Time Travail

Thirteen

  I learned about Harvey Morgenstern’s alleged breakthroughs in a funny way.

  Just as the alarm clock on one side of the bed announced the end of the tenderness session the phone on the other side of the bed joined in. Fully clothed except for her golden shoes, Beth Anderson broke away with a sigh. She clapped the alarm still, got up into a sitting position and answered the phone, all the while arranging her hair with her free hand.

  “Oh. How do you do, Mr Morgenstern … Yes, as a matter of fact he is. He’s in the kitchen. I’ll get him for … What? … No I have definitely not changed my mind. I definitely do not want to sell my home. Mr Morgenstern, you’re not going to hound me about that again like you did last year … Something else? … What kind of devices in my living room? … No, no, you must be out of your mind, frankly, to think I’d accept that … You could offer me all the money in the world, the answer is still no. Listen Mr Morgenstern, I think my roast is burning. So hold on, I’ll get Professor Weizman for you.”

  By this time I’d put my shoes back on, the only dressing necessary after our tenderness sessions. It was her name for them. I reached over for the receiver. She kept it away from me for the few more seconds necessary for me to plausibly leave the kitchen and reach it.

  Harvey whispered that he wanted me to come over right away. He made what was supposed to be a joke about the meat burning in her oven. He sounded in an ugly mood. It must have been her refusal. He’d have to wait ten minutes, I said coldly in a display of independence for Beth’s benefit.

  I hung up hard and kissed her nose. She reached up and cradled my head in her arms, rocked it like a sick child. I broke loose and kissed her cheek. She sighed and said I should hurry back.

  Although I had no irrefutable proof at that time I often thought that Beth Anderson might well prove to be a passionate woman. Sometimes half an hour after a tenderness session she’d take out a photo-album again and we’d go back upstairs. She’d reset the alarm clock for the mandatory fourteen minutes and undo the top three buttons of her blouse. Then we’d shed our shoes and lie together and resume our caresses, largely intercepted by cloth.

  Once, as she opened the album during the pause, I said that the jarring break was a little ridiculous, waiting for it unpleasantly distracting. She was perfectly aware of the ridiculous aspect of it and said so many times on that bed. She explained in justification that she considered herself to be a married woman in spite of everything. Despite temptations she’d never been fully faithless to her husband, not even after what he’d done. “Fully faithless” was another of her deliciously quaint expressions. If there was no external limit set on tenderness she was afraid she might lose control, she said flatteringly.

  But why fourteen minutes, Beth? I would protest, half-laughing. Why not fifteen? Just like that, she replied, half-laughing herself.

  Even though there was that locked guestroom at the end of the corridor she always chose the cama de matrimonio as the site for tenderness. I had a hang-up about other men’s camas de matrimonio but that wasn’t one of her hang-ups as long as the action on it was circumscribed. I suspected it was timid revenge on her husband.

  In any case, still a little sensitive to overlapping temporal levels, I was uncomfortably aware of his presence on the bed. The other member of her family was very often with us there too, not just thirty times on the pastel blue walls. Between kisses she would ask me, over and over, to repeat the good things I’d told her about the poems in the third pile. I wished we could have been alone on that bed a little.

  Regulated physical tenderness had started as an overflow of pure joy. She’d already told me what the trouble was with her son that had required all that money, what he’d been caught with and how much and what that could mean.

  The day following our dead room embrace she took off two days and went to Nebraska where it had happened. She returned a little less worried. That evening she rang me up joyously. She’d just got a fax. Everything was going to be all right. I should come over and celebrate with her.

  She didn’t limit her intake that day. She hunted around a little unsteadily for the fax in the living room and then said she must have left it upstairs, come on up. She found it in her bedroom, showed it to me and initiated the tiptoed embrace of thankfulness and joy. We were standing in the middle of another room embracing as a few days before except that in this room there were no time-sensors but a bed. Between showing me the fax and utilization of the bed no more than thirty seconds elapsed.

  Sometimes I couldn’t help feeling it was a little like an initial installment plan payment.

  The limitations she imposed on the expression of tenderness took me back to adolescence on sofas with good girls. But even with good girls ultimate buttons could be slyly undone. Certain garments could be sweet-talked off on the pretext of preserving them from wrinkles. Beth defended her ultimate buttons and said the wrinkles she feared weren’t those. I didn’t insist as much as I would have in my younger days, a sure sign of waning vigor. So I went about in a state of faint but constant excitation. It wasn’t unpleasant, a kind of rejuvenation. Or if not, embers beneath the ashes at least. That faint loin-fire was her great present, maintained by a future of imagined possession and by her refusal to let me realize it.

  I thought I was on the dangerous verge once. I’d been able to coax her into her Saturday morning Huck Finn outfit, the tattered low-riding jeans and the big man’s shirt over bareness and knotted between breastbone and navel. I quoted Robert Herrick and invited her to mess up her hair which she finally did, like submitting to any sacrifice to humor me. I prescribed the angle of the cap. She stood there in the middle of the bedroom surrounded by the photographs of her son, frowning, not answering my invitation to join me on the bed. Then suddenly she left the room and my rejuvenated heart beat hard at the imminence of total disclosure and possession. After a while I heard the querulous whine of the vacuum cleaner below. My present and future were still intact.

  I followed her around, even gave her a hand with the windows.

  The excitement involved in our exchange of tenderness was more verbal than tactile. One of the unspoken rules of our new game was that intimate things could only be whispered into the other’s ear – hers small, pink, exquisitely sculptured and unaging like her nose.

  We confessed our jealousies. Who was that young man a few weeks ago she’d had dinner with and maybe more than dinner with? Oh, Johnny, from the florists’, a baby, twenty-three, had lost his friend, needed consoling.

  What kind of consoling? I whispered. Had he been allowed to go this far? Oh no, not that, my sweetheart, she whispered ambiguously. Hadn’t been allowed to go as far as my hand was trying to go, did she mean? Or protesting that it shouldn’t go so far?

  She removed it and kissed it and whispered something monstrous. She was certain I was having an affair with Hanna. I said I felt insulted. She whispered, I know men can’t resist big breasts. I said it depended on who was standing behind the big breasts. In this specific case I had no trouble resisting.

  She once whispered that her love had been from the very start when suddenly I’d appeared that day like a kind of knight, mature but athletic, and had defied that female dragon and switched off her lawnmower. She wanted to know when I had started becoming interested in her. I replied, right from the start too but there had been that time when she’d been on her knees planting tulip-bulbs bra-less and I couldn’t help seeing her pretty little breasts, like exquisite pink-tipped tulip-bulbs themselves, I whispered. Only considerably larger, I added with exaggeration.

  Her breath came fast at that. My excitement (and hers too?) came more from this evocation than from my hand’s immediate exploration of the presumed area of her draped bosom. I wondered if this past-orientation even in sexual matters wasn’t another of the perverse effects of time-travail.

  Sometimes she whispered pretty wild things in response to those muffled caresses. Once she confessed she’d had fantasies about
me from the very first day, perfectly innocent fantasies and then less so and then not at all innocent.

  She told me all about it and said she would do it again that night and gave me the exact time and said how beautiful it would be if I did it too at the same time, each of us in our own bedroom intensely thinking of the other, my sweetheart.

  Towards the end it all ebbs back from the primitive area of intervention into the museum of the brain and the best you can hope for is a woman saying things like that.

  Despite the boldness of some of her confessions in the relative heat of action she didn’t like any allusion to our activities on that bed once we left it. I wasn’t even supposed to take the initiative to go up to it with her. She always initiated the tenderness sessions herself, wordlessly. Typically, I’d be close-reading a passage for her benefit. I’d test her comprehension with a question and get no answer. She’d be staring at me. The sudden melting not-listening expression of her face was pedagogically annoying but otherwise flattering.

  “Wait,” she’d whisper and unlock a certain closet and take out a photo-album. That was the signal and the pretext for the climb upstairs, as if the photos could only be close-read on a bed. There must have been a hundred of those albums, largely devoted to her son doing unexceptional things at various stages of growth. She conducted an enforced tour of his development in the alarmed pauses between embraces. It was the price to pay.

  One evening she brought up two albums. When the alarm clock went off she disengaged herself, sat up in bed and opened the first of the albums and quickly shut it, saying she’d taken the wrong one. She refused to let me see those wrong (so Ricky-less) photos. She placed the album back on the floor alongside the bed and groped for a bottle and a glass. “Gosh, I forgot your whisky, Jerry. I’ll be right back. Be good.”

  She was gone ten minutes, long enough for me to leaf through that wrong album.

  It was full of nude torso studies of her fifteen or so years back. Except for the last one, they were chaste enough to have graced late nineteenth century walls. Mushy with soft-focus, sometimes with cute vignette effects, the studies showed her from a variety of angles, mostly with her arms crossed over her chest. Her pretty face had an invariable expression. Those parted lips and eyes fixed on things beyond the margin meant to convey dreamy spirituality.

  The final photo was in sharp focus and showed all of her entirely nude. Her arms were lifted and her head thrown back as she brushed her long hair. She had the same expression of dreamy spirituality as though unaware that below a spot selectively lit up her abundant honey-colored fleece. That center of interest was further emphasized by her awkward posture. Her husband must have ordered her to arch her torso back to give priority to it. It was a touchingly amateurish job on both sides of the camera.

  I went on looking at her until I heard her fifteen years later singing out from the staircase: “Gangway for Glenfiddich.” She said it long seconds before she entered, giving me time to close the album and place it back on the floor. When we embraced I felt I had to pay indirect tribute to what I’d probably been meant to see.

  “Oh please no, not that, Jerry, my darling,” she said over and over.

  The alarm went off in time. She gathered up the albums, I took the glasses and bottles and we went downstairs to resume literary analysis.

  Harvey was waiting. I kissed her cheek again and said I’d be back as quickly as possible. As I turned away from her I knew her face had switched to that clandestine expression of deep concern. I could almost feel it in my back.

  I took the short way down to the cellar, through the dead room I’d begun again to think of as the living room. I didn’t pay attention to the sensors or avoid the departed piano. None of that bothered me anymore ever since my loins had started glowing with urgency for a targeted future. At least that was the connection I made.

  I stopped midway down the cellar stairs. No closer. Harvey looked up from an old TV he was gutting for parts and stared at me grimly beneath his Harpo Marx wig.

  He wanted to know what Beth Anderson had been doing here in the house a few weeks ago.

  I played it wisely. For him to have launched such an accusation he must have had proof. Neighbors might conceivably have seen her coming over that Monday morning. But Harvey wasn’t on speaking terms with any of the neighbors. Had he found a lost earring of hers in the dead room? That happened only in books and movies.

  Anyhow, I said yes, she’d been here. I’d been trying again to convince her to let the sensors be installed in her living room. It was his idea, after all. I’d even told her how much he was willing to rent the space in each corner for. She’d wanted to see them first. So I’d invited her over.

  “Did you say. What they were for?”

  “I spoke in the vaguest of terms of telluric-wave research. Some day you’ll have to tell me what telluric waves are.”

  “And that’s all. You did?”

  “Absolutely all.”

  “You didn’t maybe. Turn on the machine?”

  I looked scandalized at the very suggestion.

  “Losing my memory. But that I remember. Still the same. Old Jerry. Still the same. Pathological liar.”

  Before I could retort he switched on the screen.

  What could I say then to the infallible bastard at the spectacle of Beth and myself locked in embrace in the dead room? There was maybe one chance out of six trillion of that particular image coming up and it had. I didn’t realize at the moment that it illustrated not my habitual bad luck but a number of Harvey’s breakthroughs.

  In my discomfiture at least I was able to get satisfaction from the sight of Beth kissing me with closed eyes, something I hadn’t been in a position to notice at the time. Supposedly, insincere women kiss staring into space over their partner’s shoulder. The image was clear, unflickering and unfragmented.

  I justified myself by saying I’d had to turn on the machine so she could see the sensors in action before she made up her mind. It was elementary honesty to show her the sensors operating here as they would be operating in her living room. She hadn’t liked what she’d seen. Her answer was still no and it sounded very definitive.

  Harvey didn’t say anything more about the matter. But I knew he would brood over it. It would germinate and root in his mind, grow immense and black and bear bitter fruit, like the Shadow’s tree. And I knew who would have to taste that astringency.

  To change the subject I congratulated him on the unusually good quality of the image.

  That was just one of the things. He gave me minimal grudging information about his breakthroughs. I gathered that the image I was looking at (looking in particular at my right hand slipping down an inch from her waist to the birth of her left buttock) was taped. But devising a way to videotape the images from the past was a relatively minor accomplishment.

  Vastly more important was the progress in temporal navigation. The machine was no longer a drunken rudderless skiff on the waves of the past. It was still far from being perfectly obedient to the helmsman’s will, not yet able to sail for a stipulated hour or even day, but roughly reliable to the week. The extended maritime metaphor is mine. Harvey expressed it more aridly. The images he was interested in weren’t literary.

  Next, he’d partially overcome the problem of temporal random selection. He’d bridled the machine’s tendency to break out of the imposed time-corral. If it had mattered now I would have been thankful for an end to that particular horror. But this was my last semi-descent into the cellar.

  Also, he’d made progress disciplining the machine into staying put on the main center of interest, restraining those exuberant zooms on what for us was trivia. There was still room for improvement in this respect, he admitted.

  Obediently, as if to illustrate his words, the screen filled with a close-up of my hand well below the small of her back now, in semi-possession of the left buttock. I felt desire at the spectacle, more than at the time as an actor, I think.

/>   Now another close-up: her hand on my shoulder and then a super-macro shot of her diamond ring. It was like a comically moralizing montage in an old silent film. The machine all but supplied the curlicued subtitle: “Another Man’s Wife.”

  Also, he said, he’d succeeded in greatly extending the duration of the image without the need for a corresponding energy-input. He was still working on a device to store the image. Not the dead videotaped image. The real image. There were snags.

  But most of the preconditions now existed for what he had in mind, he said.

  Whatever he had in mind didn’t alarm me. Didn’t interest me. I’d shaken it all off. The jerking dead hadn’t come back since the first tenderness sessions. Past time-strata didn’t erupt in the corridors either. How had it been possible to do without a woman’s love for so long? Hadn’t that been the deep cause of all my troubles?

  Each time Hanna and Harvey came back from the hospital the Volvo was loaded with junk, mainly discarded machines. Harvey bent the salvaged items to his esoteric uses with Third World ingenuity. It explained why his set-up had that amateurish look. The very instruments of the attempted linkage with the past already belonged to that past. He pointed at something and I said it looked like one of those beauty-parlor helmets you used to see women reading mags under while having a permanent wave. He said that was exactly what it had been but wouldn’t stay that way much longer. I knew he wanted me to ask about that so he could refuse to answer. But I wasn’t interested. All I said was that it also looked like the funny metal helmet they stick on your head when they shock you out of existence in the electric chair. Then I went back to the other house, my new center of gravity despite the little chasm there.

  That chasm wasn’t at all impassible. We skirted it coming toward each other, smiling and pretending it wasn’t there, pretending that insane scene in the other house had never happened. This was hard to do because the climax of that scene had been the embrace that had quickly developed into our present position on her bed. I knew she longed to explore the chasm. I understood it by her intense concerned glances at me when she thought I wasn’t looking, also by the constant therapeutic head-cradling act.

  Sometimes I was irritated at being treated like a borderline case. Then I’d realize that maybe I really was a borderline case or worse. I saw the borderline as the threshold of the dead room. I’d crossed it too often. So if you pursued the metaphor logically didn’t that make of me a beyond-the-borderline case?

  Finally she asked the question that had been gnawing at her. The moment and position were propitious. She breathed a deep sigh and nuzzled in a touching ersatz of that lovely post-coital tenderness of the fully gratified woman she couldn’t possibly have been, given the limits she imposed on our relationship. “”“Je-rr-y. Je-rr-y, hon-ey.” A nose-kiss. Then: “What do those machines really do, Je-rr-y? Don’t you want to tell me, my dar-ling?” How could I? How could I tell her they were one-eyed scouts for a half-assed time machine? Just pronouncing the term “time machine” would have catalogued me definitively as a lunatic or a liar or both in her mind. So I nuzzled back and said he’d told me they were telluric-wave detectors, but maybe they weren’t. Like her, I said, I was surprised that lenses were necessary for detecting invisible waves.

  Yes, dangerous. Very dangerous.

  She went on exploring my unsettled mental state the following day in the same circumstances. After the sigh and nuzzle she asked me about that camera in the bathroom shower. She asked the question in a tone of deep soothing readiness to understand the wildest things I might say.

  How could I give her the real reason: that I’d been accessory to an attempt to install in her living room machines I’d defined as deadly? I was ashamed to confess it, I whispered. She coaxed and coaxed. She’d slap me, I said. Never, never, my darling.

  It was a kind of projective fetishism, I said finally. I’d had no photo of her. So I took shots of her shower to look at it and imagine her there gleaming, soaping her breasts. Forgive me, I begged. It sounded unexpectedly pathological once it came out. Her breathing quickened, she bit my arm and asked me to say it again which I did with a bolder variation. She gathered my head in.

  Finally she did it once too often. I recovered my head with a certain irritation and brought the thing out into the open. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” She protested, unconvincingly, at that term. Certainly not crazy, but maybe on the verge. She relativized the state. She said it happened to everybody sooner or later. She’d often been on that verge herself and even a little beyond the verge once or twice.

  She gave me her most recent experience, just last Saturday. She’d gone to New York to see a friend (a woman-friend) and on the subway all of a sudden she’d been possessed by the notion that half of the passengers in the car were members of the Golden Galaxy concentrating mentally on the other, unconverted, half. Sometimes they staged InGatherings in the subway.

  But Jack wasn’t in the car. All the passengers looked bored, unspiritual. At each station she got off that car and ran to the next one. She forgot the real reason she was in the subway. She overshot her station and got out of the final car all the way out in the Bronx. All the passengers – overwhelmingly ethnic toward the end – looked unspiritual. Jack wasn’t in any of those cars.

  “And then I almost got on another line. I was about to take another line, all the lines, IRT, BMT, all over, Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn and go on looking. But then I said, “Whoa, Beth, whoa. You could spend your whole life on the subway looking and you’d never find him.”

  She wept a little alongside me. Her “whoa” had sounded like “woe.”

  She blew her nose and returned to my case. She said it was a miracle I hadn’t had a nervous breakdown months before, living in that horrible house, the dirt, the noise, the roaches. “I was simply horrified at what I saw,” she said. Of course she meant me to understand: horrified at the disorder of that house. But maybe too she meant horrified at another kind of disorder she’d seen there.

  Horrified maybe but relieved in a way, I guessed. All the things that had deeply troubled her about my behavior now appeared in another, clinical, light. Morally it was an improvement. The poem-box unopened for months and lied about, my stealthy doings in her house, the muttering pacing of her living room, my wet-stockinged stance in her shower with a camera, etc – all that now had a reassuring pathological explanation.

  She was the kind of woman who stepped back only an instant from pathology in a loved one and then surged forward to nurse it. So she nursed me. It was a reversal of our former relationship. I had been pretty much in command before. Now she took charge of me, still another woman taking charge of me. I felt once again the great familiar relief at encouraged irresponsibility.

  Plumbing the murky depths of my mind wasn’t her only curative approach. She took active measures to reduce the infection. I was to avoid the other house as much as possible, she decreed. She programmed my activities during her absence. She kept me busy weeding her tulip strip, picking up seeds and fertilizer at the garden center, shopping in the supermarket. My mouth watered at the sight of that first shopping-list and the prospect of a home-cooked meal after two years of restaurant fare, radiated pizza and Hanna’s frigid noodles.

  But it never got beyond the Ritz cracker and skewered cheese-cube stage. She never invited me to stay for dinner. As for sleeping in her bed, even relatively chastely, that was out of the question. If she wanted to preserve me from infection why didn’t she invite me to move in with her?

  There were other even more peculiar things about her behavior. One day I found a big brass bolt installed on the inside of her front door. When I came in she locked the door and shot the bolt. Before we went into a room she was careful to draw the drapes or angle the Venetian blinds opaque.

  Why did she do that? I whispered in my turn, nuzzling her. We used to have our classroom sessions without a locked and bolted door, I reminded her. She hadn’t bothered drawing drapes eith
er in the other rooms we happened to be in. Our relationship hadn’t been the same then, she whispered. We hadn’t been deep dear friends then as we were now.

  Finally I thought I understood what it was all about. She’d once said she was sure her husband would come back one day. She didn’t want us to be surprised in inextricable postures of (relative) intimacy. She could always leap up fully clothed from the cama de matrimonio at a moment’s notice. How could she possibly get rid of a second table setting at a moment’s notice?

  As the days went by the oddities multiplied. Our (slow) progress in intimacy upstairs was accompanied by the progress of fearful precautions downstairs. She trained me to vanish at a moment’s notice. That was at about the time she sometimes consented to removing her blouse in her bedroom.

  Suddenly in the midst of anything, television, drinks, embraces, above all embraces, her body would stiffen, her eyes would go fixed and distant and she’d tell me to vanish. It was like one of those old-time school fire drills. In twenty seconds I was to disappear upstairs leaving no trace of my presence below. From the staircase I’d see her inventorying the living room. She’d pat the imprint of my behind on the sofa out of existence, grab the bottle of whisky and my glass and hustle them into the kitchen. Then she’d face the front door, immobile, expectant.

  I had a painful insight one evening. All those theatrics made the return of her husband imminent in her mind. She’d often said that a woman could love two men simultaneously. But not on the same level of intensity, apparently. Her parasitic monk was younger, true, but no great shakes culturally and intellectually, I was sure. I didn’t see him endowed with wit and charm either. I tried to minimize her senseless preference for the man who’d ditched her as another of her deficiencies in taste, like the electric fireplace, her gothic-lettered visiting cards, her “best-of” CDs.

  Still, after that insight I couldn’t help feeling a little wounded at being reduced to an instrument to make her fantasies a bit less pathetic and impossible.

  But after, when the alarm was over and we were together on the bed, I took her head in my arms and rocked it and kissed it repeatedly.

  ***