Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [29]
The bed called to me from the other room. How small it was for all the distances we had traveled in it. We had been like angels dancing on the head of a pin. Leaning on the doorjamb, I gazed at the bed as you gaze in museums, from behind a tasseled cord, at the curtained four-posters of kings and queens.
When I first saw this bed, narrower even than a cot, I asked Sheri whether it opened up and she said no, it didn’t. Though I had noticed what seemed to be a double frame, I assumed it was broken and forgot about it. Now, just for something to do, I reached down and pulled at the frame. It came out easily enough; I didn’t see anything wrong with it. There was a lever on one side. When I pressed down, the other half of the bed came up and locked into place.
So she had lied. The realization opened up and locked into my mind like the bed opening and locking into place. But why? The only answer I could think of was that she liked to make difficulties. For her, difficulties were art, an art form—you created them. A lie was more interesting than the truth. She hated plain, ordinary truth—she saw it as a failing, a surrender, even an accusation. The truth, she once said, is for animals; they can smell it.
Perhaps she had lied for fun. I would never know. I’d never be sure of anything about her, and understanding this now, taking in the consequences of this thought all at once, made me feel tired. It brought back the strenuousness of living with her, the terrific effort, the watchfulness. I felt so tired at the memory of it that I stretched out on the bed. How would it feel? I couldn’t remember ever being in it without her. I lay there and thought about her. I had always seen her through my excitement, but I wanted to consider her through my fatigue, to look at her through half-closed eyes. I lay on the bed like a patient in a hospital, recovering.
Yet it was also true that she had tried to help me, to make me more elastic, or fantastic, more modern. She had tried to lighten me, to teach me how to float, to rescue me from my simplicity. She had set me a number of riddles or parables to educate me by example, the way you do with children who can’t understand abstractions. Like the stairs, for example, carrying her up the stairs—that was one of her lessons. There was nothing wrong with her heart—suddenly I was sure of this. If I had stopped to think about it, I would have known. It was like the bed—she had to find a way to break the monotony. Young men are so monotonous.
How shrewd it was of her to bring her heart into it when she hardly had a heart, to suggest it might fail or break. I had to smile at the picture of myself climbing the stairs, breathless and red in the face, carrying her in my arms. She had given me something to do, a lover’s job, a fool’s errand.
Always she had opposed my curiosity, and now that she wasn’t there to prevent me, I pried into her; I pawed her secrets. I got up and went into the other room to look at her paintings. The one on the easel, the last thing she had done, was called Anatole’s Ontological Conspiracy. Ontological was one of my favorite words—you could hear it every night in the San Remo Bar, where young writers hung out. In one of the books in my shop John Crowe Ransom said that the critic must regard the poem as a desperate metaphysical or ontological maneuver. It was as if we had just discovered not the word but existence itself. In 1946, for the first time, we existed.
I dedicate this painting to you, Sheri had said. I give it to you—it’s yours. She gave it to me as if that would make me like it. Now I asked myself whether I did in fact like it, but I couldn’t tell; I didn’t know. It was a part of her that I couldn’t separate from the rest. It may have been the most tangible thing about her—more tangible, for example, than her sex.
It was an abstract painting, of course, huddled