Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [32]
It isn’t worth it, Scanlon said. He leaned back in the chair until he was looking at me between his feet. Walk out of here, he said, and you’ll see that the streets are full of pale-faced girls.
I couldn’t think. I didn’t want to think. I was afraid to think.
Well then, Scanlon said. He swung his feet off the desk and put his hat back on. His expression changed; he became brisk and purposeful. He picked up the painting and held it out at arm’s length so that we could look at it together from our different sides of the desk. He invited me to see it for what it was—but what was it? I had been trying to decide that since I met Sheri.
He waited while I sat there like a witness on the stand who can’t remember. Then he reached out his other hand so that he was holding the painting on either side, trapping it. Watching me all the while, he rotated it, like someone turning a wheel. Then he leaned it against the wall again, wrong side up. Look, he said. Turn them upside down and you can’t tell one from another.
What? I stared at him in astonishment and a wave of disgust washed over me. He wasn’t smart after all. He was just a cop, an Irish cop.
No, I said, that’s not true. It’s not that simple. But there was no point in arguing. I wasn’t talking to Meyer Schapiro; this wasn’t the New School. Anyway, my quarrel wasn’t with Scanlon—he was only an innocent bystander, after all, like me. We were just two men puzzled by love and art.
I saw, at last, all at once, with a sadness that had been patiently waiting for me, that I would have to leave the painting. And that wasn’t all; it was more than that—I would have to leave Sheri there too, in that room, sprawled on the desk. It wasn’t, as Scanlon had said, a nice way to remember her.
PART TWO
After Sheri
13
There were lots of good talkers in the Village—that was mostly what we did—but Saul Silverman’s talk had high seriousness. This was one of our favorite phrases. It was from Matthew Arnold, whom none of us had ever read. It’s hard to explain what the expression meant to us—each of us would have given a different definition—but I suppose it meant trying to see the world as all of a piece. High seriousness meant being intimate with largeness, worrying on a grand scale. There was an evangelical element in it—Saul thought of ideas in terms of redemption. Our ideas would save us from our sins. He was a type that was fairly common at the time but that seems to have gone out of style.
Talking was such a passionate act for Saul that he had grown a bushy mustache to conceal his mouth. To see the organ of his talk, the words being formed, the working of his lips and tongue, would have been too much. Sometimes he would put his hand over his mouth and speak through his fingers as well as his mustache. He had some kind of adenoidal impediment, so that he threw his head back when he spoke, like a rooster crowing.
Saul reminded me of a boy named Meyer who was in my class in the fourth grade at P.S. 44 in Brooklyn. Meyer was thin, with dark crinkly hair and high, perpetually shrugged shoulders. His features were so emphatically articulated that even when he wasn’t doing anything he looked hysterical. When the teacher called on him Meyer would stand up in the aisle and throw his head back and gasp for air, pulling his voice unwillingly through his throat and sinuses and forcing it out of his nose. Once he got it out, his speech was extremely precise. He bit off his consonants and spat them into the room, and I remember thinking, though not in those terms, that it was the jagged precision of the words he used that made them pass with such difficulty.
There were two or three other boys like Meyer in the school—skinny, with hawklike faces, curved