Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [7]
Later, when I was back at the apartment, sitting in my usual chair and watching Sheri paint, I thought about Horney, and it seemed to me that there were lots of other, better things she could have said to the woman. She could have said, Why does everyone think it’s so terrific to have a penis? I myself, for example, had a penis, but it didn’t help me now to imagine what went on in Sheri’s mind as she filled in a ragged area of the canvas with muddy green paint. It seemed to me that a penis was a very primitive instrument for dealing with life. Besides, Horney was wrong. Sheri did have a penis—mine belonged to her more than it did to me.
3
I hadn’t been living with Sheri very long when Dick Gilman tried to take her away from me. There was nothing underhanded about Dick. He simply came over to the apartment one night and explained that I was not the right person for Sheri, and that he was.
His opening remarks were so elegant, so hermeneutic, that I didn’t realize at first that he was talking about me. Dick hardly ever referred to real persons, and my initial impression was that he was describing an unsatisfactory character in a novel.
When I finally understood what he was doing, I was more surprised than angry, because I thought of Dick as a friend. This was no way for a friend to behave. Yet what he said sounded just like the friendly discussions of books we carried on in Washington Square or in the San Remo. And it was this blurring of the boundaries that confused me.
Dick was odd in a lot of ways. In his reading, for example, he was a serial monogamist. He’d fall in love with a particular author and remain faithful to him alone, reading everything by and about him. He would become that author, talk like him, think like him, dress like him if possible. If he could find out what his current favorite had eaten and drunk, Dick would eat and drink them, too. He took on his politics, his causes, his eccentricities. At one point in his D. H. Lawrence phase—this was after his Yeats and Auden phases—Dick actually went to Mexico and tried to find Lawrence’s footprints in the dust.
He was a very fast reader, so these affairs came and went fairly quickly. No author can survive that kind of identification for long. When he came to the apartment, Dick was still in his Lawrence phase, so perhaps he saw himself stealing Frieda from Ernest Weekley. Could it be that he had fallen for Sheri as he had for Lawrence and Yeats and Auden?
All the same, Dick was a formidable rival—a brilliant talker, an attractive man. He might even have been handsome if his face had not been just a bit vainglorious with all the books he’d read. As Harold Norse, a Village poet, said, “Dick was only twenty-one and he had read more books than Hemingway.”
He had told me he was coming to see us and I had thought this meant he wanted to be better friends, because he was rather standoffish and had never visited us before. Now that he was here, I offered him a beer and asked him to take a chair, but he refused both, like a policeman who doesn’t drink or sit down while on duty.
He began with a prologue, or prologomenon. He had examined his motives, he said, and was satisfied that they were disinterested. For a moment I thought he was going to say that, like art, he was a mirror held up to nature. What he did say was that I was not serious. There was, he said, an incongruity in my relation to Sheri. At that time we were all very much under the influence of the idea of incongruity in art. But while incongruity was good in art, it was, apparently, bad in life.
We were in the kitchen. Out of a kind of tact, Dick hadn’t advanced farther into the apartment. I had taken a chair and Sheri leaned on the metal cover of the bathtub while Dick paced back and forth between the sink and the stove. Since they were only three or four steps apart, he kept whirling around. He was like a lecturer in front of a class, or a peripatetic philosopher. No doubt he had read Nietzsche, who said that the best thoughts come while walking.
Using words like unconscionable, he