Читать книгу Allan Stein - Matthew Stadler - Страница 10

Allan Stein was the spoiled only child of progressive Jewish parents. A cultured, upper-middle-class boy in a prosperous city, he was the happy recipient of endless lessons: piano, tennis, boxing, language, crafts, horseback riding. He liked streetcars and went with his father to the “car house to watch his dearest cars being shampooed.” At his mother’s behest, he “played man, to show what he will look like when he is a man.” A raft of cousins from Sarah’s side kept him company in Berkeley, while back in San Francisco, at 707 Washington Street, Allan played with his bearded, bearish father, Mikey.

His mother posed him for photographs, once a week, and then every month of the first four years of his life, costumed for outlandish scenarios, which she mounted and labeled in great albums to be shared with friends: A Young Don Quixote, Paderovsky Up to Date, No More Dresses For Me No Sir, Champion of the Brawl. After nearly dying from loss of blood and an infection caused by the difficult birth of this ten-pound baby, Sally wrote to her sister-in-law, Gertrude:

“He has Mike’s forehead and horrifies me by moving the entire top of his head just as Mike does. Above an exquisite upper lip he has a nondescript nose whose nostrils he inflates in an alarming fashion. On the whole he is considered a very intelligent-looking but not a beautiful child.”

And later, “There certainly is nothing in the line of happiness to compare with that which a mother derives from the contemplation of her firstborn, and even the agony which she endures from the moment of its birth does not seem to mar it, therefore my dear and beloved sister-in-law go and get married, for there is nothing in the whole wide world like babies.”

Sarah was devoted to him. “I doubt if a happier, more attractive youngster can be found,” she wrote. When Allan was two, Sarah reported the boy’s “cute little sayings” to Auntie Gertrude—

“‘Poor mamma has wind in her odder leg, its a hoyyible fing to have wind, dear me!’ The little fellow will not play with children his own age and he regards younger children with disgust, but he dotes on boys and girls from eight to fourteen.”

In Paris, Allan was the only child of the four Stein adults, great big children themselves, who, with the sour exception of dour Uncle Leo, adored and doted on him. He went to the private École Alsacienne, an innovative school in their Montparnasse neighborhood. I imagine him on a cold day in the late winter, the rue Madame smelling of ice and coal. I have been studying the maps. M. Vernot, in blue coveralls, throws grit on the stone sidewalk to make it safe. Allan watches his breath in clouds and crosses the street to walk where there is no grit. The sky is slate gray and empty. On every street there are children rushing to school. Allan hurries down the rue de Fleurus and crosses the rue Guynemer to the iron gate of the Luxembourg Garden. He pulls his mittens off and fixes the satchel, then runs with it against the fence, making a dull accelerating noise. At the rue d’Assas, where bombs would fall during the Great War, Allan slows and walks. Boys from his class call greetings or hit his head with their mittens. His friend Giselin bumps his shoulder and they shake hands. Older boys stand by the wall at the Lycée Montaigne, blowing smoke and staring past them. Allan and Giselin say nothing. The courtyard echoes with shouting and the smack of hard shoes on gravel. Allan’s cap is grabbed and pulled down over his eyes, and he pushes it back up again. Cold mist hangs among the shouting boys, muting light from rooms where teachers write lessons on blackboards in chalk. The hard ball comes flying, unseen, toward Allan, and he feels the sting and then a sharp burn of pain on his bare calf when it hits him.

“If you went to Paris, Herbert.” We were at Shackles again. The day was sunny and warm, and Shackles had their articulating windows thrown open to the spring breeze. I was trying a rosé Tristan said was typical of Provence. Herbert had scotch. “I mean, to find those drawings: Wouldn’t the museum tack your vacation on after the work was done? I mean, a week or two of business, then ‘Herbert’s vacation’?”

“Naturally I could do that. I’m the one who accounts for my hours. It’s not like a factory time clock. What are you getting at?”

“I think you need a vacation.”

“Of course I need a vacation, just not in Paris. Are you fixing to send me away for a long time so you can take over? Madame Assistant leads the revolution?”

“No, I’ve got a much better idea.” I left an obnoxious silence, which Herbert didn’t bother filling. He just stared, sipping his scotch. “I should go to Paris in your place.” This made him laugh, which I preferred to the silence.

“You’re delusional. You don’t work for the museum. That is a fiction, a lie we told Hank, just for—for I don’t know what reason.”

“I know that. I’m not proposing that I go to Paris, per se.”

“Well then, how will you go, if not per se?”

“I’ll go as you. As Herbert Widener. I’ll get the drawings, have a fine time doing it, and take however long you want me to, and you can just disappear into whatever vacation your heart desires—paid, I might add, while everyone thinks you’re off in Paris working.” This put him into a much more involved silence. I fiddled with the decanter, holding it up to the sun as if this could tell me something about the wine. Herbert thought and thought and thought some more.

“You’ll go as me.”

“Mmm.”

“What if you run into someone who knows me?”

“Why would I?”

“I don’t see why you would.”

“The Steins don’t know you.”

“No, they don’t.”

“Does anyone in Paris know you? I mean by sight.”

“Well, a few friends of course, but no one you’d have any reason to deal with.” A long pause. “You can’t stay at the Mahler.”

“At the what?”

“The Hotel Mahler. All my friends know I stay there. They’re probably checking the register every day, just waiting for me to show up.”

“I won’t even stay in the neighborhood. What neighborhood is it?”

“The Fourth—”

“Send me to the Fifth.”

“No, farther. We’ve got to put you somewhere out of the way. It is, I would say, an intriguing plan, as long as no one who knows me sees you.”

“So I’m going?”

“It’s unthinkable.” A sip of scotch. “Let me think about it.”

My first passport was shared with my mother and our dog, Max. In the picture she is seated, holding Max, and I’m standing at her side. I was twelve. Louise wanted to take me to North Africa.

Louise kept a shrine on a small credenza in her bedroom. Among photographs and candles, postcards, and especially memorable traffic citations, Louise always had propped her folded and dirty, lipstick-kissed, grad school transcript. She had studied anthropology—in fact, was studying to become an anthropologist—when the pursuit was interrupted by her pregnancy. Louise took a leave. After I was born, the plan went, she would return, Dad splitting the day care, but that never happened. She had two years of grad school, the last devoted to a professor named Margaret Chang-Sagerty (her red lips on the transcript), whose specialty was something about Morocco. We were going to North Africa to spend a month among the “Mohammedans” Louise had studied at school.

We planned to travel in winter, stretching my two-week Christmas break into four and deflecting the objections of my teachers with the promise of hard study and a special report when I returned. Louise insisted I take the report seriously, and I did, and she did too. Our report was astonishing, but I’ll get to that. Louise liked to smoke, and she smoked more when she was happy. The weeks leading up to our trip were shrouded in a bluish haze, saturated with lists, borrowed luggage, special hats and phrase books, and punctuated by lessons in Spanish and French from friends of Louise who came to our house with bottles of wine and talked.

It was hard to concentrate at school. At lunch I pretended there was no water. I thought Fez was in the desert. Doug Hedges was my best friend, and I told him Louise and I were going to ride to Fez on camels.

“Fez isn’t in the desert,” he said.

“I know that,” I told him. “We could still ride on camels.”

“Why?”

Louise made maps and “itineraries” after dinner on beautiful, translucent onion paper that she’d lifted from work. We used different colored pens for the different days. She hated her job (insurance receptionist—“deflectionist,” she called it) and asked her friend Constance Pruitt to phone in sick for her the first two weeks, then call and get a “medical leave.” Constance sounded like Louise on the phone. She hated “assless bosses” as much as Louise did, and this subterfuge appealed to her.

We thought of everything except the passport. On the day before our departure, Louise went to pick up the airplane tickets and they asked for our passport. We didn’t have one which is how Max ended up in the picture. Three bulky suitcases and a knapsack (“only what can be carried”), one frantic boy, and a calm mother, all stuffed into Constance’s car with Constance and the dog, we went in the morning downtown to Immigration on our way to an afternoon departure for Madrid. Louise held Max on her lap in the photo booth and I stood, and then we waited several hours for the paperwork to be completed. The dog was well behaved. Constance kept me happy playing cards. On the way to the airport we left Max with Jean-Baptiste (of the drunken French lessons) and arrived with about an hour to spare before our flight.

My private life at that time (every child has one) had become exceedingly complicated, mostly because of puberty. I stared in the mirror constantly and was embarrassed to be caught at it. I began forming elaborate ideas about myself and my mother—who we were in the world and who we ought to be. On the airplane I insisted on wearing a tie. It was ridiculous. We had to buy a clip-on at the drugstore because neither of us knew how to make the knot. Somewhere I’d gotten the idea that I was the kind of child who should travel in a tie. This evolving scenario included Louise, who needed to become a kind of Auntie Mame in order for the tie to really resonate properly. It wasn’t a huge stretch—she had so much life and spine and humor—but no woman is Auntie Mame, and Louise had no interest in becoming her. On the airplane to Chicago, the first of three links to Madrid, she ordered a club soda and I was disappointed. I gestured to the champagne and said she should have some.

“Why?” she asked, wrinkling her brow.

“You love champagne,” I said.

“Not on airplanes. It gives me a headache on airplanes.”

“Well, I’d like to try a little.” This from a boy who had always complained that wine stank like vomit, beer was urine, and liquor poison.

Louise laughed and turned back to her magazine. “What a ridiculous boy.” Her rebuke surprised me but did nothing to diminish the elegant vision I had conjured. The story in my head was not a lie but a kind of reality-in-progress. I had all the guileless relativism of a child. Louise’s rebuke didn’t mean I was mistaken; rather, reality had not yet caught up to my imagination. (And of course at this point, in the guise of memory, my childhood has become exactly this kind of mutable, irrefutable thing.)

We made it to Spain but never Morocco. Morocco required a visa we didn’t have, and now it was too late. Louise wrote most of my report in a wonderful cheap hotel in Barcelona where we stayed for four weeks, a long, elaborate fiction about our adventures in the market culture of Fez. The report was encyclopedic and stunning, with photos taken from a reference book and drawings, by me, of a Fez based largely on Barcelona’s old quarter. Afternoons were spent in cafés on the Ramblas drinking colorful sodas and playing solitaire (or rummy with Louise, when she wasn’t busy scripting seventh grade paragraphs). The nights went on and on into hours I thought even adults could not inhabit, and I was a great hit in my clip-on tie, dancing with Louise at a club called El Sol, where the waiters gave me free snacks and admired my cards.

I was pleased that my second passport would not include Max. When Herbert finally agreed to my plan (against his better judgment, he said), it was a Friday and I had three days to get ready for my trip to Paris. Among the felicities that finally swayed him was the availability of a place to stay deep, deep in the Thirteenth arrondissement with a family that had nothing to do with art or museums. The Dupaignes offered a “suite of rooms” on the ground floor of their house to foreign scholars visiting the Cité Universitaire, just a few blocks away. Herbert had a friend in the university’s history department (another fruit) arrange everything on his behalf, and the rooms were secured for two weeks. Herbert Widener was expected in Paris April fifteenth.

Outside, the afternoons had become legendary and warm. I rescued my tired and neglected leather datebook from its place on the dusty window ledge. Traversing its many barren pages, its vast white field of empty days and weeks, I penned in this single appointment, Arrive Paris April 15, punctuated with a swift underline.

“I’m only doing this to rescue you from the scandal you’re courting here in town.”

“Courting? I’m not courting anyone.”

“You can’t go inviting twelve-year-old ex-students to sleep with you and expect nothing to come of it.”

“Oh, everything came of it. He’s fifteen, by the way.”

“Exactly my point. You could be arrested.”

“I’ve already been punished for it by the school. It’s the least I can do, you know, to make the charges valid.”

“That’s certainly selfless—and stupid.”

“I wish Dogan could go with me.”

“It’s out of the question. I’m the one who’s going to Paris.”

“I’m sure I’ll keep to myself.”

“Maybe you’ll get this Turk out of your system, or at least develop the good sense not to sleep with him anymore.”

“Hmm.”

The bright blue days became crowded. I hadn’t packed bags like this since my second trip with Louise (France at age sixteen), and it was relaxing to lift them in two hands and feel anchored by their weight. The neglected datebook got filled with errands and addresses, lists, phone numbers, and the pleasing finality of sharp check marks stabbed beside those tasks I managed to complete. Herbert was disappearing to a vast ranch near Petaluma to take pharmaceuticals, drink chilled fumé blanc, and lie in the sun with an architect friend of ours who had everything one could ever want in life except company. The “rest cure,” Herbert called it.

“Jimmy asked if you were free too.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That you were in jail.”

“No.”

“I told him you were taking some school group on a trip. I didn’t say where. I doubt he’ll press me for details.”

“Maybe I’ll join you. I mean, after Paris.”

“Mmm, you should. I don’t see any reason not to stay on at Jimmy’s.”

“I could bring you the drawings.”

“Yes, you could; that’s very good. I’ll tell them I’m flying back via San Francisco. A week in Paris and then a week in San Francisco. I’ve got to get back by the twenty-ninth.”

“The museum won’t collapse in your absence?”

“Not so anyone would notice.”

The prospect of vacation at Jimmy’s was already giving Herbert a blush of health and vigor I hadn’t seen on him in several months. He still looked gaunt and drunk, but his mouth was more relaxed and his eyes sparkled. The arrangement promised to be as good for him as it was for me, and this equanimity was pleasing. It assuaged the guilt I felt for the one truly wrong and completely unconscionable thing I did to my dearest friend before going to Paris. I don’t know why it was important to me. I can’t say how the compulsion became so irresistible and the act so plausible, but I took his passport. I stole it from his apartment while he was at work, rifling through the desk to find it, together with his birth certificate—and then I mutilated the passport, so it would have to be replaced. I wanted a new one with my picture and his name, to make the masquerade of my Paris trip complete.

Our last drink was at Shackles. An air of melancholy settled with the balding assistant manager’s news that Tristan was gone for two weeks. “The kids are all off for spring break,” he told us. “How glum,” Herbert said, and indeed the whole place was glum. The assistant didn’t bother to wear the croupier’s disguise. He wiped our clean table with a filthy cloth and stood waiting for an order. We split a bottle of heavy Bordeaux and then a Napa Valley red zinfandel that was like drinking a brick wall. A little bon voyage.

“Is that a new watch? You never wore a watch before.” I’d bought a watch and Herbert was right, I had never had one before.

“I know. I thought I might need one.” I fiddled with the mechanism and ran my fingers along the soft leather band. I had been doing that all evening.

“What time is your flight?”

“Afternoon. One o’clock, I think.” The bar was crowded but it seemed empty, the drinkers subdued by the fact it was Monday evening, stunned by the recent weekend’s end and the terrible recurring surprise of work again.

“It takes forever.”

“Eleven hours. I change planes in Copenhagen.”

“Oh, SAS?”

“Mmm.” I’d bought the ticket with Herbert’s credit card, as per instructions; I also had it issued in his name, with his passport, but he didn’t know that.

“I love SAS. All those little sandwiches, and you know they’ll give you aquavit, chilled to absolute zero.”

“Delicious.” We drank wine without speaking for some time.

“Thank God I’m leaving for California. I couldn’t stand another evening like this, here without Tristan.”

“Thank you very much. I’ll miss you too.”

“I mean without Tristan or you, obviously. That kind of thing goes without saying.”

“Tristan’s probably waiting for you at Jimmy’s.”

“Don’t tease me. I would die to spend a few weeks with him at Jimmy’s.”

“He looks Californian, maybe he’s back home for break, just over the ridge at the next ranch. Jimmy probably hires him every spring to, you know, mow the range. The neighbor boy, out mowing the range, all shirtless and sweaty.” I smiled weakly, happy to give my friend at least this small token.

“Maybe he does live down there. I wonder if he’d visit, I mean if I invited him?”

“He’d have to stay overnight. Can’t drive drunk.”

“The bursar would certainly have his family’s address.”

“A scented note in the letter box.”

“I should probably just phone. Though maybe a note is best, so he doesn’t feel pressured in any way.”

“A simple note: Jimmy’s phone number and a condom.”

“You’re so crude.”

“What’s so crude about a condom? It’s a very normal thing. You’re so anachronistic.”

“It isn’t normal to send one in the mail as a dinner invitation.”

“Mmm, just dinner?”

“Obviously just dinner.” Herbert tried the zinfandel and made a face. “Or maybe a day trip, a hike in the hills and lunch somewhere, like that fabulous place near Point Reyes. Jimmy could get us reservations, I mean if anyone could.”

“Just send the condom.”

“Oh, shut up.”

I would miss Herbert, but that went without saying. My well-kept secret lent the evening some of the poignancy and glamour of the Last Supper, but only for me. Herbert was a Christ without a clue, unaware he’d been betrayed by his most ardent friend. The betrayal was minor (certainly by comparison), but its resonance was deep. The torpor of our stalled conversation felt profound to me. There was nothing left to exchange. I had already taken the last token of his identity from him.