Читать книгу Talent - Juliet Lapidos - Страница 11

Again I walked to Worcester Square. Again Helen greeted me shoeless at the front door. This time she’d expected me. Again she led me to the den, and again she left me there alone, this time while she finished cooking. I took in the room like a familiar place, or, more precisely, with the wonder one feels at finding a place familiar that so recently seemed alien. How quickly one goes from What’s all this? to Oh, this. Resting on the window ledge were unopened letters from multiple credit-card companies and a copy of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Its pages were yellow and its dustcover worn. COPYRIGHT MCMXXXVI BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Helen returned to find me reading the racist classic.

“Um,” she said, infusing that one syllable with a heap of disapproval.

“Sorry. This must be for work, a look-but-don’t-touch type of situation. Is it a first edition?”

“No, no, dear. That’s not actually from 1936. It’s a facsimile. I’m pleased, though, that you fell for it.”

“There’s a dark side of antiquarianism, I guess.”

“Some clients don’t care about the real thing. All they want is an impressive-seeming library.”

“And do those clients know they’re not buying the real thing?”

“I wouldn’t dream of deceiving anyone.”

Was she winking at me?

“The trickery’s all on their end, not yours,” I said.

“I disapprove. It’s just — I have bills to pay. And rent. When I see an opportunity, I take that opportunity.”

That statement may well have been a red flag, but I had enough at stake to ignore it. In Langley I had discovered precisely what Professor Davidoff had commanded me to seek: A subject for an inspirational case study. He was prolific, then silent. Inspired, then — there was no antonym for inspired. Blocked. Dried up. De-inspired. For Langley’s process as a young man, I had Freddy Remembered. For the later years, I needed Helen. She was a primary source enfleshed. When I saw an opportunity, I took that opportunity.

I followed Helen into the sitting room, which doubled as a dining room. We arranged ourselves on either side of a foldout table that was usually a resting place for papers but now held our meal: spaghetti with red sauce on mismatched plates.

As if it mattered what she served. There were some authors — Mitchell among them — who could build a scene around food. They found significance in under-buttered rolls and improperly folded napkins; they found lyricism in crisp baguettes, soft white cheese, dry red wine, and the dry witticisms exchanged over that dry red wine. I guessed they were slow eaters — how else could they have observed so much? — whereas I consumed so quickly that I didn’t really notice anything except, in this particular case, that the cook had used too much salt and that my dining companion was a partisan of the spoon-support technique for pasta. When I was learning how to feed myself, no one had suggested that method and it still seemed exotic, more foreign than chopsticks.

I so looked forward to eating; not just at Helen’s, in general. But eating itself was routinely disappointing because it never lasted long enough and the end was always in sight, always quantifiable: ten more bites, five more bites, two more bites, maybe three if I was careful. The period of satiation was painfully brief. Then began the countdown to the next feeding. Hours spent waiting for lunch, and then minutes to consume it. Hours spent waiting for dinner, and then a few more minutes to consume it.

Cooking anything in the least bit complicated came to seem futile, as silly as and perhaps sillier than spending money — which everyone said was the same as time — on an outfit I would wear only once. The outfit, once worn, would find its way to a closet and later a trash heap. The meal, once eaten, would find its way to a toilet and later a sewer. For these reasons I subsisted mostly on Pop-Tarts.

All that said, it was pleasant to have a hot meal for a change, and someone to talk to across the table, someone who listened patiently as I described, in greater detail than was strictly necessary, my usual dining habits, which I compared to my family’s more formal habits when I was young. Back home, we’d eaten well and we’d eaten carefully, with two or three forks and two or three knives and the water glass and the wineglass placed just so, the multiple courses brought out just when. I felt a little guilty, a little ashamed of my casual degeneracy, but Helen laughed away my concerns. She had a full laugh. A warm, soothing, affirming, seductive laugh, nothing like Evelyn’s high-pitched giggle, Evan’s conceited guffaw, or Professor Davidoff’s silent shoulder-shake.

Degeneracy, to Helen, was just another word for liberation. I should do exactly as I pleased. It was absurd to do anything else. Although she wished I were more capable of enjoying something so simple as food.

“Don’t worry that it’s futile, dear,” she said, helping me to seconds. “Most things are.”

We let the dishes fester and retired to a lumpy couch in the same room. Helen fetched a family photo album, one of those old-fashioned, leather-bound books filled with self-adhesive pages that had lost much of their stick. The spine read Milford, the Connecticut town where Helen had grown up. Side by side we waded in. On the first page were pictures of baby Helen crying, smiling, eating, crawling, sleeping, pointing at wooden toys — the gamut of infant actions — held aloft, held in arms, held on laps, thrown high into the air. She’d been an ugly baby: scrawny, bald, and splotchy.

“That’s my father, Thomas,” Helen said of a fair-skinned man looking out of the frame as little Helen tugged on his sleeve. “He was a psychiatrist. And my mother, Edith, who stayed at home.” She was the standard white middle-class housewife, from the updo to the pumps. “My nanny, Valeria” — a Latin lady in a cornflower-blue apron. “She made me hot chocolate with marshmallows every day after school, using milk, whole milk, never water. And my grandfather, my paternal grandfather, Robert” — scowling, wild hair, thin face. “He lived not too far away, in Concord, where my father and Freddy were raised. My father got along with Robert well, he took after him, but he was a difficult man, extremely demanding. Anyway, I guess I’m boring you. You said you wanted to learn more about Freddy, so let’s skip to the Freddy years. My uncle wasn’t around when I was small.”

“He must have been in Europe then,” I said, drawing on my library research.

She nodded, neither surprised nor impressed by my knowledge.

“I met him when I was about fourteen. Well, I’d met him as a newborn but I don’t remember that.” Helen chuckled. “He came to visit, thinking he’d stay just a short while to get his bearings. He’d run out of money. But he never left.”

“I didn’t realize he lived with you.”

“Right up until he died, about four years. Though I was at boarding school for part of that time.”

Langley — I couldn’t bring myself to call him Freddy, not even in my thoughts — did not seem eager to smile for the camera. His longish hair had gone gray. Not a nice gray either, more like wet-squirrel color. Broken capillaries crept across his nose.

“Well?” Helen asked.

“What?”

“Well, don’t we look alike?”

They did not.

“Yes, the similarity is striking.”

Helen beamed, flashing her sharp little teeth.

“Here’s one where you can really see the family resemblance. Our nose and ears are just the same.”

Judging from Langley’s dazed expression, he’d been surprised by the photographer. He sat on his unmade bed, legs extended, back against a pillow, a beer resting precariously on his lap, wearing a yellow short-sleeved shirt open at the collar. Slovenly. There was something strange about the proportions of the space around Langley, at least as captured on film.

“The ceiling looks slanted,” I said.

“He slept in the attic. My parents offered him a perfectly nice spare room. But he chose up there. He was a cliché.”

She stated this matter-of-factly, as if it were a perfectly ordinary way to describe a human being. He was a baseball fan. He was a journalist. He was a father of three. He was a cliché.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“How much do you know about my uncle, Anna?” she asked.

“Whatever’s in Freddy Remembered.”

“In that case, you know next to nothing. No one in my family had any interest in working with an official biographer — so nosy! — much less participating in a trivial oral history. The people rustled up for that collection — their impressions were stuck in the 1960s,” she said bitterly. “They thought of him as a gifted college boy. By the time he moved in with my parents, he was washed up. I don’t mean to sound harsh. I loved him. He was nice to me. He doted on me, gave me pocket money. Even as a girl, though, I could tell something was off. He’d stay cooped up in the attic for days at a time. Do you understand? That’s what I mean when I say he was a cliché.”

Helen kept flipping pages. Langley in front of a birthday cake, grinning and bearing it; Langley and Thomas playing cards, grinning and bearing it; Thomas mowing the lawn with Langley looking on from the front steps, grinning and bearing it. Langley’s lackluster attitude prompted me to ask the question that had been nagging at me since the library.

“Why did your uncle stop writing after Omega?”

“He didn’t.”

“But —”

“He didn’t. Well, for a long while he did. He’d just had enough, as far as I could tell. Then he started again. He kept notebooks. I figured you knew. I figured that was part of why you were here.”

There were two notebooks, Helen told me. Langley had started the first in 1978, when he’d been living in the attic for twelve or fifteen months. It contained ideas, outlines, scattered thoughts. He’d started the second notebook not long before he died. It contained the rough draft of a longer project. Both notebooks were now in the possession of the university’s rare-books library, the Elston, about a mile away from where we sat. But they weren’t available for public consumption because Helen claimed they belonged to her and had sued the library to establish her rightful ownership.

“Anyone who wants to study the notebooks needs my permission until the courts sort this out,” she said. “Only a small handful of people have read them — including me, naturally, but that was years ago and I don’t remember much. All I can say definitively about the notebooks is that they’re mine.”

I could hardly believe my luck: Inspired, de-inspired, re-inspired. The fifty dollars I’d given Helen at the supermarket was starting to look like the best investment I’d ever made.

Helen announced that now was as fine a time as any to show me a letter from her uncle that was “very revealing.” She led me through the house to her bedroom, which faced a patch of concrete that an ambitious broker might have called a backyard. It was spartan: a bed, a nightstand with a cheap metal lamp, a dresser and mirror. That was all. No plants or art. No personal touch. I loitered at the door, feeling awkward about entering Helen’s retreat while she knelt beside the dresser and opened the bottom drawer.

Helen knew precisely where to find what she was looking for. Without hesitation she fished out a postcard displaying a sunny Connecticut beach — Hammonasset — with the Connecticut motto, Qui transtulit sustinet. “He who is transplanted still sustains.” On the back, in messy cursive: Dear Helen, Remember what we talked about. Love, Freddy.

I returned the cryptic postcard to my host. She received it carefully with both hands, like a raw egg or a football.

“Let me explain,” said Helen, reading my thoughts. She sat on the bed and I leaned against the door frame. “One day at boarding school, the headmistress interrupted my math class to say that my uncle was on the phone; he wanted to speak to me urgently. I could tell immediately that he was in a bad state. Anxious. Morbid. He said, ‘I need you to promise me something.’ ‘Anything, Freddy.’ He said — his exact words — ‘When I’m gone, I want you to look after my notebooks.’ I never did find out what set him off, but I promised to do as instructed. Then he sent me this postcard. It’s evidence that the notebooks are mine.”

Helen still held the postcard with both hands. She gripped it chest-high, reminding me of grief-stricken survivors in post-disaster newscasts who so hopefully exhibit head shots of their probably deceased loved ones. To Helen, the postcard was evidence, but for it to carry any weight, one would have to believe that she faithfully recalled a conversation that had taken place decades earlier. I did believe her. If her lawsuit rested on so little, however, it was hopeless. The presiding judge wouldn’t have heard her laugh, wouldn’t have eaten her salty pasta on an empty stomach accustomed to Pop-Tarts, wouldn’t have any good reason to trust her.

“How’d the Elston end up with the notebooks?”

“Freddy died unexpectedly, as you might already know.”

“In a car accident.”

“Right.” She nodded. “It fell to my parents to handle the funeral, which was a nightmare, as you can imagine. They also had to dispose of all his stuff — as they saw it, all his junk. The easiest option was to ask the Salvation Army to pack up the attic, just take everything away.” Helen paused. She played with her hair. “It happened so fast, I didn’t have a chance to find the notebooks. I figured some idiot had thrown them out along with Freddy’s old sweaters and tennis shoes. But I was wrong. A few years ago, they turned up at an estate sale, and a curator from your university swooped in.”

Not for the first time, my university was taking a finders-keepers approach to cultural patrimony. It was a Collegiate professor who’d raided Tiwanaku and returned home with a truckload of artifacts: ceramics, jewelry, human skeletons. A century later, Collegiate was still insisting that its claim to Bolivia’s national treasure was as good as Bolivia’s.

“May I ask what it is you’re doing?” Helen said.

Unthinkingly, I’d fallen into my stretching routine. Arms up; chest out. I must have looked ridiculous. When I explained that my rhomboids hurt, Helen offered to rub my back. Or more like ordered me to sit on the bed so she could do so. She stood above me, using her thumbs to circle and press my sore muscles. At first the physical intimacy made me self-conscious. But the pleasure of relief banished that feeling quickly. Through some mysterious pathway in my nervous system, every pinch along my spine made my earlobes tingle.