Lynne Tillman - Cast in Doubt

I did not see Helen as an impediment, but took her for a miracle, my Beatrice, if you will. She existed outside my world, and so was a delicacy, an entity delicious in it, drawn into it but separate from it. I embraced her without reservation. To me she was unaccountable and yet, within limits, delightfully unmanageable. Now I see that my habits were designed precisely to control my world. And that I deigned to do so was typical of my approach to life before a certain dramatic break in my thinking, perhaps not dramatic, but one of import to me, and one which necessarily affected my daily routines. And surely one might — I will — call that dramatic.

John is due to arrive at noon. Yannis is nowhere to be found. I have already spent most of the morning writing, which included invitations to the soirée for Gwen. Yannis has not been home for several hours, not counting the evening hours. Yet this is not terribly unusual. He must have gone home to visit his mother, a widow. I believe he shares with her some of the money I give him, and that is perfectly all right with me, though he never tells me precisely what he does with his allowance. Nor do I ask. I assume he thinks I would not like it, were I to know, but in fact I do, very much, as I feel my largesse supports those who need it. This in turn supports me in feeling worthy and virtuous. After all, I am the scion of Calvinists and Puritans, an upbringing that still adheres, in some respects. In addition I have heard that Beauvoir and Sartre support the people around them, their adopted family, and I admire that greatly.

John appears. He is late but he looks beautiful. I would say as usual, but this afternoon he has a glow on. That is how my English friend Duncan might put it. Duncan would sleep with him right off, without so much as a by-your-leave. He would know just how to seduce a supposedly non-homosexual lad into his bed and into imagining that just this once made no difference whatsoever, that, no matter what, he was as good as new, still a man, that life goes on, and in fact it may not make a difference and life does go on. Duncan with his lime-green eyes and catlike cunning — Duncan would simply charm and charm and then pounce. But Duncan is younger than I, and even when I was younger, I never pounced. I am not the pouncing type. I am cautious, unless I am drunk, and then I don’t care, and no one else does either, I should think.

John glances about my rooms with no hint of self-consciousness. He takes them in and I drink him in, a rich brew, a heady tonic. Some such idea wafts playfully in my mind. He is quite playful too; I am sure he is flirting with me in earnest. He measures the wall against which I want to place two bookcases. He moves gracefully and with assurance. He is a lissome lad, I think contentedly. And he seems to know what he is doing. He is even direct when it comes down to it — the nuts and bolts of daily life, the practicalities. We discuss the size of the shelves and whether I would want them all to be of equal height. I decide to have the top ones built for oversized books. John even appears interested when I explain how my library will be ordered and how it will differ in plan from that of the Dewey decimal system. Libraries reflect their collectors, and each library, I tell John, has a life and mind of its own.

Naturally talk evolves from shelves to books and to other subjects and at one moment to Helen, which is not a surprise. I am prepared for this. We are sitting on my couch, having tea. John discovers that I have not seen her for a while. I reveal the whole truth — that she and I may be on the outs — because now my subterfuge would be almost callous and surely unnecessary. John becomes alarmed, which surprises me pleasantly; his entire demeanor had excluded the possibility of his being shockable. He could not be just “a liar,” as Helen had said, but a delicate young man, more complex and sensitive than she allowed. I keep reflecting upon how odd it is, how peculiar, that someone as hip, probably as groovy as John, in his colorful terms, should manifest alarm. His rationalizations for it are feeble, to the effect that it has nothing to do with him, but everything to do with her. Though I have my own doubts, I attempt to calm him, assuring him that no harm will come to Helen, who is willful and remarkably resilient. He now exhibits a grave scrupulosity, but says nothing. His expression, easily called up in my mind’s eye, is full of meaning, yet ambiguous, even opaque.

I am still extremely curious about Helen’s sister, and whether she was a suicide as I had surmised, and whether they were twins, which I have less belief in of late, especially now that Gwen is in town. With Gwen around I am more aware of my feelings toward her, twinnish feelings. In fact, I was in the process of writing something to that effect when John knocked at my door.

Long ago, I imagined Gwen and I were fraternal twins — man, woman, heterosexual, homosexual, black, white. But in a way these supposed oppositions meant nothing to me except as qualities that added to our specialness. The point was we were originals, that was what was most important. Nothing could really separate us. Gwen and I were two sides of the same precious coin. As Alicia might put it, we were each other’s anima and animus. But I really don’t subscribe to Jungian theory. It was true, though, that I idealized us, and perhaps I will always. From other sides of the tracks but on the same track, we were, and are, our own club. Gwen has often commented upon how discriminating we were in those days, how exclusive, no one was good enough for us. She was a greater snob than I in many ways.

She must have acclimated quickly to being the only black person in our group, and often the only female. She never let on what her feelings were, if any, about being singular in those ways. I knew then, and know now, very little about her other, earlier life, with her family, and little in regard to her attitudes toward or even her experience of race. In New York there was a black piano player she liked, but he too spent most of his time in white society. On one occasion I attempted to ask her. She uttered something rather abstract about being more about sex than race and disallowed, through her laconicism and gestures, I recall, any further questions, direct questions of that nature, anyway. It was a less strange remark then — to be about sex, not race, in a way — than now, although maybe not, since it was at the beginning of the sixties. I accepted her answer, as it neatly coincided with my conception of her. But in any case, I was not and am not one to press, even though I am unusually curious — this is often said of me. I have the urge to pry. Can this truly mean, as Freud suggested, that I am always seeking to discover my parents in flagrante delicto?

Gwen never wanted to talk about her family; it was as if anything said about families at all was childish or beneath contempt. She seemed to hold them in contempt. But all of us did then. She seemed, and still seems, not to think about herself in any of the ways one might imagine. This may be true of original people generally. But while she never made pronouncements about race, as if it didn’t occur to her, and therefore ought not to others, I have now more than a sneaking suspicion that nothing escaped Gwen, that she always knew where she was and where she had come from. Very little escaped from her that she didn’t want others to know, no matter how close one was. But this never occurred to me then. Gwen must have suffered the way one does when one lives a crucial aspect of one’s life in secrecy, in the closet. She must have suffered in silence. Perhaps she still does, even in these more open times. I felt a chill and shivered involuntarily. I walked to the open window and shut it decisively. The cold air had blown in from some distant, terribly remote place outside me, outside us. Actually, I felt a bit like Rebecca in Daphne du Maurier’s novel, which Hitchcock most successfully brought to the screen.