With a little encouragement Ravelstein would reveal Battle's confidences-or anyone else's. He would say, quoting a late friend of ours, "When I do it, it's not gossip, it's social history."
What he really meant was that idiosyncrasies were in the public domain, to be enjoyed like the air and other free commodities. He wasted no time on psychoanalytic speculation or the analysis of everyday life. He had no patience with "this insight bullshit" and preferred wit or even downright cruelty to friendly, well-meant interpretations of the conventional, liberal kind.
In the cold, sunny street-his face all folds in the whipcrack cold-Battle said, "Is Abe receiving visitors, these days?"
"Why not? He's always glad to see you."
"I didn't say it right…. He's always polite to Mary and me.'
Mary was a plump, witty, short, smiling woman. Ravelstein and I were particularly fond of Mary.
"Well, if you are welcome and he's nice to you, what's the question?"
"He's not in the best of health, is he? '
"He's one of those tall, strong, always ailing men."
"But isn't he more ailing than usual?"
Battle was testing me, hoping for hints about Ravelstein's condition. I wasn't about to tell him anything, though I knew he liked Ravelstein-looked up to him, somehow. With odd people I can go along so far and no farther. Each frosty breath through Battle's dramatic nostrils rushed more red into his face. The color went down as far as the accordion pleats under his chin. He seldom wore a hat. His black hair seemed to keep the back of his neck warm enough. He wore a tango dancer's shoes. I sympathized with his eccentricities. It seemed to be a mixture of hold-tight delicacy and flyaway brutality.
The Battles, man and wife, valued Ravelstein highly. They felt for him. You could be certain that they had frequent conversations about him.
"Well," I said, "he has had a series of infections. The shingles hit him hard."
"Herpes zoster. Of course," said Battle. "Inflammation of the nerves. Horribly messy and painful. It often hits the spinal and cranial nerves. I've been around such cases."
His words made me see Ravelstein. I saw him lying silent under his down quilt. His darkened eyes were recessed. His head was set on its pillows. His posture suggested rest. But he wasn't getting any rest.
"Got over that one, did he?" said Battle. "But hasn't he been hit by another? Something new?"
There was another. This next infection was called Guillain-Barrй by the neurologists when they finally identified it. It hadn't yet been diagnosed, just then. Abe had flown back from Paris for a dinner in his honor given by the mayor. Black tie and celebrity speeches-just the kind of occasion that Ravelstein, long starved for recognition, couldn't say no to. In Paris, where he intended to spend his sabbatical year, he had taken an apartment on an avenue of embassies and official residences very close to the Elysйe Palace. The police were always around, and coming home at night presented a problem, since Abe couldn't find the time to waste at the bureaucratic Hotel de Ville applying for a _carte de sйjour__, so that when the cops stopped him for his identity papers he had none to show and there were long midnight discussions. He referred the police to the Marquis of Such and Such, his landlord. There was something to be said for everything that happened in these streets. Even the inconveniences in Paris were on the highest level. Compared to his real troubles, these Corsicans (Ravelstein believed that all _flics__-French cops-came from Corsica, that no matter how close they shaved, their chins still bristled) remained in every respect entertaining.
The long and the short of it was that Ravelstein made a fast flight home to attend the mayors banquet for him and came down with a disease (first discovered by a Frenchman) that sent him to the hospital. The doctors put him in intensive care. They were giving him oxygen. His visitors were let in no more than two at a time. He said hardly anything. Occasionally he gave me a stare of recognition. His big eyes were concentrated in that bald, cranial watchtower of his. His arms, never well developed, quickly lost such muscle as they had had. In the early days of the Barrй virus he wasn't able to use his hands. Still he managed to convey that he needed to smoke.
"Not with an oxygen mask, you won't. You'd blow up the whole joint." Somehow I found myself stuck always in the cautionary role, speaking up for the commonest sort of common sense to people who took pride in brushing off prudence. Was it others who were forever putting me in this position, or was I at bottom exactly like that? I thought of myself, at hyper-self-critical moments, as the bourgeois _porte parole__. Ravelstein was aware of this flaw of mine.
Nikki and I were not unlike, in this respect. Nikki was far more sharp and critical. When Ravelstein bought a costly rug from Sukkumian on the North Side, Nikki shouted, "You paid ten grand for all these holes and loose threads-because the holes prove it's a genuine antique? What did he tell you, that this was the carpet they rolled Cleopatra in naked? You really are one of those guys, as Chick always says, who thinks money is supposed to be thrown from the rear end of an express train. You're on the observation platform of the Twentieth Century scattering hundred-dollar bills."
Nikki had been telephoned and told that Ravelstein was sick again. He was still at his hotel school in Geneva, and we learned that he was returning immediately. Nobody questioned the strength of Nikki's attachment to Abe. Nikki was perfectly direct-direct, by nature, a handsome, smooth-skinned, black-haired, Oriental, graceful, boyish man. He had an exotic conception of himself. I don't mean that he put on airs. He was never anything but natural. This protйgй of Ravelstein's, thought-or used to think-was somewhat spoiled. I was wrong, there, too. Brought up like a prince, yes. Even before the famous book that sold a million copies was written, Nikki was better dressed than the Prince of Wales. He was more intelligent and discerning than many bettereducated people. He had, what is more, the courage to assert his right to be exactly what he seemed to be.
This, as Ravelstein pointed out, was not a posture. There was absolutely nothing in Nikki's appearance that was decorative or theatrical. He doesn't look for trouble, mind you, but "he's always ready for a fight. And his sense of himself is such that… he'll fight. I've often had to hold him back."
He would sometimes lower his voice in speaking of Nikki, to say that there was no intimacy between them. "More father and son."
In matters of sex, I sometimes felt Ravelstein saw me as a throw back, an anachronism. I was his close friend. But I was the child of a traditional European Jewish family, with a vocabulary for inversion going back two millennia or more. The ancestral Jewish terms for it were, first, _Tum-tum__, dating perhaps from the Babylon captivity. Sometimes the word was _andreygenes__, obviously of Alexandrian, Hellenistic origin-the two sexes merged in one erotic and perverse darkness. Mixtures of archaism and modernity were especially appealing to Ravelstein, who could not be contained in modernity and overflowed all the ages. Oddly enough, he was just like that.
He came out of intensive care unable to walk. But he quickly re covered partial use of his hands. He had to have hands because he had to smoke. As soon as he was installed in his hospital room he sent Rosamund out to buy him a pack of Marlboros. She had been his student, and he had taught her all that a student of his was required to understand-the foundations and assumptions of his esoteric system. She understood, of course, that he had only just begun to breathe on his own again and that smoking was damaging, dangerous-it was almost certainly forbidden.