Collected Stories

the tail, next to the rest rooms. She stowed the violin overhead and the zipper bag under the seat. Victor lowered himself into place, arranged his body, leaned backward, and shut his eyes. Either he was very tired or he wanted to be alone with his thoughts.

The plane filled up. It was some comfort that despite the mean look of the weather, practical-minded people never doubted that they would lift off from Buffalo and land in Chicago—business as usual. In the hand of God, but also routine. Katrina, who looked sensible along with the rest of the passengers, didn’t know what to do about her anxious doubts, couldn’t collect them in a single corner and turn the key on them. In one respect Dotey was dead right: Katrina jumped at any chance to rush off and be with Victor. Victor, even if he was ailing, even if no life with him was really possible—he couldn’t last long—was entirely different from other people. Other people mostly stood in a kind of bleakness. They had the marks of privation upon them. There was a lack of space and air about them, they were humanly bare, whereas Victor gave off a big light. Strange little Wrangel may have been a pretentious twerp. He wanted to exchange serious thoughts; he might be puffing himself up absurdly, a faker, as Victor suspected. But when he had talked about ecstasy as the everyday spirit or men and things set in brilliants, she had understood exactly what he was saying. She had understood even better when he said that when the current stopped, the dullness and depression were worse than ever. To spell it out further, she herself could never generate any brilliancy. If she had somebody to get her going, she could join in and perhaps make a contribution. This contribution would be feminine and sexual. It would be important, it might even be indispensable, but it would not be inventive. She could, however, be inventive in deceit. And she had made an effort to branch out with the elephant story. She had, nevertheless, had that serious setback with M*A*S*H. The movie house itself had been part of her misfortune. They were surrounded by hippies, not very young ones, and in the row ahead there was a bearded guy slurping Popsicles and raising himself to one cheek, letting off loud farts. Victor said, “There’s change from the general for the caviar it’s eaten.” Katrina hadn’t yet figured out that one. Then Victor stood up and said, “I won’t sit in this stink!” When they reached the street, the disgrace and horror of being exposed by M*A*S*H and associated with San Francisco degenerates made Katrina want to throw herself in front of a cable car rushing downhill from the Mark Hopkins.

Now she made a shelf of her hand on her brow and looked away from Victor, who was staring out at the field. Was there anything she could do about that goddamn elephant? Suppose a man turned up who hypnotized ball players and could do the same with an animal. They were now discovering new mental powers in the bigger mammals. Whales, for example, sang to one another; they were even thought to be capable of rhyming. Whales built walls out of air bubbles and could encircle and entrap millions of shrimp. What if an eccentric zoologist were to visit the management with a new idea? Meanwhile the management had to send for fodder while the elephant dropped whole pyramids of dung. The creature was melancholy and wept tears as big as apricots. The mahout demanded mud. If Margey didn’t have a good wallow soon, she’d go berserk and wreck the entire fifth floor. Abercrombie & Fitch (were they still in Chicago?) offered to send over a big-game hunter. For them it would be terrific publicity to shoot her. Humane people would be outraged. Suppose a pretty high school girl were to come forward with the solution? And what if she were to be a Chinese girl? In Chinese myth, elephants and not men had once been the masters of the world. And then?

Victor’s mind was also at work, although you couldn’t say that he was thinking. Something soft and heavy seemed to have been spread over his body. It resembled the lead apron laid over you by X-ray technicians. Victor was stretched under this suave deadly weight and feeling as you felt when waking from a deep sleep—unable to lift your arm. On the field, in the winter light, the standing machines were paler than the air, and the entire airport stood in a frame of snow, looking like a steel engraving. It reminded him of the Lower East Side in—oh, about 1912. The boys (ancients today, those who were alive) were reading the Pentateuch. The street, the stained pavement, was also like a page of Hebrew text, something you might translate if you knew how. Jacob lay dreaming of a ladder which rose into heaven. V’hinei malachi elohim—behold the angels of God going up and down. This had caused Victor no surprise. What age was he, about six? It was not a dream to him. Jacob was dreaming, while Victor was awake, reading. There was no “long ago.” It was all now. The cellar classroom had a narrow window at sidewalk level, just enough to permit a restricted upward glance showing fire escapes under snow, the gold shop sign of the Chinese laundry hanging from the ironwork, and angels climbing up and down. This did not have to be interpreted. It came about in a trance, as if under the leaden weight of the flexible apron. Now the plane was starting its takeoff run, and soon the NO SMOKING sign would be turned off. Victor would have liked to smoke, but the weight of his hands made any movement impossible.

It wasn’t like him to cherish such recollections, although he had them, and they had lately been more frequent. He began now to remember that his mother had given him the windpipe of a goose after drying it in the Dutch oven of the coal stove, and that he had cut a notch in the windpipe with his father’s straight razor and made a whistle of it. When it was done, he disliked it. Even when dry it had kept its terrible red color, and it was very harsh to the touch and had left an unpleasant taste in his mouth. This was not exactly Marx’s nightmare of history from which mankind had to be liberated. The raw fowl taste was nasty. The angels on the fire escape, however, were very pleasing, and his consciousness of them, while it was four thousand years old, had also been exactly contemporary. Different ideas of time and space had not yet been imposed upon him. One comprehensive light contained everybody. Among the rest—parents, patriarchs, angels, God—there was yourself. Victor did not feel bound to get to the bottom of this; it was only a trance, probably an effect of fatigue and injury. He gave a side thought to Mass. General, where a tumor had been lifted out of a well of blood in his belly, and he reminded himself that he was still a convalescent—reminded himself also that Baudelaire had believed the artist to be always in a spiritually convalescent state. (This really was Baudelaire Day; just a while ago it had been the touch that brought the dead to life.) Only just returned from the shadow of death, the convalescent inhaled with delight the close human odors of the plane. Pollution didn’t matter, the state of a convalescent being the state of a child drunk with impressions. Genius must be the recovery of the powers of childhood by an act of the creative will. Victor knew all this like the palm of his hand or the nose on his face. By combining the strength of a man (analytic power) with the ecstasy of a child you could discover the New. What God’s Revelation implied was that the Jews (his children) would obstinately will (with mature intelligence) the divine adult promise. This would earn them the hatred of the whole world. They were always archaic, and they were always contemporary—we could sort that out later.

But now suppose that this should not be convalescence but something else, and that he should be on the circuit not because he was recovering but because he was losing ground. Falling apart? This was where Katrina entered the picture. Hers was the touch that resurrected, or that reunited, reintegrated his otherwise separating physical powers. He asked himself: That she turns me on, does that mean that I love her, or does it simply mean that she belongs to the class of women that turn me on? He didn’t like the question he was asking. But he was having many difficult sensations, innumerable impressions of winter, winters of seven decades superimposed. The winter world even brought him a sound, not for the ear but for some other organ. And none of this was clearly communicable, nor indeed worth communicating. It was simply part of the continuing life of every human being. Everybody was filled with visions that had been repressed, and amassed involuntarily, and when you were sick they were harder to disperse.

“I can tell you, now that we’re in the air, Victor, that I am relieved. I wasn’t sure we’d get back.” The banking plane gave them a single glimpse of Lake Erie slanting green to the right, and then rose into dark-gray snow clouds. It was a bumpy flight. The headwind was strong. “Have I ever told you about my housekeeper’s husband? He’s a handsome old Negro who used to be a dining-car waiter. Now he gambles. Impressive to look at. Ysole’s afraid of him.”

“Why are we discussing him?”

“I wonder if I shouldn’t have a talk with her husband about Ysole. If she takes money from Alfred, my ex- husband, if she should testify against me in the case, it would be serious. Alfred’s lawyer could bring out that she raised me, and therefore has my number.”

“Would she want to harm you as much as that?”

“Well, she’s always been somewhat cracked. She used to call herself a conjure -woman. She’s shrewd and full of the devil.”

“I wonder why we’re flying at this altitude. By now we should have been above the clouds,” said Victor.

They had fifteen minutes of open sky and then dropped back again into the darkness. “Yes, why are we so low?” said Katrina. “We’re not getting anywhere.”