Geoffrey stopped. Not another word. Just like that. He was implored to go on. His listeners were all itching with curiosity, he had involved them so slyly in his tale, but he slumped in his chair. At last, all he said was, “I have to wash my face.” Berenice and Andreas later confided that they had shared the same impression of watching a well-oiled machine breaking down. It’s true that naturally his face was a mess. He’d started crying while he spoke of Malachi’s vindictive obsession — it was an appalling project, but it was still shocking to see tears running down the face of this normally quiet-spoken man. After a moment he added, “I seem to have painted myself into a corner. I won’t be long.”
He kept his word and soon came back, very much his “old self”; Andreas later said, “The screws on that leaky sump of his were now bolted tight!” That wasn’t quite true. If Geoffrey had fallen silent before without a word of explanation, he now became as communicative as his companions could desire and, what’s more, gave them his best reason for being so. His usual urbane composure had surprisingly yielded to a softer, more relaxed liberality.
Geoffrey resumed his story. “To continue from the point I’d reached — that Malachi had decided that his revenge would be accomplished through a work of fiction — what I’d have had to say next is that Malachi wanted me to write it. And how could he possibly have thought of me for the job? As far as you know, I’d never written anything. What you don’t know is that between the ages of thirteen and twenty-three I led a totally different life. No one here knows this, not even Margot. Earlier in my conversation with Malachi, for some reason I had told him about it. For some reason! For the same reason we form intimate friendships and initiate rapturous love affairs on skiing vacations and ocean cruises, even on bus rides. Malachi was a likeable, intelligent man, and I knew I’d never lay eyes on him again. It was a golden opportunity to at last divulge my secret, to someone. Now it’s time to tell it to real friends like you. And most of all to my beloved Margot.”
Andreas: “My God, Geoffrey, what were you so ashamed about? Were you a Ponzi schemer? a sly pornographer?” “Oh, shame had nothing to do with it. I changed from one life to a very different other one. The first life became irrelevant. Nevertheless the fact is that for ten years I was a writer. I lived for writing and reading and nothing else. And not any sensible sort of writer, but a poet, no less. I breathed and ate poetry, I planned my present and future around it. I wrote dozens of poems every month, some promising enough to earn the interest of readers I respected. I even published a few in little magazines. Then I gave it up. The details hardly matter. I don’t want to dump the whole story on you.”
Andreas laughed — a gentle laugh, without a hint of mockery: “No dumping necessary. We’re all ears.” Geoffrey shook his head. “At least tell us why Malachi really thought he needed a writer — when it came to stories, he was an expert after all.” “He said he lacked what I had, what poets had — an irrational passion for pure language, that was what was real for them, and it was essential for him — ” Andreas: “But he was right! Geoff, would you consider reciting a poem from your unspeakable past?” To our surprise, he acquiesced.
“It’s not one of my best, there’s really nothing beautiful in it. But it’s relevant to the change in my life. It’s my last poem — no, next to last. It’s called ‘Cassation on a theme by Jacques Dupin.’ It was written two months before the May ’68 events in Paris — my one prophetic work. Almost every word in it reads like a gloss on what happened then, even the title — one of the first meanings of cassation was ‘street music,’ and the legal sense was ‘quashing,’ very appropriate! Jacques Dupin was a well-known poet and authority on Matisse, he was also an excellent boxer, and he used his boxing skills effectively late one afternoon in mid-May when he led an attack on La Bourse, the Paris stock market. I have no idea what you think you know about mai soixante-huit, but if you weren’t there, you don’t know anything. I’d been in Paris for a while, studying French poetry at one of the satellites of the Sorbonne. I saw what was happening. I was part of what was happening. Just to give one simplistic idea of that: the city I’d left a month earlier functioned according to the social principles of skepticism and discretion, one click away from cynicism and indifference. In the city
