Kafka Was the Rage Page 12

  We drove to West Street, along the Hudson under the West Side Drive. In those days West Street was deserted at night. When Virginia stopped the car, the dog jumped out and sat on the cobblestones, waiting for a signal. Then, as we headed south, he loped easily alongside. The car was so low that his head was on a level with mine. He grinned as he ran and I noticed that he had high cheekbones, too.

  I remember that there was a hugh garbage compactor on the dock at the foot of Twelfth Street and its smell mingled with the milder reek of the river, which we could glimpse between the rotting wharves. The MG was stiffly sprung and made a lot of noise drumming over the cobblestones. Virginia held her hands at three and nine o’clock on the polished wooden steering wheel.

  West Street at night was the kind of place that makes you pensive. The ruined docks seemed to say that there would be no more steamer trunks and champagne in first-class cabins, or friends coming down to the dock to see you off to Europe. To take Virginia home with me would be like sailing from one of these docks. I looked at her and tried to estimate my chances, but she was wrapped up in her dog and her driving.

  The docks reminded me of the one in Yokohama where I had scraped the shit away and there was a military suggestion about Virginia too. She wore a tweed suit whose jacket was cut in what was called an Eisenhower style, with a biswing back. In everything she did, she impressed me as obeying a mysterious discipline.

  We drove south for about a mile, then turned north again. We did this twice and it was all perfectly solemn. We hardly spoke because of the wind in our ears and because the scene itself imposed a kind of silence. The third time around I noticed that the dog was tiring. His tongue was lolling and his stride had lost some of its grace.

  I wondered how much farther Virginia meant to go. The vibration of the car was getting to my bladder and the dog was so done in that it seemed cruel to keep on. I was going to ask her to stop, but then I realized—I don’t know how, but I knew—that she had forgotten about the dog. She was deciding whether to go home with me or not. Perhaps the car would run out of gas.

  In the end, it was the dog who decided. When I tapped Virginia on the arm and pointed to him, she stopped suddenly, the first break in the perfection of her driving. I thought I would have to lift the dog into the car, but with a last gallant effort he jumped to the canvas. Tired with running after this girl, almost panting myself, I knew how he felt.

  Now, one way or the other, she would have to answer. I rested my case, because I didn’t think it would do any good to try to persuade her. She would follow her own peculiar imperatives.

  The car idled very fast, as if it was nervous. Virginia set the hand brake and then she pulled off her driving gloves. At least, I thought, her hands are naked, it’s a beginning. Then she turned in the seat and stretched out one hand to the dog. She began to pet him, rubbing his ears, his head, his back. She went on rubbing, rubbing him for some time while I sat there gazing at the river shining between the wharves.

  She was asking the dog what to do—what should she do? She was asking him to decide. And he said Yes, you need to run too. The night is made for running. She went home with me because the dog was so graceful, so brave. Perhaps we too would be graceful and brave. In her way Virginia was, though in the two or three months that I saw her she never said anything remotely resembling that remark about the water lapping against her boat.

  The saddest part of sex in those days was the silence. Men and women hadn’t yet learned to talk to one another in a natural way. Girls were trained to listen. They were waiting for history to give them permission to speak. They led waiting lives—waiting for men to ask them out, for them to have an orgasm, to marry or leave them. Their silence was another form of virginity.

  There were all kinds of silences: timid silences, dogged silences, discreet, sullen, watchful, despairing silences, hopeful silences, interrogative silences. In the beginning, in the early stages of knowing a girl, I didn’t mind, because desire was a kind of noise—but afterward, lying in bed, the silence was cold, as if we had no blanket to cover us. There were girls who insisted on kissing all through the act, and I thought of this kissing as a speechless babble.

  I was so depressed by this silence, by the absence of real talk or genuine confiding, that I went around for a while with a deaf and dumb girl. Why not? I said to myself. Why not go all the way? I didn’t know, when I picked her up in the lobby of the New School, that she couldn’t hear. I assumed that her odd speech—the way of someone who has never heard speech—was the accent of a foreign student. It sounded like Arabic.

  When I realized that she had been born this way it seemed like a judgment. I felt that I had reached a logical conclusion. This was the final silence between women and men—why go on pretending? Her hearing aid was in her bra—when she undressed, she was stone deaf. We could only tap each other on the arm. She told me that she heard my voice as a vibration in my chest.

  There was another kind of silence: the silence of the body, not only in sex but in its other functions. I’ve known girls who never, even if they stayed a week at my apartment, had a bowel movement. If orgasm was difficult, excretion was impossible. And so these poor girls would be twice constipated, would have a double bellyache. In my small apartment, the toilet was too near, like the nearness of shame.

  I could see the evidence of this withholding in their clouded eyes, their fading complexions, even their speech patterns. Their faces would get puffy, their bellies would be distended, their bodies knotted. Their sentences would clot as they longed to get away, to let go of it all.

  If I had known how to reassure these girls, or if I had remained with any of them long enough, they might have relaxed and become natural with me, and I with them. But I was driven with restlessness. I was still looking for transfiguration, as I had said to Dr. Schachtel—it was transfiguration or nothing. But transfiguration had to start somewhere, and I never gave it a chance. There was another obstacle, too: I was just learning how to write, I turned everything into literature, and this was something no affair could survive.

  Although their bodies were often beautiful to me and their personalities as appealing as our inhibitions allowed them to be, it was ultimately with girls’ souls that I grappled. No matter what we said or did, I couldn’t get away from their souls. Their souls lay beside us in the bed, watching, sorrowing. Perhaps I needed their souls—there is no other explanation for their inconvenient presence—but I didn’t know what to do with them, any more than I knew what to do with my own.

  I was looking for so much in each girl and she was looking for so much in me, we confused and depressed each other. I think too that I may have muddled sex and literature. The tension and the excitement were so similar that sometimes the two things were as difficult to distinguish as the tolling of distant church bells.

  I remember once I was walking in the street with my friend Milton Klonsky and we were talking seriously, deeply, about books when we passed a wonderful-looking girl. She must have seen the admiration in my face, because she smiled, a little conspiratorial smile. I broke off in the middle of a sentence and ran after her, which enraged Milton. I could never make him understand that, at the moment when she smiled, I saw her as the incarnation of meaning.

  POSTSCRIPT

  When Anatole became ill in 1988, he set aside this memoir to write about his illness and was never able to work on it again. He intended the last part of this book to be about the death of his father. In a letter to his publisher he wrote: “The death of my father was like the end of an era for me, like the 1929 Depression that sent the American expatriates home from Paris. In a way, I had been an expatriate in the Village, living in a style that was essentially foreign to me. I was flying, like a Freudian dream of flying, and the book ends with my attempt to come back down to earth.”

  Although Anatole often talked about his work, I don’t know what was in his mind when he wrote, “the book ends with my attempt to come back down to earth.” Yet I know the stor
y of his life, having been his wife for twenty-nine years, first living in Greenwich Village, then moving to Connecticut, where we raised two children. Anatole, in my view, came back down to earth by becoming a father. He came back down to earth by writing about books for The New York Times, being immersed in literature. Words supported his spirit. And books provided the work that supported his family and home. They were the ballast, the lifeline that gently, gradually, lowered him back down to solid ground through time and through a succession of places—Greens Farms, Fairfield, and Southport, Connecticut; finally Cambridge, Massachusetts; and always in the summers, Martha’s Vineyard. Unlike Icarus, Anatole, who was luminous in his personality, did not fall and hurt himself in his descent.

  His last conversations were about this book—work still to be done. Anatole remains. His spirit lingers, as do his opinions, his prejudices, his stories, his wit. In bringing these writings together, he has been an active collaborator.

  Alexandra Broyard

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  March 1993

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JULY 1997.

  Copyright © 1993 by Alexandra Broyard

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Carol Southern Books, an imprint of Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, in 1996.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Carol Southern Books edition as follows:

  Broyard, Anatole. Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village memoir / by Anatole Broyard.—1st ed. 1. Broyard, Anatole—Homes and haunts—New York (N.Y.) 2. Greenwich Village (New York, N.Y.)—Social life and customs. 3. Greenwich Village (New York, N.Y.)—Intellectual life. 4. Greenwich Village (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. 5. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3552.R7915Z463 1993

  809—dc20

  [B] 93-7830

  eISBN: 978-0-307-75748-7

  Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com

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