Insomnia

on wrestling with the devil at three o'clock in the morning when you're in love--and no longer young

First It Was a broken toe, then a broken brow, and finally a broken heart. But, as I said somewhere, the human heart is indestructible. You only imagine it is broken. What really takes a beating is the spirit. But the spirit, too, is strong and, if one wishes, can be revived.

Anyway, it was always about three in the morning when the broken toe awakened me. "The witching hour"--because it was at that time I wondered most what she might be doing. She belonged to the night and the wee hours of the morning. Not the early bird that catches the worm but the early bird whose song creates havoc and panic. The bird that drops little scads of sorrow on your pillow.

At three A.M., when you're desperately in love and you're too proud to use the telephone, particularly when you suspect she is not there, you are apt to turn on yourself and stab yourself, like the scorpion. Or you write her letters you never mail, or you pace the floor, curse and pray, get drunk or pretend you will kill yourself.

After a time, that routine palls. If you are a creative individual--remember, at this point you are only a bloody shit!--you ask yourself if it might not be possible to make something of your anguish.

And that is precisely what happened to me on a certain day around three in the morning. I suddenly decided I would paint my anguish. Only now, as I write this, do I realize what an exhibitionist I must be. Not everybody, to be sure, recognizes the anguish I depicted in these crazy water colors. Some look upon them as right jolly, don't you know. And they are jolly in a heart-rending way. All those crazy words and phrases--what inspired them if not a twisted sense of humor? (Maybe it began long ago, with another one, the first one, for whom I bought my first bunch of violets, and as I was about to hand them to her they slipped from my hand and, accidentally [?], she stepped on them and crushed them.) Little things like this can be very disturbing when you are young.

Now, of course, I am no longer young--which makes everything all the more ridiculous. Except, mark my words, that where love is concerned, nothing, nobody, no situation can ever be utterly ridiculous. The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough of is love.

And so we have this reputedly famous old man (75, no less!) pursuing a young will-o'-the-wisp, the old man very romantic, the young songstress quite down to earth. She has to be down to earth, because it's her business to make men fall in love, do foolish things, buy expensive gowns and jewels. She lost her heart, not in San Francisco but in Shinjuku, Akasaka, Chiyoda and such places. That is to say, when she began earning her daily bread.

The old man (c'est à dire moi, monsieur Henri) had rehearsed the whole scene almost 40 years ago. He should have known the score. He should have been able to play it by ear. But he happens to belong to that tribe of human beings who never learn from experience. And he does not regret his weakness, for the soul does not learn from experience.

Ah, the soul! How many letters I wrote about the soul! I doubt if there is a word for it in her language. Heart they have, yes, but soul? (Anyway, so I would like to believe.) And yet, no sooner than I speak thus do I remember that it was her soul I fell in love with. Naturally, she did not understand. Only men, it seems, talk about soul. (It's a sure way of losing a woman, to talk about soul.)

And now we should talk a bit about the Devil, blessed be his name! For he had a part in it, as sure as I live. A very important part, I may add. (Forgive me if I sound like Thomas Mann!) The Devil, if I know him right, is the one who says, "Don't trust your instincts. Be wary of your intuitions!" He wants to keep us human--all too human. If you're headed for a fall, he urges you to keep going. He doesn't push you over the cliff--he merely leads you to the brink. And there he has you at his mercy. I know him well, for I have had traffic with him often. He delights in watching you walk the tightrope. He lets you slip, but he doesn't let you fall.

It's the Devil in her, of course, that I'm talking about. And it was that which made her so intriguing, so help me, God. Her soul was to me angelic; her self, at least as she revealed it, was devilish. Of what ingredients was she made? I often asked myself. And every day I gave a different answer. Sometimes I explained her by race, background, heredity, by the war, poverty, lack of vitamins, lack of love, anything and everything I could think of. But it never added up. She was, so to speak, an insolite. And why did I have to pin her down, like a butterfly? Wasn't it enough that she was herself? No! It wasn't. She had to be something more or less. She had to be graspable, understandable.

And how foolish this sounds. Everybody "had her number," it seemed, except me. To me she was an enigma. Knowing myself as I do, I tried to believe that it was all part of my usual pattern with women. How I love the unattainable! But it didn't work, this sort of calculation. She was like one of those numbers that are indivisible. She had no square root. And yet, as I say, others could read her. In fact, they tried to explain her to me. No use. There was always a remainder that I could never figure out.

That smile that she gave me occasionally, like a special gift, I gradually observed she could give to most anyone--if she were in the mood or if she wanted something. And I would go again and again just to watch her hand it out! Go where? Why, to the piano bar where she sang nightly and dispensed her charms. (Just as I did with the other who "taxied" her clients to paradise and beyond. Always thinking, poor fool, it's me she enjoys dancing with.)

The old man! How vulnerable he is! How pathetic! How he needs love--and how easily he accepts the counterfeit of it! And yet, oddly enough, the end is not what you think. He won her finally. At least, so he thinks. But this is another story.

Night after night it was the bar. Sometimes it began with dinner--upstairs I would watch her eat with the same attention as later I listened to her play and sing. Often I was the first one at the bar. How lovely, how enchanting to receive exclusive attention! (It could have been anyone else; he would have received the same attention. First come, first served.)

Those same songs night after night--how can anyone do it and not go mad? And always with feeling, as if delivering her very soul. So that's the life of our entertainer! I used to say to myself. Same times, same faces, same responses--and same headaches. Given the chance, I would change all that. Surely she must be fed up with it. So I thought. An entertainer is never fed up with the game. At the worst, she gets bored. But never for long. Life without acclaim is meaningless to her. There must always be a sea of faces, silly faces, stupid faces, drunken faces--no matter--but faces. There must always be that starry-eyed idiot who appears for the first time and with tears in his eyes exclaims, "You're wonderful! You're marvelous! Please sing it again!" And she will sing it again. And if he is a man of means, perhaps a shoe manufacturer, he will ask her to go to the races. And she will accept the invitation, as if he had bestowed a great honor on her

Sitting there at the bar, playing the part of Mr. Nobody, I had a wonderful insight into the whole show. Forgetting, of course, that I was a part of it, perhaps the saddest part. One by one, they would confess to me, tell me how much they loved her, and I, I would listen as if immune, but always sympathetic and full of understanding.

I try to think--when did I first fall in love with her? Not the first time we met, that's definite. If I had never met her again, it wouldn't have bothered me in the least. I remember how surprised I was when she called me the next day or the day after. I didn't even recognize her voice. "Hello! This is your little friend from Tokyo speaking." That's how it began, really, over the telephone, me wondering why I should be honored with a call. Maybe she was lonesome. She had arrived only a few weeks before. Maybe someone had tipped her off that I was crazy about the Orient, particularly about Oriental women. More particularly, about Japanese women.

"You really dig them, don't you?" a pal of mine keeps saying.

The ones I dig most are still in Japan, I guess. Like Lawrence said, "The whistlers go to America." There are people who are born out of time and there are people who are born out of country, caste and tradition. Not loners, exactly, but exiles, voluntary exiles. They're not always romantic, either: They just don't belong. And I mean nowhere. We carried on quite a correspondence. That is, I did. Her contribution was a letter and a half. To be sure, she never read all my letters, for the simple reason that I didn't mail them all. Half of them are in my quaint old New England chest. Some of them are stamped and marked Special Delivery. (What a touching thing it would be if someone sent her those after I was six feet under! Then, to paraphrase my beloved idol. I could whisper from above: "My Dear Koi-bito, how sweet to read these rabu reta [love letters] over God's shoulder." As the French say, Parfois il se produit un miracle, mais loin des yeux de Dieu. God isn't interested in (continued on page 196) Insomnla (continued from page 130) miracles. After all, life itself is just one prolonged miracle. It's when you're madly in love that you look for miracles.)

• • •

All in all, it was the old problem of the happy lunatic begging for love. I love you! If I said it in English, it meant nothing. (Who would think, for instance. that a beautiful word like omanko means cunt?) And if I said it in Japanese, it was verboten, because premature. To love. "Easier said than done," she once told me over the telephone. Marry first, then talk about love--that was the general idea. Yet every night, at the piano bar, it was nothing but love. love. love. Rivers of love poured from the ivories; nightingales warbled in her throat, all singing love among the roses. By one A.M., the joint was steaming with love. Even the roaches were friggin' away between the keys. Love! Just love. A sweet death. And in Japanese it sounds even sweeter: "Gokuraku ojo." Beneath the mascara was the shadow of her smile. And beneath the smile lurked the melancholy of her race. When she removed her eyelashes, there were two black holes into which one could peer and see the river Styx. Nothing ever floated to the surface. All the joys, all the sorrows, all the dreams, all the illusions were anchored deep in the subterranean stream, in the tohubohu of her Japanese soul.

Her black, sluggish silence was far more eloquent to me than any words she might utter. It was frightening, too, because it spoke of the utter meaninglessness of things. So it is. so it always was. so it always will be. What now, my love? Nothing. Nada. In the beginning, as in the end-- silence. Music is the bloody hemstitching of the faceless soul. At bottom she hated it. At bottom she was one with the void.

"Love Forever in Bossa Nova."

And so, after months and months of it. what with the itching toe, the unanswered letters, fine fruitless telephone calls, the mah-iongg. the mendacity and duplicity, the frivolity and frigidity, the gorilla of despair that I had become began to wrestle with the devil called Insomnia. Slipslopping around at three, four and five in the morning, I took to writing on the walls--broken sentences like "Your silence h;., meant nothing to me. I'll outsilence you." Or, "When the sun sets, we count the dead." Or (courtesy of a friend). "You would not be looking for me if you had not already found me." Or the weather report from Tokyo, in Japanese: "Kumore toki doki ame." Sometimes just "Good night!" ("O yasumi nasai!") I began to sense the germ of a new insanity sprouting in me. Sometimes I went to the bathroom, looked in the mirror and made funny faces, which frightened hell out of me. Sometimes I just sat in the dark and implored the telephone to ring. Or hummed to myself, "Smoke gets in your eyes," or yelled, "Merde!" Maybe this was the best part of it all. so help me, God. Who can say? I had been through it before, dozens of times, yet each time it was new. different, more painful, more intolerable. People said I looked wonderful, was getting younger every day. and all that crap. They didn't know that there was a splinter in my soul. They didn't know that I was living in a satin-lined vacuum. They didn't seem to realize what a cretin I had become. But I knew! I used to get down on my knees and look for an ant or a cockroach to talk to. I was getting tired of talking to myself. Now and then, I would take the receiver off the hook and pretend to talk to her--from overseas, no less. "Yes, it's me, Henry-San. I'm in Monte Carlo [or Hong Kong or Veracrux, what matter?]. Yes, I'm here on business. What? No, I'll only be a few days. Do you miss me? What? Hello, hello..." No answer. Line dead.

• • •

Does love, true love, entail full surrender? That was ever the question. Is it not human to expect some return, however small? Must one be a superman or a god? Are there limits to giving? Can one bleed forever?

Some talk of strategy, as if it were a game. Don't show your hand. Play it cool. Back away, Pretend, pretend! Though your heart is breaking, never betray your true feelings. Always behave as if nothing matters. That's the kind of advice they give to the lovelorn.

However, as Hesse says, "Love must have the power to find its own way to certainty. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract."

And then--? Then God help us, for what we attract may not be at all to our taste. And what we so longed for may prove to be no longer desirable. And whether we attract or arc attracted, all that matters is the one and only, the bakrai. More important than enlightenment is the missing half. The Buddhas and the Christs are born complete. They neither seek love nor give love, because they are love itself. But we who are born again and again must discover the meaning of love, must learn to live love as the flower lives beauty.

How wonderful, if only you can believe it, act on it! Only the fool. the absolute fool, is capable of it. He alone is free to plumb the depths and scour the heavens. His innocence preserves him. He asks no protection.