Twice Told Tales (2 page)

Desecration: to remove from anything its sacred character. To profane or unhallow.

You understand these definitions, these hints and apostrophes with which I delay all the excitement to come: midnight sexual encounters, blindfolds, comic turns, a baby forgotten in the cloakroom of a midtown restaurant, high moments of intellectual adventure with some of the most brilliant of the time—these interruptions are a hazard of my occupation.

I am a copyeditor, freelance. Interrupting is my job, digression is my mother tongue. I explicate terms the way other people chew food. And I’m proud of one fact: when I tackle the work of an author—there is no forest, only trees! I’m also proud of my identity. I am the only life-long, freelance copyeditor in the United States. If at the top of the literary ladder stands the Nobel laureate novelist or poet, who can stand on the bottom rung? No—I do even better. I
am
the bottom rung! And it is my great pleasure to be the lowest rung on the ladder. What joy. Not nowhere to go but up. I lost
that
illusion years ago. No.
Nowhere to go!
It’s hard to communicate to my contemporaries the peculiar pleasures of starting in a cul-de-sac—so that you can’t possibly come to one.

Ah, some of you are now thinking here’s where he tells us he’s really a writer. This freelance copyediting dodge is just a cover. Wrong! I have only one story to tell and that’s why I’m here today. For this is my story of how I desecrated Katherine Eudemie on one of the most balmy, exquisitely forgiving spring nights so many thousands of nights ago; a night that changed my life.

Let me present to you this sturdy wheat-colored girl.

Wheat-colored?

Yes.

The girl, herself?

Yes. I would have marked cl. for cliché in the margin for wheat-colored hair, say. But all of Katherine Eudemie evoked shades of wheat. I knew. I’d seen wheatfields in movies when I was a kid. Later, on the train to Fort Ord, Indiana, en route to basic training during the Korean unpleasantness which followed the “recent” unpleasantness and preceded the Vietnam unpleasantness, I’d seen wheatfields blurring by from the train window.

And I am correct. As Katherine undressed that night, post-party, pre-desecration, in the half-darkness of that tiny Village apartment, her body was definitely wheat-colored from long legs to crown. A kind of amber-light-brownish, with tints of yellow fading in and out. I hope you understand that there is the chaos of memory and the distance of time to deal with. And, since I do not share the graphomania of my generation and have only this one story to tell, I’m trying to be as true as I can to the details. Someone has said God rests in the detail. And as I recall for myself and you that party at the Trillings, and this young woman fresh out of Oak Park, Illinois, by way of the University of Chicago, this one detail presents itself with authority: the wheat-like coloring of that long-limbed lovely body now prematurely harvested. I know, I know, they’re all premature. But she was only forty something. That’s pretty premature given the life insurance statistics, given her part-Cherokee Indian blood (
her
claim, unsubstantiated), given the fact that she began as a gifted poet of ferocious ambition, wrote one published novel at twenty-three, appropriately titled
The Country of the Young,
one produced play, and followed those by hundreds of grants and summers at Yaddo and MacDowell. Not one line of print by or about her ever appeared again.

Given all that. All after having been desecrated by me on a night of moonlit clouds, of pure calligraphic wonder.

“Who’s that talking to Trilling?”

“Steve Marcus. He invented Victorian pornography.”

“Then why are they talking about fishing? Dry flies, wet flies.
The
moment of my intellectual life and they’re talking trout. Where’s Jane Austen? Where’s E. M. Forster?”

“You’re sure it’s fishing? Maybe it’s sex. Dry flies, wet flies …” She liked to play at being lewder-than-thou.

I knew why she’d taken me to Lionel Trilling’s home. Because I was not only a literaphile (there’s no such word: it’s my neologism for someone who loves literature, not merely books, as in bibliophile) but I was also an autodidact. She knew I’d be doubly delighted by the quality of the discourse: Bloomsbury on Morningside Heights.

There was no way for her to know I would tease a stony-faced Huntress of Ideas:

“Where did you go to school?”

“I’m an autodidact.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I taught myself to drive.”

Beware! Those who tease the gods will be punished. In the first case by talk of fish instead of Forster. But after fish (and much wine) came dessert. Katherine Eudemie. We’d been engaged in the usual sexual sparring (it’s no accident that in sparring the fighters are called partners. A fight is only a fight. Sparring is a relationship). And our relationship, about forty hours old, was bouncing along its competitive, sexy way; myself, Jewish, New Yorkish, bookish, twenty-fiveish. Katherine Eudemie, gentile, Judaphile, turning twenty-five in a short while.

She was my first encounter with the stream of wheat-colored young women traveling West to East in search of their promised Jews; the Rose Rabbis of their flowering literary, political, and sexual ambitions. The dark strangers between whose temples, arms, and legs wisdom was to be found, and whose wisdom was aphrodisiac.

I had no wisdom to offer. I had then what I have now: a rag-bag of quotations: the currency of the uneducated. It sufficed. A line from a Pound canto for an open-mouthed kiss. A Goethe aphorism for one bra-strap down. A murmured memento from the Talmud to spread knees ever so slightly. Pretty good for forty hours of acquaintance this many years ago. I’m not being cruel. Cruelty requires a victim and an executioner. We were both victims. It was as thrilling to me as it was to Katherine. She came to me from Illinois that spring, singing songs of famous Chicago Jewish writers who refused to come East. Her affair with the most famous of them left a spoor on her skin. We both sniffed it to track each other around the bed.

Hence: sparring. Ducking, weaving, touching, panting, we were teaching each other the game in a match no one could win. Though, it turned out,
someone
could lose. My situation at the precise party-moment was the obverse of Katherine’s. She had left her family to come East, raging to be known.
My
family had left
me
two months before I met Katherine Eudemie; left me for California. My quotations from de Tocqueville about restless, rootless Americans had been useless.

“There was no California, then,” my father said, with his optimism typically masquerading as logic. It was no help for me to point out that there was no California now either. Like Katherine he was enormously ambitious but it was not a vague, boundless ambition. It was precise and could be satisfied—by a great deal of money.

Every enterprise failed him or vice-versa—it was never clear which was the case. He landed the first Volkswagen dealership in America. The guy with the second one made money. He bought land in Florida years after the whole country knew there was no land in Florida to buy. My mother’s bitter joke in Yiddish: “Your father, the alchemist in reverse.
Fun gelt er macht dreck.
” Somewhere in the sunshine of California shimmered more gold. Like all good alchemists he believed in the magic of wealth and that getting it was a reasonable even scientific matter. He had ideas, he had plans, he had methods, he had obsessions. What he never had was the
gelt.

I lingered on, pleasantly post-adolescent, amid the
dreck
of his dreams, carefully avoiding dreams of my own. All ambition was tainted. I assumed this was a temporary reaction. I had a tender tolerance for my own failure to get started.

It was a lively time. A college degree, my conspicuous lack, had not yet achieved the status of a high school diploma. That is, you could still get a job without one. Before leaving for the Golden West my father had arranged for my Uncle Harry—the flip side of my father, a true Midas—to pull strings at Duell Sloane & Pearce, a small but classy publisher, and J. Walter Thompson, an epic advertising agency. At the same time, an editor at N.Y.U. Press had offered me a manuscript to copyedit, a book on the language of sexual relations. I toyed with them all; a kind of languorous, lingering, professional foreplay.

“Getting involved with you is activity enough,” I told Katherine.

“You’re crazy,” she said.

“No, you are; the mad alien invader. You’re going to eat New York.”

“I’m not
that
hungry.”

“That’s because you haven’t had your first real taste.”

“Oh? The review in the
Times
… ?”

“True. A taste.”

She regretted having confessed that her Chicago hotshot had helped her place her novel. We’d argued, sparred, clothing and ideas all in disarray: her half-slip, Dostoyevsky’s abominable politics, my shirt and half-opened fly, and the life and death of The Novel. Next to the bed on which we’d done everything except
it,
her ancient Royal Portable trembled on a tiny wooden table. She pointed to it.

“That’s what placed my book.”

“Easy does it,” I said. “It’s only been published and reviewed. It takes years to
place
a book.”

“Is that a quotation?” she asked. Suspicion clouded the blue fields of her eyes.

“No. Just a cheap irony of my own. But true, anyway.”

“Is it so awful to want a place,
my
place?”

I was merciless the way one is when being kept above bed instead of in bed.

“Are you sure it’s your place—or
a
place;
any
place?”

She pressed red lips to my neck and mumbled, “Don’t sell me so short. I’m not here just to make out. I want to find out, too.” She stood up, a tall blonde apparition of confusion, wisps of hair everywhere. She blew some from the corners of her wide mouth. “To find out,” she repeated.

I decided to be stupid.

“Find out what?”

“Everything.”

“Everything Jewish, you mean.”

Without smiling she said, “That’s everything.”

I grabbed her back to the bed, rolling on top of me; a roiling of unharvested wheat.

“God, I give up! The only parts of you not full of goyish nonsense are
these.
”

I attacked these with mouth and hands.

All full of life, given the confusion, given the lust and the teasing, given the youth and the resentments. And all long before I had carved out my unique position as the bottom rung—America’s only life-long, freelance copyeditor; even longer before my surprise fame as a funeral eulogist—the Georgie Jessel of the small-fry literati—had reached and convinced Jackson Eudemie that no one but I would do for the obsequies of poor, premature Katherine. Talk about finding your place. We found our places. Or they found us.

“You’re so beautiful,” I said in a rare abdication of irony. “No cosmetics. How do you do it?”

“With mirrors,” she said. And, indeed, there were mirrors everywhere in that tiny Village apartment whose address I never knew.

Typical of the time and the immigrant-bohemian-style, she was staying in an apartment which had been loaned to a professor friend and who, in turn, loaned it to her; if you can loan what does not belong to you. I would guess you would simply have to
give
it if it’s not yours. In any case, she had it—with no phone. One of the loaners or the other had carefully turned it off. It seemed to be significant that she could never get the address straight. It was one of those weird tripartite meetings of Christopher Street and two others. She always—the three times I went there with her—told the cab driver to turn here, turn there, stop here, and, presto, we were there. Where, we had no idea. (Once I went down to get cigarettes, just around the corner, and almost could not find my way back.) But when we were inside the apartment there were mirrors; tall, wooden, burnished, dark antique, a bureau mirror, tortoise-shell hand mirrors on every surface.

Yet she didn’t seem to care for mirrors; not for makeup, not for fussing hair, not for anything. Except for the moment before we entered Trillings’ apartment. But that’s because on the way up I’d made her weep.

We’d been talking about poetry as we walked. It’s hard to believe, writing from the embattled city of now, that we so obliviously let stars creep from behind clouds, let the half-moon lighten, let night and shadows form around us with perfect insouciance as we walked and talked the hundred blocks from the West Village to Riverside Drive and Morningside Heights. We felt safe from everyone except each other.

“Why attack my poems?”

“I’m not. They were beautiful.”

“Were.”

“Are.
It’s their simple lyrical liberalism that worries me.”

“Simple?”

“You don’t even know which insult to get angry at. The word to worry about in that sentence is ‘liberalism.’” I can see now, hundreds of thousands of words later, the copyeditor being born.

“You prefer fascism?”

Remember, this was back when fascism referred mainly to the recent unpleasantness. She whirled on me, grabbed my shoulders and shook me, the way men shook women in old movies.

“Are you doing this because I didn’t let you?”

I took her hands from my shoulders and twisted an arm up behind her back. She was a broad-shouldered farmgirl, stronger than I was. I had to play tough.

“Ah,” I said. “It wouldn’t be nice, not liberal, to be a son-of-a-bitch about your poetry just because you’re torturing me by holding off making the beast with two backs.”

The image distracted her. “What’s that?” she said.

“
Othello.
Act I, scene 3.”

“You’re hurting my arm.”

“Your trouble is not your parts, whether to allow me entry or not. Your problem is your heart.”

“What’s wrong with my heart?”

“It’s in the right place.
You can’t be a serious writer if your heart’s in the right place.
Look at Eliot, look at Lawrence …” We were outside the apartment now. She stared into the hall mirror.

“Look at
me
,” she murmured, brushing at her wet cheeks, “do I look awful?”