Carpenter's Gothic

by William Gaddis

  When the headlights flashed on, the four had already gained the step pushing the smallest of them forward, white skull mask askew and a hand up to raise it on eyes absorbed with greed for the coin from the depth of a pocket, and the black car moved sweeping its lights across the front of the house as the door closed against it.

  Past the ringing phone in the kitchen he stopped for a rag from the cupboard, wiping his hands on it back in the sudden stillness of the room, wiping off the bottle and raising the quavering lip of the glass to pour back half an ounce for the good ounce that spilled and wiping that up, sitting down, taking a sip, picking up the scattered cigarettes one by one back into the tin and lighting the last one before he swept papers, bills, folders from the open file drawer into the carton. Here and there he paused to set something aside, to study a page, or a picture, crumpled with the rest till the carton was full and he carried it in to the hearth, down digging for matches, heaping the empty grate, pulling the wing chair closer as the blaze came up, sitting there with the notebook unopened on his lap. Headlights glowed at the windows, passed the alcove and were gone. The wind had risen out there, throwing the leafless branches dancing in black silhouette, setting up the creak of a beam in the dark somewhere up past the head of the stairs. He came forward to stir the fire with the edge of the notebook, an old school looking sort of thing in crudely chiaroscuroed covers, Compositions lettered on the front, Name left blank, he banked it against the flames and got up pulling off the jacket he'd had on all this time, walked into the kitchen and looked in the refrigerator, into the dining room and looked at the plants, filled a clean glass to water a wilting member of the jewel-weed family, moving more slowly till now he was back staring at the books in the bookshelves, taking one down, and another, running through them to stop at pages checked in the margins, to stare at those passages perplexed as though someone else must have marked them, must have found some stinging revelation in this inconsequential line, or that one, jamming them back till he came on one with a narrow orange spine as if it were what he'd been after all this time. He came out with it, and the glass, and a sheaf of cobwebbed papers from under the table, brought it all out to the fire in the living room which he stirred into life with a stick from the copper tub by the fireplace where he stood for a minute looking into the flames. Then he walked straight into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, took a pot out and raised the lid on some chance kind of stew sporting wrinkled peas, greying peaks of potato, and put it on the stove; went on to pull closed the sliding door, the light still on in there; stopped to come down abruptly and dig in the trash for the worn address book. Round the end of the kitchen table he turned on the radio which eagerly informed him that a group of handicapped mountainclimbers had carried an American flag and a bag of jellybeans to the summit of Mount Rainier before he could bend to turn the dial, slowly, bringing in the full chord of a cello.

  Back to the fire, he threw in the canceled passport, the worn address book, added crumpled papers, crumpled snapshots where repetitive landscapes, glimpses of dips, outcroppings, curled and turned black, added a split piece of ash from the copper tub and sat back in the wing chair making a fresh cigarette, the glass at his elbow, opening the slight book's paper covers to page 207 where it was marked with a slip of paper, a list in an open and generous hand, milk, paper towels, Tampax, tulip bulbs, which he crumpled and tossed into the flames before he took up there, I distrusted romance. See, though, how I yielded to it.

  A man, 1 suppose, fights only when he hopes, when he has a vision of order, when he feels strongly there is some connexion between the earth on which he walks and himself. But there was my vision of a disorder which it was beyond any one man to put right. There was my sense of wrongness, beginning with the stillness of that morning of return… while from the kitchen, the chords of Bach's D major concerto heaved into the room around him and settled like furniture.

  5

  She lay back on the bed as though she'd never left it, the damp sheet turned chill and fallen away, feet curled close in the frolic of sunlight through the trees outside and her nipples drawn up hard with a hand passing down her breast, out to the knee flexing up for its reach, gliding down slowly on a hard edge of nails to the rising fall and the warmth of breath lingering in the villous suspense of her legs fallen wide broken, abruptly, by the sound of her own voice. — It's an amazing thing to be alive, isn't it… catching the hand back to sequester the white of her breast — I mean, when you think of all the people who are dead? And then, sharply up on an elbow — was that true, what you said last night? about having malaria? But whatever his answer might have been was lost in the muffle of her breast where his lips came up opened, and his tongue — wait… She held his face away, fretting his profile there under the eye with a fingertip — just, hold still…

  — What are you, ow!

  — No it's just, hold still it's just a little blackhead… bent closer, eyes creased in clinical concentration, a sharp thrust of her nail and — there. Did that hurt?

  — Just didn't expect it, what…

  — Wait there's another one… but he had her wrist in a turn that sank her back on the pillow, his hand gathering her breasts closer again and his lips — wasn't that a strange dream? She held his face pressed against her, — but they always are aren't they, when they're about death, I mean when they're about somebody dying and you don't even know who it is? Her fingers brushed the forehead, the hard cheekbone, the hard line of the jaw's fixed appetite there at her breast, — when he used to read out loud to me and I thought all the books were about him, and he wasn't really reading to me at all. Huckleberry Finn, The Call of the Wild, those stories by Kipling and that book about the Indian, the last Indian? He was just turning the pages and telling the story the way he wanted to. About himself. They were always about him… and the touch of her fingers went harder, hard as the lineaments they traced — it must have been about him, that dream. Don't you think so?

  — You told me last night he was pushed off a train. I asked you when your father died and you said he was in a train accident, he was pushed off a train. Maybe that was a dream too.

  — No but isn't it strange? I mean how you always want to tell your dream to somebody in every exact detail? and they couldn't care less? He didn't want to tell his, he said, and no, they weren't bad, they weren't complicated, they were just dull, they were about this house, a lot of them, finding the porch caved in, or a whole side of it missing, finding somebody he'd never seen before in the living room painting the walls orange, his hand now slipping lower along the swell of her thigh, over the pelvic crest, or they were about things that had happened twenty years ago, nothing he could do anything about, nothing that was any use now, his hand idling further where white gave way in velutinous red, a fingertip seeking refuge in the damp — but did you ever think? She was up on that elbow again, turned to him so his hand fell still on the white of the sheet, — about light years?

  — About what?

  — I mean if you could get this tremendously powerful telescope? and then if you could get far enough away out on a star someplace, out on this distant star, and you could watch things on the earth that happened a long time ago really happening? Far enough away, he said, you could see history, Agincourt, Omdurman, Crécy… How far away were they she wanted to know, what were they, stars? constellations? Battles he told her, but she didn't mean battles, she didn't want to see battles, — I mean seeing yourself… Well as far as that goes he said, get a strong enough telescope you could see the back of your own head, you could — That's not what I meant. You make fun of me don't you.

  — Certainly not, why would…

  — I mean seeing what really happened back when…

  — All right, set up a mirror on Alpha Centauri then, you'd sit right here with your telescope watching yourself four, about four and a half years ago is that what you…

  — No.

  — But I thought…

  — Because I don't want to see
that! She pulled away, pulled up the sheet, staring up at the ceiling. — But you'd just see the outside though, wouldn't you. You'd just see the mountain you'd see it go down and you'd see all the flames but you wouldn't see inside, you wouldn't see those faces again and the, and you wouldn't hear it, a million miles away you wouldn't hear the screams… What screams, he wanted to — No, no that one's too close, find one further away… and he subsided, looking at the sheet clenched to her throat and the length of her gone under it, recommending Sirius, setting up business on the Dog Star, the brightest of them all, watching what happened eight and a half? nine years ago? — I told you what happened… the sheet clenched firm, — I told you last night no, twenty, twenty five years away when it was all still, when things were still like you thought they were going to be?

  — Oh… He gave a gentle tug at the edge of the sheet, she caught it closer.

  — Because I could see myself then at Longview, I mean there were always people, he'd have shooting parties, George Humphrey, Dulles, people like that they'd go out in these wagons for birds and, I don't know, foxes? He had Jack Russell terriers, that was when things started to get mixed up, that station wagon with those Jack Russell terriers because we just adored him. When we were little we thought he could do anything and then when we got older, when we started to say things he thought were critical and he sort of drew away and he got those dogs, those hateful little Jack Russell terriers they just adored him, they followed him everywhere they'd do anything to please him and we never could and then Billy, after he was four Billy didn't even try. He'd put some mud on one of my little doll's plates he was pretending to feed one of them, like you pretend with a doll, and it bit him right under the eye and my father came in and, and he picked up the dog. He stood there on the telephone calling the doctor holding the dog, it was all trembling snuggled up under his chin telling the doctor that Billy was teasing it and it bit him, and could he come over and that's when, I mean it was strange. I mean he'd never read to Billy, he never even pretended. It was strange.

  Was it? his hand idling its way under the sheet, returning unseen and as though unattended to pause at her breast, perhaps it had more to do with disappointment he said, not of being disappointed but the fear of disappointing someone else, his words unhurried as the straying of his hand, pacing it, of disappointing someone close, of living on the edge of some betrayal that was bound to come along sooner or later, one way or another, his fingertips failing that hard outcropping they sought over the soft unbroken rise under the sheet there and descending a corrugated path to the open plain cradled below, — even the smallest one. Even a gift, like giving the wrong gift and you're telling her you don't know who she is, or you want her to be somebody else. Get it going both ways, that fear of disappointing each other and those inadvertent little betrayals that poison everything else, isn't that it? Isn't that part of it? And his hand now, strayed down from hill to hummock poised there while his voice idled on each as though to recover what had been lost and found and lost again and again — last night, he went on, when they'd talked about letting yourself become the prisoner of someone else's hopes, wasn't that part of it? The weight of his hand sunk deep on the hillock, that whole presumption of taking the responsibility for making someone else happy, the rule of his finger measuring the furrow hidden there — and not just the presumption, the insult, the plain insult of it… he turned thrust hard against the length of her thigh, — the futility of it, even with children…

  In a sweep the sheet fell away and she was sitting up cross legged. — I mean have you ever heard? it's really children that choose their parents just so they can get born? He muttered something unforgiving at the knee looming there that abruptly, his hand up to bring it aside — no, no wait. I mean sometimes it's like they'll take anybody isn't it, just bringing some man and woman together who have no other reason to be together at all, or they shouldn't, I mean there's every reason they shouldn't be together maybe they don't even know each other, they probably hardly know each other and they could have done something else, I mean they could just have gone sailing or something but instead they, I mean… her face coloured, looking down — don't make fun of me.

  — Why would I want to make…

  — I mean because you're so, I'm just always afraid you will.

  But he'd rolled over on the evidence, his hand resigned on her knee there where it might have been a shoulder, an elbow, crossing a street, taking her arm in to dinner as though they might just have met, a mere courtesy finding themselves seated together by a host who knew one of them slightly enough to abandon them both to the polite fare exchanged before the soup came in — like this friend of mine, she offered, sitting up pert as though this nakedness still lay hid under some décolletage pierced only in the eye of the beholder, proffering her best friend — when we'd sleep over and whisper about being stolen by the gypsies? and she said she thought she'd been stolen from the gypsies. Because her father, I mean if you ever knew Edie's father… a prospect which seemed to rouse his interest even less than that of knowing Edie and the gypsies, his hand on her knee there as it might have been his hand on her knee under the tablecloth while the wine was being poured — because I thought she knew everything, like she'd say that women had this extra layer of fat that men didn't have, for survival? and we were both just as skinny as boards and were scared we might not, survive I mean. And then she'd talk about living in this previous existence and I believed that too. I mean she was really the one that thought of that telescope, if she got far enough away where she could see herself in this previous existence? As what, he wanted to know, or pretended to, his hand stalling along the course of his recent dry run there against her thigh. — It was always different. And I mean she's the one that told me about all these babies trying to get born… The air would be so thick with them you couldn't breathe he said, good God, when you think of all the people who are dead? — Now you are! and all the polite, the politic, the sheet torn away and with it the flimsy stratagem of the tablecloth — making fun of me, aren't you…

  But he'd drawn her down, laid out the length of her beside him — no no no, his voice as calming as the hand along her back, it was all just part of the eternal nonsense, where all the nonsense comes from about resurrection, transmigration, paradise, karma the whole damned lot. — It's all just fear he said, — you think of three quarters of the people in this country actually believing Jesus is alive in heaven? and two thirds of them that he's their ticket to eternal life? fingertips running light as breath down skirting the top of the rift, tracing down its edge, just this panic at the idea of not existing so that joining that same Mormon wife and family in another life and you all come back together on judgment day, coming back with the Great Imam, coming back as the Dalai Lama choosing his parents in some Tibetan dung heap, coming back as anything — a dog, a mosquito, better than not coming back at all, the same panic wherever you look, any lunatic fiction to get through the night and the more farfetched the better, any evasion of the one thing in life that's absolutely inevitable… his fingers searching the edge of the rift and down it, deeper, desperate fictions like the immortal soul and all these damned babies rushing around demanding to get born, or born again, easing the rift wider to the moistened breadth of his hand, — I'd come back as a buzzard Faulkner said once, nothing hates him or wants him or needs him or envies…

  — Oh! she pulled away, up on that damned elbow again — have you read Faulkner much?

  — A long time ago. If then.

  — What?

  — Never mind. He'd sat straight up, one foot off to the floor.

  — But, I mean don't you like Faulkner?

  — I don't like Faulker. I don't dislike Faulkner. He'd got hold of his trousers, — I just don't know why in hell we're talking about Faulkner.

  — But why are you, I mean where are you going.

  — Cigarette… he had one leg in, — I left things downstairs.

  — But no… she caught at his shoulder
— I mean, you don't have to right now do you? get up I mean?

  — Why not.

  — Well because you, I mean because we were talking… her hand running down his arm, down where he'd wilted there before her eyes — and you might not come back.

  — As what, a dog? a mosquito? He pulled the trouser leg up sharply, freed his leg for the other one — as a buzzard?

  — No that's not what I, I mean I didn't mean to upset you about Faulkner I thought you were talking about Faulkner, and I mean I don't know if I've read Faulkner much either. Except The Heart of Darkness, I think I read that once.

  He leaned back, simply looking at her, at the effort clouding the clean planes of her face, blurring the light of her eyes. — That's an excellent thing, he said finally.

  — Where the girl's body gets sent home someplace down south right at the start? and the hearse keeps breaking down going to the cemetery? He just looked at her. — Because I mean I still mix things up sometimes. Like the men I heard about on the radio whose boat turned over? and they were saved in this thrilling rescue by postcard? Her hand came straying up his calf still bared there on the bed, over his knee, — do you think that's why people write it? fiction I mean?

  — From outrage… he eased his leg closer.

  — No or maybe just boredom, I mean I think that's why my father made all those things up, because he was bored, reading to this little girl on his lap he was bored so that's why they were always about him… her hand moved on, paused smoothing hairs in its idle course — because what you just said, about being this captive of somebody else's hopes? and about disappointment? I mean I think people write because things didn't come out the way they're supposed to be.

  — Or because we didn't. No… his legs fallen wider for her fingertip twisting in a coil of hair — no, they all want to be writers. They think if something happened to them that it's interesting because it happened to them, hearing about all the money that gets made writing anything cheap, anything sentimental and vulgar whether it's a book or a song and they can't wait to sell out.