The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (17 page)

—Mummies?

—Egyptian mummies.

—Why are you reading a book on Egyptian mummies?

He cleared his throat, but said nothing.

—But what I gave you of mine, the story I’m writing, you haven’t read that yet.

—Yes, I did read it.

—And . . . well? What did you think?

—It was . . . you seemed quite partial to the word atavistic.

—Well that, is that all?

—Well Esther, the um, and double adjectives, cruel, red anger; hard, thin lips; dark, secret pain . . .

—But . . .

—But women’s writing seems to get sort of . . . Sharp, eager faces; acid, unpleasant odor . . . listen. He turned toward the radio, where a poet whose work they both enjoyed was about to read. She looked at him a moment longer, and the book which had gone closed in his hand the instant she’d spoken to him. It had happened as directly as when once she had said, —You have wonderful eyes, and he turned them from her. What was it? As though to protect whatever lay beyond them until he could solve it himself, betraying the fear that in one lax moment his eyes might serve her as entrances. Even taking up a book she had read (Esther admired Henry James, but she trusted D. H. Lawrence), he did so anxiously, as though he might find the pages blank, the words eaten away by that hunger.

—Do you want to follow it? she asked, coming toward him with the
Collected Poems
opened in her hand. He shook his head, but did not look up, listening; and she sat down nearer him.

The poet read, in modulated tones given a hollow resonance by the radio. Esther’s thumb was drawn down the page, following one line to the next, bent over the book, and her lips moved, forming around the poet’s words as he spoke them, clear separate syllables which her lips, meeting and parting, moistened by her tongue, allowing exhalations in vowels, wet clicks from the roof of the mouth on
d
, brought into viscous consonance with her absorbedness, unrestrained by those lips clamped tight beside her until he cleared his throat and suddenly got to his feet. Before she could speak he had reached a door.

—But what? . . .

—I have some work, he said quickly, and left her there sitting, hunched over the pages, staring after him, while the poet read on in clear separate syllables. She blew her nose, and returned to the page before her, but her lips did not move, for she did not hear another word of the reading. Neither did her eyes, for she was gazing at the backs of her hands.

The room Wyatt had entered was as large as the bedroom, but had only one window which would have opened on an airshaft if anyone had bothered opening it. During the first year or so, the room served various vague purposes. Though between them they hadn’t a great number of books, not great enough, that is, to warrant a library (for a library, to Esther, was a roomful of books), it served as that for awhile. However, this was not practical, for reasons of which each privately accused the other in refusing to admit his own. Esther liked books out where everyone could see them, a sort of graphic index to the intricate labyrinth of her mind arrayed to impress the most casual guest, a system of immediate introduction which she had found to obtain in a number of grimy intellectual households in Greenwich Village. Her husband, on the other hand, did not seem to care where his books were, so long as they were where he put them. That is to say, separate. No doubt Boyle’s
Skeptical Chemist
, Jalland’s
The Church and the Papacy
, Cennino Cennini’s
Libro dell’ Arte
, or
La Chimie au Moyen Age
would have dressed up Esther’s shelves; no doubt the
Grimorium Verum
and the
Turba Philosophorum
would have been dusted down their spines regularly. No doubt these were among the reasons he kept them on his own, or strewn among the litter which had gradually filled the undetermined room until it belonged to him. Things were tacked on the walls there haphazard, an arm in dissection from a woodcut in the
Fabrica
of Vesalius, and another sixteenth-century illustration from the
Surgery
of Paré, a first-aid chart called “the wound man”; a photograph of an Italian cemetery flooded by the Po; a calendar good for every day from 1753 to 2059; a print of a drawing of the head of Christ by Melozzo da Forlì; a ground plan of the Roman city of Leptis Magna; a mirror; and rolls of paper and canvases on stretchers leaning in the corners.

When he started to work at restoring paintings, in addition to his regular job, the littered room changed only slightly. There had always been piles of drawing paper, and canvases on frames, prepared and clean or the composition begun in black unfinished lines, most prominent, or most familiar among these the initiated portrait of Camilla. The gessoed surface had cracked here and there, and got unevenly soiled, but the composition was very clear in lines unaltered since he’d put them there some fifteen years before. Occasionally
this was hung on one of the walls, as though being studied with an eye to completion. Other times it remained stacked with the other empty and besmirched canvases against a wall. There was a wide flat drafting table, and a heavy easel stood erect in the middle of the room under the bare electric bulb. But the most noticeable change was not to be seen: it lay heavily on the air, the smell of varnish, oils, and turpentine, quickened by the pervasive delicacy of lavender, oil of lavender which he used sometimes as a medium.

Esther had admired the drawing begun on that large soiled cracked surface, the fine-boned face (so unlike her own) whose fleshless quality of hollows was elevated by heavy earrings, archaic hoops of gold she had seen in a leather box where her husband kept odds and ends; admired the drawing not for what it was but, as she said, for what it could be. He stood looking at it, and they were silent, for he knew she was looking at him. The only work he had ever finished, those paintings shown in Paris years before, had ended up in a warehouse in New Jersey. Esther had never seen them. They seldom discussed painting, for like so many things upon which they might agree, they never managed to agree at the same moment; and as the conversations of the early months of their marriage went on, their ideas and opinions seemed to meet only in passing, each bound in an opposite direction, neither stopping to do more than honor the polite pause of recognition.

The poet’s clear tones had given way to the ingratiating pillage of the announcer, and she rose, the charm broken, with no word of the poet in her head but, for no apparent reason, “By prostitution I seem to mean usefulness.” She picked up
The Royal Mummies
and blew her nose as she crossed the room toward the half-open door, where she put her head in, and the book, saying, —Do you want this in there?

—What? Oh that, thank you.

—What are you doing?

—Nothing, just . . . this work. He motioned toward the plans pinned on the drafting table.

—Don’t they give you enough time down there, to do your work? But he lowered his eyes from hers, shrugged and turned back to the table. —If it were something real, but this, going to this silly job every day, year after year.

—It’s not a silly job, Esther, he answered soberly, without turning.

—Copying lines, copying plans, one bridge after another. Oh, all right, it isn’t silly but you could do better, you could do more. Honestly Wyatt, the way you go day after day with your job and your reading and your . . . fooling around, and you could do more.
It’s not . . . you’re not waiting to discover something, are you. Waiting to be discovered, aren’t you? Oh I hate to go on like this, sounding like this . . . She paused, watching his narrow black-suited figure bend as a vertical line came down the paper. —It’s this . . . seeing you like you are sometimes now, she went on slowly, —I see you with your head down and, I don’t know, but it upsets me, it makes me unhappy to see you that way.

—Why? he asked in a voice near a whisper, his face close down to the paper.

—Because you look so lonely and that’s what I can’t bear, she brought out at his back. Then her eyes lowered to the floor when he did not turn, and she brought the damp knot of the handkerchief to her nose. —Don’t you want anything . . . any of the things, that other people want?

—Other people? he demanded, turning.

—Oh . . . , her throat caught. —Never mind. There. I’ll leave you with company.

—That? the mirror?

—I love that, you having a mirror in here.

—But that . . . to correct bad drawing . . .

—Good night, I’m going to bed when I’ve done the dishes.

—I’ll do them, if you’re tired, he offered. —Your cold . . .

—Don’t be silly. I’ll do them. She left him there, knotting a piece of string in his hand. A few minutes later, when she’d turned out the lights in the living room, the light from the half-open door drew her eyes and she saw him standing, running the fingers of his right hand over his rough chin, up one cheek and then the other, as though to wake after the night needing a shave made sense, but finding his face rough with growth after a day’s well-lighted consciousness a strange thing. Then he said aloud, —How safe from accident I am!

She had once heard him mentioned, with little more than curiosity, by people whom neither of them knew now. Then, when she came to asking more pointedly about him, there were anecdotes enough (someone she met at a party had heard he’d jumped off the Eiffel Tower, and with drunken persistence marveled at his survival). In and out dodged the vagrant specter, careering through conversations witness to that disinterested kindness which other people extend to one who does not threaten them with competition on any level they know. Costumed in the regalia of their weary imaginations, he appeared and vanished in a series of images which, compacted, might have formed a remarkable fellow indeed; but in that Diaspora of words which is the providential nature of conversation, the fugitive persisted, like those Jewish Christians who endured
among the heathen, here in the figure of a man who, it appeared at last, had done many things to envy and nothing to admire.

—Wyatt, what is it? What’s the matter?

—A dream? . . .

—Only a dream?

—But . . .

—It’s all right, darling, whatever it was it’s all right now.

—It was . . .

—What was it?

—At home, in bed, that parsonage was a big empty house and I know every step in it, I woke up and I could hear footsteps. I woke up there hearing very heavy footsteps in an even tread and I knew where they were going, I heard them down the stairs and through the front hallway and into the living room, across the living room and through the back hall past the dining room toward the kitchen . . .

—But, was that all?

—But listen, What was terrible was that I know every step in that house, I know how many steps it takes to come down the stairs or to cross the living room, I can’t tell you the number but I know, but these steps I heard in the darkness, they were regular and even, not in a hurry but what was terrible, they kept reaching places too soon. I know the sound, I know how the sounds change when you step from the front hall into the living room, or passing the dining room or off the last stair and . . . but these steps kept arriving too soon, not hesitating anywhere and not in a hurry, but if you take regular even steps, and there weren’t enough of them.

—It is strange. And your voice, you sound like a child.

—It doesn’t sound terrible does it, now.

—We’ll talk about it in the morning, she whispered, and her hand moved down his body to find him and gently raise him into life. —There must be a reason . . .

—Reason! but, good God, haven’t we had enough . . . reason.

Her hand twisted and her fingers, closed together, moved only enough to make themselves felt, to make their motion not an act but a sense, to arouse not simply the blood which rushed to meet them but, in a touch, something beyond it. —Why do you fight it all so hard, Wyatt?

—Women, he commenced, and then, —men rising to isolated challenges, he spends his life preparing to meet one, one single challenge, when he triumphs it’s, they call it heroic, but you, I know how hard you try for me, women just go on, they just go on, and I . . .

—They have to, Esther said beside him, as he came over half upon her in the darkness. —If we could get away from here, you’ve been everywhere, you’ve studied in Germany and in Paris and I . . . Wyatt, if we could travel . . . She felt his leg relax on hers. —And you don’t want to, you don’t want to travel.

—To voyage . . .

—With me?

—Charles Fort says maybe we’re fished for, by supercelestial beings . . .

—Yes, without me. Alone.

—My grandfather, he fell down a well once, did I tell you? He talks of voyages, he’s oriented by the stars. Orientation sidérale, the man who experimented with ants in the desert in Morocco . . . Then he seemed to tighten and hold her off suddenly, and she asked:

—What is it?

—In that dream, I just remembered my . . . my hair was on fire.

She felt him run his hand over his hair, and down his rough cheek in the darkness. —We’ll talk about it in the morning, she said, —not now.

—Not flames, he said holding her again.

—You, you’d go to Morocco . . .

—But just burning, he whispered, almost wondrously, as she rose to engage the incredulous tension of his right hand, still murmuring:

—And be more . . . Moroccan . . . than the Moors.

Next morning Esther woke alone, to realize that she had been alone most of the night. She swallowed, and found her cold better. She smelled coffee and went to the kitchen, where half a pot of it was boiling furiously on the stove. She started to call out, felt a wave of nausea, and sat down and decided to eat something. She got out bread and butter and looked for an egg, but could not find one. Then she poured some of the boiling coffee into a cold cup, and the cup cracked; nonetheless she poured until it was full and took it into the living room.

Light showed from the studio, and she heard sounds behind the half-closed door. Then:

—Damn you, damn you . . . damn you!