Yvonne's shrink was not a
shrink. Though there was some support to the use of that title, she used it when
speaking of her time away from the regular world on Tuesday afternoons so she
wouldn't have to explain or describe her hours with Felix Lord.
Everyone needs someone in an
overwhelmingly, twitchingly, dangerous and nervous planet with whom they can
feel both at home and yet inferior to. Otherwise there'd be no highest
friendship, there'd be no distance more for talent to arc and try to ungap. And
there'd be no comfort gained without a sense of distance more to go, greater
understanding to be attained. With Felix and Yvonne, with no politic to their
relationship other than the infinite spiral of metaphysics, there was never a
damning bottom line.
It was a
sweet and honorable fear Yvonne had of Felix Lord. She cherished their Tuesday
afternoons. Together they collected the gleaming warm epiphanies. They washed
them clean carefully together, and sorted them. They admired all the pretty
patterns of the world, lingeringly tracing the designs of accident and scheme in
the history and habit and genius of mankind. Together they held up the
hard-yet-frail truths of man and that which transcends man, and they would
expertly tap these truths, and then together smile upon hearing the ring of
truth. It was nothing she could explain to Hal or Greg or anyone, this
relationship. "It's like possessing a grand set of heavenly china, gathered
piece by piece, this seven years of knowing Felix Lord," she thought as she
entered his building this Tuesday afternoon. "Imagine having to explain that to
Maggie Howard!" And she gave a little shudder of frisson metaphysique.
As she rode the elevator up to
Lord's penthouse, she thought of the beginnings of the friendship. Lord had
asked to see her poetry one night at a party she had given after another guest
mentioned to him that she wrote. She had been twenty-eight at the time, bogged
down in a depression that comes at such an age in such a woman who in her
ambition despairs of every succeeding. In the world's eyes, Yvonne had been a
success for a long time, but the directing of a major play hadn't come, and she
was entrapped in the day-to-day petty play with Hal and Gabriel and Maggie.
While she flitted around performing in the role of non-depressed, charming
hostess, Felix Lord had sat through the party in her study reading her poetry.
After all her other guests had
left that evening, Felix had lingered. At first Yvonne was elated to discuss her
poems. And the world. Then she had grown wary when an hour was passed and the
first pleasure was passed. She had been stung so often over the poems in the
past, and over her metaphysical bent that she had grown withdrawn about such
matters in recent time. She grew sleepy and irritated that Felix stayed so long,
and upset that she divulged as many secrets at least as sentences she spoke. But
somehow after a bit more she had grown merry and sad at once, excited and rested
at once, like a child and a woman at their best all at one time.
That first time they talked and
every time since, if she said something wild, he would interpret it as the storm
side of wisdom; if she said something stupid, he would juxtapose with quoting
something like it from literature and the sum of the two statements equaled wit.
And so on. If she grew melodramatic, he would laugh appreciatively at her talent
with the form of farce; if she grew tedious, he grew meticulous. And so on. And
it was never predictable. And she never bothered to anticipate him. Ten minutes
into their first talk she learned it was impossible. He was a constant source of
delightful surprise. Their time together was an emancipation that way, because a
human word was almost never spoken that Yvonne wasn't expecting.
And not only was Felix
unexpected, but she herself never knew what she was going to say in his
presence. There was no script. There were no rules. Yet it always had form and
style and art to be with Felix. The play they played changed constantly, all the
universe was their stage, and even the speed of light and gravity were constants
only if they chose. Even black holes are not threats when parallel universes
have poems and plays and laughter somewhere. If Yvonne were to fall through the
trap doors of the universe while she was with Felix, she felt certain she would
land somewhere lovely. Like the stage of the Paradise Theatre, perhaps.
She had just amused herself with
this image when she knocked on his door. "Or lovely like his rooms," she though,
as the door fell open.
"Hello,
Yvonne," he said. "Come in!" His eyes twinkled. He was the only one she knew
outside of books and besides contact lens wearers whose eyes really twinkled.
And he laughed when she entered, as if finding her at his door, in his foyer,
were a delight of some sort quite beyond Yvonne's range. She knew that if she
were to find someone such as herself upon opening her own door, she would drop
dead from the responsibility.
"Well, Feel, ya want to hear the soap opera, read these poems, discuss something
like the way the crescent moon cups Venus every fifteen years, or analyze the
vicissitudes of presidential wearings of top hats at inaugurations?" she asked,
nervous and shocky from lack of sleep and trying to concoct ceremony on the spot
in order to disguise her restless and unhappy state, as well as her delight at
being here.
Felix laughed again,
somewhat more gravely. "Come on. I'll make tea, and hear the soap opera," he
said as he led her to the kitchen.
Felix had nothing else ever that
Yvonne knew of but tea and lemon and sugar and honey and real cream and a tea
service and a tea kettle and cookies and cheese and fruit and articles to wash
up with in his kitchen. Yvonne was as astonished as ever as she spoke of the
weekend and watched Felix open cupboards, drawers and refrigerator and there was
pristine space surrounding these few items. He must eat elsewhere she
conjectured for the three hundred and sixty-fifth time--for it was that many
times that she had been there in seven years of Tuesdays. "That's a year of
Tuesdays!" she exclaimed to herself while she was going on out loud about
Maggie. "The thing is," she told Felix, "in someone like Maggie Howard who isn't
given to imagination and who doesn't understand that macabre, grisly images are
part of the package as sure as the exquisite visions--well, for Maggie it's
pathological to picture Gabriel in the grave."
She was saying this, but she was
wondering about Felix's existence. She was wondering if he had other visitors
regularly like herself. She was wondering where he ate. Until recent months when
he had begun to come out of retirement and started working on the Paradise, what
did he spend his time doing? It was part of the inviolate nature of their
relationship that she would never ask such questions. Just as she wanted their
time totally private, she wouldn't have asked him about his time and habits. And
yet she always talked about her life, as she was doing now; but her life was
always rendered unreal, fodder only for intellectual speculation when she was
with Felix. She had the impression that her real life was Tuesday afternoons.
That here and now was where she lived.
"Don't you think maybe you're
patronizing Maggie? Doesn't every person have unlimited access to the realm of
the imaginative? Not as a constant habitation of course, but when something
upsetting happens, can't it give rise to almost any form of vision, idea?" Felix
was saying, as Yvonne suppressed a yawn of true physical tiredness.
"Of course, that's my point. It
isn't that the image of Gabriel is so unusual, it's just that it's unaccustomed
for Maggie, and therefore doubly horrifying," Yvonne defended, but she was
wondering where Felix slept, a question brought on by her own sleepiness. While
they talked she walked mentally through his apartment.
There were four rooms other than
the kitchen. The dining room was an art gallery with a Louis XIV dining suit.
Felix had a Picasso, a Renoir, and a Da Vinci, among other paintings sketches
there. The livingroom was a garden zoo. It held dozens of aquaria and terraria
containing fishes and reptiles and amphibia. He had seventeen tropical birds
screeching and chattering as they flew between and perched in potted trees.
Palms, banana trees, etc. And there were miniature sheep and goats and ponies
there, and a monkey or two. The livingroom ceiling which soared twenty-two feet
above the floor had massive skylights which could be raised electronically on
suitably tropical summer times. Elsewhere in the apartment there were two rooms
that were expected to be bedrooms, Yvonne supposed. One was a library, plastered
with walls of books. The other room was the most wondrous room of all. It was
inhabited by one enormous chair, covered in elegantly worn plum colored leather.
This room, all 18' by 20' of it, held nothing more.
"What do you do in here?" Yvonne
had asked about the chair room upon her first tour of the apartment. "What is it
for?"
"Why it's not for anything.
It's for nothing at all. See these ivory walls? See the cherry wood floor? See
the stars?" Felix asked, pointing at the inventory, that included the view out
the window, item by item. "I sit in this chair and see all sorts of things here.
Much more than in the rest of the rooms, or anywhere else. Sometimes I see
nothing. Nothing at all."
For one
split second Yvonne had taken him superficially. Took him to mean that he saw no
imagined thing or no wonderfulness in the plain good paint job in the room, or
the fine floor, or the remarkable, city rare but always splendid stars. But then
she realized with a shudder and a whole new bank account of awe for Felix Lord
that he meant he could achieve a state of nothingness. "The Zen Room," Yvonne
partially wanted to call it, but there was something more universal and more
peculiar even than the highest attainments of any religion here. To attach
notions of religion to it would miss the point. Probably Felix Lord could
materialize and disappear at will, it had occurred to Yvonne on that first tour.
She might have been terrified, might even have collapsed upon thinking it. But
she had looked at Felix who smiled. And the thought became just a wispy
impression that she could take out in her thoughts and fondle, or put away as
needed for sanity's sake. The important thing about Felix, the truly
extraordinary thing about him was that he was happy. And as for his chair room:
"I sit here and doze," he had
said, by way of concluding the matter.
"Felix, if you ever doze, atom
bomb explosions are the equivalent of comatose states." And Felix had laughed at
her goofy comparison.
"Comatose
states like as in 'United States'? The state of the USSR?" he countered, leading
her back to their first Tuesday tea party.
Now on this Tuesday afternoon,
she concluded her mental tour of his rooms with wondering if he even lived here.
Now the tea was almost ready, and Yvonne was leaning like a gossip into her
telling of tales that life had spun since she had seen Felix on Friday at the
Paradise. But what she was doing other than dispelling this duty to story, other
than tracing his apartment, what she was really doing with this time was
something different. It wasn't another thought process going on. It was a
photographic process. She was taking impressions of Felix from every angle and
storing these in her heart.
Yvonne was madly yet extraordinarily silently in love with Felix Lord. She had
recurring dreams. In one dream she sat on a green hill. Snow would start to fall
and Yvonne would know that it would eventually fill the dream. This was an
utterly silent dream. Yvonne would begin to freeze to death, and so feel sleepy.
But she fought the urge by erotically reveling in the silence and the beauty of
the snow. Sooner or later Felix would come walking up the hill and sit down
beside her. She would lie back in the snow and die. Felix would rise when she
was dead and continue his walk. Another dream was set in spring. That is, the
world was forever spring, and her employment in this world was to follow Felix
around making sure his shoulders and hair were sprinkled with blossoms. And
overall, waking or sleeping, what Yvonne wanted to do for Felix was walk around
after him or run in front of him, making sure the world was tidied of its
crassness as he went. And yet here she was, showering him with every fetid
detail of her crass soap opera life. Once she had apologized for this habit, but
he brushed it off as not being an offense at all, saying, "But this is only
another example of the mundane and the sublime, the grotesque and the exquisite,
the paradoxes of the earth which reconcile themselves only in art and dreams. So
what happened next?"
And it was
all those "what happened next"s, and all those little microscopic-minute
corkscrew thoughts they shared that enthralled Yvonne. It was transference and
not love, she knew on a pragmatic, prosaic intellectual level. It was avoidance.
Rather than face life, face herself, Yvonne insisted on loving Felix Lord. And
Felix had the total and absolute goods on her. He knew everything there was to
know about her, down to atomic detail. It was macro-politics and micro-politics,
here really, rather than being apolitical. But there was no question of mixing
the dynamics of her relationship with Felix with the mundane politics of the
rest of her life. It was inconceivable to unite the two worlds. She would just
have to maintain her separate worlds. She couldn't cast Felix into her crass
life, and she wouldn't live without being in love with him, no matter how much
it resembled classical patient-psychiatrist transference. Better to transfer
than to not love at all, she had long before decided. Better full out
schizophrenic than to miss one of Felix's cosmic bon mots.
She did yearn for sex with Felix.
But it was impossible, she knew, or felt. Certainly not because there was
anything wrong with Felix. But because the fine intensities that were in him and
in the air and in her while they were together somehow carried the message that
it was absolutely and incontrovertibly forbidden. If she was ever close to
suggesting sex to him, some force kept the words from getting onto her tongue.
She had long given up that proposal. And yet all of their meetings were fraught
with great sexual energy. And she doted on his appearances.
It was those appearances that
Yvonne was now dreaming of even while she stood in Felix's kitchen, while he
peered into the steaming pot of steeping tea, while she raved insipidly, while
she also each second took several photographs of him for the heart.
"So you're not going to do Paul's
play? Surely it means more to do the play than to use it as a device to get rid
of Greg?" Felix asked, leading her to the dining room, tea tray balanced on one
hand before him. "I don't understand. The play sounds perfect. Lovely, in fact."
"Oh it is! But it's too perfect,"
she said, helping him with the cups and cookies at the table.
"In this world, nothing's too
perfect," he said.
"That's just
the point. I'm sick to death of the soap operas. If I do Ruth, I'll be
stuck in that life. And I can't go on with Greg. You know that. So I just
combined the two things and I'm setting them adrift. Oh, it's not that
ruthless--"
"Book of Ruthless?"
Felix asked, whereupon Yvonne sputtered on a piece of cookie she had bitten
quickly when interrupted.
"Oh,
God! I'm deserting my family you mean?" she moaned after a laugh and then having
grown serious.
"No, no. It was a
simple pun. If it had any serious intention, it was more in response to the fact
that you are being too serious. You are not being ruthless. They'll survive. Hal
and Paul know what they're doing. And getting Greg a part is a fine gesture."
"Sort of a part-ing
gesture," Yvonne said.
"A role
over," Felix said.
"I'm putting
his ass in a cast and getting mine out of a sling," Yvonne said, and then they
both munched and sipped in silence for a while, almost embarrassed at how close
she had come with her joke to sexual terms.
"So what are you going to do?"
asked Felix after a bit.
"Felix!"
she exclaimed, her eyes Mary Pickford large. "I'm going to do your play!" And
when he opened his eyes very wide, raised his hands palms toward her, and shook
his head, she said in almost a sob, "Oh, Felix! We haven't been led up the
garden path on this thing?"
"I
talked with Adam Friday at the theater--you had run into him outside--and he..."
But just then the phone rang and Felix rose. "I'll tell you about Adam when I
get back. The main thing is that we have to be patient with him," he said, and
he went into the kitchen phone.
Yvonne tossed off a drink of tea like an ounce of whisky in a Bogart movie.
"Greg was right," she said. "There's no play."