Mortal Leap, page 23
It took me some time to understand all these things, because at first I had the impression Leo was some kind of a millionaire and this wasn’t my idea of how people with money lived. I suppose I had got most of my ideas of millionaires out of old Fred Astaire movies. In that world people never wore anything but tuxedos, rode around in long shiny cars, spent most of their time in nightclubs and had everything done for them by servants. When Fred Astaire took off his gloves (pearl-colored, suede) he just tossed them into the air and there was a valet in a striped jacket to catch them. Leo didn’t wear gloves and had probably never been inside a night club, and his station wagon looked as though he had bought it second-hand from a Japanese gardener. It was obvious they had a lot of money and didn’t mind spending it, but Leo’s shoes were run over at the heel and Ary dressed so casually that it was a long time before I realized how much her clothes cost.
It all seemed as plausible, in its way, as the Fred Astaire movies and after a while I just stopped thinking about it and surrendered passively to the way they did things. As spring came on and it got warmer we spent more and more time on the beach, which was almost deserted at that time of the year. Usually in the morning when it was foggy the three of us would walk down the beach or explore the rock pools, then in the afternoon the fog would burn away and it would be hot. For long hours I would lie face down on the beach with my eyes closed, listening to the buzzing of insects and the crisp foaming of the surf, the sounds coming to me muffled and yet somehow magnified by the heat. When it got too hot I would swim, wading out waist-deep in the glassy water and then kicking my way lazily out to the rocks a couple of hundred yards offshore. Suzanne would usually come with us on the morning walks, but often in the afternoon she would take Ary’s car to go to Laguna or Newport Beach to shop. Ary would go swimming with me (she swam languidly, hardly making any effort, yet she seemed to move through the water quicker than I did), then she would sit cross-legged reading a book under a large Mexican straw hat. Sometimes in the afternoon we would go up to make love in the blue bedroom, closing the mahogany shutters and then afterwards lying drowsily in the darkened room until the evening breeze came through the shutters to move across our naked bodies and wake up. After a week or two these things were as familiar to me as my own body, with the familiarity of a half-forgotten taste or the pain of an old wound: the odor of the pines baking in the sun, the muffled sound of the surf, the coolness of Ary’s body, the shadowy blue room where the light from the sea played dimly on the ceiling.
I gained weight and lost track of the calendar. Like everything else she seemed familiar and yet at the same time strange, and for a long time the strangeness didn’t go away. One part of me felt easy and relaxed with her, but another part, the reasonable and conscious part, would wake up now and then in a blurry way and make me realize the precariousness of what I was doing. I knew, as I had known from that morning I first entered the house and sensed her watching me as I moved uncertainly through the bedroom, that she knew (but what was it that she knew?) and yet neither of us spoke about it and it seemed that we never would, that we would go on pretending this strange dark place was not there and yet skirting carefully around it whenever we talked. I knew that there was no question of my becoming anyone that I was not, that even if I were letter-perfect in the part I would have given myself away a thousand times, that earlier when I had imagined I could do this I was simply lost in the hallucinatory non-logic of the hospital world. And yet if this wasn’t what I was doing I didn’t quite know what I was doing. Somehow I sensed that whatever it was I was doing she was on my side, and probably Leo and Suzanne were too, but why they were or what was going on in their minds was a mystery, an enigma that my thought processes were not capable of coming to grips with. The fact was that in spite of the precariousness of my whole existence I didn’t think very much about it at all. It was like the other basic questions, why God created the world and then put evil in it or what happens to us when we die. Most people believe in a part of their minds that these questions are very profound and important and have a crucial significance for them, that they are important above all other questions, and yet they don’t think about them very much because they don’t believe there are any answers to them, or perhaps because they are afraid of what they might discover if they thought them out to the end. In this way my situation was a kind of a metaphor of the whole human predicament; I sensed I was balancing over a chasm but I preferred not to look down. And probably I was right; now that I had walked out over the chasm what good would looking down do?
The thing was to stop worrying about it and simply relax and be natural. But how the hell did you do it? In the situation where I found myself, being natural seemed the most difficult and intricate thing I had ever had to do. I thought I had been around a lot, I had been on my own since I was seventeen and I had wandered around over half the world, but I had never ordered a bottle of wine in a restaurant, made love to a decent woman, seen a play on the stage, listened seriously to music, or paid any attention to the food I was putting in my mouth. I was getting better now, and I couldn’t blame all my blunders on my sickness. When I began to grasp the complexity of what I had to do I felt like a trained baboon trying to play a cello. At every turn it seemed there was a new decision, probably crucial, although I could never be sure. What did I want for dinner? Which necktie should I put on? Did you wear a necktie at all to go to the Coast Inn at eight o’clock for drinks? Before a rack of neckties I was in a cold sweat. I knew enough not to say ain’t, but did you say, “the man who came” or “the man that came?” “I am different than you” or “I am different from you?” When you broke wind in public and there was some doubt as to whether this accident had been noticed, did you say nothing or murmur some apology?
This was nothing compared to the bafflement caused by a wine list. What the hell were crus classés anyhow? I bought a book on wine and studied it covertly, the way I had read dirty magazines in Spanish Creek. Instead of explaining what crus classés were, it was full of other French words and I was thrown into despair. Holy Moses, have pity, I had never studied so hard for my license! And wine wasn’t enough, it seemed that there was more than one kind of cheese. To me cheese had always been just cheese, it was a yellow stuff that tasted cheesy and you put it between two pieces of bread. Now it seemed there was Bel Paese, Brie, Camembert, Edam, Gruyère, Liederkranz, Mozzarella, Muenster, Port Salut, Romano, and Roquefort, and there was a time to eat each one or you were a yahoo. Swiss cheese, it seemed, was called Emmenthal. The kind of cheese you put in mousetraps was called Cheddar. I wondered if the mice knew it was called Cheddar and whether they preferred it to Pont l’Evêque. I almost decided it would be easier to give up eating, and all this was before I discovered that gravy was called bordelaise sauce.
One evening in March or April Leo had just come back from a trip and the four of us were sitting down to dinner: filets, asparagus hollandaise, a bottle of Beaujolais. I took a preliminary bite of my steak and then I got up and wandered off toward the kitchen. When I couldn’t find what I wanted I came back into the dining room.
“What are you looking for?”
“Catsup.”
“What for?”
“To put on my steak,” I said, feeling the first premonition that something was not quite going right.
The three of them looked at each other.
“I think there’s some A-1, or some Worcestershire,” said Suzanne.
“What’s the matter with catsup?”
“Nothing, nothing.”
“All right, skip it.”
“I think there was a bottle somewhere,” said Ary. She got up and went off toward the kitchen, I heard cupboards opening and closing, and in a few minutes she came back with it. The three of them stopped eating and watched me while I socked the bottom of the bottle and spread this stuff on my filet mignon.
When I saw they were all watching I put down the bottle. “All right, what do you have catsup in the house for if you’re not supposed to use it?”
They looked at each other again. “For hamburgers, I suppose,” said Leo.
I noticed now for the first time that there was a bowl of sliced lemons on the table. I went on cutting up my filet and chewing for a while, and then I slowly scraped off the catsup with my knife. Leo silently passed me a lemon and I squeezed on some juice.
“It’s just that,” Ary remarked, “some things kill taste and others enhance it.” So I finally understood why we used to put catsup on the goulash on the Chileno Cape. But I was still a little annoyed; I felt I was being maneuvered and these people were trying to educate me without my realizing it, and I wasn’t having any of this and I didn’t understand what was going on in their minds anyhow. I was ready to have it out with them right then and there and tell them to mind their own damned business because I liked catsup on my steak. But I didn’t, partly because I still felt uncertain and defensive and partly because the steak was better with lemon. Instead I went on meekly eating, with lemon on my steak mixed with the traces of the catsup I hadn’t been able to get off. Besides it was impossible to be annoyed with them for very long because I sensed their good will and because they themselves took the whole thing so casually, as they took everything else. After a while Leo remarked, “Joe Gould when he was living in the Village always used to pour catsup out on his plate and eat it with a spoon. He didn’t like the stuff but he said it was the only thing in a Village diner that was free.”
“Who was Joe Gould?” I demanded, still a little truculent.
“A philosopher,” was all he would say. A philosopher who ate catsup? That night after the others had gone to bed I locked myself in the study and looked him up in Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy but he wasn’t there.
For a long time I went on this way, feeling more or less like a passenger in an airplane who had grabbed the controls when the pilot had died of a heart attack. I was staying up in the air somehow but I wasn’t quite sure how I did it. Small crises, like downdrafts and puffs of wind, would hit and I would hurriedly make some readjustment. The plane would go along smoothly for a while, and then there would be a lurch. I would have to think fast: what was I doing wrong? Putting catsup on my steak, applauding between movements at the symphony? I pulled the levers blindly, waiting for the time when I would accidentally pull the one that made the bottom drop out. I was so busy with this that I never really thought out my basic situation or what I was trying to do or who the hell it was I thought I was kidding. All I knew was that I had finally found a world to which I would like to belong, even if it meant cheating and misrepresenting myself and living all the time with the ghost of an unexamined reality hanging somewhere just out of sight in the back of my thoughts. One morning that summer there arrived in the mail a letter from the Eleventh Naval District. I opened it and found a check for my back pay as Lieutenant (j.g.) in the United States Naval Reserve. I stared at this document. In addition to the amount payable, which was in four figures, it contained an admonition not to fold, spindle, or mutilate along with a pithy warning not to commit any kind of a fraud.
In the desk in the study there was a pigeonhole full of old papers belonging to me. (So to speak, I heard Gore adding.) Ary had suggested a couple of weeks before that I look through this and “throw away what I didn’t want anymore.” I suppose by this she meant that she wanted me to clean out the desk and throw everything away; it was one of those vague double-entendres we used to exchange with each other in that time without ever really saying what we meant. I locked the door, sat down at the desk, and went through the papers. Finally I found a sample of my alleged signature. Holding a pen in my stiff fingers, my tongue between my teeth like a second-grader, I practiced the art of forgery. I wish I could have seen my face; it must have had a look of concentration as though I were inventing something terribly difficult, like the telephone or the double-entry bookkeeping system. When I was done I examined the results. A poor thing but my own, or a reasonable facsimile.
Meanwhile breakfast was ready; Ary and Suzanne were in the kitchen and hadn’t noticed the study door was locked. With the evidence of my crime in my pocket I sat down and ate my first shirred eggs Grand Marnier. They tasted queer and I couldn’t figure out what they had put in them, marmalade, lemon extract, or a good grade of whiskey. By this time I knew that if I kept my mouth shut I would sooner or later find out by accident what it was, so I simply said nothing and ate it.
After breakfast I walked the mile into Laguna to the bank and opened a checking account. There were no hitches, although the whole thing made me slightly nervous. Everyone in the bank kept calling me Mr. Davenant and inquiring whether I wanted a joint account with my wife, which would merely be a matter of adding my signature to the account she already had. I smiled and agreed this would be the simplest. I walked out with four hundred dollars in cash making a lump in my back pocket, and a great deal more in the checkbook. Fraud! Embezzler! It was strange, I felt nothing. I had no desire to write a check. Or to buy anything; I had plenty of cigarettes and enough clothes for years. On the way back I stopped out of impulse at a shop and bought a jade pin for Ary. It was a big massive silver pin with a green stone mottled with black streaks. My God, jade cost money! A hundred dollars for a piece of stone? Well, at least I found one way to spend it. I even bought a scarf for Suzanne: four dollars plus California sales tax.
I felt reckless, a master criminal, but this was only the start. The next week I had to go with Ary to the Long Beach Naval Hospital to get psychoanalyzed again, have my urine examined for albumin, and various other rituals connected with my final severance from the Navy. This went more easily; I was an old hand now in duplicity, or rather in half-statements and ambiguous silences, and I sat in a chair and answered their questions without turning a hair. At the end I even smiled a little at them. It was not necessary to make a public display of mirth, but I felt I ought to indicate at least that I was beginning to feel more normal.
The psychiatric examination was a pure formality. There were two psychiatrists. The younger one was evidently some kind of an intern or apprentice and said very little. The other was a full commander with wrinkled jowls and a wise and ruminating manner, like an old bird dog. He sniffed at me without very much interest as I answered his questions. Obviously he considered me a rather common sort of psychopath. I told him it was beginning to come back my life with my wife, the house, the things we had done together. About the time before that, Seattle, college, nothing. Another blank for the night in the sound off Tulagi.
“Normal, perfectly normal,” he said indulgently. “You’re back home, and the places recall the experiences. For a total amnesiac you’re coming normally. How long is it now—let’s see—” he consulted the file—“a little over eight months? Well, you are coming a little slowly, but you’re progressing. Anxieties? Bad dreams?” He seemed impatient to go to lunch.
No anxieties, no nightmares.
“Sexual relations?”
Well, yes, I confessed, a little confused. What he wanted to know, however, was whether they were the same as before, i.e. normal. I glanced at Ary, lifted my shoulders noncommittally, and the commander put something down in his notes. Perhaps that I was bashful, a good sign. “Normal, normal, a typical traumatic amnesia.” It was a quarter after twelve and from somewhere inside the commander were coming faint audible noises indicating hunger. “A textbook case.” The interview was over. He folded up the file, handed the notes to the yeoman to be typed, and disappeared with the younger doctor in the direction of the officers’ club. Ary and I sat for a while listening to the yeoman clacking away at the typewriter, and finally he looked up. “You can go, Lieutenant,” he told me. “They’ll send you the papers from Com Eleven.”
This was the last thing I ever had to do with the United States Navy. The papers came in about a month from San Diego: partial disability with a small pension, referred to Veterans Administration for continuing post-surgical and psychiatric treatment. There wasn’t very much to the post-surgical treatment; at the outpatient clinic of the Veterans Hospital they told me to continue Dr. Waldbach’s exercises. For about six months more I went on working my fingers in hot water for an hour every day: flex, clench, flex, clench. The brain was supposed to recover its resiliency by itself.
The Navy was only an institution, and like all institutions it was easy to deceive. What institutions wanted out of you was a conventional response, something that could be put down on a form. If there was anything unconventional about your case they preferred not knowing about it. Telling them the truth was something like pouring sand in the gears. Everything grated to a stop and they started yelling at you. I learned that in San Quentin, the only institution of higher learning I ever attended, and it was a valuable piece of wisdom which served me well the rest of my life.
With human beings it was not so easy. Ary seemed to accept me casually and naturally, and yet I had no notion what was going on in her mind or what she was thinking to herself. Sometimes I would accidentally do the right thing and she would accept it without comment. Other times I would make blunders, like ordering red wine with fish or wanting to make love without taking off my socks. (Making love in the morning, it seemed, was spontaneous, making love with your socks on merely crude.) Sometimes she would laugh, at other times she would make some mildly ironic comment. What was I supposed to do, laugh too? It didn’t seem to make much difference, because by this time both of us were committed to this thing we were doing together and neither of us could back out. But I couldn’t go on doing queer things forever; sooner or later I was going to have to start acting more like myself. Like who? I thought. I didn’t know who I was until I saw how I was going to act. Secretly and half unwillingly I tried to keep all the rules in my mind. Once in a while I tottered on the tight wire I was walking on, flailed for balance, and almost fell. Toward the middle of the summer she told me, “I’ve written to Seattle.”
