In reality, though reality is, especially in my condition, debatable, Gwen deserves John. She can — ought to — have him; age before beauty. No, no, the other way around; in our case, beauty before age. Though Gwen is not quite beautiful but handsome. Also she is my guest, and I intend always to be a good host. It is an image I hold of myself, the gracious host, which must be maintained, I feel, as if civilization itself depended on it, and it may, actually.
Even now I am neglecting my duties. Hurriedly I open another bottle and pour us all more to drink. I have no food to serve them which I’m sure Gwen has already registered — Horace is starving us, she’s thinking. I laugh out loud; it’s amusing to think I might be purposely depriving them and that I wish them to die of starvation. They are quite thin already. It wouldn’t take much to starve them. It is an interesting idea, one that might be useful. Someone could be holding them prisoner, they might be sex prisoners, love slaves, that kind of thing. Perhaps captives of a de Sade-type character, who lives in New Jersey or Connecticut, some unlikely locale, and they are bound together by his insanity, even manacled together in his faux-medieval fort. The neighbors never suspected, they would say, clucking nonsensically as they viewed the bodies being wheeled out from the dungeonlike cellar. I must for that down later.
Now John and Gwen are discussing Jackie Onassis and Angie Dickinson, and the Andrews Sisters, of all things, molls, and their gangsters. Can Jackie Kennedy Onassis really be thought of as a moll? I ask. Such a well-brought-up woman? Gwen makes light of this, having seen many too many well-brought-up young women go to pieces, all the crowd around Warhol — Drella, she calls him — and she knows how these women trade, on a grand scale, their sexual favors and beauty, jockeying for better position and greater financial security. Gwen reports that the just-married Jackie Kennedy, when asked if she was madly in love with then Senator Kennedy, answered the newsman, No. Incredulous, he asked her again, and she repeated, No. Did she really, Gwen, I ask, did she really say that on camera? Yes, she did, I have it from a good source. Gwen has good sources.
I must admit I’m shocked, I rather like Jackie, and even approved of her marriage to Onassis. I can see how she’d like an older man. I am an older man, I’m thinking. I may be slurring my words, but what does it matter. What about Callas? John asks. Jackie marrying Onassis screwed her up, right? I’m astonished. This can’t be my rock-and-roller John speaking, not about the diva Maria — it is Alicia speaking through young John. She is mad about Callas.
Hungry? I ask them. Shall we dine? Or dance? I mime a tango and mince around the room. Gwen joins in. I love Gwen. I hate myself for ever thinking her a disruption. Though she is. And so are John and Helen. Life disrupts life. I am getting little to nothing done, it’s true. But the dance is life, and life is a dance, and life is a short dance, and oh, I am silly, and on and on. I whirl wildly about the room, as if I hadn’t a care in the world, and right now I don’t feel I do have a care in the world, only what I wish to care about. I do not wish for anything to care about. I am shockingly free. Free. Fancy-free. I come to a halt, throw my head back and pretend to strip off long evening gloves like those worn by Rita Hayworth in Gilda. Gwen roars with laughter and curtsies before me, her king or queen. It is as if she had been presented before royalty countless times. And even to think of countless times, of the ages of human existence, makes me sigh. I feel weak, I weaken before that august history, weaken before Gwen. I return her curtsy, and her courtesy, and snap the long invisible gloves in the air for emphasis, as if the gloves were designed as punctuation marks — periods or exclamation marks — and were oh so necessary to the sense of my performance.
John probably has no idea what I’m doing. For his sake I ought to have imitated Mick Jagger. It is for his sake I am dancing the tango of the gloves, is it not? For whose sake then am I dancing? Does one commit mischievous acts for oneself or another? Murder, a tango, a striptease. How I wish my body were beautiful! I toss myself here and there, hither, thither, and yon. My ecstatic positions are ephemeral, sublime, ludicrous, but they do have a logic, even if it is only internal. They make sense to me.
I stop prancing just as suddenly as I started, mentally patting myself on the back for bravado, nothing else. I offer to treat them both to a wonderful meal at the only restaurant on the harbor. John hesitates. Is he thinking of Alicia? Gwen notices his hesitation or reluctance. Damned hungry, she declares and grabs me by the hand, pulling me toward the door. This action leaves John standing alone in the middle of the room, with the empty wine bottles on the floor about him. They look like sinking ships.
We must go, I declare to John. John’s hands dangle foolishly from his long thin arms. He himself is in some way dangling foolishly, even dangerously. Ah, I muse waggishly, a pretty boy is considering his options. He must soon come to a decision, having weighed the pros and cons of doing this or that, I suppose. He blinks, clears his throat, but says not a word, and then follows after us penitently, nay, passively. He’s a young man easily led.
Will I be the leader or Gwen? Am I in any condition to lead? Actually the idea of Gwen and me as leaders is marvelous; in our present state, we ought to be inflicted on the public! To Gwen I bellow, in a mock English accent, Where will it all end? Hell, she mutters, just hell. O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I, I answer. I recite this line in the manner of Olivier, I’m almost positive of that. Dear Gwen, perverse Gwen. Perverse me. To dinner we three!
Chapter 11
I am losing too many nights, if nights can be lost. How do I love thee, let me count the nights. They do count, whether or not they are lost. Perhaps Gwen and the boy have scooped it up, whatever it was that was lost. I must have been asleep for a generation — accounting for the generation gap — and they have taken my — that — night from me, sharing it between themselves. What a foul idea. I don’t even remember if Roger made an appearance at the restaurant when we three were there. If he did, I think he and Yannis were scowling at each other, quite ferociously. I can see their contorted faces before me. How ugly anger is! John must have deposited me at my door. Or Gwen. Or both. Though for some reason I believe it is unlikely they were together. Something happened between them, I think. Perhaps it will come to me as the day goes on.
The sun glares into the room. The curtains were not drawn. Yannis forgot to do it. I don’t want to open my eyes. Not yet. But even though I think that, I do open them, just to demonstrate to myself that I can think one thing and do another. My small world comes into view — bureau, slice of sky, books on floor, and so on, and I ask myself again: why has Helen disappeared? What is the reason? There must be a reasonable explanation. But I cannot, for the life of me, find one. I am, I decide, obsessed by this, and I know it’s weird, as John might put it. I think he did put it that way, the other day, come to think of it, when I talked to him about Helen. John thinks me strange, I think. Yet I must find the bits that I do not know and join them together into a reasonable, a functional whole. This makes me a sort of quilter on the order of Great-Aunt Sarah, a loathsome woman, but most talented in her homely way.
I am reminded of an unfinished piece of writing about Helen. But where is it? If only Yannis acted as my secretary. I get out of bed and shuffle through some papers and come to it.
We were at the restaurant, at my table. Helen was rubbing her foot. Then she began tapping her foot on the ground in an arrhythmic pattern that annoyed me but I did not complain. She asked about my past, friends, college, Boston, New York, as she did from time to time, and very easily did I relate anecdotes and tales that I believed she enjoyed and which I would not so willingly tell others. Helen was a wonderful listener. One simply felt her appreciation. I told her about a fatal disagreement between two artists, both of whom developed a certain kind of technique or effect. They fought about who did it first and who could claim it. Each was adamant. It ended their friendship. Helen was astonished. What did it matter, she wanted to know, who did it first? I explained that it had to do with originality, with thinking up something first, with being the first to have fostered a new idea, to have changed definitively a field — in art, in science — to have produced a theory or form, which established a new way of thinking, in writing, even a locution, and that that ought to be credited. Helen thought it was funny. She declared that she would never care about something like that. Why did it really matter who did it first; didn’t it only matter that it was thought or done, she wanted to know. I was hard-pressed to get to the heart of it, to why it mattered ultimately. But I elaborated that it was important, for instance, in science, to mark the link from one idea to another, and to give credit where it was due. Human beings strive for immortality, for recognition and acknowledgment, to make their mark, to encourage progress, and to move civilization forward, I went on. Later, we laughed about the fifteen minutes any of us might be given in this regard, but my sweet young Smitty accepts this short span on the stage more readily than do I, I think. Indeed I was winded by the end of my short speech. I waxed and waned with it.