Lynne Tillman: Cast in Doubt

Tonight I am annoyed by this charade and bored. Sometimes I don’t mind repetitions, but I always prefer originality. I look toward Helen’s terrace, and this time her head bobs up. She waves her tan arms above her head energetically, calling to me. There’s your Psyche, Alicia says. Perhaps you’d better go to the sweet girl, all alone. Roger howls. Alicia exhales a mouthful of smoke. You two, I say waspishly, are unkind, despicable.

I am shaky on my feet. The water slaps against the harbor and the blue sky is under my feet as well as above my head. My legs have gone numb again. Yannis helps me walk away from the table. I believe I’m leaning on him coquettishly, like some Southern belle, or perhaps I’m merely an old drunk, a silly aging queer. I don’t care what they think. Sometimes I hate everyone but Nectaria, Helen and Yannis. Yannis is quite solicitous this evening. I wonder what he wants. Or how much. I rest my head on his broad shoulder — he is short but muscular. I thank the gods for my family’s ingenuity which has provided what I have, such as it is. I can keep Yannis and myself. Alicia and Roger are laughing in the background. I simply don’t care.

Bring me my slippers. Give me my robe. Coffee. Yannis hands these to me sulkily, and as it is early, and as I am barely awake, barely alive, and cannot face an argument with a boy a good deal less than one third my age, not at this hour, I do not complain, do not comment on his surly manner. The coffee is lukewarm. I pull myself together, like a shanty thrown up against a storm, and look instead toward Helen’s terrace.

There she is. She glances up as if I had in some magical way contacted her. She waves her hand above her head and points toward the sea. I suppose this means she is going to go to the beach. And now — at this I lean forward against the rusty railing — she thrusts her arms out in front of her as if gripping a wheel, a steering wheel. She’d like to go for a drive with me. I nod yes and indicate with a flourish of the hands — not this minute, later. She looks down at her book.

She is a trusting soul. Of course that is the way to get hurt. Presumably she has been. Even a girl that age — twenty or twenty-one — could be indelibly marked by painful events and circumstances, blown by misfortune and regret this way and that. Or bounced this way and that. I don’t know which I prefer. The coffee is cold and my hands are numb. I don’t feel the cup between them. A bad sign. Not like chicken entrails spilled on one’s front door, or whatever, but a bad sign nonetheless.

I don’t know why everything seems so funny to me this morning. I suppose I dreamed something that delighted me, some absurdity, some revenge. Perhaps I murdered Roger and got away with it. The perfect crime. He will figure in my next crime story — the unsuspecting victim. He won’t be Roger completely — Roger is not unsuspecting — but a writer on an island who finds out something he isn’t supposed to know, and before he does, is embroiled in The Situation, from which he can’t extract himself except by spilling the beans. I will model him on Humphrey Bogart as he was in Beat the Devil , a favorite movie of mine, in which Bogart’s character is something of a joke but still knowledgeable, savvy. Death by garroting, I think, Roger with a rope around his neck. Old-fashioned but mean. I prefer it to knives and certainly to guns. The sky is so blue today I can scarcely bear it.

The post has fallen with a thud at the front door and Yannis, penitentially, leaves the room to run downstairs and fetch it. Probably he will gossip with Nectaria. From the force of the drop, I’d say magazines and newspapers have arrived as well as a book or two. Now I have time to look at my face in the mirror. I am embarrassed to engage my narcissism in front of Yannis, for he must know I find myself ugly or he must find me so, even though he is, by no stretch of the imagination, a Greek god. Not at all. His nose was broken in a fight, one of his eyes crosses and seems to seek his nose, and he walks oddly because he is so bowlegged; but it doesn’t matter at all. He is better-looking than I ever was at his age, though I’m not sure why. Perhaps it is just that he is not me, and that is enough. I drink all the coffee even though it’s cold and leaves a flat, repellent coating on my tongue. I’d like to spit it out but I’m too lazy to leave my chair. Helen hasn’t left hers. What taste is on her tongue?

The post brings a pleasant surprise, a droll événment. Alicia has invited me to tea. She must not have minded my mood of the other evening, last week. Was it that long ago? Time races so. I too am repetitive, my little habits and eccentricities, even my bitchiness, are so well known to Alicia and Roger that they may even be appreciated. I don’t really feel judged by them. That would be intolerable. Alicia’s invitation is clever and charming. She says we will be alone. She must have something up her sleeve, prosaic as that sounds. I will pen a note, a charming response, and give it to Yannis to deliver by hand. She’ll appreciate that and invite him to tea, and he’ll be flattered to have small cakes served to him by a lady. He’ll be there an hour or so during which time I can collect myself, shower and wake enough to take Helen and him, if he wants, for a drive. I’d like to show Helen a small village where I know one of the peasants. He fought the Turks and is, as Yannis would put it, “strong like bull.” of course, I write to Alicia in my best hand, I’ll be there. I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I can see her fluff her hair, her long fingers coiling rapturously around her thick curls — no gray yet. I see her smile to herself, containing the secret within her until she has me alone in her lair.

Generally I like women. Roger says that is because I am part woman, whereas he, he implies, is not, since he doesn’t enjoy their company as I do. I think that is pure foolishness. And besides, we are all part male and part female. I don’t like all women, naturally. For a time I loitered on the fringes of a group — in college and after, around Cambridge — which was united not just by its love of literature and each other, but also by its contempt — even hatred — for women. I didn’t and don’t feel this, not at all. I like women but I am glad to be a man. I identified strongly with my mother when I was very young, and even as I grew away from her, I maintained an atavistic sympathy for her, oppressed as she was by my father, who was the classic cold and distant patriarch, absorbed in his business — trains.

In company with them, Roger pretends to like women, to flirt with them, to seek their approval and admiration, and I’m sure that the wiser ones see through him as if he were a flimsy curtain. I could have Roger murdered, in the book I’m planning next, when he is living in a dreary, rented room decorated with cheap curtains. The curtains could be a filmy nylon, reminiscent of the lingerie Lana Turner might have worn, in the movies, when she beckoned to her gangster lover. In a sordid hotel room. In the forties. The forties. A wonderful, terrible time, but a time of right and wrong. We all knew where we stood, even if we were all a bit anti-semitic. Roger, I believe, is half-Jewish, and Harvey is not his real surname, but his stepfather’s name, and for the life of me, or his, he won’t tell me with what name he entered the world.

The fishermen are calling to each other. They’re sailing into the harbor with their catch, and they’ll disgorge the octopus and squid they trapped pitilessly. The creatures are flung onto the concrete and lie there grotesquely, like bulbous sacks of wet clay no one wants. The octopuses’ slimy gray pockmarked tentacles are disgusting to me as they cook under the hot sun. They’ll lie like that, the fishermen passing the time, smoking and talking, until the restaurants have taken their pick of the catch. I vomit at the merest taste of octopus, almost at the sight. But I perversely enjoy looking at them as they die. I am fascinated after all this time. Watching the octopus is a habit of the day. And sometimes, much as I hate them, the sight of them lying there, those ugly beasts, makes me want to cry.