Page 78 - Vol V. #8

Monstrous Men (continued from preceding page) same.”
And so he had been, but not by me. I saw his
slight, distant figure again, saw his hesitation J laughed, and L dismissed her, bade her go laun- when he heard the crowd filling the street, the
dering or marketing. shouting and running, the breaking of glass and
L waited for a minute or so, then took my hand,
said, “Remember we used to live up this high?”
Even if your legs had forgotten the stairs, you
sensed the height. She prompted, “When we
were young?” “Monstrous men,” L said softly. “I spent my life
“Of course.” I hadn’t thought of the apartment on
K Street for a long time. I couldn’t argue with her. I pondered the kind-
“I used to watch you.”
nesses I’d tried to do throughout my life; they worked, but were all somehow solipsistic, and whimsical.
“I know.”
“You only wanted to frighten him,” L accepted. “It was a child’s wish.”
“I remember your music lessons.”
“Oh? Well, I remember you painting.” I thought I did, anyway.
“And children are monstrous.” I remembered them all, my genii, the spontaneous cruelty in their everyday gestures and words, but it wasn’t the real cruelty they would have learned, had they grown up with their eyes about them. “With- out really meaning it.”
“What about your last lesson?”
“What about it?” I remembered the claustropho- bia and the clutter. I recalled a trace of quinine on Mr Z’s breath, rusting buttons on his jacket.
“Anyway, look at you.” L laughed, slapped my knee. “Here you are, carrying on Mr Z’s good
“What did your teacher do to you,” L asked gen- tly, “that made you run to the window, watch the street and wait for him, and impale the poor man with a garden spade?”
work.”
I remembered that, too. The pause I made had gone on long enough when I said, “I just wanted to frighten him.”
I had often recalled Hermes in the Eagle Café, sip- ping carefully at his coffee under L’s portrait
of the president. I could never get a picture of
his whole face, just his eyes, anxious, exposed, whereas it was my eyes that were exposed, by his fingers, for the last time.
L was silent, but I had to assume she was about to ask why.
“He told me I’d never be a musician.” It was a lame excuse for an act with such an unfortunate ending. “And that was all I wanted to be. When he told me that, I never felt so frightened and alone in my life. I wanted him to feel frightened too.”
L told me he was killed by precipitation from the top of the palace, not for mislaying his glasses, but for forgetting to cancel the musicians on the night of the unveiling, once the president’s agents had discovered L’s ridiculous plan to show the world the father of her child. He could have done
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the thump of stones, pistols going off. He started, and dropped his cane, and lurched away from the wall to find it, leading him into the path of the spade, which I’d meant only to clatter next to him.
loving monstrous men.”
The Face of Genius