Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel Page 2

  Keep it company, she’d written, it’s quite a prize. Once the mechanism is moved, it must be allowed to regain equilibrium overnight, or for at least five hours, at a temperature of 71°.

  He’d kept it company; by God he’d slept here, on a couple of turned-down seats, going out like a truant for his coffee and a washroom shave.

  An hour beforehand, raise the temperature in the hall to 74.6°. Please be exact about that. Afterwards, you have only to lift the glass and it will function perfectly. Just give the crowd some music meanwhile. And there really ought to be a crowd, you know. I’d like about fifty. So invite perhaps a hundred. Any music will do. With the sharpest ear for the spoken word, she’d had no ear otherwise.

  Clearest of all, in the arrangements she’d foisted on him, was the evidence that she’d had absolutely no regard for what his feelings might be throughout them. Never had had much of course, at any time. As had been clear enough a year ago when they’d parted. Still, she might have remembered his severer musical tastes, and that it would have assuaged his feelings to—that he would have been happy to choose—Or had she known better how he, listening, was likely to memorialize her? Perhaps, with that sense of style which in women must be never wholly separable from intelligence, she’d known herself as not one best recalled in passacaglias. Listening—it was the “Vilia Song” beloved of Muzaks—he began to smile.

  2. Soft Muzak

  AT FIRST GLANCE AN olive type but not really, she had what Linhouse’s grandmother would have called a georgette skin—pale, without oil, not thin—and her brows had a penciled, brushed look which, though natural, gave her face a made-up emphasis even when fresh from the washbasin. With men, she had that charged yet careless manner they recognized at once and returned to endlessly, to be addressed either as men or as “boys” of her own age, but never, with the usual stance of her countrywomen, as sons—since the age of six she had been a jampot for boys. Almost at once a man sensed that the usual ploys invited by her elusively median appearance—“Were or were not her eyes hazel? Was she really more of a redhead than a brown?”—had all been tried and returned many times before, yet she always answered as if these were new, causing her to be spoken of as “a French type” by those mistaking for flirtatious the warm-cool smiles which Linhouse had reason to know were not manner, but a personal thing no Frenchwoman of his acquaintance had ever been guilty of—somewhere, she didn’t care. Had she been a beauty, hers would have been of the kind that is either outside fashion or makes it; since she wasn’t sugarlump pretty, her attraction couldn’t be pinned down. This had been its fatality for him, God knows; she could not be pinned down.

  “Oh—” she’d been saying at a party where, unintroduced, he had stood at her elbow, “if I weren’t of the white race there’d be more names for my indefinite mixture—mahine, grayling—” and she had gone on to list several more abstruse but apparently similar terms he’d never heard of before. He already knew her to be an anthropologist, one of no special distinction—he’d been told that also. This was the way it went with the few women on the staff here; the Center, instead of choosing fearfully brilliant survivors of competition with the most distinguished male colleagues, discriminated rather more thoughtfully, tending to settle for a few mediocre women scholars who might then be taken as evidence that the others didn’t exist to be found.

  He recalled now that he had been smiling at this private thought when, finishing her sentence, she had seemed to address her smile particularly to him: “Guess I’m what might be called a white octoroon.” Even as their eyes met—she must really have been replying to some speech of the Austrian heavy at her other elbow—he had sensed that it was merely habit on her part, to make any man seem particularly addressed. Later, he thought of it as a power she couldn’t discard. At the time, he’d nodded, but not answered. In his own way, he was knowledgeable enough about women. And later on, as the campus had let him know, she had indeed singled him out.

  He had slept with her. According to gossip, since her widowhood no one else had. Still later, they’d become one of those couples who were invited together; in the easy droppings-in of the life here she’d been discovered at his flat, he at her cottage; since this was a civilized community the worst was known of them without comment, and the best—i.e. marriage—hoped for. And what had endlessly preoccupied him all that year together and beyond it, down to the very moment when her letter had led him back to her house to find the object now on the dais, was—what it could be, what in God’s name could it be, about which she didn’t care?

  In their sexual moments, though no grunting peasant girl for whom the exchange was nearest to the intake of food, she was normal enough, fully as much so, he suspected, as many of the nice matrons hereabouts and most of the fast ones, both of whom would have been disillusioned to the bone if told either that sexual exchange was quite Europeanly their own purchase money in the buy-marts of life, or that on this basis it might still be enjoyed. She too wanted her exchange, but whatever it was it wasn’t any of the usual, not marriage. He’d never had an affair in which there was less sense of the marriage topic coming up—and this was unnerving. She was always unnerving him.

  Once, when in his arms—was it their last day?—she had revealed herself so far as to say, of the sexual act itself, “Oh well, it’s the nearest, isn’t it, the nearest we can come in this world, to nothing”—and when she saw his face, full of attempted Freudian concern for her and real concern for his own vanity, had at once hopefully amended it. “Oh, I mean—to talk your language—” by which she meant philosophy, though he was technically a classicist—“the Something that is nothingness.” She often tried to talk what she thought of as his language, just like any respectable doctor’s wife or professor’s moll, and with about the same success. This effort had been one of the most womanly things about her. And the only proprietary one, if it was that, which he now doubted.

  For it was earlier on this same occasion when they were as a matter of fact still lying together on the extraordinary couch she had brought back from New Guinea only to find out later it was fake—she was a poor anthropologist—that he’d discovered why she had singled him out.

  “But why!” he’d said, outraged. She’d mistaken him, she said, for a physicist. No, not any special one—just a physicist. “Unless you were planning to go through the departments one by one!”

  “Now, you know that isn’t so,” she had countered, calmly enough. “I’ve never wanted to be one of those academic how do you say it, het—hetaira.”

  He’d had to laugh. And he supposed it was true enough; since the death of her husband, the Jamison who had been a good anthropologist, she hadn’t slept around. As an older man with whom she’d gone off so young, her husband had been willing enough to train her for the travel she was so eager for, and they had lived happily enough.

  “He first got interested in me because I belonged to a tribe,” she had informed Linhouse on a still prior occasion.

  “Uh-huh, of course,” Linhouse had answered—she was on his knee at the time—fully aware of what she must have been at eighteen. What the boys around the jampot must have thought of her going off with a fifty-four-year-old man, he could well imagine. And he knew that her name had been Wertham or Wertheim, that she had grown up in Pennsylvania.

  “No, really. I’m from a religious sect, the Amish. That is, my grandparents were. The ‘plain people.’” She’d had to explain this to him, adding rather seriously, “We were lapsed ones. My parents, that is. There aren’t many of those who are lapsed, you know. But we were.” This was the one glimpse he had had of her earlier life, beyond a remembrance that once, when he’d suggested driving down to what he by then knew was referred to here as the “Dutch” country, meanwhile thinking of the trip British style as a picnic tour of, say Lancashire, with some good old churches on the way, and some inns of course—she had replied, “No, I never go back anywhere. The farm’s there, but I’m not. So why try?”

  All his
memories of her, of this woman who never went back anywhere, were like that, leading circularly into one another, heading him only to that nowhere in which he still refused to believe she was. On the couch, that later and last day, he’d been as furiously bereft and confused by her as any of those earlier, presumably non-Amish, wretched boys.

  “Why a physicist!” he had bleated again, taking the insult for a professional one, where it hurt him less. “If you were fancying he’d train you up to be one, isn’t twenty-eight a bit late to start? They get their major insights earlier than the rest of us, you know. Like poets.”

  As he said it, light broke, or seemed to. There were women who had, it was said, not so much a natural bent as a natural bending, who performed very well, or perhaps only, in the hypnotic wake of another being. These women were not the helpmeets of great men—the wives of Rembrandts and Disraelis, carriers of the cup, the helmet and the nose drops; these were the disciple types who galloped the desert a length or two behind their sheikhs, reached the crest of the Jungfrau in time to see him, their guide, planting a flag there, or flamed down the Ganges of the intellectual life alongside beloved mahatmas who were still very much alive. After all, he thought expansively, she had tried to learn his language.

  In the tender ray of this, he’d been about to apologize for his nastiness. Before he could do so she had replied calmly, “Much too late, at thirty-four.” Until then he hadn’t known her exact age, and he found this directness as annoyingly unfeminine as her refusal to see his nastiness. She never either took or gave the bitchy backchat which at once refreshed a male’s sense of superior rationale. To be a bitch, a woman had to care.

  “So you settled for a philosopher,” he said. “Who turned out to be a classicist.” He was too low to ask again—why. If indeed she knew. No, no, that was the worst of it. Medium as her coloring, her mind might be, but one always got a firm impression that she knew her mind.

  “Oh, but there’re things you’ve taught me—” From whatever distance it might have wandered, that personal look of hers always returned just in time. “What you told me Descartes said, for instance—or was it Comte? Me imperturbe.” She pronounced the Latin impeccably, may eempairtoorbeh, whether or not she was familiar with it, with a delicately parroty ability she did have, to mimic the sound even of inflected dialect—Chinese, Navaho—tickling the labials with the lightest tongue, sliding oboesque through diphthongs that were utterly orient; it was here, in their recordings, that she had best helped Jamison. Watching her pout the Latin, he mused that the inner arch of her mouth must be shaped by all this bel canto, like a Bali woman’s perhaps—if the Balinese sang.

  “But I’ve been thinking—” she said. Her American was ordinary enough. “I—me imperturbable in the world, the universe. But how could he, anybody be, as long as he still admits the I—me part?”

  He planted a kiss on the mouth, and sought its arch. They were lying together even closer when he heard it whisper, not teasing, from that pool of annihilation he’d thought satisfied. “But they’re the ones who know, these days, aren’t they. The science people. After all, that’s what it means, doesn’t it—scientia?”

  It had taken her a long moment to answer his gruff “Know about what.”

  They were still close, yet all sad leagues apart when she said softly, “About—about Elsewhere.”

  Yes, he had heard that hungering, traveling voice, and not heeded it. Travel had always been for him her one snobbishness; he’d even heard her say that the much-traveled were like celebrities, at ease only with their own kind. If, she said, one wished merely to speak of Paris with love, or Africa with wonder, or a Flanders winter with warming, reminiscent hate—or perhaps, like two ski addicts, only of that burning up of space which was a mutual need—the others always stood about, sour and envious at what they took to be boastfulness, or worse yet, pulled a kind of moral rank of their own, armchair people listening to the rackety talk of fools who risked the front row at Le Mans.

  “Why—you’ve been almost as many places as I have!” she’d said at their first meeting, with what he’d taken to be the American mixture of cheek and dotty charm. He hadn’t been to her Africa, but he knew his Europe of course, and even (unlike her) his Russia. His having been to Australia also had fixed him as once upon a time having been at least in the archipelago of some of her weird island diggings—and he had been to “their” Asia. Though not what was here called “an Oxford man,” he had been more than once in the small close of Merton, Jamison’s college.

  “Worn stone,” she had said dreaming, while the Austrian man beside her—who had never been farther from here than Vienna—now looked on at them. “Worn stone and live green.” And then, with full face again—that cool lamp—“And all the sparrow-sex voices.”

  He’d thought he understood that right enough, a woman’s signal to him whom she recognized as man. “Now, now,” he said with the proper coyness, “just what do you mean by that!” and they were off, to all the exchanges which obviously were waiting to kindle between them, and had—in spite of her slight mistaking of him, and his great one.

  His mistake had been awesome. To think of it that way lent his scrabbling actions, then and since, the only sort of dignity these could have. He’d fallen into an error of emotion about another human being, at the deepest level on which such could be made. It was only an error of reversal—a plaint whose echo could no doubt be heard above many a circle of the damned. He’d merely forgot, or not until now learned, under what actual light every human being was to be seen, approached, and if possible honored. What she hadn’t seemed to care about—he knew it now because he knew it for himself—had been merely the bramble and shadow behind which she had cached whatever it was she had cared for so ungovernably, enough to leave her world for it. In that light, every man he saw now seemed to carry his own meaning before him, plain as the nose on Cyrano; every woman, if one troubled to receive it, shook it out like the perfume of nakedness, no matter what concealing garments of gesture she wore. A hundred times or more she must have told him what it was, silently handing him it the way children pass one another an icicle, holding at last only its shape. And when she said it aloud he hadn’t heeded, much less listened with every cell as he would now, for the clue of it, for the way she’d named it as if it were an actual country—Elsewhere.

  If he’d known that this was to be the last time he saw her intimately, would he have listened more carefully for the key to it and her? He doubted so. In the nine-month interval since, the affair had died in what had at first seemed to him no more than one of the several more or less familiar ways such affairs did die, no differently for him, he’d always supposed, than for other people—i.e. other men. Women had their own versions of these things, blueprints somewhat intensified, of what they had long accustomed the world to think of as their side of it. Accordingly, they never imposed agony. Since the collapse of his own early, brief and only marriage—to a young woman too high-minded to leave him quickly and honestly for the kind of maintenance she really wanted and ultimately left for—he’d understood this, and had managed never again to be agony’s recipient. Normally, per the blueprints, women underwent it. As a friend on the sidelines, he’d sometimes watched this process, powerless to convince the sufferer that if the man in question gave signs of stopping an affair, it needn’t be because he was thinking of another woman, or had never thought much of her, or had gone away in order not to think of her; it might well be merely—that he had stopped. On occasion, he himself had been of use in supplying that consolation which was the crudest and the best. Either way, for women an affair never died—and was never consciously begun—without a “because.” But to him it had always seemed, contrarily, that between these poles of exchangeable agony there were innumerably more connections between men and women which, flickering to a stop just short of love or law—just went out. He’d become tolerant of this in his own life, though never without a sense of loss—for his choice of women, as of ideas, was nev
er made or relinquished without feeling. In both realms, though he knew the ideal to be a pursuit, not an end—it was always with a spinal sadness. A philosopher can know better than to hunt the philosopher’s stone, and yet suspect that the very act of knowing this is as sad as it is wise.

  Nor is there anybody more humbly expectant of change than a man who despairs of the absolute. Yet she’d surprised him all the way, this Janice Jamison of the name so like the fake trademarks of the Sunday clothing ads, or even when halved, so cloying—Janice—that he’d long since taken to thinking of her as “she.” Now and then he’d even addressed her so: “Come here, she,” in a teasing which she’d accepted quite without comment, as if Jamison had already inured her to the faintly ethnic cast of his own image of her as perhaps a charming bit out of his ballad collection, or his personal totem for her sex generally—a pidgin English “she.” And all the time, with Jamison; where it may have, must have begun, and with Linhouse later, she’d been thinking on, dreaming on: Elsewhere.

  When, in the next ten days or so, another meeting had somehow not been arranged, he hadn’t yet been alerted; she’d always been vague on this score—though lively enough when finally met and reminded. And under her careless power for the personal, a man could take even this for flattery, as if only his presence was aphrodisiac.

  He winced now, brought out of his Muzak wanderings by the thought of it, and glanced at the uppermost tier of seats in which a threesome was just settling. Was there any significance in the fact that Meyer Spilker and young Anders, the very-young-but-a-physicist Anders, had come in together? No, he knew better now. If Linhouse hadn’t been enough to keep her from her dreams of an elsewhere either metaphysical or sexual, neither of those chaps would have been his successor.

  Meyer was here because, as senior member of her own department, he was bound to, and because, given the old-fashioned “good works” ritualist he really was, he’d have put in an appearance anyway—it was proper. In the Polish or Russian village, painted by Chagall, from which Meyer’s grandparents would have come, a certain iron kindliness, scarcely separable from duty, had been part of the moral code; in Meyer, generalized sponge of all isms related to the liberal, that same code, though by now boringly sociological, was still active; if only because of the good Old Testament death wish, Meyer was sure to turn up at any ceremony for which the bid was marked “in memoriam.” And Lila, one of those malleable Midwesterners, by now grown to be his exact other half, was of course here also, between the two men.