it
will
break, with an audible snap, not unlike the twanging of elastic. It often happens at night, late, in public places; on certain streets, if you happen by at the right time, you can hear the racket of breaking hearts. The pieces lie there on the ground, on the sidewalk, still strangely vital, reflecting stars, streetlamps, moonlight. Isobel, there never was a language capable of saying it, what has to be said. These tears will, in the normal course of things, dry. Winter comes soon enough. And I have no choice, now, but to go down to Lonesome Town.”

“What are you talking about?” Isobel said. “Why are you harassing me? Why don't you take a bath once in a while? When are you going to grow up and settle down?”

The summer rumbled on, the weather worsened and improved irregularly, the government fell and was propped up again, Isobel bought an aquarium and filled it with guppies, several of the guppies quickly died, and Jamie had not, yet, gone down to Lonesome Town. “Later,” was all he'd say. “Eventually.” He was writing a diatribe, for a little-known journal of political thought, on the application of Marxist-Leninist dialectics to the interpretation of dreams; it helped pass the time. “I have to finish my work,” he explained to anyone who asked. “I want to wrap things up properly, before I go.” His friends looked skeptical.

He didn't care. The world was asserting its old attachments, flexing its chains, tightening, day by day, its network of connections. He couldn't gainsay its authority. Summer light was witchcraft, a seduction he hadn't the will to refuse. Voices addressed him, preached to him, quibbled and questioned; he heard them, perversely, as music. When he thought of Lonesome Town, as he frequently did, the thought lay limp and gelatinous, a foreign body, in his mind. “I swear to God,” Isobel said one day, “there must be something wrong with you.” There was, but he couldn't positively identify it; it was always turning into something else. “The revolutionary process,” he wrote in his diatribe, “is a matter of continual adaptation to new circumstances, and thus a continual revision of the circumstances themselves by the activity of adapting to them.” Isobel, reading over his shoulder, felt a surge of annoyance: once again he was trying to excuse himself. Jamie went on writing, undisturbed: “It can be said, then, that the Uncertainty Principle applies to the behaviour of the proletariat as it does to that of particles … ” Isobel went back to her needlepoint. “I get the distinct and unpleasant impression,” she said, “that things are over between us.”

Nonetheless, scraps of resolution floated, like waste paper, in the air, gathered themselves together and stuck—gradually—to Jamie. He began to plan, to pack, to settle what had to be settled, to dispose of encumbrances. He finished the diatribe with an eloquent call to arms against the incursion of counterrevolutionary dreaming; he sent it off to an editor who, a few weeks later, would gently reject it as “extremist”; he said all but the most difficult of the necessary goodbyes. No one entirely believed in his resolve, but it didn't matter: he had his ticket, his baggage, his wits about him. “So,” Isobel said, and stopped. Any number of words, phrases, occurred to her, and none of them seemed adequate. “The least you can do,” she said at last, “is take me out to dinner before you go.” Jamie smiled, for the first time in weeks. “That would appear to be in order,” he said. Ordinary living had its attractions, its unlooked-for splendours, after all. Isobel had her species of loveliness, after all. He would think more stringently, later, of the wires, the ropes of need and remembered pleasure, that bound him to this world; right now, he was content simply to admire them. “I'll get my hair tinted for the occasion,” Isobel said. “And I'll even take a bath,” Jamie answered her.

In the dead of summer, they made their preparations.

It came about, then, that on the eve of his leaving for Lonesome Town Jamie and Isobel went out to dinner at an expensive, melancholy restaurant. “We can't afford it,” Isobel said; she was wearing the fake emeralds again, and her hair was newly reddish. Jamie was achingly clean. “I know,” he said. “It isn't important.” He had been saying that, or versions of it, a lot. There were reasons. Of these the most interesting, to him, was that he was about to go down to Lonesome Town; there could be no postponing it, now. It was a journey not to be undertaken casually. Through that summer of manifold imperfections, through the past few hours in particular, he had given his departure careful consideration. He had studied the appropriate texts, had sought out advice, had accepted (not uncritically) the advice proffered. Some of it would be useful, some not. He stroked Isobel's arm. “I'm just feeling the years, if you know what I mean,” he said apologetically. Isobel laughed, showing remarkable teeth.

In the restaurant, the lights were amber and blue; they flickered irregularly, as though meaning something. The tablecloth was snowy white, except where Jamie had ashed on it. A handsome fiddler in ethnic garb played Serbian folk dirges. A handsome woman in a dirndl sang: “Oh, I am so unhappy, my heart is rent in twain, soon it will fly away. The fallow fields will weep, O my people.” Isobel shivered. “It's the air-conditioning,” she explained, whispering. “You should have worn a sweater,” Jamie said. Isobel's eyes opened marginally.
“Here?”
They both noticed, independently, that their table was not the most desirable in the house.

Waiting to be served, Jamie counted his money, trying to appear unconcerned. What he was really doing, he reminded himself, was looking for that amusing newspaper clipping he'd been saving, in his wallet, for just this occasion. “You'll love it,” he remembered to say aloud, as he searched, filling time. He must have lost the damn thing somewhere, or thrown it out. There was nearly enough money. “I'm not especially hungry, come to think of it,” he complained. “Whenever I think about food, I lose my appetite.” The waiter smelled remotely of musk oil, and his uniform could have dressed a palace guard in the Principality of Hopelessness. “And what will be your pleasure?” he said nastily. “Shipshape yachts and buggery,” answered Jamie. “A good screw and an early death.” Isobel blushed.

They ate buffalo steaks and asparagus drenched in something yellow and obscurely cheesy, and they drank a quantity of politically reprehensible wine. After the third glass, Jamie developed a problem with his knife and fork; there was a small, jarring clatter, and an audible turning of heads in the vicinity. “Oh Jesus,” Isobel said. In a moment, the Dirndl Woman began to sing:

 

How shall I rise

above

the mournful cries

of love?

How can I re-

alize

it's not just me

who cries?

 

The iced raspberries arrived then, and lay uneaten, small, round and pristine red, in their silver bowl. The Dirndl Woman went into a back room for her fix. “I guess we should probably talk,” Jamie said. “It seems to be the thing to do, over dessert.”

“Talk,” Isobel said. (You could be waiting for a bus, at your accustomed transfer point, and someone could pull a knife on you, as swiftly.) “There's no end to the talk, like the first movement of a Vivaldi concerto, like the eleven o'clock news, if you want to get prosaic about it. I suppose you do. I don't, this time around. In the kingdom of perfect love, there's no prose; they speak in strophes, alexandrines, measured, quietly lyrical, full of understated resonance. I miss that with you. Yesterday, in mid-afternoon, I had a dream in which you were crushed under the wheels of a locomotive. You resembled red cabbage in a vulgar salad. Nobody even tried to save you, glue you together, cover you. The police asked questions I couldn't answer. Outside, an eyelid's flicker away, there was a racket of gunfire; I thought it was a truck backfiring. These things occur. Still, when they do, they bother me—my palms sweat and I see little sparklers in the foreground of everything. In the kingdom of perfect love, I'd take the sparklers for granted: they'd be torches (as in the old legends) held aloft, peripherally, by Nubian sentries.”

Jamie divided the remaining wine, not quite evenly, into their respective glasses. He observed the waiter approaching, and worked hard to transcend the stains on the tablecloth. Instead, he smiled at Isobel. “I had to fall in love with a goddamned rhetorician,” he said.

“Listen.” The bill descended between them, more or less unobtrusively. Isobel decided not to look at it. “Do you imagine it will be easy to say goodbye? Pour me more wine, before I die of thirst. It's possible. I must have sat down with you a hundred times, in taverns, in rooms we forgot the contours of as soon as we left them—at your house—at mine—anywhere we could make the space. I thought it would go on forever. It didn't. It isn't going to. I went to consult a wise man once, paid him a dollar, and he said: Take everything you know, all you love, and smash it, stomp on it until there's nothing left of it, grind it to a powder you'd be ashamed to spice your meat with.
And you, Jamie, you,
you talk of rhetoric.”

In the middle of this, the Dirndl Woman began to sing:

 

You might as well leave the place

that you left behind.

You might as well fill your face

while you drain your mind.

If someone tries to cut your heart out

baby

offer him your soul

You've got to play your part out

baby

and he's just another lowdown

downtown lumpenprole.

 

When the song finished, there was polite clapping. Jamie ordered another bottle, indifferently, as if born to the ordering of bottles. Isobel reached for her purse, and smiled as she opened it. “We were the last to know,” Jamie said. “Everything got taken, conscripted, while we slept. I held on while I could. Sometimes I lay down on the floor, where you could see me. I wanted more than anything else to go to sleep; there would never be enough sleep. Something was always lurking around, waiting, ready at any instant to demand wakefulness; if nothing else, the telephone was always intruding, saying,
Where are you? Why aren't you here?
and I had trouble thinking up clever answers. You made pancakes with apple and cinnamon, you poured orange juice from a blender, you plucked curried shrimp from the frying pan. Over Irish coffee we discussed the issues and worked on viable alternatives. There were none. In the end, sweet love, there were none.”

Isobel's fingers, immaculate, fiddled with the complimentary mints. “I'm not sure I know,” she said, “what you're talking about. I'm not sure I can stand it any more. It's very likely true: when everything came apart, broke, seized up, we were the last to know. Others knew, and didn't see fit to tell us. The ordinary world continued to function, outwardly, according to its inscrutable laws, and I never bestirred myself to learn those laws. Was that a mistake? God knows I've made enough of them—mistakes, I mean. Give me a cigarette. Are we going to have to wash dishes, to get out of here?”

“Never mind.” Jamie played with the waistband of his Expensive Restaurant pants; he thought: It's getting harder and harder to say goodbye, as the hour approaches. I feel some gesture is necessary, but I can't remember how to make it without offending you. I need some well-chosen words, but I lack the wit to choose them. There hasn't been time to prepare anything. In the kingdom of perfect love, the theory is that you don't have to prepare; it all comes on demand, complete and luminous, just push the handy buzzer provided for your convenience. I can't find it. I seem to be elsewhere. I can see what's happening: all the clichés coming true,
right on time,
every bad dream's promise fulfilled at last; there must be a fresh way to interpret it. And all the while, voices I don't recognize are saying, my own voice is trying to say:
I never knew how much I loved you, depended on you, hoped to hell you'd reach down into your bag of tricks and find a way to pull me out. I never told you …

“Yeah, sure,” Isobel said, abstractedly.

“Nothing is sufficient.” The birthday party at the next table watched unhappily, apprehensive: was there going to be a scene? “What do you think I've been doing, all this time? … I tried to summon up out of whatever darkness the aspect of, say, a face
—your face—
architecture of bones, flesh, hair, hands, anything at all to keep, cheap souvenirs of a country long ago legislated out of history, long ago vacated, left to its own.” Jamie realized that he was speaking wildly, that people were taking notice. Isobel was absorbing atmosphere, smiling glassily at the blue and amber lights, thinking
When will this be over?
The Dirndl Woman was singing again; Jamie couldn't make out the words, but he thought he heard:

 

Yeah you're lucky, fuckin' lucky

but you won't be lucky for long.

You got everything you paid for, babe

and you never did nothin' wrong
…

So take the fuckin' buck you're stuck with,

suck it, babe

while you sing along
…

Tough luck, tough luck baby, tough luck
…