Renata Adler - Pitch Dark

Look here.

I know.

Would it have cost him all the earth, sometime in all those years, to take her to New Orleans for a week?

The world is everything that is the case. And in the second place because. And in the second place because is how the Nabokov story starts, and I hate the artifice, but it is a star turn. I mean, what a star turn, what a triple coup to begin a story thus, with “And,” when nothing at all has gone before, with “in the second place,” when there has been no first place, with “because,” when there has been no why and there will be no indication what , what thing, what happening, what act, what state of mind, will follow on account of that because. The world is everything that is the case, of course, begins the work of Wittgenstein, and more. So dry and flat, in its self-contained, almost impacted quality there is nonetheless a kind of rolling thunder. True, self-evident, beyond any doubt , it creates a terrible sense of what it is possible, what it might be worthwhile, to say at all. Language, thought, advancing like bulldozers, like cement. Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist. Who could argue that the world includes things that are not the case, that some things that are not the case at all are hidden somewhere in the world? Only a specious poet or a trendy French philosopher, toying with metaphor, unworthy of the statement’s august truth. And yet, after the first flash of awe and admiration, the loss is inescapable. I mean, who wants to write specious half-truths. On the other hand, who wants to write cement.

The townhouse twins played the purest countertenor, on the stereo, also Germaine Montero singing Spanish folksongs. Men who sing like women, the super said, bewildered, and women who sing like men.

Here’s how it is in the city, on our street. For the eight years since I moved into this brownstone, they have been building a branch of the subway, to some obscure, unnecessary destination, no one seems to know exactly where. The project has meant, at least, those years of jobs for hardhats and of extra business for the deli. Hardly any inconvenience, apart from diminished parking spaces taken up by the large green structures in which the hardhats eat their donuts and drink beer. Hardly any noise, at least on our street. In deference to the block associations, which are strong here, the city agreed to muffle the nightly whistling and blasting, also, an expensive concession in this line of work, to save the trees. Inside, the first two floors are occupied by the landlady, one or both of whose late husbands must have said that what they loved about her was her temper. From time to time, she needs to throw an all-night party, with singing from The Fireside Book ; at other times, though, far more frequently, she needs to provoke quarrels, pound on a tenant’s door, and scream. The house only has four floors. When I’m in town, I’m the tenant on the third floor, just above our landlady’s duplex. Brian and Paula, both young lawyers, both the first in their families to go beyond high school, are on the top floor, with Apple, their Afghan hound.

In the winter, right after New Year’s, our landlady likes to take a cruise around the world. She sublets her two floors for six months and goes. Whoever moves in then inevitably changes the character of the house to some degree. Last year, we had a banker and his family, who were the children and grandchildren of a war criminal. This year, all day on weekends and sometimes after school on weekdays, a child comes and endlessly picks out “Frère Jacques” on the piano. Pausing, hesitating, never getting it quite right, using sometimes one hand, sometimes two, alternating, though this month is March, with a few notes from “Jingle Bells.” One night, when Brian went to look for something in the basement, he encountered an armed man, whom he took to be a prowler. The man was a bodyguard. The family in our landlady’s duplex this year, it turns out, lives under a pseudonym. Their real name is Somoza. Today, this morning, someone is using a hammer and a blowtorch on a house across the garden. Apple has begun to bark. And Madame Somoza cowers behind her shades and draperies at this quantity of noise.

Very amusing, the rich Italians always say now when they’re here. Or else, Not very amusing.

By the time the old couple moved to the suburbs, she had become flatly, almost by reflex, ornery. He was a sort of engine of cliché. “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” he might say, over his brandy. And she would reply, without hesitation, “Yes it was.”

Maybe he won’t be there when I get back. Maybe I won’t either. Who would have thought that every time he had a choice he would choose the other thing.

Did it mean nothing, then, that he came to see her every day?

Oh, it meant a lot, a lot. And I don’t hold with saying, at every mood and moment, This is how I feel, this is what’s happening now to me. I know reticence has its depths. I really do. But you can go too far with the undone and the unspoken things. What it comes to in the end is that there’s only an ambiguous footprint, a hair that could be anyone’s, a drunken moment that I couldn’t actually swear to, though it held me for a few years longer, to say that there was ever a living creature there. And while I was moved to tears when you walked here in the night, with your flashlight and your dog — not to tears, I guess, but to a stillness of the heart — it was really with your dog that you walked in the moonlight and the woods, and I drove you home. A man I know used to speak of women as high or low maintenance. Since his world was city life, what he meant was that one kind of mistress requires furs, cars, constant small attentions; another kind asks much less. I guess I’ve been high maintenance in just this sense: that you’ve given me more time, on those rides, business travels, visits in the interstices of your life, than you ever planned to give. What you’ve done, though, is to arrange your life so that all the things with a little joy or beauty in them were the things in which I had no part. No, I don’t mean that. It is only that I didn’t think I set the price so very high. There wasn’t ever going to be a price. Yet here I am, after all, alone on Orcas Island. And it’s just that what happens now is just so bleak and ordinary, either way.

Hey wait.

Well, love after all is a habit like any other.

A habit, maybe. Like any other, no.

Drivers of large cars drive extremely badly. So do old men; men wearing hats; men with thick necks and florid faces; hunters; drivers of cars with dented fenders, or with more than one generation in them, or with college stickers on their rearview windows, or with slogans on their bumpers, or with license plates of names or words instead of numbers, or with New Jersey license plates. I have left out matrons, nuns, dyed blondes, old women; their lapses tend to be blunt and unaggressive, like an inability to park or a wrong turn on a one-way street. That is all I know, categorically and without reservation, about drivers. Two other facts I think I know are these. Nobody ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document. Also, that it is children really, perhaps because so much is forbidden to them, who understand from within the nature of crime.

You are, you know, you were the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life.

Yet here I am, for the first time and yet again, alone at last on Orcas Island.

Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?

Having read in the paper that a London society called Exit was about to publish a book of pharmacological instructions for terminally ill people who simply wanted to die, peacefully, in their sleep, I thought of Ed Rubin and old Bayard. Then, I misplaced the clipping and forgot. Months later, when I found the clipping and remembered, I wrote to London Exit. Nothing happened. No reply. Long after that, when I had again forgotten, I received a letter from a Los Angeles society called Hemlock, who said that, since I was an American, London Exit had forwarded my communication to them. I had a moment of hilarity about this. The clear sense of jurisdiction. Then, I read, in a newsletter enclosed by Hemlock, that London Exit had never published its instructions. They had been enjoined from publication, and suppressed. Exit’s officials, moreover, had been indicted under the English law of suicide, aiding and abetting. Los Angeles Hemlock, however, was going to go ahead and publish. I called and asked how they were going to keep from being suppressed under the California equivalent of the English statute. Their plan, they said, was to publish, not instructions, but short case histories: Harry, weighing this many pounds, took this many grams of this substance, and it wasn’t enough; Anna, who weighed less, took this many grams more, and it was. No law could prevent the publication of case histories. Not when we have the protection of the First Amendment. That was that. Hemlock published. There was, though, this improbable footnote from London: Exit, it seemed, may really have aided and abetted, even proselytized. Witnesses were coming forward to say that, in response to their phone calls of the most tentative inquiry, a voice would offer to come at once. Within hours, an elderly man would appear on their doorsteps, offering to help, urging them to be spared further misery, from their asthma, their sadness, their lower back pain. Another moment of hilarity. And yet. And then it passed.