Lynne Tillman - Cast in Doubt

I am tired, tired even in my bones. Weariness has descended upon me as if it were a drug I had swallowed. It invades every part of me. I struggle out of the chair and walk to the door. Nectaria has left my dinner outside, in the hall, on a tray. Though covered, the food will be cold by now. I didn’t hear her knock, and she must not have wanted to disturb me. I was hungry, but now I am too tired even to eat. I nibble at everything so as not to insult Nectaria.

I am also disheartened. Like Helen I kept a diary when I was young. It was nothing like Helen’s. I tried faithfully to record the events of the day, to describe what I was reading and thinking, and to scrutinize and explicate my reactions and so on. She does little or none of this. But further I am disappointed. Certainly I did not find in the south the real Helen, certainly not her person, but having found her diary, perhaps I have found out too much and too little. For I have both more of a sense of her and less. I hoped, glimpsing her secret yearnings, I would encounter her true self. Yet she eludes me. Of course, I remind myself, Helen was not in any way attempting to create art, to invent, to make order out of the chaos of her young life. Still, and in any case, what I have discovered is not what I was looking for.

And Helen is not what I thought she would be. That is the short and the truth of it. Upon what basis can I judge her writing, these fragments that are not meant for other eyes? Read this and die, indeed!

I hold the purloined book in my hands. Sometimes I find her person unappealing. In her diary she seems not at all like my Smitty, the Helen I conversed with and spent time with. Perhaps not time enough. But is there ever enough time? No, there is never enough time, and I have wasted time, chasing after her. I feel embarrassed and old. I despair of my foolishness. “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.…”

I undress and change into a pair of freshly laundered flannel pajamas. This act in itself consoles me; the soft cotton material next to my skin reassures me. The smell of clean flannel is as sweet as the fragrance of the sweetest and ripest peach. Actually I prefer nectarines. Absentmindedly I realize that Yannis has not yet come in. But I am too distracted to bother much about his absence. He wouldn’t have expected me in any case, since I had said in my note to him that I might be gone a week. He is probably with his mother.

I lie down on the bed and pull the covers up to my neck. Like a child I place my arms beneath the quilt. As if waiting for something, I lie still as a stone in the darkness. I will discuss this episode with Gwen tomorrow. I will figure a way to tell her I have the diary. She will offer a view different from my own, surely, and it will illuminate my position. How events turn one about and construe effects so different from what one expects from time to time! What did I wish to find? For surely if I truly wanted to, wouldn’t I have been able to find it, once I had set my mind to it? I close my eyes and also, as best I can, shut my mind to these disorderly and disruptive questions. To sleep, “to sleep, perchance to dream.” Alas, poor Horace!

Some years have passed, long years and short ones too, since I began recording my impressions and experiences during this particularly intense and revelatory time in my life. It has taken me a while to return to this journal, but with the munificence of hindsight — which Gwen refers to as “thinking with the behind or through one’s ass”—I decided to plunge into it once more. I have tinkered here and there with the material, but it is basically the story as I lived it. I did go south, I did meet some Gypsies, and Roman, it was Stephen I found, and so on. It is in most respects revealing, to me at the very least.

For less than a year, much energy and thought centered on Helen. Was it an obsession akin to Humbert’s for his nymphet Lolita? Did Helen represent my last chance for freedom, my lost youth? Gwen humored me and humorously observed that my rabid voyeurism was much akin to her raging hormones. Then, from rabid voyeurism she pulled out of a hat the original concept of rabbit voyeurism. This, she contended, was the most difficult voyeurism to deal with, for every time one saw a rabbit one stood still, mouth agape, and because rabbits multiply so rapidly, there were so many, and soon the world would stand still, and so on. How she made me laugh! Especially at myself.

In the past and over the years, my voyeurism was something Gwen never failed to remark upon. But then we writers have generally acknowledged that in ourselves. She contested, rather too directly I thought at the time, for I myself had not thought of it, if you had wanted to see Helen, why didn’t you casually ask Stephen if he knew where she was? She might have still been with him. It hadn’t occurred to me at the time, on the beach, but I recognized instantly, and not without embarrassment, when Gwen confronted me with it, that my not asking it demonstrated some error in my approach. It struck me — though I dismissed it quickly and buried the thought — that I did not want to find Helen at all.

This discussion took place the afternoon of the day after I read Helen’s diary. Gwen was as full as ever, full of news and noise, and wit and all the stuff of Gwen that made her so inimitably her. I was terribly happy to be in her presence once more. How important a true friend is! I provided her with an abbreviated account of my night with the Gypsies. Had I related too many details — I did not give the specifics of my fortune, for example — she would have known about my infatuation with Roman. I was rather humiliated, at my age, for having fallen in love like a schoolboy. It was my belief then that that ought not happen. I was in no mood for her teasing me about him.

Gwen was not as shocked as I thought she’d be by my theft of the diary. Rather she seemed to have expected it of me. Perhaps I ought to have been insulted but I was too surprised. I do not know how she knew me capable of this to this day. She contrived some linguistic play about criminal and critical that I thought clever.

Without much elaboration and in as cursory a manner as possible, I described the diary’s contents. She didn’t seem much interested — Gwen thought Helen typical — but I didn’t want Gwen to be too interested. It was incumbent upon me not to show her the diary; I told myself that more eyes would only double the crime and doubly incriminate me. Inchoately I sensed that it would in some odd way expose me as well. While I sensed that, I didn’t actually know it. It was not a coherent thought. In any case I knew I didn’t want Gwen to see the diary.

I did not tell her that I was disappointed in it and in Helen. I could not admit that to her, then. Instead, I complained only of its lack of precision and that Helen was no precisian. Gwen laughed and renamed me Granddad the Grammarian.

What pleasure Gwen derived in annotating the torrid and tawdry details of her short-lived affair with John. They had had another night of pain and pleasure, as she put it, culminating in a shouting match. But things took a much more extreme turn the day after their ultimate and “second” last night together (a night which she had insisted she would never have again!). The change affected all — Alicia, John, Gwen, the town. Unbeknownst to anyone, John had met, when he first arrived, a young Greek woman, a widow, and had fallen in love with her; it had been a secret from all of us. Within a day of my departure, John had vanished. Soon it was determined that he had moved in with the young widow. It was of course a scandal in the town — Nectaria and Chrissoula were enflamed — one that heaped instant infamy upon the two lovers. This episode brought Gwen and Alicia together, somewhat, and they had, in my short absence, many drinks and some laughs over it or him. As is her wont, Gwen laughed about it more than Alicia, and to me had fun with the idea that Homo erectus, the one who stands, preceded Homo sapiens, the one who knows. Alicia rued the day she ever let John into her house. Gwen jettisoned the affair and him with, C’est la vie, I’amour toufours, c’est la guerre, all delivered in one great rush of breath.