False Entry (30 page)

“Did you burn it this time?” I cast a glance at a small work of his, hung over my mantel, that I bought last year. No, he answers, not this time. He has locked the door on all that order, given the key to Cecile, who cries, “Oh, not again! But I knew!” gone down the stair, and come here. Inside the closed studio, as he makes me see it, the wind streams under the sash like a continuous peal of laughter, bearing in that pointillist surface which none can ever hope to abstract or diffuse. Somewhere back there too is that lost land, lost depth from which he has tried. He falls silent, despairing of its description, that pure, angry country from which a man can presume to pose a four-by-four canvas against the Augean confusion of the world.

“Demiurge, Number Three,” I say. That is the title of the picture over the mantel.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Pierre,” he says, “that’s a dealer’s word. The dealer insisted on names and we got it out of the dictionary at random. I like the words that come before and after just as well,” he says, grinning—“demitasse, demirep.” Already his voice is a little more arrogant; in my obverse way I have helped him. I know why he comes. “No,” he says. “To
make.
That’s as far as I’ll go with you word-mongers. To
make.
”

“Only an auxiliary,” I say. “Make peace. Make money.”

“Basic,” he says, getting up to go. “Make water. Make love.” I watch him go down my staircase and stop at the landing.

“You know what Cecile shouted after me when I left,” he says, looking up. “‘Burn it, why didn’t you,’ she says, ‘you
flâneur
, the ones that are left will only be worth all the more.’”

I laugh, and he joins me, for since he is already being collected by both bankers and museums, that is probably true. “What will you be doing now?” I call after him, but he has not heard me.

On his febrilely merry “Be seeing you,” the door slams.

As, for the months of his dry season, I shall. For what Maartens will do now will be to bury himself, at first desperate, then with calculating fervor, in the nonvisual world. He may be heard of as attending a music school six hours a day five times a week—he is a fair cellist; on another of his “tours,” as he calls them, he will earn his certificate at a cooking school—two uncles were chefs, on the Swiss mother’s side.

On his afternoon visits to me, he becomes less and less expository; he is forming his secrets again, nursing up his slow, fruitful anger against “the people outside.” It is at that stage that one meets him, as I did first, at their parties, drinking in as if it were elixir the heliumated gabble of those who do everything but make. He listens with interest to their version of him, how to one he is a primitive, to another an artist made healthy by his “hobbies,” to all a House and Garden version of the Renaissance man. “Ah, Maartens,” says a lady lay psychiatrist, summing him up, “he
lives
everything out”—and she gives him the smile with which the viviparous are regarded by those who have learned, like Jove, to give birth only from the brow. Maartens says nothing but one hand nurses his stomach—he has rather a tidy pot—the way pregnant women do, and I amuse myself with the surmise that he is congratulating himself on having a navel, in the specious presence of so many who might almost be imagined to have none. For what is he doing there if not using them, by night, as by day he uses modes of expression that are foreign to his, as he would haunt even the world of the blind in order to be sent back with force on his own?

And on one of these nights one meets him in that gay-dreary little backroom cloaca of all such parties. He is looking down at the bed and there is pity on his face for the mink and polo cloth exploded so hopefully on the counterpane, for that touching pile of pupa-cases left in the back room by those who expect so faithfully to find themselves angels, breathing the
Zeitgeist
, in the front. As he tugs on his muffler, however, he is muttering expletive in one of his languages—dirty Marseillaise lingo maybe, or outhouse Flemish, or perhaps only the universal guttural of nausea. Be seeing you, he says with some embarrassment, for we both know that now he will not. He has got it back again, that hard and temporary country of his dominion. Will he remember from there that I have listened and half understood him, being halfway between him and those others outside? Of course not. Were I to call the next day, Cecile would tell me that he is at work. And the messages he sends from there are indiscriminately for all.

No, I thought this morning, one does not call upon Maartens. He does what he can by doing what he must—while the rest of us have only the chronicle of ourselves. I walked over to the desk and looked down at these pages. Through the open sash the greening wind of April riffled them, turning up on page after page the same watermark—footprint of the self up from its own depth and pacing its own cubicle—I, I; I, I. I gathered them up roughly and held them over the grate. They trod a circle, but until they crossed its center could I burn them? Or would they plague me forever, bringing me round again to the dead-end bar at midnight, to the point at which I sat down here and began? No, until they bore up their trophy they would not burn. Yet even the most doting autobiographer must feel the shame of the ceaseless monotone that to others is only “he.” Was that why the morning wind had brought me Maartens? The satiric distance has its uses even for him, I thought, and on an impulse to dramatize it, I put down the papers and went round the room snapping up every blind, meanwhile smiling at the thought of the cleaning woman who, imposing her Grundy code, would tour the room again pulling them severely halfway down. Then I flung open the window, leaned on the sill, feeling the hot purr of the sun, and regarded the world.

From where I was, am now, one can see only the back gardens of these brownstones. No one was in them at this hour. The superintendent had gone, and I regretted him. My own voice must be a croak; for weeks I had used it only when buying food. Behind me, the pages shifted under the breeze, and turning, I gathered them up and slid them into a drawer. One of the heavy spring-binders knocked against the telephone, loosing the steady dial tone. I let it whine on for a moment, then replaced the handset. That tone must be immediately annulled with a number; it is not bearable company. In the silence I had an urge to hear a voice, any voice. Urban children, I gather, have a game in which they dip like jackdaws into the wondrous rags-and-diamond bag of the directory and hold surrealist conversations with strangers—I knew who had told me that, her arms clasped around her knees as she rode that charming hobbyhorse of hers, the peculiar delights of a city childhood. We did it as much out of wonder as mischief, she had said—we could choose from a multitude and spell one of them into the hollow of our ear. As if we were all together, she had said, in a kind of synagogue of the air. In the city a child is never far away from his fellows, from the vastness of man, she had added with a musing tenderness, and I had not answered, thinking that, daughter of such a father, such a home, she would not have been—but of how many there must have been who were. And I had thought of my own game, and of how close it was to that other.

“Tell me some different things you did as a child,” I had said, trying to forget in her presence what I did as a man. Now I looked down at the phone, in which hers and mine had been the last voices, and it seemed to me that it still held that residuum, sending up its bouquet of fear. I fear that I may trust I knew the look of the page on which I had written that, and I had an impulse to lock the drawer. Lifting the phone again, I let the dial tone whine on. There should be a listening service, I thought—a mechanical presence that would record nothing, merely registering its attention now and then in suitable syllables. Thousands would use it the first day. And after due survey, it would be found that the same syllables were appropriate to all. Then I reminded myself of a safe number, ME 7, and dialed it, with a grin for the animism still lurking for us savages in our most inorganic contraptions—for what Plato would deny soul to an instrument on which, in certain places, one might dial ME? For a few seconds I listened to the time signal, tiny ant-voice always climbing toward infinity. When you hear the signal the time will be … 12:59. And always falling back again. No, I will do first as Maartens does, I thought, and closing the door without a look behind me, I went down the stair.

Outside on the doorstep I shivered in my jacket, blinking at the house opposite like an animal up from its hibernation, then started walking. The air was cooler than it had looked from above, a pre-spring mixture of capricious sun and cool already passing its zenith and on its long afternoon trend downward to the winter ultramarine that was the New York color above all others—a blue hour, I had read somewhere, of a purity to be found nowhere else in the world, in a city, except Lisbon. I did not know whether this was true, but I flattered myself that I knew all the prototypes of day bred by this city between its waters and its ether. If I had time, I thought, I could construct a semicelestial gloss, a new-sided kind of Diurnal or Hours in which those to whom a day was an entity still evasive behind the weather reports could find the “days of New York” numbered to the closest tolerance, weighed and named perhaps as the elements are in the international table, from actinium through curium, gadolinium, krypton, palladium, tantalum, wolfram, yttrium, and all the others that Demuth had made me learn, down to zirconium. It would be a listing like that one, susceptible to addition but rarely to change, and with no more poetic than is natural. Take the sidereal hour, I thought: angle unit of right ascension equaling 15° measured along the equinoctial circle. Let the standard atomic weight be oxygen at 16. (
According to such measurements and others
,
herein this book is described
,
with addenda for industrial precipitations and all others short of cataclysm
,
a day for instance of such a blend of color
,
texture
,
mood
,
and other qualities as might be called the Interim or Jade: medium
,
nonseasonal
,
opaque rather than overcast
,
from the air dull over the cardboard Flushing flats and perhaps faintly Brontëesque over the Rocklands
,
but in the sea-level midtown streets of a caressing
,
mutton-fat dampness as perceptibly pleasant and undemanding as a held-back
,
happy tear. Colors without penumbra in that atmosphere. Green especially rises to viridian. Ladies should not wear bluish-reds. Day without edema
,
good for the purchasing of shoes. No sunset. Evening will impinge without drama
,
dishes with some condiment recommended
,
a little fugitive poetry among friends
,
or the milder forms of conjugal love. No stars.
)

This is the intensity of the convert, I told myself, as I waited for the long light at Park, teetering on my heels with a certain bland assurance at knowing how much longer that particular light was. Always a tendency to press on the natives those evidentials to which the latter were so informally born. That summer I had arrived here, a month before school began, I had tossed my clothes in the dormitory room and never been in it from dawn to dusk and sometimes not from dusk to dawn, roving the streets with the same magpie acquisitiveness I had hitherto given to books, learning the city strata with a voyeur scholarship that had soon outstripped the obvious, until remarkably soon, thanks to youth, shanks’ mare and subway, I could botanize any neighborhood—until in time I could dispense his own heritage to the native, telling, for instance, a third-generation New York Jew,
genus German
,
habitat East Eighties
, of the Ankarese Sephardim in New Lots, of a street, not far from Hester, not quite Mott, where pariah Galitzianer had mingled with Eurasian Chinese. Even now, that punditry, though relaxed, is the only one I am not averse to displaying—for though an encyclopedist, like members of some other professions, is, after the American habit, much buttonholed for free in the parlor, I prefer not to draw too much attention to a mnemonic talent outside the routine.

The light changed and I crossed, thinking meanwhile what a dull street Park was, a hallmark; even at Christmas, with its evenly illuminated trees equidistant along the stream of cabs, it had only a barely standardized faërie, like a hotel salon trimmed once a year for the chambermaids’ ball. One might felicitate oneself, of course; it was not every provincial who had learned to despise Park. Still, I thought, I was forever convincing myself into the city, mentally possessing and repossessing it; for all the years I had been here I could never see its towers without a disquieting sense that I must regrow them for myself each day. This was not man’s universal reaction to cities, I told myself; this was the parvenu’s trouble—always trying to forget what he must not remember. Or always refusing to remember what he must not forget? How agile of you, dear harpsichordist, I thought, and how unworthy of both you and the old professor in the course you were so proud of taking in your first year here—“Metaphysics of Vitalism and Pragmatism,” and his name was Phillips—who was forever pressing his young gentlemen to note how little grist was ground by paradox.

I turned a corner down a street of embassies, one of them painted the same buff, yellowish cream, slightly grimed, as the house opposite mine. I stopped in front of it. Answer me this, then, I thought, still apostrophizing my bright morning musician, there aren’t many such houses in New York, and I don’t find any connection—why do I find the sight of this one so pleasant?—answer me, you who know so well that free association is never free. Ah, it answered, if one could travel the whole world, know every recondite cave and the tops of all the topless towers—as should soon become possible, even laughable, as men find their own planet only a miserable insectarium in the garden of the sky—then to such a traveler all places will be analogues of one another. From the boundless store of his impressions he will turn up a bit of yellow Mississippi mud on the Irrawaddy, on Second Avenue a dusk that was Portugal’s, in the Himalayas, cornered perfect in its monastery, a day out of your gloss. With that terrible weight on his shoulders, any Canaan of place will be lost to him forever. To the man without further hills, who can see on both sides of the horizon, all places will become less dear, none final. No, I will not admit that, I answered, and staring again at the house front, I thought—perhaps it reminds me of hers. But that was absurd; hers was the old brownstone like mine, which, when sanded back to its quarry color, as the Mannix house had been, has a henna-violet tint in the evening and in the last flash from the west almost a carnelian—one can imagine a row of them then in their heyday, inflamed by the late-century sun. For a moment I stood there and imagined them. I have always preferred their era to the skinny-shanked nineteen-twenties so favored by this one; it was an era of
embonpoint
in women, in sofas, in time. They too had been all but eaten by the time signal, I thought; then, how absurd to take flight, as I had done each day, from this neighborhood of their ghosts. Under that aspect, what could it matter, the conjunction of a soon-to-be-ghost woman with a similar man? No, I answered myself, one does not go down to that subcellar and pull the centuries over one’s head. Between one’s appetites and one’s dangers, one moves on.