The Syme Papers (33 page)

There is a certain gap – often no more than a foot or two, across the dirty pillow of an old couch – that occurs only between two people who have greatly loved each other. It resembles in some respects a gap in
time
,
being quite … unbridgeable, despite the fact that the other side appears impossibly close and clear. I leaned over and crossed it – or, rather,
seemed
to cross it to an outside eye, crossed it only in shadow, in overlapping shadow – and kissed her. This occupied a little time, and produced occasional noises: of the springs in the couch; a shifted knee; an arched back stretched awkwardly into position; a sigh, of discomfort, like the release of air from a squeezed pillow; curious sucking sounds; the rustle of burrowing creatures; another sigh, like the sharp intake of breath, at a cold day, lungs filled again.

Then she said, ‘
I
’
ve
read it.
I
’
ve
finished it.’

I tried to kiss her again but she pushed me away and touched the back of her hand lightly to her lips. She had a way of shrinking, becoming suddenly prim. She sat now with her knees together, and her skirt pushed down and squeezed between them. Her cheeks had flattened somewhat, and lacked their plump perfection;
her nose had become sharp. She could look the school-miss properly on occasion. Then I heard her, and stopped short.

‘Is it not’ – I began, discovering myself through some perfidy of the dirty sofa cushion and the natural humility of the cavalier in front of his ladye-love, upon my (painful) knees, reaching out to her own knees, knocked together – “beautiful?’ I said, in the virgin shyness and delicate pleasure of an author, the body of whose private thought has been undressed at last by a tender hand. ‘Those turning mechanical spheres, the grinding pure contraption of the planet – the echoing halls below the world, where a boy might shout, like Syme, to hear his voice come back at him? His great full faith in the virtue of the mind’s eye to see into the heart of things, despite the clamour of naysayers and fools, and the utter obscurity in which he worked? Is it not …’

(Pitt is fond of a speech in his way. Pitt considers them on the pot and in the car, delaying at times even the hand that draws the seat-belt to its buckle, while he turns out of the drive into the traffic, and concludes a rolling oratorio in the breathless auditorium of his head.)

‘No‚’ said Miss Susie, biting a twist in her lip. She never quite trusted
plain
truths
–
they seemed a risky speculation to her and liable to bite back – and so she bit her own lip (a tell-tale) sign, to forestall them. But declared herself none the less. ‘It – upset me‚’ she said, quite sober now, or rather in the last fading echo of drunkenness, and very far away from everything. ‘Very much so. It seemed so – it made you appear so – no, I mean
you
seemed so – hopeless.’

‘Not that‚’ I replied, still awkwardly crouched and partly, shamefully, delighting in my supplicant role. ‘Try the other one. Hopeful. Utterly full of hope.’

‘No,’ she insisted, ducking her head, shying from the bar I set in front of her, and refusing to clear it. Susie knew when to insist, to dig in her heels, and she insisted now. ‘A little desperate. Hopeless I said and mean. Just that – like your father, you know, Pitt – very much like your father. You sounded like a kook, a crank. The worst of it was, I thought you liked Syme best, you
liked him just
because
,
in fact … he was so far wrong. You wanted him to
be
wrong. You liked him for that.’

‘No, no, because he was right – because he was wonderfully, prophetically right.’

‘I very much believe’, she said, ‘that if all the world were clever, you’d make yourself stupid, just to stick out, like a sore thumb. Stick out like a sore thumb – to you that’s praise, isn’t it, Pitt?
Being
original
To you that’s flattery.’

‘Not just this second, I believe‚’ I answered, raising myself on my haunches and standing up, to let my legs think and the traffic of my heart run free again. ‘Not so very much just this second. But if you mean that I think to be called original is great praise, is rare praise, is, in point of fact, the only
real
praise – you’re quite right in that, Miss Susie – spot on. We use the word now to mean personal or unique; we mouth such nonsense as
most
original – and, worse still, we qualify even that. The most original
whatever
of the year.
Whereas
‚’
I declared, a mouthful and a sentence in itself, bit off in anger. I had found my stride now, literally and figuratively, and paced along the shore of newspaper at the foot of the couch, from the television perched awry upon the phonebook, to Aaron’s inflatable baseball bat, yellow and squeaky and shiny, propped in the corner of the front doorway. ‘The great thing about being original is that the only year that matters is the
first
one – everything after that is echoes. Original has nothing to say about the personal or the unique. It means simply of beginnings; something begins with me. Across the great colour-coded board of history, one of the lines, no matter how small, starts here.’ And Pitt banged his breast. Pitt was tumescent, towering.

‘That’s not what original means‚’ Susie declared, cold as cucumbers. ‘Original’s just the word you use, when you can’t think of anything else nice to say. Anyway, you weren’t original at all – you borrowed it all from Syme, and you may as well have left it unborrowed.’

‘Second hand’, I said, slowing down in breath and foot, ‘is better than third or fourth or fifth – which is what most people deal in. I believe that second hand is the best I can do. Pitt has a poor
mind, but he spends wisely. He hunts for bargains, for
tsatskes
,
as your mother would say. You should know.’

‘That’s another thing‚’ Susie said, and left it at that.

I stood and she sat in silence. The evening pressed upon us again, like a subtle flood we had neglected to keep at bay – spilling over and running through all our cracks, spreading to a broad expanse of dark and loneliness. I had been back only a week, but the water between us, crossed at first by the sudden bridge of arrival, had become impassable again, at least not without a thorough drenching.

‘I know you think I’m stupid‚’ she said, pressing her hands upon her lap. ‘I know you think I’m – unambitious. That I don’t care a bit about changing worlds or setting up monuments of Miss Susie Wielengrad for future ages. That I’m quite happy to leave things as I found them. That I take things as they are. But the fact is’ – and here the edge of her voice grew sharp, her hands unclasped – ‘I Know How To Live. Never mind if it’s all fifth hand. I was taught well. I knew what part of town to grow up in – Yorkville, between 2nd Avenue and the East River. I knew the best restaurants, the bagel bakery, the German coffee house to go to. I knew where to shop. I knew what to wear and when to wear it – the fashions, and which of them to follow, which to ignore. I knew who to have over for Sunday brunches and what to talk about and what to think about. The best new books; the bad ones it was OK to read on holiday. The walks to take on sunny mornings along the river, while the men played chess on the cold stone tables. The longer, colder walks in Central Park. That the only time it wasn’t tacky to wear my Barnard sweatshirt was jogging on the weekends along the side-streets between 1st and East End Avenue. Yes, I was a snob – I am a snob. We all dressed up for Friday nights at the synagogue on 79th Street, and we looked at the families in the pew behind us as if they were a little further from God. I knew just how much to believe – how much was appropriate – what I should never mind about, and when it was OK to be sentimental. I went to all the best galleries, and wasn’t too shy to say I liked art pretty. I never thought to leave my mark
on the world – because I knew my place in it, and was never ashamed of simply being happy.

‘Even if it was all fifth hand; who cared? But now‚’ and here she took my hand, roughly, and pulled me towards the door and into the night and we stood on the driveway under a hundred stars (not a thousand or a handful, but a hundred, a compromise between the dull glow of the city and the enormity of the country), ‘I step outside and wonder where is the stink, where is the stink, and the beeping of the garbage trucks, and the dirty streets and the doormen watering them and the trash bags heaped on the corners? This isn’t home; I wasn’t taught how to live here. Where are the shops along the avenues, the bars, restaurants, hardware stores, cafés with cheap tables on the pavement? Where are the tailors and the laundrettes, squeezed into the ground-floor apartment blocks along the side-streets? Where are the girls from Brearly I used to know, and the aunts living ten blocks down, and the kids I taught and ran into Saturday nights at the kosher Italian? There is nothing here for me.’ And she sat down and shoved up on the hood of the Volvo, hoping to appease me by unhappiness, by the tenderness of misery, but I was only angry now, Pitt rising and venomous at last.

And I answered that I wasn’t taught how to live; that I never knew what to think or how to dress. That my father dropped out of high school to serve in Korea, because that’s what a young man did. ‘Don’t interrupt me, Susie – I know you know this – I’ve earned the right of repetition.’ All that was left of him by the end was too much kindness and a stupid humility and a tinkering obsession with his no-good job that was the only place his smarts had to go. (A certain amateur interest in immortality, an obsession not unlike my own, with the structures supporting the permanent monuments of our civilization – in his case, office blocks; in my own, books – and a firmly held belief that he could simplify the
scaffolding.
)
My mother had an
incident
(with a boy and a bottle) in college and came home and never got over it and never talked about it and met my father in night school, where he was trying to get
up
in the world and she was trying to get
back,
and they married
and both stopped dead where they were, because all they really wanted to do was avoid fuss. They avoided fuss until she died. Never underestimate the amount that gets done and doesn’t get done in the world out of the honest desire to avoid fuss.

So I was never taught how to live or what to think. Pitt had to go about all of that for himself. Pitt had to crib the material first hand. And so I declared to her, in the faint half-chill of summer midnight, to the bow of the crickets and the soft cymbal of the front-yard sprinklers, the words of the great Syme, uttered nearly two centuries before: ‘Let me not be among those wealthy men who pay their servants to attend to the tasks they should perform themselves. Let me then be among the servants, if you grant me leave to go over even old ground with a fresh hand, a clear head, and a curious heart.’

‘Oh, Pitt‚’ she cried, tucked up on the hood, ‘I wouldn’t mind so much, only all this has happened before. And if I hear again how your father nursed secret ambitions to … I don’t know what – I’ll scream.’

‘My father is a self-educated man …’

‘Your father is an
un
educated man …’

‘Who wishes to better himself – yes, just that, though you flinch at the low-class phrase;
better
himself. And there’s nothing more honourable than …’

‘I can’t bear it – all these wasted lies.’

‘His book on the history of scaffolding, a
first-hand
account
, could make his name in a small way, and that’s all he wants, and more, really, than he dreams of …’

‘You’re just the sort of man to come up with some elaborate nonsense to prove what nobody else would bother to boast of even if it were true. You’re too enthusiastic – it puts people off. You get these ideas and let them run away with you, that’s what Bunyon said; and this isn’t the first time. I said to him, Don’t get me started. What about that thesis you never finished at Oxford, where you wrote, against the best advice of all your tutors, about the history of
silence
–’

‘Only think, Susie‚’ I interrupted, a fresh vein pricked, a fresh
flow of life’s blood pouring forth – ‘the single language of human thought utterly unchanged by time. Gestures of rebellion or contemplation that never lose their prime – that never require translation. The syntax, the punctuation of our thoughts – arranging them, filling the gaps between every spoken word, as much greater than the words themselves as the sea is greater than the shore. The first, most fundamental right we possess, to remain silent; Cordelia’s privilege and Hamlet’s final thought. History and literature are filled with the several often contradictory uses to which silence is put: political rebellion, and political punishment, and political consent; spiritual purification, and spiritual condemnation, and spiritual isolation. Silence invites and denies and ignores and distils, protests and represses and leaves us all for dead in the end – the dial tone equally of life and death. Can you think of a nobler subject to pursue?’

I had grown quite overheated by the flame of a former inspiration, quite red in the face, puffing and bedewed – conscious that when the fire went out the cold of misery would surge around again. Susie looked at me, and reminded Pitt suddenly and most improbably of the ham-fisted lawyer in
The
Caine
Mutiny
,
who had prompted a necessary outbreak to prove a point, but disliked the job, and felt sick about it – an unflattering resemblance, I know, that did no justice to the thick bob of her hair, the wonderful little Jewish stubbornness of her nose, the rich, wide mouth and perfect, peach-shaped, apple-coloured, orange-scented cheeks.

‘Then why didn’t you finish it?’ she said, sliding off the Volvo. ‘Why did you – give up’ (the word Pitt would have chosen is flinch) ‘and run to New York?’

My fire was almost spent, my heart more and more choked in its own ash. ‘Because‚’ I sighed, ‘on that particular question … I ran out of things to say.’

‘And this time round‚’ Susie answered my sighing, breath for breath, ‘it’s hollow worlds.’

The great stupidity of life lies in the necessary repetitions, and this was an old argument, well grooved, running upon familiar
lines. I marvelled (not for the first time) at our terrible, almost noble, even courageous, capacity to repeat and repeat and repeat; and imagined (not for the first time) the impossible spacious sweetness of a life in which everything was said only once. (Perhaps it would be very lonely.)