Richard Weiner: The Game for Real

When I entered, it struck me that they were both still dressed. That confused me a bit, and my bliss lost some of its depth. Admittedly, they weren’t asleep yet, but they were already nodding off. He was sitting in the armchair under the lamp. I was turned toward him, which is to say he was giving me that face of a goody-goody gourmand, about which I have already spoken, and which reminded me so much of Fuld. His half-open eyes did dampen this impression somewhat, but it was still distinctly there. His head turned a little, his mouth slightly open, and his hands, which he had raised to his head (where they now remained) as if at the height of despair, aroused the impression that he would have long since cried out had it been physically possible for him to have done so (thus entirely different than if this cry were to have appeased his will). Despite this, however, he did not look like he was desperate; amazingly, he didn’t even seem sorrowful. His features rather reflected, as it were, the animal irritation of people whose slumber is hindered by some physical defect. I understood that what ailed him were his upraised hands. I took them and slowly placed them in his lap. He looked up sleepily, with the grateful expression of a child when we’ve gotten him all nice and snug. All this time, then, she had been tensely watching what I was doing, and seeing how attentive I was being to him she smiled understandingly, you might say conspiratorially — with that indulgent superiority of older sisters who know their little brothers’ weaknesses and urge a strange man not to think poorly of them and to indulge them as well. Against expectation, however, the smile ended by plunging into her mouth’s left corner, which twisted. And it was as if this had thrown her into embarrassment: again, that tugging at the skirt, though this time in the manner of a movingly strange gesture. She sought to extricate herself from this new embarrassment, making as if she were awkwardly positioned and looking for a better spot on the sofa. I approached so as to fluff her pillow. As I bent down, I heard at first a whistling, a kind of admonitory rebuke, and right after that, words.

“Take him off my hands! I hate him. Take him off my hands.”

I straightened up, surprised.

“Who?” I eventually muttered.

Was it because she couldn’t stand my gaze? Was it a sign, her averting her eyes? Toward him, it seemed to me. I followed them, and they indeed came to rest on him. I got the sense that she was eyeing us uncomfortably. When I turned again to settle things with her with my eyes, she had already lowered her eyelids again and resembled a young lady who “knows how to sleep.”

I went back to my bedroom to lie down as well. Once there, with one leg already in bed, I suddenly stood up again: all at once it had struck me that I was forgetting something. I thought about it hard. The sole outcome of which was that I arrived at a tautological semblance of a thought: I won’t remember what it was ; that is, the thought that “I’ve forgotten something.” Today I write “tautology,” but then, at first glance, it didn’t seem a tautology. Only after I had constructed a rather subtle logical chain from one half-proposition to the next (a chain I’d hardly be able to follow today) did I succeed in satisfying myself with the conclusion that if I am not able to remember something, I therefore must have forgotten something, and only in this was there some hope that I might still recall that thing which I had forgotten. And, as a result, I immediately remembered that something, while also being aware that this was not yet it. That is, I got a flash of a certain act by Grock, the unforgettable king of clowns. He is aping his partner, who, having readied his fiddle, suddenly can’t remember what it was that he’d wanted to play, so he turns, goes to the piano, and leans his elbow against it (his back to the audience), his fist to his chin, assuming the pose of a man struggling to remember.

But this is where I raised my head, having realized that the thing I couldn’t remember was those astonishing, brief, and rash words of the woman as I was fluffing her pillow; with them, then, was the reason they had vanished — the words, that is.

So now I had remembered both those words and the thing that had overshadowed them in my memory: it was a disproportionately large space suffused with a sense of the incompatibility between the sounds by which I had judged that these two had gotten undressed — sounds that I had heard so clearly, so distinctly, and which were surely not mere reminiscence— and the fact that entering the living room I had found both strangers still quite clothed. But having raised my head with that recollection, I was at the same time confronted with the fact that I was sitting at my writing table, that is, with something quite unexpected. He on one side, she on the other. They were now in their pajamas. They were standing faithfully, the way I was just then imagining Grock’s partner. Or no, they had already given up that posture again; but I inferred — I no longer know why — that they had given it up only just before I’d noticed them. And so it was actually as if I had been sleeping and was awakened only by their having given up that posture. Or else they had their fists to their chins the whole time, yet they contorted their faces symmetrically with mine. The smile that was playing on their lips was remarkable for the light it cast on the recent, albeit already buried, past. In this way it also happened that I again recognized, which is to say I caught up with, what had directly preceded this, that is, that I myself had recently settled into the posture of Grock’s partner, and they had crept quietly in and were aping me good-naturedly , until finally, having readied a smile and turned their heads, they inadvertently induced me to look up.

This, however, is where I gave a start, for he spoke.

“What’s that you’re playing with there?” he said.

Far be it from me to say whether I started out of surprise or because he’d caught me at something I’d prefer to keep to myself. For it was only now that I realized that with my right hand I was massaging one of those pliable puppets they sell in the gallery of the Folies Bergère. If their arms were straight along the body, they’d just be nude, but they have them folded behind the head, which makes them naked; and they are so flexible that they gratify even the most lascivious fantasy. One of those dolls rests upon my writing table. That’s her place. Of the reason behind this whim I can say nothing more than that it’s more or less at the antipode of the reasons why others buy them. However , this time I had taken her into my hand unknowingly.

So I gave a start, and I thrust her away. And something so peculiar happened that my astonishment — if that’s what it was — at the stranger’s unexpected words, or my sheepishness at having been caught in so ambiguous a game (if I indeed regretted it), was all at once as if extinguished. It was oddly discreet; it was imperceptible. All around that modestly amazing phenomenon, however, it was as if everything had been piled up to foster the hope that it would bring about some decisive, universally desired answer that had, so far, been hanging in the background. That from this would come an answer to the questions, events, and matters that had arisen so remarkably this evening, and perhaps even an answer to those two, who surely had to know and, in truth, perhaps did (and thus, perhaps, that smile of theirs); everything, I say, turned toward the sound and listened intently to what would follow. I have said that, having been interrupted by the words “what’s that you’re playing with there,” I thrust the young lady aside. Now, these toys are made of a flexible, very soft, yielding material. Imagine that a ball bouncing off a tabletop were to make a sound like that of a heavy, unyielding body. That’s just what the young lady I’d thrust aside sounded like. I was so surprised that I automatically moved to console her — she weighed no more than before, and she was just as yielding to the touch as usual — but dropped her again. Once more, the same bang, like a Browning going off, you might say. I looked up at the strange woman: she was no longer looking at me; she was staring at the table and stroking her brow embarrassedly. I looked up at the strange man: he did not dodge my gaze. But the impish smile fell from his lips. He was still smiling all right, but in a sort of reproachful way, and he was shaking his head as if at a child who’d done something he shouldn’t have, and it’s a wonder he didn’t get hurt. Without taking his eyes off me, he reached for that young lady himself, picked her up, dropped her, fixing me with his stare. Nothing. Not a sound. She fell the way she should.