The Grand Master had placed himself in silhouette in front of the open window at the far side of the long table. He had removed his ceremonial vestments and was dressed now in the plain suit of the ordinary priest. As I stepped toward him I felt like someone in a black and white film. The bright gardens behind him seemed part of a different world.
Despite my boasts to Nate, I had taken the Grand Master for granted. Margaret had explained the tradition of his marrying all the Medicis. It went back five centuries. Until now it hadn’t puzzled me that I had become involved with something that had gone on for five centuries. Well, so what? Nobody ever said man’s traditions were mortal.
Though he had spoken in a firm, clear voice a moment ago, the Grand Master now seemed to be asleep. He was an old man, as old as Herlitz had been. His face, as difficult to see in that dark room as if it had been in a painting in a church, seemed even in repose faintly cruel, used to power. It was no different from the Renaissance faces I had seen in portraits in the Uffizi when I had gone with Margaret to Florence. (Margaret still had rooms there — that was part of the five centuries, too — though her family had given the palace to the state long ago.) It was a pale face with a surprising patch of red on each cheek, faintly like the high spoiled blush painted on dolls. It was undeniably handsome, though drained by its long familiarity with power, as though power were a sort of bad habit like alcohol or narcotics that ultimately ravaged the features. Its expression was what people euphemistically called “aristocratic,” and was at least one part a faint fear and two parts a boredom with the stupidity of others’ responses. Clearly, the Grand Master loved a mystery. To give myself the advantage I tried to imagine him naked, on the toilet, dead. I couldn’t; he had a tenacious dignity and I began, despite myself, to admire him.
“You are not what is called ’a good Catholic,’ are you?” the old man asked suddenly.
Surprise me no surprises, I thought. “I try to be,” I said.
“Do you?” he said. “I watched you before. You fumbled with the rituals.”
“I’m a convert, Grand Master. It’s still somewhat new to me.”
“I hope there has been no mistake in making this marriage.”
“Because I didn’t make the sign of the Cross smoothly?”
“You made it very smoothly,” he said.
Runs deep, I thought. Familiar type. Recognize him from literature. Marvelous when you meet him in life. Grand Master, Grand Inquisitor. Grand. Lee J. Cobb plays him in the picture. Good guy or bad? Hard to tell. But, I thought, that’s it. To be like that. That’s the ideal. Cryptic wisdom. Talk like a double acrostic. Never raise your voice when you shout. Spiritual politics. Run scared. Every day a new election. Move! Manipulate! Mold! Power the still center at the core of motion. That’s it. That’s it. Seen everything, been there before; nothing new under the sun. Past so long you’re already immortal. Never sick a day in your life but always in pain. Anguish in the smell of a rose. Heart, strategies, philosophy. Wisdom, the black art!
So much for you. It boils down to death, statistics. Everybody dies. Death is my argument. Leave me alone.
“My wife”—he would understand the thrust—“ My wife has told me that you are angry about the settlement. I’ll try to explain it to you.”
“The settlement is a matter of indifference to me,” the Grand Master said.
“Of course,” I said. “I understand that. She has made me a wealthy man. That part was her idea, anyway. I know you don’t object to that — you don’t care who has the wealth as long as someone has it. I think perhaps it’s The Club you’re interested in.”
I began to explain about The Club.
Part Three
I
The truth is we haven’t caught on. We are so lonely. Margaret asks, Are we happy, and the question makes me furious and sad. I put her off with a joke. I read our bank balance. I point to the carpet and indicate its thickness with my forefinger and thumb. I bring her to the kitchen and show her our meats.
I tell Margaret that she is my war bride. The fact is she seemed actually to diminish when we went through customs. The man asked if we had anything to declare and Margaret stared at him as if she didn’t understand the question. When he asked again she looked at me and I thought she would cry.
“No, nothing,” I said. “We have nothing to declare.” You know how it is when you make a mistake.
I can’t explain it. We are out of touch. Not with each other, but mutually, with everything.
Hawthorne tells a story about a man named Wakefield who left his home one evening and didn’t return for twenty years. His act was a whim, unpremeditated, but it made no difference; if he had come back a week later it would already have been too late. One must never break the rhythm of his life. You stay in lockstep or you suffer. Every vacation is an upheaval. I have seen men at the seashore whose free time is the most grotesque of burdens. They are haunted by the idea of things going on without them, of someone at the office doing their job, opening their mail, answering their phone. It’s an intimation of death. You have to make a life, however grab-bag or eccentric; there has to be routine, pattern. I’ve failed there. Something about my life gives my life away, something improvised and sad. At my dinner parties there are mismatched dishes, chairs, plastic spoons. I was better off alone, I think. There was desperation to keep me going. It’s all what you’re used to. For me running scared is the only way to travel. Poor is what I know best, and there are times when I can almost taste the old degradation of the bones — ten minutes for a rest stop, pee, spit, and regret, talking to the driver beside the big open underbelly of the bus where the cardboard suitcase goes, the box tied up with string.
I’ll tell you what’s wrong with me. I don’t know what to tip. A grown man!
There are “executive flights” now and I am on them and there is always monogrammed linen and the best booze in my attaché case, but the truth is I was never less attaché. I have heard the stewardesses singing each to each, I do not think that they will sing to me.
Well, the grass is never greener, I always say. The course of true life never did run smooth.
When as a child I was home ill everything was fine until the others came back and I heard their voices and laughter outside. Then something would happen inside me, in my heart, and I’d have to get up and shut the window. To this day the most awful sound for me is a conversation overheard, people talking to each other in a restaurant at the next table, behind me on a bus. I swear, sometimes I feel already like a ghost.
For me envy isn’t a sin, it seems, but a fact. I need it to live, like air. Sometimes I think, If I’d lived more to the purpose… Crap! Who has lived more to the purpose than myself? No; disappointment, like rotten fruit, is always the last thing left in the larder. Things pall. The world’s appalling. A’palling. It goes like a song.