Very Old Bones Read online

  I was light-years beyond them all in handling both the deck and myself, for I had learned from Manfredo that a magician is also an actor; and so I considered my financial gain from those ink-stained wretches to be fair exchange for a thespian’s risky performance. Some nights I chose to lose heavily at the outset, though good luck would usually stalk my later play. On occasions I might even drop thirty dollars on the night to prove my vulnerability, but by so doing was then free at the next sitting to fleece again those good- and well-tempered suckers. Thus did I move ever closer to my degree in education.

  I interrupted my college career to enlist in the army in 1942, when I turned eighteen, gained a lieutenancy, and in ’44 I landed at Normandy with replacement troops after the heroes and martyrs had taken the high ground as well as the beach. I was seldom in danger from then on but could not let go of the universal fantasy that death was a land mine ten steps ahead. I walked the wrong way to die, it turned out, and after the war I went back to Albany to finish my degree in three years instead of four. After graduation, instead of teaching, I found a job with the Manhattan publishing house where my father had worked as an illustrator.

  Idiotically, I’d stayed in the reserve after the war, so when Korea erupted I turned into a retread. We started at Fort Benning, creating an infantry division from scratch. The Captain who had been assigned to establish the Public Information Office, the division’s press section, liked my record: precocious scholar, sometime newsman, editor of books, working on a book of my own, and, on top of it all, a line officer in the big war. What can I say?

  We went to Germany instead of Korea, the first troops to go back to Europe since the war, and we headquartered in the Drake Kaserne, a comfortable old Nazi Wehrmacht barracks outside Frankfurt, which brings me to Giselle, my somewhat excruciating wife, and the cause of my using my talent with cards for the second time in my life to enhance my net worth.

  The enlisted men of our PIO section were throwing a Christmas party that year (it was 1951) and invited the Captain and me to stop by for a bit of wassail. I was already there when the Captain arrived with this remarkable beauty on his arm. They’d have a drink, then go to dinner; that was their plan. The men had hired a belly dancer named Eva to elevate the lust factor at the party and she was dancing when the Captain and Giselle arrived. The troops were yelling at Eva to remove garments, but she wouldn’t even lower a strap. She did a few extra bumps, but that didn’t cut the mustard with the boys, and half a dozen of them backed her into a corner. Because of who knows what reason, Giselle spoke up.

  “Leave her alone,” she said. “I’ll take over.”

  The Captain looked stricken as Giselle picked up a high stool from a corner and carried it to the center of the room. All eyes went to her as she sat on the stool with her hands in her lap, evaluating her audience. Then she undid the two top burtons of her blouse, revealing a contour—the quartering of a small moon. She lifted one leg, pointed her toe, her instep arched inside her elegant black pump, the heel of her other shoe hooked over the stool’s bottom rung. One up, one down. The upward motion of her right leg moved her skirt a bit above the knee. She swept the room with her eyes, engaging everyone like a seductive angel: madonna of the high perch.

  The swine who had been attacking Eva suddenly realized that Giselle’s panorama seemed to be accessible. They didn’t even notice Eva backing off to a corner, snatching up her coat, and running out the door.

  The swine grunted when Giselle brought her right leg back and hooked her shoe on the highest rung, her skirt going higher still. Oh how they grunted, those swine. They were all in uniform, their Ike jackets swinging loose. They jostled each other to solidify their positions. They knew, as others jostled them, that their turf nearest Giselle had become valuable. They could have rented it out.

  One of them leaped into a crouch, inches away from Giselle’s knee, and he stared up the central boulevard of her shadow. But no one dared to touch her, for they intuited that vantage was all they would ever get, and the jostling grew stronger.

  They moved in an ellipse, the ones with a clear view of the boulevard being the first to be shoved out of the vista.

  Shoved out of the vista, imagine it.

  Poor swine.

  But they ran around the ellipse, got back into line, and shoved on. “Keep it moving” was the unspoken motto, and on they shoved, those in the best position always trying to retain the turf. But they’d lose it to the needy, then circle back again.

  Giselle started to sing, in French, “Quand Madelon.”

  “Et chacun lui raconte une histoire, une histoire à sa façon . . .” she sang.

  Then she moved her blouse to the right and exposed more of that region. My impulse was to photograph her from a low angle, but when I told her this later she said she’d have considered it rape. She touched her breast lightly and I thought, “Phantom queen as art object.”

  “La Madelon,” Giselle sang, “pour nous n’est pas sévère.”

  The swine kept moving round and round, like the old ploy of running from one end of the photo to the other in the days when the camera panned so slowly you could put yourself into the photo twice. I see those piggies still, moving in their everlasting ellipse—that piggy-go-round—shouldering one another, hunkering down as they moved to their left for a better view of that boulevard, lowering themselves, debasing all romance, groveling to Giselle’s secrets with bend of knee and squint of eye.

  I still can’t blame them.

  And what did the swine see? Quite amazing to talk about it afterward. One saw wildflowers—black-eyed Susans. Another said she wore a garment. Yet another no. A sergeant who’d been in the Fourth Armored during the war said he saw a landscape strewn with crosses and corpses, the reason why the war was fought.

  And then she gave one final rising of the knee, stood up, and put herself back together. Slowly the troops started to applaud, and it grew and grew.

  “More, more,” they called out, but Giselle only buttoned the last button, threw them a kiss, and returned to the Captain’s side. The troops shook the Captain’s hand, congratulated him on his taste in women, and when he went for their coats I asked Giselle her name but she wouldn’t tell me. Then the Captain came and said, “All right, Giselle, let’s go.”

  “Ah, Giselle,” I said.

  It took me only a few days to track her to the office where she worked as a translator for diplomats and army bureaucrats.

  “I’ve come to rescue you from old men,” I told her.

  “I knew you would,” she said with a foxy smile.

  But she resisted me, and professed fidelity to the Captain, who, though twice-and-a-half her age and going to fat, was flush with money from his black-market adventures in coffee and cigarettes.

  “Can you take me to Paris for the weekend as he does?” she asked me. “Can you fly me to the Riviera?”

  “How direct the mercenary heart,” I said. “I understand your point. I suspect we are much alike.”

  But the truth was that I never valued money except when I had none. And Giselle’s hedonist remarks were a façade to keep me at bay. You see she was already starting to love me.

  Each day I sent her a yellow rose—yellow the color of age, cowardice, jaundice, jealousy, gold, and her own radiant hair. In a week the flowers softened her telephone voice, in two weeks she agreed to dinner, and in three to a Heidelberg weekend, which was the first stop on my road to dementia.

  We stayed at a small pension and left it only for meals. Otherwise we inhabited the bed. She put all of her intimate arenas on display and let me do with them what I pleased, with a single exception: I could enter none of them with my principal entering device.

  I had never been more excited by a woman’s body, though I know the relative fraudulence of memory in such matters. Denial of entry was of small consequence to a man of my imagination, given the beatific pot of flesh to which I had access in every other way. Giselle said she was fearful of pregnancy, of disease,
of sin, even of vice, can you imagine? But I know she was actually testing my capacity to tolerate her tantalizing. I’ve known exhibitionistic women, several, but none with the raw, artistic talent for exposure that Giselle demonstrated in Heidelberg. This was my initiation into the heavenly tortures of Giselle-love.

  In the days that followed, she and I moved together in a delirium, I sick with love. When I was away from her I fell into what I came to think of as the coma of the quotidian, my imagination dead to everything except the vision of her face, her yellow hair, and the beige, angelical beauty of her sex, though that describes only the look of it, not the non-angelical uses to which she put it.

  One understands addiction, obsession. It begins as the lunacy of whim, or desire, but ends as the madness of need, or essence. I could not be without her, and so all my waking movements were the orchestration of our next meeting.

  I bought her gifts: Hummel dolls, a cuckoo clock, a Chanel suit, Italian shoes, cultured pearls (I could not afford diamonds). I bought her books. She’d never heard of Kafka, or Christopher Marlowe, or Philip Marlowe, for she was a visual animal, fascinated by art and photography, the twin provinces of her mother, who ran an art gallery in Paris.

  I bought her a camera, took her to Versailles, Mont St. Michel, and other spectacles for the eye, took her to Omaha Beach and tried to explain to her some of the war and my puny part in it. She’d lived in Paris the entire war and saw no fighting, only occupation, during which her father had been executed by the Nazis. Her mother, a paragon of independence and survival, raised this very willful daughter.

  There was much more, but, to get to the point, Giselle-love broke me. I ran through my paychecks and small savings account, and got a bit of money from my mother. But I soon went through it all, and it was out of the question to ask Peter for money. He never had any.

  Then I remembered Walt Popp, captain of Special Services, mentioning a game of poker. That was a month after I met Giselle, the days when I had no time for any other game but her. Now I tracked down Popp at the officers’ club and bought him a drink.

  “I thought you were getting a poker game together,” I said.

  “I did ask a few guys. Are you ready?”

  “I could use a little action.”

  “I thought you had this beauty, this cover-girl type.”

  “Hanging out with you mugs, I’ll appreciate her even more.”

  “I’ll round up a crowd for Friday night,” Popp said.

  So I practiced. There’d never been a time I hadn’t, really. Manfredo’s wisdom was that once you lose your touch it will never come back with quite the same delicacy. Any talent must be husbanded or else we diminish in the breach; and so I spent two hours a week, maybe three, handling the cards, cutting them for aces, dealing seconds, bottoms, reading the deck when I shuffled. I practiced in bed, in the latrine, anytime I was alone. Almost nobody after Fobie’s knew about me and cards. My magic was still in my hat.

  Popp told the Captain there’d be a game and I’d be playing, and the Captain brought it up the next day in the office.

  “Cards? You mean you aren’t seeing Giselle anymore?”

  “Matter of fact I am,” I said.

  “I don’t see her anymore.”

  “Is that so?”

  “You damn well know it’s so.”

  “I don’t follow you around, Captain.”

  “You follow Giselle around.”

  “I wouldn’t deny it.”

  “She likes ’em young.”

  “She’s young.” She was twenty.

  “I miss her,” he said.

  “I’d miss her too.”

  “You took her away from me.”

  “That’s not how it happens. People do what they want.”

  “She liked me.”

  “We all like you, Captain.”

  “You do good work, Orson. It’s a good thing you do good work.”

  “I try not to disappoint.”

  “That’s smart. Never disappoint. What time is the game?”

  “Seven o’clock.”

  “I’ll see you across the table,” he said.

  It sounded like an invitation to a duel.

  “Is the coffee ready, Orson?” my father called.

  “It is,” I said. “Come on down.”

  I heard him shuffling toward the stairs in his slippers, and I remembered when as a child I shat in one of his slippers, a moment of my precocious psychosis. It is a thief’s traditional trick to shit in the victim’s lair, and I had been a thief of vision—of my father’s and mother’s private life. The occasion was an argument over love. Whose property was Claire Purcell? Was she owned body and soul by Peter, her live-in lover, or was she the intimate assistant to Manfredo the Magnificent?

  I awoke in the middle of the night to find my father home after a two-week absence, heard his voice, moved toward it comprehending no words, closed on the parental bedroom to see my naked father standing over my supine, naked mother, and hear him say: “Why don’t you take your cunt back to Manfredo and have him give you another one?”

  I, at the age of eight, had never heard the word “cunt” uttered other than once in schoolboy talk: Why do they call it a cunt? . . . You ever see one? . . . Yeah . . . Well, then, what else would you call it? Nor did I understand the import of the phrase “another one,” until time had passed and I had dwelled sufficiently on the overheard words to conclude that my father had been talking about me, the only one there was: Orson Purcell, son without siblings (living or dead) of Claire Purcell-never-Phelan. I was “son,” “sonny,” “Orse,” and “Orsy-Horsey” to Peter Phelan, the only father I’d ever known. But when I at last understood the meaning of his assault on my mother (I soon began to use the term “father” in an ambiguous way, and eventually abandoned it), then it occurred to me that bastardy might be an enduring theme of my life. I grew angry at Peter for not (if not) being my father, grew angry also at Manfredo, who was unacceptable as a father.

  This latter anger prevailed after I entered a dressing room of the Palace Theater in Albany, just after Manfredo had finished his act on stage. There sat Mother on the dressing-room vanity, naked legs akimbo. There stood Manfredo in top hat, tux jacket, and pants around ankles, thrusting his magic wand into her rabbit, and giving moon to all visitors who did not know they were not wanted, just as the magic couple did not realize that they had not locked the door until after the Orse was gone.

  Orson the adventurer, Orson the thief of vision. I waited a week before making the assault on my father’s slipper (I should have shat in Manfredo’s hat) as an ultimate gesture of rebellion against his verbal cruelty. My mother rejected my act of solidarity with her, terming it loathsome, and my father, whose anger with Claire had abated, took off his belt and said, “Now I’m going to whip you until you bleed,” and did. I then brooded myself into a dream of being attacked by crocodiles and, while pulling myself out of the water, of being consumed by the crocs up to the neck, my head floating away to live a disembodied life of its own.

  That, more or less, is the truth of my head.

  Peter finally reached the bottom of the stairs and shuffled toward the dining room.

  “I never thought my bones would turn into my enemy,” he said with a great wheezing sound. “Skeletons are not to be trusted.”

  He sat at the dining-room table and I put the toast and butter on the table and poured his and my coffee.

  “Are you going to go to work?” I asked him.

  “I have no alternative.”

  “You could take it easy. Take the day off. It’s a special day, isn’t it?”

  “That’s like cheating at solitaire. Who gets cheated?”

  “Are you nearing the end of this painting?”

  “There’s distance to go, but there’s even more to do after this one.”

  “You always talk about dying but you don’t behave like a dying man.”

  “As soon as you behave like a dying man, you’re dead.”
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  “You’re a man with a mission.”

  “A man with curiosity. I come from a long line of failed and sinful flesh, and there’s a darkness in it I want to see.”

  “Speaking of sin,” I said, “isn’t today the day that Adelaide comes to give you your therapy?”

  “You have an abrasive tongue in your head this morning.”

  “I just want to make sure I’m here to let her in.”

  “You’re a thoughtful boy, Orson.”

  “I used to be a boy,” I said.

  We looked at the window at the beginning of the day, a grudging gray light, no sunbeam to color it brilliant.

  “They say it’s going to rain,” I said.

  “They always say that,” said Peter. “And they’re always right.”

  Those who do the great heroic work of being human never work solely from experience. My father, for instance, could never have painted his Malachi Suite, that remarkable body of paintings and sketches that made him famous, without having projected himself into the lives of the people who had lived and died so absurdly, so tragically, in the days before and after his own birth. I am not implying here that any historical reconstruction is heroic, but rather that imaginative work of the first rank must come about through its creator’s subordination of the self, and also from the absorption into that self of what has gone on beyond or before its own existence.

  Clearly there is no way to absorb the history of even one other being wholly into oneself; but the continuity of the spirit relies on an imagination like my father’s, which makes the long-dead world, with a fine suddenness, as Keats put it, fly back to us with its joys and its terrors and its wisdom. Keats invented the term “negative capability” to define what he saw in the true poetical character: a quality of being that “has no self—it is everything and nothing . . . it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low . . .” The poet should be able to throw his soul into any person, or object, that he confronts, and then speak out of that person, or object. “When I am in a room with people,” wrote Keats, “if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain . . . the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me [so] that I am in a very little time annihilated . . .”