Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas

by Gass, William H.

  Also by William H. Gass

  FICTION

  Omensetter’s Luck

  In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

  Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife

  The Tunnel

  NONFICTION

  Finding a Form

  Fiction and the Figures of Life

  On Being Blue

  The World Within the Word

  The Habitations of the Word

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

  Copyright © 1998 by William H. Gass

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.randomhouse.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gass, William H.

  Cartesian sonata and other novellas / by William H. Gass. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Contents: Cartesian sonata—Bed and breakfast—Emma enters a sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s—The master of secret revenges.

  eISBN: 978-0-8041-5091-0

  1. Didactic fiction, American. 2. Good and evil—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.A845C37 1998

  813′.54—dc21

  97-49462

  v3.1

  THESE NOVELLAS ARE FOR MARY

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  CARTESIAN SONATA

  The Writing on the Wall

  The Clairvoyant

  I Wish You Wouldn’t

  BED AND BREAKFAST

  EMMA ENTERS A SENTENCE OF ELIZABETH BISHOP’S

  THE MASTER OF SECRET REVENGES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Earlier versions of Cartesian Sonata were published in pieces: “The Clairvoyant” (called here “The Writing on the Wall”), in Location 1, no. 2 (summer 1964); “The Sugar Crock” (called here “The Clairvoyant”), in Art and Literature no. 9 (1966); and “I Wish You Wouldn’t,” in Partisan Review 42, no. 3 (1975), as well as in The Pushcart Prize (1976–77). “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s” (then in the form of a short sketch) appeared in The Iowa Review 24, no. 2 (1994), and subsequently in Hard Choices: An Iowa Review Reader (Iowa University Press, 1996). The final version came out in Conjunctions (1998), and in its final form, with photographic illustrations by Michael Eastman, in Conjunctions 30.

  CARTESIAN SONATA

  The Writing on the Wall

  This is the story of Ella Bend Hess, of how she became clairvoyant and what she was able to see.

  There was nothing in her childhood to suggest it. Her gift was the gift of the gods, not a natural product of her past, I am sure of that. It was a true gift: free and undeserved, as beauty is supposed to be, or the descent of the dove: inexplicable and merciless.

  Marvelous is what I mean. Miraculous. Mysterious? Surely not a word so weak. Yet it has to begin with an m.

  You see how little pride I have, to let you watch me fumble. I could have sent that wretched word away and written what I wanted, you’d have been no wiser; but I haven’t got that kind of courage anymore, the courage of the liar. My will, somewhere along the way, has grown most deathly tired; now I have the scruples of a worn-out thief—fierce, painful scruples—and I wish I could recover everything I’ve stolen from my stories over the years; maybe then my angry blood would quiet. Of course, they do catch up, these phrases that I’ve condemned, poor awkward creatures, and occupy my dreams. They remind me of a row of prisoners, rapping on their bars. They shout their names and shout their names. I laugh with all my nerves. Well … prison is my only metaphor.

  Is it right or honest? After all—Ella Bend—where is she? Isn’t she as much in all those scraps I threw away as in the scraps I saved? Threw away, mind you, when they held her name. Where else did she have her life? I’d given her a long nose, I remember—no good reason why. Now her nose is middling. I made her sing a bawdy song—a poor idea. And I cut the nursery scene entirely, the whole scene, you understand, where she comes in, more than half asleep, the baby bawling, frightened, pawing at the darkness, helpless as a beetle on its back. When Ella touches him she shares his skin and feels him stiffen. Just then she understands the dreadful quality of his confusion. Her mouth falls open. She strikes the air.

  I’ve never had the experience myself. How would it be to bump things like a spider? Anyway, there were too many principles against the passage.

  I didn’t give her a long nose exactly. She had a long nose. Now it’s gone. I decided she looked too much like a witch, and since she really was a witch, it wouldn’t do to have her look precisely like one. If I weren’t honest you’d never know; you’d think her nose was middling. So it is. My god, don’t blame poor authors. Think how shameful it would be to say: Ella Bend had a long nose, which I shortened to a middling one because a middling one made her look less like a witch, although a witch is what she was. You won’t find many who’ve got the guts. They make a cheap product—skimp on the goods. If you want my advice—don’t buy.

  Passage is the right word. Passage. Every sentence is a passage. So I changed her life; changed it; not in advance but afterward, after it was over. That’s real magic for you, not the merely manual kind. What is this art but the art of appearance? I make bright falsehoods to blind the eye.

  Maybe it was merciless I meant. Beauty is often a curse, and I suppose clairvoyancy could be. Now: what do I mean? You realize that time has passed—another thing the cheapskates hide. Time. Whole weeks. A lot happens. My mother dies. I am caught by a famous disease. Or nothing happens. My mother does not die. I am not caught by a famous disease. Do I still intend whatever it was I did? Ella Bend is lucky to be alive. I have a terrible pain in my head. Of course she’s dead. But not yet. She doesn’t die in the story. At the moment all she has is an altered nose and nervous eyes. Think if that were all you were.

  Cassandra’s curse wasn’t clairvoyancy. It was not being believed. Suppose it had been Cassandra who saw but who also disbelieved. That would have been more interesting.

  I wonder if you understand about that m. The other day I idly scribbled twelve of them in the margin of a canceled page: mmmmmmmmmmmm. They doubtless affected my mind. I was writing away, “the descent of the dove” and all that, when I caught those m’s in the corner of my eye. That’s how I came to feel some force in its direction. But, good lord, why? Could anything be more absurd? Would God create that way?

  Look at them again: mmmmmmmmmmmm. Hear the hum. Isn’t that the purply dove? the witches’ mist? It’s Ella Bend in receipt of her gift. Her eyes fill.

  The dove descends, says here you are, accept it and forgive. Her eyes fill.

  There was nothing in her childhood to suggest it. She was pudgy. She’d worn a red coat that buttoned to her chin, scratching her neck; Sallydale highshoes, secure as a mother’s love, the salesman said; thick stockings with tight elastic tops; bloomers that cut her skin; severely woven braids tied with pale fluttery bows; and wool mittens that itched when her hands began to sweat. The salesman had a case that folded out impressively. Even Ellareen had hoped he’d fold it out again. He unlidded and unpleated it. It was a polished black sample tray with shiny chrome catches—a shoes-in-the-box, Ellahen had said—and everyone had laughed, Ellareen putting her hand on Ellahen’s colorless head, deciding right then to buy her a pair; and the box undid itself, legs sliding out, secret after secret coming u
ntil the shoes were there, even yellow ones, red, very vulgar and beautiful, making Ellareen feel like an Indian, covetous and primitive. The salesman was talking and smiling. He had fine hands and smooth black hair.

  Let’s just try this on for size, he said.

  A shoehorn dangled from a chain that disappeared into his vest.

  Black is useful.

  Ella trembled when he held her feet. The shoes seemed cool, but they didn’t feel like a mother’s love.

  It don’t show wear.

  Thomas thumped the case.

  Stands up noble, Ellareen said.

  It gets them all, the salesman said. They want to know how it works. They love it.

  The salesman rubbed his thumb against the side of Ella’s arch.

  Walk on that. See how it feels.

  Ella stood awkwardly, wiggling her toes, rocking as she was bid, while Thomas touched the leg-joints of the sample tray. Her mother stooped quickly, closing her thumb and finger on Ella’s ankle.

  Is it tight enough there?

  Oh yes ma’am, you need some play.

  Has to be some support, too. I like things to fit. She snapped erect. Try a pair on Ellahen.

  We like to sell our shoes in the home where they’re worn. That’s why we come here like we do. See there, he said, holding up the mate, that’s well made.

  He folded the toe into his hand, then crumpled the top, and Ella felt a pang for the shoe that might be hers.

  Feel that—soft and smooth.

  He held it out to Ellareen, who balanced the shoe on her hand, squinting at the heel.

  Has to be firm, she said.

  The shoes were in tiers, one from each pair, on deep puffed velvet like valuable jewels. He had the others loose in a bag.

  The salesman measured Ellahen.

  Ella has weak ankles and her feet are flat, takes after Mister Bend in that. It’s Ellahen who’s real strong there.

  The salesman smiled at Ellahen, who blinked and rubbed her nose. Well all of them lace high, he said, and Ella thought he seemed like a knight, kneeling in front of Ellahen, making his vows, and she wondered how in the world all those shoes went in. She wanted him to fold it up so she could see, and the request shaped her mouth. Then she wondered instead what the salesman thought of Ellahen, whether he’d ever seen an albino before (she supposed he had) and what he would think if he knew why Ellareen had broken her rule against men who sold from door to door to let him in.

  This salesman’s name is Philip Gelvin; he’s a thoroughly bad hat, as the saying was then, and he hates albinos; they make his flesh crawl. He hates their pink rabbitlike eyes. His uncle saw one sunburned once. The lines in the skin were embossed on the blisters. She was helplessly sick to her stomach; terrifying white hair fell about her face; her tinted glasses lay in the grass. That was Willie Fogal—his uncle—who is ninety and who saw Pister Welcome, he says, shoot The Badman in the boot, like the rhyme says. Willie was always claiming to have seen this or that. Who could tell? He’s in his dotage now and takes a dislike to death that’s far too late to be sincere. But poor old man and his dissolving head. Visit him at the farm sometime, he’ll tell you what he sees: gray mists, vapors, spaces, holes. Stares straight ahead. The kindly ladies keep him clean. Might as well look one way as another, he says, it’s all around, just open up your eyes and look … Quite a change from the warrior days … Well I pity everyone his age. Anyway that’s what he said: he saw Pister take his rifle down the first the pigs got loose, mad as hell naturally, and he saw him walk up the street with it under his arm until he was where The Badman was standing, where they all were standing, and then Pister says, according to Uncle Fogal, you ain’t worth shooting in the head; you ain’t worth shooting in the ass, whereupon the gun went off, as though, really, it was accidental, and The Badman fell on his shoulder in the mud. The boot, even with the hole through it, held the blood from The Badman’s shattered foot so well it hardly stained the puddle. I never shot anybody just because of pigs, The Badman said.

  Scenes like this—that’s what Uncle Fogal filled his eyes with, why he lived … the swine.

  There must be some truth to the tale, though, because you can view the boot, the shattered edges of the leather curled and the mud removed, at the Harrison County Historical Museum any hour it’s unlocked. Take the stairs you’ll see in front of you when you enter (mind the banister, it rocks), cross the balcony as it sweeps to the right, and you will find the boot on the first table through the door, by the spurs of The General, with a placard propped; but Mrs. Crandall keeps her schedule secret, so if you want to see it you’ll have to set a watch. Try to look honest, sincere and devout. She fears thieves and anyone with a pencil. It is generally believed that wags one day arranged a number of the mounted animals in attitudes of copulation, destroying as they did so the supports and backdrop of an educational tableau, much admired over the years, which had featured a leaping frog, a frightened hare, and a screaming eagle. I happen to know that when Mrs. Crandall observed the address being paid by a moose to a deer, a terrible weakness overcame her and she almost fainted—not from modesty or outrage but from an unbearably poignant recollection—sagging against the banister I warned you about with such force it yielded, nearly spilling her across its upper railing onto a table of fans and combs and looking glasses just below, the mirrors cleverly arranged to multiply the combs and fans by three. (So I should, she said, have broken more of those fine combs and illustrated fans than ever had existence.) Instantly her weakness was replaced by indignation, for, as she very often told me later, the decorative scene had been created by Willard Scott Lycoming himself, and though the foreground was mostly grass enlivened here and there with daisies, the middle distance represented with astonishing fidelity (fidelity, alas, uncommon in the paintings of our faithless age) a view of the Harris Creek, where the Lister Farm had been before it burned and where the plant that folks now call the Pork Works was, while the far ground contained the barest suggestion of a pointed mountain scarfed with purple haze of which the artist had been vouchsafed, he had told the then Miss Swanson, a vision in a dream (there are no mountains in these parts, though several low hills lie along the river); a peak which had, he said, meant a great deal to him ever since and which the tableau had hinted was the home of the screaming eagle, whence it came; and the violation of this lovely historical work had filled her with such a fierce and avenging anger that she struck an indecent squirrel from its mounting, snapping its dry and ancient tail upon the floor. The placard was composed by Mrs. Crandall, who ought to know the facts, and it says nothing of Uncle Fogal or Pister Welcome either. (Pister, Mrs. Crandall tells me, is a myth.) It merely identifies the owner of the boot; relates the manner of his shooting simply and does not fasten to his death the dignity of names; calls attention to the worn heel, the scuffed toe, the poor quality of leather; suggests that The Badman was hardly a fit object for hero worship, even though he has become a hero to our children; and closes with a bitter reference to the symbolism in his ruin, the coating of his shattered foot with clay.

  What impressed me most about the boot, when I was taken as a boy to see it, was its size. It’s quite small, smaller than I felt it should be, dainty almost, and in those days the top had been allowed to droop upon its stem like a flower, although now there is a stick inside to stiffen it. While I made no public boo-rah, privately I snapped my jaws together and refused to believe in it, a judgment I have since had ample reason, of course, to change. A boot so small and cheaply made could not have held The Badman’s foot, I thought, and I was encouraged in this opinion by Pelcer Wilson’s dad, who said the boot had been fished from the creek—the hole looked bitten through by water rats—and anyway it was a lady’s style and size, look at the heel, he said, ever see a man wear a heel like that? and where was the mate if it was the boot of The Badman, a man near six foot five, he knew, and not a teeny-weeny dandy, his father having seen him kill a man with his bare hands, holding him clear of the ground at the e
nd of his arms like a clutch of prize fish. It was Melon Yoder he killed this way, and Melon was at least six foot himself, broad in his shoulders like a steer, fat in his belly like a sow, thick through his thighs like Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, and when The Badman loosened him he made a dent in the ground. His father told him, Pelcer Wilson said, that The Badman’s boots were tall and darkly glistening; there were silver nails in the heels and silver stitching over the toe and a row of silver tassels all along the top which shook joyously when The Badman walked like wheat in an intermittent wind.

  Lies, lies, lies. What can anyone believe? The Badman was a mimsy parlor-chested squit who stole small change from empty poker tables and whose most daring and most desperate act was freeing Pister Welcome’s pigs to run the town. That sort of childish bullyragging jape was what he made his name by, how he lived … the swine. Men will always lie about the measure of their penis, you can bank on it. Sam T. Hoggart somewhere in his History says the same. Sam’s the only historian I know who hates numbers (excepting William Frederick Kohler, of course, up on charges now for molesting his female students). Anyway, his book is a fine one, and I more than echo our friendship when I recommend it. He’d do the same for me.

  Then Lycoming. I take no pleasure in inventing him. He is a negligible painter. Three names for snob. A man, however, as they used to say, of parts. But no dent in the history of art. It may have been his contradictions that destroyed him, teetered him insane, for he was a hollow-eyed visionary of the romantically desperate kind, cruelly devoted to the truth, afire to prophesy, full of flummoxy notions about the nature of perception, intoxicated by geometry, royally ceremonious, utterly unscrupulous, wholly mad, yet loyal, with the stupid blind loyalty of the lover, to the world he saw and felt surround him. Well it threw him down. These fanatic, jealous, brutal devotions made him so fastidious with every detail he could not manage their subordination. He gave them all his skill, painting each with a microscopic precision that shattered the unity of his canvas and created there a kind of grossly luminous horror. Obedient to the perverse demands of his creative demon, he could not paint a crowd it did not fall into an anarchy of faces (Ensor’s Christ Entering Brussels comes to mind)—(no, it’s called The Entry of Christ Into Brussels), while these immediately became round porous noses and converging eyes—all, mind you, at the behest of some arbitrary spatial symbol, mathematically shaped and mystically significant (like the logarithmic spiral or a chessboard, the lines of someone else’s poem, and so on). Yet it is nearly true that in his work each brush stroke speaks. Well they make a godly clamor (one should confess the virtue that gives suck to every vice), but the din, I must admit, despite my love for dear Peg Crandall, who may love him still (since it was he who first put paint-stained fingers to her breasts and chewed her ear), is awful, simply awful. The foreground of that scene I mentioned, although torn by the vandals and never repaired, is marvelously rendered, and so subtle was Lycoming’s genius that in its lower corner, by the signature which grime by now has nearly covered, he has broken off some blades of grass and flattened others to suggest that someone was standing there a moment ago, perhaps the artist himself, gazing across the Harris Creek to the overgrown stones of the Lister home and toward the vaguely risen dream peak in the distance.