“The photographs came with the frames. My mother never understood that you were supposed to remove them and put in your own,” he says.
He leads me into the kitchen, and makes tea while I sit on a white wooden chair beside a metal kitchen table. When he opens a cabinet and takes down a cup I catch a glimpse of a strange assortment of patterns. The dishes are familiar, too, the geometry of their designs like something remembered, known always, like a landmark or some permanent combination of old things, its impression stored on the lids of the eyes.
On the kitchen table is a glass sugar bell. Its sides are ridged; it has a chrome lid that screws on. I used to see them in restaurants.
Lazaar puts my tea in a cup and his in a glass. He takes half a shriveled lemon from the icebox and holds it above my cup and squeezes. A few cloudy drops fall into the tea. “Excuse me,” he says. “I didn’t even ask if you take lemon.” He puts the hull in his glass.
There is an open box of Jack Frost sugar cubes on the table. Lazaar takes a cube in his fingers and puts it between his teeth. Like everything Lazaar does, this act seems foreign, faintly unhygienic. I have a vision of Lazaar as a young boy. He is on the toilet. When he finishes, his mother stands over the bowl and stares down into the bowel movement he has made, examining the turds. She wipes him.
I sip my tea. Lazaar makes a slushing sound as he sucks his through the sugar. The heat and the wetness and the sweet taste are palpable for him, tactile, sensual. If I were not there he would grunt in pleasure. It comes to me again how well I understand Lazaar. For all the difference in our experience, for all our difference as persons, we might be Doppelgängers. Even when I am not with him I sometimes see him in some particular situation. I know how it is for Lazaar.
“Do you want more tea?” Lazaar asks. He smiles, his corrupt teeth stained, chipped, like the teeth of some careless animal.
Sweets, I think. I have a sense of all the candy, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of it, that Lazaar has eaten in his life.
“Yes,” I say, “the tea is very good.”
“There’s no more lemon.”
“I’m indifferent to lemon,” I say.
Lazaar laughs. “You’re indifferent to tea,” he says.
It has been so pleasant in Lazaar’s apartment, I have been so content just to sit with him, that I have almost forgotten why I am there. I see that Lazaar prefers me to leave. He knows there will be trouble for me, that I will be drawn in, if he kills himself in my presence. Lazaar is considerate. He is the kindest person I have ever known. Putting the lemon in my tea without first asking if I wanted it was, for him, an almost violent breach of conduct.
“Please,” I say, “I’d like some more tea. I really would.”
I drink four cups, five; Lazaar prepares another pot. I have to urinate but don’t dare leave him alone. Life is absurd.
“Another cup?” Lazaar asks.
“No.”
He sits down across from me and stares at me. I make him uncomfortable. I am rude to be there. Good— good I make him uncomfortable; good I am rude.
“Well, then,” Lazaar says finally, “let’s talk, then. Let’s have one of our conversations.”
“Why? Why, Lazaar? Why?”
“The trouble with you is that you think only in terms of life or death,” Lazaar says.
“What else is there?”
“Please. You’re involved or you’re not involved. I’m not involved.”
“Terrific.”
“Why are you angry? What do you think I ought to want?”
“Age.”
“Well, that,” he says mildly. “That’s easy. Live in a sealed room. Eat what the dietician says. Do moderate exercise. Take all the shots.”
“Sure.”
“Please,” he says patiently, “you’re still caught up in it. Of course you don’t understand.”
“You need a psychiatrist.”
He seems to consider this. “If I wanted to be cured,” he says. “I don’t need a psychiatrist any more than an arsonist needs the fire department.”
“I don’t understand suicide,” I say.
Lazaar looks at me. For a moment he seems genuinely interested, as though I have offered some fresh philosophical position. “That’s because you want to live forever,” he says quietly. I am startled to see the tears in his eyes. I have ruined it; I have ruined his death. He understands that it will bring me pain, that I will not forgive him. “Boswell,” he says, “please. I take no pleasure in my life. It gives me pain. If I could kill my feelings without harming myself I would settle for that. But that’s impossible. To continue to live would be a disloyalty to my needs.”
“I should have called the police,” I say.
“That wouldn’t make any difference. By the time they got to me I would have killed myself. I don’t mean to turn on the gas, to wait for the sink to fill with warm water. You must be made to understand there is nothing you can do to stop me.”
“Then why did you tell me about it? You must want me to do something.”
“That was a mistake,” Lazaar says sadly. “I meant to do you a favor.”
“Some favor.”
“Why? You’ve always wanted me to share a secret with you. This is my only secret.”
“That’s crazy. Nobody’s killing himself for me.”
“Of course not.”
“I’m not to blame.”
“No. Of course not,” Lazaar says.
“Then don’t give me that stuff.”
“I thought you’d be able to use it, to share it.”
“What the hell do I want with your death? I can’t use it. It’s off the record — not for publication.”
“I’m sorry,” he says gently.
There is a knife in his hand. It is ridiculously small, the one he uses to cut his lemons, perhaps. It glints dully in the warm kitchen. Like the dishes and the photographs, it seems familiar. Everything in my friend’s life is an old story to me.
“Maybe you’d better leave me alone now, Boswell. If something should happen, if someone were to see you, you could be accused of my murder.”
I lean across the table almost lazily and strike the knife from his hands. It is as if it has never occurred to him that I would be capable of hitting him. The knife skids on the metal surface of the table. It lands against the sugar bell, clattering faintly, harmlessly. He looks at me, startled, confused; shaking his head as if to clear some false vision from it, he reaches for the knife. I slap his wrist sharply and he pulls it back as if it has been burned. His eyes go dark and suddenly he seems stupid, incapable of any perception. Again he reaches for the knife. I punch him in the stomach and he doubles over foolishly in a classic, almost comic posture. I expect him to say “ooph.” I take up the knife and snap it in two. I drop the pieces on the floor. I have pulled up my chair beside him. He looks at me as if to protest; he has never been hit before. He slides off the chair onto the floor and on his knees grovels for the broken knife. I kick it from him, grazing his chin with my shoe. He falls and turns over on his back slowly. Now he has been hit and kicked for the first time in his life. He seems puzzled by it; violence is a strange food he is judiciously turning over in his mouth for the texture, the taste.
I pick up Lazaar and carry him to the telephone, and call the police.
Lazaar is in Bellevue. They are observing him.