The Table Turns Itself

I had long suspected that freedom, when possessed by the wrong person, acquires an odor offensive to the respectable. Not the grand, framed freedom of speeches and monuments—no, that one is always welcome, provided it remains immobile and preferably dead—but the living variety: uncombed by custom, mildly insolent, able to dine alone without taking it as evidence of exile.

For a time, I was assigned a role in the little theatre of other people’s anxieties. I was to be the dependent apparition, the decorative freeloader, the man apparently sustained by some invisible purse, some familial moonbeam, some arrangement too hazy and therefore too scandalous for the bureaucratic imagination. It did not matter that I worked; work, unless it produced the approved facial expression and a properly mournful schedule, is often mistaken for leisure. They saw the liberty, not the labor beneath it; the open door, not the hand that had learned to turn its own key.

There were questions, of course. They came daintily dressed as concern. “And what is it,” someone would ask, with the bright, surgical politeness of a person arranging cutlery, “that you do?” The answer mattered less than the brief, exquisite pause in which they hoped I might stammer, confess, shrink, provide them with a loose thread to pull. Their curiosity was not cruel enough to bite; it merely nibbled with excellent manners.

I became fond, in time, of disappointing them.

Not by winning some vulgar contest of legitimacy, nor by dragging ledgers into the drawing room, nor by presenting my life like a trained seal balancing certificates upon its nose. No. I learned that a sentence, properly placed, could do more than an apology ever could. A certain serenity could be its own notarized document. One need only decline to accept the office of defendant.

The oddity is that the world eventually catches up, though it never admits it has been late. Its desires molt. The thing dismissed yesterday as vagueness becomes mystery; the quality called instability becomes range; the person deemed insufficiently fixed becomes, with a sudden migration of taste, wonderfully “international,” “independent,” “multifaceted.” The same people who once tried to determine whether one was real begin, years later, to inquire how one managed to become so.

At such moments, the temptation to offer a small, elegant revenge can be nearly irresistible. One imagines a table laid beneath a forgiving lamp, the former examiners seated with their napkins folded like white flags, waiting to be told the secret. But I find it kinder—and, therefore, more amusing—to tell them none. Let them suppose there was a method. Let them build a school around it, if they like.

The truth is less teachable. I made a home of the space I was told did not count as home. I took the names meant to diminish me, aired them out, turned them in the light, and discovered that several had a rather handsome lining. If I seemed to drift, it was only because they mistook the sea for an absence of destination.

And now, when a chair is offered at a table that once had no place laid for me, I accept it graciously. I have no wish to overturn the furniture. I merely sit, smile, and let the room notice—somewhat belatedly—that the table has been turning all along.