Testimony and Demeanor (24 page)

Ann began to giggle. No one else batted an eye. The man went on, “But he failed to listen to me. He did nothing to avert the financial disaster that overtook his entire family. It was a blindness that you cannot imagine in this country.”

Ann burst out laughing.

Professor Keller said quickly, “But his holdings in this country would have been sequestered during the war in any case.”

The man said, “I had in mind a holding company based in a neutral country.”

Ann kept on laughing. Even Mr. Pelham gave her a look. She was laughing very loudly by this time. Mr. Pelham was always alarmed by loudness. But it was her being loud and rude that I really loved. I’d been trying to think of something to say, but she was much better. And what was good was that she was out of control. She wasn’t picking away at this guy; she couldn’t help it. Her eyes squinted up and her mouth was open so wide I could see her gold fillings in the back. I wanted to get her away and just listen to her laugh.

I missed the turn the conversation took, but things broke up fairly soon after. We went back to her place, but the mood had passed, and she in fact seemed somber, so I wasn’t able to tell her she’d been terrific. It doesn’t matter; she was.

Answer [Mr. Pelham]: “Certainly. What it is that I find in my social life is this: That the threads of my life (ideas, friends, et al.) are woven into designs around me of course interests me, but what interests me more is when I can feel the threads being pulled out by a neighbor’s design in the making—being stolen inch by inch, sliding out of their backing, over and under and
over and under and finally out. Well, that is a sensation that is certainly worth more to me than the jealous retention of the designs in my own life. What is best of all, by the way, is to feel several designs being raveled away multifariously. I feel very much in touch then, as they ravel out of my life and are knitted up into several others. It is, if you will allow a certain dryness [
laughter
] or aridity of phrase, a sociospiritual sensation. Which gives me great pleasure.”

Q: “Pleasure?”

A: “Satisfaction. Fulfillment. It is, you know. I should add that people always talk of sacrifice wrongly. The word once meant a pleasurable giving. Now it means, oh, rationing, privation, imposition. People then turn around and say, e.g., Proust sacrificed his life for his work. I would assert that on the contrary, Proust was not in the least deprived but very cleverly bargained away a life that he could never have really led for one that gave him the highest pleasure. I would be happy to make—in a very minor way, you understand—the same sort of bargain.”

Ann: “You know, I was struck today by the helplessness one feels in front of what is most touching. Last summer I was at a family picnic, of all things. I have a nephew named Bill who is a great ox of a schoolboy who spends all his time exercising, as far as I can see, and I have a cousin once removed who is sixteen and quite attractive. She has a little brother of an indeterminate age named Josh. Perhaps he’s eight, or six. All three happened to be standing by the swimming pool. My cousin had a great crush on this lifeguard of a nephew—why, I can’t imagine—and she was trying to attract his attention. So she started talking to her little brother. ‘If you’ll go swimming with me, Josh, I’ll give you a surprise.’ Josh said, ‘What?’ He was—quite rightly—suspicious of this sudden bright-eyed attention. My cousin said, ‘Oooh, I can’t tell you, but it’ll be something you really, really like.’

“Josh still said ‘What?’ but what intrigued me was that he was beginning to squirm under the intensity of her really remarkable physical charm. She was hovering over him, and although
she wasn’t touching him, the air was positively electric, and of course he couldn’t know it wasn’t for him. All the while Bill was doing deep-breathing exercises of some laborious sort. Finally my cousin turned to Bill and said, ‘Oh, Bill. You make him come swimming with me. He’s just being awful.’ Josh looked very hurt that he was being awful, but Bill said, ‘Can’t talk. Hyperventilating,’ and then dove into the pool and swam underwater down and back. It’s quite a long pool, and he pulled himself out like a wounded crocodile and just lay in the sun, occasionally rearing his head to knock the water out of his ear. My cousin looked down at him for a while with that brutal sour look that teen-agers have, which I hope is not as seriously evil as it looks. Then she walked off. Bill just lay there oblivious. Josh wandered around the pool looking very thin and sorry for himself, but when I talked to him he was completely bored and couldn’t wait for me to stop.”

An odd thing. Mr. Pelham and Ann both happened to ask me the same question.

Mr. Pelham: “I imagine there is such a thing as rustic virtue. Disabuse me.”

Ann: “You must have had a marvelous childhood—I mean, growing up away from all the usual vices. Catching trout while boys in New York were shoplifting. Everything must have been so natural.”

I said to Ann, “There’s nothing more natural about New Hampshire than New York anymore. Most of those trout are stocked. My brother worked as a guard at a state trout hatchery. Herons would come in droves to eat the hatch and he’d shoot the herons by the dozens.
They
were what was
natural
. But it’s an economic election. Herons or trout. Tourists come for trout. Q.E.D.” Ann was appalled.

I said to Mr. Pelham that if rusticity itself is the virtue he’s talking about, and if virtue is desirable, which we assert by
definition, then why did I, and my fellows, come to New York, and why does the rest of the state want, more than rusticity, electric power, highways, industry? And so forth.

Story for story, essay for essay. But I begin to think that their idea of the purpose of their relations with other people is primarily informational. And that eventually the information, the more interested they become, will be an essence of me that they’ll have to dismantle me to get. Nothing necessarily destructive. Just to see. I suppose that’s O.K.

I asked Mr. Pelham how he’d ever come to drop in, what first interested him. He wasn’t surprised. He had his essay.

“I thought at first you were—from what people said—what every rigorous headmaster of every rigorous prep school claimed he wanted his boys to be. In practice, headmasters were often thrown into violent reactions by factors they professed to ignore. E.g., charm. They were both infatuated and irritated by it. But the theory of their preaching was that ‘a strong character’ was to be praised over intelligence, charm, talent, and even accomplishment. It was a curious thing to preach, because it was a sermon without end that crushed everyone. It praised, for example, those who gave their lives for their country in a way which made the living feel guilty. It praised the grit of the loser who battled on and on. Hopelessly. Which made the winner feel guilty and was no balm to the loser, because even when one is told he has a strong character, one cannot really acknowledge it inwardly. In any event, praise of one’s grit should be no substitute for winning.

“A curious side effect of this preaching, by the way, was that certain extremely gifted prep school boys competing some years later for, let us say, Rhodes Scholarships would falter almost on purpose before the interviewing committee. They were under a posthypnotic suggestion, you see, to lose with grit and prove their character.

“But to return to you. You seemed to be slogging it out on your own in both theory and practice, and because no one had imposed the theory on you, you were uninhibited toward bald success. I can’t tell you how deep a chord this struck in me. I have often had a dream career of being a headmaster. To be quasi-Olympian above the fray. To be on the riverbank as a racing eight swept by, knowing the life story of each man in the boat. What each stroke cost.” He paused. “To bestow the trophy, saying, ‘Well rowed, Prancer and Dancer and Donder and Blitzen …’ ”

Later I asked Ann what had first got her interested in me. She started to back away, but I finally got the bit in her mouth. And then, of course, she took it between her teeth and ran off.

“Well, I can say one thing, which is that you’re unlike any previous entanglement. Except perhaps Charles. Charles was like you—many years ago, of course. Not in manner. But he was isolated in the same way. Nothing, I can tell you, is less appealing than a lonely man who is feeling sorry for himself, but on the other hand, a lonely man who seems to be bearing up and who acts with a certain rudeness is infinitely attractive. The only thing more momentarily alluring—and it can be only momentary—is a man who is obviously in love with another woman, who is paying absolutely no attention to anything else, and who then, out of a clear blue sky, suddenly notices you and is visibly shaken. It’s quite moving. But then, of course, he must either turn away sheepishly or advance raffishly, and that is that. I’m afraid I may be sounding like a terrible old whore, but if you insist on questions, I’m afraid you’ll get answers that go on like this. I mean, I’m not going to pretend that I returned to my maidenly role as frail flower after Alfred departed the scene. Indeed, I don’t even think that I find it a convincing role—frail flower, I mean. It is aesthetically repugnant, and I may say I’m glad to see that it is really not even a fashion
anymore. Which is not to say that I admire myself unreservedly. In fact, I was somewhat unreflective with Charles in that it should have been apparent to me that since he was someone whom Alfred admired a great deal, I very likely had ulterior motives. I have noticed that divorced women tend either toward someone whom their husbands admire or toward someone whom their husbands rather despise. A visible step up or down. From the husband’s point of view, of course. The reality is always more baffling. But the original motive is to break away from the husband’s taste in people, which is the most lingering shared taste, because, of course, the people around you can’t be sent into storage along with certain chairs and rugs and paintings. But the people can be perceived differently. And one changes oneself, and so forth, until there is a whole new arrangement. But the period of changing one’s perceptions is, oddly, a very impersonal one—although not necessarily rational—and the person closest to one at the time gets treated rather badly, I’m afraid. That is to say, impersonally. I mean, one can behave quite theoretically. Women can. Men on the whole behave better, more naturally, at least more wholeheartedly. Alfred behaved extremely wholeheartedly and remarried very happily, if a little bit absurdly.

“Fortunately Charles and I became lasting friends, largely through his withdrawal in a very independent and orderly fashion. There was scarcely a bad moment. We were both very busy, and we soon found that we weren’t relying on each other at all, even though we kept on seeing each other. This was years ago. And then, of course, he became more the way he is now. His whole world in his head. Not in any selfish or even embittered way. Perhaps a little melancholy, but very literary, very picturesque. What I find attractive now is that he is analytic in a generous way, but not
a
and
b
,
x
and
y
—like a juggler, really, so that you just catch a glimpse. It really is the way I prefer to hear about things.”

I said, “I guess you find me too much the other way. Too
x
and
y
.”

She said, “Now, that is the intriguing thing; I really don’t know. Actually I do—at least one thing, which is this: that you’re changing visibly, and I find it amazing to be a cause—not so much a cause as a catalyst. Do you know what happens to catalysts, by the way? People are always using catalyst as a metaphor, and I know what it means metaphorically, but actually, chemically, I have no idea what happens to them.

“Do you remember saying that your sleek, demure young associates seemed to know you down to the ground and that you didn’t know the first thing about them? I can assure you that that is most unlikely. There is, to flatter you some, something awesome about you. I’m quite serious. You really are as independent as Charles was, but with a more massive core of energy. Of course, that may be youth. I’ll tell you what I do like, though, is that from time to time you seem to focus it all on me. I can’t tell you how I’ve come to appreciate that feeling. Wasn’t that what you wanted to know?”

I said yes.

She said, “You know, for someone who never mentions it, you’re actually quite sensual.”

She smiled, having deliberately turned the conversation that way. I noticed her mouth particularly. Her front teeth are large and regular. There is something attractive about the idea of her gold fillings in back, on the way to her red gullet. I find myself sometimes thinking about her insides, almost in a way to put me off. Not on account of her but on account of my own state of mind. The other day it made me think of shooting a deer—the whole process—seeing it flash, shooting, hauling it out, gutting it. Other times, fortunately, I think of her bones. They’re very light, and that is altogether pleasant, associated mainly with her control of her body.