Kafka Was the Rage Page 6

  As I came awake, it seemed that there was something altered in the room. There was a thinness in the air, a note of sibilance or shrillness, a faint medicinal edge, like the smell of dry cleaning on clothes. Though I couldn’t identify it, it was not unpleasant; I didn’t mind it. I noticed too that the light was on in the kitchen—it spilled halfway to the bed. I thought that Sheri must be in there, and I got up to see what she was doing.

  When I stood up, the smell was stronger, but it didn’t mean anything to me because novels are full of the smells of tenements. Then, as I reached the kitchen door, I saw Sheri.

  She was sitting on a chair, a wooden kitchen chair. She was naked—we slept naked—and her bare feet rested on the dirty linoleum. Her knees were together and her arms hung down on either side of the chair, which she had pulled over to the stove. She leaned a little to one side to rest her head on the top of the stove, where she had folded a towel for a pillow.

  All the gas jets were open. I could hear them hissing—or not exactly hissing, but whispering, emanating. My first thought, of course, was to turn them off, but I hesitated. She had taught me not to be so enthusiastic. To turn them off right away would be to miss the point. There had to be a point to what she was doing. The chair, the towel folded on the stove, the gas—they had to mean something.

  Of course it was all like a dream—it had the odd, insistent details of a dream—and I needed to assure myself that I was awake. Then I looked at Sheri to see if she was all right, if she was breathing, but it was difficult to say—everything about the scene was difficult. Her eyes were open and her expression was placid—you’d never have supposed that gas was streaming out a few inches from her face. In fact, she looked like the people in medieval paintings who held their heads on one side—impassive and abstracted. While it occurred to me that she might be in danger, I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that she could breathe gas.

  Though I could hear it, though it seemed to be streaming into the room, I was less worried about the gas than I was about getting the point. I gathered myself up and tried to concentrate. I took a deep breath, inhaling the gas, holding it in my lungs like smoke. I took in Sheri’s naked body, too, the small breasts and heavy legs, the pallor. I felt the entire apartment thrumming in my head—the dishes in the sink, the dirt on the floor, the paintings on the walls. I could see without looking up the stamped tin ceiling and the plain sheet of tin I had nailed over a hole where a rat had come out.

  Standing in the doorway, leaning on the cold jamb, I felt a sudden wash or swoosh of sadness, as if our love was a stove and she was letting all our gas run out. She didn’t care about the waste; it didn’t touch her. The smell was very strong now and I remembered that she loved to talk about death; she was always comparing things to it, saying that this or that was like death.

  She had goose pimples on her skin, and when I looked at my own naked flesh, I saw that I had them, too. Look, I said, we both have goose pimples. I wanted her to see that I was calm, that I could speak in a clear voice. Yet I felt lonely to the point of madness.

  I was trying to catch her eye, to make her see me. If she saw me, perhaps she would reconsider, she would turn off the gas herself She would remember that we had an arrangement, she had invited me to come and live with her. I thought that if she saw me, she might grow nostalgic.

  But that was a sentimental idea. The gas was making me sentimental—it was time to turn it off. I threw open all the windows, then I picked her up and carried her to the bed. Think how charming you could be, I said, if you chose to speak. But I knew she wouldn’t speak. She never spoke when I wanted her to, only when it didn’t matter. I composed myself to sleep because I couldn’t think of anything else to do; she tired me out. And as I was dozing off I thought that soon I would have to leave her.

  11

  When I left Sheri I had nowhere to go but Brooklyn. Apartments were still hard to find. Everyone was looking for a place in the Village, like people looking for love. But the last thing I wanted was to return to Brooklyn, even for a little while. I had tasted the city, and I would never be the same. To go back home made me feel like a character in one of those novels reviewers describe as shuttling back and forth in time. I’ve always disliked those novels.

  My parents didn’t know about Sheri, so I told them I’d had a three-month sublet and now I was looking for a permanent place. They said yes, of course, they understood that I needed an apartment of my own—I was a veteran now. I don’t know what the word meant to them, but they used it all the time. They were forever saying, “You’re a veteran now,” as if that explained everything, as if I had been killed in the war and this veteran had come back in my place. They were still thinking about the war, but I had already forgotten it. I was a veteran of Sheri, and the war was nothing to me now.

  When I first came back from the army, I had seen Brooklyn as a quiet place, a safe place. Now, after living with Sheri in the Village, I didn’t see it at all, I walked through Brooklyn without looking, without curiosity. I could only remember being a child there.

  I had closed the bookshop. For the first time in my life, I felt a distaste for books. I think it was because my experience with Sheri reminded me too much of the books in the shop. Sheri and I were like a story by a young novelist who had been influenced by Kafka. Everyone was influenced by Kafka in those days. People in the Village used the word Kafkaesque the way my parents used veteran.

  But without the shop, I had nothing to do all day. I wandered around the Village, ringing superintendents’ bells, asking about apartments. I sat in Washington Square, watched children skating, pigeons begging, the sun going down. Sometimes I rode on top of the Fifth Avenue bus to 110th Street and back. I didn’t want to see any of the people I knew in the Village because they reminded me of Sheri and I knew they would ask me about her.

  Then, just when I needed something to do, my friend Milton Klonsky asked me to collaborate with him on a piece he had been asked to write for Partisan Review. The piece was on modern jazz, a subject neither Milton nor the editors of Partisan knew anything about. Since I had always been interested in jazz, Milton suggested that I write the first draft and he would rewrite it. What he meant was that I’d supply the facts and he’d turn them into prose.

  It never even occurred to me to resent this arrangement—I was awed by Partisan Review and flattered by Milton’s offer. I had never written anything but notes to myself. I was always scribbling on little pads I carried around, jotting down ideas, phrases, images. Half of the young men in the Village were writing such notes. They wrote them in cafes, in the park, even on the street. You’d see them stop and pull out their pads or notebooks to jot down something that had just struck them—the color of the sky, the bend of a street, an incongruity. These notes were postcards to literature that we never mailed.

  I took Milton’s proposal very seriously. I would go upstairs in my parents’ house and listen to jazz for hours, playing records over and over. It suited my mood, which was like the lyrics of a blues song. I had always liked old jazz—from Louis Armstrong to Lester Young—but I hadn’t made up my mind about Charlie Parker, who was everybody’s hero at that time. While he could be brilliant, I found in Parker’s style a hint of the garrulousness that would soon come over black culture.

  Also, it seemed to me that jazz relied too much on improvisation to be a full-fledged art form. Nobody could be that good on the spur of the moment. And there was too much cuteness in jazz. It stammered and strained. It took its sentimentality for wisdom.

  I tried to imagine what Meyer Schapiro would say about jazz. Was it like Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a fracturing of music, like the splitting of the atom? But there was something momentous, something world-shaking, about the Demoiselles that jazz didn’t have. It seemed to me that jazz was just folk art. It might be terrific folk art, but it was still only local and temporary.

  I found a parallel for jazz not in Schapiro’s class but in Gregory Bateson’s. Bateson loved to tell
stories, and he told them very well. He was in New Guinea, he said, living with the Iatmul tribe, sleeping in a thatched hut on tall stilts, when one morning he was awakened at daybreak by a sound of drumming. He got up and looked out and saw a lone man walking beneath the clustered huts of the village, beating a drum. He walked in a curious way, this man, in a sawtooth pattern—not turning around to keep to his pattern but stepping backward, heels first. And in counterpoint to his drumming, he chanted a sad, staccato recitative.

  Bateson learned that this man had suffered a grievance that he could not get settled. The tribe had rejected his plea for redress and so he got up every morning and rehearsed his complaint to the village. He tried to wake them, to disturb their rest, invade their dreams. Thinking about jazz, I remembered this man and I thought that jazz musicians were something like that.

  I was still going to the New School, which seemed to be proof against my mood of disillusionment. My classes met three nights a week and I attended them with a somewhat more dispassionate air than before. It was on one of these nights, after a session with Meyer Schapiro, that I came home to Brooklyn, to find Sheri sitting on my mother’s lap.

  I was so struck by this sight that I felt as if I had butted against a glass door, the way people sometimes do when they don’t see it. Sheri and my mother made such a grotesque picture that I thought for a moment I was back in Schapiro’s class, looking at Guernica or a de Kooning.

  They were in an armchair in the family room. Sheri was sitting not with my mother in the chair, or beside her, but on her. She was perched on her lap, as a bird perches. In spite of her slenderness, Sheri was much bigger than my mother, who looked like a child beneath her. It was like an adult sitting in a child’s lap. Because of the way Sheri slanted across her, only my mother’s head and shoulders showed; she peered out from behind Sheri. My father was in a love seat across the room.

  They were looking at an album of photographs, our family album. I knew those pictures all too well. I could see them in my mind’s eye, my sisters and myself posed against chimneys and cornices on black tar rooftops. Sometimes, in one corner of the picture, clothes fluttered on a line, because people still hung clothes on the roof to dry in those days. My father took us up there because he thought he needed more light; he tortured us with light. When the pictures came out, we looked helpless and blind, like deer caught in the high beams of a car.

  This was before people learned to take advantage of the camera, to show it only their best side. The light in our family album was like the glare of truth; there were no shadows in it, just as there are none in the photographs on driver’s licenses. It paled our faces and darkened our eyes, almost gave us wrinkles. My father—for it was he who always took the pictures—caught us red-handed and barefaced. We looked at the camera as if it was to be our last look, now or never. Because these pictures seemed to me to be absolute, artless, and true, I didn’t want Sheri to see them. To see them would be to know too much about me. If she saw me, me as a child, she would molest that child.

  I wanted to take the album away from her, but how could I? I couldn’t even talk to her under the circumstances. God knows what I would have said, and how she would have replied. All I could do was watch her and try to keep her in some kind of bounds. Sitting next to my father on the love seat, I gazed at her pale, heavy, unstockinged legs with a mixture of apprehension and desire.

  My mother was at her worst, almost helpless, in ambiguous situations. She couldn’t improvise. She was a planner; she liked to count. I could see that she was nervous with Sheri on her lap; she was gulping for air. Yet I was afraid to interfere. As long as I let her sit on my mother’s lap, Sheri would behave up to a point.

  My father was, in all things, deliberately different from my mother. He saw himself as a man of great aplomb, equal to any occasion. In the French Quarter, he had been a popular figure, a noted raconteur, a former beau, a crack shot, a dancer, a bit of a boxer. Now he was looking at Sheri with a show of astuteness. He was a builder and he studied her as if she were a blueprint. I had often seen him poring over blueprints, because it was his job to take them from the architect and translate them into practical terms for the carpenters, plasterers, bricklayers, and painters. He would bring the blueprints home and make a great show of rescuing the building from the architect, whom he always represented as a mere boy.

  What did he think of Sheri? I wondered. How did he see her? Was she another piece of architectural foolishness, a schoolboy’s idea of a woman? He must have found her flimsy; he would have used more lathes, more plaster, more material. He had once told me that he liked Floradora girls, around 180 pounds.

  The room was filled with examples of my father’s taste. It was his hobby to make furniture on the weekends in his workshop in the basement. He was always turning out end tables, side tables, and coffee tables. They were beautifully made, indistinguishable from the better furniture in stores, except that there was something heavy or chunky in their design, as if they were meant to be used by Floradora girls. They were too sturdy-looking, too indestructible. You felt they would last forever, that they would bury you.

  Giving my father’s pieces away was my mother’s hobby. As soon as he made a new table, she gave away one of the old ones. The neighborhood was saturated with his tables; by now my mother was giving them to near strangers.

  Because of the way Sheri talked, my mother assumed that she was a foreigner. She spoke to Sheri slowly and distinctly, without a trace of her strong New Orleans accent. She even began to sound a bit like Sheri. Anatole loved to play, she said. When he was a little boy, he was always playing. Carried away by the family album, she embarked on a history of my childhood.

  I was waiting for my father to speak. I believe that he too took Sheri for a foreigner, and I expected him to come out in French or Spanish. He once told me that he had learned Spanish in Mexico when he was a young man. But he didn’t speak to Sheri at all; he was uncharacteristically silent. His eyes were narrowed and his lips pursed, as if he was meditating or shaping a thought, but he never said what it was. Perhaps it was Sheri’s position in my mother’s lap that put him off. He had changed his attitude and was looking at the two of them in a dreamy sort of way. Unless you kept him busy, he was always dreaming off.

  He was not really a conversationalist—what he liked was to tell stories. He fancied himself as an observer, a commentator, a satirist. He was always telling anecdotes. But he couldn’t seem to find an anecdote in his repertoire to tell to Sheri. He couldn’t classify her.

  He should never have left New Orleans, but my mother nagged him into it. He had left the French Quarter a popular man, but he got off the train in Pennsylvania Station, to find snow falling and no one there waiting for him. He lived in New York under protest, a protest he never admitted even to himself. He was ashamed to think that he had been pressured into leaving the city he loved.

  We had to leave because my grandfather, my father’s father, kept seizing our life savings. He was the best-known builder in the French Quarter and he would take a down payment on a job and spend it on horses or women. Then when he had to buy materials, he would seize our life savings. He had persuaded his four sons to give him power of attorney, but my father would have given him the money anyway. And of course he never paid it back.

  My father couldn’t get accustomed to New York City. Once, for example, he had a man on the job, sent to him by the carpenter’s union, who didn’t know how to hang a door. My father couldn’t understand how a man who didn’t know how to hang a door could hire himself out as a carpenter. But when he sent the man home, the union sent him back. Perhaps now, as he looked at her, he was wondering whether I could send Sheri home.

  He shifted on the love seat so that he was wedged into one corner. He looked uncomfortable now, strained. He was squinting and his head was pulled back in a peculiar way. It was an odd attitude and yet it was familiar, another image from our album. I could see this image clearly because my mind was abnormally alert.
Sheri’s presence in the room electrified me and it took me only a minute to go back twenty years and identify that expression on my father’s face. It was his “walking on his hands” look.

  When we lived in New Orleans, my father would sometimes walk on his hands. A spirit would seize him and he would throw himself down as if he was diving, and then all of a sudden he would be standing on his hands. On a Saturday afternoon when people brought rocking chairs out in front of their houses and everyone was feeling sociable and relaxed, my father would go down on his hands and walk over to one of his friends on the block. Though they would laugh, nobody seemed to think this was strange. Men were more simply physical in those days, athletic in odd ways. Once, on a bet, my father walked all the way around the block on his hands.

  The first time I saw my father on his hands, when I was only two or three, I was terrified. It was as if he had turned the whole world upside down. I was afraid he was never going to get back on his feet again, that he had decided he liked it better down there on his hands, like a dog. He had a funny way of looking at us, too, from down there—not inverted, with his eyes at the bottom of his face, as I had expected at first, but peering up, his head thrown back until it seemed to rest on his shoulder blades. It was this looking up that frightened me so, because the veins in his neck stood out as if they’d burst.

  Standing on his hands put a lot of strain in his face. He strained and smiled at the same time, and I thought he was like a monstrous spider scuttling along the ground. Now, wedged into the corner of the couch, he was looking at Sheri this way, as if he was standing on his hands, his neck arched and his head rearing.

  Anatole loved to go to school, my mother was saying. According to her, I loved everything. Could it be true? Until I refused to wear it, she sent me to school in a pongee shirt with a ruffled collar. He hated to miss a day of school, she said. One time when he had a cold, I kept him home and he cried and cried.