27
Never did I dare tell Vernor Matheius about my adventure in the office of the Dean of Women. I hadn't the courage though continuing to think with childish obstinacy He would love me, if he knew. My courage on our behalf.
But was it so? Would Vernor Matheius have loved me, or even admired me, if he'd known? If he'd overheard? Or would he have been mortified, infuriated, disgusted at my appropriation of his name? My boast of my friend Vernor Matheius which was the first time, and would be the last time, I spoke his name to another?
But I never told him, he never knew.
Nor did the Dean of Women continue in her harassment of me. So far as I knew. My threat of a lawsuit and my evocation of "civil rights" had been a blind strike in the dark, yet inspired; the exact weapon with which to defend oneself against a college administrator in that era of civil rights reform; of a radically new thinking about race, individuals, civil liberties. The Dean of Women would not have cause to speak with me again that year, nor in my remaining two years at the university; ironically, by what seems in retrospect a remarkable fluke, I would be named valedictorian of the class of 1965 and would deliver an idealistic valedictory speech on the subject of civil rights; afterward, on the commencement platform, I would be warmly congratulated by the chancellor of the university and by a succession of administrators in academic regalia, including of course the Dean of Women; I saw that she was one of very few women in the commencement program, and among so many tall, distinguished-seeming men a figure of female uncertainty, her raddled face too lavishly powdered and her black cap unflatteringly bobby-pinned to her grayish-brown hair. Her mouth pursed as I approached; her small damp eyes fixed upon my face as if in sudden dread of my uttering something sarcastic, rude, damning that would be overheard by her male colleagues. But our meeting, which was also our parting, was amicable. I may have been a little nervous, excited, and still high from giving my speech, and being applauded; I was smiling at everyone, and seeing no one; except there loomed the Dean of Women before me, a black tent of a woman, and there was my hard little hand being shaken by her soft boneless hand, and both hands were cold as if drained of blood; the Dean of Women smiled saying, "Congratulations, my dear. You have lived up to your early promise." I said, "Thank you, Dean. And good-bye."
But this was the future, two years away. A future I could not have fantasized with even my wayward powers of imagination.
28
I am not a man for any woman to count on. Not a man who wants to be loved.
But: love me.
Wanting to surprise my lover, to make him happy. For what makes happy the one we adore makes us happy; what not, not; the universe is a void, an unfathomable inkwell otherwise.
How many times drifting through bookstores seeing books I knew Vernor Matheius would prize and thinking I would steal for him-would I? As I would never have stolen for myself: annotated editions of the works of Leibniz, Hegel, Heidegger; a new commentary on Wittgenstein; a new translation of Plato's dialogues; biographies of Kierkegaard and Jaspers; Ernst Cassirer's essays on the mythic nature of language. Holding one of these precious, expensive books in my hand thinking How happy it would make Vernor to own this. Wishing not to think What a transparent ploy to make the man love me.
Never stole a single book. Though I'd been labeled an outlaw, a sociopath, yet I never stole for Vernor Matheius, as I would never have stolen for myself; my pride was such, I couldn't stoop so low; nor could I work out how Vernor might respond if he discovered that books had been stolen for him; and he'd known I hadn't the money to buy them. Frequently he'd expressed disdain for any form of dishonesty, above all intellectual dishonesty; he scorned unoriginal thinking in philosophy; he scorned any form of petty crime.
"Petty crimes require petty souls."
Though I couldn't afford it, sometimes on impulse I bought Vernor gifts. Never in my life until then had I experienced that rhapsody of happiness: buying a gift for someone you love. The adrenaline rush I am the person who can buy this gift. Only I, so privileged.
These were thrift-shop treasures. I was patient, I could look through bins of cast-off things. I discovered a handsome old fountain pen, black with gold trim, that still functioned; a pair of fake-jade cuff links engraved with miniature sphinxes; a crystal paperweight (only just finely cracked, but still charming) that was also a magnifying glass. For Vernor's thirtieth birthday I gave him a silk vest in an elegant houndstooth check on a gray background gossamer as smoke; when he unwrapped and opened the box he didn't lift the vest out of the tissue paper for a moment, staring down at it, and I worried that such an item of apparel was too personal a gift and might offend him; but Vernor took it up, slipped it on, and frowned at his reflection critically in his single mirror, above his bedroom bureau-"Hmm. Not bad."The silk vest had come from a consignment shop in downtown Syracuse; it had been marked down numerous times, at last priced at $9.95. How beautiful it had seemed to me, the old-fashioned cut, a row of small black wooden buttons; a vest for a gentleman; for Vernor Matheius. He laughed when I told him it was secondhand; its label had been carefully removed. "What it is, no doubt, is a dead man's vest, recycled to me." "That's only logical," I said, "since you're alive." Vernor laughed again and asked, not for the first time, why I bought him things-"You don't have any money, Anellia." I ignored this saying proudly, "You look very handsome in your silk vest, Vernor, it suits you perfectly." Vernor said reprovingly, "I don't look 'handsome' and it doesn't suit me 'perfectly' and I surely don't need a vest but thank you, Anellia." Smiling at me, and my heart soared.
"A special occasion. And I have something special to tell you."
Vernor wore the houndstooth silk vest beneath his old gray flannel jacket that fitted him tight across the shoulders when he took me out to dinner for the first time (as it would be the last time) at a good, expensive restaurant in the city, the Brass Rail; he was clean-shaven and his face was sharp planes and angles like carved mahogany; his hair hadn't been trimmed in some time, and rose in a woolly penumbra around his head; one of the earpieces of his glasses had broken and was mended with adhesive tape, which gave him a savage yet scholarly look; he was handsome and swaggering in his best ironic style; he wore the vest, the jacket, a greasy-looking dark necktie and dark trousers with a haphazard crease and his shoes were brown leather, badly worn and water-stained. I wore a black silk dress that seemed to have a life, an identity, an idiom of its own; in the style of the Forties it had a flared skirt, long, tight sleeves and a V neck that drooped to show a portion of my narrow, pale chest and the edges of my pale breasts; the dress had a cloth belt that had begun to curl, to show its underside; the woman who'd owned the dress (of course it was secondhand) had had a waist thinner than my own for the belt had been mutilated as if with an ice pick to make extra holes in it, that it might be buckled tighter, and yet tighter; Vernor thought the dress "erotic"-"smelling of grave mold"; with it I wore a thin tarnished gold chain that had once belonged to my mother; at least, this was what I'd been told as a young girl by my grandmother who hadn't wanted it for herself. Nerves had caused my sensitive skin to break out in random rashes yet my face was radiant, I'd applied layers of makeup including rouge; my eyes shone with the glisten of madness; I thought This is the happiest day of my life. Yet could I trust happiness? I could not bear the suspense of what Vernor had to tell me at dinner; immediately he'd made his remark, offhand and casual, I forgot I'd heard it; I looked away, evasive and frightened.
It was a giddy thing, to appear so publicly with Vernor Matheius; the two of us dressed for the evening; his carved-wooden face, my beaming-bright face; his mismatched, rakish clothes and my black silk witchy dress; we walked along the sidewalks, crossed streets, and drew all eyes to us like magnets; I wondered if Vernor was making a declaration about me, about us, at last; we walked hand in hand sometimes, and at other times Vernor seemed almost to forget me; yet there was the glitzy facade of the Brass Rail, where my Kappa sisters' parents took them for dinners, there was Vernor opening the door for me, and the trepidation of stepping inside as if stepping out onto a stage, or into a pit. Vernor had made a reservation; as the ma?tre d' frowned through his book, Vernor winked at me and said I looked the part; what part, I asked nervously; Vernor said, "The part of a young writer celebrating her first sale." And my heart contracted in disappointment for I'd believed he would say something else.
(The special occasion we were celebrating was my having placed a short story in a distinguished literary magazine; one of my flukes of good if improbable luck; I'd written a first draft of this story, back in December, miserable with insomnia in the basement of the Kappa house; because I'd been so desperately unhappy, I had made the story comic; bleakly, savagely comic; it was an excursion into madness even as flames of madness licked at my feet, hands, hair. When I shyly told Vernor this good news, which embarrassed me as winning a lottery would have embarrassed me, Vernor stared at me in frank surprise for a moment then smiled, whistled a congratulatory tune, and told me he "wasn't surprised" at anything I might do. I would wait for him to ask to read the story, but Vernor never asked.)
In the cool, tinted interior of the Brass Rail we were led to our table by the ma?tre d' in his tuxedo; there was in the restaurant a ripple of, not sound, but the immediate absence of sound; a collective indrawn breath. The ma?tre d' with an expression stiff and somber as a mortician's seated us at the very back of the dining room; a small table near the hallway to the rest rooms; yet it was an attractive table, with a lighted candle on it, and a small vase of carnations; the restaurant was beautiful, if undersea and dim; as soon as we were seated, Vernor reached over to take my hand and lifted it, as he'd never done previously, to kiss my fingertips; a gesture I supposed was meant to be playful, theatrical; yet I was moved by it; I was made uneasy by it; for I was aware of other diners observing us; eyes that, if I glanced around, shifted immediately away. Some time was required before our waiter arrived, and blindly I took from him an enormous menu; there was some fuss about our candle, whose flame had gone out; Vernor insisted it be relighted; a couple at a nearby table stared openly at us; middle-aged, very well dressed and white-skinned (of course); I was beginning to feel the oppression of white; the ubiquity of white; for everyone in the Brass Rail was white except the busboys in white (dazzling white!) uniforms, and these busboys were black. (And how steadfastly they looked away from us. Through the ordeal of our meal, they would not see us at all.)
You! Aren't you ashamed of yourself I heard subterranean murmurs of disapproval, the woman at the table next to ours, our automaton waiter, and I thought No! No I am not. Some time was required before our drinks were brought, wine for Vernor, a club soda for me (I was underage), and during this time Vernor gave no sign of noticing how we were being watched; this was the Vernor Matheius of campus pubs and restaurants who never so much as glanced at other people; this was the Vernor Matheius of Oneida Park who'd made love to me a few yards from a public trail; this was the Vernor Matheius of the lecture hall; except this evening he laughed frequently, and sometimes loudly; he seemed very relaxed; I laughed with him, though there was something forced and feverish in his laughter; I thought Is this a man I know, or a stranger? Yet how exciting to be in the presence of such a stranger. For much of the meal Vernor interrogated me in his playful-serious Socratic manner; a relentless questioning that was like rough tickling; it made me laugh, and squirm; a rash on the underside of my jaw throbbed; in his eloquent professorial voice Vernor Matheius spoke just distinctly enough to be overheard at other tables; speaking of Heidegger's Being and Time, that "untranslatable text" which he was reading in German; in Heidegger it's the weight of language that is as significant as meaning; yet the paradox (Vernor argued, or was this Heidegger?) of language is that there can be no single language, only languages-"The tragic paradox is, each of us speaks and hears a language unlike any other." I said, clumsily, "But people understand one another, usually; at least, they get along," and Vernor said, "But how do you know?-the conviction that you 'understand' and that you 'get along' might be a delusion." He spoke then of Plato's famous allegory of the cave. Though I'd studied it, I seemed not to know Vernor's special interpretation. He was then speaking of his own "cave-origins"-his "ancestry"; Vernor Matheius who'd seemed until this moment to have had no personal history, no "ancestry" at all. Matter-of-factly he told me that his ancestors, those he could trace, had been the luckiest of Africans brought to North America as slaves because they'd been sold up north into Connecticut in the 1780's; and in 1784 slavery was outlawed in Connecticut; there'd been no significant history of slavery in Vernor's background; the name "Matheius" had been chosen by his great-grandfather, from a stranger's gravestone (as family legend had it); which was why, Vernor said, he'd been born with a free soul and not a slave soul. He addressed me as if I were silently arguing with him and needed to be convinced; he smiled, sipped wine, said belligerently, "Why the hell then should I spend my life being 'Negro' for anyone's sake? I have a higher calling." I was moved that Vernor should confide such things to me; never before had he spoken except vaguely of himself, and never had he asked me about myself; though he was interested in my courses, in what I was studying and writing, he had not been interested in who I was; nor had I been interested in telling him; for who I am has never greatly interested me set beside who I might become. I asked Vernor where in Africa had his ancestors come from and he said, with a moment's hesitation, " Dahomey -a place I know virtually nothing about, even its location."This seemed unlikely to me; or unnatural; yet I wasn't about to argue with Vernor Matheius. He changed the subject, and we talked now of families; of identities; not specifically but as abstractions, ideas; I realized that since I'd known him, Vernor had never left Syracuse or spoke of visiting his home, nor had anyone visited him; he never received personal mail so far as I knew, or telephone calls; he had a few friendly acquaintances in the Philosophy Department, there were professors and fellow graduate students who invited him occasionally to their homes, but of course Vernor made no effort to reciprocate, and would not have been expected to reciprocate; he'd once told me, his home was in the mind and I saw now that was literally true. His mind was his home, and only one person lived there. "You are free to choose identity by choosing a course of mental action that excludes other courses," Vernor said. Again he reached across the table in his atypical gesture, to take my hand; squeezing my fingers as if I were slow, obstinate; as if I required being coerced into acknowledging. "I will try to believe that," I said; and Vernor said, severely, "But you don't try hard enough, Anellia. Even Wittgenstein worked at thinking. It isn't a pastime like eating, chatting, copulation." I was hurt by this remark for I knew it was calculated to hurt; yet Vernor continued, "In your thinking, Anellia, you disappoint me." I said, "I'm sorry, Vernor." He said, baring his chunky teeth in a smile like pain, "Anellia, there's something I want to tell you." I knew it could not be happy news. Even as I reasoned Do you believe you merit happy news?-of course not. This is good-bye. We'd been eating our dinners without seeming to taste them; Vernor had ordered for both of us, the least expensive dinners on the very expensive menu, chicken; still, the cost of the meal would be exorbitant; there seemed an oblique irony in the very fact that Vernor had brought us to the Brass Rail, a place of the kind he'd have ordinarily scorned. I knew I must ask Vernor what he meant, like a character in a Kafka parable who must, so cruelly, participate in his own execution; yet the words stuck in my throat, like the food I was eating, or trying to eat. Vernor said, in his professor's voice, "Better yet, there's something you can tell me." I lifted my eyes to inquire, what? and Vernor said, "What do you want from me, Anellia?"
What did I want from Vernor Matheius!
I pondered this. I may have smiled, slightly. A girl in a black silk dress with a neckline that exposed her pale smooth chest, a white-skinned girl being spoken to, lectured to, earnestly by a sharp-faced black man in a gray jacket, silk vest, greasy dark necktie. I hoped to sound like a girl practiced in sexual wiles, seduction. In the eyes of those diners covertly watching us, a mysterious girl. "Only to be with you, Vernor. If-" He squeezed my fingers harder, as if he felt pity for me, and impatience. As if wielding a piece of chalk, working out a syllogism on a blackboard in Introduction to Logic. "Anellia, there is not the opportunity for that." He might have been making a statement about weather; a self-evident fact; a fact not to be questioned; a fact not to be modified; he chose his words, as usual, as if each word had a price; he was parsimonious with words, and shrewd. Sipping the last of the wine, the dark red liquid he hadn't offered to me to taste. My mouth ached with its unaccustomed smiling; a public display of smiling; a roaring in my ears like the sound of the surf in a dream imperfectly recalled; I could not hear the rest of Vernor's words; Vernor's dark fisted hand enclosed mine as if protectively, lifting so that his knuckles lightly grazed my left breast; the shock of being touched ran through me; I felt my nipples harden, absurd and piteous inside the black silk dress of a dead woman; it was a caress meant to comfort, not to arouse; nor even intimidate; there was nothing sexual in the gesture except in the display of it, and perhaps that display was unconscious; still I felt strangers' eyes upon us, cold and infuriated; I hadn't the strength to confront them, and drew back from Vernor's casual touch. I thought This is a life: these minute particles of sensation, emotion. I thought But can I live this life? Am I strong enough? Our waiter had departed, and had not approached our table for a long time; he'd prepared the check, and placed it conspicuously near Vernor's elbow; now the ma?tre d' in his tuxedo stood above us imperial and frowning; disapproving; explaining in a tone of perfunctory apology that our table had been reserved for another party at nine; it was now past nine; we would have to leave as quickly as possible; the check could be paid at the front. Vernor lifted his eyes widened in mock solicitude to the ma?tre d', a white man in his fifties with an oblong fattish face, insolent eyes; Vernor seemed about to protest, then said nothing, and with deliberation pushed back his chair and stood, abruptly; in such a way that the ma?tre d' stepped back; not that Vernor had threatened him; a tall knifeblade of a man with very dark, chiseled face and fisted hands. I'd gotten quickly to my feet, wanting only to escape from this terrible place; for the restaurant was air-conditioned, and uncomfortably cool; it was a temperature for men in suits, not for girls in low-cut silk dresses; I'd been shivering through most of the meal. Vernor took my hand and tugged at me, saying to the ma?tre d' in a tone of icy politeness, "Fine. We are leaving, and you needn't worry we'll be back."
And there we are walking through the Brass Rail as diners stare at us wondering was there a confrontation? between the ma?tre d' and that arrogant black man? I try to see us: but there's a blur, a merciful haze; as in a dissolving dream; the gray silk vest, the black silk dress; a face frozen in anger, a face stricken in embarrassment. Can I live this life, am I strong enough? I waited outside the Brass Rail as Vernor Matheius settled the bill.
And later. In Vernor's bed in those sheets smelling of our bodies; in Vernor's arms that didn't close about me, but held me loosely rocking as one might comfort a small child; I was trying not to cry for nothing's so banal as crying in a lover's arms, banal and futile; as Vernor said, with unnatural gentleness, "Didn't I warn you, girl, I'm not a man for any woman to count on? Eh?" and, more gently, "I wish I could love you the way you deserve, a girl like you, but I can't, you know I can't, I have never lied or misled you, Anellia, have I?" These earnest words like a pronouncement of death and yet I was pleading, "Vernor, I can I-love enough for us both. Give me a chance!" My absurd makeup had begun to melt on my sallow little face. My hair I'd shampooed that afternoon, brushed to a sheen, now disheveled as if I'd been wakened from sleep. And Vernor saying in that soft resolute voice, "Anellia, maybe you should go away now. Maybe this should end." I held myself very still, very still, not hearing.
To purify myself utterly, how? To become nothing, bare picked white bones. And then I will be free.
29
On June 12, 1963, three days after our evening at the Brass Rail, a young NAACP field secretary named Medgar Evers entered history; he was shot in the back by a white racist as he was about to enter his home in Jackson, Mississippi. Even Vernor Matheius who avoided the news like a bad smell could not avoid learning of this.
Fuck. Fuckers.
It was a sign of Vernor's debasement, that so common, you could say so clichéd a vulgarity sprang to his lips.
Beginning now to drink in the early afternoon. At midday. Waking late, groggy and still drunk from the night before; dragging himself to work at his desk, or try to work; beer, rot-gut wine, cheap jug wine; refused to leave his apartment, even to wash, put on fresh clothes. He was feverish, he had no appetite. Now the raw sewage was backing up on him. Stay away he warned me but I would not. I took advantage of his illness, his weakness; every day, twice daily, I climbed the outside stairs at the rear of Vernor Matheius's building where the door might be locked against me and no amount of pleading could induce Vernor to open it, or the door might be unlocked, might swing open when I pushed against it and an odor of defeat and fury would fill my nostrils so that my instinct was to flee even as, stubbornly, I would not. Why! Why d' you come here when I don't want you was Vernor's silent accusation. As I pleaded, in silence taking his hand and lifting it, the sweaty unwashed palm, to my cheek. I've told you: I can love enough for us both.
Through that long winter and into the spring there'd been a flu epidemic in upstate New York. Vernor had boasted of being immune to such weakness, but at last he succumbed; joking that he'd been poisoned at the Brass Rail. Within a week he'd lost so much weight I could see his breastbone sharp as the edge of a shovel outlined through his filthy shirt when he lay flat on his back; I saw that his cheekbones had grown sharper, his eyes were sunken and glowed meanly as the candlelit eyes of a deranged Hallowe'en pumpkin. I was frightened for him. I worried he would starve himself to death out of spite like those recluses we'd hear of sometimes in the countryside of my childhood, who hadn't enough to eat during the winter or were too poor or too proud or too stubborn or too deranged to ask neighbors for help. Of the martyred Medgar Evers whose assassin had not yet been named Vernor said That's what happens when you step into history: history grinds you flat beneath its boot heel. The remark seemed to give him pleasure.
There were times when he seemed delirious; there were times when he ranted, cursed; once when I let myself in, with a key I'd appropriated from him, I was shocked to see that he'd thrown books and papers onto the floor in disgust, he'd torn down the likenesses of Socrates and Descartes; in the smelly little bathroom, it looked as if he'd urinated onto the likeness of Wittgenstein with his enigmatic bamboo cane. Trying to lower his window shades he'd dislodged them from their rollers and they dangled in strips and shreds I could not repair, and so I removed them; there was broken glass underfoot, there were cigarette butts, ashes; the room stank of beer and cheap jug wine and of smoke and of scorched fabric; there were scattered burn marks in the bedclothes; I worried that Vernor would set fire to his bed, burn himself and his fellow tenants in the night.
Let me love you. Let my love heal you.
Vernor Matheius heard me perfectly well. He fell into a fit of coughing and lay his head on his arms, on the kitchen table.
On his ransacked desktop the portable typewriter had been shoved back against the wall. There were gouge marks in the wallpaper. A sheet of paper looked to have been torn out of the typewriter carriage, and on this paper there were numerous XXX's and a single legible paragraph-
Axiom: if (following LW) the propositional sign is assigned a protective "relation" to the world does it therefore follow that the use of the perceptible sign of a proposition (spoken or written) is a projection of a possible situation? (See LW, 3.11)
I understood that "LW" was Ludwig Wittgenstein; the rest of the argument, which must have been part of the treatise Vernor was writing for his doctoral dissertation, was lost to me. Nor did I dare to ask Vernor about it since he'd have been furious to know I was looking through his papers. My task was to care for him, and this I did with energy, resolution, and good humor; I would not fall sick myself but would be his nurse, and he would see how I loved him, and did not judge him; for you don't judge the sick, you nurse them back to health; you nurse them back to sanity; you nurse them back to their true selves. I brought food to Vernor's apartment to prepare for him; on his sickest days he hadn't any appetite, food disgusted him and he could tolerate only soup; a thin broth of a soup in which I cooked sliced vegetables; I
hummed and smiled as I cooked in his tiny kitchen; it was an old European tale in which a love potion is mixed with a man's food; a maiden who adores him mixes her blood with his food, he eats it and falls in love with her forever; I smiled thinking I would secretly cut my finger on a paring knife and let a drop or two of my blood fall into Vernor's soup; so powerful was my fantasy, I would come to think I'd actually done such a bizarre thing; perhaps in fact I did it; but no crude wishful magic would work on a man like Vernor Matheius. I had to be content with being tolerated in his presence; I had to take pride in what he might eat that I'd prepared; I convinced him to eat a piece of whole-grain toast; I convinced him to drink a half-glass of orange juice; I sat close beside him at the little kitchen table and watched as he ate, close as an anxious mother; Vernor's face was drawn and haggard; he looked like a man suffering from grief; grief indistinguishable from rage; rage indistinguishable from grief; he wore a sweat-soaked undershirt, and sat slump-shouldered, his hard little muscles prominent in his upper arms; his jaws were covered in an ugly black stubble; fascinating to me, every harsh breath he drew; when I held him, to help him stand, or walk, I was disturbed to feel his erratic heartbeat; I was panicked thinking he might be seriously ill; if I suggested taking him to a doctor, or to the emergency room of the hospital a block away, he cursed me; he removed his glasses, drew his forearm roughly across his eyes, and cursed me. Sick to death, my guts are sick, fuck you leave me alone can't you see I don't want you, your cunt, the color of your skin repulse me.
I waited to become sick like Vernor. In his bathroom mirror my eyes shone with jaundice; the interior of my mouth was coated with something clammy and sickly sweet; Vernor's sickness eased into me like something clammy and sickly sweet; I did not resist, I entered into his delirium; if he didn't repel me, I lay beside him in his bed gripping his bony hand; it was a big hand, the knuckles prominent, though bony; I curved his fingers around mine so it seemed as if he was gripping my hand; as in the Brass Rail he'd boldly nudged his knuckles against my breast; my breathing quickened, or slowed, with Vernor's breathing; like carved funerary figures we lay together in a suspension that might have looked, from a distance, to a neutral observer, like peace, tranquility; the aftermath of love.
Why why are you doing this?
Because I am strong enough. Because I can love enough for both.
In his soft, soiled underwear Vernor Matheius lay on his couch like a fallen prince amid soiled sheets; he smoked cigarettes I'd had to buy for him, despite my disapproval; he scattered ashes like seed everywhere. When one day in June, a hazy early-summer heat suffusing the apartment, he rose to stagger into the bathroom to shower, not wanting me to help him, I thought This is the turn, he will be himself again. (As if I weren't terrified of that self.) Six days and six nights had passed since the onset of Vernor's sickness; seven days and seven nights since the murder of Medgar Evers; and still Evers's murderer went unidentified; for Evers's murderer was ubiquitous in the South, and elsewhere; in that pattern of crazed accelerating cruelty and violence against civil rights activists that would culminate in April 1968 in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; in that future blowing toward us like a dark, ravening wind. When you step into history, history's boot steps on you. I did not think at the time If you fail to step into history, history erases you for at the time I was thinking only of Vernor Matheius and of his health; while he was in the bathroom showering I began hurriedly to clean the apartment; stripped the soiled bedclothes from the bed with the intention of taking them to a Laundromat; I'd taken a few of Vernor's things to a Laundromat near the hospital a few days before, and brought them back undetected; when Vernor finished his shower, I would add his towels; I would add as many of Vernor's clothes as he would allow. I found a broom in a kitchen closet and swept the littered floor; emptied dustpans of cigarette butts, ashes, crumpled papers and bits of dried food, dirt and hairs into a brimming wastebasket; collected the empty beer cans and wine jugs; trundled the trash downstairs to a Dumpster at the rear of the lot. As if I live here. I live here now, with Vernor Matheius in apartment 2D. Now that Vernor seemed to trust me, now I might stay with him through the night; I had the key to his apartment and could come and go as I wished; I wished I would encounter another tenant of the building so that I might have exchanged greetings in a neighborly fashion, another young woman, a young wife, or one of the foreign graduate students. The midday sun blazed overhead; my hair burst into flame; I was made to think of Nietzsche's mad prophet Zarathustra, and of Zarathustra's blazing noontide. What is wan? cries Zarathustra. A ball of wild snakes. Despite the heat of the sun I was energized, excited; I took happiness in such simple physical tasks as hauling trash, sweeping and cleaning floors. I saw the grinning teeth of those who despised me. Negro-lover! Nigger-lover! I laughed, and ran back upstairs where the door was opened, as I'd left it.
Vernor was still showering. I listened outside the bathroom door and heard his thin tuneless whistling beneath the sound of the shower and I thought He is himself again. I set about restoring order on his desk; that desk I'd so admired, now strewn with papers; except for the Olivetti portable everything had been knocked about; I thought I would rearrange scattered pages (from Vernor's treatise?) into their original neat stacks; but I failed to make sense of them, and gave up. I opened a filing cabinet drawer, curious about what was inside; these cabinets were made of metal painted a pale green, but badly scratched; Vernor had bought them, he'd boasted, for five dollars apiece at a fire-bankruptcy sale of office supplies; the drawer was crammed with manila folders containing typed papers and note cards; some of the folders were meticulously clean, and others were strangely soiled as if they'd been stepped on. You should not, should not be doing this, this is wrong a small frightened voice cautioned me but I saw no harm in glancing through the folders; a treasure trove of old, yellowing papers; neatly typed outlines of books of the Bible including such obscure books as Jeremiah, Hosea, Philippians, Thessalonians as well as most of the books of the New Testament; in a large and passionate hand not immediately recognizable as Vernor's were written in columns the names of magical-biblical figures-Moses, Jacob, Joshua, Elisha, Job, Jesus, Mark, Paul, Mary Magdalene-as if these names belonged to individuals known to Vernor Matheius. In other folders, farther back in the drawer, were more notes and outlines; theology, philosophy, ethics; most of these written in a bold, rapid hand, no more than a dozen lines to a page, as if thoughts had spilled out of Vernor's teeming mind onto the paper, scarcely contained in language. I smiled to see his college papers: neatly typed, held together with rust-stained paper clips; with such titles as "The 'Problem of Evil' in Milton's Paradise Lost" "The Concept of 'Virtue' in Epicureanism," "The Concept of 'Mind' in Bertrand Russell"; if there were red marks on these papers, the marks indicated enthusiasm, praise; Vernor Matheius's grades were uniformly A and A+. I tried to summon up a younger, vulnerable Vernor Matheius, an undergraduate hoping to impress his professors; how difficult to imagine arrogant Vernor Matheius perceiving himself in a position inferior to anyone. Then staring into another folder I'd carelessly opened, at what appeared to be razored-out pages from magazines and books; an essay on Plato's Laws removed from an issue of The Journal of Philosophical Inquiry, Fall 1961; a chapter from a study of Spinoza; a chapter from a study of Kant; several diagrammed pages from an essay on symbolic logic; had Vernor Matheius removed these from library materials? But Vernor wouldn't do such a thing. Not him. Pushed against the back of the drawer was a folder containing packets of much-folded letters and creased snapshots; some of these were in black and white, the rest in bright color; I found myself staring at brown-skinned strangers, a family; and there was a young, boyish Vernor Matheius in their midst; sixteen or seventeen, tall and lean and smiling; and in other snapshots he was perceptibly older, with a thin moustache, still tall and lean but without expression standing beside a much shorter, plump, happily smiling young woman with a baby in her arms and a boy of about two beside her clinging to her skirt; the young woman, I knew, was Vernor's wife, a good-looking woman in her mid-twenties with full fleshy lips and a wide pug nose; the little boy was cocoa-colored, with Vernor's beautiful long-lashed eyes and narrow face; the snapshot blazed with color, having been taken in a grassy outdoor setting, a wood frame cottage in the background; flowering fruit trees, dogwood and forsythia; there was a strange, stark, preacherly look to Vernor in his tight dark suit, long-sleeved white shirt and dark, tightly knotted tie; the very tie Vernor had worn with his new silk vest at the Brass Rail; his glasses weren't wire-rimmed and round but black plastic and oval; he stood slightly apart from his happily smiling little family and he was staring moodily at the camera and beyond the camera as if already Vernor Matheius was edging out of the frame, planning his escape. May 1959. So he's married, has been married. Has a family, young children. He lied.
I meant to replace the snapshots but my hand trembled. Several fell onto the floor. When I groped for them, my vision blurred. My love for Vernor Matheius was contracting like an outstretched hand contracting into a small, hard fist.
There was a sudden swift sound behind me: Vernor's bare feet slapping against the floor. I felt the angry vibrations of his footsteps before I turned to see him, partly dressed, in trousers and undershirt, rushing at me. He grabbed my arm, shoved me away from the opened filing cabinet; he slammed the drawer shut, and cursed me-"God damn you, Anellia! Get out of here!" His face was contorted in fury, and in chagrin; it was the chagrin I would remember; the lenses of his glasses were faintly clouded with steam from the bathroom; his skin had darkened ferociously with blood. To protect myself, I pushed at Vernor's hand; he pushed back at me, catching the side of my head with his fist; I felt the sharp, hard edge of the filing cabinet cutting into my thigh; blindly I half-crawled away, stumbling to my feet and ran for the door, which opened off the tiny kitchen; Vernor didn't pursue me, but cursed after me as I ran panting and sobbing on the stairs, sick with guilt, and fear of what Vernor might do to me. I ran down the outdoor stairs and heard his voice above me, a furious lowered voice like a wail of grief. I pressed my hands over my ears to stifle-Get out of here don't ever come back God damn you! Fuck you! fuck you white bitch!
30
By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.
Pascal
At the foot of the wooden stairs. My thoughts beat like moths against a screen. I sat hunched, hugging my knees; staring out at the rain. Vernor Matheius had driven me away as you'd drive away a dog yet there I sat huddled at the foot of the wooden stairs at 1183 Chambers as night came on.
How long I'd been there, I could not have said. Night now, and steadily raining. A steamy mist rose from the pavement. I was sick with grief and chagrin of my own; I'd run away from Vernor Matheius and wandered in the rain and at last returned, hair dripping in my face, my clothes soaked, I was stunned, I was sick, yet a part of my brain continued to operate as always What did you expect, wasn't it freedom from him you wanted. From a distance came the sonorous tolling of the bell tower of the Music School on its drumlin-hill; Chambers Street was on lower ground, in a virtual gulch; the air was heavier here, more viscous and oppressive; the mist rising from the pavement had become fog; my face and throat ached as if I'd been crying, but I didn't remember crying; tears are a child's desperate ploy, and futile. I thought I will never cry again, no one will ever have the power to hurt me again; and this would be so. I felt Vernor's hard fingers grabbing my arm, the hard blow of his fist against my head; I saw again the man's look of rage, disgust, yet guilt; something like shame; I'd peered too deeply into his soul for him to forgive me; I'd gone too far; he had loved me or had almost loved me or (I would tell myself) had begun to allow himself to consider that he might, in his way, love me; or that he might have begun to allow himself to consider that he might allow me to love him without irony; and I'd destroyed that, I'd destroyed my own meager hope of happiness, I'd destroyed the purity of my own love for him; I'd destroyed Anellia, who was such a fool. The idolator is always a fool. It was Anellia's wet hair dripping into her face, Anellia's lean arms, lean-muscled legs pressed tight against her shivering body; though the season was summer by the calendar, the air was cold; the rain was cold; Anellia whose soul quavered at the brink of extinction; about to be sucked into the void, which was Nothingness; the bliss of Nothingness; for what was there after all, as Vernor Matheius had once wittily declaimed, except atoms-and-the-void at the start of human time, which was the start of human thinking, and that effort of human futility to which the name Philosophy has been assigned. Yet I saw with a stab of certainty what I would do: I would return to my room and toss my costume-clothes into a heap, my cheaply glamorous secondhand things purchased with such misguided hope; I would cut these things into pieces with a scissors; as once I'd cut my long, bristling hair; to hurt oneself sometimes is a balm; to hurt oneself sometimes is the only way of healing; debridement was a term of Vernor Matheius's, and it would be a term of my own; even the silver belt I would tear at until its silver medallions broke apart and clattered to the floor; my heart beat hard with the certainty of all I would do, and would not regret doing; I would step into history, as Vernor had scorned; I would join demonstrators marching and chanting and waving handmade signs; I would join CORE, I would join SANE; I would find a way of bringing my intense inner life, my questing life, into balance with history; I would be fearless, or give that impression; I would be fearless, though frightened; I would march with Negroes and whites and confront the race-hatred of my race; I would expose my heart, as I would expose my body; I would make myself vulnerable, I would expiate my guilt; I would remake myself another time, empowered by loss, grief. No longer Anellia. Waiting to see who I might be, after Anellia.
And there came at last Vernor Matheius's voice above me. And it was a voice of sobriety, and not reproach; a voice still lowered with emotion; a raw voice, a voice of hurt and dismay. "Anellia, is that you?" A pause, a beat. My heart continued to beat calmly with the certainty of what I would do, and what I would not do; what I would not ever do again; and I didn't turn to look up the steep steps at Vernor Matheius. I heard him mutter, "Jesus!" I heard him descend the stairs slowly, like a man just awakened from sleep; he was breathing quickly, audibly. When on the step above me he paused, I had a childish fear he would kick me; and very possibly that thought ran through his head, too; but he said, "Anellia, you shouldn't be here. You'll only be hurt." I might have said I've already been hurt. But I said nothing. Vernor stepped down to sit beside me, with a sigh; a sigh like a shudder; stone cold sober the man was, and shaky; I had to ease aside to make room for him, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for us to sit together here in the dark, in the rain; Vernor lit a cigarette and expelled smoke through his nostrils, and after a moment said, thoughtfully, "I don't have a black soul. Because I don't have a black soul, I don't have any soul at all." I said, "Vernor, I thought you didn't believe in 'soul.' I thought you didn't believe in personal identity, history." He said, "I don't. The way a colorblind person doesn't believe in color because he hasn't experienced it." There was bemusement in this remark, and melancholy; a melancholy I'd never heard in Vernor Matheius before. I said, "You have a family, I guess? Young children?" and he said, "No longer," and I said, "What do you mean, 'no longer'?" and he shrugged and said nothing; and my voice quavered with indignation I hadn't known I would feel, since the initial feeling I'd had, seeing the big-boned smiling woman in the snapshot, had been jealousy, "You left your wife and children? Left where? Where are they? How could you do such a thing, Vernor?" and Vernor said quietly, "It's none of your concern who or what I've left behind me or who or what I am. Or what you or anyone else expects of me." And I said nothing, for this was so; this statement of fact could not be contested; I said nothing, but I didn't acquiesce; and Vernor sucked at his cigarette and released clouds of stinging smoke which was the smell of guilt; and it crossed my mind that I would not miss this: the smoke, the stink of cigarettes, my poor father's smoking habit, my father's mysterious dying, the perverse romance of addiction; I would not miss this at all. We watched a car pass in the rain, it must've been a police squad car with a red light on its roof, driving fast along Chambers splashing through puddles; there were rivulets of rainwater rushing down Chambers Street, the steep hill from the university hospital complex. And at last Vernor said in a flat voice, a voice from which all pretension had drained, "My ancestors from Dahomey were tribal people, they were captured and brought to North America as slaves in the 1780's; but they'd been slave traders themselves. They'd captured and sold other black tribes as slaves. This was a secret imparted to me by my mother's grandfather, a minister, when I was twenty-one years old. This was our handed-down secret, handed to me. That my ancestors, his ancestors, had sold other black Africans, other tribes, to white European slavers." I turned now to look at Vernor; I looked at him in astonishment; for this was a man out of whose mouth revelations emerged, and always unexpected. I had believed I could predict him at last, and yet I could not have predicted this; never could I have predicted the sadness in his voice, and the resignation. As if, for him too, something had ended. Yet there came his wry humor, his sidelong grin and squint as if (after all) he and I were allies in this predicament; this problem; as if Vernor Matheius were an intellectual puzzle we might contemplate together as colleagues and attempt to solve; like those students of philosophy devoted to logical analysis; enjoined in a singular quest for truth which is the philosopher's life's work. He said bitterly, "But why judge them? My putative ancestors? They were human beings and like all human beings they were cruel, exploitative, xenophobic; they were primitive people in a tribal society in which members of other tribes aren't perceived as fully human; you can kill them, you can sell them into slavery, you can practice genocide like the Germans of the Third Reich, and someone will absolve you-it's 'natural,' it's 'Nature'; it's instinct. So my ancestors sold their brother and sister Africans into slavery and they flourished for a while until it came their turn to be slaves. White men's trading ships sailed from Liverpool to the west coast of Africa and traded textiles, arms, and other cargo for black men and women; the ship sailed across the Atlantic to Jamaica where the black men and women were traded for sugar, which was brought back to England to be sold; for what would the English do without sugar in their tea and pastries; what would the white man's civilization be without sugar in their bloodstream; again the ship sailed from Liverpool to the west coast of Africa and loaded up with black men and women; and so on, and so forth; it was a prosperous business, these were boom times, everyone flourished except those with the bad luck to be branded 'slaves.' " Vernor spoke with the mildest irony; this was a recitation of facts, of history; yet every syllable was damning; every syllable was an outcry of pain. Hesitantly I touched his arm, and said, "Vernor, you aren't your ancestors any more than I am my ancestors," even as my voice faltered, for maybe this wasn't true; and Vernor said practicably, "Then I'm no one. I don't know who the hell I am." I said, "But why should it matter?
Why-now?" For hadn't we faith in pure rationality, pure logic and language pruned of all sentiment, all tribal history; wasn't the dream of philosophy possible, even now? Vernor said, for even at such a moment Vernor Matheius was one to have the final word, "Yes, why should it matter? Yet it does." How strange to be sitting beside this man on these wooden stairs smelling faintly of rot, at such a time; gazing out toward the rain; a couple seated together gazing out into the rain; they live upstairs and have come outside for fresh air, the man smoking and the woman seated close beside him; a harsh, sibilant rain blowing along the pavement beneath streetlights, with a look of antic excitement. Another time we heard the remote sonorous tolling of the Music School bell tower; more chimes than I could count, it must have been midnight. How strange, how uncanny and how wonderful, what elation flooded my small gnarled heart on the eve of my twentieth birthday as I sat beside Vernor Matheius on the stairs at the rear of the shabby stucco building at 1183 Chambers Street, Syracuse, New York on the rain-swept night of June 18, 1963.
If you'd driven by, and noticed that couple, wondering who they were, they were us.