Call me Reb! Those were Sid Essen’s parting words.
Such exquisite torture, this writing humbuggery! Bughouse reveries mixed with choking fits and what the Swedes call mardrommen. Squat images roped with diamond tiaras. Baroque architecture. Cabalistic logarithms. Mezuzahs and prayer-wheels. Portentous phrases. (Let no one, said the auk, look upon this man with favor!) Skies of blue-green copper, filagreed with lacy striata; umbrella ribs, obscene graffiti. Balaam the ass licking his hind parts. Weasels spouting nonsense. A sow menstruating…
All because, as she once put it, I had the chance of a lifetime.
Sometimes I sailed into it with huge black wings. Then everything came out pell-mell and arsey-versy. Pages and pages. Reams of it. None of it belonged in the novel. Nor even in The Book of Perennial Gloom. Reading them over I had the impression of examining an old print: a room in a medieval dwelling, the old woman sitting on the pot, the doctor standing by with red hot tongs, a mouse creeping toward a piece of cheese in the corner near the crucifix. A ground-floor view, so to speak. A chapter from the history of everlasting misery. Depravity, insomnia, gluttony posing as the three graces. All described in quicksilver, benzine and potassium permanganate.
Another day my hands might wander over the keys with the felicity of a Borgia’s murderous paw. Choosing the staccato technique, I would ape the quibblers and quipsters of the Ghibellines. Or put it on, like a saltimbanque performing for a feeble-minded monarch.
The next day a quadruped: everything in hoof beats, clots of phlegm, snorts and farts. A stallion (ech!) racing over a frozen lake with torpedoes in his bowels. All bravura, so to say.
And then, as when the hurricane abates, it would flow like a song—quietly, evenly, with the steady lustre of magnesium. As if hymning the Bhagavad Gita. A monk in a saffron robe extolling the work of the Omniscient One. No longer a writer. A saint. A saint from the Sanhedrin sent. God bless the author! (Have we a David here?)
What a joy it was to write like an organ in the middle of a lake!
Bite me, you bed lice! Bite while I have the strength!
I didn’t call him Reb immediately. I couldn’t. I always said—Mr. Essen. And he always called me Mister Miller. But if one had overheard us talking one would think we had known each other a lifetime.
I was trying to explain it to Mona one evening while lying on the couch. It was a warm evening and we were taking it nice and easy. With a cool drink beside me and Mona moving about in her short Chinese shift, I was in the mood to expand. (I had written a few excellent pages that day, moreover.)
The monologue had begun, not about Sid Essen and his morgue of a shop which I had visited the day before, but about a certain devastating mood which used to take possession of me every time the elevated train swung round a certain curve. The urge to talk about it must have come over me because that black mood contrasted so strongly with the present one, which was unusually serene. Pulling round that curve I could look right into the window of the flat where I first called on the widow … when I was paying court to her. Every week a pleasant sort of chap, a Jew not unlike Sid Essen, used to call to collect a dollar or a dollar and thirty-five cents for the furniture she was buying on the instalment plan. If she didn’t have it he would say, All right, next week then. The poverty, the cleanliness, the sterility of that life was more depressing to me than a life in the gutter. (It was here that I made my first attempt to write. With a stump of a pencil, I remember well. I didn’t write more than a dozen lines—enough to convince me that I was absolutely devoid of talent.) Every day going to and from work I took that same elevated train, rode past those same wooden houses, experienced the same annihilating black mood. I wanted to kill myself, but I lacked the guts. Nor could I walk out on her. I had tried but with no success. The more I struggled to free myself the more I was bound. Even years later, when I had freed myself of her, it would come over me rounding that curve.
How do you explain it? I asked. It was almost as if I had lefts a part of me in the walls of that house. Some part of me never freed itself.
She was seated on the floor, propped against a leg of the table. She looked cool and relaxed. She was in a mood to listen. Now and then she put me a question—about the widow—which women usually avoid asking. I had only to lean over a bit and I could put my hand on her cunt.
It was one of those outstanding evenings when everything conspires to promote harmony and understanding, when one talks easily and naturally, even to a wife, about intimate things. No hurry to get anywhere, not even to have a good fuck, though the thought of it was constantly there, hovering above the conversation.
I was looking back now on that Lexington Avenue Elevated ride as from some future incarnation. It not only seemed remote, it seemed unthinkable. Never again would that particular kind of gloom and despair attack me, that I was certain of.
Sometimes I think it was because I was so innocent. It was impossible for me to believe that I could be trapped that way. I suppose I would have been better off, would have suffered less, if I had married her, as I wanted to do. Who knows? We might have been happy for a few years.
You always say, Val, that it was pity which held you, but I think it was love. I think you really loved her. After all, you never quarreled.
I couldn’t. Not with her. That’s what had me at a disadvantage. I can still recall how I felt when I would stop, as I did every day, to gaze at her photograph—in a shop window. There was such a look of sorrow in her eyes, it made me wince. Day after day I went back to look into her eyes, to study that sad expression, to wonder at the cause of it. And then, after we had known each other some time, I would see that look come back into her eyes … usually after I had hurt her in some foolish, thoughtless way. That look was far more accusing, far more devastating, than any words…
Neither of us spoke for a while. The warm, fragrant breeze rustled the curtains. Downstairs the phonograph was playing. And I shall offer up unto thee, O Israel … As I listened I stretched out my hand and gently ran my fingers across her cunt.
I didn’t mean to go into all this, I resumed. It was about Sid Essen I wanted to speak. I paid him a visit yesterday, at his shop. The most forlorn, lugubrious place you ever laid eyes on. And huge. There he sits all day long reading or, if a friend happens by, he will play a game of chess. He tried to load me with gifts—shirts, socks, neckties, anything I wished. It was difficult to refuse him. As you said, he’s a lonely soul. It’ll be a job to keep out of his clutches … Oh, but I almost forgot what I started to tell you. What do you suppose I found him reading?
Dostoievsky!
No, guess again.
Knut Hamsun.
No. Lady Murasaki—The Tale of Genji. I can’t get over it. Apparently he reads everything. The Russians he reads in Russian, the Germans in German. He can read Polish too, and Yiddish of course.
Pop reads Proust.
He does? Well, anyway, do you know what he’s itching to do? Teach me how to drive a car. He has a big eight-cylindered Buick he’d like to lend us just as soon as I know how to drive. Says he can teach me in three lessons.
But why do you want to drive?
I don’t, that’s it. But he thinks it would be nice if I took you for a spin occasionally.
Don’t do it, Val. You’re not meant to drive a car.
That’s just what I told him. It would be different if he had offered me a bike. You know, it would be fun to get a bike again.
She said nothing.
You don’t seem enthusiastic about it, I said.
I know you, Val. If you get a bike you won’t work any more.
Maybe you’re right. Anyway, it was a pleasant thought. Besides, I’m getting too old to ride a bike.
Too old? She burst out laughing. You. too old? I can see you burning up the cinders at eighty. You’re another Bernard Shaw. You’ll never be too old for anything.
I will if I have to write more novels. Writing takes it out of one, do you realize that? Tell Pop that some time. Does he think you work at it eight hours a day, I wonder?
He doesn’t think about such things, Val.
Maybe not, but he must wonder about you. It’s rare indeed for a beautiful woman to be a writer too.
She laughed. Pop’s no fool. He knows I’m not a born writer. All he wants me to prove is that I can
