The Recognitions (17 page)

—Oh no, he isn't, Don isn't, don't you listen? He told me that this . . . this . . . She held up that
Collected Poems
, shunning to speak the poet's name. —Did you know it? 

—What? Yes, I've heard something like that. 

—Why didn't you tell me? 

He looked up for the first time. —Tell you? 

—You might have mentioned it, she said and put the book aside with its cover down. 

—Might have . . . why would I mention it? What's that to do with . . . 

—When we were sitting here listening to him read, it didn't occur to me, it's funny, it never occurred to me about him, pictures I've seen of him, and his poems, the things he says in his poems . . . and I'd wanted to meet him. Esther's eyes had come to rest on the floor, and the shadow thrown there from the chair, meaningless until it moved. 

—And you're surprised? . . . upset over this? 

—I'd wanted to meet him, she commenced, following the shadow's length back to its roots. 

—Meet him? And now a thing like this ... I don't understand, you Esther, you're the one who always knows these things about people, these personal things about writers and painters and all the ... 

—Yes but ... 

—Analyzing, dissecting, finding answers, and now . . . What did you want of him that you didn't get from his work? 

Esther's eyes rose slowly from the floor the height of her husband's figure. —Why are you so upset all of a sudden? she asked him calmly. —Just because I'd mentioned Han . . . 

—Han! he repeated, wresting the name from her. —Good God, is this what it is! That stupid . . . Han, why he ... after all these years, a thing like this . . . 

—And that painting you gave him, you've never given me . . . 

—Gave him? It disappeared, that's what I told you. "You give it to me to remember you, because we are dear friends, this Memlinc you are making now . . ." He asked me for it, but it disappeared before it was even finished, when they arrested the old man, Koppel, that's what I told you. He subsided, muttering something, he'd picked up a piece of string and stood knotting it. 

She murmured, her eyes back on the shadow's busy extremity, —You've told me . . . 

—That stupid . . . Han, he went on, —in his uniform, pound-ing his finger with a beer stein, "You see? it couldn't hurt me . . ." At Interlaken, what else was there to do but drink? Snowed in, waiting, "There's something missing," he says, he hadn't shaved for three days, the blank look on his face, ". . . if I knew what it is then it wouldn't be so missing . . ." I've told you . . . 

—Oh, you've told me, she said, impatient, looking up at him for a moment, then back at the shadow. —I don't know what all you've told me, what little . . . New England, all right, you're the Puritan, all this secrecy, this guilt, preaching to me out of Fichte about moral action, no wonder a thing like this upsets you, when I mention a poet I've wanted to meet and he turns out . . . you don't want to talk about it, do you! she pursued him, where he had got almost across the room, about to escape into the studio. 

But he stopped in that doorway, reaching a hand inside he snapped on the bright light which flung a heavier shadow across the floor to her. —Listen, this guilt, this secrecy, he burst out, —it has nothing to do with this . . . this passion for wanting to meet the latest poet, shake hands with the latest novelist, get hold of the latest painter, devour . . . what is it? What is it they want from a man that they didn't get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he's done his work? What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology. 

—Wyatt, these romantic . . . 

—Yes, romantic, listen . . . Romantics! they marry cows and all kinds of comfort, soon enough their antics betray them to what would have been fatal in the work, I mean being obvious. No, here, it's competence right here in the world that's rewarded with romantic ends, and the romantics battling for competence, something to eat and carfare home . . . Look at the dentist's wife, she's a beauty. Who's the intimate of a saint, it's her Jesuit confessor, and the romantics end up anchorites in the desert. 

Esther stood up, turning her back as she spoke to him so that he could not evade her question with a look, or by turning away himself, but was left with, —Then tell me, what are you trying to do? And she picked up a magazine, and came back to a chair with it, not looking up to where he took a step toward her from the brightly lighted doorway. 

—There's only one thing, somehow, he commenced, faltering, —that . . . one dilemma, proving one's own existence, it ... there's no ruse people will disdain for it, and ... or Descartes "retiring to prove his own existence," his "cogito ergo sum," why ... no wonder he advanced masked. Kept a salamander, no wonder. Something snaps, and . . . when every solution becomes an evasion, . . . it's frightening, trying to stay awake. 

Though his voice had risen, still Esther did not look up, but sat quietly turning the pages of the magazine, and when she spoke did so quietly and evenly. —You've told me, all your reasons for letting year after year go by this way while you . . . work? And even this, look. This magazine your company puts out, look at this picture, this bridge, it's something your company did, designed by Ben somebody, I can't pronounce it, the road bridge at Fallen Ark Gap. 

—Do you like it? he asked, suddenly standing beside her, anxiety still in his face and sounding in his voice, but a different, immediate anxiousness. 

—It's beautiful, she said. Then she turned and looked up to him. —Wyatt, you know you could do more, more than just the drafting, copying lines, wasting your time with . . . 

—Look at it, he said, —do you see the way it seems to come out and meet itself, does it? He held his hands up in a nervous bridge, fingertips barely touching, the piece of string still hung from one of them. —Does it look that way to you? that sense of movement in stillness, that . . . tension at rest and still ... do you know that Arab saying, "The arch never sleeps"? . . . 

—Yes, it is dynamic. Wyatt, you, why can't you . . . Then her eyes, meeting his, seemed that abruptly to empty the enthusiasm from his face and his voice. 

—It's derivative, the design, he said. 

—Derivative? 

—Of Maillart. 

—I don't know him. 

—A Swiss, there's a book of his work somewhere around here. She looked at his hands, gone back to knotting the string, and watched a bowline form there. —Like a knot, she said, —pulling against itself. 

—I'm going back to work, he said and turned away. She walked after him as far as the lighted doorway, and stood for a minute staring at the picture on the upright easel. —I've come to hate that thing, she said finally, and with no answer, left him removing corroded portions of the face with the sharp blade. 

Most nights now Esther went to sleep alone, her consciousness carried in that direction by Handel and Palestrina, William Boyce, Henry Purcell, Vivaldi, Couperin, music which connected them across the darkness in the stream where everything that had once brought them together returned to force them apart, back to the selves they could no longer afford to mistrust. Sometimes there was a long pause between the records; sometimes one was repeated, over and over again. 

She woke to the same exquisitely measured contralto, —
When I am laid
. . . , that had lost her to sleep what seemed so many hours before. She lay in the dark and saw herself as she had been, a week before was it? sitting with an open book. —Wyatt . . . ? —What is it? When she said nothing he looked up at her. —What is it, Esther? She looked at him. —I just want you to talk to me. He looked at her; and looking at him she heard herself saying something she had said another time and wanted to repeat but there was no way to, for he simply sat, looking at her, and would not provoke it: —I wish you
would
lose your temper, she had said, —or
some
thing because this . . . this restraint, this pose, this control that you've cultivated, Wyatt, it becomes inhuman . . . He just looked at her. 

The music, she realized now, was not the Purcell, not the contralto at all, but strident male voices in a Handel oratorio. Memories ran together, and she sat up in bed. Just her position, lying flat on her back, had advanced one memory, one evening and one conversation, into another, like streams commingling on an open plain. Bolt upright, everything stopped. She drew breath, and smelled lavender. 

Esther got out of bed and went into the living room, where she sat down in the darkness. The door to the studio was open barely an inch. She sat, listening and remembering, as though he had been gone a long time. Would the music of Handel always recall sinful commission, the perpetration of some crime in illuminated darkness recognized as criminal only by him who committed it: Persephone, she sat now listening. And would the scent of lavender recall it? as it was doing now; for she felt that she was remembering, that this moment was long past, or that she was seated somewhere in the future, seated somewhere else and had suddenly caught the smell of lavender in the air, recalling this moment only in memory, that in another moment she would breathe deeply, destroying the delicate scent, that she would arise and go: queen of the shades, was her mother wandering in search of her? now where she waited, here on the other side of the door opening upon her husband's infernal kingdom. 

She woke sitting straight up in the chair. The music was right where it had abandoned her: repeating? or had she been lost to it for no more than a transition of chords, as is the most alert consciousness. She stared at the shaft of light; and immediately she was up, and had pushed the door open. 

Wyatt had modified his handwriting to a perverse version of Carolingian minuscule, in which the capital
S
's,
G
's, and
Y
's were indistinguishable, and among the common letters,
y
, g, and
f
. The looked like
M
, and
p
a declined bastard of
h
. (Esther wrote in one continuous line, interrupted by humps, depressions, lonely dots and misplaced streaks, remarkably legible.) There were specimens of his writing strewn about the room; still, his childhood hand was apparent as the child father to the man. On the length of the table made from a door, on top of large sheets of unfinished lines drafted in origins of design pinned to the table, among opened books, and books with slips of paper profusely stuck between their pages,
The Secret of the Golden Flower
,
Problems of Mysticism and Its Symbolism
,
Prometheus and Epimetheus
,
Cantilena Riplœi
, beside an empty brandy bottle, lay open Foxe's
Book of Martyrs
, and there in the scrupulous hand of childhood, written on lined paper, a nursery rhyme which she suddenly had in her hand, standing alone in the room. 

—Esther ... 

—I just couldn't stop reading it, she said. He had her, supporting her with one arm. 

—But what . . . why . . . 

—Are you here now? she said, looking at him, into his eyes. 

The music stopped, and the automatic arm lifted, paused, returned to the grooves it had just left. He reached over and turned it off. 

—Wyatt . . . ? 

—I thought you were asleep, I just went out to get this, he said, holding up a bottle of brandy. He looked down quickly at his table, at the undisturbed plans and the books there. —I thought you were asleep, he repeated, looking at her. Then he saw what she had in her hand. —That, he said taking it from her, —what are you reading it for, it ... it's just something I found here, here in this old book of Aunt May's. It's nothing, it's just something . . . He set the brandy down on the table. —Something she made me copy out. 

He had no coat, and was dressed in a black suit. The bones in his face were smaller than Esther's. His hair was cut short, and his skull looked almost square. —Esther? . . . She put her arms around him. —Come to bed. 

The dream recurs. 

—Darling . . . the same one? 

—Yes. The same. Exactly the same. 

She thinks then, Perhaps . . . 

—It doesn't really hurt, there isn't any pain and there aren't any flames, but just that my hair is burning . . . 

Perhaps the consecration has not taken place yet after all, and the substance is still there, caught up in accident, waiting. Bedded in darkness she drew him over, and sweating he performed, and lay back, silent, inert, distant. —There are some cigarettes on the dresser, she said. He walked there in the dark, found them and lit one, sitting on the edge of the bed he smoked. 

—Wyatt? 

—What. 

—How are you? 

—Fine. 

—I mean how do you feel? 

—Empty, he answered. 

She said nothing, but pretended sleep. After minutes of sitting abandoned he turned open the disrupted covers, and was asleep before she was, dwelling close up against the exposure of her back.