"I was busy with absorbing work," I said. "In the morning she'd put on her clothes and her makeup and then check her hair, her face, and her figure in three different lighted mirrors-dressing room, bathroom, and guest toilet. Then she'd slam out of the front door. I had half a headache and half a heartache. This concentrated my mind."
"She doesn't know how to dress," said Ravelstein. "All those strange materials-what was it she was wearing last year? Ostrich hide?… Finally she accuses you of having a corrupt sex affair with me. What did you say?"
"I laughed like anything. I told her I didn't even know how the act was done, and that I wasn't ready to learn, at my age. It seemed like a joke. Still she didn't believe me…."
"She couldn't believe you," said Ravelstein. "It took too much out of her to invent even this pitiful accusation. Her mental range on that side is extremely limited-though I'm told she's very big in chaos physics."
It was from Abe's telephone network that this information must have come. The old expression "He has more connections than a switchboard" had now been buried under the masses of data heaped up by the wildly expanding communications technology.
Ravelstein had asked his friends everywhere for items about Vela, and he was prepared to tell me much more than I wanted to hear. So that I would clap my hands over my ears and squeeze my eyes shut. But you can't keep your innocence in this age. Nine-tenths of modern innocence is little more than indifference to vice, a resolve not to be affected by all that you might read, hear, or see. Love of scandal makes people ingenious. Vela was ingenious in her science and guiltless in her conduct.
You couldn't, as the intimate and friend of Ravelstein, avoid knowing a great deal more than you had an appetite for. But at a certain depth there were places in your psyche that still belonged to the Middle Ages. Or even to the age of the pyramids or Ur of the Chaldees. Ravelstein told me about Vela's relationships with people I had never heard of till now. He said he was ready to name my rivals but I wouldn't listen. Since she didn't love me I had, with innate biological resourcefulness, holed up behind my desk and finished a few long-postponed projects-quoting Robert Frost to myself: _For I have promises to keep __A_nd miles to go before I sleep.
__
At times changing this to: _For I have recipes to bake __A_nd far to go before I wake.
__
The joke was on me, not on Frost-a sententious old guy whose conversation was mainly about his own doings, about his accomplishments and triumphs. It can't be denied that he was a self-promoter. He had PR genius. But he was a writer of rare gifts, nevertheless.
To hear about Vela's alleged misconduct was destabilizing. I lose my footing, I stumble when I remember what Ravelstein told me about her various affairs. Why were there so many conferences to attend in summer? Why didn't she give me phone numbers where she could be reached? Of course, he wouldn't have been interested in these facts if they hadn't been singular facts. As I have said, Ravelstein was crazy about gossip and his friends were given points for the racy items they brought. And it was not a good idea to assume that he would keep the lid on your confidences. I was not particularly disturbed about this. People are infinitely more clever than they used to be about pursuing your secrets. If they know your secrets they have increased power over you. There's no stopping or checking them. Build as many labyrinths as you like, you're sure to be found out. And of course I was aware that Ravelstein didn't care a damn about "secrets."
But since Ravelstein had a large-scale mental life-and I say this without irony, his interests really were big-he needed to know everything there was to know about his friends and his students, just as a physician pursuing a diagnosis has to see you stripped naked. The comparison breaks down when you remember that the doctor is bound by ethical rules not to gossip about you. Ravelstein was not so bound. When I was a kid in the thirties the notion of the "naked truth" was in the air. "Let's have the naked truth." An Englishwoman named Claire Sheridan wrote a memoir called The Naked Truth. It was appropriate that she should have visited revolutionary Russia, where she seems to have been on familiar terms with Lenin and Trotsky and many other prominent Bolsheviks.
But all this is mere background.
Let's get on with it.
Ravelstein, speaking still of Vela, said, "You make her an offering-beautiful country summers-but she doesn't care about this place, Chick, or she'd spend more time here. And so I find it curious that you should try so hard. However," he continued, "let me say what I see in all this. I see the Jew, the child of immigrants, taking the American premises seriously. You are free to do what you like, and can realize your wishes fully. It's your privilege as an American to buy land and build a house where you live in full enjoyment of your rights. It's true there's nobody here but yourself. So you have built this New Hampshire sanctuary where you're surrounded by your family mementos. Your mother's Russian samovar is a beautiful object. It's thee-ah thee-ah terribly handsome. But it's far far far from the city of Tula-Tula was for samovars as coals were to New castle. Thee-ah thee-ah Tula samovar has never been in such a foreign location of maximum deracination. As for you, Chick, you're making your total American declaration of rights. It's very brave of you to do it but it's also off the wall…. For miles around, you're the only Jew. Your neighbors have one another to rely on. Whom do you have-a gentile wife? You've got a theory-equality before the law. It's a big comfort to have constitutional guarantees on your side, and it's certain to be appreciated by other devotees of the Constitution itself…."
He was enjoying himself. I didn't much mind. To be shown a pattern in my activities diverted me.
"I have to assume also that your tax bill is high…."
"It certainly is. And there are new education assessments yearly."
He said, "I can imagine what sort of education they get here. Have you ever attended a town meeting?"
"Once I did."
"And your high-stepping wife?"
"She was there, too." Before the cycle of obscure or new diseases began, Ravelstein and I had many fun conversations like the above. He seemed to think that I would value his opinion of my activities. Up to a point I did, in fact, find them useful. He said, for instance, that I was anything but risk-averse. And he asked, "I am fascinated by the marriages you've made-you remember Steve Brody, don't you?"
"The guy who jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge on a bet."
"That's him-one of those spirited people."
See Plato's Republic, especially Book IV. I did not study those great texts closely, but there wasn't the slightest hope of following Ravelstein's thoughts if you were ignorant of them entirely. I was not really intimidated by them. By now I am as much at home with Plato as with Elmore Leonard.
"There's nothing I say to you that you don't immediately understand," Ravelstein would sometimes declare, but it's possible that he had cultivated the art of conversation with good old Chick and would take special care to go slowly with him. And it's possible also that as a genius educator he knew how much traffic my mind would bear.
In New Hampshire he would press me again and again to repeat old jokes, old gags, and vaudeville routines. "Do me that Jimmy Savvo song." Or else "How does the furious husband bit go, again? The heartbroken man who tells his buddy 'My wife cheats on me."
"Oh, yes. And the buddy says, 'Make love to her every day. Once a day at least. And in a year that will kill her.'
"'No!' The guy is astonished. 'Is that the answer?'"
"'Once a day. That often, she'll never survive…'
"Then a sign is brought on stage. You may remember how that was done. An usher with a round cap and a double row of buttons would carry out a tripod with a sign. In bold print this sign read, 'Fifty-one weeks later.' And then the husband is pushed onstage in a wheelchair by the wife. He looks very weak. Muffled in blankets like an invalid. The wife is blooming. She is dressed for tennis and has the racket under her arm. She fusses over him, tucks him in, kisses him. His eyes are closed. He looks like death. She says, 'Rest, darling, I'll be back after my set-real real soon.' As she strides off the feeble husband brings his hand up to his face and behind his hand in a wonderful vaudeville whisper he says confidentially to the audience, 'She don't know it, but she's got only a week to live.'"