‘Hig, I want you to meet Stefan Vogel. A wonderful dissident poet. He and his wife fled the former East Germany in – when was it, Stefan?’
‘’Eighty-six,’ I tell her, bearing the various inaccuracies of her introduction in silence, as I must.
‘Stefan very kindly read manuscripts for us at the magazine. Hig of course was on the advisory board. There, now.’
And with that, bestowing on each of us her elevating smile, she moves on.
Gedney turns from the ladies, sending a ripple of unease through their group. He looks at me with his pointed, ruddy face cocked appraisingly. I have been familiar with this face since my teens in the German Democratic Republic, where it formed one of a half dozen human images into which the abstraction ‘America’ would resolve itself in my mind. It was always gentle and frail and tired-looking, giving the impression of a sad god working overtime to help the human race, and now it is even gentler and frailer and more tired-looking than ever. The crest of sugar-white hair rising from his forehead looks almost ethereal in its silkenness; a veritable halo.
‘A poet?’ he asks – slight tremor of age in his voice.
I hasten to disavow the name:
‘Well, no, not really. I’m -’
‘I don’t have much time for poetry.’
‘Good God, I would hope not. A man in your position!’
Gedney gives me a circumspect look, as if unsure of my tone. I recall suddenly that he has been drawing fire recently, this distinguished elder statesman; a little late showering of opprobrium at the twilight of his career. I have heard his name mentioned in connection with the hostility towards America currently surging across the globe. Even some talk among his enemies of bringing him to account for certain of his past actions and policies. I try to think of something I can say to show him I’m not being ironic; that I am on his side. But his hand is suddenly thrust out towards mine. I shake it confusedly, hear him say, ‘Good meeting you, young man,’ and stand there blinking as he walks firmly away.
Beside me the ladies dart reproachful glances in my direction. They must have been hoping to reclaim their high-ranking consort after he was done with me. Meanwhile, a young woman is approaching…
‘Excuse me, are you Stefan Vogel?’
A fair-haired woman in a grey dress. Pearls at her ears and throat. Her face broad and smooth; rather pale. As she moves towards me I have the sense of a soothing presence coming into my field of attention. I do notice that she isn’t smiling as she asks her question, but her very seriousness adds to her calming air. I look into her eyes, anticipating some balmlike, restorative conversation with her.
‘Yes,’ I reply.
And out of the points of light gleaming about her, the goblet of red wine, which I have not previously noticed, detaches itself, coming perplexingly towards me, in a perplexingly violent manner, its ruby hemisphere exploding from the glass into elongated fingers like those of some ghastly accusatory hand hurtling through the air at my body until with a great crimson splatter I am suddenly standing there soaking and reeking, blazoned in the livery of shame.
The shock, but then also that familiar, muffling déjà vu sensation; kicking in as soon as the shock wears off: the sense that despite the appearance of new damage, any harm done to me was in fact done aeons ago. It has already happened. Therefore nothing has changed. And therefore it is not important.
‘I WAS BOUGHT…’ Always imagined I would begin a memoir with those words if I should ever write one. A me-moir.
‘I was bought’ – instead of the usual ‘I was born…’
I was bought
I was purchased
September 19
Tech and telecom stocks tumbling again. Good year on that front at least: accounting scandals, fear of terrorism, current administration’s economic policy, all battering nicely at the markets. Even Intel’s sinking. I shorted it at forty and again at thirty; now it’s under twenty. Feels like betting on gravity, or on death.
This wondrous provision for gambling on failure! How it caught my imagination when it was first explained to me back in New York. I felt I’d stumbled on something like a professional calling. The first practical and profitable way I’d found of exploiting my own personality; my capacity for doubt, my tendency to expect the worst. I seem to have an instinct for companies in trouble; corporations with rotten wood under their gleaming skins. Too bad I lack the recklessness that ought to go with it. A little less caution and we’d be rich instead of just getting by. Own a nice house instead of renting this little cottage. Not have to rely on Inge’s job at the health food store for our insurance. Would that have made a difference? I doubt it. Not that Inge doesn’t appreciate the finer things in life (I always wished I’d been able to buy good clothes for her), but the lack of them is not what ails her.
Even so, I should like to set her up with a truly large sum, and for that, as for everything else at this point, my own annihilation seems increasingly the most elegant solution.
Convert myself into gold: one way of remaining with her for ever!
September 25
I walked Lena up to the quarry. She’s still limping, but chased a squirrel and almost caught it too.
How Inge nursed her back to life after the truck hit her, instead of putting her to sleep as the vet recommended. Carrying her out into the sun every day on that wooden rack, till her pelvis healed enough for her to walk. Massaging her every morning, boiling hamburger meat for her. Then, since it seemed to help her sleep, bringing her up onto our bed at night.
My objection to that. Ostensibly on grounds of hygiene – her wheezing, her drooling and hair-shedding. But really it was just a kind of peevish jealousy that made me deliver my ultimatum: the dog or me.
I could swallow my pride and go back upstairs to our comfortable bed. There’s nothing to stop me, and I believe Inge would welcome it. I could undress and climb in with her, find some way of opening a conversation. She would no doubt do her conscientious best to be responsive, as she would too if the talk should lead me to attempt more intimate things, though I know also the expression I would find in her white-lashed eyes (crow’s-footed now at their corners but more beautiful to me than ever in their grave way, like two great aquamarines grown richer in their lights as their settings tarnish) if I were to lean over and kiss her: that papery look of good-natured effort and insuperable reluctance, flattened by each other into the same blank plane.
Fantastic freshness in the air up at the quarry. This autumn vigour that feels so like the energy of life, growth. Trees still a dusty, steely, end-of-summer green, but on a slope below me there was a single maple with half its leaf dome turned scarlet -splash! – like some trendsetter’s bold new fashion statement; this year’s embroidered shawl or silk pashmina.
I sat on a slab of bluestone in the rubble under the white birches. Burnt yellow plumes of goldenrod down by the old radio tower. Wild vines coiling all over its chain-link fence.
Inge, my Sleeping Beauty! Her spellbound air: deeper and deeper with every year that passes. Whose kiss will break the spell? Mine, if I can get this right… A farewell kiss.
Felt calm, looking out over the twilit valley, a bird singing its evening song from the cliff above me, birch trunks glowing like alabaster in the dusk. To disappear from this – like the swan in the poem stepping off from the solid ground of existence into the water; gliding there ‘infinitely silent and aware’. Or would one just sink like a stone?
No concept of hell in the Bible. I read that in a magazine some evangelist group left in our mailbox. No basis for those lurid medieval fantasies of eternal torment. ‘The wages of sin is death’; that’s all. The unrepentant sinner merely passes into nonbeing: which after all is what he wants, increasingly, while he’s alive; the prospect of new life being steadily more problematic and tiresome to him.