School attendance became sown with pitfalls, nightmarish at times. Every hour, every day, contained its start of anxiety, frantic search, rancorous reassurance — and too often the savage anguish of loss. Worries over his possessions thudded into his inattentiveness, and his inattentiveness seemed to become ever more habitual, an invincible caesura of consciousness. . goddamn dope, forever daydreaming, woolgathering. Bad enough, but the fantasizing was far worse, his cunning conspiring to fulfill his fantasy. It was like a thickening shadow across the delight he felt being in the same school with Farley, a thickening shadow blotting out the vicarious glory of being Farley’s boon companion. He began to steal.
In vindictive fury at first, after he rushed back from the hall at change of class, to find his fountain pen gone from the groove on the desk in which he had left it — only a minute before! His last and only fountain pen! Lousy bastards, sonofabitch bastards! He’d get even. He’d snitch someone else’s pen. Frig him, whoever he was. . And what a cinch it turned out to be! Nothing to it. It was so easy, he’d get another one. Never have to worry about fountain pens anymore. Once you did it, had the nerve to do it, once was all that you needed to learn the knack; at the beginning of the gym period everyone divested himself of his jacket, changed shoes for sneakers, and went out on the gym floor to begin calisthenics. Ira loitered behind. Brushing, as if by accident, against a nearby jacket, exposing the inner breast pocket, brought to light the clip of a fountain pen. It took only an instant to extract, and in an instant the pen was his — his, and slipped safely into his own pants pocket.
“And thus he became predator.” Ira read the words of his first draft, the yellow typescript beside him: became! He could feel the grim sneer that bent his own lips: he became a predator from that day on. Ira appended the text: “Indeed, it seems to me not in the matter of fountain pens alone, but as if their theft was symptomatic of the metamorphosis the entire psyche was already undergoing.”
Ah, yes, the point I was about to make, Ecclesias, and then forgot, as often happens to the writer, and probably more often to the aged one; so that the intended aside seems like a luxury, a self-indulgence. I once wrote a novel, as you know well, Ecclesias, when I was young.
— Yes?
And the poor little nine-year-old tyke was victimized by the society around him, by forces in the environment around him, the good little nine-year-old tyke I might have written.
— Wasn’t he?
Yes, of course. In the novel. But the reflection is a false one; it’s quite distorted.
— Perhaps. But let me ask you: why do you say that?
I say it because it is false to me, to the one I am, to the one I actually was.
— At the time of writing?
At the time of writing, yes. That’s exactly the point — I think of Joyce’s Dedalus here, and of Joyce himself — censoriously as usuaclass="underline" trying to formulate my chief objection, and to test it against the evidence: that what I found most objectionable in Joyce, most repelling, was that he had brought to an extreme the divorce between the artist and the man; not merely brought to an extreme; he had flaunted it, gloried in it: the icon of the artist detached from his autonomous work, disavowing moral responsibility for his creation, paring his nails with divine indifference. Joyce had amputated the artist from the man. What baloney.
But to my point, the writer I was imagined, given trifling variations of detail and time, that he was faithfully projecting, enacting, faithfully engrossing himself in his milieu, nay, faithfully representing himself in relation to his milieu. Do you follow me? The guy really believed he was purveying the truth, realizing actualities.
— Do you deny that the writer was victimized?
But not in that way! He was part of the process. And it is his part in the process he unconsciously suppressed, unconsciously omitted, and hence the picture is distorted. I can say the same thing another way: the writer was under the delusion that he was portraying truth, but in fact, he wasn’t.
— How do you know he is now?
I don’t — with any absolute certainty; only the relative certainty that I have at least taken into account, born witness to, hitherto ignored relevancy.
— Could it be at the expense of art? Could it? You are silent.
I don’t know.
The theft of the fountain pen led to the theft of another, and still another. Their acquisition conferred on Ira something akin to freedom, a new kind of freedom, unwonted freedom from concern; not only from that shudder of alarm over whether he had or hadn’t taken his fountain pen with him when he changed classes, and would now have to pay the penalty for his neglect (even if he did, there were more where those came from); but the freedom accorded by callousness, the license that sprang from callousness, callousness that dispersed the thought of the unhappiness he brought the one he had despoiled, callousness that bartered sympathy for power, that toyed with depravity.
And then came the inevitable, the inevitable in its devious way. Came the day when in the breast pocket of one of the jackets that he brushed against was clipped a magnificent fountain pen, the upper barrel glistening in silver filigree. Silver! Vine and arabesque! He clawed at it; it was his.
His!
For a long while he kept his superb trophy hidden in his favorite cache, the dusty floor underneath the lower drawer of the built-in wardrobe in Pop and Mom’s bedroom, kept it wrapped up in a piece of brown paper bag beside its run-of-the-mill mates. The round knobs on the dingy-white drawer, the dark maw within when the drawer was pulled all the way out, the accumulated dust on the floor whereon his fountain pens were secreted became accomplices of his stealth, abettors of his crime. The preciousness of his unique prize, the silver-filigreed Waterman, continually glided through his mind, continued to twine about it, like the silver filigree around the barrel of the pen.
On a sunny weekend toward the end of March, he and Farley lazed together in the sandy-carpeted mortuary — once again reinstated as the Hewin family parlor — lazed and chatted about the track meet Farley was scheduled to compete in next month. He felt sure he would place. Coaching and practice had greatly improved the two things in his running that most needed improving: his start and his stride. He had already been unofficially clocked in the 110-yard dash in the awe-inspiring time of 11.6 seconds.
Every now and then, Ira would wind up the phonograph, put on “Mavoureen” with John McCormack singing, and, paying only token attention to Farley, drift off into enchanted reverie under the spell of the Irish tenor and his mellifluous brogue. Clipped to the inner breast pocket of Ira’s jacket was the silver-filigreed fountain pen. He had brought it with him. Why? Because it was safe to sport it on weekends, with no school, and no owner to claim the beautiful object as his, not Ira’s. Because the pen tantalized Ira’s consciousness so continually, he had to wear it — even if he didn’t display it. He had to wear it concealed or he had to give it away, because what was the fun of wearing it concealed?