The Way Through Doors (10 page)

—Haven’t you something to say to us, Mr. Golp? he asked.

—Well, said Piers Golp, as a matter of fact, I do.

A tiny bit of light came from the out-of-doors around the edges of the shuttered and draped windows. It made its way slowly and carefully over to the three friends and settled on them.

—There is, said Piers Golp, in this city, a certain anonymous pamphleteer whose work I greatly admire.

He held up the book he had been reading. This turned out in fact not to be a book at all but a substantial pamphlet, neatly and elegantly folded to produce the illusion of a book if viewed from a distance of twelve to fifteen feet. On its cover it said,
An Inquiry into the Ultimate Utility of the Silly, as Prefigured in the Grave and Inhospitable.

—Is this a particularly good one? asked the guess artist.

—I’ve only just begun it, said Piers Golp. My very favorite is one entitled,
Entering Rooms, a Grammar and Method.

To all this S. said nothing, but only sat upon his heels, watching very carefully the tides and eddies of expression pass over the face of Piers Golp.

—About this pamphleteer, Golp continued, almost nothing is known. A friend of mine who knows about my predicament here sends me every pamphlet he can get his hands on. He knows how I long for news of the outside world. After all, I was for many years a war correspondent.

—A war correspondent, exclaimed the guess artist.

—Except that, said Piers Golp a bit ashamedly, there were no wars at the time, so I stayed home.

The guess artist and S. nodded in an understanding way.

—The first of these pamphlets appeared about two years ago, said Piers Golp. Then, about a year ago, new pamphlets began to appear with much greater frequency. Also, they were better printed, and displayed an obviously greater degree of attention and skill. About him I can hazard little, save that he is a young man of great leaps. He is very sly and is best pleased only when he surprises himself. I think that it is most certainly the case that the best artists are the best because they have in their hearts an infinite affection for the objects of the world.

In one of these pamphlets,
The Foreknowledge of Grief,
he plots out a rubric for creating a person to fall in love with.

First, he says, you have to go out into the world. This is not a simple matter of going outside one’s door. No, that is simply going out. That’s what one does when one is on the way to the store to buy a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a bottle of wine. When one goes out into the world, one is shedding preconceptions of past paths and ideas of past paths, and trying to move freely through an unsubstantiated and new geography.

So, one goes out into the world, and then one wanders about.

The querist goes out into the world, and wanders about. Perhaps the day is a pleasant one. It has rained while he was still sleeping, and this rain brought with it an attendant coolness that remained after the rain had gone north or east with the wind. The streets are fresh as though a blanket of snow has fallen. Each square of pavement has yet to be trodden upon. All the weight of past footsteps has been lifted. Through it the young man walks, looking up at the tops of buildings and into the boughs of trees. How often in our progress we forget to look up! And how much there is to see. A bird takes off from a branch and lands upon another. His eyes trail this bird, follow the branch, then follow the trunk of the tree back down to the ground. A dog there is running past just at that moment. His eyes perch atop the dog’s standing fur, and are shuttled back and forth along the street, far down and up to the dog’s mistress, who, in a loose pair of trousers and a light jacket, is returning from a morning promenade. Her hair is unkempt and in a morning disarray. Her face is flushed with the pleasure of the day. The young man has approached her with his eyes, in the company of her dog, but he will go no farther himself. She and the dog move off through the streets, and the young man continues.

He remembers that the pleasure he has in morning comes in part from a time in childhood when he would leave school and wander through the quieted town. Shaded streets were lined with silent houses. The beds of lawns cried out to be lain in. And how then he would go up to the old cemetery on Cedar Hill and lie in the cool space between the graves and sleep while all around him was still, and while, to his great happiness and enduring pleasure, his fellow pupils were seated in rows in a classroom, learning lessons.

In the city too there is a girl. She is the appropriate girl. But she is still sleeping, having refused sleep for the better of the night, having gone along a path of streetlights until the streetlights themselves went out, and the paling horizon ushered her up to her door and into her small room.

It is for this girl that the young man is looking. Day after day he wakes in morning and goes searching for her. In his work, and in his life on mornings that are not miraculous and afternoons that are sundry and various, he saves the corners of his eyes for her, and watches at all times the entrances and exits of every establishment to which he comes. For he knows that eventually, in time and given some protracted period of days, weeks, and months, he will come upon her, and know her in an instant for who she is.

He pauses sometimes in the rooms that he keeps, looking over the equipment of his chosen profession, the printing press, the lithograph machine, the rolls of butcher paper, and endless space of desks and typewriters. He looks at the stacks of pamphlets he has made that are piled in corners and pinned upon the wall. And he thinks and knows in his heart that there is one glorious pamphlet waiting yet to be made. He calls this pamphlet by its name,
World’s Fair 7 June 1978,
and he longs for its arrival. Somehow he knows it is tied to the girl he cannot find.

Oh, the
World’s Fair.
What wonders will fill its pages? He makes notes towards its construction, building in his head and upon the page schematics of impossible architecture, pathways that stretch out across water, preserving in themselves a flatness of the earth to oppose every roundness, or a house in which all sound is diverted and played both upon and with, moved here and there, at distance and closeness, words sometimes amplified, sometimes dampened, and phrases cast upon precise winds, both proscribed and known.

He ponders interviews with artists who were never born, who say things he himself would like to say. These persons, beginning with a perfect biography, an inexplicable and wondrous origin, go on to thunder out the objects of his own hope. Oh, the
World’s Fair.
If there is an affection, a complete and dear affection, it is to this idea of the book that he will one day write.

He stood by the door one day, trying to replicate a posture he had seen in a mannequin, when the door sounded with a loud knock.

—Who’s there? he asked.

—Let me in, came the reply.

The pamphleteer went to the door and slowly opened it. A girl was standing there, dressed in the sort of khaki suit that best befits early-twentieth-century female explorers of Africa.

—Sif! he said. How nice to see you.

—And you, she said. It has been some time, I think.

—Yes, he said. I have been busy working on a pamphlet.

—Which one? she asked.

A glint came into her eye.

—Have you finished
World’s Fair 7 June 1978
?

—Of course not, he said. This one is a method for how to enter rooms.

—Well, then, said Sif. Let this be a lesson to you.

She entered the room, doing a slow sort of pirouette.

—Will you get a girl a drink?

She sat down on the edge of the sofa and watched him as he brought out a glass bottle that perhaps had once held wine, but now looked very much like

—Iced tea? he asked.

—Yes, thank you, she said. You know, I was thinking about the story you told me the other day. The one about the gambler. I’m not entirely sure whether or not he was imagining the girl, what was her name, having affairs.

—Ilsa, said the pamphleteer.

—Yes, continued Sif. I think her dress was unbuttoned and her hair wasn’t pinned up properly, etc., not by chance. I think it’s very possible that a man who could disappear into, what was it, a fold of heat and light, could very easily appear in a room, ravage a woman, and then disappear.

—That’s something to consider, said the pamphleteer.

—But on the other hand, said Sif, the story is interesting because it’s also possible that he is just crazy, that he imagined the whole episode with the devil, and that he is imagining all her possible adulteries. I mean, the point of it could just be that it’s ridiculous in the first place that she should be his property, that he should be able to barter her as an object in his possession in a wager with Satan. Am I wrong?

—Well, said the pamphleteer, there is the burn on his wrist. That’s real.

—He could be imagining that too, said Sif. He’s the only one who ever saw it.

—But the Chinese woman referred to it. And her grandmother too, said the pamphleteer. You can’t just ignore their testimony.

—Sure I can, said Sif, tossing her hair. That means nothing, and you know it.

The two sat quietly, drinking their iced tea.

—Was there pinot noir in this bottle before the iced tea? asked Sif.

—Bingo, said the pamphleteer. Boy, you’re good at that.

—Can’t help it, said Sif. I just like wine. Next time you should try a young cabernet. I think that would contribute better to the taste of the iced tea.

—I’ll put it under advisement.

—Oh, so did you hear about the guy who’s down at Coney Island?

—No.

—The guess artist, there was a piece on him in the
Times.
Supposedly, he can guess what you’re thinking in three tries.

—Most people think about a very limited number of things, said the pamphleteer. Especially when they’re at the beach.

—No, you sap, said Sif. He can tell you
exactly
what you’re thinking. I’m going to go down today and see. You want to come?

—I’ve got some things I have to take care of here, said the pamphleteer. But we’re supposed to have supper later on. The Tunisian place on Third, right?

—Yeah, said Sif. Seven o’clock.

—I’ll see you then.

Sif stood up, straightened her skirt, and, leaning over the pamphleteer, gave him a long and lingering kiss.

—That’s so you remember me all day.

—Wow, said the pamphleteer. You need to leave right now.

—See you ’round, said Sif.

In a blur of Nordic grace and khaki, Sif disappeared out the door. The pamphleteer sat, and looked at the bottle of iced tea. Cabernet, he thought to himself. Cabernet next time.

Sif left the pamphleteer’s building and hailed a taxi with a peculiar and effective gesture known only to her and the people to whom she had confided it. This gesture was so effective that with it one was able to steal taxis from people who were upstream. One can imagine how valuable a technique this was in the devil-may-care world of New York City.

She got into the taxi.

—Coney Island, she said, and step on it.

Out of her bag she took a booklike object. First there was a thin card-stock cover.
Entering Rooms, a Grammar and Method,
it said in neat black letters. Out of this cover, she slid the pamphlet of the same name. She opened it and began to read.

Upon coming to a threshold one should always consider the possibility that there may be something hostile awaiting one within. Also, there may be some great pleasure, which, with its sudden and implacable onset of joy, may disarm one even more than the deepest hostility. Sometimes one must be more careful of being seen in happiness than in grief or anger. A great deal may be told from the expression of a happy man or woman. In any case, one must be prepared for the worst, and ready. Therefore, pause a moment before passing through a door, unless, of course, one is being watched on the outside, or one’s approach to the door is being timed, as in a situation when one is buzzed through an exterior door. In that case, one does not have the leisure to pause, for that pause would in its turn be noted and interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which would be harmful. Therefore, perhaps we should say, make the pause a mental pause, a sort of inner unveiling of precaution. It should last barely a second, and immediately preface the entering of the room in question.

Now, when one enters a room one should consider all the angles that are now present from which one’s person may be approached. One should instantly scan the room, looking not with a particular gaze, but with a gaze in general. This second sort of gaze is a more comprehending gaze, and allows the faculty of the mind a greater freedom.

Gunfighters, when entering a hostile situation, have a vague eye that assesses the room at once with a piecemeal faculty, and at once in a coherent vein. They arrange in a flashing second the hierarchy of shooting ability on the part of every man, woman, and child there present. Thus when the gunfighter begins to shoot, killing the various inhabitants, he kills them not from right to left, or left to right, as we often see in films, but according to the prescriptions of his established hierarchy, from strongest to weakest. First he might shoot the old man half-hidden by the bar. He knows the old man was a captain in the Mexican cavalry and that, furthermore, there is a shotgun behind the bar that must not under any circumstances come into use. Then next he spins and takes out the wealthy rancher on the stairs. He has been guested several times at the ranch and knows the rancher’s prowess with the silver-touched pistols he keeps at his side. These two gone, the gunfighter may continue, shooting down first the youngster with the Winchester, leaning against the faro table, and then and only then the cowboy on the near side of the bar. Now, you may say, why wait that long to shoot the cowboy? Alone among the people in the bar, the cowboy has two pistols, and one drawn already at the gunfighter’s approach. Well, it is true that the cowboy may be able to get off two or even three shots before the gunfighter can attend to putting a bullet through his hardy skull. However, the gunfighter relies upon the fact that the cowboy is a terrible shot, this fact gleaned from the state of his pistols, which have obviously not been cleaned or attended to for some time.