Love and Death on Long Island Page 4

  With this brand new project, however, I was still the sculptor at that point in the process before the block of marble has been ordered, when it is the idea, not the accursed work, that is ‘in progress’, when it is the contours of the idea that have to be shaped and moulded and refined. Walking back along Fitzjohn’s Avenue, passing the palm tree at no. 43A without even noticing it, I had had that idea – rather, two ideas. I would write a novel in the first person singular; and (this, I conjectured, was probably a first in English literature) its protagonist would be stone deaf.

  The latter trope in no way represented a desire on my part to humanise my fiction with a crude injection of the pathos of disablement. I had as a writer a positive horror of what I would scornfully refer to as ‘the tyranny of the subject’; my novels had never been, in any easily determinable manner, ‘about’ anything; and the new one, to which I cautiously gave the elegant, tragic title of Adagio, would assuredly not be ‘about’ deafness. What stimulated me in the conceit of a deaf protagonist was the strictly formal challenge that it would pose, the formidable puzzle of having to organise and articulate a narrative whose central character, whose conscience in short, would be incapable, on a pedantically literal level, of communicating with his fellows. That this disability could also be assimilated without too much strain into my personal thematics of sacrifice, and would therefore function for the more discerning of critics as what the French term an effet de signature, I was well aware. But I might claim in all simplicity and honesty that the idea had just ‘popped into my head’, as all my ideas did, and if it bore a strong resemblance to those which had preceded it, that could only be because it had sprung from the selfsame source.

  I worked well and, despite those occasional seizings-up of despairing helplessness, reasonably quickly. I would rise early, at about seven o’clock. After a cup or two of sugary tea and a summary glance at my mail, I would settle myself behind the slightly tilted desk in my study. Thereafter, saving a short break for lunch, never more than half an hour, the only sounds made in that room were the stealthy ticking of the marble-framed clock on the mantelpiece and the soft scratch of my fountain pen – an amazingly slim, elongated silver model from Cartier, which had been presented to me one Christmas by my French publisher – as it filled the pages of my notepad. Invariably, at some time between four and five o’clock, I would start to tire or else feel reluctant to continue working by lamplight; without reading through what I had written, I would shut the notepad and slip it into the top drawer of my writing desk. It was then that, in virtually all weathers, I took my daily constitutional around the Heath, returning to the house an hour later to answer the mail and scan the newspaper and mix myself a dry Martini. I sat down to dinner promptly at half-past seven, and the evening hours would be spent either reading or listening to music – mostly German – on my Walkman, another Christmas gift, made from myself to myself, as I had a terror of disturbing my neighbours (which was in truth a terror of setting a precedent and thereby licensing them to disturb me).

  Such was my daily routine. Conscious that the artist, no matter that his work may strike the world as the epitome of classical concision and grace, is himself a figure fatally cast in the Romantic mould, I wilfully courted the security and even monotony offered by such a routine as the indispensable counteractant to my more feverish bouts of creation. And I was, these few days, as contented a man as I was ever likely to be.

  I even won a measure of personal satisfaction in the affair that had provoked me so. Now that I had regained my detachment, I thought the matter over and decided that I did not dare run the risk of letting it fester unresolved. I rang my agent again to enquire if negotiations with the magazine had already reached a contractual stage and, learning that nothing had as yet been signed, let him know that I was no longer willing to authorise the publication of extracts from my book and that he must resist any further overtures in that direction. Probably he was less astonished by this belated right-about face than by the initial acceptance – perhaps, too, he had reason to know that the editor would be relieved rather than otherwise to be freed from the burdensome obligation to which he had blindly committed himself. In any event, he received the instruction without comment and undertook to carry it out forthwith. The matter dealt with thus, the parenthesis closed, it almost felt to me as though the thing had never happened at all.

  There was a single cloud on the horizon: my sleep was not of the best.

  When in bed, on the far shore of consciousness, I had long possessed an eerie and inexplicable knack, that of conjuring up a gallery of faces whose features, if unrelated to those of anyone I knew, presented themselves to my inner eye in a hyper-realist wealth of detail: it was a knack which no longer disquieted me, even reassured me that sleep, real sleep, was about to envelop me.

  These faces were disposed to a certain gaping-mouthed grotesquerie of character and expression, they were informed with an extraordinarily scrunched-up vitality and realism, their kinship (for in my waking hours I had given some thought to them) was with Daumier caricatures and Japanese masks and baroque, obscenely spouting gargoyles and caryatids. No sooner had they been evoked than they would generally start to fade, but many of them would leave a faint afterimage and next morning I would sometimes still remember the ones that had made the greatest impression on me.

  For the last few days another type of face had begun to exhibit itself on the magic lantern of my semiconscious mind, one whose features, blurry and spectral of outline, were not at first as piercingly transparent to me as the others. It was its very fuzziness which kept me from falling asleep, as I would struggle to bring it into sharper focus.

  This happened four nights in succession. On the fifth, by virtue of so superlative an effort of concentration it seemed to me my brain might combust, I contrived at last to rip off the veil – which, uncannily, at the very last instant, fluttered away of its own accord, like one of those protective tissue covers in old-fashioned volumes of art reproductions – and the face that it had been concealing was disclosed. It belonged to the boy in the film.

  I opened my eyes and picked up the alarm clock that sat on my bedside table. It was one minute to one. Although I seldom smoked in the bedroom, I usually kept, by the clock, a pack of cigarettes and a matchbox. Without switching on a lamp, I drew a cigarette from its open pack and lighted it. I inhaled deeply, then exhaled through my nostrils, tracing the whitish curl of smoke upwards to the ceiling. Halfway up, it was traversed by the shaft of light that filtered through from the street lamp just outside my front door and that had often chanced to remind me, appropriately enough, of the luminous cone that issues from a cinema projectionist’s cabin.

  The whole futile business had obviously nettled me more than I had realised, for this was the first time I could with certain knowledge attribute the paternity of a face from my night-gallery to one I had earlier glimpsed in daytime. Several days had passed since I had seen the film. Apart from stray lines of its dialogue which, imbecilic to the nth degree and occasionally bordering on the downright illiterate, had lodged in my brain against my will and of which, once in a while, I would find myself inopportunely reminded as I wrestled with my emerging narrative, I had put it out of my mind. I pondered the meaning of this little aberration, decided it had none; then, my cigarette only half smoked, stubbed it out in an ashtray and almost immediately fell asleep.

  My work was also interrupted, if in more wonted fashion, by the arrival of a first complimentary copy of The Gentrification of the Void, followed a day or two later by nine others making up the full complement that was due to me. The latter would be sent to Cambridge graced with dedications that I seemed to have to agonise over as much as over the work itself.

  It was, though, my practice to read the printed text through before sending out any copies at all – even if, having overseen each stage of creation and fabrication, I had become exhaustingly familiar with its every semicolon. I had to be the first to know what lay in store for
the reader. I couldn’t abide the thought of receiving a friend’s flattering note of appreciation to which he then tacked on an afterword, doubtless sympathetic in intent but tending to the facetious in tone, about a line that was missing or a paragraph that had been printed upside-down. In this latest instance I did not discover too much to complain of, except for one ‘literal’ that caused me to die a little when my eyes rested upon it. To my horror, the name of Baudrillard, a ‘thinker’ I did not admire, had somehow been transmuted twice on the printed page into ‘Bachelard’ – a nonsense in the context. The error was all the more intolerable to me in that it was plainly not a misprint, that I could have ascribed to the negligence of a copyist or typesetter, but an unforgivably careless oversight on my own part. I scored through the offending name in each of the copies to be sent off to Cambridge and scribbled a laconic note in the margin beside it.

  In the meantime work on Adagio was advancing well. It was firming up nicely, it was growing as hard and dense and compact between my hands as a snowball from which the fat, as it were, has been removed. The stimulus for having my protagonist speak in the first person had, of course, come from the revelation these few months back that I had never proceeded so in the past. That much was evident. But it was also my ambition to have him ‘speak’ in the literal sense and to contrast his stilted and faltering attempts to do so with the keenness and clarity of his mind as it would be revealed to the reader. Would I be able, I wondered, to simulate on paper the speech patterns of one born stone deaf – I who, as a writer, had never claimed onomatopoeic mimicry as being among my gifts? And would such an achievement, were it successfully carried off, not be bound to be regarded as tasteless and patronising in the extreme? One of my near-neighbours was a deaf-mute and she had been quite friendly with my wife. Although I had had little contact with her myself, and would see her hardly at all now that I had been widowed, I could still recall the curious moaning sounds that she had produced in her pathetic endeavours to communicate, speaking somewhat as one imagines one does oneself when under the influence of a dentist’s anaesthetic. I made a few preliminary attempts on my notepad to reproduce these sounds in words, or sometimes just in letters strung along one after the other, and worked hard at it until I started to feel confident that I could carry it through an entire novel.

  Absorbed in my labours, in these great and burning questions of art and representation, I erected a barrier between myself and the world outside; I was already something of an isolationist by natural inclination but the gestation of a novel would make me rigorously so. Once, some months before, around a dinner table, the conversation had turned to a young novelist in vogue and of universally acknowledged talent, who also possessed the good fortune to be the son of a novelist equally admired; and when I remarked to a question put to me that I had never read a line of his, my table companion jocularly turned to address me: ‘What? Never read a line of X – ? You’ve led a sheltered life!’ ‘Only a fool would not wish or try to,’ I coolly replied, aware that I was thereby reinforcing my personal ‘legend’, even among my closest acquaintances, as a self-willed solitary, practically a recluse.

  It was not quite so – except, precisely, when I was at work; for then, struggling to forge my own language, I would refuse to let myself ever be distracted by what Mallarmé termed ‘the words of the tribe’. I all but ceased to read newspapers lest my eye be drawn to, my brain obstinately register, some inept specimen of journalese, some insidiously punning headline that I would then worry at for days afterwards, since its very vulgarity would have made it next to impossible for me to forget. For the same reason I scarcely listened to the wireless any more, and read or reread only writers in a foreign language – even then, only those so far distant from my own sensibility in both period and world view as to render unthinkable the risk of any involuntary influence.

  Yet, one afternoon, sitting at my desk, pen in hand, letting my mind wander as aimlessly as a schoolgirl’s, I caught myself, to my surprise, thinking again of the youth from the film and wondering what could have happened to him after he had been sprayed with ketchup; wondering, too, what was taking place in the photograph that I had studied outside the cinema and whose setting had been unfamiliar to me – a garage, was the vague impression I had, what Americans call a filling station, or possibly some type of factory, for I seemed to remember a hint of piping in the background. At any rate, I idly told myself, it meant that he had not disappeared from the narrative, as I had assumed, after the incident in the café, that he must later have reappeared, probably more than once, and perhaps exacted vengeance on the awful Cory.

  The thought passed dreamily through my brain that the boy might serve, in part at least, as a model for my protagonist (it was while seeking to clarify my thoughts on the character’s age and physical formation that I had let myself slip into a state of museful reverie) and I tested out on him the same smooth, unlined brow, the same feathery blond hair and, above all, the same smile – a victim’s smile. But even though, in order to facilitate the reader’s identification with him (or rather, as I did not believe in such ‘identification’, his desire to accompany him through the meanders of my fiction), I meant my hero to be young, personable and bursting with health, unimpaired in every respect save that of his single disability, I soon laughed the comparison away, so ludicrous did it suddenly strike me.

  Thereafter, however, at odd, unexpected moments, evenings, for example, when I might be reading in bed, the actor’s face would resurge and press itself on my attention; venturing not to linger over it, as I did, would merely render it the more vividly present. I didn’t know what to make of it all. It irritated me; and yet it also amused me as an unprompted and unwarranted little adventure of the spirit. What I did not feel, strangely enough, was any very real unease that my interest in the youth might be erotic in nature. Such as I remembered him at least, he was a lovely, flowerlike nonentity. If, as I fancied, adolescent girls fainted away as he passed, that was explained by the immaturity of their emotional lives recognising its natural correlate in the immaturity of his physique. And, a classicist by both education and temperament, I knew nothing more shaming and tedious in the literature of my contemporaries and near-contemporaries than the maudlin neo-Hellenist cult of the ephebe, with middle-aged men like Wilde and Gide tastefully salivating over sleeping youths and making mawkish comparisons with asphodels and eglantines. Yet this particular face had piqued my curiosity, this face I had not recognised was nagging at me like one I had recognised but could not name. I wanted to stand back, hold myself up to the mirror of my own self-scrutiny and conceptualise (here I thought with a grimace of the features editor) – contextualise my feelings on the matter.

  I remembered that, while at Cambridge, I had been asked by the editors of an undergraduate journal, of the ‘aesthetic’ sort still more or less fashionable when I was up, to submit to the Proust Questionnaire. To the question ‘What is it that most depresses you in life?’ I had replied, The unequal distribution of beauty.’

  On one level, the reply had been derisively intended, a wilfully provocative rejoinder (quite without consequence, to be sure) to what I considered to be the fatuous sham of any left-leaning political engagement among my privileged contemporaries. On another, though, it was a reflection of the almost religious fervour with which I had once prostrated myself before the world’s beauty, and it could not have been more passionate and sincere (a contrast, in this, with most of my replies).

  Yet if so exacerbated a type of aestheticism (now to be recollected with a sardonic smile) tends to be conventionally interpreted as a symptom or sublimation of homosexuality, such was not at all my own case. I had not once, not even at the feverishly lubricious public school to which I had been dispatched as a petrified ten-year-old, had what might be thought of as a homosexual experience. I could not even recall from those terrible and inexpiable years having felt burdened by the guilt of frustrated prurience, although I was always perfectly well aware of the nature
of the heated fumblings and scufflings I would hear after lights out, the tiptoeing to and fro from one bed to another, the obscene little cabaret held evening after evening in the communal lavatory. No doubt I was undersexed, but, alone and aloof, I had never been exposed to the famous ‘phase’. I knew myself, even then, to be ‘boringly heterosexual’, as I had later described myself to a wistful suitor at Cambridge.

  As for the concept of bisexuality, so very modish now, I refused to take its premise seriously. The ‘bisexual’, so far as I was concerned, was a libeller of the self and of its profoundest instincts; to say the least, a victim of the most unproductive kind of wishful thinking. For me, indeed, he bore a droll likeness to precisely that unhappy young man who had clumsily propositioned me at university and who, in a foredoomed attempt to endear himself to me, had rattled on, slightly desperately, about how he loved ‘every kind of music, from classical to pop’. But when, invited back to his room for a few dry biscuits and a thimbleful of sherry, I had had a chance to inspect his record collection, what I discovered was row upon row of obscure Broadway musical comedies and, tucked away out of sight as though in positive embarrassment and shame, certainly never turned to in the anticipation of any sheer, uncomplicated pleasure that they might afford, a classical library numbering no more than three records: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, naturally; a pairing of Mozart horn concertos; some vapid piano pieces by Satie.