“Damn you, Ben,” she said. “If you didn’t have a bloody tin ear yourself you’d have known what I was talking about. Shakespeare was a poet.”
“Bullshit!” The fact was that I didn’t know beans about Shakespeare but I did sense that Isabel had mixed feelings about liking him and being in one of his plays. I felt I had something there. “Bullshit!” I said again, getting into it. “Shakespeare was a middle-class Englishman and he sucked up to aristocrats and the only people he endowed with classy feelings were princes and generals and emperors. The rest of his characters are drunks and clowns.”
Isabel didn’t even look up. “And women,” she said. Then, “Your tea water’s boiling.”
“Thanks,” I said, and walked back to the kitchen wall with what felt like controlled dignity. Actually, my mind and heart were a muddle. One thing about impotence: you miss the clarity that comes after an orgasm. Sometimes it felt as though my unspilled semen was backed up to my brain and had shortcircuited half the connections there. And what was there to do about such a muddle except to shout at Isabel? “I hate snobbery!” I shouted. “Goddamn it, I hate the way you want it both ways, Isabeclass="underline" you want to be a Communist and bleed for the masses and you cultivate the tastes of an aristocrat. Antique English silverware”—I gestured toward the nail on which hung Isabel’s safety-deposit key; she kept her Georgian service for twelve in a vault—“and antique furniture. You wouldn’t let a veneer in the door. You wouldn’t so much as set your pinky down on a surface that wasn’t hand-rubbed by forelock-tuggers in a fucking English sweatshop. You’re proud as a pumpkin of being a daughter of the People’s Republic of Scotland, but the only barricade you’ve ever stood near had footlights on it.”
I felt a muted brotherhood with Shakespeare. Way to talk, Bill! I looked at Isabel and it seemed as if she were far away. Everything seemed far away. Isabel was staring into the fire, where my Mafia coal was burning. Her face was pale and drawn—impassive. Then she raised her eyes to my face silently and I saw something awfully, horribly hurt there, something that twisted me in the stomach and suddenly brought me back into the room with her. “Why are you talking like that, Ben?” she said.
I thought suddenly of Lulu and Philippe, the two California seals at the Central Park Zoo. I would walk up there sometimes around noon to buy one of the four-dollar hot dogs that the vendors sell. I needed to get out of the apartment from time to time and I’d walk up Fifth Avenue, by all those empty stores and then, near the park, by the run-down apartment buildings. The park itself was always a bit depressing, its trees long gone to wood thieves, and the zoo was full of empty cages that nobody wanted to have heated anymore. There hadn’t been an elephant in the place for forty years. But there were still some birds and an aquarium, and the big heated pool was still there with its two California sea lions. I’d buy my hot dog with sauerkraut and mustard and then go, huddled against that awful winter in my mackinaw and scarf and long underwear, and look at the seals while I ate. When they swam they rubbed their smooth bodies against one another in a kind of continuous “Hello.” The love in this was perfectly clear and as easy as sunshine, even in what must have been for those displaced Californians a frigid environment. To say the least. Yet they were full of life and of straightforward affection for one another. Why couldn’t Isabel and I, two grown homo sapiens, be like that? Why couldn’t I? What the hell? What was wrong?
Isabel appeared to be on the edge of tears, and there was a grimness in her profile that moved me. There was old Scots’ darkness in her eyes and heaviness in her brow. “My God, Isabel,” I said, “I’m sorry as hell. What am I saying?”
She looked at me quickly and then looked away.
“What do I know about Shakespeare?” I said.
She spoke quickly and her voice was soft and distant. “That’s not it, Ben. It’s not Shakespeare.”
“I know,” I said, becoming explanatory now. “I know it isn’t. I don’t know why I…”
“Don’t explain, for Christ’s sake,” she said. “Just shut up. You’re not talking to me. You haven’t talked to me all evening.” She stared at me hard. “Don’t you know, Ben, that the things you say hurt?”
I stared at her. “I’m sorry, honey,” I said. “I’ll fix tea.”
On her bathroom wall Isabel kept a hologram of herself as a seven-year-old, taken for her first day at Socialist Primary School in Paisley. She wears a hand-knitted sweater and a kilt and her eyes hold a look of anxiety. Isabel’s father was at sea for most of her childhood, and her mother was as cold as mine. Sometimes toward the end of our stay together I would see that same anxious look in Isabel’s eyes, in her early forties.
In the hologram she holds a striped cat in her lap. Something in Isabel’s psyche had always drawn her toward cats, and when I moved in with her she had the two, Amagansett and William. I remember shouting at Isabel once in the middle of the night that I could probably get it up for her if she weren’t so damned anxious about it and her saying, levelly, “Don’t get it up for me, Ben. Get it up for yourself!” and knowing with a knot in my stomach that she was right, I padded for refuge into the bathroom and found the two cats huddled behind the base of the sink. They stared up at me with pained, curious eyes. I looked at them silently a minute and then said softly, “She knows everything, boys.”
My red Chinese computer also reads. I can set a book in its drawer and it will turn pages and read aloud in a pleasant, avuncular voice with a midwestern accent. Sometimes I do that with my library books when my eyes are blurred from morphine or I just don’t want to open them. I set the drug synthesizer to make ethyl alcohol, mix it with grape juice from my garden vines, and drink myself into a near-coma while my computer reads the short novels of James: The Lesson of the Master, The Beast in the Jungle, The Pupil. I’ve never read them sober; I’m not sure which has the ball-less William Marcher as protagonist, but I know I see him looking like my father. Distant, lost in terminal self-regard.
I speak in this journal as though my time on Belson were spent in reading and thought; in fact, much of it is passed in the grip of an uneasy lassitude. For the last five days I have been incapable of action or reading or of amusing myself in any significant way. I merely pass time. Often I feel like a fifteen-year-old hanging around the drugstore waiting for someone to drop in. Yesterday I merely waited all day for Fomalhaut to set.
When dusk comes, the sky has a way of modulating its colors that evokes feelings I have no names for. There is nothing like it in the skies of Earth, no pinks and yellows to match these pinks and yellows, no blue-grays so somber as Belson’s. Last night I felt a gentle suffocation as I watched Fomalhaut descending. As it touched the magenta horizon and reflected from the thousand acres of obsidian the suffocation was relieved and my heart expanded with my lungs and I became for a moment dizzied with happiness.
It is a terrible comment on the nature of capitalism that a man as baffled by himself as I can be so successful at it—that I could become so rich and so confused at the same time.
Three days after I moved in with Isabel the temperature dropped to eighteen below zero. It was November 1, 2061. All Saints’ Day. Isabel had a matinee and an evening show and she was out of the apartment all day. I managed to get out onto the icy streets and buy enough wood to make a big fire in the fireplace; I spent most of the day huddled by it, wrapped in a blanket, reading a book called Nuclear Fission in the U.S.: The Loss of Denver. I don’t know why I didn’t find myself a warm hotel room. Yet something told me I should stick with Isabel for that winter, and I didn’t really question it.