Collected Stories

The Metaphor Is Dead—Pass It On

“THE METAPHOR is DEAD,” bellowed the gargantuan professor, his walrus mustache dancing and his thundery eyebrows knitting together rapaciously. “Those accustomed to lunching at the high table of literature will now be able to nosh at the trough on a streamlined sub minus the pickle. Banished is that imperial albatross, that dragooned double agent, that muddy mirror lit by the false flashing signal like and by that even more presumptuous little sugar lump as. The gates are open, and the prisoner, freed of his shackles, has departed without so much as a goodbye wave to those who would take a simple pomegranate and insist it be the universe.

“Furthermore,” trumpeted the cagey professor, warming to his thesis and drumming on the lectern, “the dogged metaphor, that scurfy escort vehicle of crystalline simplicity, has been royally indicted as the true enemy of meaning, a virus introduced into a healthy bloodstream and maintained by the lordly shrewdness of convention. Oh, it was born innocently enough with Homer and his wine-dark sea (a timid offering, perhaps, but one that dropped a velvet curtain between what was and what almost was). Then came Beowulf, stirring the pot with his cunning kennings, and before you could count to sixteen, the insidious creature had wiggled through the window and taken over the house. Soon it became a private addiction, a pipe full of opium taken behind a screen—but the wavelet graduated to turbulent ocean, and the sinews of metaphor became, finally, the button and braces that held up the pants of poesy. The commonest object was yoked by adulterous communion with unlike object (bread and wine, as it were, touching the salty lips of unreason like a capricious child who insists on placing a token toe in every puddle).

“Initially a toy of the literati,” the fiery professor cried, “the metaphor grew like a polyp on the clean chamber of poetry whose friendly narrative lines had previously lain as simply as knives and forks in a kitchen drawer and whose slender, unjointed nouns, colloquial as onions, became puffed up like affected dowagers, swaying, pelvis forward, into a Victorian parlor of cluttered predicates, where they took to sitting about on the embroidered cushions of metonymy and resting their metered feet on quirky mean-spirited oxymorons.

“Once established they acquired an air of entitlement, the swag and flounce and glitter of the image boxed within another image, one bleating clause mounting another, sometimes marinated in irony, other times drenched in the teacup of whimsy. Grown fat with simile and the lace of self-indulgence, the embryo sentence sprouted useless tentacles and became an incomprehensible polyhedron, a glassine envelope enclosing multiple darting allusions that gave off the perfume of apples slowly rotting in a hermit’s cryptic cellar. There followed signs of severe hypochondria as these verbal clotheshorses stood contemplating one another and noting the inspired imbroglio lodged beneath each painted fingernail. The bell had clearly sounded. It was time to retreat.

“And now,” the professor essayed, stabbing the listening air, “like light glancing off a bowling ball, the peeled, scrubbed and eviscerated simplicity of language is reborn. Out onto the rubbish heap goes the fisherman’s net of foxy allusions. A lifeboat has been assigned to every passenger—and just in time too—and we are once again afloat on the simple raft of the declarative sentence (that lapsed Catholic of the accessible forms) and sent, shriven and humble, into orbit, unencumbered by the debris of dusty satellites, no longer pretending every object is like another; instead every object is (is, that frosty little pellet of assertion that sleeps in the folds of the newly minted, nip-wasted sentence, simple as a slug bolt and, like a single hand clapping, requiring neither nursemaid to lean upon nor the succor of moth-eaten mythology to prop it up). With watercolor purity, with soldierly persistence and workmanlike lack of pretence, the newly pruned utterance appears to roll onto the snowy page with not a single troubling cul-de-sac or detour into the inky besmudged midnight of imagery.

“But, alas,” the ashen professor hollowly concluded, “these newly resurrected texts, for all their lean muscularity (the cleanly gnawed bones of noun, the powerful hamstrings of verb) carry still the faulty chromosome, the trace element, of metaphor—since language itself is but a metaphoric expression of human experience. It is the punishing silence around the word that must now be claimed for literature, the pure uncobbled stillness of the caesura whose unknowingness throws arrows of meaning (palpable as summer fruit approaching ripeness) at the hem of that stitched under-skirt of affirmation/negation, and plants a stout flag once and forever in the unweeded, unchoreographed vacant lot of being.

“And now, gentle people, the chair will field questions.”

A Wood (with Anne Giardini)

THE OTHER EVENING Ross AND STANLEY arrived at the rehearsal hall in time to see Elke go through her violin concert to be performed at the end of the month. It has taken all these years for recognition to come, though she began composing when she was sixteen. How serene she looked in the middle of the bare stage. But she was wearing that damned peasant skirt; Ross had begged her not to dress like that. It made her look like a twelve-tone type. It made her look less than serious.

“Isn’t she magnificent!” Stanley said, breathless. “The coloring! The expression! Like little gold threads pouring out.”

“She’ll never be ready,” Ross said. “She should have been working all summer.”

“You’re hard on her. Don’t be hard on her. She’s human. She needed to get away.”

“We’re all hard on each other, all the Woods are hard on each other. Papa used to say, ‘A Wood will only settle for standards of excellence. A Wood asks more of himself than he asks of others.’”

Stanley hadn’t thought of poor Papa for some months, and now he joined in. ‘“A Wood knows that work is the least despised of human activities.”’

“Shhhh,” Ross said. “She’s starting her Chanson des Fleurs.”

“‘A Wood values accomplishment above all,’” said Stanley, who, now that he had started, couldn’t stop. “Shhhh.”

The first searching notes of the song were spirited from the instrument. Elke heard each note as a reproach. She hadn’t yet seen her two brothers in the back row; the lights at the top of the stage were on, blinding her. The song was coarse and coppery, not as it sounded when she wrote it. Why did she write it? How could she expect substance to come out of nothing?

The violin dug uncompromisingly into the soft flesh of her neck and chin. Today the bow seemed malicious and sharp. These benign forms—she had let them take her over and become something else. The song, mercifully, ended, and so did her dark thoughts.

“Bravo! Encore!” Stanley’s voice rang out. Was he here then? If only they’d shut off the lights. Why would they need them on so long before the actual concert? Today wasn’t even a real rehearsal. How has Stanley tracked her down? If only it could be hoped that he hadn’t brought Ross.

“Stanley?” Her wavery voice. It was a good thing she hadn’t been trained as an actress. “Was that you, love?”

At the restaurant Elke was drinking red wine instead of white because Ross said it was more calming for her; she could scarcely afford to have one of her spells with the concert so near at hand. And only one glass, said Ross, then she must go home and get a good night’s sleep.

Stanley watched her closely, thinking how regal she was. The long Wood nose. The Wood eyes. An almost-Wood chin, but less resolute than his or Ross’s, which was perhaps a good thing.

“Well, of course I’m glad you came,” she was saying to Stanley. “But who told you where the rehearsal hall was? Ross, I suppose.”

“When you played the Danse du Feu, I had tears in my eyes,” Stanley said. “Even now, two hours later, just thinking about it brings tears.”

Ross said, “But you always cry at concerts.”

“And at art galleries,” said Elke. “I remember taking you to the Picasso retrospective at the Art Gallery when you were fifteen, and you got weepy and had to go to the men’s room.”

“Papa cried when he heard Callas,” Ross said. “You could hear him sniffling all over the balcony.”

Elke turned to Stanley and touched the top of his wrist. “Promise me you won’t cry at the concert. I don’t know what I’d do if I heard someone blowing into a handkerchief from the third row. I’d lose my place. I’d lose my sense of balance.”

“I can’t promise,” Stanley said, his eyes filling with tears.

Elke found it hard to breathe. She was overwhelmed the way she had been with Papa before the accident. There was Ross, so brusque and demanding. And Stanley, too sweet, too sweet. The two were inseparable and, it seemed lately, inescapable. She would have to invent strategies to keep them out.

“Do you believe,” she asked them, “do you believe that there is hidden meaning in what we dream?”

“Oh, yes,” said Stanley at once.

Ross poured himself another glass of his chilled, ivory-colored wine.

“Well,” Elke began, “I’ll tell you my dream then, and you must interpret it for me.” The only question in her mind was which dream to describe. She chose the one they might be most likely to understand.

“Papa gave me, in this dream, a set of heavy, leather-bound books. They were encyclopedias, very old and very valuable. They filled the long shelf above my desk. One day, as I sat looking through volume R to S, I noticed that the binding, under the leather, was made of old sheet music. I was certain that this was one of Schiffmann’s lost symphonies, although I don’t know why I was so sure of this. So, of course, I ripped apart every book and peeled away the pages of the symphony. And just as I became aware that I was mistaken, that the music was only a series of piano exercises, I also became aware that you and Papa had come into the room and were looking at me with expressions of enormous reproach.”

“She made it up,” Ross said later, when he and Stanley had turned out the light and were about to go to sleep. “She made up the whole dream.”

From the other side of the room Stanley’s voice was muffled. He liked to pull the blanket up so that it reached his lips. “How do you know it wasn’t a real dream?”

“Woods don’t dream, at least not dreams as vivid or as detailed as that. Besides, I talked to her psychiatrist after the last episode, and he told me she made up dreams all the time.”

“I have dreams,” said Stanley.

“She makes up dreams in order to reinforce her image of herself as a victim. In her made-up dreams there is always someone shouting at her or scolding her or pointing out her faults. In one of the dreams Papa was telling her she’d ruined her career because she’d cut her hair. It took all the creative force out of her.”

“Like Sampson,” Stanley said.

“There was another dream, more extreme, when Papa was accusing her of causing his accident. She invited him to supper, and then she phoned and told him not to come after all; she was too tired even to make him an omelet. That was how he happened to be wandering down Sherbrooke on his way to the delicatessen when the motorbike knocked him down. Of course, it was all invented. She prefers to think she’s the guilty cause of disaster. You might say she’s greedy for guilt. But she didn’t fool the psychiatrist at all. Real dreams have a different texture, and he’s convinced Elke never really dreamed these dreams.”

“I have dreams,” Stanley said.

Elke started awake so suddenly her left leg cramped beneath her. Gently she kneaded at the hard knot in her calf. The window was open, and the moon floated full and fat as though for her inspection. Last summer she’d been sent to study in Paris, and in the bank where she’d gone to change her grant checks there had been a sign: DEMANDEZ-VOUS DE LA LUNE. Of course she never did. Instead, she’d spent the tissuey franc notes and the long August afternoons in the café nearest her hotel.

She was seized, as always, in the middle of the night by regrets. She’d been so close to something original; it had flickered at the edge of her vision, in one of the darker corners of the café.

She must try to sleep. She would have to focus her energy and try to concentrate, if only for their sake. At least they found her worth their trouble. That was something.

“Too much, too much.” She whispered these words out loud.

Then she slept, and her head again filled with dreams.

Despite being a Wood, Stanley had at least one vivid little dream every night. In the morning, as soon as he woke, he wrote a summary in a spiral-bound notebook. Sometimes he dreamed of food, chiefly artichokes, which he loved immoderately; sometimes he dreamed of music; and very frequently he dreamed of wandering down corridors with labyrinthine rooms going off to the left and right. He never dreamed about Papa. In fact, he seldom thought about him for weeks at a time, and he was naturally a little ashamed of this.

But he excused himself; he was busy. He woke early every day, drank a glass of hot tea and was in his workroom by eight-thirty. He had a great many orders—everyone seemed suddenly to want a handmade guitar. A student from a technical school helped him in the afternoons. They talked as they worked, which Stanley found charming. At 4:45, he locked the door and walked the mile and a half to the concert hall in order to catch the end of Elke’s rehearsal. Usually, Ross was there when he arrived, sitting with a copy of the score on his lap and holding a little penlight so he could see in the dark.

One day after the rehearsal, a week before the performance, Stanley slipped Elke a note. “Dear Elke,” it read. “The night before Papa’s accident I forgot to remind him to take his heart pill. You remember how forgetful he was. I am certain that he had a heart attack on the way to the delicatessen and collapsed just as the motorbike came around the corner. Love, Stanley.”

Elke was too tired to read yet another of Stanley’s little notes. She accepted it with a small smile, then slipped it between the sheets of music on her stand. She never saw it again and assumed that it had fallen during the night and been swept up and thrown away—which was what she would have done with it herself.

In any case, the note wouldn’t have comforted her. She worried less about the actual cause of Papa’s death than everyone thought. It was what he’d meant to her that she fretted about, and his expectations. Her psychiatrist had assured her that the death would release her, but she knew she was going through with the concert for Papa’s sake. For Papa, everything must be flawless.

Stanley told her her playing was perfect. It was impossible for her to improve. “Don’t change a thing,” he begged.

Ross told her he would select her clothes for the concert. He had examined her wardrobe. Only the red blouse would, perhaps, do. She needed a skirt, shoes, a scarf—everything. She was not to worry about it. He would look for the clothes and would buy her what she needed.

Elke found herself thanking him.

Ross was happy. Stanley had not seen him so happy since before Papa died. He smiled; he pranced; he showed Stanley the new clothes that he’d spread out on his bed. (Once this had been Papa’s bed.)

There was a long black skirt made of some silky material, a pair of black shoes that consisted of thin little straps, and a printed scarf with red fleurs-de-lis on a black background.

That night, however, Stanley dreamed that the scarf became wound around Elke’s neck during the performance and strangled her. He said to Ross in the morning, “I like everything but the scarf. Elke should wear the gold necklace instead of a scarf.”

“It’s too heavy for Elke,” Ross said.

“It might bring her luck,” said Stanley.

Many generations of Woods had worn the gold necklace. Three Woods had been married in it. A Wood had worn it to a funeral mass for Czar Nicholas. A Wood had shaken the hand of the great Schiffmann while wearing it. A Wood had hidden it behind a plaster wall in the city of Berlin. Another Wood had carried it out of Spain in 1936 sewn into the hem of a blanket.

“Gold can be vulgar,” said Ross. “A scarf has more esprit.”

“Papa would have insisted she wear the necklace,” said Stanley. He was tired. He’d worked later than usual.

“All right,” Ross said. “Tomorrow I’ll go to the bank and get it out of the vault. But don’t tell Elke. I want to surprise her.”

On the day of the concert, Elke woke refreshed and alert after what seemed to her to have been a dream-free night. She lay for a few minutes in her bed and tried to remember when she’d last felt so almost happy. Her bedroom was filled with sunny shades of yellow and red—colors she’d chosen herself. The room was quiet. She could lie here as long as she wanted, and no one would come to tell her to get up.

She was at the hall by noon, before the technicians, before her brothers, before the audience and critics. Today the stage felt friendly; it welcomed the sound of her steps and her soft humming of the music she would play tonight. There was no terror in this.

“How do you feel?” Ross’s voice sounded sharply at her feet. He was standing, suddenly, at the stairs leading from the front row to the stage. “Did you sleep well?”

“Woods always sleep well.” Her rare teasing voice.

“But did you?” He paused, then walked up the stairs to where she was standing. His arms stretched toward her in a curious, beseeching gesture. “I’ve brought you the necklace. I got it from the bank yesterday, just before it closed for the weekend. I was so worried, I hid it underneath my pillow all night.”

“Are you sure—?” Elke asked.

“Papa would have wanted you to wear it.”

“Then I must, of course.”

“Hurry,” Ross said to Stanley. “We want to be there at least twenty minutes before the program begins.”

“I should polish my shoes one more time,” said Stanley. The two brothers stood by the door, dressed alike in their black suits and dark ties, the coarse Wood hair brushed back from their foreheads.

“Your shoes are fine as they are,” Ross said, but he did not want to start a quarrel. He had quarreled with Papa the night he died, a circuitous quarrel about bonds and about the little Monet drawing—what should be done with it. It was just after the quarrel, in fact, that Papa had rushed out into the street and fallen in the path of the motorcyclist.

“I’ll only be a minute,” Stanley said. He found a soft cloth and rubbed at the toes of his black shoes. Then he pulled at his shirt cuffs and examined them. Elke must be proud of them tonight.

The air outside was spicy and cold, and the chilly white light of the moon coated the pavement and the tops of parked cars. Ross and Stanley fell into step, left-right, left-right. They were silent, guarding their thoughts and guarding at the same time, it seemed, Elke’s good luck. Stanley wondered if she were anxious, if the little nerves were jumping under the skin of her playing arm, if she were finding it painful to breathe, if her vision were blurred or her thoughts scattered.

Walking along dark streets always made Stanley think of how piteously men and women struggle to make themselves known to one another, how lonely they can be.

At least he wasn’t alone. He would never be alone. Thinking this, he stumbled slightly with happiness and bumped up against Ross. The two of them bounced lightly off each other as two eggs will do when boiled in a little pan.

Elke had persuaded Ross and Stanley to let her eat supper alone. She had eaten two peeled peaches and a bowl of corn flakes, and had drunk a small glass of Scotch. Now she was wandering the corridor beneath the stage.

There seemed an endless number of rooms: dressing rooms like her own, larger rooms filled with props and costumes, one tiny room with row after row of wigs, several rooms of mops and rags and buckets, then a little library whose shelves were weighted down with scripts and scores, next a delightful room full of instruments in need of repair, and still another room full of instruments beyond repair. This labyrinth of rooms had the surprising and inevitable logic of a dream.

She glanced at the watch given to her by Papa for her last birthday; the slim gold pointers had moved alarmingly fast. She had only a few minutes to get dressed. Before turning back to her room, where Ross’s clothes lay spread out on a divan waiting for her, Elke opened one last door.

Costumes, costumes. These must be the costumes for the Saturday matinee performances of fairy tales given to busloads of children; Rapunzel’s gown, Goldilocks’s frilled pinafore, Sleeping Beauty’s nightdress, Cinderella’s slippers, Red Riding Hood’s cape. The costumes were made to last for years of performances, and were lovely enough to enchant the most disenchanted of children. Rapunzel’s gold-green gown, with its square neck and high empire waist, was by far the most beautiful and, as it happened, fit Elke perfectly.

The gold necklace, retrieved from a hiding place in her dressing room, sat solidly on her throat, framed by the square of satin and velvet. Elke caught up her violin and bow and walked lightly up to the wings.

“Four more minutes.”

“Five. Shhhh.”

“A worthy audience. A very fine audience. Wouldn’t you say so, Ross? A fine audience?”

“Well, of course. A Wood always—”

“Ross?”

“What?”

“Papa.”

“What about Papa?”

“Do you think he—? Do you ever believe that … after people die, that they—”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what? You mean, you think—”

“Yes, I’m sure of it. Papa is here. With us. Tonight.”

“I don’t.”

“What do you mean, you don’t?”

“I don’t think he’s here.”

“Of course he’s here.”

“I think he’s gone. I’m sure of it. He’s left us.”

“He’ll never leave us.”

“Isn’t that—?”

“Yes. Shhhh. She’s coming.”

Elke had just arrived in the wings when the lights were dimmed and the noise from the audience thinned to a softer sound. She stood, bent slightly forward, with one arm crooked around the violin and the bow held lightly in the opposite hand. Under the surprising folds of the costume, which she now realized smelled strongly of mothballs and dust, her body felt cool and determined.

It seemed suddenly as though Papa were near—in the chamber of the violin or wrapped around the rosined strings of her bow. But she knew this was only an illusion stirred by the hard lights and the rising excitement.

“He’s gone,” she told herself, looking down at the backs of her hands. “I’m sure of that, at least.”

It was time to begin. It was past time to begin. A hand pressed on her spine between her neck and her waist, between her shoulder blades, an encouraging, insistent pressure. “Go, go, they are waiting.”

Elke bent her neck to show she was ready, then followed the angle of her head out onto the stage. A few minutes of surging noise—was someone shouting something to her?—then she laid her chin and her cheek on the violin, positioned her arm and bow. She closed her eyes and clearly saw the notes of her Chanson des Fleurs lined up before her. With a slight nod to the notes, to the audience, to herself, to whoever might be watching, she began to play.

Stanley was on his feet. “Bravo! Bravissimo!”

The two, bright, flag-shaped words were out of his mouth before he realized it and before Elke had played a single note. The shame, the shame. He felt the blood go out of his clapping hands and then their unbearable weight at his sides. The disgrace! For Elke, for Ross, for Papa, whose wide, pale, disappointed face came sliding before his eyes.

To himself, he said, “I’m going to faint.”

But he didn’t. All around him people were rising to their feet and applauding. For Elke, darling Elke. Even Ross, looking stunned, rose and opened his mouth and whispered, “Bravo.”

She began. Her Chanson first, each note rounded like the bowl of a spoon. Stanley held his breath in the final bars, where the notes seemed to heap themselves one on top of the other. Then her August Suite and, after that, her Fleuve Noir, so slow, so stately that Stanley would have cried if he hadn’t felt carried to a calm, rivery place beyond tears. Last, Elke played her silky little Lament in memory of Papa.

She bowed deeply. It was intermission already. The gold necklace burned at her throat, and the great golden-green dress swept the floor—where had she found such a dress? Stanley turned to ask Ross, who was staring straight ahead, “Where has she found such a dress?”

“We picked it out together,” Ross was saying. “It seemed to set off the necklace.”

It was over. She was back in the dressing room, exhausted, happy, her fingers aching for the resistance of the strings, her heart rocking. All those people; all those eyes scraping against the skin of her face.

She hesitated only a moment before opening the door to Ross’s knock. One, two, three, she counted, then opened it.

Stanley followed Ross into the room, carrying—by the stems, heads downward—an enormous bouquet of flowers, an absurd bouquet of flowers. “Ecstasies! Ecstasies!” His eyes rolled, his arms swung, and the flowers fell to the floor, their sharp fragrance mingling with the odor of mothballs.

Ross blinked, then smiled, then bent down and picked up the strewn flowers. “For you,” he said, presenting them and kissing Elke in the Wood way, first on one cheek, then on the other, finally on the forehead. “You are a true Wood,” he said into her ear. He did not look into her eyes.

“The truest Wood,” added Stanley, who liked the last word, and who was always permitted to have it.