The Archivist (12 page)

“They’re such pompous fools, those Board members,” Edith said, taking a large bite of her sandwich. Tuna salad spilled out from either side.

“Shit,” she yelped. “I’m sorry, Matt. I guess I’m feeling a bit frayed. You know it’s not like me to —”

“— stop,” I interrupted. “It’s completely understandable. You’re under a lot of pressure. You don’t have to explain.”

She stopped toying with her food and looked straight at me. “It helps knowing that. It really does,” she said, beginning to compose herself. “Thanks for your patience.”

“No problem,” I said. “You’re plenty patient with me.”

“Am I?”

“Yes — when I’m cranky, which I probably am a lot.”

She laughed. “Constantly,” she said. “I’m always complaining to Tim about you.”

“And what does he say?”

“He says I should be glad I’ve got someone to complain to.”

“Tim’s right, you know. I guess that makes us all lucky.”

Edith leaned back in her chair, and I could feel her getting ready to say something probing. She’s so seldom directly personal with me that I can always detect the impulse; her physical movements give her away.

“Not exactly,” she said. “You’re the one who doesn’t have someone to complain to at home. Matt — do you ever think about finding someone?”

“A person, do you mean?” I began laughing, and Edith’s face reddened.

“Of course,” she said. “I’m not talking about a dog or a cat.”

“That’s good,” I said. “At least with a person you don’t have to worry about buying enough canned food or refilling the water bowl.”

“Quit fooling around. I’m talking seriously here. I mean, when was the last time you took someone out on a date?”

“Last night, as a matter of fact.” As soon as I spoke, I realized that I could neither lie to Edith nor tell her the truth.

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“Where’d you meet her? What’s she like?”

“In the neighborhood. She’s too young for me. No — that’s not it. I’m too old for her.”

“Oh for God’s sake! What is she, ten or something?”

“Three times that. But not the older-man type.”

“Don’t count on it. I have to say, Matt, I’m really pleased to hear about this. It just seems wrong to me that you spend so much time alone. I mean, solitude’s fine, but it can get to be a bad habit.” She paused. “How long has it been since Judith died?”

I was caught completely off guard by her question; it’d been years since either one of us had mentioned Judith. I had to look away. After a moment or two, my eyes focused on a large, brightly colored canvas on the far wall of the cafeteria. In its garishness, the painting reminded me of Roberta’s description of her parents’ work, and this association only fueled my consternation.

“Too long,” I said.

Edith was scanning my face closely, attempting to read it. “What exactly does that mean?” she asked softly.

“It means too long to remember, and too long to forget.” Suddenly I felt acutely sick — not to my stomach but in a deep, bone-and-muscle way, as if my entire system were registering an invisible assault. With it came a wave of dizziness. I closed my eyes briefly; when I opened them, Edith was giving me a concerned look.

“Well then,” she said. “As long as you’re not turning into a hermit.” Her tone indicated she wouldn’t press further.

“No, no,” I said, still feeling light-headed. I needed Edith to keep talking while I collected myself. “Tell me about the Board. What’s their scheme now?”

Edith moved briskly into gear. “I need some advice on how to handle the latest attack on our independence. It involves you rather directly.”

“Yes?”

“It’s ridiculous, but I’m afraid it’s also a fait accompli. Darnton and a few others on the Board called Lewis and convinced him — I mean, can you
imagine
a more spineless president of a university? — to go along with their newest scheme, which they’re billing as ‘student involvement.’ The idea is to appoint one grad student from each of three departments — English, History, and Computer Science — to serve as so-called library guardians. They’re supposed to work closely with us to maintain, preserve, and expand — those are Darnton’s words — the Mason Room collection. Darnton insists this has nothing to do with your performance, Matt. He’s as pleased as always with you. It’s a matter of giving capable students a closer look at how institutional resources are developed, as he put it. Have you ever heard such crap?”

She paused and shook her head. “I mean, how on earth can three grad students with no prior experience in library science be anything but a nuisance? And what’s worse, we don’t even get to pick them! That’s left up to the three department heads. Which means that we’ll have several complete strangers milling around, sticking their greasy fingers into everything.” Edith pushed away her half-eaten sandwich in disgust.

I was able, by this time, to chuckle. “You have to look at the funny side of this,” I said.

“There isn’t one,” she moaned.

“At least two of these guardians are from the humanities,” I said. “We’re relatively safe. Only one will try to talk us into putting the whole collection on disk or some such nonsense. Can’t you hear it? I mean, who needs Eliot’s galleys when we can fit the entire ‘Waste Land’ onto a microchip?”

Edith started smiling, but she wasn’t finished worrying. A fresh cloud of anxiety blotted her face.

“Actually, it’s the Eliot material I’m thinking about,” she said. “And the other more or less modern items. I mean, even the Board won’t let a couple of grad students paw over the older stuff. All of the Poe letters, the American Transcendentalist manuscripts, the slavery archives — those are clearly off-limits. But the modern stuff — well, the Board doesn’t mind using the twentieth-century portions of the collection as a learning experience for these three students. Darnton said something about how their first assignment should be to write some flashy descriptions of our recent acquisitions for the alumni magazine. Of course he’s working the fund-raising angle, and he smells some free labor. He specifically mentioned the Mencken papers, the Harlem Renaissance photos, and the Eliot letters. Darnton wants his guardians to become familiar with those acquisitions.”

“What is there to become familiar with?” I said. “These things have all been indexed. That’s it. There’s nothing else for anyone to do but wait until the stuff is out of mothballs.”

Edith shook her head again. “I know. And Darnton knows that too. But he wasn’t really listening, he was thinking about the fund-raising.”

She stared off, lost in her frustration, and I finished my coffee. My stomach felt tight. The usual comfort I find in Edith’s presence had deserted me, and I needed our lunch to be over. But I had another question to ask.

“Edith,” I said, “have the three students been picked already? Do you know who they are?”

“Yes, they have — and yes, I know them. Their names, that is. The computer scientist’s is something unpronounceably Japanese. Actually, I’ve met one of the three — and so have you. The English department has bequeathed Roberta Spire to us. She happens to be one of their shining lights, you know. Apparently an excellent poet. I guess she’ll get to see the envelopes of the Eliot letters after all. She’ll be glad for that, won’t she?”

I had my answer.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “I’m sure she will.”

Two

1959

Hayden House
April 20

Light came first, then words: in the beginning the luminous mirror. First light, then language; first the
en-sof
, the unknowable, then the letters of the Torah all jumbled, from which somehow we were supposed to construct a world — somehow! — though how did He expect us to do this once Adam the dust-man had broken the sacred vessels and scattered the light like motes of his own pale dust everywhere, leaving what the Kabbalists call shards. Leaving us broken incomplete wordless, each of our souls attached to a letter in the Torah but still unconnected — separated in the Here and Now?

Eliot:

I can connect

Nothing with nothing.

The Holy One cannot fail to see how lost we are, how our souls’ letters form not a language but only gibberish. How opaque and dull the light has become. (Always I keep the bulb lit in this little room, but it does no good; I do it only as a gesture toward Him.)

Hayden, my nicely landscaped hell. I am utterly infantilized here. It seems they think I am the baby the cops delivered to Len and Carol after those two deaths on Broadway, some dead couple’s helpless child.

Today the doctors talked to me about eating; yesterday, bathing; tomorrow, dressing, combing my hair each morning. Also they speak of what they call my episodes, and I can read the fear in their eyes — as if they and not me were experiencing all this.

I want to forgive Matt for bringing me to this place, but I don’t yet know how.

April 29

All my books have arrived. Matt packed them carefully, on their sides or with spines up, to spare the bindings. One of the attendants — black, the color of bitter chocolate, around the mouth he looks amazingly like Bud Powell! — brought in the boxes, and a good-sized bookshelf. He helped me shelve all the books. Later I counted them, one hundred and seven.

My typewriter sits on a table in the corner, across the room from the bed. I have plenty of paper, my fountain pen, two bottles of ink. I will use the pen for letters if I ever feel like writing to anyone. I can’t imagine that.

For myself I will use this machine. I need its metal solidity, the clacking it makes.

I can’t picture the living room of the apartment without my books. There are gaps now in the shelves where my books were, but soon Matt will buy as many as it takes to fill the empty spaces. He thinks that will work, but it won’t. His new books will give him no pleasure because they’ll remind him of where I am and how I got here.

I’ve organized the titles by subject, just as Matt would do: top shelf, poetry; middle shelf, Kabbalah; bottom shelf, miscellaneous, including art books and my records. Eventually Len and Carol will bring the record player they promised me, and then I can listen to Powell again. For now I hold my favorite tunes in my head. I can hear all the lines, all the changes, all the shadings, all the fury sadness loss and that stunning virtuosity, the truth of the playing.

I have to force myself to eat. When I manage to sleep, I dream of the apartment.

It looks the same, but Matt and I aren’t its tenants. Lottie and Sam live there, and they have a child who is me but not me, a dark-haired girl who’s safe.

May 2

Yesterday I threw out the book of Auden’s poems I was reading the first time I saw Matt. The attendant who empties the trash (a different one, surly, not the man who reminds me of Powell) tried to make me take it back when he found it in my basket, but I refused, and then the bastard told Dr. Clay, and I was pressed into one of those predictable dialogues in which Clay tells me my actions are “emblematic” — how psychiatrists love such words! — of other refusals. This time I told him in a deliberate, malicious way to fuck his mother, I could discard whatever I liked.

That seemed to unnerve him. I could tell I’d made him angry, but I also knew
he
knew he couldn’t be openly angry at me, couldn’t show it. It’s easy to turn the tables on these people.

But I’m alone, so the tables are turned on me.

May 3

Poetry. The actions of reading and writing it seem so remote. I can bring myself to read Eliot but most of my other favorites scare me, they’re so much less controlled. (Matt likes Eliot precisely for that control, but I need him for what slips out in spite of it, and for his remarkable cadences:
Teach us to care and not to care …
)

I’m having trouble remembering specific poems, anybody’s, my own included. But yesterday a few lines came to me from a LeRoi Jones poem, and I hunted for it in several journals and finally found it in a copy of
Beat Coast East:

Or the broad-edged silly music the wind

Makes when I run for a bus …

Things have come to that.

I am reading the
Zohar
, the
Book of Splendor
. I am poring over it for clues, as if it were a detective story — though God knows what I can really expect to find in a bunch of obscure epigraphs and homilies written in the thirteenth century by someone named Moses de Leon.

Surprisingly, I find a great deal. This, today:

But later, men abandoned the road of faith and left behind the singular tree which looms high over all trees, and adhered to the place which is continually shifting from one hue to another, from good to evil and evil to good, and they descended from on high and adhered below to the uncertain, and deserted the supreme and changeless One.

The doctors are giving me medications that make my hands and feet swell. I feel distorted. They won’t give me any news. I’m no longer allowed to read the Times or the other papers every day because (the doctors say) I get too upset.

How can the
tikkun
occur if we don’t know what is happening to us — all of us?

They are hiding the world from me.

Everything is so much more frightening than it was when I was living with Matt. I was beginning to accept — why does Matt feel that
now
is the time for me to be here — can’t he see it was so much worse for me ten years ago, right after the war?

Perhaps it’s Matt’s turn to be frightened, and that’s why he brought me here. Matt can no longer count on his Christ. I’ve talked to him about the
tikkun
, the repair, but he won’t hear it. He hears only that the original light was shattered and then dispersed, and the original light seems to him as irretrievable as the first months of our marriage, when our bodies and our feelings were not different things but the same. And he could find redemption, grace, each time we kissed and each time he came into me, looking into my eyes and seeing everything there, not just himself mirrored, tiny and distant; or me in shadow, hazy, recessive: as he sees me now. Through a glass darkly.