🎧 772: “I had never . . .”

60

“I HAD NEVER BEEN MUCH of a reader, and I didn’t know where to begin. I had certain advantages, though. I had time, and I had as many advisers as I chose to accept. As soon as I announced that I wanted to learn something, I had no end of willing instructors. At first, this seemed remarkable to me. You know—I thought why should they want to bother with me? But then I began to understand the motivation of some of those willing instructors. Some of them, it’s true, came to me out of an eagerness to teach—”
     “—and some out of an eagerness to be seen as being eager to teach—”
     “—some because they wanted to become known—”
     “—and some because they just wanted a few minutes in the limelight with you.”
     “Yes, certainly. Many, many of them came to put on a show. In most of my ‘tutorial sessions’ we were all performing. I played the part of student—”
     “—and each of them played, more or less successfully, the part of sage.”
     “Sage? No, not sage. I think that was already out of favor. More like ‘impassioned seeker after truth.’ Yes. Impassioned. I must say that all of them—no matter how much or how little they actually had to teach me that was reasonable, or thought-provoking, or useful—really got into the part. Without exception, they taught me with—passion.”
     “I’ll bet,” I said, looking for the easy laugh.
     “I know what you’re thinking, and of course you’re right. Quite a few of them felt compelled to extend their lectures into the bedroom—”
     “—where they found themselves inspired to—”
     Quickly, she cut me off with: “—to drive their points home to me, I guess you could say.”
     During the laughter she reached across me to take my glass, and in a whisper said, “Be very careful not to step on my lines, Peter. Watch me. Listen to me. You should be able to tell when I’m building up to something.”
     “Sorry,” I whispered.
     “No harm done,” she said. “Just be careful.”
     “Sure.”
     She pinched my cheek, affectionately.
     “Hey,” she said suddenly, as if reminded of something. “Let’s sit out on the porch for a while.”
     “Huh?” I said. “How come?”
     With a tilt of her head in the direction of the kitchen, beyond which was the back porch, she said, “We’ve been neglecting the people in the cheap seats.”
     “Oh,” I said. “Oh. Sure.”
     We picked up our glasses and walked to the back porch, where I settled onto a director’s chair and Ariane leaned on the railing and looked reflectively upward at the general area where she might have seen the moon if we hadn’t been inside a warehouse.
     “So for the last five years,” she said, in that way she had of simply continuing the conversation as if there had been no interruption, “I have spent most of my time sitting here reading, thinking, daydreaming, and that, I think, has strained my relationship with my audience.”
     As she spoke, there was an unmistakable finality in her voice. I had the impression that things were drawing to a close—and to judge from the silence, I think that everyone in the audience shared my impression. She swept her arm outward toward the seated crowd, and extended the gesture as part of a pirouette so that she indicated all the seats around her house, and, as she raised her arms and continued to turn, more, much more than the people assembled there, suggesting that she meant all the people who had ever attended her, however separated by time or distance, her whole vast audience, everyone.
     “They hated the thinking,” she said. She leaned over the railing to stare at a man sitting in the nearest row and asked, “Right, sir?”
     The man she singled out was not embarrassed, as I had expected him to be. He piped right up and said, “Right!”
     “They hate those inner struggles,” she said, to me. “There’s nothing to see. Who can tell whether what I’m thinking is interesting or not? They’ll stick with me for a while, even if it means watching me do nothing but brood, but they regard it as an investment that better pay off when all that cogitation and meditation comes a-bubblin’ to the surface and makes me kinda interestin’ to watch.”
     To the audience she said, “Whenever I seemed about to say or do something, then you fell silent, you stopped your twitching and coughing, and concentrated on me, just me, unblinking, eager, hopeful that whatever I said or did would be memorable, something that would become one of those ‘moments.’ Memorable moments. Something to talk about over dinner, after you left me. I know how some of you talk after you’ve left me. I’ve read those articles about viewing me. I subscribe to the fan magazines and those weird newsletters. I’ve watched your conversations about me on television. I know what you say about me. I know how you talk about me. I know what you want from me. Inevitably, the question comes up. Whenever two or three of you are gathered together in my name, one of you will ask, in a voice that betrays your envy in advance: ‘Were there any moments when you saw her?’
     “And the other one, if he’s honest, or not clever enough to make something up, will say, ‘No,’ and anyone can hear the disappointment. ‘She just sat there most of the time, reading a book, looking out the window, twisting her finger in her ear. I don’t know—thinking, moping, daydreaming—you couldn’t tell.’
     “I dislike having you expect that I’ll provide a moment for you. They shouldn’t be expected; you shouldn’t require them of me. And yet—”
     A complete change came over her. She became coquettish, the flirtatious Tootsie Koochikov.
     “—I love providing them. I’m delighted when I prove to be worth the price of admission.”
     Back to her normal voice.
     “I know that when I’m sitting and looking out the window, or reading, or thinking about what I’ve read—that this bores many of you. Viewed from out there, I don’t seem to be doing much, certainly nothing that’s likely to give you any moments, but there are moments, let me tell you. I’m having my moments quietly, privately, invisibly. Some of these moments come from the secret knowledge that I’m having them and hiding them from you. The last hiding places are the head and the heart, remember? If you look closely enough, you can see the flickering evidence of my hidden moments. You can see it in my eyes, or in a certain tendency of my lips to form a smile against my will.”

[to be continued]

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