SHE: I used to say that to Papa.
ME: What did he say?
SHE: What you see is not what you think you see.
ME: Sound science.
SHE: Doesn’t that depend on the scientist?
ME: I wouldn’t depend on the scientist …
SHE: If I were you?
ME: It isn’t a warning.
SHE: A threat?
ME: Do I look like a threat?
SHE: You look exactly like the previous four threats.
ME: What are you going to do?
SHE: What would you like me to do?
It was what Jove had said a few months ago when he had been holding my wrist, too tightly, across a restaurant table. She was still holding my hand and what I did was outside of anything I had imagined I would do.
I leaned across the narrow table and kissed her.
SHE: Women as well?
ME: No.
· · ·
Cowardice bedshares with arrogance. I was afraid and I wanted to bluff my way out. The kiss was a smoke bomb to cause confusion and distract attention. I thought she might slap me. I thought she would rush away. In fact she did nothing. Asked her question and did nothing. I started to re-eat my cold pasta. I would have been glad to climb into the plate and cover myself in clam sauce.
ME: I’m working on antiquarks.
SHE:
ME: They are the antiparticles corresponding to the quarks.
SHE:
ME: They haven’t been discovered yet.
SHE:
ME: That makes them quite difficult to work on.
SHE:
(Say something please say something)
ME: Did you know I was born on a tug-boat in the River Mersey?
SHE:
ME: My father wanted to call me Mersey but my mother wouldn’t let him.
My real name is Alluvia. I shortened it to Alice.
SHE: Alluvia?
ME: That which is deposited by the river.
SHE: Shall I call you Moses?
ME: If I grow a beard.
SHE: Jove calls you Rivelleto.
ME: Little River?
SHE: I call him a mamzer.
ME: Mamzer?
SHE: Yiddish. Look it up under Bastard.
ME: I know.
SHE: Come on.
Walk with me. Walk the broken past, named and not. Walk the splintered plank, chaos on both sides, walk the discovered and what cannot be discovered. Walk the uneasy peace we share.
Walk with me, through the night, the night air, the breathing particles of other lives. Breathe in, breathe out, steady now, not too fast on gassed lungs. I did not mean my words to poison you.
Walk with me, walk it off, the excess fat of misery and fear. Too much to carry around the heart. Walk free.
She had a long stride though I was taller. Soon we were at the Battery.
Valet de Coupe. A youth stares anxiously into an elaborate cup whose contents are concealed. There may be no contents. Nevertheless he holds onto the cup. Carrying it with him as he walks.
Page of Cups. Young hopeful of the Tarot deck. My identity card.
When Stella kissed me I remember thinking, ‘This is not allowed.’ I was glad of the fog and the dark because I knew that if anyone saw us, the totality of our lives; history, complexity, nationality, intelligence, age, achievement, status, would be shrunk up to the assumptions of our kiss. Whoever saw us would say, ‘There’s a couple of …’, and this kiss, tentative, ambivalent, would become a lock and key.
I had seen it happen to others. I did not want it to happen to me.
At the same time I realised the absurdity of pinning anything onto a kiss.
At the same time I realised that I would like to do much more kissing if it were not so complicated.
So complicated. My first serious emotion was for a married man. My first experience of authentic desire was with a married woman.
You see, I did want to kiss her. That was what surprised me most of all.
‘I see why he likes you,’ said Stella, examining my neck with her fingers.
‘Is that why you’re doing it?’
‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’
I would argue with that.
She took me home, didn’t put on any lights, took off her clothes and had me lie down beside her on what seemed to be a very narrow bed. I wanted to touch her. The reflecting image of a woman with a woman is seductive. I enjoyed looking at her in a way that was forbidden to me, this self on self, self as desirer and desired, had a frankness to it I had not been invited to discover. Desiring her I felt my own desirability. It was an act of power but not power over her. I was my own conquest.
Her breasts as my breasts, her mouth as my mouth, were more than Narcissus hypnotised by his own likeness. Everybody knows how the story changes when he disturbs the water. I did disturb the water and the perfect picture broke. You see, I could have rested there beside her, perhaps forever, it felt like forever, a mirror confusion of bodies and sighs, undifferentiated, she in me, me in she and no longer exhausted by someone else’s shape over mine. And I had not expected such intense physical pleasure.
Why then did I trouble the surface?
It was not myself I fell in love with it was her.
Deeper now where the water is not clear. What patterns do the numbers make? One plus one is not necessarily two. I do the sum and the answer is an incipient third. Three pairs of two: Jove and Stella, Jove and Alice, Alice and Stella, and under the surface of each the head of the other.
I want to feel but with feeling comes pain. I could advise myself to keep out of complications and I won’t pretend that I have had no choice in any of this. I have noticed that choices seem to be made in advance of what is chosen. The time gap in between the determining will and the determined event is a handy excuse to deny causality. In space-time there is always a lag between prediction and response (synchronicity is a higher dimension phenomenon where the rules of space-time do not apply), sometimes of seconds, sometimes of years, but we programme events far more than we like to think. I do not say this is conscious, usually it is not, and there lies the difficulty. I have seen my father pushing the world, he quite unaware of what was pushing him. He did not believe in the unconscious, except as a soup of fantasy and half-memories that entertained his sleep. To suggest, as I did, that the mind is a self-regulating system, where consciousness and unconsciousness work as load-balancing pulleys, roused anger enough to make me think I had touched something relevant. I continued my reading: Paracelsus, Jung, Einstein, Freud, Capra, and although I still know nothing, I am no longer a disciple of Fate.
Fate. A spin on the Wheel of Fortune and out I tumbled at Jove’s feet. Another dizzy round, and there is Stella waiting to help me off. But who is turning the wheel? Honest Guv’ I had both hands tied behind my back.
My father used to tell me I had an octopus-complex. ‘Must you try and do eight things at once?’ I used to imagine that there was an octopus, hooded, ancient, floating in the limp waters of my body, reaching out, dark and blind, using its tentacles to probe what stood outside it. Analogies fail, but I am capable of behaving like an eight-armed cephalopod while protesting the innocence of my two hands on the table.
I wear a white coat, tie my hair back and assume the proper attitude to what I call my life. I will examine it, but underneath the dark things stir. What would happen if I came face to face with what I am? I think it is happening but because I do not recognise myself I say it is somebody else; him, her, them, who are responsible. Responsible for my terror. Every piece of furniture in the room has been destroyed.
· · ·
I woke up in the dazed apartment. Next to me on the massacred bed, the order and beauty of her body. On the table beside, an amputated lamp. Across the room was a Snow Queen’s mirror, its pieces scatters of despair. I crept from beneath the scissored blankets to the bathroom. The white and chrome was a shrine to Chanel. A place for everything, everything in its
place. Peace.
I sniffed the bottles. Here were the secrets of irresistible skin and salt smells of pearl and oyster. Lemon, brine, seaweed, sandalwood, musk, bitter rock-rose, frankincense and myrrh. Not here the floral notes of the high-octave female. I admire the soprano singer but not the soprano speaker. High voices like high heels are a put-on. Unfortunately only the shoes get kicked off at night.
Did I say that? No she did. I sometimes think my personality is a troopship’s atoll; invade me.
Tell the story as it happened.
Alluvia: the deposits collected and jetted by the river.
We cooked breakfast in the remains of the frying pan and ate our food standing up, looking out of the window over to the park.
‘Every day with Papa,’ she said. ‘Through the park to Amsterdam Avenue. When I look out of this window I am looking back into the past. It’s one of those wormholes you people talk about, a membrane between now and then. A tunnel of energy. I work here, at this window, pulling in the past like Rapunzel’s hair.’
I was going to say that wormholes are only a theoretical possibility. But Stella wasn’t listening to me.
‘How do you think I got the Jackson Pollock?’
(Did she mean the big canvas of violent colour hung in a crude wood frame?)
I said, ‘Tell me.’
Central Park. New York. Papa walking every morning in one direction, Miss Peggy Guggenheim being driven every morning in the other direction. Papa was a handsome man and took off his hat to the great lady, shrewd as she was rich, patron of painters, collector of fortunes and spender of them.
Papa may have been in love with her as some people love movie stars and he liked to talk about her to the street sweepers and garbage collectors who know everything, living as they do, in the intimacy of human leftovers.
One of these men, Macy, thin as a shovel, tough as a pick, collected modern art. That is, when his day’s work was done he went down to Washington Square, where any number of artists had studios round about and offered to do odd jobs in return for a little drawing or a bit of paint. There was always plumbing to fix, roofs to patch, and he had become a familiar figure with his bag of tools in one hand and his portfolio case in the other. He was the one who took Papa to meet Jackson Pollock.
‘Cans of the stuff,’ whispered Macy, as Pollock threw paint over his floor-pinned canvas and rolled himself over it from end to end. Papa thought of the ecstasy of David who danced before the Lord.
‘Are they expensive?’
‘Hell no,’ said Macy. ‘Just pay him for the paint.’
1947. The year I was born and the year that strange Wyoming-born Pollock exhibited his Action Paintings in New York. Papa took me to the opening and it was no disadvantage that my eyes could not yet focus. In his long black coat and deep hat he carried my head over the crowds, little body dangling beneath. We were at a Shabbat of rioting light. When Pollock was killed in a car crash in 1956 he was famous.
Mama wanted Papa to sell the painting, still rolled up, never framed, but he refused, and kept it from her. When I came back to New York in 1970, it was with the rest of his property, left to me, in the fading old offices of his attorney. We unrolled it together and even the dust shone.
‘You know, it isn’t insured. I can’t afford the premiums.’
She smiled. ‘Jove wouldn’t let me hang it until he found out what it was worth and then when he found out what it is worth he said we couldn’t possibly hang it.’
Jove. The name hung between us.
SHE: Are you in love with him?
ME: Yes. No. Am I?
SHE: I’m not your mother although he is old enough to be your father.
ME: I thought you and he had an arrangement.
SHE: We do. He arranges things and tells me later.
ME: I don’t understand.
SHE: You don’t know him.
ME: Don’t I?
SHE: A man is more than his penis. Not much more but something.
ME: Have I missed the something?
SHE: I have been married to him for twenty-four years.
ME: Then it must be quite a something.
SHE: I deserved that.
ME: Do you want me to go away?
SHE: No. No, actually I want you to stay.
ME: Who with?
SHE: Sometimes I wonder which is which. Where I begin. Where he ends.
ME: You love him.
SHE: Too simple.
ME: About last night …
SHE: Is it in the past already?
ME: I didn’t mean that.
SHE: We were talking about Jove.
ME: Tell me.
When Mama and I left for Berlin, Jove was about to go to Chicago to study. He was nineteen, a dark teenage hero to a girl in old-fashioned clothes and dreaming about James Dean. We went to the trattoria to say goodbye. Mama was sad but unable to conceal her winged feet. I, no aliped, hid my lame heart.
We had a party and Raphael came with the only two of his dogs left, and Signora Rossetti wept like the Tiber and said that the good happy life had been snuffed away and the miserable dirty life had got control. There were many people who felt that way, that in spite of the war and the Crash, things had been better before the Fifties. Maybe it was Senator McCarthy’s influence. During the Fifties, anyone on the outside, any kind of outside, learned to be afraid of being different. It was a decade that fell into the gap between an earlier innocence and a later tolerance. Mama said she hadn’t risked her life to get out of one tyranny just to suffocate inside another. Plenty of Europeans began to think of going back home. We all knew someone who had lost their job or been put in prison for un-American activities.
Jove, Giovanni, as he was then, had twice been approached as a student by a man he had never met and offered money for information on any college students he knew who might have been Communists.
‘We are not informers,’ Signora Rossetti had said, when her popular Polenta Nights came under surveillance.
As one who had been followed from birth, I couldn’t understand what the fuss was about.
I kissed Giovanni who gave me a dollar and a ferocious Bowie knife.
‘Protect your virginity,’ he said, like a mafioso, but I only heard ‘ginity’ and thought it was something to do with Prohibition.
‘Alla Vostra Salute!’ The party drank our health and we were gone.
Stella turned towards me and crumpled my heart in her hand.
‘Do you fall in love often?’
Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all. There are children who grow up as I did, with the love clamped down in them, who cannot afterwards love at all. There are others who make fools of themselves, loving widely, indiscreetly, forgetting it is themselves they are trying to love back to a better place.
I loved my father incestuously. I would have coupled with him in a different morality. He wanted my love but, except in small children, demonstrations of affection embarrassed him. No, it was not always so, but perhaps it is worse when love has flowed freely to find it one day dammed. When he changed I changed with him and wore a collar and lead to learn that love is not a puppy dog.
Some people dream in colour, I feel in colour, strong tones that I hue down for the comfort of the pastelly inclined. Beige and magnolia and a hint of pink are what the well-decorated heart is wearing; who wants my blood red and vein-blue?
Don’t lie.
Don’t lie. You know you like to view but not to buy. I have found that I am not a space where people want to live. At least not without decorating first. And that is the stubbornness in me: I do not want to be someone’s neat little home. I looked round at the wrecked flat. Not answering Stella, then I said, ‘I’m not in love with you.’
What would it be to love? Would it be the fields under rain, the vivid green the grass takes? Would it be the air current the bird finds? Would it be the fox and the fox hole? Would
it be natural at all? Would it be lucky find or magic trick? Buried treasure or sleight of hand? Would I be the conjuror or the conjured? Would it be a spell or a song I sing?
If I am a wound would love be my salve?
If I am speechless would love be a mouth?
I do not want to declare love on you as of midnight yesterday. I do not want to be captured nor to hold a honeyed gun at your head. I do not want to spend the rest of my life as a volunteer member of the FBI. Where did you go, who did you see, what did you do today dear? I would love you as a bird loves flight, as meat loves salt, as a dog loves chase, as water finds its own level. Or I would not love you at all.
Would it be natural? You are not of my clan, not of my kind, there is no biological necessity to want you. Instincts of tribal survival do not apply. I do not want to reproduce myself nor do I need your money. You will not grant me status. You will not make my life easier. Capacity for love in its higher forms seems to be peculiarly human although even in humans it is still peculiar. This love suggests there is something beyond self-interest. The geneticists will scoff and since I cannot prove them wrong any more than they can prove themselves right, I shall only mention that scoffing is not a very scientific approach.
· · ·
Am I rehearsing my arguments? Yes. My accuser is approaching.
HE: You went to bed with my wife?
ME: With Stella, yes.
HE: What did you think you were playing at?
ME: I didn’t think we were playing chess.
HE: I don’t believe it.
ME: It was sex not a miracle. (It was a miracle.)
HE: How could you?
ME: I didn’t plan it.
Jove walked towards me, he walked away from me, he circled me as a shark does a pool of blood. Then he rang up Stella and shouted down the phone, in Italian, for two hours sixteen minutes without a pause. For the following three months he behaved like a character amalgam of Bluebeard and Coco the Clown. If he was not raging and threatening, he was cracking jokes about the man who had intended to remain a bachelor and ended up with two wives. Jove and I continued to work together, Stella and I made love together, and once a week Jove and Stella met for dinner. Emotionally balletic by nature, both were practising their lutz; in figure skating, a jump, with rotation, from the back outer edge of one skate to the back outer edge of the other. Their ice rink was my heart.