Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (3 page)

“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 never 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.

“Tippy” Anders was here with them because last year, as new staff like the Spilkers, he’d taken on rooms in their overlarge house and the alignment had continued, for reasons that nobody looking at him—or at them—would ever impugn. For, though Lila, genial haystack in beads, had good legs and skin, and Meyer was even handsome, together they had that air, so common to couples here in the States, of having left the romantic arena forever; it was possible to imagine them procreating, but only with each other; they had become all parent. To this unity of flesh they had added an even less disseverable one—that of shared views. The Spilkers’ was one of those happily educated households—once peculiar to campuses here perhaps, but now endemic almost everywhere even in a better financed America—whose ideal number of children, pets, cars and sailboats was forever overflowing missionarywards; at dinner at their house one was forever stumbling over a darkish somebody in native dress or just out of it.

Though their preference ran to persons of color, and Anders was one of those extremely white Americans who so often seemed to come from the minor towns of upstate New York, perhaps this very aura—as of the last stage of whitedom—had qualified him. At twenty-three, wearing lenses thick as chips of Steuben crystal, his hair already moulting, he seemed to be ageing backwards, to the nineteen of a very old chick. Something about him, not as simple as sexlessness, certainly not rooster, nevertheless linked him elusively in the mind to genus bird or fowl, and if the observer-eye concentrated, became clearer. Looking at the back of Anders’s head, recalling what discoveries had already cracked from within that membraned oval, had circled and belted this universe and were now brooding toward others, any member of the warmer-blooded species found himself filled with awe, as once the ancients perhaps, before the mystic properties of Egg. Frontface, he had the turned-up features of a merry-andrew gone solemn, and again that high oval, the apostolic forehead. One ended up equally uneasy. This could hatch.

As Linhouse watched, the three of them walked down to the front row of what in a theater might have been called the loges, and seated themselves centrally. Though they couldn’t see him, Lila had already turned on the worried stare she allotted those who, under suspicion of breakdown or home troubles or racial ones, might possibly be candidates for care. At her right, Meyer’s face, less at-the-ready, kept the benign gloom of a person whose sympathies lie with the mass. On her left, Anders’s face wore—though less noticeably than the back of it—its resemblance. All three, directly in line with the object on the platform, seemed not to notice it or perhaps had already classified it according to their lights, as an artifact known or unknown, a machine with or without a name. What these three and the rest of the audience had said of Linhouse beforehand and now were thinking—a lover about to open his liaison’s legacy thus publicly—was best not imagined, and already had been. But at his wildest he should never have imagined either of the men out there as his successor. Last year at this time, however, he’d done precisely that.

When, after a month, her vagueness could no longer be so classified and yet couldn’t be pushed to anything more definite—either way, pure curiosity had moved him to look about him. Women didn’t stop, without reason. Someone else was the likeliest. Pure curiosity, he told himself then, had almost entirely motivated his side of the whole affair. What had motivated hers seemed to him, a man of normal vanity and conquests, so entirely natural he hadn’t questioned it—in spite of her “mistake.” Still, no one could blame him for wanting a look at her next. For one thing, the scope here was so peculiarly limited. For a second, in this all but closed community, it was almost impossible, honor aside, not to find out.