The Fool?
Martha’s large husband. Sprawled in an armchair in full czarist regalia, dethroned as Boris Godunov, dethroned as Martha’s husband. Because I knew she wasn’t there, not with the house in this condition. Not with him in this condition. I didn’t know opera singers owned their costumes—they don’t, do they? Yet there he was in that heavy tapestry robe and that knitted crown they affected with the jeweled trimming and the little cross on top. He lifted his glass: To The Pretender, he said, looking at me, and then because he hiccupped his arm jerked back and the contents of his glass made a lovely arc through the air and hit his portrait on the wall behind him, splashing over his face made up as Boris Godunov so that the painting seemed to be shedding tears.
Did this really happen?
What?
Your impulsively going to New Rochelle because you’d heard Boris Godunov on the radio and then finding this czarist simulacrum lying around drunk?
I’m not angry at you for asking that question because I hardly believed it myself standing there in that dark living room, which incidentally was unheated, which may have been the reason Martha’s large husband had put on that heavy regalia complete with that watch cap of a crown. And, after all, might he not have been listening with some bitterness to the same Saturday broadcast? I stood over him as he looked at me with bleary half-focused eyes. He had lost weight and was no longer the intimidating figure he’d been. He’d been a big humpy manatee of a man, huge and sleek. No more. The double chin, the wide face, the big head, it was all thinned out now, the physiognomy, with his jawline like a wishbone and the hollow cheeks with eyes staring up at me that belonged to a very sick man. I found myself furious, totally unsympathetic, and spoke to him as one speaks to a drunk.
Where is she, where’s Martha, goddamn you, where’s my child?
He staggered to his feet and began to sing the dying scene in his raspy bass, holding his arms out to me.
I ran upstairs, looked in all the rooms. An empty crib, open empty drawers, empty closet. In the master bedroom a rumpled bed, one closet with just the hangers hanging there. On the floor, some scraps of paper. A folded-up bus schedule. Ras-chee-chev. Ras-chee-chev. [thinking] Listen, I want to correct the wrong impression I may have given you about my feelings for Briony.
Wait a minute—what did you do then?
What?
After you found Martha gone.
I caught the last train back to Washington. That poor drunk had no more idea where she was than I did. He couldn’t even tell me how long she’d been gone. I had the feeling looking around that it had been a while. Of course the kid would be safe with her. She’d left her piano. It was still there in the study. That meant to me Willa was now her life. But there was no rush, this was not an emergency, if I hadn’t impulsively taken that trip I would really have been in the dark. So relatively speaking I was up on things.
And there was a little bit of relief there too, do you suppose?
Well, why not? I’m not ashamed to say it. What is more daunting than a judgment in the eyes of a child? It would come eventually, inevitably. It just wouldn’t be now. But I was trying to tell you something.
Yes?
See, the door was open and there I stood. So to a man, an opera singer costumed as Boris, and seriously drunk, singing the role there in his living room—what could be more reasonable than for Boris to see the fellow standing at the door as the Pretender Grigoriy, with his Polish-Lithuanian army, arrived to take the crown. I had thought he was talking about me, and maybe he was but somehow now also putting me in the opera. I was the false claimant to the throne, you see?
Was he that drunk?
Drunk or not, he was in the play, casting me as the enemy. Some basis for that in my being Martha’s ex. And yes he found just the term, plucked it out of Russian operatic history maybe by way of a deeper recognition. At the root, Andrew is The Pretender, OK? Is that what you want to hear? You’ve interrupted my train of thought. You guys aren’t supposed to do that.
But this is important, don’t you think? Didn’t he make you mad?
Listen, he knew I did cog science. He was not unintelligent. When I left he was singing his heart out to me, following me to the door. So don’t jump to conclusions. I felt sorry for him, to tell you the truth. He kissed me on the top of my head. And then he got down on his knees and begged for my blessing. That’s what Boris does in the opera, he begs for the blessing of the Holy Fool who stands in his mind for all of Russia. So I was no longer the Pretender to the throne. I had been recast as the Holy Fool. Or he might have been acknowledging me as one Pretender to another. After all he couldn’t exclude himself pretending to be the rightful czar. You weren’t there. We were brothers under the skin.
So it was a reprieve, is that what you’re saying? You were absolved of being Andrew the Pretender?
We’re all Pretenders, Doctor, even you. Especially you. Why are you smiling? Pretending is the brain’s work. It’s what it does. The brain can even pretend not to be itself.
Oh? What can it pretend to be, just by way of example?
Well, for the longest time, and until just recently, the soul.
I may have given you the wrong impression about my feelings for Briony. But for that moment in California as we left her parents’ house, and perhaps a few others, my love was as pure and uncomplicated as never before in any attachment I had had to a woman. I haven’t told you about my relationships, some of them seemingly strong. But never uncomplicated.
Before your marriage to Martha?
And after. Trouble with all of them is that I was always myself. With Briony I was the person I’d always dreamt of being. For a person congenitally unable to be happy, I was, with Briony, happy. Happiness consists of living in the dailyness of life and not knowing how happy you are. True happiness comes of not knowing you’re happy, it’s an animal serenity, something between contentment and joy, a steadiness of the belonged self in the world. Of course I’m talking about life in the developed Western world. A modest busyness in the routine of life, a satisfaction with your lot, the deliciousness of sex and food and fine weather. You don’t just love the person you love, you love the given world. A feeling possibly induced by endomorphin, the brain’s opiate. I know, there it is again, the cephalic instruction. But so what! As we crossed the country there were snow mountains for the skiers, white-water runs for the rafters, free rides everywhere you looked. We drove one day along a field where in the distance balloonists had convened. We pulled over to watch this languid flotilla of rainbowed sky ships risen into their own blithe sense of time and space. We discussed the possibility that Americans more than any other people understand what the earth and sky have to offer. At these moments life was what it was and nothing more, it was exactly what it seemed to be with nothing behind it. A presiding belief in the future, all the synapses afire as if to make a metaphysical music and you are blissfully existing in the consciousness of the customary given world as the only reality. And of course the guilt is gone. The fear that was your old self. All that, I say, is what Briony did for me. My delight in everything everywhere on that trip was essentially the joy of being with her, the fact that she was with me—everything about her—her thoughtfulness, how she confronted you with her eyes, her laugh, the simplicity of her self-attentions—she wasn’t much for makeup, never primped, her hair was brushed, sometimes tied behind the neck, sometimes not. Just by the way she casually fixed her hair she suggested the different aspects of her being. When we fell silent during a stretch of straight road that went on for miles, she sat with her arms crossed, or looked for music on the radio. She was in charge of the music and decided I had a lot to learn, which was true, I’d never gotten beyond the Beatles and the Grateful Dead. (Oh, she said, you mean The Dead.) I wasn’t afraid for her, she would never be a victim of The Pretender. I was through with him. I was transmogrified, I was on my way to Holy Fooldom.
But as I say, we were riding across the country and I was the n
ew Andrew, no longer anxious, no longer worried for her. Everything was amazing. Escarpments of red rock, endless fields of wheat, towns of one dusty street, a roadside diner where you moved down along a steam table and took what you liked to the cashier, a sign on the wall announcing: “Efficient and Courteous Self Service.” A trailer park in a sandstorm, the wind whipping up the clotheslines, a motel with a purple dinosaur on its roof, seemingly endless wooden one-room Baptist churches with the day’s chapter and verse out front, antebellum towns with pillared mansions shadowed in live oak. In Atlanta we stopped at a bookstore and bought a bunch of Mark Twains, and on the interstate whoever was not driving read him aloud—we took turns—Briony drove well, not impatiently but not dillydallying either. I saw Mark Twain in her eyes as we passed under the repetitive amber lights of the highway, and I saw him flickering in her imagination—
So, there was your MT. Huckleberry Finn, I suppose?
The Prince and the Pauper. The two boys exchange identities, the prince is the pauper and the pauper the prince. Briony liked the romance of that, Clemens saying there’s nothing to royalty but the assumption. But it’s more than a democratic parable: It’s a tale for brain scientists. Given the inspiration, anyone can step into an identity because the brain is deft, it can file itself away in an instant. It may be stamped with selfhood, but let the neurons start firing and Bob’s-your-uncle.
I’m not sure of the timing of your trip. Had Briony graduated? I thought you said she was a junior when you met. Were you reappointed for a second year?
I remember coming up the Jersey Turnpike, past the oil refinery burn-offs, and with the growling of the convoying semis in our ears, and away off to the left the planes dropping to the runways of Newark Airport and then the fields of burned grass irrigated by rivulets of muck and with what looked like a buzzard floating over the turnpike risen now on concrete pillars that in their tonnage were holding up the furious intentions of traffic, the white lights coming toward us, the red lights beckoning, and when I glanced over at Briony she was staring straight ahead, clearly stunned by this dazzling information, it wasn’t exactly fear in her eyes but more like a virginal response to the unexpected. What I wondered at that moment was how much time one got for transporting a young woman across state lines. What is it you asked?
When this was, and did she drop out of school to go with you.
Briony was half junior, half senior, when I came along. She was graduated in January, when there was no commencement. She had her various jobs while I rode out my year’s contract. With Briony sometimes auditing in her front-row seat I was inspired to give the students only good news: how much neuroscience is advancing almost day by day. I was positive, always anticipating a resolved future of essential discoveries, it was the guarded optimism of the classroom, the assumption of any science course, that we would get to the truth eventually. I harked back to Whitman, who knew better than anybody what we are and sang of “the body electric.” How pleasing to those children to learn, body as brain and brain as body, that it all came together. Of course I wouldn’t tell them he was a poet. Ruin everything.
So there we were. I had taken her out of her organized life, removed her from her horizontal bar, and moved us to New York. In fact, she loved the city. We found a place after a while in the West Village. An apartment in a converted warehouse, with a loading-dock entrance and iron front windows, a creaky elevator, old unpolished wooden floors. Three rooms, lots of light, trees on the block, wonderful stores in the neighborhood, and of course the storekeepers all got to know Briony, the Italian bakery on the corner with the fresh breads in the window, the Korean food market, the coffee shop, newsstand. Because she was lovely, outgoing, cheerful, friendly, asking questions, warming up all these crotchety New Yorkers, who responded, to their own amazement, in kind. Andrew, she said, everything you need is right here, you don’t have to drive to a mall to shop, when was this invented! And we would walk everywhere, she wanted to explore, we walked to Chinatown, we walked over to Washington Square, where I had lived as a child, she got to know the city quite well.
How did you live?
I had a contract from a textbook publisher to do a kind of cog sci workbook. And then for the same company I became an outsource editor for their science lists. Reading books and proposals. And Briony tutored in math. She put something on the Internet and in no time at all she had more clients than she wanted—high school kids, middle school kids—testament to the state of education in America. So we made out OK. This was before the baby, you understand. When the baby came, a cake was delivered by the old Italian baker, the Koreans sent over a basket of fruit, all the old ladies of the neighborhood had tracked her pregnancy, she was everyone’s expectant young mother, and when on a spring day Briony brought Willa out for the first time, carrying her in a chest sling, somehow people appeared, it was as if they had been waiting, it was a kind of royal procession, Mother and Child, Briony couldn’t walk ten feet without someone stopping to ooh and aah.
What about you?
Well, I was there, of course, hanging in the background. I had never connected with the neighbors as Briony had. I just kept a smile frozen on my face, saying nothing and being more or less ignored. But I’ll tell you how lovely it was to watch Briony nurse our little girl, her cheeks flushed with happiness, her eyes on the baby and then on me with an expression of such fruition, as to enunciate in that moment the magnificence of life. And it was all in her eyes, my dear wife of twenty-two, who had the strength of being to totally transform me, turn me into something resembling a normal, functioning citizen of the world. [thinking] Ach, God.
Kleenex on the little table there.
So now you know why I’m here.
I do.
It’s a kind of jail, the brain’s mind. We’ve got these mysterious three-pound brains and they jail us.
Is that where you are?
I’ve known it for some time. I’m in solitary, one hour in the yard for the exercise of memory. You’re a government psychiatrist, aren’t you?
Well, I’m board-certified, if that’s what you mean.
And I thought we were travelers on the road together. The two of us, walking down the road. On the other hand I don’t think you travel well. I suppose you’ve never been to Zagreb.
Zagreb?
I was in a park there where every little bush and sprig of flowers was identified with a card on a metal stand. You had to bend down to read the Latin name. I was there with the woman who did the all-in-the-air somersault.
I see.
She was a prostitute, of course. And why I said to the pimp that her act was too brief to hold an audience for an entire evening, I don’t know. Perhaps I was drunk. Perhaps the somersault only seemed to be entirely in the air. She was a soft-spoken little woman habituated to submission. She smiled through her tears as she asked me to take her away from Zagreb, there in the park on a chilly autumn afternoon with the little bushes labeled carefully as if this was a truly civilized part of the world that had never seen war and whose native population didn’t hate the Serbs or the Bosnians, and who hadn’t made themselves into a puppet state of the Nazis in World War II. I saw this sedate, meticulously botanized park with the autumn leaves blowing across our path as a claim in the name of civilization to deny the brutal history of this place.
What were you doing there?
Just wandering. I had set off across Europe, hitchhiking with some other Yalies, but one by one we went our separate ways and there I was in Zagreb. In the hotel an old man in a tuxedo played the piano. American songs from years before as if they were the latest numbers. “My Blue Heaven.” “How High the Moon.” “Mr. Sandman.” And in a stiff clumsy unsyncopated way that revealed his obdurate classical training. Even Martha could do a proper swing tune if she was in the mood. I was the only American in the place, so I guess the performance was for me. A dark little room with red draperies and stuffed chairs and ottomans with the shape of buttocks worn into them. Just a few customer
s sitting in attitudes of waiting with their drinks untouched in shot glasses. The waiter nodding off in a corner. They all seemed in cahoots, the big bulky pimp, the pianist, and the customers—all of them there to demonstrate that this was the place to be, this third-rate hotel in this sadly unremarkable city of interest not even to the people who lived there. And she wasn’t the only one, the somersaultist …
The only one what?
Who asked me to take her away.
So this was not a dream.
There was a woman in St. Petersburg who asked the same thing. I don’t remember how I met her. Maybe at the Hermitage. She wore white stockings, a cherubic girl with her stockings held up by her generous thighs. Whose white-stockinged legs pointed skyward with almost military precision and then separated, widening like calipers.
Why are you telling me this?
Because I remember it. Because I don’t want to speak of what happened. It was clear wherever I went that I had no money. A student with a backpack, skinny and perpetually anxious. Yet this is what people do, when they are driven to it. With my American passport I was a commodity. Why are you looking at me like that? I’m trying to tell you that before I married Martha I had my share of adventures with the race of women.
I see.
With one marriage and several affairs behind me I was under no illusions. So that I did not impute to Briony her moral beauty, her natural unschooled virtue. It was really there. Nothing about her was practiced except perhaps her acrobatics. She came to me as Revelation. Not only because of the death of Martha’s and my baby girl, but because as a youth, as a student, I had been stupidly, cockily uncaring, not yet cunningly the resolved accidental killer-pretender but merely a heedless sort of lout like some of my collegiate pals.
I see.
There was one extended affair at Yale. I refused to marry her. So it ended as it had to at graduation and she went off to Spain, I think it was, with her degree in comparative lit, a tall pretty girl with dark eyes, and not long after there in the mail were her wedding pictures. The groom was not only a cognitive scientist, he even looked like me. So that when she wrote a few years later to tell me that she was leaving him I knew it was all over between us. You’re smiling.