Fame & Folly (11 page)

There was something Hansel-and-Gretelish about our excursions, so brotherly and sisterly, so childlike and intimate, yet prickly in their newness. Fresh from an all-girls high school, I had never before conversed with a boy about books and life. I had never before gone anywhere with a boy. Boys were strangers, and also—in my experience, if not in principle—as biologically unfathomable as extraterrestrials. Though I had a brother, there was a divide between us: he had ascended to college when I was in grade school, and at this hour was still in the army. At home, with my parents at work in their pharmacy, I had the house to myself: I sat
at my little wooden Sears, Roebuck desk (a hand-me-down from my brother, the very desk I am using right now), and fearfully pressed out my five hundred words for Mr. Emerson, jealous of what I imagined Chester might be contriving on the same subject, and burning against him with a wild will. I wanted more than anything to beat him; I was afraid he would beat me. When I listened to him read his paper aloud, as Mr. Emerson occasionally had us do even well into the semester, a shrewdly hooked narrative turn or an ingenious figure of speech or some turbulently reckless flash of power would afflict me like a wound. Chester was startling, he was robust, he was lyrical, he was wry, he was psychological, he was playful, he was scandalous. He was better than I was! In one respect, though, I began to think I was stronger. We were equally attracted to the usual adolescent literary moonings: to loneliness, morbidity, a certain freakishness of personality. But I felt in myself stirrings of history, of idea, something beyond the senses; I was infatuated with German and Latin, I exulted over the Reformation. I supposed it meant I was more
serious
than Chester—more serious, I presumed, about the courses we were enrolled in. Chester was indifferent to all that. Except for English classes, he was careless, unexcited. He was already on his way to bohemianism (a term then still in its flower). I, more naively, more conventionally, valued getting an A; I pressed to excel, and to be seen to excel. I thought of myself as a neophyte, a beginner, an apprentice—it would be years and years (decades, aeons) before I could accomplish anything worth noticing. I regarded my teachers not as gods, but as those who wore the garments of the gods. I was as conscious of my youth as if it were a sealed envelope, and myself a coded message inside it, indefinitely encased, arrested, waiting. But Chester was poking through that envelope with an impatient fist. He was becoming gregarious. He was putting his noisiness to use.

And still he was soft, susceptible. He was easily emotional. I saw him as sentimental, too quickly inflamed. He fell soppily in love at a moment’s glance. And because we were brother and sister, I was his confidante; he would tell me his loves, and afterward leave me feeling resentful and deserted. I was not one of the pretty
girls; boys ignored me. Their habitual reconnoitering wheeled right over me and ran to the beauties. And here was Chester, no different from the others, with an eye out for looks—flirting, teasing, chasing. Nearly all young women seemed extraordinary that spring: archaic, Ewardian. The postwar fashion revolution, appropriately called the New Look, had descended, literally descended, in the form of long skirts curling around ankles. All at once half the population appeared to be in costume. Only a few months earlier there had been a rigid measure for the length of a skirt: hems were obliged to reach precisely, uncompromisingly, to the lower part of the knee. What else had that meant but an irreversible modernity? Now the girls were all trailing yards and yards of bright or sober stuff, tripping over themselves, delightedly conspicuous, enchanted with their own clear absurdity. Chester chased after them; more often they chased after Chester. When I came to meet him in the commons nowadays, he had a retinue. The girls moved in on him; so did the incipient bohemians; he was more and more in the center of a raucous crowd. He was beginning to display himself—to accept or define himself—as a wit, and his wit, kamikaze assaults of paradox or shock, caught on. In no time at all he had made himself famous in the commons—a businesslike place, where the resolute veterans, grinding away, ate their sandwiches with their elbows in their accounting texts. Chester’s success was mine. He was my conduit and guide. Without him I would have been buried alive in Washington Square, consumed by timidity.

He journeyed out to visit me twice—a tediously endless subway trip from the bowels of Brooklyn to Pelham Bay. We walked in the barren park, along untenanted crisscross paths, down the hill through the big meadow to the beach. I was proud of this cat-tailed scene—it was mine, it was my childhood, it was my Brontëan heath. Untrammelled grasses, the gray keen water knocking against mossy stones. Here I was master. Now that Chester was celebrated at school, I warmed to the privilege of having him to myself, steering him from prospect to prospect, until we were light-headed with the drizzly air. At the end of the day, at the foot of the high stair that led to the train, we said
goodbye. He bent toward me—he was taller than I, though not by much—and kissed me. The pale perfect lips and their cold spittle rested on my mouth; it was all new. It had never happened before, not with any other boy. I was bewildered, wildly uncertain; I shrank back, and told him I could not think of him like that—he was my brother. (Ah, to retrieve that instant, that movietone remark learned from the silver screen of the Pilgrim Theater, half a mile down the tracks! To retrieve it, to undo it, to wipe it out!) He wormed his blunt white fingers into his jacket pockets and stood for a while. The el’s stanchions shook. Overhead the train growled and headed downtown. Two puddles lay against his lower eyelids, unstanched by the missing lashes. It was the same, he said, with Diana; it was just the same, though Diana wasn’t a brute, she hadn’t said it outright. He didn’t want to be anyone’s brother—mine, maybe, but not Diana’s. I knew Diana, a brilliant streak in the commons excitements: in those newfangled long skirts she had a fleet, flashing step, and she wore postwar nylons and neat formal pumps (unrenovated, I was still in my high school sloppy Joes and saddle shoes). Diana was one of the beauties, among the loveliest of all, with a last name that sounded as if it had fallen out of a Trollope novel, but was actually Lebanese. In after years I happened on a replica of her face on the salvaged wall of an ancient Roman villa, with its crimson tones preserved indelibly: black-rimmed Mediterranean eyes fixed in intelligence, blackly lit; round cheeks and chin, all creamy pink. An exquisite ur-Madonna. Diana had a generous heart, she was vastly kind and a little shy, with a penetrating attentiveness untypical of the young. Like many in Chester’s crew, she was single-mindedly literary. (She is a poet of reputation now.) Chester yearned; and more than anyone, Diana was the object and representation of his yearning.

But I yearned, too. The word itself—soaked in dream and Poesy—pretty well embodies what we were, Chester and I, in a time when there was no ostensible sex, only romance, and the erotic habits of the urban bookish young were confined to daring cafeteria discussions of the orgone box (a contrivance touted by Wilhelm Reich), and severely limited gropings at parties in the parental domicile. One of these parties drew me to Brooklyn—it was
my first look at this fabled place. The suburban atmosphere of Flatbush took me by surprise—wide streets and tall brick Tudor-style houses flawed only by being set too closely together. The party, though given by a girl I will call Carla Baumblatt, was altogether Chester’s: he had chosen all the guests. Carla would not allow us to enter through the front door. Instead, she herded us toward the back yard and into the kitchen. She had managed to persuade her parents to leave the house, but her mother’s admonishments were all around: Carla worried about cigarette ashes, about food spilling, about muddy shoes. She especially worried about the condition of the living room rug; someone whispered to me that she was terribly afraid of her mother. And soon enough her mother came home: a tough, thin, tight little woman, with black hair tightly curled. Carla was big and matronly, twice her mother’s size. She had capacious breasts that rode before her, and a homely mouth like a twist of wax, and springy brown hair, which she hated and attempted to squash down. She was dissatisfied with herself and with her life; there was no movie rhapsody in it. An argument began in the kitchen, and there was Carla, cowed by her tiny mother. Curiously, a kitchen scene turns up in Chester’s first novel,
Jamie Is My Heart’s Desire
, published in England in 1956, a decade after Carla’s party—the last time she ever tried to give a party at home. The narrator describes a young woman’s “largeness”: “I have always felt that her body was the wrong one, that it was an exaggerated contrast with her personality, and that one must disregard it in order to know Emily at all. It is her fault I have believed this so long, for in all her ways she had negated the strength and bigness her figure shows, and substituted weakness and dependency and fright, so that one imagines Emily within as a small powerless girl.” When Carla reappeared in the living room after quarreling with her mother, she seemed, despite her largeness, a small powerless girl; she was as pale as if she had been beaten, and again warned about dirtying the carpet.

In the middle of that carpet a young woman lay in a mustard glow. Her head was on a fat cushion. Her mustard-colored hair flowed out over the floor. Her mustard-colored New Look skirt was flung into folds all around. She was sprawled there like an indolent
cat. Now and again she sat up and perched her chin on her elbow—then the dark trough between her breasts filled with lamplight. She had tiger’s eyes, greenly chiaroscuro, dappled with unexpected tinsel flecks. Her name was Tatyana; she gave out the urgency of theater, of Dostoyevsky, of sea gulls. A circle of chairs had somehow grouped in front of her; she had us all as audience, or as a body of travelers stung by a spell into fixity. Carla, stumbling in from the kitchen, seemed devoured by the sight: it was the majesty of pure sexuality. It was animal beauty. Carla’s plump stooped shoulders and plump homely nose fell into humility. She called to Chester—they were old neighborhood friends, affectionate old school friends. The familial currents that passed between them had the unearned rhythms of priority. I resented Carla: she had earlier claims than I, almost the earliest of all. I thought of her as a leftover from Chester’s former life—the life before Mr. Emerson. It was only sentimentality that continued to bind him to her. She was a blot on his escutcheon. She had no talents other than easy sociability; away from home, in the commons, she was freely companionable and hospitable: she would catch hold of me in the incoming lunch crowd and wave me over to her table. But we did not like each other. On Chester’s account we pretended congeniality. Worse yet, Carla dissembled bookishness; it was an attempt to keep up. In April, on my eighteenth birthday, she astonished me with a present: it was Proust,
Cities of the Plain
, in the Modern Library edition. Carla was so far from actual good will that her gift struck me as an intrusion, or an act of hollow flattery, or an appeasement. I owned few books (like everyone else, I frequented the public library), and wanted to love with a body-love the volumes that came permanently into my hands. I could not love a book from Carla. When I eventually undertook to read
Cities of the Plain
, it was not the copy she had given me. I have Carla’s copy in front of me now, still unfondled, and inscribed as follows: “
Ma chêre—c’est domage que ce livre n’est pas dans l’originale—mais vous devriez être une si marveilleuse linguiste comme moi pour lire cela—Amour toujours
—” Carla’s English was equally breezy and misspelled. Her handwriting was a super-legible series of girlish loops. Chester had inherited her along with other remnants of his
younger experience. He rested in Carla’s sympathy. I imagined she knew the secret of the yellow wig.

Because of Tatyana—the mustard glow on Carla’s mother’s carpet—Chester was undistractable. When Carla tried to get his attention, he threw out some mockery, but it was to Tatyana. He was a man in a trance of adoration; he was illuminated. Tatyana stretched her catlike flanks and laughed her mermaid’s laughter. She was woman, cat, fish—silvery, slithery, mustard-colored. She spread her hair and whirled it. She teased, turned, played, parried, flirted. The room swam with jealousy—not simply Carla’s, or mine, or the other girls’. Call it the jealousy of the gods: Tatyana, a mortal young woman, was in the seizure of an unearthly instant. The engines of her eyeballs moved all around with the holy power of their femaleness.

The second and last time Chester came to Pelham Bay, it was in the company of Ben Solomons. Ben had become Chester’s unlikely sidekick. Together they were Mutt and Jeff, squat pepperpot and tall broom, Arthur’s handsomest knight and Humpty Dumpty. Ben was nicely dressed and not very talkative (taciturn!). He was a little older than I (even weeks counted), and had the well-polished shoes of a serious pre-med student. (When I heard, decades later, that he was Dr. Solomons, the psychiatrist, I was surprised. Not urology? Not gastroenterology?) Since he did not say much, it was hard to assess his intelligence. What mattered to me, though, was his breath, his tallness, his nearness. I had been sickened, that afternoon, by infatuation: out of the blue I was in love with Ben. The lunch my mother had left us had been mysteriously unsatisfactory; it lacked some bourgeois quality I was growing aware of—the plates, the tablecloth, the dining room chairs. It was only food. All my tries at entertainment were a nervous failure. At three o’clock we walked, in the eternal rain (Chester’s jacket up over his head), to the next el station to see a movie at the Pilgrim Theater—called, in the neighborhood, the Pillbox, because it was so cramped. In the middle of the day the theater was desolate. I was self-conscious, guilty, embarrassed. It was as if I had dragged us to a pointless moonscape. We settled into the center of the house—myself, Ben, and Chester, in that order,
along the row of vacant seats. The movie came on; I suffered. Next to me Ben was bored. Chester tossed out cracks about the dialogue; I laughed, miserably; Ben was silent. Then I shut my eyes, and kept them shut. It was a wall against tears. It was to fabricate boredom and flatter Ben’s judgment. It was to get Ben to notice. His big hand on his left knee, with his gold high school graduation ring pressed against the knuckle, drew me into teary desire. I unsealed an eye to be sure that they were still there—the hand, the ring, the knuckle. Ben was sedate, waiting out the hours.