Читать книгу Obligations of the Harp - Arthur Saltzman - Страница 11
Оглавление6 Reason Not the Need
A telephone, its shorn cord dragging after, a few ripped filaments licking the pavement. A bag of Christmas wrapping. A mobile made entirely of CDs. There is no predicting what someone will rush to salvage from the fire. There is no knowing what an intruder will choose to carry off from an unlocked apartment. A cocker spaniel. Metal chessmen simulating Union and Confederate forces. You’d think they’d think alike, occupant and outlaw, but that’s seldom the case. Nor does either one automatically seize what you’d seize. A cabinet that once housed an old-fashioned radio, now nothing but a husk. An ashtray that had been painstakingly shaped by the thumbs of an eight-year-old at sleep-over camp or one that advertises a restaurant an uncle once owned, now, restaurant and uncle alike, gone under. An assonant series sounding like something out of Doctor Seuss—a hat, a bat, a cat, a doll named Pat, and a basketball that’s flat—whose rhyme does not guarantee a reason. There is no system to infer from the compulsions that litter the news. A tornado smashes storm doors and storefronts, and the thieves are one step ahead of the Samaritans. The home team blows the pennant or wins it: the host city braces itself for invasion either way. A revolution breaks open the marketplace like a piñata, and the mad scramble is on.
Or not so mad: what seems at street level like chaos and abandon may seem from the distance of sociology understandable. Michael J. Rosenfeld, a Stanford University professor, has inferred an underlying logic from his data on looting. “You get a sense, from what people loot and destroy, of which things they think are legitimate,” he discovers. “The things left standing are the parts of society that people feel some solidarity with.” Occasionally, the protocol of what gets protected and what gets plundered is obvious, such as when during the Viet Nam War students ransacked the private bookstore on my campus while leaving the Union Bookstore, which gave a superior student discount and funneled money back into the university’s general fund, undisturbed. (They also savaged the local phone company outlet and shattered the windows of a bar notorious for carding undergraduates, but the inspiration was not determined to be political in either of these instances.) When the cash register at the dime store remains intact although all the candy bars and gum are gone, the cops rightly forego interrogating suspects from grown-up syndicates in favor of neighborhood kids. Money and jewelry spark obvious motives, and no one wonders about neurosis when they are made off with. Only a handful of culprits might be held accountable for missing vials of anthrax, and while editorialists debate the repercussions, none question the rationale. In a word, thefts tend to make sense.
But just as often, it seems that there is no concept or consistency behind what the violent bear away. Eight mannequins were stripped naked and abducted from a department store in an Ohio suburb. A rack of costumes was filched from a party supply store in the same mall. (A fraternity scavenger hunt? An outbreak of transvestitism? Officials claim that it would be premature to connect the robberies to one another, much less to some eccentric fascination more disturbing than the break-in itself.) All the brass instruments—only the brass instruments—were hauled off from the band room of a community college. In one night a week before Thanksgiving, three cases of Merlot were taken from a Bloomington, Indiana, liquor store and, from a farm less than two miles away, half a dozen baffled, crated turkeys. (Police surmised that the feast would take place somewhere in the same county. Citizens, lock your pantries! Keep your eyes on your pies!) From a barbershop in Pasadena, two electric clippers. From a sports card shop, a baseball signed by Tony Oliva. (Be on the lookout for the only Twins fan in Kansas City, where the robbery was committed.) From an open garage just outside of Nashville, a drill, a weed trimmer, some guttering, and two pair of work gloves, one so worn that it had stiffened permanently into the contours of the guy who’d been using them for so long, so they’d accept no substitute hands. (Credit the criminal with a dedication to home maintenance, despite his other moral lapses, that’s undeniable, as well as with a willingness to supervise his own rehabilitation through work detail.) From a dentist’s office in Lincolnwood, Illinois, a glittering fistful of picks. The plastic letters from the sign outside the First Presbyterian Church of Jefferson City, Missouri. When passions surpass understanding, we are left with as much wonder as dismay.
When a Denver felon was asked in court why among the stuff he burgled from a neighbor’s house he bothered to steal a box of empty jars, jars the man had gathered for recycling, he answered, “It’s what there was.”
ABC News publishes an annual “crime blotter” devoted to the year’s weirdest delinquencies, and the competition is always fierce. There was an outbreak of gumball banditry all over greater metropolitan Newark that was so extensive and so prolonged that only a coordinated gang operation could account for it. During the same week that a Nebraska man was arrested for stealing garden gnomes, an Iowa man pleaded guilty to swiping 35,000 toy Hot Wheels cars. There was a spate of parking meter robberies in Pittsburgh—214 meters beheaded and absconded with in a span of two months. Then there was the case of Melvin Hanks, who swiped ninety-six ponytails that had been donated to a charity for the making of wigs for sick children. He was brought to justice, but the person or persons behind the theft of a sixty-five million-year-old dinosaur footprint from Bosque County, Texas, which had to be chiseled out of the surrounding rock to accomplish the crime, remain at large. So does the Condom Crook of Little Rock, Arkansas, whose pilfering of dozens of cartons of condoms has lifted him to folk-hero status and suggests a brand of criminality at once profligate and oddly, in terms of proper sexual precautions, responsible. In countless as yet undiscovered headquarters, under assorted mattresses and piles of clothes in closet corners, in mud-choked crawlspaces and in plots dug at night in backyards all over America lies the enigmatic stash of indecipherable crimes. Presumably, the perpetrators can hardly contain themselves for the thought of the classic hubcaps, Hummel figurines, or trick handcuffs their respective estates now secretly contain.
In the film Arthur, the amiable alcoholic title character, played by Dudley Moore, marvels at Liza Minelli’s Linda, whom he accidentally observes stealing a necktie from an upscale men’s store. “It’s the perfect crime!” he gasps. “Girls don’t wear ties! Well, admittedly some do, but it’s a good crime!” He responds to the pure aesthetic gesture of useless, inscrutable shoplifting. It is the movie’s inceptive moment, too: love at first crime site.
Although TV cop shows would have us believe otherwise, forensics cannot always track the damage back to a coherent, triggering grudge. Such was the case at the Tri-State Mineral Museum, where a Saturday night’s vandalism struck both the museum curator and the detectives assigned to the case as arbitrary and impenetrable. They—for it did appear to have taken more than one crook to accomplish so thorough a trashing in a single visit—had shattered the glass cases where the better pedigreed gems were kept and scattered their lines of ascent all over the floor. They had dislodged the plutonic tools from their wall mounts and toppled the reef of semi-precious stones that had stood for more than half a century against the north wall. They had scattered the sullen plunder of Joplin’s founding excavations and spilled the fittings and gears of bygone machinery like the black castings of titanic worms. Displays that had taken the proprietors months to construct and patrons even longer to fund were overturned. Even the reporters on the scene, stepping gingerly through the muddle of base metals, could not restrain themselves from commenting on air about the loss to community history and the shameful conduct of teenagers—for the consensus was that this was the handiwork of teenagers, evidenced in part by the lingering aroma of beer and (a clue discreetly kept off the air) a soiled prophylactic—who had no conscience and no resources for finding something more worthwhile to do on a Saturday night.
Within the year, however, the museum restoration was essentially complete. In a follow-up interview, the curator expressed his relief that almost the entire collection had been recovered piecemeal from the wreckage. Although the place had “looked like West Hell six months ago,” he said, he was confident that it would soon reopen to the public “good as new, that is, if you can say that about a history museum.”
So robbery was not the point, which was some comfort in the wake of catastrophe. The instigators did not steal the lucre from the filth or load their every rift with irreplaceable ore. It seemed that their sole incentive had been the thrill of trespass itself. Breaking into and breaking down the Tri-State Mineral Museum might have been a logical extension of their alcoholic and sexual transgressions, nothing more.
On that latter subject, wistful citizens definitely had trouble appreciating the appeal of having intercourse in such glum and loveless confines. How plight troth amid the mangle or wrest pleasure in this subterranean context, where thoughts must eventually turn from carnal urgency to the somber way of all flesh? When in From Here to Eternity Burt Lancaster dropped knees first to the sand, paying no heed to military protocol and sharp coastal deposits, millions of women envied what Deborah Kerr was about to succumb to. (Some couples like it rough, they say, and we may remember Howard Nemerov’s “The Goose Fish,” a poem about another beachfront liaison, whose guilty lovers “had thought to understand / By violence upon the sand / The only way that could be known / To make a world their own.”) But Burt and Deborah suffered nothing compared to the injuries the anonymous guilty parties at the Tri-State Mineral Museum must have endured to exercise their desire among the rocky debris. What romance could flower in the dank and gravel there? “If kids are going to risk juvenile records for a little erotic adventure,” a neighbor commented to me, “why not break into a furniture store? At least there’d be mattresses. I mean . . . ouch! You know?” To which I could only reply that the course of true love never did run smooth.
The inside dope is that there is still at least one item missing from the museum inventory. They have yet to recover a shard of alexandrite, small enough to fit into a pocket—not the rarest or most expensive loss they might have incurred, but by no means negligible. The single souvenir of an evening’s ardor in the dark: perhaps it betokened a birthstone. The police should be advised to focus their investigation on the whereabouts of high school students born in June.
Hoarding can be its own reward. It can be its own indictment as well.
“Well, he left, see. And the secretary went out. I was all alone in the waiting-room. I don’t know what came over me, Hap. The next thing I know, I’m in his office—paneled walls, everything. I can’t explain it. I—Hap, I took his fountain pen.” This is from the testimony of Biff Loman in Death of a Salesman. Reduced to feckless, petty revenges for imagined slights against him, he cannot reason his own need. “That was an awful dumb—what did you do that for?” his brother asks. “I don’t know. I just—wanted to take something,” Biff replies, lost and foundering.
War, retribution, and romance—all come with spoils. But acquisition is not the only means of establishing a relationship between the taker and the taken. Witness the example of Alcee Arobin, that paragon of self-involvement in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. When Edna Pontellier, the novel’s heroine and his current paramour, calls his attention to a photograph, surely a memento of their affair, Arobin rejects it without sentiment or ceremony: “What do I want with it? Throw it away.” Thus dispossession may be self-possession on another plane.
“It was a part, at once of Mrs. Sparsit’s dignity and service, not to lunch. She supervised the meal officially, but implied that in her own stately person she considered lunch a weakness.” As an entrenched luncher myself, who for that reason views noon as the zenith of the day in more ways than one, I am stung by the self-righteous abnegation of this Dickens original, who turns up her nose at the very enticement that captivates mine. She maintained her pinched and disdainful manner as others indulged in eating, “looking quite cast down by the popular vices,” of which lunching struck her as among the more vulgar.
I can well imagine Mrs. Sparsit wincing as I dig in to my own midday meal, with her minatory expression tightening nearby as though someone had yanked a drawstring on her bag of a face. A world purged of lunch? Hard times, indeed!
The contrast between Mrs. Sparsit and me explains why I’d be the more sympathetic juror in the case of the elderly gentleman who, having never committed so much as a misdemeanor in his whole scrupulous, dutiful life, after the cafeteria he had frequented every day for so many years was scheduled for demolition, managed to unfasten the lock and smuggled his lunch onto the condemned premises. Passersby spied his humped figure through a soaped-over window and contacted the police.
When they arrived, the man was layering his daily bagel with sugar-free strawberry jam (a concession to his doctor’s advice about improving his diet). “Five minutes more, please,” he said, and they saw no harm in stepping back and allowing him the courtesy of finishing his lunch before taking him into custody.
As I would have. For I, too, customarily protect and prolong my lunch as much as possible and would elevate every lunch to the level of fetish or ritual if the workday permitted. I, too, expend loving attention upon the embellishment of my bagel and find trenchancy in the trifles that accompany the task. Just consider the cunning little tub of jelly that is given free of charge with each day’s selection. I find it touching to think that it is someone’s job to detach the packets from their frames, the orderly corpuscular networks in which they are shipped from Mason, Ohio (the home of PPI Corporation), and to position them in wire baskets (unless this second procedure is entrusted to a second employee), where they gleam like isolettes in a nursery for the delectation of lucky lunchers like me. Each plump packet has a simultaneous quality of sturdiness and give, a sensation at once agreeable and disquieting, with something of the heft and suppleness of a small toad resting squat in your palm. It makes a shearing sound as its epidermal seal is pulled away, like a rake’s screech against pavement or what I imagine the legendary mandrake root would cry if it were abruptly stripped from its bed. The silver underside of the cellophane gleams in the fluorescent light of the lunchroom, and there is always a translucent blood blister of jelly adhering there, a jellied ectoplasm, which gleams, too, and which, like the general experience of the jelly packet, is at once agreeable and disquieting as well. Such sweetness concentrated in a condiment! Such ingenuity and simple grace, free for the taking, for as long as one’s lunch allows. (Begging Mrs. Sparsit’s pardon for my dilations, but a lunch hurried is a lunch dishonored.) Had police denied that poor, hungry soul, not to mention any given luncher, so little as five minutes’ lingering to satisfy so modest and sublime an appetite as that, they’d have committed a crime worse than the one they’d been summoned to interrupt.
Recognizing that age only intensifies our addictions and that custom beds down so deeply in us that not even dementia can extinguish it, the corporation that had bought out the cafeteria decided not to press charges. For if lunch is a weakness, Mrs. Sparsit, lack of compassion is a greater one.
Any upscale store worth its standing recognizes that the first item to be manufactured and sold is desire. Before Sharper Image and other such companies brought esoteric needs into being and focus for us, who knew enough to want to want their products?
Bookended mid-row by a couple of massive, implacable sleepers during a flight from Austin to Tulsa, I paged through my complimentary copy of Sky Mall, one of those magazines dedicated to the proposition that passengers are so desperate for means of passing the claustrophobic span of their captivity that they’ll not only prolong and savor a bag of pretzels from the snack cart but will also read anything, even if it’s a magazine that’s 100% advertising. But as I thumbed through Sky Mall, I found myself authentically absorbed. If the chief quality of a perfect gift is that it is something one would never think to buy for himself, I’d hit the mother lode. I learned that a motorized Turbo-Groomer for trimming nose and ear hair and featuring rotary blades that whirl at over 6000 rpm goes for $59.95. A remote control for paging one’s keyrings, memo pads, and other elusive possessions, which the owner would electronically “tag,” can be had for $49.95; for that matter, a caddy for holding all of one’s remote controls (made of solid maple and available in either cherry or mahogany finish) costs $69.00. If that’s too dear a price for the coach passenger to afford, an automatic, silver-plated business card dispenser runs $37.95. A canister of Oxygen Shot, for that quick blast of cell-cooling refreshment, is only $29.00 for a three-pack. The same $29.00 will also buy a Lip Enhancer Vacuum for creating fuller, more voluptuous lips, an effect that lasts up to twelve hours per treatment. A fair price? Who can say what the market will bear when the market did not previously exist?
It requires a special sort of genius to ensure that eccentricity does not diminish as budgets tighten. A pair of lawn aerator sandal attachments—you walk your lawn in these special elongated spikes to revitalize your grass and rid it of thatch build-up—is only $12.99. So is a decorative sink strainer / stopper, which comes in white, almond, blue, or gray speckle (this last ideal for a stainless steel sink). And a mere $8.50 buys a Bracelet Buddy, which by helping someone fasten her own bracelet puts an “end to another of life’s little frustrations.” On the other hand, and at the higher end of the consumer scale, you can replace nearly anything you own, from your showerhead to your hubcaps to your putter to your garden gnomes, with gold. Also, there are countless products that allow you to similarly couch, swaddle, and otherwise pamper your pets, including, for $189.00, a PetStep Ramp to aid arthritis-stricken or injured dogs in getting into and out of the van. And my favorite, for the person so utterly endowed that his possessions seem impregnable to precedent-setting presents, there’s the Sparta Watch Winder, which uses a “natural swinging action” to wind any automatic watch. It takes only two D batteries and $225.00 to guarantee that look that says, “You know, I never would have gotten this for myself.”
It’s like my father’s friend Maury once told me: if the customer already wants it, you don’t have to sell it to him. “When noon rolls around, you don’t have to sell a guy lunch. He comes into the restaurant because he’s hungry already—he’s ready to buy, right? There’s nothing for you to do except maybe get out of his way or refill his coffee. That’s not selling. Selling is persuading someone that he has to have something he doesn’t know he has to have and maybe really doesn’t have to have. More important, that he has to have the one something you’ve got to sell him.”
“I don’t get it.”
“What is it you don’t get?”
“I don’t get how you know people want the stuff you’re selling.”
He leaned in meaningfully. “That is exactly the wrong question. How do they know that they don’t want the stuff I’m selling? That’s the right question. That’s the last twenty-seven years of my life, from my car to my clothes, from that question.” Then the big signature smile of his opened over his cigar. “It’s a lot more interesting than taking orders from off a menu, right? And even though it’s not such a secret, most of the schmucks out there act like it was. Believe it.”
I did. A compelling fellow, Maury, who had the knack of making people feel smart because they listened without contradicting him. Smart the way guys whose pens contain currency translation programs, who travel with laser-sleek leather document organizers, and who store their liquor in massive walnut Old World globes feel smart. Or so I can only suppose, having none of those items and, truthfully, not wanting them either, a fact that does make me feel free, but only when someone like Maury isn’t around to dispel my contentment.
Twenty-five volumes constitute the full set of the American Review, which ran for ten years, from 1967 to 1976, on the literary journal scene. Twenty-five, plus a special valedictory volume compiled once the extinction of the series had been determined. I happened upon my first volume while I was browsing through a used book bin at a university bookstore. My rule of thumb is that a journal must contain at least two items to which I suspect I might want future access before I buy it, and AR #9 readily passed the test. A week or so later, I happened upon AR #7 in that same bin—the merchandise is fluid, and regular customers have the best crack at securing the treasures—and #5 and #6 showed up later that semester. AR #8 appeared on, of all places, a grocery store close-out rack, idly at swim among the reduced plastic wrap and Graham crackers, the remaindered Grishams and Krantzes.
It is hard to say just when not having shaved for a while turns into deliberately growing a beard—the boundary probably differs from man to man and from face to face—but one day you look in the mirror and you’re a guy with a beard. Who knows but that the infamous Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, whose corpses were unearthed in 1947 from a moraine of newspapers, broken furniture, garden implements, medical equipment, umbrellas, gas chandeliers, rusting guns, and other rubbish—103 tons of junk, all told—heaped in their Harlem mansion, didn’t begin innocuously with, say, a few outdated phone books or the jawbone of a horse? (Yes, the phone books and jawbone were part of the booty that the cops shoveled out.) That is to say, I did not consciously covet the series and never characterized myself as a collector. But when I saw AR #1 in a bag of books a colleague was preparing to trade in for cash, a shiver of eagerness ran through my fingers as I snatched it and, with no bargain hunter’s pretense toward nonchalance, offered him the full cover price.
Around this time I formally subscribed to the periodical and cleared off a bookshelf to devote to it exclusively. In addition to the growth of my collection through the mail—for a collection it by now had most certainly become—there was the occasional swelling of the shelf due to the odd volume I’d find serendipitously. (This was before the Internet, of course, which has made collecting far easier, more systematic, and, assuming one has sufficient cash flow, dependably predestined to succeed.) As for the red-letter day when out of the blue I received a call from an old friend from graduate school alerting me to his having discovered at his campus bookstore AR #2, #3, and #4 huddled inconspicuously together on a sale table like in-laws kibbitzing over the cold cuts at a family reunion . . . well, the memory of that lucky find and lasting friendship still moves me. With a little effort, I believe I can still feel the texture of the checkbook as I gleefully signed off on his reimbursement.
Novelist Alexander Theroux would grant my small penchant greater profundity than I do. To his way of thinking, collecting is, variously, a quest for adequacy and identity, a disclosure of personality through what one accrues to bolster it, and an aspiration, however scaled down or trivialized, toward the Absolute. Or so he asserts at the conclusion of his essay “Odd Collections,” in which he inventories dozens of collectors, from the renowned to the otherwise anonymous, and thereby, in the form of his catalogue, creates an odd collection of his own. “The mere challenge of collecting may generate the impulse,” he muses, “the impossibility of success like the inevitability in high-jumping of failure guaranteeing a strange kind of buoyancy, because it is endless.” To put it another way, the essence is the process, the collecting rather than the collection the key. Indeed, the futility of ever having it all, the principle of inexhaustibility, ensures the sheer ongoingness of the enterprise, which, Theroux suggests, might be the real point of engaging in collecting in the first place. (Comedian Steven Wright may have hit upon the ideal balance between reach and grasp when he boasts of having the largest seashell collection anywhere. It is so extensive, he says, that he keeps it on beaches all over the world.) Thus to amend Camus’ interpretation of the myth of Sisyphus, the eternally condemned man’s confrontation with the Absurd would not result solely from his having finally successfully shoved his boulder to the top of the hill. We must also factor in the paralyzing realization that that single component completed his rock collection as well as his curse.
As opposed to accumulations of marbles or Mickey Mouse memorabilia, though, my own collection is relatively unambitious, being so concisely defined and circumscribed. Neither is it unique enough to warrant inclusion among Theroux’s chosen ones, since with the termination of the American Review in 1976, a comprehensive set could reasonably be had by anyone. As of this writing, I possess twenty-five of the extant paperbacks, AR #11 having eluded me for well over two decades now. As I say, I’m fairly certain that I could scare up a copy of the prodigal volume on Amazon, Alibris, or eBay, but somehow resorting to websites strikes me as not being truly in the spirit of the thing. The prospect rubs against the grain of my idiosyncrasy: in randomness and vague fortune I began, and so I will persist. My compensation for the hole in my holdings parallels that of Thomas Hardy’s Tess, whose slightly flawed features made her all the more fetching: “And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.” And should my collection forever remain unfinished, I shall content myself with my allegiance to those Native American artisans who purposely leave a flaw in their weavings so as not to offend the gods by competing with their perfection.
On the other hand, I might decide to sell off the lot, renunciation being the other side of the collector’s coin. Then I might be the Arobin of the bibliophiles, whom not acquisition but purgation fortifies, whom relinquishment frees.
The American-led war for the liberation of Iraq broke the government’s grip on its property as well as its grip on its people. As of this writing, tens of thousands of artifacts are still missing from the National Museum of Antiquities, many dating from the earliest civilizations. Some maintain that this illicit network must have roused to action the moment the bombing of Iraq began, so precise and efficient were the strikes on the museum’s most priceless objects. As archaeologist Paul Zimansky dolefully admits, “A whole industry developed after the Gulf War of people going out and digging up things at night. We’re talking about organized, armed teams.”
Rumors have been as prolific as the looting itself. It is said that pieces are trickling out of the country inside suitcases and spare tires, sewn into collars and cuffs, heading for the elevated netherworld of high-stakes art connoisseurs with an appetite for the forbidden. Because these items are instantly recognizable and because identifying information about them is spreading with unprecedented effectiveness, experts are hopeful of their ultimate recovery. “These things are radioactive from a legal point of view,” says William Pearlstein, co-counsel for the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art. “They are hot, hot, hot and simply unmarketable.” Should anyone try to sell clay tablets bearing the earliest cuneiform writings in existence, the 4,330-year-old bust of an Akkadian king, or the so-called Mona Lisa of Nimrud vase, intelligence agencies throughout the world, not to mention the global offices of the Art Loss Register, are on the alert.
It must be pointed out, however, that the fact that the thieves will never be able to broadcast or cash in such holdings does not necessarily mitigate but may actually intensify the delight of procuring them. Although legitimate dealers would never touch the major pieces, says Jerome Eisenberg, owner of New York’s Royal-Athena Gallery, “I could visualize some multimillionaire hiding a piece away and gloating over it.” Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; therefore, by confining ourselves to the getting alone, we keep more of ourselves in reserve.
For what consolation terminology is worth, it is more accurate to speak of the artifacts as “missing” or “transplanted” rather than “lost,” in that certain people undoubtedly do know where most of the objects are. In all actuality, with the exception of gold artifacts that may have been melted down to re-enter the bloodstream of international capital, they are not only intact but better protected in some hidden vault than they ever had been when their location was both familiar and open to public view.
Our most acute drives drive us into privacy. From the highest echelon of corporate embezzlement on down to pickpocketing in the street, from the tycoon who godfathers the pillaging of Mesopotamian heritage to the centripetal Collyer brothers holed up in their decaying freight, we steal to steal away, restricted to what we are surprised to learn is necessary. To reference Steven Wright once again, you can’t have everything. Where would you put it? So it is always a quirky version of the world that is too much with us, something about the size of our cellars and obsessions. And even though it may not be exactly or all we long for, we take it anyway, if only because it’s what there is.
