Q & A Page 3
Remember this. Remember.
Kenyon stubs out his cigarette. Coffee in one hand, he takes up his valise in the other. “I’d better walk over.” He likes to claim the quiet of the classroom before anyone arrives. Always so many thoughts to put in order, layers to excavate. He wants to be devout about this work. “Sorry I didn’t stop and knock, Dad. Nervous energy, I guess. Let’s ride together tomorrow.”
Behind his coffee, Dad just nods and smiles.
World experience. What did Kenyon mean by that? In his youngest days, he’d harbored an immediate suspicion of the laughter of strangers. Most children do. With Kenny the proportions were tragic. Anyone who laughed was laughing at him and he’d burst into tears. You mustn’t get so upset, Dad would say. Other people’s happiness isn’t at your expense. Maynard Saint Claire would have his boys know that the world is a place of welcome with goodness and laughter to spare. But something inside the boy believed, stubbornly, reflexively, that everything in the world had something to do with him. It was in Europe that Kenyon finally managed to shake these old notions, and when he saw that they’d left him at last, he saw that other things had fallen away with them. In a world where everything concerns you directly, you are prone to injury, yes, but watched over too. He realized in Europe that for all his life he’d felt himself held, assuringly held in the palm of a hand. Life, though sometimes it laughed, would never let him drop. He’d even had a destiny. He’d moved steadily toward it under that benevolent protection. But in Europe—in Paris—he learned how, eventually, if one is to live, one becomes lonely and unprotected—that this is everyone’s lot. Somewhere, finally, the great hand gives way and one finds oneself in free fall.
Kenyon was never supposed to be in Paris at all. He’d fled there from Cambridge, six months into an ill-fitting fellowship. He’d learned in Cambridge that he wasn’t one for the English scholar’s robes or hushed cloisters, all the farm-like intellectual industriousness of those gothic halls and chapels. He’d begun to feel surrounded by the lifelong choir boys of academe. What he wanted to do was live somehow, live and write. He had a novel coming on, his first novel, and he couldn’t get the whiff of the continent out of his curious nostrils. So he fled, first to Sidie’s room in Montparnasse, a girl he’d met on a gallery tour in London.
She lived in a low-ceilinged rear atelier on the Avenue des Gobelins. There was a toilet in the open beside her bed. When one person required its use, the other would wait in the hall, a surprisingly sexy little routine. Kenyon slept the first night on her floor and thereafter they shared her narrow mattress and musty duvet. She made a lithe and lively first lover, and she took clear pleasure in leading him out of his inexperience, teaching him the ways of the body. He would wake with her sweat-scented hair all spilled across his face, straw-yellow hair that clashed pleasingly with her dark and fulsome eyebrows.
She was studying English literature and art, so he was spared speaking French all day. He could read it well enough, but out loud he tended to chew the words. He couldn’t manage to forget that it was a foreign language. He and Sidie never lacked things to talk about. She loved Paris and gladly led him all around. In the Montparnasse cemetery just blocks from her flat stood the plain little grave of Baudelaire, and some mornings they would sit there on the stone ledge beside it with their baguettes, breadcrumbs accumulating for the excitable little birds. He walked with Sidie to the Sorbonne, he wandered amid the giants in the dusty crypt of the Panthéon, he went up and down in the rue Mouffetard, the air thick with the smell of roasted chicken. He loitered under the slanting houses in the Place de Contrescarpe and in the shady bandstands of the Luxembourg Gardens, poked at the mildewed volumes of the Left Bank booksellers. He was like Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors, a surprised child. Nowhere else had he ever felt the developed interior world of civilization expressed so naturally in the daily setting and rounds.
The air had a taste as of something mixed with art, something that presented nature as a white-capped master-chef.
He did not carry James’s book with him, but he had the words by heart. And somewhere there, also in his mind, was the voice of Bill Westhouse, his old professor at Saint John’s, lecturing on James’s late novel: “Now gentlemen, it is well you recognize that these Paris marvels are a cliché. The loveliness of the Tuileries—and they are lovely. The grandeur of Notre Dame—and it is grand. By themselves, even collectively, they are a magnificent surface—and surface only. It is what one does with them. It is, as in all things, how one sees that matters.”
More than once, Kenyon went with Sidie to the Old Navy or the Café Dome, where they would wait over smoky coffees for Sartre to waddle in. Even in the present, their own time, this place went on happening. The lights were lit. The books were open. If this was Paris, what was Europe at large?
Kenyon had started his novel. He’d been in Sidie’s room two and a half weeks, and they could go on forever, god knows. In bed, she would give him her fingers to suck—his tongue pressing the bulb of each salty knuckle one by one to the roof of his mouth. She would turn and give him the smooth cleaved peach of her rump, shivering when he kissed the back of her neck, the downy darkness at her hairline there. In her building was a single-occupant elevator, a little slow-moving booth of glass that the open stairway encircled, and they made a small ritual of Kenyon’s climbing the stairs around her as she glided upward, Sidie rotating on her heels inside the glass to watch him, their eyes on each other all the way to the fourth floor. He was hardly aware of his own efforts, didn’t notice his reflection laboring up the steps. And then, in her bed behind her door, they were always ready.
It was this way between them—or he believed so—until the day she started pressing him for money. He didn’t understand at first—he thought them little quips, these comments about all she’d given him.
—Haven’t I provided for you?
—I’ll give you something for the rent, yes.
—And for my bed? My body?
Finally he saw that she’d mistaken him for a son of rich Americans. He did give her a little money, as much as he could spare, but now their time together was tainted. Or rather, he’d come to understand what she’d expected all along. He’d known she had other lovers. She’d never pretended this wasn’t so. He’d thought of her as a teacher—her body teaching and teaching generously—he’d believed himself her pupil in some pure form of tutelage. Now he understood how blind that was, how blind they’d been to each other.
And his novel was growing, so he found a room of his own in the rue de Seine. His concierge, a faded little lady in a flowered frock, sympathized with his aims, or maybe pitied him for them. She said she had a daughter in America, a writer like him. The girl had gone to California to write, she’d told her mother, because in Paris, in Europe, so much had already been done. Which was, Kenyon reflected, exactly what had brought him here.
In his room was a bed, a table, a tiny stove, and a sink. The plaster of the walls was flaking away. He would brush it into little piles every other day. The windowsill had rotted in the weather. There were rats, and slimy droppings from other vermin, and a minor pestilence of fleas. But he told himself he would write in the cafés, the gardens, the library. The days were cold. Out walking, his hands and feet would often grow numb. Settling in on a park bench with notebook and pen was soon out of the question. And soon the cafés, too, cost more than he could spend. That left the library. But even enshrouded in the library’s delicious quietude, he found he couldn’t divest his thoughts of the lures of the city outside. Also preying on his attentions were the unknown lures of the continent. What must Vienna be like? Or Czechoslovakia. Or Istanbul. He’d stopped seeing Sidie altogether. He roamed the arrondissements, a nominal writer in shabby clothes, a hungry, writerly sponge soaking up all that he saw. The novel was started, and it persisted in his mind, troublesome, indeterminate. What would it take to write it? When would he really feel a sense of purchas
e on life to make that possible?
He’d developed some painful sores behind his zipper.
He hadn’t written to his family. They knew only that he’d left Cambridge and gone to Europe—that much he’d told them.
Alone in this chilled and beautiful city, ministering to his sores and wishing he could write, he now began to feel he was waiting out the weather. Haunting his thoughts were all those characters in literature who live in little hovels and die of the cold. He tried to put them out of mind. At the table in his small room, cloaked in a coarse woolen blanket, he ate spaghetti and read books and thought about his novel. In what he’d written so far he saw that somehow, shockingly, he’d fixed on the idea of patricide. There were allusions to Oedipus in the father’s house, to Isaac seizing the stone, the knife, the axe, and turning, right there at the altar, upon Abraham—and upon the old man’s damned angel too.
He still resisted wiring his parents. Whatever venereal sickness he might have, however quickly he might starve once his money ran out, he didn’t want to be located. Why? He hardly knew, but it was like a conviction within him. What was he up to in Europe? Of how many young Americans has this question been asked? Was he hiding?—hoping, even as he wrote, that somehow his own ideas would not find him?
One day in Paris, in his sometime diary, he wrote:
Now and then you’ll hear people say, “So and so seems to be doing very well for himself. Did you hear? He’s moved to Rome or Paris, someplace, and he’s writing a book.”
No one ever knows how anyone is doing, of course.
We are all uncreditable and delusional voyeurs.
We never know.
In the end his novel remained unfinished. George had come to Paris and brought him home. And in all that time abroad, had Kenyon lived?
SIDNEY
Sidney Winfeld is inside the door that’s inside the door of 667 Madison Ave. Midday in Manhattan and look here: tonic water and cherry in hand, he’s perched on the couch in the master office of Mint & Greenmarch, Inc. Three weeks running he’s been on the air, three consecutive Tuesdays he’s glided past the concierge up the elevator and past the secretary into this room at the heart of it all, to stand on Mr. Greenmarch’s—Ray’s—Persian carpet shaking the man’s hand, take position on the silvery-green corduroy of the couch, receive a glass clinking with ice, and talk details, nuance, the finer points.
From a drawer in the gleaming frigate of his desk Greenmarch brings out the blue question cards. Turning them in his hands, he settles himself in the low-slung leather chair adjacent to the couch. Behind him the large window is a frame, the windows in the opposite building his backdrop, rectangular glass portals stacked in columns and rows. Beside the window, in a frame of its own, hangs a headshot of Lucille Ball. Across her brow runs the black valance of a wig, black pigtails covering her ears. She’s doing her crazy lady disguise, her smile huge and toothless in front.
“That’s new,” says Sidney. “Do you know Lucy?”
Greenmarch glances over his shoulder. “No. I mean yes, who doesn’t, but no. Now Sid, you’ve got your continuity cards by now, haven’t you?”
“Mm-hm, Mister Lacky had ’em ready for me after last week’s program.”
“Fine. Although in future you won’t get them so early. Better we have till Tuesday, to allow for putting in reference to very current things. That means, of course, you’ll only have a day to memorize before broadcast.”
“Sure thing, Ray. My memory’s not so shabby anyway.” In future, are the man’s words. Meaning, Sidney realizes with a shiver of joy, that they’re keeping him.
“All right then, I’ll speak to Mister Lacky.”
“Oh, and Ray, I’d like to correct a little thing on the cards, which is where Mister Mint comments how Sid Winfeld hits the books every night. It isn’t the books so much, you see, as it is my photographic memory.”
“These are production decisions, Sid. The chitchat on the cards is strictly for Mister Mint, Mister Lacky, and myself to decide.”
“I thought I’d bring it up is all.”
“Well, there’s no need. Now Sid, we’ve only got a little time and we need to talk mannerisms. For instance, with a three or four part question, don’t ever take the parts all in a row, OK? That’s flat. It gives us nothing to watch, see. What we need from you is to always leave one part out, something to struggle with. In other words, say you take the first part, second, leave out the third, take the fourth. Then when you come back to the second—”
“The third,” says Sidney.
“What?”
“You said leave out the third, so you mean when I come back to the third.”
“Sure, fine, when you come back to it—”
“Not the second.”
“Look, Sid, it doesn’t matter third or fourth—”
“Second or third.”
“Excuse me?”
“Second or third is what we were saying, not third or fourth.”
“Sid, look, I appreciate your exactitude, but let’s make sure you’re getting my point, which is to say that it’s all in the indecision. Got that? I need you to be indecisive and I’m going to tell you how. Do this for me now, Sid, OK? Close your eyes.”
“What? Here?”
“Yes, put down your glass.”
Sidney sets his tonic water and cherry on the lacquered wooden coaster on the end table, sits back in the couch, tugs at his lapels, shuts his eyes.
“Now Sid, I’m gonna ask you Part Three, and before you answer I want you to squeeze your eyes tight, count to six, and mumble all the answers over again one at a time on your fingers. Ready? Here’s Part Three. Name the mythological beast of the ancient Greeks that was part lion, part goat, and part serpent.”
“Oh, that’s the Chimera.”
“No, Sid—”
“But Ray, I’m quite sure that it is.”
“Sid, please. Please. Squeeze the eyes, count to six, mumble.”
“Even if I know the answer, you’re saying?”
“People don’t want you to know everything, Sid. This is the point.”
“I know what I know, Ray.”
“Of course. But we’re making television here. Will you close your eyes again please? OK. Listen, in this case you’d still say Chimera, which is correct. You still get the points, the cash, all that. I only want you to slow it down, think it out in a way we can watch.”
“You mean pretend to think it out, like acting.”
“Bingo.”
“Well, I guess I know something about that.”
“We all do, Sid, we all do.”
“So, Lucy—she an inspiration or what?”
Greenmarch sighs. He drops the blue cards in his lap. Two-handed, he removes his glasses, like they’re very heavy or delicate. He palms his forehead, drags his hand over his eyes, nose, mouth, chin. “You wanna know what Lucy is? I’ll tell you what Lucy is. Lucy is Number One.”
Greenmarch speaks with nauseated quietness, under some kind of duress, glasses dangling in one hand.
“Five years she’s been Number One,” he says. “Her viewership shot from ten to fifty million in her first three years on air. When Little Ricky was born? The number watching was twice the number as watched Eisenhower’s inauguration.”
For Greenmarch these facts are gut-rotting, rote.
“Lucy has made television the biggest thing in the world. And you know what that means? It means whoever is Number One on television, there’s nobody bigger. Anywhere. Nobody.”
Greenmarch replaces his glasses, and now there’s a razor-like glint in the lenses. He seems refortified and coiled to spring. “And that picture, you know what I like about it?” he says, though it hangs behind him, out of his sight, as he turns his attention back to the cards. “She’s had her fucking teeth knocked out, is what I like.”
“We call it trivia but it’s not trivial at all. I say that it’s better to know something about everything than everything about something.”
KENYON
Kenyon feels restless, undeniably ill at ease, whenever he finds himself in a house whose walls are not conspicuously lined with books. This apartment is such a place. He’s come for dinner at the invitation of his old friend Clover, a mutual acquaintance. She secured him a brief writing job back in the spring, a pamphlet for the U.S. Information Agency to be entitled What is American Culture? It proved easy enough to write, he recalls, and paid reasonably well considering. He’d had the pleasure of citing Carlyle (The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was capable of being) and making reference to Stevenson’s The Amateur Emigrant, where the Scotsman said: Culture is not measured by the greatness of the field which is covered by our knowledge, but by the nicety with which we can perceive relations in the field, whether great or small. Tonight would be, as Clover had put it, a gathering of television and movie people, and might prove interesting if not helpful to him. “They’re always looking for writers, these folks.”
Arriving, Kenyon learned that Clover herself would not be present. “In absentia,” said his hostess, “she’s offered us your company, Mister Saint Claire.” The hostess wears a smart collared shirt and beaded necklace and her gestures are quick and graceful. He understands this vaguely familiar woman to be an actress of some kind. An air of practice in everything she does. “You’re a marvelous writer, Clover tells us.”
She’d led him in among the guests, the roomy apartment packed and chattering, and soon he was turning here and there holding a wine glass and shaking hands. He knew nobody, though it seemed they all knew one another, and he’d arrived several minutes too late: everyone in mid-conversation. He began drifting about, the interloper, wishing there were bookshelves on which to train his focus. It’s an urbane and moneyed crowd, the women in wraps and bangles, with Audrey Hepburn hair, the men’s shoes impeccable. In his professor suit Kenyon feels dowdy and defensive. There seem to be, even amid the evening repartee, deals in the making.