Such anger was alien to him. As a lifelong student of Stanislavski, Tad had always taken pride in losing himself inside a character. He believed that a certain capacity for self-abnegation was an essential part of the actor’s job. He’d gone to Zen workshops, to meditate himself nearly out of existence. Through dire professional disappointments, like the part he’d so nearly won in the New York premiere of Albee’s The Play About the Baby, as through grief after Michael’s death, he’d been able to find in himself a quiet, deep-breathing place from where he could contemplate the worst with something not too far from equanimity.
No more. Now he found himself raging like the most psychotic of the poor bastards down in the alley, waving his bottle and howling imprecations at blank windows.
Until Sunday, he’d been unaware of just how dangerously far his disease had spread. It felt closer to demonic possession than he could have conceived when he found his anger boiling up against Alida. He was astonished and terrified by himself.
Unthinkable. Yet the too-familiar shivering, the stiffening of muscles in his cheeks, the seismic disturbance in his foundations, were out of his control. The mad interloper standing in Tad’s shoes was raging internally at Alida the way it raged at the moms in the Hummers. It, not him. It was a thing, not a person — a cancer doing what cancers must.
He’d lain awake all night, pressing his fists into his eyes to stop the tears. It was futile and cowardly of him to blame his anger on the times, which were no excuse for his wanton fury with Alida. He wished he could pray, for redemption and absolution, but he despised sky-god religions; there was nobody up there to pray to. He ached for Michael, the most understanding and level-headed of confessors. At four he clambered out of bed to rummage through his narrow shelf of Buddha books, unopened for years.
Anger. One of the great obstacles to Nirvana, a delusion, a belief in a false I and a false object. “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned,” said the Buddha. “You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.” And here was the Dalai Lama:
If we examine how anger or hateful thoughts arise in us, we will find that, generally speaking, they arise when we feel hurt, when we feel that we have been unfairly treated by someone against our expectations. If in that instant we examine carefully the way anger arises, there is a sense that it comes as a protector, comes as a friend that would help our battle or in taking revenge against the person who has inflicted harm on us. So the anger or hateful thought that arises appears to come as a shield or a protector. But in reality that is an illusion. It is a very delusory state of mind.
Anger the false friend: yes, for the last few years Tad had found companionship in his anger. How often had he soothed himself to sleep by plotting the destruction of his enemies, from the president of the United States to the new artistic director at the Rep? Time and again he’d reached out gratefully to his anger as a buddy and a bedfellow; yet on Sunday night with Alida, he’d found himself to be his anger’s slave.
Now, he read, he must learn to feel “compassion” for his anger. But he could no more feel compassion for it than he could turn himself inside-out like a sock. That he was too angry with his anger was the problem: he wanted to get his hands around its neck and throttle it to death, which was, as they said in the Buddha books, incurably bad karma. By 4:30, Tad was getting angry at the Dalai Lama. At five, he turned on the radio to listen to the news: suicide bomber kills thirty-six, White House defends new measures to combat terrorism…
Fuckers! Tad thought. Those guys are the fucking terrorists.
RELUCTANT as Lucy was to go back to Useless Bay for the weekend, she had to accept Augie’s invitation because Tad had forced her hand. Not to go would give the appearance of caving in to his ridiculous outburst on Sunday night. He hated Augie because he’d refused to demonstrate with his students against the war in Vietnam — so far as Lucy could see, that was the long and short of it, and his paranoid tirade about Augie’s “sadism” was just an attempt to settle an ancient political score. Either that or he was being babyishly jealous of Alida’s fondness for Augie. Whatever — they now had to go to Useless Bay. To do otherwise would be bad for Tad’s character.
Yet she was concerned. Tad’s increasingly odd behavior over the last few weeks was truly frightening. She looked anxiously for signs of weight loss, but on his inhibitors and whatnots he was deceptively pink, portly, and Pickwickian. When he came back with his wrist bandaged after the TOPOFF exercise, Lucy’s first appalled thought was Kaposi’s sarcoma — he’s hiding a lesion. Tad had always been chattily informative about things like his T-cell count and the changes in his cocktail of medications, but lately he’d brushed off her inquiries with I’m fine and My doc threatens to predecease me. What was really going on?
She was terrified by the thought of him dying, and not just on Alida’s behalf. Tad could be maddening, but he was her best and closest friend, the only person besides Alida whom she loved. She’d often thought wistfully that if only he weren’t gay, the best place to settle their absurd political disagreements would be in bed, where she could take him in her arms and exorcize his black fantasies with kisses. These fantasies arose, she was certain, from the loneliness of his life without Michaeclass="underline" Tad was someone made to need a partner to cherish him, a role that Lucy, had things been differently constructed, would have volunteered for at the drop of a hat.
The sight of his bandaged wrist had panicked her, but when the bandage was off the following day, what it concealed was exactly what Tad had said, a nasty scratch inflicted by an amateur actor with a shovel. Though she hadn’t said a word about it, the relief that swept through her was immense.
She loved him dearly, but he could not be allowed to get away with the outrageous performance he’d put on last night. So she called the Vanagses’ number and got Minna.
Augie was out birdwatching. “He’ll be so pleased — he likes to talk to you,” Minna said, her faint Mittel-Europa accent sounding more pronounced over the phone.
“What can we bring?”
“Yourselves only. Everything on the island’s so much fresher than in the city.”
“Wine?”
“You see Augie’s cellar? We are drowning in wine.”
After Minna’s openheartedness, it was with a feeling of unpleasant disloyalty that Lucy sat down to her assigned task for the morning, which was to read a truly false memoir of World War II — Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments. No ordinary fraud, Mr. Wilkomirski, having persuaded himself that his childhood lay in the Nazi extermination camps, had produced a work of fiction that, before it was exposed by a Swiss journalist, had won prizes and international attention as a work of harrowing documentary fact. Could you tell just by reading the book, Lucy wondered, by studying the way the words fell on the page, that it was untrue? If so, could Boy 381 stand up to the same test?
Most reviewers had been taken in by Fragments, comparing Wilkomirski to Primo Levi and Anne Frank, though one or two had raised cautious doubts as to its authenticity. Then the Swiss journalist, Daniel Ganzfried, had come along, with the shocking news that Wilkomirski “knows Auschwitz and Majdanek only as a tourist.” The last thing that Lucy wanted or expected was to be Augie’s Ganzfried. In fact, she hoped very much that reading Wilkomirski would put her mind finally at rest about Vanags.