I never finished recording the events of that day and night which we spent together. What did we do that day? I cannot remember now. It’s so odd what one forgets and what one holds and stores inside one, good memories as well as bad ones. The oddest occurrence of all is when a friend remembers much too well an event you have no memory of and yet it struck the friend as worth preserving, consciously or unconsciously, and in the friend’s memory you are a vivacious actor in the scene.
I reread the page. What did it mean really, that conversation with Helen? As a piece of writing it doesn’t seem to fit anywhere. It may not. It does not explain anything to me. But I am not sure. There may be clues in it that are hidden from me. I put it away again but this time place it in a clean new folder which I mark, Questions about Helen.
In the great scheme of unknowable things, Helen’s absence is unimportant, a speck of dust in a vast and unseemly, filthy world. Still, a mystery is a mystery. I rub my eyes; they are coated, a film over them. I cannot see properly. While this may be a metaphor, it is also true that my sight has bothered me for years, and as I age I worry more and more that one day I will not be able to read, that I will go blind, and end life as one of those poor souls with a white cane who is forced to walk the streets waving it in the air about him, a spectacle who cannot see what kind of spectacle he makes. I am susceptible to humiliation, while the people I admire most are indifferent to how they appear to others. Could I, like Milton, train young people to read for me, and would I be as cruel — to teach them to read without understanding? I have no daughters. I nearly thought, I have Helen. How comic, how predictable. Now a pang — a kind of hole — lodges just under my heart, a register of longing or emptiness, which may be the same. This hunger I experience — to be full and whole. Do terribly obese people suffer this in the extreme? Still, why shouldn’t one long for eternal life? Why shouldn’t one crave immortality? Or is this pang an intimation of heart disease?
Immortality is one thread in the quilt. I try in all matters to find the significant thread — or theme — that if pulled would rip apart the sweater, unravel the yarn. It’s why I enjoy writing stories based on real-life crimes. People usually have motives for what they do, foolish ones, perhaps, ones spurred on by the least attractive qualities in men and women. Jealousy, greed. Ignobility. There are always motives in the crime stories I’ve written. Thus I can move from event to event unselfconsciously and with a degree of fluidity: someone wasn’t named in a will and took revenge; he stole his girl; she took a lover and her husband found out, then murdered them both; and so on. A murder is committed or two murders, the second to conceal the first. There is a chain of events, a series of links, and one need merely trace the links back or begin at the beginning, moving forward to the penultimate event, to understand the ultimate one. Increasingly, life is not like this.
Yannis arrived home late last night, his tail between his legs. He is sporting a ghastly black-and-blue eye, a shiner, we used to say, and is terrifically vague about his lost days and nights. Lost to me, not to him, I suppose, as he knows what he was doing and I do not. Yet because of the palpable presence of John and the comfort of inimitable Gwen — at least in some respects — I’m indifferent to his evasiveness. I do not press him as I would have in the recent past. I refuse to react to his shenanigans. I do not cajole and barter. Yannis is startled by the change in my attitude: my lack of reaction has sharply shifted things for him. He doesn’t know what to do to catch hold of me again. I see him thinking, plotting how to do it. It is the same look that overcomes his normally placid features when he is fishing at the harbor and something tugs on his line. He snaps to with a mixture of stealth and cunning, a tiger about to pounce, then he jerks the rod to fix the hook in the poor fish’s gaping mouth. Thus is he thinking about me, with the same determined expression on his face. One day Yannis may find he’s lost me, that I have not been adequately hooked. That I have not taken the bait. Look, I am saying to him, I am swimming away. You cannot catch me. You do not have the right bait and lure. And soon, I say to myself, seeing his power diminish, he may leave me — I can sustain this thought — and that will be all right. Nothing is forever, after all, except common death.
Distracted — or perhaps in order to distract myself — I choose a book from the night table, one of Alicia’s, entitled The Gypsies, and I turn to the index, where I discover a citation for Death. Under the subheading, “Death and Funeral Rites,” I read that “a Gypsy does not die in his bed…no more than birth, may death pollute the home.” “On the announcement of death, the whole tribe begins to weep or cry out, even yell.” I should have liked to have witnessed such behavior at my mother’s funeral. My brother would never wail; even the need to wail and cry out would be beyond his comprehension. Actually he would be incapable of wailing, I’m certain. At our funeral rite for Mother, there were some wet eyes, and several cheeks were damp with tears, the teardrops pressed into or blotted onto the skin with handkerchiefs.
But oh I have wailed, I have brayed at the moon, I have found myself on my knees, howling. I have seen the best minds of my generation…and really I disdained the Beats then. Yet even I, in that funereal group, was contained, tight. In fact, I was tight. How else to get through such a sad ceremony, surrounded by the living dead.
It seems the Gypsies have a different conception of death from us. Once they bury one of their own, they forget the place of burial. That makes sense for a nomadic people, for travelers. Fascinating, fascinating, I mutter aloud — Yannis is not, I hope, within earshot. I converse with the invisible interlocutor who, I often imagine, stands near me to hear my amazement, to absorb my thinking, and to encourage and feel my rising excitement. At times I recognize that this other must be my mother, as she was the first person who shaped and shared my intellectual concerns; she did encourage them, and me.