He and I always seemed to be counting the time as it passed and waiting for it to pass so that the day would come when we would be together again. That was one reason he said he couldn’t go on with it. And maybe he’s right, it isn’t too late, we will change over to a friendship, and he will talk to me now and then long distance, mostly about his work or my work, and give me good advice or a plan of action when I need one, then call himself something like my “éminence grise.”
When I stopped making my phone calls, I was too dizzy to go to sleep, because of the wine, so I turned on the television and watched some police dramas, some old situation comedies, and finally a show about unusual people across the country. I turned the set off at five in the morning when the sky was light, and I fell asleep right away.
It’s true that by the time the night was over I wasn’t worrying anymore about what was wrong with me. At that hour of the morning I can usually get myself out to the end of something like a long dock with water all around where I’m not touched by such worries. But there will always come a time later that day or a day or two after when I ask myself that difficult question once, or over and over again, a useless question, really, since I’m not the one who can answer it and anyone else who tries will come up with a different answer, though of course all the answers together may add up to the right one, if there is such a thing as a right answer to a question like that.
Sketches for a Life of Wassilly
Wassilly was a man of many parts, changeable, fickle, at times ambitious, at times stuporous, at times meditative, at times impatient. Not a man of habit, though he wished to be, tried to cultivate habits, was overjoyed when he found something that truly, for a time, seemed necessary to him and that had possibilities of becoming a habit.
For a while, he sat in his wing chair every evening after supper and found it pleasant. He once thoroughly enjoyed smoking a pipe of fragrant tobacco and thinking over what had happened to him during the day. But the next evening he suffered from wind and could not sit still; the pipe, also, kept going out; the lights for some reason flickered and dimmed constantly, and after a while he gave up the pretense of leisurely contemplation.
Some months later, he decided that a stroll after dinner was also a popular thing to do and might easily become a habit. For many days he went out of his house at a fixed hour and walked through the neighboring streets, successfully evoking in himself a mood of calm speculation, gazing at the swallows as they flew over the river and at the red sun-soaked housefronts and deducing various ill-founded scientific principles from what he saw; or he let his thoughts dwell on the people that walked by him in the street. But this did not become a habit either: he realized with great disappointment that once he had exhausted all the possible routes within an hour’s stroll of his house he became frankly bored with walking, and that instead of benefiting his constitution, it upset his stomach enough so that he had to treat himself with some pills upon returning home. The strolls stopped altogether when his sister came unexpectedly to visit him, and did not resume when she left.
Wassilly was ambitious to learn, and yet sometimes for days on end he could not bring himself to study, but would sneak off into a corner, as if to avoid his own anxious gaze, and spend a long time bent over a crossword puzzle. This made him irritable and dull. He tried to throw the puzzles into a more favorable light by including them in his scheme for self-improvement. During three days, he tested himself against his watch: he did most of a puzzle in twenty minutes on one day, all of it in twenty minutes on the next, and then almost none of it in twenty minutes on the third. On that day he changed the rules and decided he would try to finish the puzzle every day, no matter how long it took. He clearly saw the time coming in which he would be master of the game. To this end he started keeping a notebook in which he wrote down all the more obscure words which appeared regularly in the puzzles and which he otherwise forgot as soon as he learned them, such as “stoa: Greek porch.” In this way he persuaded himself that he was learning something even from the puzzles, and for a few wonderful hours he saw the conjunction of his baser inclinations and his higher ambitions.
His inconsistency. His inability to finish anything. His sudden terrifying feelings that nothing he did mattered. His realizations that what went on in the outside world had more substance than anything in his life.
Sometimes Wassilly had an inkling that he suffered from a deeper boredom than he could completely picture to himself. At these times, he would brood about the yearly allowance his father gave him: perhaps it was the most unfortunate thing that had ever happened to him; it might ruin what was left of his life. Yet one of the only things Wassilly could be sure of in himself was the recurring hope that things would not turn out as badly as they seemed to be.
His effect on the world was potentially astonishing.
Wassilly’s few real successes left him unmoved. Or rather, he could not bear to look at an article he had published and would allow his copies of the magazine to become covered with coffee stains and bent at the edges. He could not feel that his printed name was really his, or that the words on the page had really come from his own pen. His sister confirmed this feeling by remaining utterly silent about what he sent to her and also by treating him in exactly the same way she always had — as an agreeable but ineffectual person — when he felt his accomplishments should have made her see him in a new light. As some sort of retaliation, he occasionally wrote her long, deeply serious, and carefully phrased letters criticizing her personal life. These she would only mention months later and in an offhand way.
Not only did his published name and works seem to belong to someone else, but he derived little joy from anything he wrote. Once he had done it, it was out of his hands: it lay in a no-man’s-land. It was neutral. It did not speak to him. He wanted to be proud of himself, but felt only guilty — that he had not done more, or better. He envied people who set out to write a book, wrote it, and were pleased with it, and when it was published read it through again with fresh pleasure and turned easily to their next project. He felt only a frightening emptiness ahead of him, a vacancy where there should have been plans, and all his work grew out of impulses.
Wassilly was so extremely self-conscious that at times even the soft eyes of his dog made him blush with embarrassment when he tried to attract her attention by some stupid action. Talking to friends on the telephone he would put fantastic interpretations on what they said and respond with clumsy remarks which left them bewildered and nervous.
In strange company he spoke too softly to be heard, afraid that his remarks would be misunderstood. His confidence was further weakened by the fact that people looked puzzled every time he spoke, since they were trying to hear what he was saying, or did not even notice that he had spoken.
Sometimes he was not certain whether or not he should say goodbye to a stranger. He compromised by whispering and looking off to one side.
He did not know exactly when to thank his hostess after attending a dinner or a weekend party. In his uncertainty, he would thank her over and over again. It was as though he did not believe his words carried any weight and hoped to achieve through the effect of accumulation what one speech alone could not accomplish.