I gazed at Gwen’s wry face. To her I asserted: one can never fully know oneself, and this is, perhaps, and in one sense of the word only, a fate one can never escape. Gwen followed with the idea that the only thing about someone else you can always be right about is that you’re wrong. About yourself, too, I responded, returning to my predicament with a false merriment.
Having fortified myself with food and drink, I inquired of Gwen what her paranoid letter had meant. She asked which letter. The last letter, I answered. She groaned, “Oh, that pistol”—for epistle. “I had had it. Everyone was thinking and behaving so stupidly and no one was thrilling me, there were no thrills, no frills. I want to be thrilled to death, Lulu. I had had it. I was frazzled, not dazzled, by life. I was bored, and you know I despise being bored.”
As if I didn’t hear her, I pronounced gravely: Death is of course the one fate no one can escape. I reminded Gwen of our talk at the restaurant on the harbor that eerie night and how she had seemed to indicate that she was preparing to meet her Maker. I told her that for all this time I had worried that we may have invoked the fates, that very night. “Lulu, you’ll make me die laughing” is how she responded. She was not dying, but it was the type of thing, the kind of tragic end that often occurs and that, I hesitate to mention, I was looking for.
Nevertheless, for whatever reason I had come, Gwen was very happy I was there. “You’re here, Lulu, and I’m not even ready to give up the ghost. Do black people,” she teased, “have white or black ghosts?” Then, more seriously, she said that she might leave New York, the States, and “give up the ghost of the music man — Lulu, you know the one.”
What were or are the disasters you were alluding to? I asked. She enumerated several difficulties, big drags, but none had to do with drug dealers or the Mafia or cancer or whatever. Then Gwen paused. I could tell she was about to tell me a story. I ordered another bottle and poured the wine into her glass and mine.
Gwen had visited her family for the first time in years. When she was in college, she had detested going home for holidays and walking into their apartment. But finally, recently, she had gone home again. She carried on in this uncharacteristic vein and related a story from her past, which I had never heard, though I knew her then, or was just about to meet her. She was a sophomore in college — on scholarship, she reminded me — invited for a weekend at her best friend’s house, a white girl from an old family, wealthy, of course. Everyone was wealthy. Gwen entered the friend’s home, whose door was opened by a black maid. We were Negro then, Gwen said, unsmiling. The maid was in uniform; Gwen didn’t know who was more surprised, mortified, she or the maid. The household was content, lulled, Gwen thought, by years of privilege and whiteness and money into a sleepy and unthinking acceptance of the good life. Gwen brushed past the maid, barely looking, barely able to look at her. That moment was indelible to her. She had never mentioned it to anyone. Then Gwen said, “After all these years, I can still remember it.”
I was at a loss. What is it about that sentence, “After all these years I can still remember…” that can always bring me to tears. Whenever I hear it or come upon it, even in a newspaper article, I weep copiously. I didn’t want to embarrass Gwen. Every one of us who has years more to live, if we do — and every one of us ought to be permitted three score and ten at the very least — every one of us will have a chance to look back and remember that and not that, this and not that…To recover, I muttered words, sentences, of this ilk to her.
Not only was this the first time in a long while, or ever, that Gwen had deliberately mentioned her family to me, it was the first time she had articulated so explicitly and plainly something of this nature, to me. With a start I realized again that Gwen was the one and only black person I was friends with and who was friends with me. That she had made such statements, with such emotion, about her history indicated a change in her, I believed, one that must have been painful to achieve, and perhaps indicated a change in me. A change in the times, too, I supposed. It was and is impossible to tell to what extent these things merged one into the other. This is the moment when, I believe, Gwen characterized us as the shrimp boats of history.
I was not certain what I should say. Gwen had not spoken in anger. She had not spoken to point a finger at me. I understood that much, I thought.
For a while we drank in silence, both of us musing and mulling over the many topics we had discussed. The restaurant had emptied and we were its last customers. We were closing the joint, as Gwen would put it. This was not at all unusual for us to do. In fact, over the years I have taken some pride in having helped toward that end many times. Gwen and I had tucked away several bottles of wine; I knew my morning would be ragged. But I didn’t care. I was content.
Suddenly Gwen startled me out of my reverie. She was laughing aloud, to herself. What’s so amusing? I asked. She could not yet speak, but she had stopped laughing, as abruptly as she had begun. She seemed to be laughing inwardly. “Lulu, Lulu,” Gwen managed to whisper. “What is it?” I urged. “How do I know what she thought?” “Who, dear?” “Or if she was mortified?” “Who, dear?” I asked again. “The maid, my friend’s maid,” Gwen answered. “Oh, yes,” I said, “I see.” But I wasn’t quite sure that I did, then.
Another surprise, though of a different order, was Gwen’s announcement that she might leave New York, even the States. I complained that she had no right, having teased me mercilessly about being an expatriate. Gwen took my hand and said that she would run away to Altoona, Pennsylvania, or become a Buddhist in Colorado, just get off the Great White Way. Broadway anyway. I urged her to move to Crete.
Gwen couldn’t bear it that Reagan had been elected President. I reported that Roger was over the moon about it. Not that Gwen had especially approved of the peanut farmer. She had been mildly puzzled, even somewhat disarmed, when Carter had spoken to the nation on TV, and, as she put it, had so hokily beamed himself to the American people to report on their malaise. “In French, Horace, he didn’t mean mayonnaise.” I repeated my hope that she’d move to Crete and live near me. She said she’d consider it. She has not yet decided. “You’re quaint, Lulu,” she said then. “Je t’adore.”
Later that night, spurred on by the dialogue with Gwen, it dawned on me — dawn it was: a fulgent light streaked across the sky simultaneous with this idea, this is absolutely true! — that what Horace had written, which I, as his namesake, often quoted, was correct. That I may have figuratively lived it — even literalized it — was perhaps, I decided, not such a terrible matter. It depended upon how one thought about such things. “With the change of names, the story is told about you.” A more modern translation of the Latin goes: “Change the name and you are the subject of the story.” Undoubtedly I had absorbed Horace’s words and allowed them to penetrate, to suffuse my mind and body, to subsume and consume me. I enjoyed that interpretation better than most of the others I dallied with. The break in my thinking, which I experienced and thought had occurred when I acknowledged, for one thing, that I was not always in control of the story, as I had imagined, probably flowed from this literary, this metaphorical, if not metaphysical, transformation. (At another dinner Gwen kidded me mercilessly about Roman, once I had surrendered that tale to her. Roman’s nonappearance was all she needed for one of her transformations. She galloped on about Roman, the novel, never returning, the novel’s death, the end of authors, readers, reading, and so on.)
One might well ask: Did Helen truly exist? Was there a Helen? And were I asked, I might answer: She existed for me. Or, there was a Helen for me. And she was not insipid at all.