Fury (4 page)

“I remember it, or a lesser version of it,” Professor Solanka assented, thinking of that night in Market Hill long ago. “And you were the one who snapped me out of it. Now it’s for me to do the same for you.” The other shook his head. “This isn’t something you just snap out of, I’m afraid.” The attention he’d been getting, the celebrity status, had greatly aggravated Dubdub’s existential crisis. The more he became a Personality, the less like a person he felt. Finally he had decided on a retreat back into the cloisters of traditional academe. No more of all that globetrotting
Magic Christian
Derridada! No more
performance.
Energized by his new resolve, he had flown back to Cambridge with the literary groupie Perry Pincus, an unashamed sexual butterfly, actually believing he could set up house with her and build a stable life around the relationship. That’s how far gone he was.

Krysztof Waterford-Wajda would survive three further suicide attempts. Then, just one month before Professor Solanka metaphorically took his own life, saying good-bye to everyone and everything he held dear and striking out for America with a spiky-haired doll in his arms a special, early-period limited edition of Little Brain in bad condition, the clothes ripped, the body damaged-Dubdub dropped dead. Three arteries had been badly clogged. A simple bypass operation could have saved him, but he refused it and, like an English elm, fell. Which perhaps, if one were searching for such explanations, helped trigger Professor Solanka’s metamorphosis. Professor Solanka, remembering his dead friend in New York, realized that he had followed Dubdub in so many things: in some of his thinking, yes, but also into
le monde mediatigue,
into America, into crisis.

Perry Pincus had been one of the first to intuit the link between them. She had returned to her native San Diego and now taught, in a local college, the work of some of the critics and writers whom she had carnally known. Pincus 101, she called it, brazen as ever, in one of the annual Happy Holidays messages she never failed to send Professor Solanka. “It’s my personal greatest-hits collection, my Top Twenty,” she wrote, adding, a little cuttingly, “You’re not in it, Professor. I can’t walk around in a man’s work if I don’t know which entrance he prefers.” Her season’s greetings were invariably accompanied, incomprehensibly, by the gift of a soft toy-a platypus, a walrus, a polar bear. Eleanor had always been much amused by the annual parcels from California. “Because you wouldn’t fuck her,” Professor Solanka was informed by his wife, “she can’t think of you as a lover. So she’s trying to become your mother instead. How does it feel to be Perry Pinch-ass’s little boy?”

3

In his comfortable Upper West Side sublet, a handsome, high-ceilinged first- and second-floor duplex boasting majestic oak paneling and a library that spoke highly of the owners, Professor Malik Solanka nursed a glass of red Geyserville zinfandel and mourned. The decision to leave had been wholly his; still, he grieved for his old life. Whatever Eleanor said on the phone, the break was almost certainly irreparable. Solanka had never thought of himself as a bolter or quitter, yet he had shed more skins than a snake. Country, family, and not one wife but two had been left in his wake. Also, now, a child. Maybe the mistake was to see his latest exit as unusual. The harsh reality was perhaps that he was acting not against nature but according to its dictates. When he stood naked before the unvarnished mirror of truth, this was what he was really like.

Yet, like Perry Pincus, he believed himself to be a good person. Women believed it too. Sensing in him a ferocity of commitment that was rarely found in modern men, women had often allowed themselves to fall in love with him, surprising themselves-these wised-up, cautious women!-by the speed with which they charged outward into the really deep emotional water. And he didn’t let them down. He was kind, understanding, generous, clever, funny, grown-up, and the sex was good, it was always good. This is forever, they thought, because they could see him thinking it too; they felt loved, treasured, safe. He told them-each of his women in turn-that friendship was what he had instead of family ties, and, more than friendship, love. That sounded right. So they dropped their defenses and relaxed into all the good stuff, and never saw the hidden twisting in him, the dreadful torque of his doubt, until the day he snapped and the alien burst out of his stomach, baring multiple rows of teeth. They never saw the end coming until it hit them. His first wife, Sara, the one with the graphic verbal gift, put it thus: “It felt like an ax-murder.”

“Your trouble is,” Sara incandescently said near the end of their last quarrel, “that you’re really only in love with those fucking dolls. The world in inanimate miniature is just about all you can handle. The world you can make, unmake, and manipulate, filled with women who don’t answer back, women you don’t have to fuck. Or are you making them with cunts now, wooden cunts, rubber cunts, fucking inflatable cunts that squeak like balloons as you slide in and out; do you have a life-size fuck-dolly harem hidden in a shed somewhere, is that what they’ll find when one day you’re arrested for raping and chopping up some golden-haired eight-year-old, some poor fucking living doll you played with and then threw away. They’ll find her shoe in a hedge and there’ll be descriptions of a minivan on TV and I’ll be watching and you won’t be home and I’ll think, Jesus, I know that van, it’s the one he carries his fucking toys around in when he goes to his perverts’ I’ll-show-you-my-dolly-if-you’ll-show-me-yours reunions. I’ll be the wife who never knew a thing. I’ll be the fucking cow-faced wife on TV forced to defend you just to defend myself, my own unimaginable stupidity, because after all, I chose you.”

Life is fury, he’d thought. Fury-sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal-drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of
furia
comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy. But never mind about gods! Sara ranting at him represented the human spirit in its purest, least socialized form. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise-the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untrammeled lord of creation. We raise each other to the heights of joy. We tear each other limb from fucking limb.

Her name was Lear, Sara Jane Lear, some sort of distant relative of the writer and watercolorist, but there wasn’t a trace of antic Edward’s immortal nonsense in her.
How
pleasant to know Sara Lear, who remembers such volumes of stuff! Some folks think her awfully queer, but I find her pleasant enough.
The revised verse didn’t raise the ghost of a smile. “Imagine how many times people have recited those exact words to me and you’ll excuse me for not being impressed.” She was a year or so his senior and was writing a thesis on Joyce and the French
nouveau roman.
In her second-floor flat on Chesterton Road, “love”-which in retrospect looked more like fear, a mutual clutching at the life belt of the other while drowning in twenty-something loneliness-made him plow his way twice through
Finnegan’s Wake.
Also the dour pages of Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet, and Butor. When he looked up miserably from the great heaps of their slow, obscure sentences, he found her watching him from the other armchair, turning in his direction that angular devil-mask of a face, beautiful but sly. Sly-eyed lady of the Fenlands. He couldn’t read her expression. It might have been contempt.

They married too quickly for thought and felt trapped by the mistake almost immediately. Yet they stayed together for several miserable years. Afterward, when he told the story of his life to Eleanor Masters, Solanka cast his first wife as the one with the exit strategies, the player most likely to resign the game. “She gave up early on everything she desired most. Before she found out she wasn’t up to it.” Sara had been the outstanding university actress of her generation but had left it there, forever leaving behind the greasepaint and the crowd without a word of regret. Later she would also abandon her thesis and get a job in advertising, emerging from the chrysalis of her bluestocking wardrobe and spreading gorgeous butterfly wings.

This was soon after their marriage ended. When Solanka found out about it he was briefly furious. All that effortful reading for nothing! And not only reading. “Thanks to her,” he raged at Eleanor, “I saw
L’Annee derniere
a
Marienbad
three times in one day. We spent a whole weekend working out that damn matchstick game they play. ‘You wont win, you know’. – ‘It’s not a game if you can’t lose.’ – ‘Oh, I can lose, but I never do.’ That game. Thanks to her it’s still stuck in my head, but she’s buggered off to the universe of if you’ve got it flaunt it. I’m stuck here in the blasted
couloirs
of French fiction and she’s in a Jil Sander power suit in a forty-ninth-floor corner office on Sixth Avenue, pulling down, I have no doubt, some major bucks.”

“Yes, but for the record, you dumped
her,”
Eleanor pointed out. “You found the next one and traded Sara in: left her cold and flat. You should never have married her, obviously, which is your only excuse. That’s the great unanswerable question about love posed by your Queen Lear: what on earth were you thinking of? Also, you got yours when the next one, the Wagnerian Valkyrie with the Harley, threw you over for which composer was it?” She knew the answer perfectly well, but it was a story they both enjoyed. “Fucking Rummenigge.” Solanka grinned, calming down. “She worked as an assistant on one of his three-orchestras-and-a-Sherman-tank efforts and afterward he sent her a telegram.
Kindly refrain from all sexual intercourse until we can examine the deep bond that evidently lies between
us. And the next day a one-way ticket to Munich, and she disappeared into the Black Forest for years. She wasn’t happy, though,” he added. “Didn’t know when she was well-off, you see.” When Solanka left Eleanor, she added a bitter postscript to these reflections. Actually, I’d like to hear their sides of these stories,” she said during one difficult telephone call. “Maybe you were just a coldhearted bastard from the start.”

Malik Solanka, strolling alone toward a late-night Meslowski double bill at the Lincoln Plaza, tried to imagine his own life as a
Dekalog
movie. A Short Film About Desertion. Which Commandments could his story be said to illustrate or, as the Kieslowski scholar who introduced last week’s episodes preferred, interrogate? There were many Commandments against the sins of improper commission. Covetousness, adultery, lust, these things were anathematized. But where were the laws against sins of improper omission? Thou Shalt Not Be an Absentee Father. Cometh to Thinkst of It, Thou Shalt Not Walk Out of Thy Life Without a Fucking Good Reason, Buster, and What You’ve Put Up So Far Doesn’t Even Come Close. What Dost Thou Think? Thou Canst Do Any Goddamn Thing Thou Wantest? Who the Fuck Dost Thou Imagine Thou Ist: Hugh Hefner? The Dalai Lama? Donald Trump? At What the Sam Hill Art Thou Playing? Huh, Bub?
Huh???

Sara Lear was probably right here in town, he suddenly thought. She would be in her late fifties now, a big shot with a booming portfolio, the secret booking numbers for Pastis and Nobu, and a weekend place south of the highway in, ah, Amagansett. Thank heavens there was no need to track her down, look her up, congratulate her on her life choices. How she would have crowed! For they had lived long enough to witness the absolute victory of advertising. Back in the seventies, when Sara gave up the serious life for the frivolous, working in ad-land had been slightly shameful. You confessed it to your friends with lowered voice and downcast eyes. Advertising was a confidence trick, a cheat, the notorious enemy of promise. It was-a horrible thought in that era-nakedly capitalist. Selling things was low. Now everyone eminent writers, great painters, architects, politicians-wanted to be in on the act. Reformed alcoholics plugged booze. Everybody, as well as everything, was for sale. Advertisements had become colossi, clambering like Kong up the walls of buildings. What was more, they were

loved. When he was watching TV, Solanka still turned the sound down at commercial breaks, but everyone else, he was sure, turned it up. The girls in the ads-Esther, Bridget, Elizabeth, Halle, Gisele, Tyra, Isis, Aphrodite, Kate-were more desirable than the actresses in the shows in between; hell, the guys in the ads-Mark Vanderloo, Marcus Schenkenberg, Marcus Aurelius, Marc Antony, Marky Mark-were more desirable than the actresses in the shows. And as well as presenting the dream of an ideally beautiful America in which all women were babes and all men were Marks, after doing the basic work of selling pizza and SUVs and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, beyond money management and the new ditditdit of the dotcoms, the commercials soothed America’s pain, its head pain, its gas pain, its heartache, its loneliness, the pain of babyhood and old age, of being a parent and of being a child, the pain of manhood and women’s pain, the pain of success and that of failure, the good pain of the athlete and the bad pain of the guilty, the anguish of loneliness and of ignorance, the needle-sharp torment of the cities and the dull, mad ache of the empty plains, the pain of wanting without knowing what was wanted, the agony o£ the bowling void within each watching, semiconscious self. No wonder advertising was popular. It made things better. It showed you the road. It wasn’t a part of the problem. It solved things.

As a matter of fact, there was a copywriter living in Professor Solanka’s building. He wore red suspenders and Hathaway shirts and even smoked a pipe. He had introduced himself that very afternoon by the mailboxes in the vestibule, holding a set of rolled-up layouts. (What was it about Solanka’s solitude, the professor silently asked himself, that apparently obliged his neighbors to disturb it?) “Mark Skywalker, from the planet Tatooine.”

Whatever, as Perry Pincus would have said. Solanka was uninterested in this bow-tied, bespectacled, markedly un-Jedi-knight-like young man, and as a former science-fiction buff despised the lowbrow space opera of the Star Wars cycle. But he had already learned not to argue with self-invention in NewYork. He had learned, also, when giving his own name to omit the “Professor.” Learning annoyed people, and formality was a form of pulling rank. This was the country of the diminutive. Even the stores and eating places got friendly fast. Right around the corner he could find Andy’s, Bennie’s, Josie’s, Gabrielas, Vinnie’s, Freddie & Pepper’s. The country of reserve, of the understatement and the unsaid, he had left behind, and a good thing too, on the whole. At Hana’s (medical supplies) you could walk right in and buy a MASTECTOMY BRA. The unsayable was right there in the window in red letters a foot high. So, anyway, “Solly Solanka,” he replied, neutrally, surprising himself by using the disliked nickname; whereupon Skywalker frowned. “Are you a landsman?” Solanka was unfamiliar with the term, and said as much, apologetically. “Oh, then you’re not.” Skywalker nodded. “I thought, because of Solly, maybe. Also, excuse me, something about the nose.” The meaning of the unknown word quickly became clear from context and raised an interesting question, which Solanka refrained from asking: so, they had Jews on Tatooine?

“You’re British, right,” Skywalker went on. (Solanka didn’t get into the postcolonial, migrational niceties.) “Mila told me. Do me a favor. Take a look at these.” Mila was presumably the young empress of the street. Solanka noted without pleasure the euphony of their naming: Mila, Malik. When the young woman discovered this, she would no doubt be unable to resist mentioning it to him. He would be forced to point out the obvious, namely that sounds were not meanings, and this was a mere interlingual echo from which nothing, certainly not a human connection, need follow. The young adman had unrolled the layouts and spread them on the hall table. “I want to get your honest opinion,” Skywalker explained. “It’s a corporate-image campaign. “The layouts showed double-page-spread images of famous city skylines at sunset. Solanka gestured vaguely, not knowing how to respond. “The copy line,” Skywalker prompted. “Is it okay?” All the pictures bore the same heading. THE SUN NEVER SETS ON AMERICAN EXPRESS INTERNATIONAL BANKING CORPORATION. “Good. It’s good,” Solanka said, not knowing if it was in fact good, average, or terrible. Presumably there was