Very Old Bones

One

The solidification of my father’s reputation prior to this present hour, the summer of 1958, followed the exhibition of the six canvases and many sketches he made during the years 1936–1939, the ostensible subject of these works being the near suicide of Francis as witnessed by the artist, by the cruel waif from the carnival, and by myself.

In the wake of the aborted suicide, Peter fell into an artistic silence that persisted for much of 1935. I judge it to have been induced by his guilt over not confronting Francis when he first saw him beside the tracks, but instead waiting for the train he thought would carry the man away — and thus would Peter have been done with a pesky brother.

But again Francis confounded his sibling, stepped onto the track bed, then stepped off again, a game of perilous hopscotch if there ever was one. And what this did was derange Peter for more than a year, the greatest thing that had happened to him as an artist up to that time.

Artists, of course, use their guilt, their madness, their sexual energy, and anything else that comes their way, to advance the creation of new art. Peter had fared modestly in his one-man show in that winter of 1934, realizing some dollars, plus an enhanced (but still marginal) reputation, and proving to the gallery owners that, although he was perhaps not Matisse, he was worth wall space. But Peter, given this green light, immediately stopped painting, and no one could get him to say why. It all looks crystalline now in retrospect, but it was probably mysterious even to him for a time. His artistic cycle, as I came to perceive it, was this: profound guilt and remorse, followed by delight with the remorse, for it created the mood for art; self-loathing that followed being delighted by remorse; boredom with self-loathing; rumination about self-destruction as an escape from self-loathing; resurgence of boredom when self-destruction is rejected; and resumption of art to be done with boredom, art again being the doorway into the emotional life, the only life that mattered to him as an artist.

He began by objectifying, in segments, the scene as it had been, or as he had transformed it in his memory, revealing all that I saw, even to the cat, the legless doll, and especially the waif, which surprised me. She disappeared after I screamed at Francis, but Peter had already seen her in the weeds, and drew her peering out at the tracks like a vigilant demon, which is how I thought of her in subsequent years.

In one canvas he drew the scene from the perspective of Francis, leaving out the tracks, but including the lumber mill, the switch box, even the Phelan house, which he placed on a hill several blocks to the east and transformed into a place of dark and solitudinous dilapidation. He used the light of dusk, which was when the whole event took place, but he also painted Francis in bright sunlight, a way I never saw him. He painted the carnival boxcars in the background of one work, its people minimally developed, but busy with violence, copulation, voyeurism, and domestic acts around an open fire, none of which I had observed.

Peter learned about Francis’s leg wound from me (it was years before we knew how he’d gotten it), for I had seen it at the house when, sitting alone at the table, he wrapped a napkin around it, then tied it with a piece of string he took from his pocket; and I saw it again clearly when he sat on the switch box and raised his pant leg to examine his lease on death, so to speak. Peter created one picture in which only that ghastly leg exists on a realistic plane (precisely the repulsive purplish-and-white scaliness as I had related it to him), vividly detailed in drybrush watercolor. The rest of the scene — the body of the leg’s owner, the sky, the tracks — he rendered with a few pencil strokes and a smear of color. The leg in that drawing appeared to be a separate being, an autonomous entity. It did belong to a body, but further specifics of that body remained for other drawings to reveal.

I’m speaking now about the sketches Peter drew (he liked to quote Ingres that drawing included three-quarters of the content of a painting, that it contained everything but the hue), to some of which he added watercolor, most of them in pen or pencil or charcoal, depending on the tool at hand when the impulse came to conjure yet another response to the event. Peter did forty-nine sketches for the three paintings, which may seem sizable, but is really a parsimonious figure when one compares it to the hundreds of sketches he did for the Malachi paintings.

The Itinerant series, as the Francis paintings came to be called, was the realization of Peter’s new artistic credo: profligacy in the service of certitude. He came to believe that he could and would paint for decades to come, and that there was no such thing as too much prefatory creation to any given work. But he did not behave in any way that supported his new flirtation with infinity. When he removed himself into silence he also began to ignore his personal life. He grew further estranged from Claire, remote from me (which I didn’t understand; and I felt myself guilty for having done something I had perhaps not understood, or did not know I’d done; but I had not done anything except witness his fratricidal behavior), his personal hygiene deteriorated to the level of the most unwashed of those bohemians in whose midst he lived; his work as an illustrator, more in demand than ever, became loathsome to him, and he did less and less of it until his income was zero, and in this latter action he achieved a secondary goal: to so impoverish himself that he would henceforth be of no help whatever to Claire in supporting the house.

He was slowly converting himself into a replica of Francis at trackside: man without goal, home, family, or money, with only his wits to keep him alive. This was art imitating life, artist imitating man who lives or dies, who cares? Art be damned. Useless art. Pointless art. Now is the time to live or perish.

In this way Peter moved forward, trying to discover how the phantasm of death is visually framed in this life.

Peter concealed his Itinerant series for two years after he completed it, his first manifestation of that reclusive temperament that would continue for another two decades, and sold only three unrelated oil portraits (commissioned) to support himself. His year of silence had obviously fed his imagination, and led to the creative explosion he could no longer keep to himself. Critics who subsequently wrote about these paintings gave Peter his first leg up to fame, finding in them the originality he’d long sought, and either ignoring his earlier work or relegating it to the status of preparatory effort. They did not yet see that all six paintings had their subliminal inspiration in one late masterwork by Hieronymus Bosch, even to the name: The Peddler, or The Tramp, or The Landloper, or The Prodigal Son, as the Bosch work was variously called.

I doubt seriously Peter ever knew all the parallels the Bosch would have to his own work, his own family. He was not derivative, always argued against emulating the Impressionists who had so moved the American artistic world in the Armory Show in that year of his arrival in Greenwich Village, 1913. He resisted also the thrust of the Surrealists, who dominated the direction of art in the 1930s and 1940s. Peter used all these schools in his own way, never fitting any categories; yet the critics, after The Itinerant series, linked him to proletarian realists and Depression agitators, all of whom he might admire in principle, but would loathe in the particular for their politically partisan cheerleading.

An Interview with Peter Phelan

by Orson Purcell

O: These Itinerant paintings, they’re all about your brother Francis, are they not?

P: No. They’re not about anybody.

O: Who is the tramp figure in the paintings?

P: He’s anybody, nobody.

O: How can you tell me this when you and I were watching as Francis stepped onto the tracks and then off?

P: Artistically I never saw that.

O: You’re clearly lying, even to yourself.

P: All art is a lie.

O: Is your life a lie as well?

P: More often than not.

O: With the success of this art do you consider yourself an arrived man, a famous artist?

P: I will never arrive, but I’m famous with my friends.

O: Who would they be?

P: They’re all dead. Their names no longer matter.

O: What motivated you to paint The Itinerant series?

P: The paintings, as they took shape.

O: The paintings inspired themselves?

P: That’s how it happens. There is nothing and then there is a painting.

O: But things happen to make you arrive at a certain subject matter.

P: No. Nothing happens ever. There is no subject matter until the painting exists.

O: You are putting the egg before the chicken. What makes the egg?

P: The artist. He is an egg factory. He needs no chickens.

O: No guilt or envy or enmity or smoldering hatred or fratricidal impulse ever inspires art?

P: I know nothing of any of that.

O: You talk as if you have no internal life, as if only an empty canvas exists on which you, a mindless vessel, an automated brush, shape the present. This is the school of unconscious art, is it not?

P: You see this painting here? That’s a shoulder bone. This is a chest bone.

O: Whose bones are they?

P: Anybody’s. Nobody’s.

O: Why did you paint them?

P: Because they emerged.

O: Then they are your bones.

P: Quite possibly.

O: Just as The Itinerant, if not Francis, is then you?

P: I wouldn’t deny it.

O: What else wouldn’t you deny? Paternity, perhaps?

P: What?

O: I say paternity?

P: What?

O: I suggest that all your work and hence all your life is a parody of that subconscious you so revere. I suggest you cannot even take that deepest part of yourself seriously, that you have trouble acknowledging your status as a human being, as well as the status of your son, whom you treat as one of your works of art, disclaiming responsibility for him, allowing him to float free in the universe, devoid even of the right to the intentional fallacy. Your stance suggests you did not even intend him as quantitatively as one of your paintings, and so he remains a happenstance of history. Tell me if I am close.

P: Art is the ideation of an emotion.

O: Do I qualify as a work of art?

P: Art is the ineffable quotient of the work, the element that emerges when the work is done, that does not itself exist in the spatial qualities of the finished painting. Art has no subject matter.

O: Then neither do I.

P: Art is a received conception.

O: I am here, therefore I was conceived.

P: The conception of art has no logic and means nothing.

O: What does mean anything?

P: Art, as it exists.

O: What does art do after it exists?

P: It represents, it symbolizes, it expresses. Art is impact.

O: On whom? On what?

P: On the universe.

O: I doubt it.

P: Doubt is an impaction.

O: As a work of art I doubt myself, my conception, my creation.

P: A theory and its opposite may coexist in the same mind. The unavowed is the companion of mystery.

O: And mystery is the secret of art and paternity.

P: As you like it. As you like it.

Two

I was home from Germany five and a half months in March of 1953 when I visited with my mother for the first time in four years. We talked on the phone from time to time but she consistently put off any meeting. She was no longer Claire Purcell. She now called herself Belinda Love (not legally) and said at last she’d meet me, under the clock in the Biltmore Hotel, because she saw that happen once in a movie.

I arranged my one outing of the week for that day, a visit to the publishing house for which I was editing and tidying up the erotic memoirs of Meriwether Macbeth, an extroverted and pseudonymous bohemian writer and sometime actor who was having a renascent vogue as a result of having been murdered. This was an assignment that seemed doable to me, first because it was the story of a real life lived in Greenwich Village, my environment of the moment; and further because Peter had known Macbeth personally in the 1920s and loathed his acting, his writing, his ideas, his presence, and his odor.

I brought in the heavily edited and rewritten segments of Macbeth’s manuscript to my editorial boss, then walked the several blocks to the Biltmore, where I settled onto a bench from which I could monitor all who organized their futures under the clock.

I spotted my mother as soon as she appeared in the lobby, and saw that she looked remarkably like herself of five years gone. She was fifty-eight, looked forty-five, and exuded (with long, scarlet fingernails, spike heels, pillbox hat, wasp waist that was visible beneath her open, form-fitting coat) the aura of World War Two, the era when her independence had reached its apogee, the time of her final separation from Peter, and of her entrance into a solo career as singer and mistress of ceremonies, first in local Albany nightclubs, then with traveling USO shows, and, after the war, in a 52nd Street jazz club where she sang with the resident Dixieland group, her looks and her legs equally as important as her voice, and, ultimately, more interesting. As she walked across the lobby she drew the stares of the bell captain and his minions, then turned the heads of two men waiting to check in. Nearing retirement age and still a dazzler. Mother.

“Hello, darling boy,” she said when we embraced beneath the clock, “are you still my darling?”

“Of course, Mother.”

“Are you well?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Your letters were dreadful. You sounded positively wretched. So discontented, so — what can I say? — scattered.”

“Scattered is a good word. I’m nothing if not that.”

“Whatever happened to you?”

“I went out of my mind.”

“Just like your father.”

She signaled to the maître d’ of the Palm Court and we were seated under a chandelier, amid the potted plants, the tourists, and the cocktail-hour habitués. She ordered a Manhattan on the rocks, I an orange juice, my alcohol intake at zero level as a way of not compounding my confusion.

“When was Peter out of his mind?” Orson asked.

“Ever since I’ve known him. And I was out of my mind when I took up with the man. I thought he’d have committed suicide by this time. Miraculous he hasn’t.”

“Why would he commit suicide?”

“I certainly would have if I were him. The man is daft. Bats in his hat.”

“He’s painting well.”

“Yes. He does that. Does he have any money?”

“Not really.”

“Of course not. How are you living?”

“Frugally. I’m editing a book for a publisher, and my wife is working.”

“Oh yes, and how is she? The dear thing, she couldn’t bring herself to join us?”

“She’s in Germany.”

“There now, a wife who gets around. Something I always wanted to do.”

“I remember you got around in vaudeville.”

“The east coast. I never went to Europe until the war.”

“What are you doing now, Mother? Are you singing?”

“Good Lord, no. I’m running a talent agency.”

“For singers?”

“Singers, jugglers, magicians, dancers.”

“Strippers?”

“One stripper.”

“Tell me her name?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“So if I see her I’ll think of you.”

“I don’t think I like that reason.”

“She’s your client.”

“I was never a stripper.”

“You came close with some of your costumes.”

“If you’re going to attack me I’ll leave.”

“I don’t want you to leave. It’s taken five months to get you here.”

“I’ve been traveling.”

“It’s all right. We mustn’t dwell on maternal neglect. Tell me something important. How sure are you that my father is really my father?”

“Absolutely sure.”

“Manfredo had nothing to do with me?”

“Nothing.”

“He had something to do with you.”

“In a moment of weakness. You shouldn’t have seen that.”

“Where is he now? Do you still see him?”

“Not for fifteen years or more. He has palsy and can’t do his stage act anymore. He does card tricks at veterans’ hospitals.”

“Peter thinks Manfredo was the one. Nothing convinces him otherwise.”

“It’s his way, to be difficult.”

“He really is consistent about it.”

“I gave up trying to persuade him when you were a baby. Doesn’t he see how much you look like him? It’s quite uncanny, the resemblance.”

“His sister Molly tells him the same thing, but he refuses to believe.”

“It’s rotten that he still does this to you. And you’ve grown so handsome since I saw you last. Has he told you about all his women, how he even brought them home? He thought every man I knew was my lover, so that’s the way he behaved. A severe case of over-compensation if there ever was one. Is he still the king of tarts?”

“He sees several women. I don’t think they’re tarts.”

“Take a closer look.”

“It’s difficult getting close to him. I never even know what to call him. I’ve spent my whole life not calling him Dad. I don’t think he’d answer if I ever did call him that, or Pa, or Papa. I never call him anything.”

“It’s so depressing. The Phelans are crazed people. They always have been.”

“No more so than the rest of the world.”

“Oh yes. There’s a history of madmen in their past.”

“You’re making that up.”

“Get your father to tell you about his Uncle Malachi.”

“I’ve heard him mentioned, but not with any specifics. They don’t like to dredge him up.”

“Of course not. He was certifiable.”

“What did he do?”

“I’m not sure. But I know it wasn’t good for anybody’s health. Ask your father.”

She finished her Manhattan and touched a napkin to her lips, and I saw in her face beauty in decline, the artful makeup not quite camouflaging the furrows in her cheeks that I couldn’t remember seeing five years ago. She pushed her glass away and reached for her purse.

“I must dash, darling. I have a dinner party.”

“You’re such a butterfly, Mother. I didn’t even get to ask what I wanted to ask you.”

“Ask away.”

“It’s awkward.”

“You can ask me anything.”

“All right, anything. Can I move in with you? Temporarily. Peter works all hours of the day and night and I can’t sleep. It’s rather a small apartment.”

“Yes it is.”

“It truly is cramped.”

“I’m sure.”

“What do you think?”

“Oh darling, I don’t think so. I have any number of people coming through all the time. Friends, clients. You’d hate it.”

“Probably so.”

“You’re far better off with your father.”

“Perhaps that’s true.”

“Do you have money?”

“I can cover the drinks.”

She placed on the table, in front of me, a folded one-hundred-dollar bill she had been holding in her hand.

“Buy yourself a shirt. Something stylish.”

She stood up, leaned over, and kissed me on the cheek.

“And do get some rest,” she said. “You look worn out. Call me some night and we’ll have dinner.”

Dearest Moonflake,

I write you from the dregs of my father’s teapot. We live together in an armed camp, tea leaves and silence being our weapons of choice. Neither of us drink anymore, he out of fear that the rivers of hooch he has already drunk have given his muse cirrhosis, I because the jigsaw puzzle that is my life becomes increasingly difficult to solve when several pieces of the puzzle are invisible. You, for instance. It is coming onto six months, your contract is up, and when are you coming back?

I cheer your early photographic success from this remote bleacher seat, slowly gnawing away my own pericardium. I miss you with every inch of that bloody sack and all it contains. I live in a world without love, without affection, without joy. I have taken to sleeping for twenty-four-hour stretches whenever I can manage it, so as to lose a day and bring the time of your arrival closer. The job affords me small pleasure, but it does fill the hours with reading that does not remind me of my own inability to write. The author I’m editing is a micturator of language, a thirsty, leaky puppy whose saving quality is his cautionary, unstated message to me never to write out of the ego; in exalting himself he wets the bed, the floor, the ceiling below.

I finally visited with Mother Belinda this week. We met for a drink and I examined her being and found her in full, late-blooming flower, not that she hadn’t bloomed in earlier seasons, but now she has the advantage of looking as young as she was in the previous blossom, quite an achievement for the old girl. She is utterly without guilt concerning her abandoned child and husband. She thinks him mad, and though I would also like to judge him so, I cannot; and she thinks me “scattered,” which I suppose is how I appear to those unable to perceive any purpose in my chaos. There is purpose, of course. .

It was at this point, while pacing the room and considering how to value my chaos on paper, that I went downstairs to the mailbox and found Giselle’s letter. It was brief: “Dearest Orson, I’m arriving at Idlewild Tuesday at 3 p.m. on Air France. Please meet me with love. Life magazine wants me to work for them. Thrilling?”

The letter was six days in arriving, and so I had only one day to make the apartment livable. My stomach was suddenly full of acid, my head ached, I was weary to the point of collapse, and relentlessly sleepy.

I began moving things, carrying a three-foot standing file of Peter’s finished and unfinished canvases out of my bedroom and into his studio, which may once have been a living room. Tubes of paint, boxes of tubes, jars of old brushes, boxes of jars, table sculptures, easels, palettes, rolls of canvas, and half-made frames had also spilled into my room from the studio. Whatever the artist used or created eventually found its way into every corner and closet, onto every table and shelf in the four-room apartment. He threw away nothing.

I swept the floor, washed dirty dishes, hid dirty laundry, stacked my scatter of books and manuscripts, made up the sofa bed on which I slept and which I would give to Giselle for sleeping. I would sleep on the floor, use the throw rug and two blankets as a mattress, it’ll be fine; and Giselle and I would reconsummate our marriage on the sofa bed, wide enough for one-on-one, wide enough for love. We’d often done it in more cramped accommodations.

“What the hell happened here?” Peter asked when he entered the apartment, finding his studio devoid of disorder and dustballs, his own bed in the corner of the studio made with fresh pillowcase, clean sheet turned down with precision, blanket tucked army style.

“My wife is coming home,” I said.

“Home? You call this home?”

“What else would I call it?”

“Anything but home.”

“It’s not your home?”

“Colonie Street is my home. This is my studio.”

“Your studio is my home. I have no other.”

“But it’s not your wife’s home.”

“Home is where I hang my hat and my wife,” I said.

“That remains to be seen,” Peter said. “You know she can’t live here.”

“Why not? There’s plenty of room.”

“There isn’t even any room for mice.”

“Are you saying she can’t come here?”

“No, I’m telling you it won’t work. She wouldn’t stay here with me hanging around the place all day long. Don’t you know anything about women?”

“I like to think I’m an expert on the subject.”

“I once thought I knew all about the art world, but I didn’t know my ass from third base, as your Uncle Francis used to tell me as often as possible.”

“My Uncle Francis?”

“You know who I mean.”

“Is he really my uncle?”

“He said I was born innocent and would grow old that way. I believed him for years, but I’ve outgrown his prophecy. Now I’m beginning to wonder whether I’ve passed my old condition on to you.”

I looked at Peter and saw myself as I might be in thirty-seven years, when I too would be sixty-six. It could be worse. I knew men of fifty-five who seemed decrepit, ready to roll obligingly down that beckoning slope. Peter was still a vigorous figure, grizzled of mien, with his voluminous gray mustache all but minimalizing the crop of gray hair that sat in wavy rumples behind his half-naked forehead; robust of torso, a man who professed no interest in clothing, but who in public wore the uniform of creaseless trousers, formless coats, always with leather elbows (where did he find them?), each coat a perfect fit; an open-collared shirt to which he added a neck scarf for dress occasions; the jaunty fedora which, no matter how many times it wore out from fingering and grease, was always replaceable by a twin from the new age; and two pairs of shoes, one for work, one for walking through the world, the latter less speckled with the artist’s paint. In short, the man presented himself as a visual work of art: casual self-portrait achieved without paint or brush.

“She might not stay, but I want to bring her here.”

“Bring her, bring her,” Peter said. “I’d like to see the look of anybody who’d marry you.”

Peter smiled. I examined the smile to evaluate its meaning. Was it a real smile? It looked like a real smile. I decided to return it with a smile of my own.

Son?

Dad?

The bright light of the day had cheered me all the way to Idlewild Airport, spring only a day old but the brilliant white clouds racing ahead of my step, even so. I felt the fire of the equinox in my chest, a sign of certainty: Orson Purcell, no longer an equivocator. I saw Giselle coming toward me from a distance, hatless in her beige suit, frilly white blouse, and high heels designed in heaven, and I quick-stepped toward her, stopped her with an embrace, kissed her with my deprived mouth that was suddenly and ecstatically open and wet. Even when I broke from her I said nothing, only studied all that I had missed for so long, reinventing for future memory her yellow hair, the throne of her eyes, the grand verve of her mouth and smile; and I felt the fire broiling my heart with love and love and love. Love is the goddamnedest thing, isn’t it? The oil of all human machinery. And I owned an oil well, didn’t I? Separation would be bearable if it always ended with rapture of this order.

I retrieved her one suitcase (the rest of her baggage would arrive later) while she went to the ladies’ room; then we quickly reunited and resumed our exotic obeisance to unspoken love. So much to say, no need to say it. In the taxi I stopped staring at her only long enough to kiss her, and then I realized she was naked beneath her skirt, which buttoned down the front. I stared at the gap between two buttons that offered me a fragmented vision of her not-very-secret hair, reached over and undid the button that allowed expanded vision, and I put my hand on her.

“Did you travel from Europe this way?”

“Only from the ladies’ room.” She kissed me and whispered into my ear: “I’ve been with you for twenty minutes. When are you going to fuck me?”

I immediately undid more of her buttons and parted her skirt to each side: curtain going up at the majestic theater of lust. I loosened my own clothing, shifted and slid her lengthwise on the seat and maneuvered myself between her open and upraised legs. The cab driver screeched his brakes, pulled off into the breakdown lane of Grand Central Parkway.

“That’s enough of that,” the driver said. “You wanna behave like a couple of dogs, get out on the highway and do it, but not in my cab.”

I saw a crucified Jesus dangling from the driver’s rearview mirror, and a statue of the virgin glued to the top of the dashboard. The first time in my life I try to make love in a taxi, and the driver turns out to be a secret agent for the pope.

“This is my wife,” I said. “I haven’t seen her in six months. It’s her first time in this country.”

“I don’t care if she’s your long-lost mother. Not in my cab.”

Giselle was sitting up, buttoning up, and I tucked in my shirt. The driver pulled back onto the parkway and turned on the radio. Bing Crosby came through singing “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.”

“I’m overcome by irony and chagrin,” I told the driver. “If I were you, I wouldn’t expect a big tip.”

“Just what’s on the meter, buddy. I don’t take tips from creeps like you.”

Condemned by taxi drivers. A new low in moral history. I took Giselle’s hand in mine and put them both between the opening in her skirt, then covered her lap with my topcoat. Clandestinely, I found the passage to the Indies, stroked it as passionately as a digit would allow, and made my wife sigh with some pleasure. Life has never been easy for immigrants.

I directed the cab to my father’s apartment, and Giselle was barely inside when she told Peter Phelan, “I must photograph you.”

“What for?” asked Peter.

“Because you cry out to be photographed. Has anybody ever done a portrait of you in this studio?”

“Never.”

“I’m surprised.”

“You’re naïve. I’m not important enough to be photographed.”

“I disagree,” said Giselle. “I love the paintings of yours I’ve seen. I like them better than some of Matisse. I took photos of him a month ago in Paris. He was a charmer.”

“Orson,” said Peter, “I know why you like this girl. Her lies are as beautiful as she is. How did you convince her to marry you?”

“He didn’t convince me,” Giselle said. “He wooed me, and carried me away to Never-Never Land.”

“You still hang out there?” Peter asked.

Giselle looked at me. “I don’t know, do we? Don’t answer that.”

“Why not answer?” Peter asked.

“I want to talk about Matisse,” Giselle said. She opened her camera bag, took out her Rolleiflex, and looped its strap around her neck.

“I’m struck that you know Matisse,” Peter said.

“When I went to see him he was in his pajamas. I fell in love with his beard.”

“He says light is the future of all art,” Peter said. “I thought that was pretty obvious, but he must understand darkness in some new way or he wouldn’t think that was an original idea.”

“The only thing I understand is photographic light. I once heard a lecturer say that without light there is no photography. How’s that for obvious?”

“I avoid lectures on art,” Peter said. “It’s like trying to ice-skate in warm mud.”

“Orson,” Giselle said, “I’m falling in love with your father.”

“Gee,” I said, “that’s swell.”

Peter leaned on the table and stared at Giselle. She focused her camera, snapped his picture.

“Orson,” she said, “stand alongside your father.”

“Father in a manner of speaking,” I said.

“However,” said Giselle. “Just move in closer.”

I so moved, and there then came into being the first photograph ever taken of Peter Phelan and Orson Purcell together. In the photo, it was later said by some who saw it, the two men bear a family resemblance, though Peter’s mustache destroys any possibility of establishing a definitive visual link. My full head of dark brown hair has a torsion comparable to Peter’s, and our eyes both shine with the dark brown pupils of the Phelan line. By our clothing we separate themselves: Peter, in his bohemian uniform, I a spruced dude in double-breasted, gold-buttoned black blazer, gray slacks (retrieved that morning from the cleaners) with razor-edge creases, black wingtips burnished bright, black-and-white-striped shirt with winedark four-in-hand perfectly knotted, and red-and-black silk handkerchief roiled to a perfect breast-pocket flourish as the finishing touch.

I had not groomed myself so well since I’d arrived in New York as a basket case. This was a gift to Giselle: a vision of myself in meticulous sartorial health: no longer the manic, self-biting spiritual minister to the rabble; now Orson Purcell, a man in command of his moves, a surefooted, impeccable presence ready to enter, at a highly civilized level, the great American future, with his beautiful wife beside him.

It had been my plan to use the one hundred dollars my mother gave me to pay for a weekend at the Biltmore with Giselle, maybe even ask for the room where Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald had spent their honeymoon. This was a harebrained idea, but I thought the ambience of that outlandish marriage might serve as a psychic prod to our own marital adventure, which seemed as blasted from the outset as the Fitzgeralds’ most vulnerable union.

I broached the matter in the taxi back from the airport, but Giselle had scant memory of Scott or Zelda (though I had lectured her on both).

“Anyway,” Giselle said, “we already have an apartment on the West Side. Twelfth floor, three bedrooms, view of the river. A Life editor I met in Paris offered it to us. He was doing a story on Matisse the same week I was there to photograph him. You know I knew Matisse when I was little, did I ever tell you that?”

“No,” I said. “Lots of things you’ve never told me.”

“The editor’s in Japan for two months,” Giselle said. “We can have his place for the whole time, if we want it.”

Giselle’s steamer trunk had arrived ahead of us, and was already inside the apartment. I wanted only to make love to her, immediately and fiercely, but she flew into instant ecstasy at seeing the place, which was a triumph of modern decor, full of paintings, photos, books, mirrors, bizarre masks, pipes, stuffed birds, shards and estrays from around the world, the collections of a cultured traveler, Picasso on one wall, a sketch by Goya on another.

“It’s such a stroke of luck he and I were both in Paris at the same time,” Giselle said.

“You’re good friends, then,” I said.

“Well, we’re friends.”

“He’s most generous to you.”

“He’s like that.”

“Are you lovers?”

“Orson, please.”

She opened the steamer trunk and rummaged in it for a folder with several dozen photographs. She stood them on end, one by one, on the sofa and on chairs, laid them on the dining-room table for viewing.

“This is why they want me to work for Life,” she said.

I looked through the photos Giselle had not put on exhibit and found more quality work; also two portraits of one Daniel Quinn, in uniform sitting on a pile of rubble, somewhere in Germany, and in mufti at a sidewalk café, somewhere in Paris? I then looked carefully at each of the photos Giselle had put on display, a photo of my sugar whore fellating the handless man; a photo of me biting myself; a group portrait of the rabble in the Garden of Eden; a photo of a smiling Henri Matisse in pajamas on his sofa, and on the wall above the sofa a painting of a cross-legged nude woman; industrial images — great gears and machines of unfathomable size and function in a German factory; a barge on a German river with a deckhand waving his hat and pissing toward the sky; a woman sitting in a Bierstube perhaps exposing herself to two American soldiers; two seated women in their seventies, elegantly garbed, aged beauties both, in tears.

“I can’t imagine Life running most of these pictures,” I said.

“What they like is that I seem to be present when strange things happen. Keep looking.” She stood beside me as I looked.

A farmer was plowing his field behind an ox that had been branded with a swastika.

“When Stars and Stripes printed this one,” Giselle said, “somebody went out to the farmer’s place and killed the ox.”

To my eye the photos all had quality. The woman had talent for capturing essential instants, for finding the precise moment when the light and the angle of vision allow an act or an object most fully to reveal its meaning or its essence. These pictures set themselves apart from routine photojournalism. Giselle, six months ago an amateur, was suddenly light-years ahead of so many of her peers. Obviously she had a future in photography. Her beauty would open every door of all those male bastions, and this artistic eye, perhaps developed in childhood in her mother’s art gallery, would carry her forward from there.

“This looks familiar,” I said, and I picked up a photo whose locale I recognized: the stage of the Folies Bergère. A dozen near-naked chorus girls and the beautiful Folies star, Yvonne Menard, were in seeming full-throated song, all watching, at center stage, an American-army corporal kneeling in front of a statuesque beauty in pasties and G-string, the corporal wearing a handlebar mustache for the occasion, his face only inches from the dancer’s crotch.

“It looks sillier than I imagined,” I said.

“It is quite humiliating,” Giselle said.

“How did you arrange it? They never allow photos during the show.”

“I told them I was on assignment for Life, and they let me do anything I wanted. I did get others but this is all I really was after.”

On our first trip to Paris, before we married, I took Giselle to the Folies and, because I was in uniform, an easy object of derision, I was dragooned from the audience onto the stage by the beautiful Yvonne, put in the same situation as this kneeling corporal, then pulled to my feet, drawn to the abundant bosom of the dancer who had stuck the mustache on my lip, twirled about to a few bars of music, and then abandoned as the stage went black and the dancers ran into the wings. Like a blind man, I felt with my foot for the edge of the stage (a six- or eight-foot drop if I missed my footing), found the edge, sat on it with legs dangling, and slid sideways toward the stairs that led to the audience level. I was still sliding when the lights went up and I was discovered in yet another ridiculous position. I scrambled down the stairs and back to Giselle, who was so amused by it all that she kissed me.

“You were very funny,” she had said then. “It was just as funny when I took this picture,” she said now. “The poor boy didn’t even know he was being humiliated. Neither did you, did you, my love?”

“If you have a mustache to put on me, I’ll be delighted to be your fool and give a repeat performance,” I said. “I’ll even do it without the mustache. I’ll even do it in public.”

I embraced her and undid her blouse and knew that she and I would separate, that something fundamental had gone awry and very probably could not be fixed. With her every breath she revealed not only her restlessness but her faithlessness. I saw in her that surge of youth and beauty that was so in love with itself and its imagined possibilities (they must surely be infinite in her imagination now) that even the fetters of marriage were not only ineffectual, they were invisible to the logic of her private mystique.

Standing before me in her uniform of love, she was voluptuosity itself: books could be written about the significance of Giselle in her garments, and how, together, she and they communicated their meaning. The word “noble” came to mind. What could that possibly mean? I backed away and studied her.

“Do you think we married too soon?” I asked.

“I didn’t,” she said.

“You seem so certain.”

“I never make a wrong decision on things like that.”

“Are there any other things like that?”

“I know what I want,” she said.

“And do you have it?”

“I have some things. I have you.”

“Well, that’s true enough.”

“Why do you want to talk? Why don’t you make love to me?”

“I’m discovering what a noble creature you are. I understood it at the baths in Wiesbaden but I didn’t put the word to it until now. Noble. How you carried that remarkable body of yours, the way you sliced the water with your arms when you swam, the way you sat beside me on the bench in the steam room with all those other ignoble nudes, enveloped in clouds of love and heat, and you a presence as brilliant as the fire that heated the rocks. The way you looked when you lay on that cot behind the white curtain to take your nap, the erotic extreme of your arched back when I knelt by your cot and offered you worship.”

“Nobody ever made me explode the way you did then. If I said skyrockets you’d scold me for using a cliché. How did you learn so much about women?”

“I’ve been a lifelong student.”

“I wonder what will happen to us.”

“Everything,” I said.

“It must be valuable.”

“Very true. If it isn’t valuable it’s a malaise.”

“I don’t ever want to do anything to hurt you.”

“But you might.”

“You really think I might?”

“Giselle is an undiscovered country.”

“So is Orson.”

“No, not anymore.”

And this was true. I knew what was in store for me, felt it coming. I decided to blot it out and I pulled Giselle toward me.

Three

“I am desperately weary of contemplating the fact that I have nothing to contemplate except the weariness of having nothing to contemplate.”

The sentence took form in my mind as I sat in the anteroom of the publishing house that had hired me to edit the pretentious subliterary drivel of Meriwether Macbeth. On the walls of the anteroom, whose floor was covered with a solid dark red carpet suitable for red-carpet authors, I looked up at the giant faces of writers whose work had been published by this house, and who had very probably trod this carpet, or these bare floorboards in pre-carpet days, hauling in their MSS in briefcase, suitcase, steamer trunk, wheelbarrow, or perhaps only jacket pocket if the author was a poet. A pantheon is what one might call the epiphany on these walls: Dreiser, Dos Passos, Yeats, O’Casey, Wharton, Frost, Joyce, Steinbeck, Sherwood Anderson. We or our work have all passed through these hallowed halls, they say; and we are what hallowed them. Which boards, which carpet will Orson Purcell hallow in his future? None at all should my present frame of mind continue, for I knew that line of mine — I am desperately weary et cetera — was hardly the mind-set required of hallowed hangables.

My editor was in conference but would be available soon, the receptionist said. I waited, trying to conjure a way out of the conversational cul-de-sac any statement about literary weariness would lead me into, and returned always to the magnificence of my morning romp on Giselle’s sacred playing fields. But it is written: one may not raise with one’s editor such uxorious delight unless one’s editor raises the subject first. Better to speak of the upcoming Hemingway, the Salinger phenomenon.

I walked to the rack of books on display for visitors, found the Cassirer, leafed in it, always wanted this. I’ll ask Walker for it. I went back to my chair, opened the book randomly to an early page, and read: “No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself.”

A book about me, I thought, and I put it in my pocket. The use of the word “symbolic” brought Malachi to mind, and also what Peter had said when I asked if Malachi really was a madman, as Mother had suggested.

“The man had madness thrust upon him,” Peter said. “The poor son of a bitch lost his cow to a Swedish cardsharp in a poker game and never got over it, blamed his wife, the devil, all Swedes, half his relatives. I never got the full story, just hand-me-down snatches from Sarah and what Molly got from Mama. As to madness in the family, Tommy’s not all there, but that’s not madness. And who’s to say I’m not nuts? We’re an odd lot, boy, we Phelans.”

I wasn’t sure whether I was included in that grouping; and I let it pass.

Walker Pettijohn, venerated editor, emerged from his inner sanctum with the durable particularities of his presence in place: the wild crown of the whitest of white hair, the face flushed not from booze but from the wrong shaving cream, the corporate stomach made round by the most exquisite restaurants in New York, the smile known round the world of international publishing, and the genuine glad hand that was as reassuring to me as the very light of day when I awoke at morning. The Pettijohn handshake drew me into the sanctum and toward the boar’s nest of books and paper that was the workspace of this legendary discoverer and shaper of American literature.

“Did your wife arrive?” he asked me.

“She did. Indeed.”

“And all is well?”

“Let’s not get into wellness,” I said. “She may go to work for Life magazine.”

“How fine.”

“Yes, perhaps.”

“Ah, you’re in your gloom still.”

“It’s gloomy, this life.”

“Meriwether Macbeth had a good time all his life.”

“All right, we’re around to that.”

“Are you ready to talk, or should we do this next week? I can wait.”

“Now is the time.”

“Then what I need is more of that wildness of Meriwether, that silliness, that absurd boyishness that kept him floating in that crazy, artistic, and erotic world of his. Peter Pan de Sade.”

“He wasn’t really erotic. He was just a satyr.”

“Same thing in print.”

“No. He’s an asshole.”

“Of course, that’s his charm.”

“Assholes are now bookishly charming?”

“This one is. He did whatever came into his head.”

“Infantile behavior to be cherished.”

“You know what I’m talking about, Orson. Don’t get remote. Use that brilliant brain of yours.”

“If I were brilliant I wouldn’t be dealing with this fool.”

“What I want is more of the stupidity of the man’s life, the empty nonsense, the ridiculous logic, the romancing of worthless women, the publishing of rotten poetry. I think of that masterpiece you tossed out: ‘Naked Titty Proves God Exists.’ ”

“My life is full of error,” I said. “I stand corrected.”

“We’re not trying to be objective here about poetic values, we’re revealing Macbeth for what he was, and if we do this book right the whole world will have a fine old time seeing through his façades.”

“They’re not worth seeing through.”

“Orson, you’re being difficult. You don’t want to quit this, do you?”

“Of course not. It’s my life blood.”

“If you say you’ll do it we’ll move on to more serious matters, like your own work. Shall we do that?”

“Let’s do that.”

Pettijohn reached into a pile of manuscripts and pulled out one bound in a yellow cover (after Giselle’s hair), and opened it, revealing handwritten notes clipped to the first page of the manuscript. He looked at me and I instantly understood that here would come a true judgment on my would-be work and my surrogate self. Now would come the revelation of my flawed brain, errant heart, rapscallion soul. The eradication of the future was at hand.

“This is absolutely brilliant,” Pettijohn said. “I love it.”

I was stunned.

“There’s a very original voice in these pages,” said Pettijohn, “and nobody writes dialogue better than you. You’re the best since O’Hara.”

I could not speak.

“There’s a potentially great book here,” said Pettijohn, “and I want you to know I’m behind it one thousand percent.” He paused, stared me in the eye. “But I can’t get anybody else in the house to back me up. Nobody sees what I see in it.”

The iceman finally cometh.

“I’ve made notes on it, and I’ve included what others say about it, so you’ll know the negatives.”

“Then you’re rejecting it.”

“Not I,” said Pettijohn, “not I. But I’m only one opinion here, and one opinion does not a novel publish.”

“A rejection by any other name.”

“Consider it temporary. Let me see it again when you’ve gone further with the story.”

“What do people fault?”

Pettijohn cast his eyes toward the ceiling. I anticipated a rain of slush from anonymous editorial heights.

“People like the story up to a point, but they think the writing lacks the necessary poetry. And they say it lacks a verve for life, that it’s life seen through a black veil of doom. The truth is, Orson, that people do occasionally laugh, even on the gallows. But this book is absolutely joyless all the way. This doesn’t bother me, but others it does. To hear them talk you’d think nobody had ever written negatively about life before you. But my arguments convince nobody about this manuscript.”

“No poetry, no verve for life, eh. They should’ve seen me in bed this morning. I was poetry in motion.”

“A wonderful way to avenge yourself on your enemies. Fuck them all to death.”

I stood up and so did Pettijohn, who picked up the manuscript.

“You want to take this?”

“I’ll get it another time.”

“What about these notes?”

“Their essence is enough for one day.”

“You’ll fatten up Meriwether’s book, won’t you?”

“I’ll make it obscenely obese.”

We nodded and shook hands across the desk and then I found my way out through the warren of corridors to the waiting room. I kept my gaze level and steady, did not glance upward toward the epiphanic walls.

Lacking in my work, and perhaps in the deepest reaches of my person, the necessary poetry, the necessary verve for life, I decided to acquire some of each, or, that being impractical, to discover, at the very least, where, how, and from whom verve and poetry were dispensed to seekers.

When I came out of the lobby of my publisher’s building and stepped onto Fifth Avenue I felt the pulsation of a new vibrancy, putting me at one with possibility in the land of opportunity. I knew this was a wholly unreasonable attitude in the face of what I had just gone through, but one must not look too closely at what liberates one into excitement. I assayed the sky and found it clear, blue, and glorious. I welcomed the snap in the early spring breeze, and I crossed to the sunny side of the avenue to confront the warmth and light of the noonday sun, which was just slightly past its zenith.

I was hungry and I envisioned food of delectable piquancy, served in luxurious surroundings by punctilious and servile waiters. I would order veal, possibly venison, perhaps duck. But I did not yet want to become stationary, however tempting and elegant the atmosphere. I would walk now, but where? I had almost three hours to spend before meeting Giselle. I’d told her to meet me about three o’clock in an Irish bar on Sixth Avenue, not far from her point of rendezvous with the editors of the greatest picture magazine in the world. Should I now walk north to Central Park, embrace the natural world of trees, of soft spring earth and new greenery, or weave my way among the sumptuous lobbies and cafés of the hotels on Central Park South? No, I longed for something grander and with more verve than those, something even more poetic than nature.

I strode southward on the avenue and knew the instant pleasure that came from the high elegance of the windows of the great stores. In Saks’ window I saw a suit that I instantly coveted, a double-breasted gray glen plaid, one of the grandest-looking suits I’d ever seen. In the window of The Scribner Book Store I found two books that suited my mood: Life Is Worth Living by Fulton Sheen and The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, wise men both. I would buy both books when I had the money. I turned, decided to say hello to Jesus at St. Patrick’s Cathedral; and I remembered the flustered Methodist cleric who protested to his Irish taxi driver that he had asked not for St. Patrick’s, but for Christ’s Church, and the driver advised him, “If you don’t find him here he’s not in town.” There’s verve.

I crossed the avenue at 49th Street and walked west between the British Empire building and La Maison Française toward the sunken plaza in Rockefeller Center. I stopped and read the credo of the great John D. Rockefeller, Jr., carved into a slab of polished black marble: “I believe in the sacredness of a promise, that a man’s word should be as good as his bond; that character — not wealth or power or position — is of supreme worth.” Wonderful. And more: “I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human soul set free. . I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world. .” And so do I, John, so do I.

I continued my walk through the Center, the greatest concentration of urban buildings in the world. I remembered coming here with Peter when I was a child to see the tallest Christmas tree in the world. I followed my shoes and found myself in the lobby of the Time-Life building, home to the greatest concentration of magazines in the world, and considered going up to the office where Giselle was being seduced away from me, but descended instead into the underground world of Rockefeller Center, the most labyrinthine subterranean city since the catacombs, passing stores and restaurants and murals and sculpture, far more exciting to a refined sensibility than any underground passageway anywhere, including Mammoth Cave, or the sewers of Paris. I took a stairway up into the RCA building, home to the greatest radio and television networks in the world (and next door the Associated Press building, home to the greatest news service in the world). Nothing in urban, suburban, or rural history could compare with this achievement, and as I moved through the magnificent corridors I noted shining brass everywhere: in the floors, the hand railings, the revolving doors; and the thought of the cost of such elegance exalted me.

The very idea of selfless munificence in the service of the architectural imagination was surely a pinnacle in the history of man’s capacity to aspire. And aspire I did, assuming the poetry of all this grandeur into my eyes, my ears, my sense of smell, the poetry of man the master builder, the poetry of man who climbed to the skies with his own hands, the poetry of Babel refined into godly and humanistic opportunity and respect and mortar and stone and endeavor and joy and love and money and thickness and breadth and luxury and power and piety and wonder and French cuisine and the American novel and jazz music and (oh yes, Meriwether, oh yes) the naked titties of ten thousand women. Oh the immensity of it all!

I taxied back to the apartment where Giselle and I were staying and, from the desk where our host kept his financial records, expropriated two checkbooks, two dozen of the host’s business cards, several letters that would verify my identity if the business cards and the checkbooks did not, assorted press credentials from the U.S., West Germany, the Soviet Union, Brazil, and an Arab nation whose name I did not immediately recognize, all identifying the owner as a writer for Life magazine. I folded these items into one of the host’s several empty breast-pocket wallets, dialed the number at Life Giselle had given me, and left a message for her: “Meet me at either the Palm Court or the Oak Bar of the Plaza Hotel, the greatest hotel in America, when you are free,” and I then set out in further quest of poetry and verve.

The first thing I did was register and establish my credit with the Plaza’s front desk, then equip myself with ready cash. I engaged a corner suite that looked out on Fifth Avenue, Central Park, and the Grand Army Plaza, and then I descended to Fifth Avenue and on to Saks, where I bought three new shirts and ties, pocket handkerchiefs, shoes, belt, socks, and the gray glen plaid suit I’d seen in the window; but I would accept it all, I told the clerk, only if alterations were done within the hour (cost not an obstacle) and delivered to my suite at the Plaza, which they were.

I bought two pounds of Barricini chocolates for Giselle, and back at the suite ordered two dozen yellow roses from the hotel florist and four bottles of her favorite French wines from room service. I went back downstairs and explored the lobby, found the Palm Court too crowded, sought out an empty corner of the Oak Bar, and ordered my first drink in five and a half months, a Scotch on the rocks with water on the side. I sipped it with care, waiting for my system to feel the first alcoholic rush of the new year, and wondering if Dr. Tannen’s prophecy would be correct: that, should I ever again drink alcohol, the flood controls of my brain would let the madness cascade back into my life.

I affirmed my disbelief in this diagnosis with another sip of whiskey, and only then did I look about me at this walnut-dark, wood-paneled male saloon, with its murals out of the storied past of the Plaza — a horse and carriage in a snowstorm in front of the old hotel, water spilling out of the fountain’s dish while a full moon is all but covered by clouds. By the light from the room’s wall sconces and copper windows this country’s Presidents, giants of capital, movie stars, and great writers had drunk for half a century. I recognized no one. I took another sip and knew the ease that drink had always provided me, a flow of juices that wakened dormant spirits and improbable values. The first sips alone did this. Consider, then, the potential of an entire bottle.

For months I had not seen anybody through the auroral brilliance that those summoned juices could generate. My life had been repetitive ritual: rise from narrow bed, dress in sordid clothing, eat meagerly and without relish, go out into the world to edit a book you loathe, confront what you now knew to be an unpublishable novel of your own making, come home in darkness to reinhabit your father’s bohemian gloom, and write your daily letter to Giselle.

I knew the danger of imposing too much trivia on my letters and so, one by one, I outlined the lives of my putative relatives to her, also wrote her short essays on the values assorted poets and writers imparted to the world, even if they never published a word. The task, of itself, I wrote her, was holy, the only task atheists could pursue that was buoyed by the divine afflatus. As for myself, the afflatus was flatulent.

I realized with each new sip of Scotch that Dr. Tannen was wrong. I had, since Germany, accepted the doctor’s rules and entertained no temptation to suck on a whiskey bottle. But here again came that most wondrous potion into my life, already sending enriched phlogiston into my internal organs, upthrusting my spirit to an equivalency with Presidents, giants of capital, movie stars, and great writers, and providing me with all this not through fraudulence, bravado, delusion, or hallucination. None of that was on the table. This was real. I saw the future unrolling itself before me, knew phlogiston, fraudulence, badness, chocolates, yellow roses, and new neckties when I saw them, Mr. Plaza.

I ordered another Scotch.

A man of about forty years sat at the next table and placed his folded New York Times on an adjacent chair. I could read one headline: U.S.-South Korea Units Lash Foe; Jet Bombers Cut Routes Far North. The owner of the newspaper ordered a martini and I asked him, “Could I borrow your Times for a quick look?”

The man shrugged and nodded and I looked through the paper: Senate will confirm Chip Bohlen as ambassador to Moscow despite McCarthy attack. Alfred Hitchcock melodrama, I Confess, is panned by reviewer. Twenty-three killed, thirty wounded in Korea, says Defense Department. Salome, with Rita Hayworth, Stewart Granger, and Charles Laughton, opens at the Rivoli Wednesday.

It all served to incite informational depression in me, especially the opening of Salome. We all know what Salome does to John the Baptist, don’t we, moviegoers? I folded the newspaper and returned it to my neighbor.

“The news is awful,” I said.

“You mean out of Korea?” said the man, who had a look about him that Orson seemed to recognize.

“Everywhere. Even Alfred Hitchcock isn’t safe.”

“Who’s Alfred Hitchcock?”

“He’s a Senator. A Roman Senator. He looks like Charles Laughton.”

“Oh.”

“He’s married to Rita Hayworth. You know her?”

“The name has a ring.”

“I agree,” I said. “Reeeeee-ta. A ring if there ever was one.”

“I beat Korea,” the man said.

I now realized that this man looked very like Archie Bell, the warrant officer I had served with at Frankfurt. It wasn’t Archie, of course, but there was something about the mouth; and the eyes were similar. But the face, the hair — nothing like Archie.

“They sent me to Korea,” Archie said, “and they thought they were givin’ me tough duty. You know what I did? I beat the shit out of my knee with an entrenchin’ tool and got a medical discharge. They thought I caught shrapnel. Got the pension, all the musterin’-out stuff, and right away I invested it in Jeeps. Willys, you know the company?”

“The name has a ring,” I said. “Will-yyyyyys.”

“Today Kaiser-Frazer bought Willys for sixty-two mill. You know what that means?”

“Not a clue.”

“That’s major-league auto-making. My broker says I could double my money.”

“Smart,” I said. “Very smart. I had a pretty good afternoon too. I started out with a hundred, and it’s ten times that now, maybe more.”

“Hey, buddy, this is a good day for the race.”

“The human race?”

“Nooooooo. The race race. We’re beatin’ the niggers.”

“I noticed. They don’t have any in here. But then again Lincoln used to drink here,” I said.

“Izzat right?”

“Every President since Thomas Jefferson drank here.”

“Izzat right? I didn’t think the place was that old.”

“Who’s your broker?”

“Heh, heh. You think I’m gonna tell you?”

“You know who my broker is?”

“Enhhh.”

“Thomas Jefferson.”

“A two-dollar bill.”

“My card, friend,” I said, handing him the business card of the Life editor. “Call me anytime. Let’s have lunch and plan some investments.”

“Watch out for falling rocks,” the man said.

“Here?”

“Everywhere,” he said, and he smiled a smile that I recognized from the poker games in Frankfurt. This was the Captain, invested with Archie Bell’s smile. I left the Oak Bar without looking back, knowing my past was not far behind. I took the elevator to the suite, put on my new clothes, opened a bottle of Le Montrachet to let it breathe, then descended to the Palm Court to meet the most beautiful, most sensual, most photographic, most photogenic wife in the history of the world.

“You look merveilleux,” Giselle said, stroking the waves of my hair, feeling the silk of my pocket handkerchief between her thumb and forefinger. I had been sitting alone in the Palm Court, sipping whiskey, listening to the violin and piano playing Gershwin’s “Summertime,” when the livin’ is easy, a perfect theme for this day. The song wafted over the potted palms, over the heads of the thinning, mid-afternoon crowd.

“I never expected this,” Giselle said.

“I decided to reward myself,” I said.

“Reward? What happened?”

“My editor loves my book. I asked him for an instant advance and got it.”

“Oh, Orse, that’s beautiful.” She leaned over and kissed me, pulled away, then kissed me again.

“And what about your day?” I asked.

“They hired me. I go to work whenever I want. Tomorrow if I want. I told them I wanted to go to Korea and cover the war.”

“I knew it would happen. Why wouldn’t they hire you?”

“I thought they wanted more experience.”

“They buy talent, not experience. Everybody buys talent.”

“Isn’t it nice we’re both so talented?”

“It’s absolutely indescribable,” I said.

“I always knew you were going to be famous,” she said. “My wonder boy. I knew it. That’s one of the reasons I married you.”

“Merveilleuse,” I said.

“I was so surprised when you said to meet you here,” Giselle said. “I thought we’d meet in some terrible Irish café.”

“There are no Irish cafés, my love.”

“I’m so happy,” she said. “Order me something.”

“Port. You love port in the afternoon.”

“And Le Montrachet,” she said.

“I know.”

She looked at the wine list, found half a dozen port wines listed, their prices ranging from one dollar to eighteen dollars. She ordered the four-dollar item, and the waiter smiled.

“You know,” said the waiter, “this is the wine Clark Gable ordered when he proposed to Carole Lombard. Right at that table over there.” He pointed to an empty table.

“It’s fated,” said Giselle.

“You two seem to be very much in love,” the waiter said. I looked up at him and saw a Valentino lookalike, a perfect waiter for the occasion.

“What’s more,” the waiter added, “the first day this hotel opened, a Prussian count proposed to his American bride in this room. So you see, this is where happy marriages begin.”

“What a waiter!” I said. “I’m putting you in my will. What’s your name?”

“Rudolph Valentino,” the waiter said.

“I thought so,” I said. “Bring us the port. Two.”

Giselle kissed me again. “My wonder boy,” she said.

The light in the Palm Court was pale beige, my favorite color on Giselle. I looked at the display of desserts the Palm Court offered: raspberries and strawberries, supremely ripe and out of season, bananas, grapes, peaches, plums, pineapples, and fruit I could not call by name. This was the center of the fruitful universe. All things that happened within its confines were destined to change the world. Values would tumble. The rain of money and glory would fall on all significant consumers. There was no end to the sweetness of existence that was possible if you ordered a bowl of raspberries in the Palm Court.

“This is what your life is going to be like from now on,” I said. “This is what success looks like. The absence of money will never again interfere with your happiness.”

Giselle beamed at me the most extraordinary smile ever uttered by woman. I considered it for as long as it lasted, tucked it away in the archives of my soul, and raised my glass of port to hers. We clinked.

“May our love live forever,” I said.

“Forever,” said Giselle.

“And if it doesn’t, the hell with it.”

“The hell with it,” said Giselle.

“There’s Ava Gardner over there,” I said, pointing to a woman in close conversation with a man whose back was to us.

“Really?” asked Giselle.

“Indubitably,” I said, but then I looked again and corrected myself. “No, it’s not her. I was mistaken. It’s Alfred Hitchcock.”

Giselle’s laughter shattered chandeliers throughout the Palm Court.

I stood next to the yellow roses, staring out of a window of our suite at Fifth Avenue below. The fading light of this most significant day (such frequent confrontations with significance were a delight) was troublesome to my eyes, but I could see a roofless motorcar stop at the carriage entrance to the hotel, saw Henry James step down from it, adjust his soft hat, then extend his hand to Edith Wharton, the pair bound for dinner in the hotel’s Fifth Avenue Café. Teddy Roosevelt struck a pose for photographers on the hotel steps, his first visit to the city since shooting his fifth elephant, and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller waded barefoot in the Plaza’s fountain to raise money for widows and orphans spawned by the oil cartel. As I stared across the avenue at the Sherry Netherland, I saw Ernest Hemingway in the window of an upper floor, his arm around Marlene Dietrich. The great writer and great actress waved to me. I waved back.

At the sound of a door opening I turned to see Giselle, wrapped in the silk robe and negligee I’d bought her when she learned we were staying the night at the hotel. I poured the Montrachet and handed her the glass, then poured my own. Never had a married man been luckier than I at this moment. By virtue of the power vested in me I now pronounce you husband and traitor, traitor and wife. God must have loved betrayals, he made so many of them.

“I think you are probably at this moment,” I said, “the most fucksome woman on this planet.”

“What an exciting word,” Giselle said.

I opened her robe and peeled it away from her shoulders. The perfection in the placement of a mole on her right breast all but moved me to tears. She stood before me in her nightgown, beige, the color of pleasure, and as I kissed her I eased her backward onto the sofa, and knelt beside her. I put my hands on the outside of her thighs and slid her nightgown upward. She raised her hips, an erotic elevation to ease my task, and revealed the bloom of a single yellow rose, rising in all its beauty from the depths of her secret garden.

“Are there thorns on this rose?” I asked.

“I eliminated them,” Giselle said.

“You are the most resourceful woman on this planet.”

“Am I?”

“You are. Did Quinn ever tell you you were resourceful?”

“Never. Say the word.”

“Resourceful?”

“The other word.”

“Ah, you mean fucksome.”

“Yes. I like that word. Don’t get any thorns in your mouth.”

“I thought you said there were no thorns.”

“I don’t think I missed any.”

“Did Quinn ever have to worry about thorns?”

“Never. Shhhhh.”

Silence prevailed.

“Aaaahhhh.”

“Was that the first?”

“Yes.”

Silence prevailed again.

“Aaaahhhh.”

“Was that the second?”

“Yes.”

Silence prevailed yet again.

“Aaaahhhh. Aaaahhhh.”

“Third and fourth?”

“Yes. Say the word.”

“Fourth?”

“No. Fucksome. Say fucksome.”

“I’d rather you say it.”

“Does your stripper say it for you?”

“Never.”

“Is your stripper fucksome?”

“Somewhat.”

“Do you tell her she’s somewhat fucksome?”

“Never.”

“Why are you still wearing your suit?”

“It’s my new glen plaid. I thought you liked it.”

“I do, but you never wear a suit when you make love.”

“This is the new Orson. Natty to a fault.”

“I want to go onto the bed.”

“A sensational idea. Then we can do something else.”

“Exactly. Are you going to keep your glen plaid on?”

“Yes, it makes me feel fuckish.”

“Another word.”

“Do you like it?”

“Somewhat. I think I prefer fucksome.”

“They have different meanings.”

“Does your stripper make you feel fuckish?”

“Somewhat.”

“Have you told her?”

“Never. What does Quinn say that you make him feel?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“I think I’ll take my suit off.”

“I prefer it that way. It makes me feel fucksome.”

“You mean fuckish.”

“I prefer fucksome.”

“Language isn’t a matter of preference.”

“Mine is.”

Silence prevailed again.

“Is this better?”

“Much better. And a better view.”

“How would you describe the view?”

“Classic in shape.”

“Classic. Now that’s something.”

“And larger than most.”

“Larger than most. That’s really something, coming from you.”

“It also looks extremely useful.”

“You are a very fucksome woman, Giselle.”

“Fucksome is as fucksome does,” Giselle said.

Four

Giselle and I walked along 57th Street and down Broadway, a change of scenery, a move into the murderous light of eschatological love and sudden death. I had convinced her after five hours of lovemaking that the walking was necessary to rejuvenate our bodies for the next encounter. Master the hiatus, I said, and you will regain the season. I did not tell her where I was taking her. I told her the story of Meriwether Macbeth, protagonist of the memoir I was putting together from a chaotic lifetime of journals, notes, stories, poetry, letters, my task being to create the quotient of one man’s verbal life.

“He lived with a woman who called herself Jezebel Jones, a name she adopted after meeting Meriwether,” I said. “She was a slut of major calibration, but quite bright and extremely willful; and together she and Meriwether cut a minor public swath through Greenwich Village for the better part of a decade. She was known for bringing home strangers and creating yet another ménage for Meriwether, who had grown bored with Jezebel’s solitary charms. She turned up one night with a hunchback who called himself Lon because his hump was said to look very like the hump Lon Chaney wore in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Jezebel found the deformed Lon enormously appealing. But it turned out Lon was a virgin, a neuter, who had never craved the sexual life, was content to move through his days without expending sperm on other citizens. Jezebel tried to change this by teaching the game to Lon and his lollipop. She enlisted Meriwether’s aid when Lon visited their apartment, and Meriwether, through deviousness, bound Lon’s hands with twine, then tied Lon’s legs to the bedposts as Jezebel, having unsuited the hunchback, aroused him to spire-like loftiness, and mounted him. Released from bondage, Lon fled into the night, returned the next day with his Doberman, and sicked the dog on Jezebel and Meriwether. As the dog bit repeatedly into various parts of Jezebel, Meriwether took refuge behind the sofa, his face buried in his arms. Lon moved the sofa and, with the hammer he had brought with him, crushed Meriwether’s head with a dozen blows. Jezebel survived and provided enough detail of the attack to put Lon into the asylum for life, and Meriwether moved on to a posthumous realm that had eluded him all his life: fame.”

“This is where I spend a bit of my social life when the world is too much with me,” I said, pulling out bar stools for Giselle and myself.

We were in The Candy Box, a 52nd Street club that featured striptease dancers from 6:00 p.m. till 3:00 a.m. It was eight o’clock and the low-ceilinged room was already full of smoke that floated miasmically in the club’s bluish light. Four young women in low-cut street dresses sat at the bar, two of them head-to-head with portly cigar smokers. The other two, on the alert for comparable attention, turned their eyes to us, recognized me, gave me greetings.

I called them by name and sat beside Giselle. On the dance floor, Consuela, a busty platinum blonde, awkwardly unhooked her skirt to the music of a four-piece band, while three other club girls cozied a table full of men, and another dozen solitary males watched the blonde with perfect attention.

“This is so depressing,” Giselle said. “Do you come here to be depressed?”

“I know the bartender,” I said.

“You know more than the bartender.”

“He’s a friend. He lost his leg at Iwo Jima. A colleague in war, so to speak.”

“And your stripper, she works here?”

“Five nights a week.”

“Are we in luck? Will we get to see her?”

“It turns out we will.”

“Is that her trying to make herself naked up there?”

“No, that’s Consuela, one of the new ones, still a bit of an amateur. My Brenda is a talented stripper.”

“Your Brenda,” said Giselle. “Your behavior is ridiculous, Orson. It’s the way you were back in Germany. You seem to like living in the sewer.”

“Orson the underground man.”

“What’ll you have, Orse old buddy?” the bartender asked. He was tall and muscular, with a space where his left canine tooth used to be, a casualty of a bar fight. But you should see the other guy’s dental spaces.

“Port wine, Eddie,” I said. “The best you have. Two.”

“Port wine. Don’t get too many calls for that.”

“It’s a romantic drink, Eddie. My wife and I are celebrating our reunion. I brought her in to meet Brenda.”

“Yeah? Now that’s a switch, bringin’ the wife in here. You don’t see much of that either.”

“Wives have a right to know their husbands’ friends,” Giselle said.

“Not a whole lot of husbands buy that idea,” Eddie said.

“It’s trust, Eddie,” I said. “There has to be more trust in this world. Shake hands with Giselle.”

“A pleasure,” Eddie said, taking Giselle’s hand.

“When is Brenda on?” I asked.

“She’s next.”

“We are in luck,” Giselle said.

“Eddie, would you ask her to come out and say hello before her act?”

“Right away, old buddy.”

“Eddie is certainly a friendly bartender for a place like this,” Giselle said.

“You should avoid categorical thinking, Giselle. There are no places like this.”

“They’re all over Europe.”

“The Candy Box is different. Trust me.”

“Why should I trust you?”

“Because basically I’m a good person,” I said.

“That’s another reason I married you, but I’ve decided that doesn’t mean I should trust you.”

“In God we trust. All others should be bullwhipped.”

I saw Brenda walking toward us from the back of the club, wrapped in a black dressing gown that covered less than half of her upper significance. On the stage Consuela was removing, as a final gesture, her minimal loin string, revealing a shaded blur that vanished in the all-but-black light that went with that ultimate moment.

I stood to greet Brenda, her eyes heavily mascaraed, her red lipstick outlined in black, her shining black hair loose to her shoulders. I bussed her cheek, offered her my bar stool, then introduced her to Giselle as “my good friend Brenda, who has done everything a woman of her profession is ever asked to do by men.”

“And what is your profession, Brenda?” Giselle asked.

“She’s a dancer,” I said.

“I didn’t ask you, I asked Brenda.”

“Is this really your wife, Orson?”

“She really is,” I said. “Isn’t she lovely?”

“I’m a dancer,” Brenda said to Giselle. “What’s your profession, honey?”

“Giselle is a photographer,” I said.

“You take my picture,” Brenda said, “I’ll take yours,” and she parted the skirt of her gown and spread her legs.

“Is that what you’d like me to photograph?” Giselle asked.

“No,” said Brenda. “That’s my camera.”

“She has a sense of humor, your Brenda,” Giselle said.

“She’s had dinner with Juan Perón, she’s stripped for the Prince of Wales. Is there anything you haven’t experienced, Brenda?” I asked.

“True love,” said Brenda. “Men only want my body.”

“What a pity,” said Giselle.

“It’s good for business, is how I look at it,” said Brenda. She stood up from the bar stool. “Business calls me.”

“Happy business,” Giselle said as Brenda left us.

“A lively mind, don’t you think?” I said.

“I’d say her tits were her best feature,” Giselle said.

On stage Brenda worked with a film of herself dancing, and a stage spotlight. The film and her live dance were the same but in the film she was seducing a shadowy male figure. As she removed a garment on stage the camera moved in for a close-up on the area about to be revealed, then cut away as the stage garment was tossed. The spotlight dimmed progressively as nudity impended, and then the camera focused in grainy close-up on the parts of Brenda that were illegal in the flesh.

“Clever juxtaposition, isn’t it?” I said. “It was Brenda’s own idea.”

“Two Brendas for the price of one,” Giselle said.

I turned my back to Brenda’s performance and faced Giselle. “I have something I must tell you,” I said.

“Don’t you want to see how Brenda comes out?”

“I know how Brenda comes out. My editor didn’t buy my book, he rejected it. The money I spent belonged to your friendly editor from Life. I took two of his checkbooks and his identification to cash them. It’s really quite simple to assume a new identity.”

Giselle stared and said nothing.

“The care and feeding of love and beauty should be a primary concern of the human race, but if I can’t afford it at any given moment, it doesn’t follow I should abandon my concern. Making love to you this afternoon, I argued with myself about confessing the deed, but confession would have destroyed the aura of love that we’d created. I also tried to understand whether my fraudulence was enhancing or diminishing my excitement, and decided it wasn’t a factor, that I existed for you apart from my fraudulence. But I knew the confession would change your view of what was happening, and I didn’t want that. I wanted you to see what lies in store for you in America, the future of your ambition, which we both know is formidable. You will have a successful career, I’m certain of that. Given our marriage and our love, I suspect you’d be inclined to tuck me in your pocket and carry me along with you, or park me in an apartment on the Upper East Side while you circle the globe with your camera. But I would rather have no Giselle than half of Giselle. I could never survive the madness that would follow such a raveled connection.”

I knew that as I talked Giselle’s vision was framed by the real and the filmic visions of Brenda’s performance, naked on screen, all but naked on stage. I turned to see Brenda remove her G-string and, unlike Consuela, stand before the club crowd without a garment, letting all eyes find what they sought while she danced another sixteen bars, and then, lights out, she was gone.

“Brenda looks naked, doesn’t she?” I said. “More fraudulence: She never lets herself be naked. She’s wearing an all-but-invisible G-string she puts on with adhesive. It covers her opening, and has a bit of hair that matches her own. She provides the illusion of nudity while she retains the protective integrity of the larger G-string, and so the customers never see the complete Brenda. I find a fascination in this betrayal of the public trust, don’t you? Most of the time in this life when you see a naked pussy you assume it truly is a naked pussy. Since we all live in the great whorehouse, and since we all give a fuck whenever we can, no matter what the cost, the discovery that even the most openhanded lewdness is only another act of cynicism seems just right, admirable even. Dr. Tannen used to chide me for my quest for innocence, or at least that’s how he described it. He said my time underground, or in the sewer as you put it, was really a search for something that didn’t exist in the world, not now, not ever. How far back in darkness do you want to go to find that innocence? he asked. The womb? Amniotic innocence? Do you really think the womb was such an innocent place? Maybe you’d like to go back beyond the womb to the soul’s descent into the womb, or back even to the soul’s creation. Personally, he said, I don’t think you can get there from here.”

Giselle put her hand on the right side of my head and held it. “Do you still get the headaches?” she asked.

“Once in a while,” I said.

“How often do you see the doctor?”

“We’re quits. I can’t afford him. But I understand. He doesn’t run a free lunch counter.”

“It was beautiful, what you did for me,” Giselle said.

“I’m glad you liked it,” I said. “I’ll pay your friend back when I get the advance on the Meriwether book.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll take it out of my paycheck.”

“You are a generous woman, Giselle.”

“You’re a loving husband, Orson.”

“Yes. That’s true. Isn’t it a pity.”

Giselle dropped her hand from my head, took my hand in hers, and was smiling her smile of rue when the shooting began in the street. One shot broke the window in the club’s door, and Eddie the barman yelled, “Get down, folks, they’re shootin’ out there.”

I could see someone huddled in the doorway until the lights went out, heard a pistol fired twice, three times, four, heard a volley of return shots, and then the doorway went silent. Eddie switched the lights back on and when he opened the door a man in a light-gray overcoat rolled down from the two steps where he’d been huddling. Two uniformed policemen with drawn pistols stood on the sidewalk observing the situation. Both holstered their pistols and one went elsewhere.

“Who is he?” Eddie asked the policeman.

“He just held up the joint next door.”

An Interview with the Corpse on 52d Street

by Orson Purcell

The interview took place on the threshold of The Candy Box, a Manhattan nightclub on 52nd Street, a crosstown artery that is home to two dozen jazz bars and exotic dance clubs along its neon way. The corpse was male, reasonably well dressed, without a necktie, but wearing a shirt with starched collar, double-breasted dark gray suit, gray overcoat, and a gray fedora that had fallen off when the man was shot. Two policemen had come upon him almost as soon as he emerged, gun in hand, from an adjacent nightclub, where he had stolen an unspecified amount of money.

The door of The Candy Box remained open throughout the interview at the suggestion of police, who were awaiting the homicide photographer. A woman customer in The Candy Box was actually the first to photograph the corpse, using a Leica thirty-five-millimeter and natural light. This dramatic photo received wide currency, appearing in Life magazine six days after the shooting.

The corpse lay on its right side during the interview, bullet holes in its head, neck, chest, and other parts of the upper torso. The eyes were open, and the expression on the face (which was free of blood) was one of inquiry, as if the man had died asking a question. This was the first interview the owner of the corpse had ever given, either in life or in death.

O: Is there any single reason why you are dead?

C: The cops shot me eight times.

O: Why did they do that?

C: I shot at them.

O: Isn’t that a crazy thing to do?

C: You could say that.

O: Do all hoodlums behave this way?

C: Not everybody. It’s somethin’ you decide.

O: Was your decision prompted by the fact that you’re suicidal?

C: Hey whatayou sayin’? I was raised a Catholic.

O: Then maybe you were just stupid.

C: Nobody calls me stupid, buddy.

O: This is speculative conversation. Crime is often an aggressive form of stupidity. Don’t be upset.

C: You think stupid guys get away doin’ what I do? You think the boss’d trust me if I was stupid?

O: Maybe you were doing it to escape.

C: Now you’re talkin’.

O: But you didn’t escape.

C: I had a chance.

O: You gambled with your life. You’re a gambler.

C: I never win nothin’.

O: Would you consider yourself an unlucky man?

C: Yeah, could be. But, shit, luck ain’t everything. I know a lot of unlucky guys who got nothin’ but money.

O: Perhaps it was madness.

C: I’m as sane as you are, friend.

O: That’s not saying a whole lot, but we won’t go into that here. Perhaps it runs in your family. If your entire family was mad then possibly you are as well.

C: My old man wouldn’t let any nuts run around in the family.

O: What about fear? People get their backs up when they’re afraid, when they think something might destroy them, or what is most valuable to them.

C: Balls. I been in half a dozen shootouts. You want the rundown?

O: No need. Consider that you may have been foolhardy. More brave than smart, in other words. Is that why you did it?

C: We do what we do because we gotta do it. You don’t like that reason I’ll give you another one. We do it because it’s gotta be done.

O: A compulsive, responsible hoodlum. That’s rare indeed. But shooting it out with the police all but presumes a belief in your own unkillability

C: Oh yeah?

O: One might describe it as hubris, which of course means challenging the gods to destroy you.

C: You’re one of them smart bastards.

O: If I may sum up, you enter into this sort of contretemps with total awareness, and you do it because you decide it’s the valorous thing to do, because it proves that at your center you are a courageous individual, because it is your obligation to a world you mistakenly believe you understand, and that, no matter what the odds against you or your ideas, you are the final arbiter of your own action. Captain of your soul, so to speak. Am I wrong?

C: What the fuck are you talkin’ about?

O: It remains to be seen. One final question. Do you think it’s possible that you’re not really dead, that you have a chance at resurrection, I mean coming back to life?

C: Nah, I’m dead.

O: Thank you, Mr. C.

I decided that not only was I an eschatophiliac, but also an eschatophile. It seemed to be the healthiest of all possible conditions: In this most illuminating darkness of the city’s night I could distinguish the last weakened light of end times, could see, with my heightened vision, that in The Candy Box’s sign the ionized neon had grown sooty in its finality, a soiled and fading flickering of the city’s last artificial light. Above my head the sky had turned increasingly frigid and black in a sunless world, and I knew that death was on the prowl. Could judgment, heaven, or hell be far behind? Even scavengers cringe in light such as this, for it destroys even the appetite to survive. Only solitude, and the contemplation of the ease of existence in the face of futility, are viable now. Suicide is pointless, for the entertainment value of terminal events exceeds that of the vapid flight to oblivion.

I now realized how much I loved to lose. Acquisition had invariably brought with it the anxiety of loss, and the settling in of that anxiety had always proved to be a prelude to harsh reality for me. This was how I had lived. I created the highs and lows of my life. I accumulated the Giselles and Les Montrachets of my days, and then I lost them. I would never again enumerate all that had been taken from me, and I blamed no one for this recurring phenomenon. I was beyond blame and had come to understand that this was the natural curve of life, especially for the Phelans. This knowledge elevated my spirit, for I knew I would live under no more delusions. I would be prepared for the worst that life could offer. Solitude, contemplation, and waiting for the finale: these were the meaningful pursuits. And also, oh yes, the elimination of the past. I would throw out all that I had written, all my letters (including those from Giselle; especially those from Giselle). I would throw out all books that did not enhance solitude. I would throw out memory. I would throw out the memory of Miss Nelson, in whose home I roomed when I first went to Albany to live. Demure, old, white-haired Miss Nelson, retired schoolteacher, had lost her connection to significance long ago. Where had it gone? There, under her canopy bed, I saw one day the bright light of yesterday’s loss shining on forty empty bourbon bottles. Goodbye, memory of Miss Nelson. I would also throw out the memories of Quinn. That would take time, there were so many. I would begin with the night at the Grand View Lake House when I was with Joanie Mac in the boat house, my hand down at Joanie’s place, when we saw Wanda, the new waitress, come back to the hotel’s servants’ quarters with Liver Mason, back from the movies in Saratoga. Let me kiss you, Liver said, and as he threw his arms around her, Wanda peck-pecked his liverly lips and pushed him away. Tomorrow again? pleaded Liver. Tomorrow maybe, said Wanda, and she ran up the stairs to bed. Getting some air, Quinn came out the back door of the hotel bar, whistling, searching in life for the elusive meaning of his solitude, and Wanda, after less than eight bars of the whistling, bounded down the stairs, took Quinn’s arm, and — just as if it were planned — they came into the boat house, his hand already up at Wanda’s, and he said later he never expected it to happen, didn’t know she was there, hadn’t been following her and Liver, was surprised out of his socks, was just out for a walk, and other genuinely true lies he told himself. Quinner the sinner. Quinner the winner. Goodbye, Quinner at the boat house. Goodbye, Quinner in Europe with Giselle. And I felt lightened already. It would be a pleasant thing to unmemorize my life. It would prove I was no longer afraid of time. I would sit in my window and watch the garbageman take away the evidence that Orson Purcell had ever existed.

And so I moved on, ever deeper, into the lovely, lovely darkness, thrilled by it all as only a true eschatophile can be.