Likeliest of all is that I am not an exceptional person and that I am simply incapable of shooting my neighbor.
Raskolnikov anguished over his murderous thoughts. I toy with mine.
If I do shoot her it will be in extremely cold blood.
I am not well.
It is possible that a so-called “mindlessly destructive act” is really an attempt by the perpetrator to rescue himself from a destructive disease, to wrench himself back into mental balance. After such an act, such a physical and mental emetic, the perpetrator, who is also the principle sufferer, returns to being a good person. In psychiatry, electroshock therapy achieves a similar effect, I believe.
I don’t expect people to understand that.
Some days I find my mood in perfect harmony with Breton’s statement. It resonates with me. And then the next day I see something, see someone, I catch a foolish smile, a moment of unreflective grace, a gesture of compassion, an old woman feeding pigeons, a mother caressing the hair of a child, and I want to throw my arms around them. Stay with me, I want to say then, Don’t leave me out here alone.
I sometimes regard my life as a succession of diseases. No sooner cured of one than I was infected by another. And I was not ever really cured of any of them. They were pushed into remission, but I was still infected with them. I was scarred and weakened, and the ground was made fertile for a new one. The terrible thing is, each of these diseases at first impressed me as perfect health. I would become infected with a brand-new malady, and I would congratulate myself, thinking that I was well at last.
Harold Nivenson went this way, then that way, then another way altogether, and so forth, and he made a pattern of ragged zigzags down the road of life.
Just after sunrise and the spandexed giraffes are outside doing stretches on the little patch of lawn in front of their house. I sit on the edge of the bed in the new pajamas she has bought me and watch them through the window. They go through this stretching ritual before every bike ride. Despite being extremely tall they are able to bend at the waist and place both palms flat on the ground in front of them and walk their hands away from their feet, forming a wider and wider upside-down V. I watch them walk their hands back to their feet and stand like that, folded over, immobile, heads turned to face each other, talking. They straighten and look around, slim and graceful, sniffing the morning air. Maybe they smell lion. Moll comes up behind me, stands by the window. I instinctively move my arm to shield the paper from view. “Stop staring at people,” she says, and jerks the shade down. I send it rattling back up. The couple walk to their bikes, stumping clumsily across the lawn in black biking shoes, the way people walk in front of children when they are pretending to be giants. On their bikes now, they flow down the drive and sweep into the sunlit street, wheels bright, shimmering blurs.
Moving to the chair by the window I place my bare feet in a patch of warm sunlight on the floor.
Moll has people in the kitchen. Voices of several women. Laughter. The kitchen door is shut and I catch scarcely a word.
Later, in the kitchen, I see coffee cups and crumbs. She is entertaining in there, receiving guests in the kitchen like a nineteenth-century housekeeper. They knock on the back door and she lets them into the kitchen.
From across the park, even with her back to me, I recognize Professor Diamond seated on a bench near the playground. I recognize her from the back by the long thin neck crowned by a chignon of dark hair. I make my way across the grass, steadying myself on the uneven ground with my stick. She sits at one end of the bench, an elbow on the armrest, a small blue backpack on the seat beside her. Rounding the bench I sit down at the other end. Of course she recognizes me as someone who lives on her street, and no doubt that prevents her from leaping up right away. She turns in my direction and nods curtly, without smiling, then seems to give full attention to the playground in front of us. A small girl says, “Hey, no pushing,” and a boy the same size pushes and she shoots down the slide. “I’m gonna get you,” the girl shouts. She races around the slide and scrambles up the ladder, has nearly reached the top when the boy lets go, swoops to the bottom, and runs off across the grass, the girl in pursuit. Sufficient time has now passed. Without looking at me again, Professor Diamond reaches for her backpack, gets up, and walks away.
This morning among the voices in the kitchen I recognize my son’s. He has been coming to see her behind my back. He comes several times a week now. We are approaching the denouement, I find myself thinking.
Moll unwraps the package: a genuine china chamber pot with lid.
The new neighbor is standing on the steps of her house, watching us approach. She is dressed in jeans and a man’s long-sleeved shirt with the cuffs turned back, shirttails reaching almost to her knees. She has a small, pleasant, worried face that is becoming pinched with age, I notice, and a great mop of red hair. She is wearing yellow latex gloves. “Nice day, isn’t it?” she says, and Moll makes us stop. The woman, who does not come down from the top of her steps, tells us they are refugees. Those are the words she uses: we are refugees. She removes her gloves and places her hands on the stair railing, leaning over, gripping the gloves between her palms and the railing. She tells us they have been driven out of the area around the university, where they would prefer living, they have been chased out by people with acres of money, she says, who have made it unaffordable for middle-class people (she means people like herself and her husband) to continue living there, even though they are both teachers at the university. The housing situation has forced them to become commuters, she complains from the top of the steps. Standing on the sidewalk, half listening to Moll and the woman talking about the housing situation, I find myself thinking about how the social and cultural condition of university professors has changed in recent decades. It occurs to me that workers in the so-called humanities, people like this woman and her husband, are now basically cultural machine operators, day laborers in the inhuman industrial-scale manufacture of useless commentary on mass-culture products. Though I never set foot there now, I was once a university habitué, I was over there every day working on my Balthus pamphlet, when I was practically an art scholar. They think in lockstep. They all have the same humanist morality, the same liberal politics, the same barely disguised class anxiety, the same laughable faith in the value of independent inquiry and thinking for oneself. Seen strictly from the point of view of a potential flowering of intellectual diversity, nothing was gained by liberating the serfs.
I am thinking it would be best to shut the universities down and replace them with scientific-technical institutes, though I don’t say those things to her.
The neighbors and I seldom speak. But when we do I am a portrait of courtesy.
She asks where we live. Looking in the direction Moll indicates, she says, “We were wondering who lived in that house.”
I happen to know a great many things, still. Not things that would help toward understanding, not “wise sayings,” just pointless tidbits, amusing anecdotes, intellectual garbage, and random scraps of information.
For example, that Edward Lear’s mother bore twenty-one children.
That in India the Jains sweep the path in front of them in order not to crush an insect or worm, and they will not walk in puddles for fear of stepping on creatures living in the water.
That Artaud died in the psychiatric clinic at Ivry-sur-Seine. He was seated at the foot of his bed. He was holding his left shoe.
Everyone remembers the shoe. It is just the emblem they are seeking. An emblem of absolute desolation and loss. A crazy old man, eaten by cancer, the wreckage of genius—everything is there, the mingling of banality and horror, in the image of the shoe.
The meaningless specificity of the description—that it was his left shoe.
She notices the mug slipping from my grip. She quickly, deftly, takes it back and sets it on the table in front of me. I hold it in both hands. Some of the coffee spills.
I would sometimes carry binoculars
on my walks with Roy, to look for migrating birds on the river. I liked watching people also, catching them unawares and unselfconscious. I might look over at a man seated beneath a tree, unwrapping a sandwich or reading or just staring out at the river, and be fascinated. I might see this man who is looking out across the water as filled with longing, sunk in despair, lost in reverie, and it was like looking at a painting. I would find myself weaving a little story around him, depending on my mood. I would never, I want to say, just leave him out there alone. I am aware that most people, blinded by their own good fortune and robust psychological health, stupefied by the moral obtuseness that accompanies good health and is perhaps its precondition and by the failure of imagination that is its inevitable consequence, would consider my fascination creepy. They would consider it a perversion, a criminal voyeurism, especially if they saw me staring through binoculars at an attractive young woman or, heaven forbid, a child. They would not see observation and study, they would see ogling, they would see leering. They would be totally unable to grasp the fascination for what it actually is: a waning art impulse, one that is steadily failing, that has already deteriorated to a distant interest, an interest that is practically a disinterested caring for these people whose company I enjoy in this way even though I might not, certainly would not, enjoy having personal contact with any of them.
Yesterday a loud vulgar woman with far too much makeup, a real-estate agent who wanted to discuss selling my house, was allowed to sit at the kitchen table with her brochures and talk about that. Even after I had said repeatedly that I had zero interest in selling, she insisted on handing me her card. When I refused even to touch it, she put it down on the bench by the door. This struck me as so insulting that I flew into a rage. I tried to throw the card at her as she was leaving, but of course it just fluttered in the air.
For years it was just me and Roy. Now I can be sitting on the bed in my underwear, in the privacy of my own home, a privacy I once thought would be guaranteed by this house on which I have wasted a fortune, and she opens the door to every Tom, Dick, and Harry. The weaker I become, the more people she parades through the house. I lie in bed, sheets pulled up to my nose, glaring, while they tour the house as if it were a public museum.
She has been emptying drawers, dumping them on the table in the dining room. She makes bundles of my cards, cinches the bundles with rubber bands. The dimly lit room, the red wallpaper, the gilt frame of the mirror on the wall behind her: like a nineteenth-century casino, Moll counting the take at closing.
She meditates every day, she says. She says it helps her take things as they come.
I was eating breakfast when Alfie let himself in through the kitchen. He crossed the house and opened the front door to the appraiser, the so-called contemporary art expert he had hired, and ushered him in, introducing him to me and Moll. A small, slim man with a narrow face, long upper lip, graying hair, and sad, intelligent eyes under thick black brows, he looked like Leo Castelli. With his well-cut coat and tie, he struck me as a typical Leo Castelli–type art-movement imitator. Alfie climbed on a stepladder and handed the higher paintings down. The appraiser studied them, looked at the signatures, examined the backs, measured and photographed them, then walked to the sideboard and tapped at his computer. I watched from the rocker. They went upstairs to catalogue the paintings there, and all the while, from the moment he stepped through the door, this art expert, this self-styled art-investment adviser, kept up a stream of small talk, a continuous patter of contemporary art gossip, the sort of smug insider gossip I used to consume as if it were the water of life, that I used to perpetuate and bandy about in order to make myself interesting, I remembered, listening to the chatter upstairs, and that the investment adviser kept up now in order to inflate himself. I unlocked the studio across the hall, a room I don’t go into normally, that I hardly ever go into these days. The largest room in the house, it would normally be the principle room of the house but is instead a storage place for my least significant paintings, a lumber room for art junk. I never go in there. I can’t set foot in there without thinking of Meininger, the room made completely oppressive by thoughts of Meininger. Many of his props are still in there—the pink Empire divan, the chrome-and-leather barstool, the antique wicker bath chair, the wooden rocking horse—objects I find myself thinking of as Meininger’s contrivances, a thick layer of dust and hanging nets of cobweb on them all, the divan practically eaten up by mice. Meininger would paint the same woman over and over, in a manner that was completely obsessive, the paintings differing mainly in the various fixtures he would paint her with. On the rocking horse, in the bath chair, and so forth.
The appraiser sat in the kitchen, computer open on the table in front of him. Moll served him lunch, and he ate while staring at the screen. I sat in the wing chair. I fell asleep. I woke up. She brought us sandwiches. Alfie jiggled in the rocker, and speculated about the paintings, repeating the appraiser’s art gossip as if it were his own.
We assembled in the dining room, Moll having announced that we should assemble there, telling us the appraiser was now ready. We took seats at the table and waited to hear his assessment of my collection, his so-called expert opinion on what I could already sense he considered my amateurish agglomeration. We didn’t talk. Even Alfie stopped chattering. There was a feeling, a subtle message, it seemed to me, emanating from the appraiser, who was staring into his computer, that we were not permitted to talk. Faced with this professional expert, we had become submissive, childlike, and now he was making us wait. He tapped at his computer, deliberately dallying, I thought, to force us into a state of complete dependence. Finally, looking up at Alfie, he said that pending more research he could give us only a rough, preliminary estimate. It was, he said, his educated guess that the preponderance of the collection was of modest art-market value, by which, of course, he meant utterly worthless. But that said, he added, looking around at us all, the Lesko watercolors might fetch a price if auctioned locally, and the Meininger was an outstanding piece. After years of controversy and crazy price fluctuations there is now an art-market consensus on Meininger, he told us. The painter’s numerous late works, while often dismissed as formulaic and repetitive, are maintaining value, he said, due to their wide popularity, their use in advertising, and so forth, while his earlier paintings have stood up under scrutiny, are now recognized as groundbreaking works. The Nude in Deck Chair is a museum-quality painting, he said, and its considerable value has only been enhanced by the artist’s sensational end, which has sent prices through the roof, he told us, pointing at the ceiling. He was, he said, reluctant to assign an exact dollar value to the painting, given the notorious unpredictability of art auctions, but when Alfie pressed him for a ballpark figure, just a back-of-the-envelope calculation, he named an astronomical sum. This astronomically obscene price knocked Alfie over. He hated the painting, from childhood on he had always hated it, and now it had suddenly become a valuable art object, an art object he naturally assumed I would be eager to sell. I told them I intended to take it into the yard and smash it, that I was going to smash it and then burn it. I told them, actually pounding on the table, cutting at the table with the sides of my palms in illustration of my words, that I intended to chop it into little pieces, that I had always intended to do that, that I was going to sell the other two paintings and with the money hire a wrecking crew to obliterate the Meininger by chopping it to bits with an ax.
I was overwrought, I was talking in a voice that they all could hear was laden with feelings that no one, myself included, had expected from me. The three of them stared wide-eyed, as if listening to a crazy person.
I am going to stop. I draw up a statement of principles and then I stop.
I will write Statement at the top of the page. Or maybe Statement of Principles. Or maybe just Principles.
It will be Euclidean. It will have theorems, corollaries, and definitions.
Begin with a definition of stopping. Ceasing to move, to think, t
o want. Desistance. Aboulia. Ataraxia. No flutter of eyelids. No twitches.
The aim is not a definition of stopping, but a definition of going on. Begin with a definition of going on. Or a definition of beginning. Work toward a theorem of happiness, for example. The pursuit of a loved object, for example. Life in that perspective. The loved object: a stick, a ball, or even a sock. Roy was never a fetcher. He could not understand the obsessive-compulsive behavior of retrievers. If I threw him a stick he would amble after it, then just go off into the bushes and chew on it. I imagine he was happy doing that.
I obsessively take my pulse.
She has brought two of her kitchen guests in to look at the paintings: an archetypal neighborhood couple, indifferently dressed in the thoroughly false manner that has become compulsive among people of their sort, a mandatory casualness that is at bottom a new formality, as oppressive and obligatory as the old. In just the same way, it occurs to me when she brings them over to my chair to greet me, that their obligatory friendliness is, at bottom, a distancing mechanism whose real aim is to make serious talk impossible. They stroll around the room looking at the paintings. The woman says “expressive” or “impressive” a dozen times, the man puts on a show of authority, pegging the paintings with art-critical jargon, then glancing at me in search of my approval, as the owner of the paintings, and as a fellow man.
When they have left I feel, if possible, more depressed than ever.
Unable to pick up the pill I sweep it off the tabletop into my palm.
Walking down to the park, I cross Professor Diamond coming up from there on the opposite sidewalk, walking briskly with long strides, a folded deck chair under one arm. That way of walking was considered “mannish” when I was young. She doesn’t turn her head in my direction, and I don’t look in hers, hobbling downhill, using my stick. I watch her from the corner of my eye. From across the street I can’t make out her eyes, can’t quite see if she has sent a reciprocal glance in my direction, but I feel her gaze on me, brushing my face, fly-like. I am the only other person on the street. I am, with my halting gait, my stick, impossible to overlook. In order not to turn her head in my direction she is obliged to actively avoid turning her head in my direction. This active and conscious avoidance is in essence a form of staring, I am thinking. It is staring in a deficient mode, just as her active avoidance is a deficient mode of actual contact and for that reason all the more striking to us both. From now on she will think of me as someone to be avoided, and I will think of her as someone avoiding. In the smooth course of her daily life I stand out as an obstacle.