Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [2]
There were three small rooms, with the kitchen in the center. She led me into her studio, as she called it, where there were paintings on the wall and an unfinished canvas on an easel. We sat down and started to manufacture or assemble a conversation. Like everything else about her, her style of talking took some getting used to. She gave each syllable an equal stress and cooed or chanted her vowels. Her sentences had no intonation, no rise and fall, so that they came across as disembodied, parceled out, yet oracular too. She reminded me of experimental writing, of “the revolution of the word” in the little magazines of the thirties. She talked like a bird pecking at things on the ground and then arching its neck to swallow them.
She went in for metaphors and reckless generalizations, the kind of thing French writers put in their journals. Everything she said sounded both true and false. At the same time I could feel the force of her intelligence, and some of her images were remarkable.
It occurred to me that our conversation might be an interview, a test of my suitability as a tenant or neighbor, so I began to inflate my remarks. I was wearing army fatigues and she asked me whether I had been in the war. She said, Did you kill anyone?
No, I said. I wish I had. I would feel further along in life.
Just when I was beginning to think she’d forgotten why I had come, she got up and offered to show me the other apartment, which was just across the hall. I had been looking forward to this moment, imagining myself with a place of my own in Greenwich Village—but in my first glimpse of the other apartment, I realized that my thinking had been too simple. Already I could tell that nothing about Sheri Donatti was simple, that behind each gesture there was another one. Behind the door of the other apartment, for example, there was an enormous old-fashioned printing press. It loomed like a great black animal, a bear or a buffalo, in the little kitchen.
It was an immensely heavy and powerful machine and I could tell by her manner, by the way she presented it, that it was hers. There was more to this Sheri Donatti than I had thought. This was another aspect of her. She was the driver of this locomotive. The thing took up most of the kitchen, which was as big as the other two rooms put together. I felt that I had entered its lair, its den—this behemoth lived here. The apartment was occupied. There was no room for me, unless I slept in its arms.
I glanced into the other rooms, which were piled with boxes, clothes, and paintings. The apartment was chock-full, crammed with stuff. I had the impression that I was being given a riddle or puzzle to solve. How did I fit into this already-congested space? Was she offering me the place or not? I saw that I would have to ask her. Even if it made me feel slow-witted, someone who doesn’t understand the form or get the joke, I had to ask her: I can have this apartment?
She smiled at the question she had forced on me.
I’ll take it, I said.
I don’t know exactly why I took it. The obvious answer was that I wanted Sheri Donatti, but I didn’t, so far as I knew. She was attractive, God knows, but my tastes were still conventional. What I felt was not desire but a strong, idle curiosity, a sense that she was the next step for me, that she was my future, or my fate. I was being drafted by Sheri Donatti as I had been drafted into the army.
I went back to Brooklyn, packed my clothes and books and kissed my parents good-bye. They didn’t know what to say—I was a veteran now. Though I regretted the lie, I told them I’d have them over to my apartment when it was fixed up. I had called a taxi, and as it pulled away, with them waving, with me waving, I had that sense of finality all young men have under such circumstances.
When I arrived at Jones Street, Sheri showed me where to put my things. She gave me part of a closet in her bedroom and I hung myself up there, so to