W.S.L. You know what he asked her? To pose. What else? To pose. Oh to be a painter so to ask to pose. To pose. A request a lady’s vanity will always find appealing. To pose. Nibbling on her shell-pink ear. My genius is stirred by your beauty my dear. The snake. Not nude, of course, just naked to the waist—unclothed, that is to say, undraped. So she did, she posed—despite the best upbringing, despite her years of Sunday school, despite her love of fancy clothing, her doting father, and several carnal shocks that fell together in her fifth year, none of which she could remember, though one of them had to do with Willard Scott as a little bratty boy in a Sunday tie and collar, black short pants, and urgently opened fly; despite the fact her painter had a skinny penis and a stony cod, which she could hardly have known at the time and seemed never to mind; in spite of her mother, who slept in her corset, or her marriage vows, or the laws of the state, the commands of God, or the rules of her rutty artist’s maidenly college; greedily, without listening for the sound of steps on the stairs or the stealthy creak of a peeper, with laughter and with solemn lewd intent, debonair as a true gymnosophist, and, as she fancied ladies often were in Aristophanes, with a smudge of ferrous green an inch below her rosier nipple. ’Pon my honor. By my faith. And I understand that in the painting, though I’ve never seen it, he put the metal smudge (tenderly, with the nostalgic tip of his finger) precisely where it belonged. Poor Peg. What an unending cliché her life has been. And so badly painted. It was a sweet joke they had to nibble on between them. Of course she couldn’t bear to wash it off, weeping when it flaked away. Prophetically. In the course of the fateful stars. My word as a disciple of Jesus.
To be looked at like that. Not the way the doctor did when he wasn’t playing doctor. But the way the painter did whose soul admired what his loins desired. What an aureole! What an inner-thigh line! Belly button to be gently pressed. Is anyone at home? To be looked at as if it were the sun, and her blood came up under her skin like a blush a burn where the eyes gazed, where desire grazed. But the result clearly compromised her ’cause it wasn’t art, it represented Lycoming’s adoration OK his lust.
So she hid the painting prudently beneath her bed until her husband’s hand uncovered it, fumbling for a slipper she had purchased Wednesday for the celebration of his fifty years. N.B. The husband and the wife made love above the oily canvas. Why not? Husband and wife. Calculate how often. Squirmed and giggled. Full orchestra for the beautiful ballad: Made Love Above the Canvas. Heedle deedle deedle. Or a cabaletta for tenor and tambourine. Ladies and gentlemen: introducing Philip and Phyllis, that inimitable pair of gymnasts, who will thrill you by making love on the giant swings—boom …, on the back of a galloping camel—boom, boom …, while riding a trike on the high wire—boom, boom, boom …, and as a special treat, never before attempted outside the steppes of Asia, in midair above a trampoline—boom … boom, boom, boom. False nose straight? Want to borrow mine? It’s aquiline. Have a pink tasseled hat and a horn. Now, I hate to keep harping on this, but don’t forget the significance of the slippers. Shall we play a few more games? Tromp about in the rosin box, it’s slippery on the wire. Or bundle up with camera. Clothing disarrayed? Uncover to discover: your wife’s image as a lover’s longing. How many rents in Aphrodite’s tents? Lucky guesser gets a buss upon his plucky kisser. Ah, what a rouser! Well, sheepishly he’d worn them to please her. They looked foolish and bedraggled, flopping on his feet—the sort of man he was. O wise and worldly gods, what appropriate conjunctions! But a silly sort of horns. Now. What does he say? He says very naturally what is this? what? eh? um? eh? In short, nothing. He has difficulty sliding it from under. Like the bare leg of a lover. Discovered. He tugs and hauls while Peg what? claws at her rump where she’s been bitten by a spider. Unattractive patch that’s not in the painting. Well, insects have no nerves. Of course it puts him in a rage. Regular. Towering. Flames flash from his steeple. His nightshirt’s ashake. There follow a number of inner ticulations. So he destroys it, the iconoclast. He smashes it, rends it. Mem. must be a convenient size, consider the set. Next gesture: he takes it up in his hands and brings it down on the left post of the bed with all his excavator’s strength. The canvas does not yield, though the knurl strikes her belly. Poor old Bill. It was beautifully stretched and sized. It’s a problem for properties. Alarm them early. The painting springs from the post—look at those aureoles!—tears itself from his hands—the light down on her arms, what a likeness!—falls, strikes his unslippered foot, skids away, shoving the rug into waves, scratching the floor—tessellated too, what workmanship!—and so on. He nearly strangles her for that scratch, of course. Hopping, he takes her by the creamy throat. O revengeful Italy. But his foot pains him greatly and he sits on the edge of the bed to massage it. Rough skin. Needs a regular application of Bag Balm. In any case he had his thumbs misplaced. How did Othello do it? She kneels now, mewing, to rub his footie too. Ah, soft France. Later he is grateful for the slippers since he cannot walk around in shoes with such a knot in his toe. Peg coughs to make him feel he’s been dangerous. She may be a whore, he thinks in the freshest way he can, but at least she’s clean. No doubt in his mind about that, for some reason. Thereafter, his manhood challenged, he thinks of her as cheap enough to purchase wealthy pleasures, and makes love to her with gusto and invention. Well, for him—invention. Dark and holy Russia. Of which the upshot is—poor Lycoming’s acold. Cuckolded by the man he made a cuckold. Of. Not long after this scene whose shameful elements with zest we have provided, the husband was killed in a sewer by a slide of mud. For his sins against art. O implacable Spain.
Can you bear this peep show any longer? How’s this for a sneak: the painter pursuing the lady, who by now is naked, through the studio with a messy palette, mainly cobalt blue, for sky, and the brush from the hair of a camel. I’ll have a sweeter canvas soon, he cries, she giggling. There are jokes about Indians and sailors and circus shows. Also under canvas. And then he has her. Dirty-fingered artist. Chester the White.
Why should I complain? Our artist merely requested Peg to pose naked to the waist, and doubtless he said something about painting the delicate slope of her back or capturing the soft shadows which fell from her shoulder blades or rendering the swanlike tube of her throat. These were all lies, of course, lies; they were not meant to be believed; except the poor girl did think she had a delicate slope and that there were shadows flowing softly down her back and that her neck was tall and nobly bent, feathery smooth and white. A painter would surely want to paint such things as these if he could stand to his easel to do it and wasn’t weak in the knees with lust. There must have been some excitement for her, too, in being looked at by another man, a painter, who, at least while he painted (as we’ve already reported), really examined his woman, consequently had to see the fine things she saw, had to touch them anyway with the soft tips of his eyes. Ah married, yet a maiden! Peg, your husband saw no further than his prick—it, elderly—and when that instrument was dangling, he was nearly blind; but a painter, even a miserable daub like Lycoming, sees too far, too dangerously far, you dare not leave an opening, he’ll enter your eyes, or your mouth and ears—any of the seven portals of the head—and for god’s sake tighten up your thighs. That carriageway is easy. The painter, my dear, the painter perceives as deeply as his seed. There he sends his eyes, curled like trichinae in the muscles of a pig. But never mind. It was thus, her back turned modestly, he painted her. Well, it was a fine painting, of course, though it would have been finer if the draperies, more in the classical manner, had fallen lower on the hips … to here, you see, creating a beautiful arabesque. Thank god that sort of flaw a little overpainting will correct. It’s a wonderful medium—oil. So now he wishes to treat the splendid bones of her behind. And hasn’t she, though! Her husband, bless his sewer-slid-on soul, not once hefted her there, hardly her breasts either, and his experiments at the very last were not of that kind. If you would turn please, a little, to the light …
There’s no point in goi
ng on. The plot, which is the soul, as Aristotle says, remains the same. Only the body undergoes a change. If we could X-ray that painting, I’m sure we’d find there every level of unclothing, like the layers of Troy, beneath its radiantly naked top. Adam—wheedle by wheedle—in the same way, got existence.
Now the careful reader will have noticed—
Bless me. The careful reader. I had forgotten him.
Does anyone remember me?
Well … My typewriter rests on a great oak plank between two sawhorses. In the old days, when the first volume of Vines and Memorial Porches had appeared and I was, in a manner of speaking, famous, I had been pictured in the colored pages of a national weekly working on Trumpet to the Dawn, then shortly to follow Hurst’s House as the middle of my masterpiece (and a thumping success, as it turned out), shirtless, the hair on my back, which was bleached by the sun, making quite an effect in Kodachrome, puffing at a cigarette, a bluish string of testimonial smoke wreathing my clenched eyes, hands descending roughly toward the keys, face screwed with the effort of creation and my nails trimmed, rope belt tightly cinched and tied as a pirate would with a looping bow above the hip … I was vain … god … it cut into my waist and raised, or rather while indenting the skin seemed to raise nevertheless, a weal, which reproduced itself in the photo as an irregular pale splotch contiguous with the top of my tan shorts … not a bit flattering; and as I remember, I wore clogs and had my legs spread straight as sticks, as I have since seen pregnant women spread them when they dared, and my desk in that photo was just such a desk as this, exactly the one my knees are under now, as a matter of fact, for I felt obliged by the picture to use it sometimes, though I don’t wear a thing when I write but work naked and compose by staring at my cock and balls, alternatively, first one and then the other; and that sense of obligation, the sight of myself in the picture, put me under it so often that I began to compare my wooden horses to the feathered dray-pulls of the Phaedrus: the right-hand horse a stallion, graceful as a skipping girl, blond and clear-eyed, yet thick-maned and large like the lion, with the lion’s deep throat and tubular teeth, swift and tireless, moreover, as a coasting bird, as farsighted, patient, and implacable, with a regal neck which lifted at every sound like a deer’s, and with wings to satisfy an angel glowing from their passage through the air; while the left … oh dear, the left a shambling, drunken mare with a cropped tail and a coarse shaggy coat made of hairs with darkened ends, sore-footed, foulmouthed, fattish and nobby, with short, uneven legs and a snub face and white-webbed eyes, nervous, sly, her inner organs cruelly eaten by disease, given to rhythmic swaying like a bear, inclined to bite, her dwarfed wings so closely folded to her sides she never flew at all but fell as crudely as a stone, as brutally, as eager; and as I say, this obligation sent me back and back again until sitting to the trestle became automatic, necessary even when bitter (as now), it was a track so deeply worn; and I can reach with a pencil end the words I have carved in the wood by tracing them a hundred thousand times, my doodles too, always the same, cutting a canyon like a stream, dark at the bottom with graphite, beautifully smooth (for graphite is a handsome lubricant), in beautifully turned calligraphy: cunt, for instance, with many curlicues … (here is something funny: I had begun that particular tracing first, so it was rather permanently down when I began the final volume, and it really happened that on the day I composed its most famous scene, that tender lovers’ parting on the porch of Mt. Lion, Parker kissing the tines of Carol’s parasol (OK, anything sounds absurd when outlined simply, and there’s a lesson for us all in that), then folding it abruptly as a sign that he is leaving the Mount forever; while I was composing this tender, sentimental scene, I say, restlessly stirring my words around and wondering how I should manage the business, my pencil was continuously, thoughtlessly, idly tracing cunt still more darkly in the oak—imparting a rhythm to my hand and arm, rocking my shoulder, affecting … what? my brain? (which reminds me of the technique of Madame Bovary and of Flaubert’s startled whore, cigar ash on her belly, formal hat on him—the supremely cool equestrian), well … and Covenant, which was the name of an historic oak beneath whose boughs a treaty, depriving some Indians of land in return, I believe, for their enjoyment of an interlude of peace, was signed by some Quakers and those Indians with an X; and when the oak, having fallen prey to drought, wind, age, or some disease (I wonder was it the same disease as mine?), was cut down (bands played, doubtless; there were solemn speeches in rented hats from wooden stands while pennants snapped in the rhetorical winds), a long heart slice was sent to me, though god knows why, I hate both covenants and trees, and this accounts for the incision of Covenant, and for fuck the Indians hurrah, a bordering phrase, etched small.
I am an inveterate pencil carver and I consequently understand the qualities of wood. I know how, for instance, the grain will cause the most determined line to quake and wriggle. My first attempt to engrave the letter c in the plank from the Covenant tree left a very bent and shaken l, though you would never guess it now, the original is so overlaid with flourishes. The secret is to proceed by a series of gentle scratches, repeated often; never an impatient deep gouge, which the wood will surely put a crick in, but always the patiently light scratch. A painted surface is tricky. Oh, it’s easy enough to make pencil marks on a fine enamel, but that’s not the aim, you know. Get under the skin, that’s the idea. You must watch that the paint doesn’t flake or you will spoil the clarity and decision of your line. I’m not much interested in images myself. I always carve letters or abstract designs: five-pointed stars sometimes, the capital L, which in script curls its edges like a sheet of stamps, or f or k, or the word Isabel, or thickety black scrawls bunched like tumbleweeds, and mazes of dizzily turning lines like the spill and flow of hair, whole worlds really, the track deepening as you journey on, as if at any moment you might penetrate something, find yourself inside the sacred wood, say, or simply, like Alice, land thump in another part of the soul where a voice is exclaiming, my, my, my, as you arrive, and there is a vague flash of white from something running or a pink glow from the lobe of an animal’s ear or the faint but steady ringing of a distant alarm. Then frequently: balloon.
Traveling, I’ve returned to stations where I’ve stopped for gas and found my stars still there, sometimes even darkened, or deepened, by those who love, as I do, to slip into a path and feel the rhythm of another mind, a stranger’s, once sitting where you are, tracing some secret of his life on the wall or in the toilet seat, not always cheap or vulgar either, for after all it is form and not the content that matters, though there are those who scratch haphazardly, concerned to get their filthy message over (in art and life the same), but they aren’t everybody, thank god, for I’ve seen the masculine member drawn by a genius, and a vagina rendered strangely like a daisy, and once, as high as you could reach, like the bragging claw marks of a bear, exquisitely formed, the word lemonade, by a divinity.
Three a.m. It’s begun to snow. Could I have the time where you are? Strange. It may be morning, hot already, sweat in all your creases. Whew. Your bare legs have stuck to your chair. That time of year. In me large flakes are sailing single file. Hear the hiss? Isn’t that the purply misssst?
There is a small hotel in town. I remember the dirty marble floor, cold and noisy, the nails in my worn heels clicking. I skirt bucket rings and patches of drying mop water, one in the shape of Spain, to escape the remote lamps of the lounge and keep my shadow out of corners while I flee on strips of carpet to the stairs where bumping down sedately through the door marked WOMAN I say I beg your pardon to the wielder of the mop though she is gone or not yet come and the booths are empty, idle, unobscene, unscatological. I try one out but there is nothing to it. My deeply yellow urine, like the light from those brass lamps, spills in the bowl and I leave it as a sign of my passing. Oh I am a foul left-handed fellow, Phaedrus, rarely ambidextrous. As I go I hear my feet … the wealthy author walks.
Did I discover much?
No, n
ot much: stale powder, strong discharges, cheap perfume, moist hair. They write on the walls with lipstick. I’ve little interest in that. It’s painting of a crude sort; nothing’s clear. It has no permanence and lacks the shaping resistance of a decent medium. But where the women water in a public playground I did follow a track in the shape of a symbol from the Isle of Man that made my hair stand on end. There was something superb scratched in plaster with a bobby pin … somewhere … I’ve forgotten … while another time, in a roadside park, I encountered a painting, a silhouette in menstrual blood entitled Sam. Not much luck. Yet I keep on. Don’t laugh. My god, remember I’m supposed to think and feel and see for everyone—imagine!—that’s the true author’s business; and all the time Christ snoozes in his chair. There’s no patron for left-handed wretches. It’s bottoms up, buddy, for us. All right, snicker. You’ve never seen your face in Leonardo’s mirror. Laugh away. But poking about takes guts, all the same. Don’t pay for anything less.
Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas Page 2