Naturally talk evolves from shelves to books and to other subjects and at one moment to Helen, which is not a surprise. I am prepared for this. We are sitting on my couch, having tea. John discovers that I have not seen her for a while. I reveal the whole truth — that she and I may be on the outs — because now my subterfuge would be almost callous and surely unnecessary. John becomes alarmed, which surprises me pleasantly; his entire demeanor had excluded the possibility of his being shockable. He could not be just “a liar,” as Helen had said, but a delicate young man, more complex and sensitive than she allowed. I keep reflecting upon how odd it is, how peculiar, that someone as hip, probably as groovy as John, in his colorful terms, should manifest alarm. His rationalizations for it are feeble, to the effect that it has nothing to do with him, but everything to do with her. Though I have my own doubts, I attempt to calm him, assuring him that no harm will come to Helen, who is willful and remarkably resilient. He now exhibits a grave scrupulosity, but says nothing. His expression, easily called up in my mind’s eye, is full of meaning, yet ambiguous, even opaque.
I am still extremely curious about Helen’s sister, and whether she was a suicide as I had surmised, and whether they were twins, which I have less belief in of late, especially now that Gwen is in town. With Gwen around I am more aware of my feelings toward her, twinnish feelings. In fact, I was in the process of writing something to that effect when John knocked at my door.
Long ago, I imagined Gwen and I were fraternal twins — man, woman, heterosexual, homosexual, black, white. But in a way these supposed oppositions meant nothing to me except as qualities that added to our specialness. The point was we were originals, that was what was most important. Nothing could really separate us. Gwen and I were two sides of the same precious coin. As Alicia might put it, we were each other’s anima and animus. But I really don’t subscribe to Jungian theory. It was true, though, that I idealized us, and perhaps I will always. From other sides of the tracks but on the same track, we were, and are, our own club. Gwen has often commented upon how discriminating we were in those days, how exclusive, no one was good enough for us. She was a greater snob than I in many ways.
She must have acclimated quickly to being the only black person in our group, and often the only female. She never let on what her feelings were, if any, about being singular in those ways. I knew then, and know now, very little about her other, earlier life, with her family, and little in regard to her attitudes toward or even her experience of race. In New York there was a black piano player she liked, but he too spent most of his time in white society. On one occasion I attempted to ask her. She uttered something rather abstract about being more about sex than race and disallowed, through her laconicism and gestures, I recall, any further questions, direct questions of that nature, anyway. It was a less strange remark then — to be about sex, not race, in a way — than now, although maybe not, since it was at the beginning of the sixties. I accepted her answer, as it neatly coincided with my conception of her. But in any case, I was not and am not one to press, even though I am unusually curious — this is often said of me. I have the urge to pry. Can this truly mean, as Freud suggested, that I am always seeking to discover my parents in flagrante delicto?
Gwen never wanted to talk about her family; it was as if anything said about families at all was childish or beneath contempt. She seemed to hold them in contempt. But all of us did then. She seemed, and still seems, not to think about herself in any of the ways one might imagine. This may be true of original people generally. But while she never made pronouncements about race, as if it didn’t occur to her, and therefore ought not to others, I have now more than a sneaking suspicion that nothing escaped Gwen, that she always knew where she was and where she had come from. Very little escaped from her that she didn’t want others to know, no matter how close one was. But this never occurred to me then. Gwen must have suffered the way one does when one lives a crucial aspect of one’s life in secrecy, in the closet. She must have suffered in silence. Perhaps she still does, even in these more open times. I felt a chill and shivered involuntarily. I walked to the open window and shut it decisively. The cold air had blown in from some distant, terribly remote place outside me, outside us. Actually, I felt a bit like Rebecca in Daphne du Maurier’s novel, which Hitchcock most successfully brought to the screen.
I was not terribly happy with the passage. It was likely I had not gotten it right, for no matter how I looked back at Gwen and myself, to recapitulate our past and to examine my perceptions of her, then and now, she and it — the past — slipped away, seemed just out of reach. I was too clumsily grasping at it, whatever it was, and it slid through my puffy fingers. Indeed even recent history was difficult to remember with precision. I wasn’t quite sure precisely how long it was that I hadn’t seen Helen. At first it seemed Gwen had arrived instantaneously, right after my telephone call to her, but now I believe more time had passed. But I was unaware of it. Time does that; I do that — refuse to acknowledge time’s passing. I let it slip through my fingers. So, as often happens, I was glad to hear John’s knock upon the door, interrupting my meditation and labors.
Now, gazing at John, my mind wanders to Helen, from Gwen to Helen, and to John, back to Helen, then to Gwen. I may be clumsy, inadequate, even unequal to the task of grasping Gwen and my relationship with her. Perhaps I am no longer an expert judge of Gwen. I feel, at least temporarily, unable to delineate her character and the quality of our relationship. The essential eludes me. As I watch and listen to John, I imagine too that Helen, like the grains of sand which measure time, has passed through and by, and that she may have slipped figuratively through my arthritic fingers. Though I mustn’t blame my ineptitude solely on age, I suppose. I might have fumbled the ball when I was young. In any case, there is still time.
After some initial reticence, John is forthcoming. It is not hard to pry from him the secret he alluded to in the hospital, about Helen’s sister and her past. He is a trifle skittish. But after discussing the shelves for a while and sitting on the couch, and after I poured us tea and observed the obligatory conversational gambits, he relaxes entirely.
It’s beautiful here, he remarks, looking toward the window. I am always touched when young American men notice beauty. Especially beautiful ones. I offer him a few biscuits which ought to be fresher, but he seems not to notice. Then I mention my visit with him in the hospital and then, first putting my cup to my lips and pausing, I ask him what he meant by saying “not like her sister, man.” John nods his head up and down several times, and it seems to me he is eager to divulge this information.
He speaks with an air of casual authority. Everyone thinks — and Helen indicated to him, at least obliquely — that her sister was a suicide. She was four years older than Helen, was finishing college, was obese, and very miserable. Helen and she got along all right, but not terribly well. Helen’s arrival in the family was a disruption for the older one; and she was, like most children, jealous of the attention Helen received as an infant. Still she was, according to many, her father’s favorite. To myself I note that, like Helen, I am the baby of my family. Helen’s parents fought a great deal, and it was rumored that the noble father — for so he was viewed — was engaged in an affair with a woman not much older than the older sister at the time of her alleged suicide. There were no brothers.
The dark events were matters of great speculation, involving some rather shocking questions about the psychiatrist father and the sister and the effects upon the sister of the illicit coupling of the father and his lover. It was very nasty business. John thinks the sister was found in a bathtub. That’s what he heard, but not from Helen. I didn’t ask — discovered by whom? — for even I felt the need to expunge the ghoulish image that “found in the bathtub” elicits.