Pitch Dark

                                    I. ORCAS ISLAND We were running flat out. The opening was dazzling. Themiddle was dazzling. The ending was dazzling. It was like a steeplechasecomposed entirely of hurdles. But that would not be a steeplechase at all. It would be morelike a steep, steep climb. They were shouting, Tell it, big momma, tell it. I mean, thechild is only six years old. Do I need to stylize it, then, or can I tell it as it was? He knew that she had left him when she began to smoke again. Look here, you know, I loved you. I wonder whether he will ever ask himself, say to himself, Well,she wasn't asking all the earth, why did I let her go?  My back went up, Viola Teagarden used to say, with a littlethrill of self-importance, pride and pleasure, head raised, nostrilsHaring, back straightening slightly, as though she had received asmall electric charge right through her chair. My back went up. She also spoke with a kind of awe of what she called "my anger," asthough it were a living, prized possession, a thoroughbred bull, forinstance, to be used at stud, or as a man who has married a beautiful,unpredictably unpleasant woman, far richer and younger thanhimself, might say "my wife." Leander Dworkin, too, though hehardly knew Viola and in fact despised her, had what he called "myrage." It resembled, sometimes a hothouse of imaginary grievancesunder lavish cultivation, sometimes a pulse which he measuredconstantly to see whether, with whom, and to what degree he mustbe angry, sometimes a source of astonishment and pleasure, sometimesjust a horse to be taken for a canter or a gallop on the moors.In times of rage, he wanted nothing to distract or mollify him. Evenflattery, for which his appetite was otherwise undiscriminating andenormous, would infuriate him on his way to an apotheosis. A fewpeople humored him in this. They were his friends. Inevitably,it was with one or more of these few friends that he was angry—asource, at first, always of distress, since he broke off with words asharsh as they were capricious, and then, for the long quiet intervalthat followed, of relief. To begin with, I almost went, alone, to Graham Island. He thought of himself, even spoke of himself, as extraordinarilyhandsome. His hair, which grew to collar length, was reddish. Hishairline was receding; his eyes, which blinked constantly over hiscontact lenses, were the palest blue. Though he was by no means astrikingly ugly man, the source of his belief in his physical beautyseemed to lie in this: that he was tall. Leander Dworkin was theamplifying poet. ·Willie Stokes was the poet of compression. Bothtaught poetry, and wrote novels, when we were in graduate school.We met in two improbable seminars, taught by great men. Notionsof Paradise, and Sound in Literature. The first was literary utopias,essentially; the second, onomatopoeia. Both were so crowded at thestart that students had to be selected on the basis of some claim ofspecial knowledge. In Paradise, that year, we had one grandson ofOneida, one nun, one believer in the Skinner box, some studentsof Rousseau, the Constitution, Faust and Plato, and one participantin experiments with a new drug, psylocybin, under the guidanceof Leary and Alpert, two young instructors in psychology. In Sound,I remember just one specialist, a pale, dark-haired Latin scholar,who rocked continuously in his chair whenever he read us onomatopoeticphrases he had found among the classics. The murmuring ofinnumerable bees in immemorial elms; l'insecte nette gratte lasecheresse. Fairly late in the semester, when we were asked whatour papers were going to be about, this young man said he wantedto write about the sound of corpses floating through literature. Oh,the professor said, with some enthusiasm, after just a moment's hesitation,you mean Ophelia. No, the young man replied, I want thesound of the sea. To begin with, I almost went, instead, to Graham Island.For a woman, it is always, don't you see, Scheherazade.In nineteen sixty-four, the dean announced to the trustees that,for all intents and purposes-meetings, sleep, meals, electricity, demandsupon her time and one another's—the students had abolishednight. "Brahms," he said, in explaining to a colleague why he did notattend that autumn's campus concert series. "All of it was Brahms.All, every. Eight. Things. Of Brahms." Though he was my friend, I did not see Leander Dworkin often.We found that our friendship was safer on the telephone. Sometimeswe spoke daily. Sometimes we did not speak for a year ormore. But the bond between us, I think, was less stormy, and insome ways more intense, than Leander's relations with people heactually saw. Once every few years, we would have dinner together,or a drink, or just a visit. Sometimes alone, more rarely with someonewith whom he was living and whom he wanted me to meet.One night, when we had gone, I think, off campus for hamburgers,. I noticed, on Leander's wrist, several thin, brown, frayed andseparating strands, like a tattered cuff of rope. Leander said it wasan elephant-hair bracelet, and that Simon, his lover, had given itto him. It was frayed because he always forgot to remove it, as heought to, before taking showers. Elephant hairs, it seems, aretalismanic. It was going to bring him luck. Elephant-hair braceletsare expensive; they are paid for by the strand. In the following year,Leander wrote many poems, and at last received his tenure. Whenwe met again, months later, the frayed strands were gone. In theirplace was a thin, round, sturdy band of gold, which encased,Leander said, a single elephant hair. When I asked what had happenedto the old bracelet, he said, "I lost it, I think. Or I threw itout." For some time, Leander had spoken, on the phone, of awoman, a painter, whom he had met, one afternoon, outside thegym, and whom he was trying to introduce, along with Simon, intohis apartment and his life. The woman was in love with him, hesaid. She was married to a real-estate tycoon. Her name wasLeonore. He was anxious for me to meet her. I knew that, in additionto his appetite for quarrels, Leander likes triads, complications,any variant of being paid for. But I looked at the bracelet, and Ithought of Simon, and I thought, Leonore plays rough.  It was as boring, you know, as droning, and repetitive as a waltz,as a country-and-western lament in waltz time. It was as truly awfulas a vin rosé.                   Well, what did you pull out ahead of me on the road for, froma side street, when there were no other cars in sight behind me, ifyou were going to drive more slowly than I did? It was early evening, in the city. The TV was on. We watchedThe Newlywed Game. The moderator had just asked the contestant,a young wife from Virginia, What is your husband's leastfavorite rodent? "His least favorite rodent," she replied, drawlingserenely and without hesitation. "Oh, I think that would have tobe the saxophone." He knew that she had left him when she began to smoke again.Is that where it begins?I don't know. I don't know where it begins. It is where I am.I know where you are. You are here. She had left him, then?Years ago, he had smoked, but not when they met. So shestopped, as people do when they are in love. Take up cigarettes, orgive them up, or change brands. As people do to be at one at leastin this. Long after that, she began to smoke again. So he knew she had left him? Not knew, not left. Not right away, or just at first. Why don't you begin then with at first? Look, you can begin with at first, or it seems, or once upon atime. Or in the city of P. Or in the city of P. In the rain. But I can't. It is not what Iknow how to do. Well, you must get these things straight, you know, resolvethem in your mind before you write them down. From the moment she knew that she was going to leave him,she started to look old. There was about her a sudden dimming, asin a bereavement or an illness, which in a way it was. He. They.Look, I would start short, if I could, with something shorter. Thestory of the boy, for instance, who did not cry wolf. Except that, ofnecessity, we can have no notion of that story, since the boy ofcourse is dead. So is the one who did cry wolf. True, but he lasted longer. Probably. I suppose that's right. He knew that she was goingto leave him when she began to smoke again. You can rely too much, my love, on the unspoken things. Andthe wry smile. I have that smile myself, and I've learned thesilence, too, over the years. Along with your expressions, like Nonotion and Of necessity. What happens, though, when it is allunsaid, is that you wake up one morning, no, it's more like late oneafternoon, and it's not just unsaid, it's gone. That's all. Just gone.I remember this word, that look, that small inflection, after all thistime. I used to hold them, trust them, read them like a rune. Likea sign that there was a house, a billet, a civilization where we were.I look back and I think I was just there all alone. Collecting wispsand signs. Like a spinster who did know a young man once andwho imagines ever since that she lost a fiancé in the war. Or an oldfellow who, having spent months long ago in uniform at somedreary outpost nowhere near any country where there was a front,remembers buddies he never had, dying beside him in battles hewas never in. Hey, wait. All right. There was, of course, a public world as well.I was there, in Montgomery, Alabama, on a summer's day inthe late seventies, when the Attorney General of the United States,a Southerner himself, spoke at the ceremony in which a local judge,who had worked for more than twenty years, with courage andhumanity and in virtual isolation, on the federal district court, waspromoted to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. That court, likethe district court under the local judge, had been a great court,decent, honorable, articulate and brave. The Attorney General himselfhad, for some years, been a member of it—quite often, as ithappened, in dissent. Here he was, though, in the late seventies,the Attorney General, Old Mushmouth, as the wife of one of thecourt's more distinguished judges had always, somewhat injudiciouslyand in his absence, called him, here he was, the AttorneyGeneral of the United States, speaking at the inauguration of agreat federal district judge into a great federal appellate court. Hementioned the Ku Klux Klan. He alluded to it several times, theKlan. And each time, he referred to its membership, the membersof the Klan, he called them. Clamsmen. No question about it, that'show he pronounced it. Clamsmen. It was no reflection on theAttorney ·General. True, the judge's wife had never thought muchof his diction. True, in the court's most important decisions, he hadbeen so often in dissent. But years had passed. He had come tospeak well and to do honor. And this business of the Clamsmen,well, it may have had to do with molluscs, bivalves. Even crustaceans.I remember a young radical, in the sixties, denouncing herroommates as prawns of imperialism.  Alone. What an odd gloss we have here on Alone at last. Sincealone at last, for every hero in a gothic, every villain in a melodrama,traditionally assumes a cast of two. You know I hate wisecracks. So do I.  One morning, in the early nineteen-eighties, Viola Teagardenfiled a suit in a New York State court against Claudia Dennenyfor libel. Also named as defendants were a public television stationand a talk-show host. Viola Teagarden's lawyer, Ezra Paris, hadbeen, all his life, a civil libertarian; in every prior suit, he had beenon the side of the right to speak, to print, to publish. He was em-barrassed by Teagarden v. Denneny et al., which, as he knew, hadno legal merit. He justified it to himself on grounds, of which Violahad persuaded him, that she was sad, hurt, pitiable, distraught. Healso thought, in friendship, that he owed her something. Her currentbook was dedicated to him. But his province had always beenthe First Amendment, and he preferred not to think about who waspaying his rather considerable legal fees, Martin Pix, a young, immenselyrich, vaguely leftish media executive, who had recentlycome, yacht and fortune, into Viola's special circle. That circle, asI gradually came to understand, was one of the most importantcultural manifestations of its time.  Look here, you know, look here. All the things she had toomuch class to mention were the things he never knew. Well, but that's the point. I mean, it hardly takes much classnot to mention things if he already knows them anyway.  It was as though he had been born in the presence of the doubt,the censor, the laugher at serious things, the unlaughing memberin the audience of a comedian, the voluble warner against placeswhere there is no danger, the reticent giver of directions toward aplace through which no one has safely passed. The check was foreverless than half a step behind the impulse. Clamped to the hoofof the Arabian horse of thought, report, or feeling, there werealways the teeth of the question: is this altogether true? The leastof the harm in it was the waste of energy and attention, in havingalways to be doubly sure, in letting pass the moments of high possibility,in seldom taking action, in having always just a bit to understateand overprove. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Can you not avoid, on the one hand,the Rorid, overly elaborate, on the other hand, the arid explorationof that after all limitless desert rock of desolation called Square One? What are you, some sort of anti-claque?  Sometimes he loved her, sometimes he was just amused andtouched by the degree to which she loved him. Sometimes he wasbored by her love and felt it as a burden. Sometimes his sense ofhimself was enhanced, sometimes diminished by it. But he hadcome to take the extent of her love as given, and, as such, he lostinterest in it. She may have given him this certainty too early, andnot just out of genuine attachment. One falls out of gradations oflove and despair, after all, every few days, or months, or minutes.With courtesy, then, and also for the sake, for the sake of the longrhythms, she kept the facade in place and steady, unaffected byevery nuance of caring and not caring. He distrusted her sometimes,but on the wrong grounds. He thought of her as light with thetruth, and lawless. And she, who was not in other ways dishonest,who was in fact honorable in his ways and in others, was perhapsdishonest in this: that not to risk losing him, or for whatever otherreason, she concealed, no, she did not insist that he see, certainimportant facets of her nature. She pretended, though with herparticular form of nervous energy she was not always able to pretendthis, that she was more content than she was, that her love forhim was more constant than, within the limits that he set, itcould be.