Kafka Was the Rage (5 page)

As I listened to her talk—for it was understood that she did most of the talking, even if it was to ask us questions—it occurred to me that she and Sheri deformed their speech as Chinese women used to deform their feet. Her talk was pretty much like the things she wrote in her diaries. An entry from this time gives a good idea of what she sounded like: “Think of the ballet exercises. The hand reproduces resistance to water. And what is painting but absolute transparency? It is art which is ecstasy, which is Paradise, and water.” Here’s another: “It is possible I never learned the names of birds in order to discover the bird of peace, the bird of paradise, the bird of the soul, the bird of desire.”

Her conversation flirted with all the arts and settled on none, like someone who doesn’t really want to buy a book browsing in a bookshop. I was careful about what I said, because I could see that Anaïs was important to Sheri. I was afraid of coming out with something literal-minded, like, Were you bothered by rats when you lived on the houseboat?

Though Anaïs described Sheri in her diary as a “figure out of the past,” I thought that Sheri was a later, not an earlier, version. Anaïs was already out of style, and Sheri was just coming in. Anaïs was like someone at a party, dancing, drinking, and batting her eyes, and Sheri was the morning after the party. Anaïs was unconscious of the picture she made, and Sheri was all consciousness. While Sheri was always listening to herself, always rehearsing and revising, Anaïs had already posed for her statue. She had posed for it without knowing where it would be put up.

Sheri too was watching herself more than she usually did, if that was possible, perhaps because she felt the pull of Anaïs, the temptation to be “magnetized by affinities.” With all this doublethinking, with no one simply speaking up, the conversation grew so stilted that Anaïs was forced to bring out a bottle of wine. With a sudden swoop, she deposited the bottle in my hands, together with an old-fashioned corkscrew. The look she gave me made it clear that this was to be a test of sorts—but of what?

I had no choice but to accept the challenge. In what I hoped was a confident, heterosexual manner, I applied myself firmly, but with an ironic awareness, to drawing the cork. When the screw was all the way in, I pulled slowly and steadily on the handle. I did all the usual things, and I did them in slow motion, so it came as a rude shock to me when the handle broke off.

It simply came away in my hand. I was holding the bottle with the screw in one hand and the wooden stump in the other. My first thought was, It’s not my fault. I did it right. She can’t blame me. Then I tried to fit the handle back on while Anaïs leaned forward and watched me. Was it a trick? I wondered. A Surrealist or
Dadaist joke? She was smiling, as if I had confirmed her intuition about me. I knew that whatever I did, I would confirm her intuition.

I wanted to fling the bottle against the wall, but she was already pressing another corkscrew into my hand, an identical one. I didn’t want it, but I didn’t see any way of refusing. I gave the thing a little preliminary twist in the air, just to see whether it would hold together. The original screw was still in place and with some trouble I managed to get it out. Then I worked the new one in, even more deliberate now. It took me five minutes to get it all the way in. I turned it evenly, so as not to put any unnecessary stress on the handle.

I pulled very gradually, gently at first, then more strongly. Nothing happened. The cork didn’t budge. I couldn’t imagine why not—it wasn’t as if this was an ancient bottle of wine that had been sealed by time itself. To get a better purchase, I put the bottle on the floor between my feet.

What came next still seems incredible to me. Sometimes I think it didn’t actually happen, that my memory is playing tricks. But it did happen: Before my eyes, I saw the corkscrew slowly emerge from the cork. It didn’t break off; the cork didn’t crumble. The screw simply straightened out, so that I was holding in my hand something that resembled an ice pick.

I felt like a person in a dream. I shook myself, tried to collect my wits, to stop the blush that was rising to my face. What should I have done? What would Henry Miller have done in my place? Otto Rank? Edmund Wilson?

Anaïs took the bottle and the corkscrew and put them on a table. Perhaps she had never meant for it
to be opened. She turned and looked at me through narrowed eyes. I can see, she said, that you are a most interesting young man.

In her diary, there was nothing about the corkscrews, but I was described as “handsome, sensual, ironic.” I wasn’t fooled: All the young men in her diary were handsome, sensual, and ironic.

L
iving with Sheri was a process of continual adjustment. It was like living in a foreign city: You learn the language, the currency, the style of the people. You find out how to make a phone call, how to take the subway, where the stores and restaurants are, the parks, the public pissoirs, the post office. You try to feel like a native, not a foreigner; you progress from grammar to idioms in an attempt to talk as if you belonged. Still, you never succeed in feeling at home. You remain a visitor, perhaps only a tourist.

There was always something else, something more, another even larger adjustment to be made. She would come out with a new twist that meant I had to start all over. When she announced one day that she had a bad heart, it was as if she had been saving this for last.

It was nighttime and we were in bed. She grew very inventive at night; she ran through in a rush all the day’s unused possibilities, the leftovers of her sensibility. I
was almost asleep when she came out with her revelation: You know, I have a bad heart.

Of course, I didn’t take in at first what she was saying. There was no context for it, no natural leading up. Just You know, I have a bad heart, as if she was saying, Good night, or Move over a little. It was dark and statements in the dark are different.

Also, I never knew whether she was speaking literally or figuratively. As I’ve already mentioned, she liked to talk in metaphors. I’ve never known anyone who used so many figures of speech. So when she said, I have a bad heart, I thought she meant as opposed to a good heart, a bad heart as in bad faith, a hard or black heart, a disloyal heart.

She liked to make me work at interpreting her. Not knowing exactly what she meant, I would give her credit for things she had never even thought of. It was like when I used to read Surrealist poetry in French—I imagined all sorts of marvels until I began to use a dictionary.

I was half asleep. We had made love and I was feeling empty, or, rather,
filled
with emptiness, replete with it. But I roused myself and tried to think—not about what she said but what was
behind
it, what she was driving at. I’ve always been rather literal-minded and it’s one of the things I’m ashamed of, as some men are ashamed of the size of their penis.

Why do you think it’s bad? I said. Do you feel you’re getting softhearted?

I must be careful about climbing stairs, she said. The doctor thinks stairs are dangerous.

Doctor? I said. What doctor? What are we talking about?

I’m telling you, she said, that I have a bad heart. It’s defective, wanting, imperfect. The doctor advises me to avoid undue exertion.

My first thought was that I represented undue exertion—we had, in fact, just been exerting ourselves—and that we must put an end to it. But then I heard what she had been saying. You mean you’re sick? There’s something wrong—actually wrong—with you?

That is what I have been trying to tell you.

But why didn’t you tell me before? How long have you known this? I got all excited. I wanted her to get a second opinion, to see a heart specialist, but she said she had already done all that. What it came down to, she said, was that her heart was simply different from other people’s hearts.

And so I entered upon still another adjustment. I made Sheri my burden. From then on, whenever we went anywhere, whenever we came back to the apartment, I carried her up the stairs. I delivered her, conveyed her. I became her porter as well as her lover. I was even ready to carry her down the stairs, but she said it wasn’t necessary.

At first, before I was used to it, she was surprisingly heavy, in spite of her slenderness. You might say that she was metaphysically heavy. I think too that she made herself go limp, a deadweight. She threw her head back, like the women you see being abducted in romantic paintings.

The hardest part was when we went to see people. Many of her friends were painters who lived on top floors in order to get the light. When we arrived, after four or five flights, I would be red-faced and breathless, unable to speak. Because we hadn’t told people about
her heart, they wondered about me. They thought we had been doing something in the hallway. I began to get a reputation.

After the first shock of her announcement, it seemed almost natural to me that she should have a bad heart. Her rib cage was so narrow. I put my ear to it and listened. While I imagined ordinary hearts to have a beat like bad rock music, Sheri’s heartbeat was more like a Chopin étude, a desultory or absentminded strumming.

I had never thought of her as physically strong. Even though her legs and thighs were solid and full, her body seemed to lead a hazardous life, to have a determined fragility. She did not walk—she floated, and none of her movements made any concession to gravity. When I thought about it, it seemed to me that the human heart was a very primitive instrument, a poor piece of plumbing, for such a complicated, arrhythmical creature. It was such a garish, representational thing to have inside her abstract chest—it was as ugly as the velvet bleeding-heart medals I had admired so much when I was a Catholic child in New Orleans.

I enjoyed carrying her. For a few moments she was in my power. And I liked the idea that she was portable. I began to think of love as weight. When I had her in my arms she seemed more tangible, more palpable. If I wanted to, I could throw her down the stairs, or over the rail.

Our lovemaking changed. The need to be gentle introduced an insidious erotic complication. I inserted myself stealthily, like a burglar. I became a sleep-crawler. In one of his lectures at the New School, Gregory Bateson had told us about a South Pacific tribe that practiced what they called sleepcrawling. The sleep-crawler,
or
moetotolo
, visited his lover in her own hut in the middle of the night. This was a tribe that slept in straw baskets to keep away mosquitoes, and the
moetotolo
had to squeeze into the girl’s basket and perform without making any noise. The whole family slept in one room, and if the
moetotolo
was discovered, he would be severely beaten.

I too became a
moetotolo
, performing under duress. Feeling like a killer, explosive as a rocket, enormous, I recoiled my passions back into my own body. My desire rebounded with such an impact that I feared for my own heart.

I
t may have been the German professors at the New School who put the idea in my head—I don’t know—but, for whatever reason, I decided to be psychoanalyzed. In New York City in 1946, there was an inevitability about psychoanalysis. It was like having to take the subway to get anywhere. Psychoanalysis was in the air, like humidity, or smoke. You could almost smell it. The whole establishment had moved to New York in a counterinvasion, a German Marshall Plan.

The war had been a bad dream that we wanted to analyze now. It was as if we had been unconscious for three or four years. Once the war was over, we began making private treaties with ourselves. We demanded nothing less than unconditional surrender from life, or to it. There was a feeling that we had forgotten how to live, that the requirements would be different now. Also, I still had some of the money from my black-market dealings in Tokyo. It was found money, so I
thought I would spend it in the black market of personality.

Most people went into analysis because they were unhappy—or at least they thought they were. Yet as far as I knew, I was not unhappy. In fact, it appeared to me that I had just about everything I wanted. But I was like an immigrant who goes from a poor country to a rich one and can’t quite believe in his new prosperity. I distrusted my happiness—it seemed too easy and I was afraid it might be simply a failure of consciousness. My imagination itched and I had nothing to scratch.

Could it be, I asked myself, that I was happy under false pretenses? Or that I was mistaking sheer youthfulness, pure energy, for happiness?

There was something else, too, almost too vague to describe, like a shadow on my happiness. I was aware of something like static in my head, a sense that some part of me was resisting, or proceeding under protest. There was a dissonant hum or crackle, a whispering in my molecules. My nerves—I suppose it was my nerves—gave off a high, faint whirring, like the sound that billions of insects make in the tropics at night. It was a disturbance as remote as grinding your teeth in your sleep. Or it was as if my brain had something stuck in its teeth. It may have been merely the friction of consciousness, but I chose to see it as a symptom.

It reminded me, this whirring, of the sound of an AC-DC converter. A lot of the tenement apartments in the Village had these converters, because the buildings were originally on direct current and they’d never been changed over. Since most appliances ran on alternating current, you had to get a converter, a machine about
the size of a hatbox. You could pick up a secondhand one for about thirty-five dollars.

The trouble with them was that they made a noise, not a loud noise but a penetrating one. People put their converters in closets, but you could still hear them whirring or grinding in there. I used to think of the sound they made as the complaint of cheap apartments, like Lorca’s “pain of kitchens.” The static or whirring in my head was the sound of my converter. But what was I trying to convert? And how could I bring it out of the closet?

One night after class I spoke to Dr. Fromm. I asked him to recommend an analyst, hoping he would take me himself. But he didn’t; he sent me instead to Ernest Schachtel, who taught a course in Rorschach interpretation at the New School.