Borges and Me, page 6
“Papa is always telling me things. Sometimes I don’t want to hear them.”
“You should listen to your father.”
“That’s a cliché. Good writing, Papa says, means no clichés. A cliché is any word or phrase that seems familiar. It’s an old printing term. I try to avoid them.”
“Like the plague.”
“That’s a cliché.”
“Right.”
Alastair stood in the doorway and banged a small pan with a spoon. It was time for dinner.
“I’m hungry,” said Jasper over the din.
“Well, you’re in luck,” his father said. And there it was again—that love in his eyes.
8
I WOULD OFTEN see Professor Falconer on the streets as he tipped forward into a blast of wind, a lonely man in a wrinkle of thoughts. A puzzled expression always bloomed when, face-to-face, I would say, “Good morning, Professor” or “It’s a lovely day!” I guessed that, as with many of his generation, the war continued to preoccupy him. His sky was still full of Messerschmitts and Junkers. The all-clear signal had yet to sound.
It did interest him that an American student should wish to focus on a Scottish poet who lived in Orkney, but it wasn’t easy to explain to him my enchantment. Falconer shook his head wearily one day when I was sitting in his office and said, “I hope you will find some manuscripts. A thesis must contain original research. Write to Mr. Brown. See if there are manuscripts. And go see him, if you can. I should think that’s possible. Research!”
That night I wrote to Mackay Brown in care of his publishers. Within a few weeks a letter arrived from Orkney in a strange crabwise scrawl on blue paper, and he said he was “brightened by” my interest in his work, although “humbled as well.” I should “most certainly” come to visit him. “I generally meet the ferry each afternoon, although I rarely know anyone who disembarks.” He gave me his telephone number and suggested I call “a few days before arrival in Stromness,” as he didn’t “require advance notice.” The letter was signed, quite simply, “George.”
Cheered by this response, I took pages of my thesis to Falconer, who continued to show little interest in my work. “Ah,” he said, “the thesis continues! The main thing is to continue, even with bad work.”
“Is my work bad?”
“No, I was just thinking aloud,” he said. “What I wish to say is, keep moving forward! Never retreat! I said this to the men aboard ship. Onward!”
That he had actually been in command of a battleship in wartime boggled the mind, and I couldn’t help but wonder about his private affairs. Rumor had it that he lived with his sister and had no real life. As it happened, I got to visit him at his house after a peculiar invitation.
It was a sunny afternoon in mid-November when I met Professor Falconer walking in the cloister under its ancient bell tower in the quad.
“I say,” he said, stammering, motioning me to draw near. “I s-say!”
“Hello, Professor. How are you?”
“M-may I have a word?”
“Of course.” I adopted a listening air.
“There is a young man, you see. I was hoping to introduce you.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Ah, good. Come to my house, number 2, Alexandra Place. Do you know it? Wednesday next. Teatime, what? Shall we say at four?”
“That’s fine. I’d like that.”
He smiled, seeming to fumble in his drawer of memory. “He’s an American, much like yourself. Interested in poetry, whatnot.”
I shifted from foot to foot as he dug into himself for more information about this young man.
“What’s his name?”
“Ah, yes,” he said. “His name is Jay Parini.”
“But, Professor,” I said, “I’m Jay Parini.”
His eyes widened. “Oh, dear. That’s too bad. Well, do come. Come anyway!”
Before he withdrew, he asked in a plaintive voice, “Do you have two jackets?”
* * *
—
This was such a good story I had to tell someone, and guessed it would amuse Bella, so I turned up at that evening’s meeting of the Poetry Society and waylaid her afterward. She laughed hard. She was also impressed by a couple of Alastair’s poems that I read aloud that night. “I’d love to meet him,” she said, and I suggested she join me the next day for tea at Pilmour Cottage.
This was going well, I told myself when I picked her up in my Morris Minor outside Hamilton Hall. The car, alas, didn’t quite impress her.
“I can actually see the road under my feet,” she said, lifting her knees.
My car was more like a mirage than an actual vehicle, and the floor was indeed paper-thin. But it carried us along.
Alastair was in a distracted mood when we arrived, having somehow forgot we were coming for tea. We sat in silence at his table for an awkward time. When finally he turned a long gaze on Bella, she was unable to look him in the eye. It was the first time I’d ever seen her fazed by anything.
“Bella,” he said, with a sidelong smirk. “Diminutive of Arabella?”
“Yes.”
“Ara means altar. Bella means beautiful. So you’re a beautiful altar on which someone might sacrifice himself one day.”
This visit was quickly slumping in the wrong direction. Already I regretted bringing Bella.
“My father tells me it means ‘yielding to pray.’ ”
“I would never yield to such a thing,” said Alastair.
I had told Bella about Alastair and Graves, and she launched straight into questions. Wasn’t Graves a better poet than a novelist? Why did he live in Majorca? Wasn’t The White Goddess a peculiar sort of book? The questions poured forth, delighting me: I had brought someone with a good mind into Alastair’s house, and he must appreciate that.
“Graves hates me,” he said. “I stole one of his goddesses. His wife was probably relieved. Anything to thin the pack.”
“Did he sleep with all of them?”
“Depends what you mean by sleep.”
Bella seemed to gather strength and, surprisingly, she held his stare in a way that impressed me. I could learn from her. “He wrote so many novels,” she said.
“Nobody knows them nowadays. Count Belisarius? Seven Days in New Crete?”
“I, Claudius is good. A perfect narrator for the madness of empire. I love the scene with Caligula, where he imagines himself a god while they’re hacking off his limbs.”
“Ouch,” said Jasper, who began to pick up the paper airplanes on the floor.
“Graves had a natural feel for the ruling classes,” said Bella.
“He’s a snob at heart,” Alastair said. “Public schoolboy turned army officer turned author. Not the best sequence.”
My flat-footed silence embarrassed me as Alastair and Bella continued to talk about the politics of the early decades of the Roman Empire. Inwardly I cursed my lack of knowledge, feeling jealous of Bella (whose British public school education had given her easy access to a wide range of information) and also of Alastair: would he, with his charisma and wild fluency in politics and literature, steal Bella’s heart not for me but for himself? Would he actually poach a friend’s potential girlfriend?
As they continued to chat, I knew that he would. And worried that Bella seemed enchanted now, excited by their back-and-forth.
Before long we sat on the floor before the coal fire: perfect for a Scottish afternoon as winter approached. Within moments Alastair came in with a tray of brownies, which he lifted high like the host at the altar—the kind of altar, I thought, at which even he might be willing to sacrifice himself. “A fresh batch,” he said. “Hash brownies.”
“I’ve never had them,” Bella said.
“They go well with wine,” Alastair told her. “Forget about tea.”
He passed around the tray, and we each took one, though I did so with a hesitation that must have shown in my expression. These were potent morsels, and I wasn’t sure how any of this might play out.
Bella took a tiny bite, chewed slowly, then took a larger bite. I allowed myself only a nibble and was relieved when the wine bottle appeared. I didn’t want to feel completely out of control, in part because I was angry with Alastair for the ways in which he’d coopted Bella, and I wasn’t sure how I might react if I got completely stoned. When you get angry, the other guy wins—that’s what my father had taught me. Given my portion, the effect of the brownies was slow in coming, taking the form of a mellowness that began in my knees and rose gradually to the top of my head.
Jasper whispered, “I like your girlfriend. She’s pretty.”
Bella, overhearing this, smiled. “I’m not his girlfriend. Just a friend.”
My skin tingled with shame and embarrassment.
Jasper made it easier, though. “You’re a girl, and you’re his friend,” he said.
“You’ve got me there.”
Alastair took me aside before we left, perhaps sensing my discomfort and confusion. “She’s splendid,” he told me. “Take her back to your place. The brownies will kick in nicely.”
“Really?”
“Do you have more wine at the flat?”
“A bottle of Beaune.”
“It will substitute for charm,” said Alastair.
As Bella and I stepped outside, both of us weaving slightly, I asked her what she thought of Alastair.
“He’s charming, though I always distrust charm.” This was, I thought, discerning.
“I have a good bottle of wine in my flat,” I said. “Come back?”
“Can’t, I’m afraid. I told Angus I would meet him for dinner. At his cottage. He lives with his godawful brother, Jack. I’d invite you to join us, but you wouldn’t have a good time. You’d hate it, actually.”
My normal reserve having been eroded by the hash, I asked, “Will you have a good time?”
“That depends. I’m easily bored. It’s a weakness in my character. I do like Angus, though not when he’s with his brother. He’s not often there, though, which is the best you can say about him.”
I didn’t know what to make of her attitude to Angus or his brother. This was a long way from Scranton, from the ways of being I had accepted as a given back in Pennsylvania. A long way from the comfortable presuppositions about how men and women behaved and what these assumptions meant for stability. In a weird way, I almost missed the certainties and simplicities of that safe if predictable world. But this was my new life, and I told myself to embrace it, to accept what came along, however strange or implausible or—at times—terrifying.
9
I SLEPT BADLY now, and half wished I hadn’t flushed those barbiturates in the toilet. Even that synthetic sleep would be preferable to my current state. Vietnam weighed on me, and a part of every night was spent in that godforsaken war zone, dreaming of vast rice paddies that concealed poison spikes or booby-trapped paths I might well have been walking had I not fled to St. Andrews. My sharpest images of Vietnam came from Billy’s letters. He wrote from outposts near the DMZ, where his job was to interrogate prisoners of war. “I go on walks now and then, though it’s fucking dangerous,” he said in one letter that I reread many times. “Not so much the Vietcong, though they’re pretty awful if you happen to run into them by accident. Fucking cunts, all of them. You should see the brush: vines tangling and drooping. Stinging plants in the mud. And crazy snakes. Ask me about the bamboo pit viper when you next see me. And the ants, neurotic little goose-steppers—kind of like your thoughts—and these prehistoric birds from hell.” He said he was “writing high, under a lamp in base camp, where rats run up and down the walls, big as tomcats. High is the only place to be in Nam.” In another letter he told me about a whorehouse in Saigon. “Man, it’s glory land. Hallelujah chorus all the way. Such bodies! Tits and ass all the way. They know what the tongue is for, let me tell you, Mr. Virgin. Hey, don’t I make this sound like fun? Come out and join us! I hear they’re running out of stooges. Remember: This is our time.”
“No thanks, Billy Boy,” I wrote back to him. I did my best to describe my daily work, my friends, Alastair and Jasper, Jeff, who had quickly become a friend and counselor, my longings for Bella, Professor Falconer: this strange little world on the East Neuk of Fife. Some nights I rose every hour or two and huddled in the chair by the electric fire, popping shillings in the meter, scribbling bad poems on a yellow pad or writing longer and longer letters to my friend in Vietnam. I told myself I was doing this to distract the poor bastard, but I was doing it as much to distract myself: from doubts about my thesis; from my guilt that Billy was over there in a hellhole and I wasn’t, and perhaps somebody else was suffering in my place. In fact, that’s what Billy had said when we had had a drink at Joey’s Bar in West Scranton only a few weeks before he left. “If you don’t go, somebody else is going instead. You can live with that?”
Was this true? Was war a kind of zero-sum game? Wouldn’t I just be giving in to a bad version of history if I enlisted? If I went, I’d be going for myself, not my country. I’d be going to have “an experience.” I’d be trying not to “miss out” on my time.
The letters from my draft board just kept coming, ramping up my anxieties, and I waited for a knock at the door. Scotland Yard, I thought, must surely have a unit in cahoots with the FBI or some clandestine international agency that dragged deserters like me back into the fold.
Over coffee one morning, Jeff tried to calm my nerves. “I don’t think they want your ass,” he said. “They don’t want mine, far as I can tell, so why would they want yours? You’d make a terrible soldier. The Vietnamese will jump for joy if they hear you’re coming. I’ll write to Nixon and tell him: Don’t draft Jay Parini!”
I didn’t tell Billy—or Jeff, of course—that I couldn’t sleep, and that I felt at night as if I were sinking through layers of space, my consciousness like a roof that falls floor by floor through a burning house. I thought about death too often, and it didn’t help that I’d seen a student tumbled from a bike in traffic on Bell Street. He soared ten feet into the air and landed at the edge of a curb with blood coming from his ears. (What became of him I didn’t know, didn’t even want to know.) One night I heard on the BBC about a crash in the London Underground that killed a nun and several others. Then one of my professors slumped at his desk one afternoon and died from an apparent heart attack at forty-seven. So much death in the world, and so little to relieve its drone in the deepest ear of my mind. How was it possible that everyone on the street shuffled about so cheerfully, as if they were not doomed, as if they didn’t carry a time bomb in their chest?
My problems were not eased by the fact that I ran into Bella often, in the grocery store, in pubs, at the tea shop in South Street. One night, stepping from a dull dance at the Student Union, I saw her and Angus walking hand in hand outside the entrance to the college quad, and—like a voyeur—followed them from a distance. They turned into a gravel lane near the East Sands and disappeared into a pebble-dash cottage, which I assumed was the one that Angus shared with his brother. I stood in the garden beside the house and looked up at what I imagined was the light in the bedroom where they slept. After the light went out, I stumbled in quiet misery to the beach below and sat on a stone wall, listening to noisy surf that ground its teeth in mindless repetitions. What was the point of life? A big moon blazed on the water, but it was not a beautiful light. It was cold and unyielding.
I told this story to Jeff the next day, and he said, “You’re unwell. You really should see a doctor.”
* * *
—
The next morning I visited the infirmary, where I spoke with a nurse in a stiff blue uniform. She listened patiently to my confession of sleeplessness, which accompanied an inability to work, a sense of doom, and what I told her felt like “a crisis of existence.” I told her that I often thought of death, mentioning a grisly dream I’d had about being dragged by a bus through the busy corners of some familiar intersection in an unknown foreign city. “Maybe Antwerp or Stuttgart,” I said, though I’d never been to either city, as I explained.
“Antwerp has very good pastries,” she said.
I told her that I hadn’t slept through a night in the past week without waking in tears.
“This isn’t good,” she said. “You must see Dr. Gillies.”
A telephone call was made as I sat there, and she handed me a slip of paper. I had an appointment the next day.
The clinic stood at the edge of the New Town, on the underside of St. Andrews, a nondescript building with the pale stucco cladding found on most recent architecture in Scotland. There was a brass plaque on the door boasting the doctor’s name and professional degrees, more degrees than a thermometer. Below it was the word psychiatry, which cut a small hole in the mental air around me. I had never imagined myself as somebody who would need a psychiatrist.
Dr. Gillies occupied a small, antiseptic office with grim rows of metal filing cabinets along one wall. I took him to be in his fifties, a ghoulishly thin fellow with a well-trimmed gray-blond beard and a slick bald head. He spoke with what I imagined was a severe Glaswegian accent, staring at me through wire-rimmed glasses. His white jacket had a peculiar stain like red lipstick on one lapel.
After fifteen minutes of terse questioning, he diagnosed depression. “It’s the curse of the northern climates,” he said. “I see it every day. The lack of sleep. The doldrums, staring into space. Panic attacks are not uncommon. Do you sweat?”
“Sweat?”
“In bed, for example.”
“Not especially. I don’t know.”
“Would you call yourself cheerful?”
“Not lately.”
“Ever?”
