MICHAEL BRODSKY
231
lady of the manor. What is there to solve, I wondered, knowing well
what was to be solved, or rather, what could replace plausibly the
placeholder X in the sentence, X has problems
to
solve. So she was
taking me seriously, all those chords faintly dissonant on the keyboard
of infirmity were beginning to resonate. Though I always made a point
of emphasizing my infirmities, I resented when someone took me
seriously. I preferred they hear them as symptoms of my humility,
noblesse oblige. Problems, she answered my unspoken thoughts.
Could I assure her that to speak of my problems was to volatilize them
directly. They were real, most real , when they lurked, rabid for a
surveillance, condemnation, made to the measure of their intensity.
Once you begin to speak of your problems, or rather once you make a
blanket admission without stooping to the elaboration of particulars,
then your laceration becomes gratuitous, self-congratulatory, refresh–
ing, and much cheaper than all the therapies she was now peddling, in
behalf of the quacks with whom she had probably had sexual relations.
A shou lder bag was one of her recent acquisitions. Did she wear it to
affirm her new sense of freedom or in mimicry of my vocation and its
fatuous emblems. I have many problems, I said, conciliatory. But for
the duration of the speaking I was the speaking and nothing else, there
was no penetration to implied depths. I knew but did not say that after
the words, the volatilization, the vapors of the evasion hang heavy for
days, weeks, even years, like lianas on which strangle comfortably. I
told her that self-knowledge came only when you were describing
something a little to the right or to the left or up or down from
yourself. And you learned also when you erected scapegoats, living and
nonliving, and infringed on the rights you loaned them. That way
prohibitions seemed to come from them. And you beat your head
against their obduracy. There was nothing more suspect than outright,
downright, upright confession .
It
was always waiting for applause or
that look of revulsion that, to certain malefactors, is better than
applause. But you don't describe anything a little to the left or to the
right, either, she said. She looked away, blank, to emphasize her
absence of malice or glibness, her inexperience in the matter of verdicts
rendered. She emphasized the phrase, to the left or
to
the right, to
indicate it did not come from her, was alien to her, she was quoting me,
but she supposed I knew what I meant by,
to
the left or
to
the right. But
the phrase cou ld not be all that alien to her or how else to account for
the little revulsion that seaped into her tone. But I deliver mail, I said. I
describe my delivery to myself. You don't deliver because you want to,
you deliver to prove you can still deliver, that you were not depleted
