Time Travail (19 page)

***

Ten

One evening without warning she looked up
from the assigned story (which had nothing to do with what she was
going to say) and announced:

“What we see is a Veil of Appearance, Impure
Illusion concealing the True Splendor behind and beneath. But one
Nearing Day the Veil will be rent and the True Splendor revealed.
That Day is near.”

It had to be a quote. It wasn’t her usual
oral style. The intruder again. Our duo was a trio. With a jingle
of his bracelets her sweeping gesture took in her living room and I
guess everything beyond.

“Do you really think this is all there is,
Jerry? There’s nothing behind or beneath, like they say?”

I was disturbed at her asking a question like
that. It wasn’t the role I’d assigned her. Knowing the poor
unspiritual stuff that lay beneath, I tried to hang on to the
illusory surface she’d downgraded. I told her that it wouldn’t be
nice at all to have her lovely living room disappear. I didn’t want
that to happen, I said.

Her face shone. It wasn’t unpleasant to make
her face shine like that. It was in my power, godlike, to
rejuvenate her. She asked me what I particularly liked about her
living room. She was 100% back in illusory surface. To exercise
more power of rejuvenation I was tempted to say “You.” It was a
dangerous temptation, involving abuse of power. So I said:
“Everything in the living room.” She returned to The Golden
Galaxy.

“That wasn’t me. I was quoting. My husband
sends me their literature every week. I wish he’d write. It’s way,
way out stuff. Too far out for me. Wonderfully poetic but I have
real trouble with some of it. For example …”

She let me have it in detail. Apparently she
read the literature Jack sent as carefully as if they’d been
letters. She could quote whole paragraphs. I closed my eyes and
sank deeper in the armchair with the whisky as she began reciting
in fatiguing capital letters – she already tended to italicize
syllables – about the two Realms, the totally Evil and Illusory
Realm of Appearances ruled over by the evil Fallen God Glauk and
the shimmering Realm of the Golden Galaxy, our true Spiritual Home.
What maintained the Unreal Realm about us was Despair, Disbelief,
Spiritual Sloth. When the balance tipped in favor of Belief and
Love, the Veil of Appearance would be rent. How could
balance-tipping be achieved? Through the process of
InGathering.

Beth Anderson stopped. She waited for me to
ask about InGathering. Maybe she was testing me to see if I was
asleep. I opened my eyes and asked: “What’s InGathering?”

I learned that InGathering was seeking the
mass presence of Unbelievers and, by intense spiritual
concentration in their unknowing midst, winning them over to
Illumination. No whitewashed cell or wilderness for the Golden
Galaxy believers. Their church was the multiplied human soul in
crowds, wherever the crowd might be, gathered for whatever reason,
however trivial: subway, football games, political meetings,
discos, etc.

One day – and it was not far – the necessary
number of believers would be reached, one billion, three hundred
thousand four hundred and twenty three and the InGathering would
attain critical mass. At any moment it could happen, mental
concentration overcoming dead lethargy.

Apparent reality would then disappear and the
usurped reality of the Golden Galaxy would appear in blinding
splendor.

I imagined them under broadbrimmed black
hats, bearded to the fanatical eyes, trying to win over the shadowy
crowds of co-dwellers to Illumination.

“You’re sure about that figure?” I asked.
“One billion three hundred thousand four hundred?”

“And twenty-three. Positive. That’s what they
say anyhow.” She reached for her glass and took a long swallow.

I certainly didn’t want to offend her.
However, I couldn’t help observing that it was the most prodigious
bullshit I’d ever heard. She blinked and replied that it was a
little weird maybe but she wouldn’t call it … what I’d just said. I
had to admit, she said, that it was full of imagination, like a
wonderful poem.

I admitted nothing of the sort. I told her
that any C student in Comparative Religion could have concocted the
tenets of that cult. It was warmed-over Gnosticism.

Gnosticism? she inquired.

Some other evening, I said and pretexted
fatigue. The subject of the Veil of Reality was a bore. I’d been
behind it and knew the diminished things that were there.
Comparative Religion was a little dim in my mind, anyhow. As soon
as I got back to the other house I consulted Harvey’s 1930 edition
of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
and took notes. It was a little like preparing a class.
While I was doing it I forgot about the co-dwellers.

The following evening I gave her a guided
tour of metaphysical dualism: Zoroastrianism, Manicheasm, the
Albigenses, the buggering Bogomils, etc. etc. She didn’t yield. She
said that if so many people believed it over the ages even if the
name for it changed then it couldn’t be a hundred percent … what
I’d said it was.

But she also said: “Gosh, Jerry, is there
anything you don’t know?” Which was satisfying to hear even though
I’d cheated in a way with those warmed-over encyclopedia
articles.

She didn’t neglect her son during our
literary sessions. She began to allude more and more frequently to
his poems. She seized any pretext. It was tiresome being nagged in
this house as well as in the other, in one to produce unwelcome
writing, in the other to read it. I couldn’t be hurried with those
poems if I wanted to do justice to them, I said. She brightened at
that. Oh yes, I know, you need time to savor them, she said. She
promised not to hurry me. She let up after that. I’d really have to
get around to doing the painful job one day. Whatever the minor
annoyances involved, her house was a relief from the other house
and my duties there.

#4

I didn’t see much of her even after she
started attending Monroe High. Between classes she was always in
the library, never had time to go out, not even for an ice-cream
soda. I don’t think she had any friends. I hardly ever saw her
except for half-hour German lessons once a week in an empty
classroom after three. It wasn’t easy convincing her to do that.
She wasn’t stubborn or anything but hard to reach. She never
volunteered anything herself. I submitted written stuff in German
which she corrected. She also corrected my oral mistakes. She was a
very nice and gentle girl but it was a little like working with an
intelligent grammar-book. And those lessons were just for a while.
The summer holidays rolled around. I spent August as a counselor in
a camp in Vermont. I hardly ever saw her at all after those
lessons.

(
I see her very often at school. She seldom sees
me. I know her schedule by heart. Between classes she’s sure to be
in the school library. I don’t want to disturb her in her work. She
emerges bewildered when you do that. From the stacks I can see how
the reference books and papers and pens are laid out neatly on the
desk before her like a perfectly done assignment in itself. She
isn’t naturally a brilliant student and tries to compensate by
grinding work. One of my girl friends angered me by calling her
that: “a grind.” Once I saw her staring down at a corrected math
paper, a disaster judging by her strained white face. I expected a
C. It was a B+. She often wears a long-sleeved white blouse with a
little-girl collar beneath a gray jumper. Once she reaches for the
dictionary and I see a big white scar on her wrist over a lovely
tracing of blue veins. She has very white skin. Maybe a week later
I see her make the same movement and see the scar again. It was the
same movement but with the other hand.

Once she suddenly looks up from her notebook
straight at me, pen poised, for long seconds. Her lips are parted.
From where I’m standing in the stacks I smile and raise my hand in
greeting but go unrecognized or unseen. She’s looking for something
but it’s inside. Now she finds it and goes back to the notebook. I
can hear the dry scratch of her pen point.

Once I witness a similar scene through the
wired glass insert of a classroom door. It doesn’t change things
all that much. When we’re together it’s as though there’s glass
between us, she polite and attentive for my benefit but behind it.
Behind this real glass I see her up front, divided between her
notes and her teacher, casting quick dutiful glances at Mr Walton
with his big Adam’s-apple above his bow-tie, her pen pausing when
he pauses. He clowns a little. The class relaxes, laughing. Her pen
stops, poised over the notebook, patiently waiting. Then he turns
to the blackboard and her pen goes back to work.

She gives me reluctant German lessons after
school once a week in an empty classroom. I’ve minored in German to
understand the lyrics of Schubert, Schumann and Hugo Wolf lieder.
German declensions prove unlyrical. I’ve declined from A to C. My
enthusiasms are always short-lived. Now I’m remotivated, a thousand
times more.

The lessons last exactly half an
hour, not a minute less, not a minute more. I have cunning pathetic
strategies. For example, during a preposition-drill I choose the
phrase, “I think of you too much.”
I say: “Ich denke zu viel um dich.”
I know the
preposition “um” is wrong. It’s to trick her into saying the
correct form, “Ich denke zu viel an dich,” to hear her, any way,
even tricked into it, say that to me: “I think of you too
much.”

Once I touch her bare arm without warning. It
jerks back involuntarily as though burned. You can tell she’s
distressed at the possible offense her reflex may have caused. Her
distress and my offense are so strong that I put my arm around her
shoulders in consolation (and revenge?). Seeing it coming, she’s
prepared. There’s no reflex this time, just a stiffness with a
slight smile. It’s like embracing a statue. She waits in polite
distress for it to end.

When you give her little things as I do
whenever I can, she exclaims “O” which expresses thanks and
appreciation and maybe alarm. Conversation isn’t spontaneous with
her. When I say something, she listens with polite intensity and
then comments on it, really tries, but it’s a minimum contribution
and she withdraws into silence until I jog her on to new
contributions.

One day, doing that, I recall a beloved early toy
which strangely I remember best from the time of defect. You wound
it up, forcing towards the end against the abnormal resistance of
the spring, pressed the button and the stamped-tin baby bear jerked
forward, silently clashing cymbals. Then stopped. If you pushed it
you got a few feeble forward-moving jerks, a weak try at a cymbal
clash, then it stopped again. Every time the spring was harder and
harder to wind. One day there was a faint metallic scream from
inside and quick crazy soundless cymbal clashes and a wild
acceleration of movement and the stamped-tin baby bear banged into
the wall blindly over and over. Then a snapping sound and it fell
over into final immobility. I kept it for years anyhow.

She’s always in a hurry, no time for a Coke
after the lesson. She has no way of preventing me from walking her
to the bus stop. Sometimes she tells me she’s in a hurry because of
a math lesson with Harvey. He helps her with her father’s book when
he has time. She’s very grateful. She confides a tiny bit in Mrs
Morgenstern. Mainly they talk about Harvey, I guess.

She wants to follow in her father’s
footsteps, at least become a scientist although her father believed
that women couldn’t because of the form of their brains. She’d
asked Mrs Morgenstern anxiously if she thought it was true. She’s
trying to decipher his textbook, keeps at it all the time. That was
why Harvey helped her a little when he had time.

“
He is a genie,” she says to me
one day while waiting for the bus. She seldom makes English
mistakes. “He’s a
genius
,” I correct, glad at the reversal of roles and the brief
domination it involved. “Oh yes!” she replies, taking correction
for enthusiastic affirmation. Her brown eyes are great with
respect. Harvey is the one subject she’s spontaneous with me about,
allowing a little give and take between us. I have to praise him to
keep the connection intact. I tell her about the shack-days, about
his scholastic triumphs.

“
Auf Wiedersehen
, Rachel,” I always say as her bus
swings in. “Goodbye,” she always says.)

I got my paper back the next day. Marginal
red ink reminded me that there had been a German lesson in her room
one year in July. That was true. It had been his suggestion.
Correcting my memory like that was another reversal of roles. So
what was the point of my new task?

(
The day after the summer vacation has begun I come
over with another book order. They’re seated side by side at the
living room table over a notebook and her father’s book. He looks
bored. Her head is bent over the notebook. Her short hair is shiny
and neatly parted. She’s working something out and doesn’t look up.
I’ve landed a job as a counselor in a camp in Vermont and won’t be
seeing her for a long time, thirty-five days.

When she finishes the problem she looks up
and sees me and smiles politely. I say I’m going to miss those
German lessons. Harvey suggests she give me the lessons here,
upstairs. Why not right now? Maybe it’s to get rid of her.

When we come down an hour later
from her room he’s still there, plunged in his own work. “How was
he?” he asks her, not looking up. “Very good, Harvey,” she says
generously. When she’s gone he asks me: “How did it go?” “OK.”
“Like?” “Declensions.” “Yeah?” he says and waits, expectantly, it
seems to me. “Masculine,” I say and recite: “Der, Des, Dem, Den.”
“Go on,” he says. I don’t know if it’s the “go on” of disbelief or
“go on” meaning “continue.”
I continue: “Feminine: Die, Der Der Die.
Do you want the
neuter too?”)