in which he never wrote of characters who had less than sixty-five thousand dollars a year. He memorized the names of the Groton faculty and the bartenders at “21.” All of his characters were waited on hand and foot by punctilious servants, but when you went to his house for dinner you found the chairs held together with picture wire, you ate fried eggs from a cracked plate, the doorknobs came off in your hand, and if you wanted to flush the toilet you had to lift the lid off the water tank, roll up a sleeve, and reach deep into the cold and rusty water to manipulate the valves. When he had finished with snobbism, he made the error I have mentioned in Item and then moved on into his romantic period, where he wrote “The Necklace of Maivio d’Alfi” (with that memorable scene of childbirth on a mountain pass), “The Wreck of the S.S. Lorelei,” “The King of the Trojans,” and “The Lost Girdle of Venus,” to name only a few. He was quite sick at the time, and his incompetence seemed to be increasing. His work was characterized by everything that I have mentioned. In his pages one found alcoholics, scarifying descriptions of the American landscape, and fat parts for Marlon Brando. You might say that he had lost the gift of evoking the perfumes of life: sea water, the smoke of burning hemlock, and the breasts of women. He had damaged, you might say, the ear’s innermost chamber, where we hear the heavy noise of the dragon’s tail moving over the dead leaves. I never liked him, but he was a colleague and a drinking companion, and when I heard, in my home in Kitzbuhel, that he was dying, I drove to Innsbruck and took the express to Venice, where he then lived. It was in the late autumn. Cold and brilliant. The boarded-up palaces of the Grand Canal?gaunt, bedizened, and crowned?looked like the haggard faces of that grade of nobility that shows up for the royal weddings in Hesse. He was living in a pensione on a back canal. There was a high tide, the reception hall was flooded, and I got to the staircase over an arrangement of duckboards. I brought him a bottle of Turinese gin and a package of Austrian cigarettes, but he was too far gone for these, I saw when I sat down in a painted chair (broken) beside his bed. “I’m working,” he exclaimed. “I’m working. I can see it all. Listen to me!”
“Yes,” said.
“It begins like this,” he said, and changed the level of his voice to correspond, I suppose, to the gravity of his narrative. “The Transalpini stops at Kirchbach at midnight,” he said, looking in my direction to make sure that I had received the full impact of this poetic fact.
Yes, I said.
“Here the passengers for Vienna continue on,” he said sonorously, “while those for Padua must wait an hour. The station is kept open and heated for their convenience, and there is a bar where one may buy coffee and wine. One snowy night in March, three strangers at this bar fell into a conversation. The first was a tall, bald-headed man, wearing a sable-lined coat that reached to his ankles. The second was a beautiful American woman going to Isvia to attend funeral services for her only son, who had been killed in a mountain-climbing accident. The third was a white-haired, heavy Italian woman in a black shawl, who was treated with great deference by the waiter. He bowed from the waist when he poured her a glass of cheap wine, and addressed her as ‘Your Majesty.’ Avalanche warnings had been posted earlier in the day…”
Then he put his head back on the pillow and died?indeed, these were his dying words, and the dying words, it seemed to me, of generations of story-tellers, for how could this snowy and trumped-up pass, with its trio of travelers, hope to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream. THE CHIMERA
When I was young and used to go to the circus, there was an act called the Treviso Twins?Maria and Rosita. Rosita used to balance herself on the head of Maria, skulltop to skulltop, and be carried around the ring. Maria, as a result of this strenuous exercise, had developed short, muscular legs and a comical walk, and whenever I see my wife walking away from me I remember Maria Treviso. My wife is a big woman. She is one of the five daughters of Colonel Boysen, a Georgia politician, who was a friend of Calvin Coolidge. He went to the White House seven times, and my wife has a heart-shaped pillow embroidered with the word LOVE that was either the work of Mrs. Coolidge or was at one time in her possession. My wife and I are terribly unhappy together, but we have three beautiful children, and we try to keep things going. I do what I have to do, like everyone else, and one of the things I have to do is to serve my wife breakfast in bed. I try to fix her a nice breakfast, because this sometimes improves her disposition, which is generally terrible. One morning not long ago, when I brought her a tray she clapped her hands to her face and began to cry. I looked at the tray to see if there was anything wrong. It was a nice breakfast?two hard-boiled eggs, a piece of Danish, and a Coca-Cola spiked with gin. That’s what she likes. I’ve never learned to cook bacon. The eggs looked all right and the dishes were clean, so I asked her what was the matter. She lifted her hands from her eyes?her face was wet with tears and her eyes were haggard?and said, in the Boysen- family accent, “I cannot any longer endure being served breakfast in bed by a hairy man in his underwear.”
I took a shower and dressed and went to work, but when I came home that night I could see that things were no better; she was still offended by my appearance that morning.
I cook most of the dinners on a charcoal grill in the back yard. Zena doesn’t like to cook and neither do I, but it’s pleasant being out of doors, and I like tending the fire. Our neighbors, Mr. Livermore and Mr. Kovacs, also do a lot of cooking outside. Mr. Livermore wears a chef’s hat and an apron that says “Name Your Pizen,” and he also has a sign that says DANGER. MEN COOKING. Mr. Kovacs and I don’t wear costumes, but I think we’re more serious-minded. Mr. Kovacs once cooked a leg of lamb and another time a little turkey. We had hamburger that night, and I noticed that Zena didn’t seem to have any appetite. The children ate heartily, but as soon as they were through?perhaps they sensed a quarrel?slipped off into the television room to watch the quarrels there. They were right about the quarrel. Zena began it.
“You’re so inconsiderate,” she thundered. “You never think of me.”
“I’m sorry, darling,” I said. “Wasn’t the hamburger done?” She was drinking straight gin, and I didn’t want a quarrel.
“It wasn’t the hamburger?I’m used to the garbage you cook. What I have for dinner is no longer of any importance to me. I’ve learned to get along with what I’m served. It’s just that your whole attitude is so inconsiderate.”
“What have I done, darling?” I always call her darling, hoping that she may come around.
“What have you done? What have you done?” Her voice rose, and her face got red, and she got to her feet and, standing above me, she screamed, “You’ve ruined my life, that’s what you’ve done.”
