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Joanna Higgins lives with her husband and two children in upstate New york and northeastern Pennsylvania. She has taught literature and writing at colleges and universities in Michigan, England, Pennsylvania, New York, and Hawaii.Her fiction and plays have received recognition and awards, including a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship. Of her first novel, A Soldier's Book, Kirkus said, "An impressive debut, complex and penetrating, a moving first novel and a notable contribution.

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THE DOUBLE LIFE OF ALFRED BUBER

By David Schmahmann

The Permanent Press

Copyright © 2011 David Schmahmann
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57962-218-3

Chapter One

These are the chronicles of the starship Buber, noted bibliophile, late night television addict, keeper of sordid little secrets so appalling he dares not breathe a word of them to a soul. Gone are the daring thoughts of which there were once an abundance. They once had shape and color and flesh of their own, but time and tiredness have frayed them until all that remains is residue, a creaking membrane of abandoned ideas, a scaffold without substance. Such a careful construct, all in all, destroyed by scandal, scandal that found him unprepared, black-eyed, bloody mouthed, quite flat footed.

Where shall I go, then, if I wish to learn where it is that I went wrong, what I could have done differently? I will say ab initio, from the outset, that I have no answer, or none that I can find. My father is long dead, my mother now so alienated that I doubt she would be a resource of any value. And I don't believe in God.

* * *

In another room, the next room, Nok sleeps. Or then again, perhaps she does not. Perhaps my bedroom, that chamber of disappointments, is empty. Perhaps there is no one in it, no one at all. In the next room Nok, out of her element, my captive, Buber's little secret, sleeps. One would think, looking down at her smooth little body, her silk hair spread about the pillow, her flimsy linen shirt, that she would meet a raft of needs. But then again, to watch her walk around this great house of the Buber's is, can be, almost comical. She appears to have no interest in anything, no sense of curiosity, to be completely devoid of awe. Her habits too are completely alien, so ... vulgar. She squats when she reads, and that with difficulty.

And what else should I have expected? A person reaps what he sows, does he not? I have created obscenity in a child scratching for a living, invited shame, and now shame engulfs me. In short, can there be any doubt that I have made a cock-up of things? Even so I am not one to scrounge about in the past for tidbits of memory that might explain it away, mitigate the damage. I mean, one only has to watch television for several minutes to see middle-aged men sniveling about the past as if it had some great, sustaining significance. I do not worship at the altar of psychotherapy, I am afraid to say. I am not, I am afraid, wired for it, even if that is my loss.

The "I" in this, the man at the helm, looks puzzled as a flash of memory intrudes. The memory is this: My mother, happening on me in a state of arousal, begins to giggle. "You don't say," she murmurs. "Even you." Later, at dinner, she ventures to my father: "You and Alfred should have a little chat sometime," and then she begins to giggle again, this time uncontrollably, must leave the room with her hand at her mouth.

Yes, even me. Freakish. Extraordinary. Incomprehensible.

* * *

Shall I describe my house instead of continuing in this vein? I would prefer to. In fact I would be pleased to. It has been at the center of so much.

When I was a young man—and that means years ago, when I was a struggling immigrant in this austere city—I passed through this town once, down this very lane, and decided that this was where I would one day live. There was something about the place that marked it as my resting place, the place in America I would claim as my own when all else had taken shape. I became quite single-minded, after that, in my planning.

This is something I do not share often, but I slept on a cot in a rooming house for four years to scrape together the money I needed to acquire this fantasy. I spent nothing in those days, did not own a car or a television, or even a telephone, but even so I had no use for flawed hand-me-downs or makeshift possessions and so I surrounded myself with ... nothing. I was making a fairly good living too, and I know that my father's cousin, Nigel, the only relative I have in this country, thought my behavior, the urgency I felt to buy an empty plot of land in a town with which I had no connection, eccentric, at a minimum. Nigel is, after all, a creature of habit, a rational man, an academic whose view of things is unshakably rooted in good judgment. Each time he asked about my living arrangements in those rooming house days and I gave the kind of oblique answers I did, he would look at me askance and a vaguely troubled expression would cross his face.

"You're a hard-working young man," he used to say, his fork poised at his mouth, his Pritiken grains carefully balanced on the tines. "I imagine a great deal is expected of you at your law firm. How can you look your best when you keep your clothes in a box and be sufficiently rested when you sleep on a stretcher?"

"The arrangements are temporary," I would insist.

"Perhaps," he would say without conceding anything. "They seem immoderate nevertheless."

Once I had bought the land I would come out here from my rooming house by train each weekend. It is a long walk from the station to my little sanctuary, and I would trudge to my destination along the narrow lanes like some Dickensian vagabond.

"May I help you?" the occupant of a rare passing car might stop to ask.

"No thank you," I would say. "I'm all set."

They'd move on, slowly, and I'd see eyes fixed on me in rearview mirrors. Later, as I idled away the time under a tree, I'd see them again, curious, wondering what was afoot, what the stocky bald-headed man in white thought he was doing.

I didn't only daydream, of course, though in the end my efforts were largely undone by bulldozers and backhoes. I moved rocks out of what I knew would someday be a courtyard, tended the sprouts of the elm trees that now line the driveway, used a shovel to level the ground where I planned to place my gazebo. I had yet to lay one brick in place but I had it all staked out, used to stand within the stakes and imagine that my house was already finished, exactly as I had planned it, solid, immovable, like a fortress of marble and glass or a chapel up on a hill. All I thought of then was beauty, the symmetries and contrasts, how the eye would move across a sloping lawn and come to rest on a perfect line of trees.

On several occasions during my Henshaw & Potter days I agreed to host the firm's annual picnic, and believe me I made my impact. I selected the best wines from my cellar, unlocked my most valuable cutlery, placed fresh flowers in every room, and during the course of the day I would steal glimpses at the young clerks as they drifted about the halls, boys clutching the hands of their companions, girls with timid boys in tow, their attention fixed on the art, the sculpture, the views from each towering window.

"Buber," they were doubtless murmuring. "Buber lives here?"

They could not have known it, of course, but it was for just such a reaction that they were invited. Buber may have had his deficits, may in some circles have been a subject of derision, but each evening he would retake possession of his museum-like rooms, move about his collection of treasures at will, be in his element.

Surely that counted for something. Surely.

* * *

There was from the outset, of course, a woman in this phantom landscape, a singular woman, bonded to me, endlessly understanding, completely intelligent. She was tall and willowy, as I saw her, her face animated, the...