Richard Weiner - The Game for Real

très magnifique scene of gracious and unpretentiously worldly gentlemen. We played it carefully, conscientiously, like in the theater, and it popped into my head that maybe that’s what we were here for. They yielded at last to my gracious insistence: they took a small step before me, languorously hunched over, as though from embarrassment and an acquiescent desire to please. — When we’d gotten to my door, they stood again like they had at the building’s entrance, one to each side of the frame. But it was no longer as it had been — out of the blue they were wearing a severe, hard look. Their mute appeal for me to open up was overbearing and threatening. I dug into my back pocket for the key, looking from one to the other. And still there was that confident curiosity within me. Their gestures, always so peculiarly simultaneous and symmetrical, became impatient and curt: now a finger pointing toward the keyhole; now a derisive and contemptuous jerk of the head; now an exaggerated collapse against the doorframe, like that of people who are waiting before a still-closed theater and affectedly pretending that they will surely never live to see the day; now tapping their feet angrily, if quietly.

A grotesque thought suddenly popped into my head. In the form of an absolute mathematical certainty, that is, that they wouldn’t bear it if I, shoving the key into the lock, were to look them both in the eye, but at the same time. Sure, I knew this was absurd. Nonetheless, the comforting sense that this was somehow just possible did not abandon me. I found the key, I ram it into the lock, my gaze fixed before me, and now I’m faced with four eyes, each of them individually and all of them at the same time, as if mutually: two of them brown, two blue; one curious, one timid, and one sweet; the fourth said nothing.

The key turned.

I came home around one in the morning, went up to my door, slid the key in. –

How’s that? What about those four eyes? The man? The woman?

How impatient you are! How impatient! Just let me get the door open.

You see: I came back around one in the morning, I went up to my door, slid the key in. I unlocked the top lock, unlocked the bottom one, leaned in gently. The door didn’t open. Not that it didn’t give at all, but it didn’t open.

That means there must be someone pushing against it from inside.

Which is to say, as we do when things are falling apart like this, “a thought popped into my head.”

A thought popped! And as yet it’s no more than that huge juniper seed when the forward march of the litany of holy logic, recited on a rosary flicking whistlingly along, comes to a screeching halt. As it must: — The door gives, but it doesn’t open. It’s always doing that in spring and summer. The apartment is humid; the door swells and catches on the upper left corner. In summer, yes. But today? What day is it? It’s the fifteenth of November. That means they’ve been running the furnace for fourteen days already. That means the door has already dried out. That means it opens easily. Yesterday it opened easily. Why is it catching today? Because something is blocking it. What’s blocking it? Let’s see. We’re on the ground floor. The porter opens the pneumatic lock with the push of a button. A tenant enters, shuts the door, and, passing the porter’s lodging, he calls out his name. He has to call out his name. And if he doesn’t? Or if he calls out a fake name? The porter knows the voices and names of the tenants. If he has the slightest suspicion, he comes out to check. But the porter is married. Furthermore, his wife is plump. The children are already grown. And yet there are still some wild nights over at the porter’s. The whole building knows this, and we know thanks to the porter, who brags about it. My door is not opening. That means the porter and his wife had a wild night. An hour earlier, two hours earlier, they’d heard the bell. Open up, by all means. But worry oneself over who called out and how they did it? Would you? Love really is the road to perdition. My door isn’t opening. Despite the fact that the furnace has been going for fourteen days already, that the door’s already dried out, that it opened just yesterday. That means. . –

Here’s the huge juniper seed felt along the forward march of the litany of holy logic: “That means someone is leaning against it from inside.”

You have come to this point exhausted, terrorized, no longer remembering, incapable of stopping. A thought? Hardly! It’s the outermost guardrail of composure, of sangfroid. Will that guardrail hold up against our blow? Or will we topple over it? Or will it break? Will it give? It won’t give? A door that doesn’t open? That means someone is leaning against it from inside. I know this beyond sure; I know this spectacularly. My litany of holy logic has prayed me into the certainty that “this makes sense.” This makes so much sense that there’s no miracle to chasten its arrogance. Hasn’t everything conspired to confirm that the door isn’t opening because someone is leaning against it from inside? So where’s the miracle? That he’s cornered? Helpless? So if I unjam it, what then? Me? I’ll unjam it, believing. Believing that, despite everyone and everything, the door is resisting me not because someone is leaning against it from inside, but. . O terrified courage, come to me! Eyes, squint! O shoulder, my ram, come, have at the door. . It’s opened! — — — —

And now look at the guy who’s doing it! — Who? The guy who was just leaning against the door from inside, of course. Let’s take a look at him. Do you see him? He looks so on and so forth, right? But that’s the point. The point is, namely, yes: Does he look the way we’d expected (for, after all , we had been expecting him)? We’ll say it right off the bat: no idea. And let’s tell ourselves presently just what it was we’d expected. Let’s settle into our sangfroid, our composure, and behold: I come home late at night. I unlock the door. The door gives a little, but it doesn’t open. I force it with my shoulder. I’m face-to-face with a stranger — let’s say, for the time being, an intruder. I should be frightened; I should at least be astonished, and so what if I’ve foreseen this, for I did foresee this, after all. But everyone knows what it means to “foresee spooky things”: on one side of the scale, there’s the premonition; on the other, the hope that the premonition is false. The side with the hope is always heavier . By which I mean that premonition is never armor against dread. We always drive like a runaway train into what we dread — through the barrier of premonition. Foresee it or don’t — what you dread, you will dread forevermore. But nay: I wasn’t feeling dread because I encountered a stranger behind my door; I wasn’t even astonished. I merely became conscious of the fact that I should have been astonished. But somehow the astonishment didn’t feel like it. If you look into the mirror, and in the mirror — nothing; if you put a record on the phonograph, and there’s no sound. It’s the same way here: I know that I should be astonished, but astonishment refuses.

And so now we move on to this other person! Now that the miracle has worn off, let’s stop calling him an intruder. The miracle has worn off; therefore, we are justified in calling him not an intruder, but rather a thief. Fine. What can a thief expect in someone else’s apartment but to be caught? And so how does a thief, now caught, normally look? Every which way: he makes a run for it; perplexity, as they say, ensues; he braces himself to resist; he attacks. And yet who among you has ever seen a thief who, having been caught, starts bawling, and that’s all? For this guy was bawling, and that’s all. And so you’re astonished that my astonishment and my shock remained out back. Isn’t that rather like, instead of themselves, they’d only sent some duly authorized replacement, i.e., a dumbstruck question, from whose secret memory drawer an associative recollection leaped from this teary-eyed thief to the domestic fantasy of a boy whom his mother has caught with his finger in the jam jar? Do you know those tears of the jam-thief? They’re not tears from any fear of punishment. They’re tears set up long in advance: this boy — my intruder, my thief — was quaking to the core; he was quaking long before there was any reason to. This smartass, this tough guy was a quaking daredevil. How do we square this? Yes, that’s the question: how do we square it?

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