But when I took my discovery to her, or rather directed her to shelf and volume, my surprise was that she was not at all surprised that in all your variation there was some repetition too. “What a child you are!” she said merely. (No, there was more to it—excuse me, this is an elegy, and I am still learning how to remember—or is that what elegy is?) She added thoughtfully, but with one of her grins also—“Or maybe you’re adolescent by now.”
By then I had learned all I could of your morphology, both historical and current; indeed it was her contention that my ontogeny had gone so self-consciously mad for my phylogeny that only her discipline might keep it from addling. Then too, I was forever coming to her with bruises or bumps I thought might be significant, until she said it was touch-and-go whether, via accident, excitement and ineptitude, I might not dispose of myself altogether, before having a chance to become a man, or anything else. Under this barrage, I began to keep my counsel, and from this began to do so generally, led by her chaffing from introspection to introspection. Life is a finding too, I thought, but other people didn’t want to hear about, preferring to find out for themselves, or pose as if they already knew. This was the sophisticate—and perhaps the contemplative—line. I might end up a contemplative, I thought, but not without a struggle first, for action. So, despite that I was not yet born to manhood, and she and I were only living together, I sometimes—according as how what I was reading swelled the heart-image or numbed the brain one—thought of this period of schooling as a courtship, even a honeymoon. I was mixed up, of course, but for me, that was progress. Emotively I was still more tentative than tangible, but at certain times I felt my potential as if it were biceps. Agreed—gestation, before too much happens to one, can be an introverted time.
So, when I stood before the fire of an evening, I tried to say little or nothing of the daily wonders, just as I try to do this now. Take for granted then, the green juice or cold swan-swoon of your seasons, or the bloom of your faces, swaying like history in the magic of your dust-coarsened air. Or there was the horse I’d seen, its hindparts cocked perky in a windy field, and like a horse I’d seen in a windy field in Bucks, and now both of them were the horse-in-a-field forever, its hind-parts cocked perky and permanent. No, no listings, else the poem would be endless and get nowhere, as perhaps it did. I contented myself with a brooding line of—not thanks; it can’t always be thanks—recognition. Between morning and evening fires, or breezes, what a ductile wonder is a day!
Dusktime of all moments of my day was the ritual one, the beautiful—the difficult. It was the hour when, until then locked in my study, for the safety of all, she said, though it was she who turned the key—I heard her at last give over those loud devotions which all the afternoon had echoed, though her bedroom was upstairs along a hallway and two doors down. So adept had she become in her grooving that after a few false starts I never heard her at it, which was alas as it should be. But when she practiced the stillness she so envied me, she was much too tense and frictional, so this, to my comfort, I yet heard.
Meanwhile, I lived in terror of her discovering that I wasn’t practicing the various exercises she had devised for me, all to small-scale radii and all designed to humanize—but instead day after day neglected them to lie indolently on the long bed, in daydreams inflamed by the vision which still clung to its cushions, and by the reading of the night before. Day after day, I set what I called the two-two, the two-headed automaton, to working there, but got no more than a Punch and Judy run-through of those few moments I had seen, or an impossibly Grand Guignol rendering of what I had not. No matter how devotedly I simmered over my zoology at the library or alternated this with the warmest romances, I could never get myself sufficiently aboil to complete the image of what I yearned to, and most needed for my development. That simplest, most singular episode, and of all your pornography the most prevalent—I could never imagine it straight on through. And when for a few exhausted moments I fell asleep, then my old former friend came up from underground indeed to take vengeance, providing allsorts of Barmecide illusion, but all of it oddities only—buttonhooks were nothing!—and thereby seeing to it that there were dangled before me all the sauces, but never the goose, all the cadenzas but never the main theme.
I decided I would either have to make it my business to see one of those movies of a sort not procurable at the library, or else—and here the circle I was in came round again—somehow get myself out of myself—and live. I was in despair of a sort. But to tell the truth, it was of the sort that could barely wait for the next afternoon.
After that came the dusk, when ambiguity flows best, and in the soft obscurity before the lamps brought us back to our own appearances, to the vast abyss still between them, measured with sidelong distant glances of evaluation, we had our most private conversations. To these we came as any couple might, each from his and her own afternoon and the ideas or emotions so stimulated—one from the slimming salon and one from the steambath. And like many a couple, I should guess, from our amiably tepid company, one might never have known. Topics we discussed were suited, she said, to any drawing room, yet would do for the humblest dwelling as well. We talked much for instance—rather like two distant blood-relatives met by severe chance, and one the much younger in the world—of what I would become. It was true of course that in not every drawing room, or hovel either, could a young newcomer discuss eagerly whether he would turn out to be white, red, yellow or black. A topic almost always avoided by the senior member, no matter how many times suggested by the other, was whether he was a he. Her own future shape was not discussable, there being only One. But she would talk endlessly of native customs, hers or mine, and in this connotation, if I wished, I could sun myself in her particularly high regard. Of all her past acquaintance, and certainly presently, I was the native she was most interested in.
And after that, perhaps, we would have a little music. The first morning, I had come out from my “museum” to hear the radio playing—a chorale of what I now know to be music. I had stood motionless, then dropping little by little, as if spelled, in a half-fainting return to my former angle—was not this my own, our own classical laughter, or faraway and cold, that poignance of the almost undesperate sublime? After that, she never turned on WQXR or any of the stations too devoted to the kind of music which might too much affect me with these intimations of my O-mortality—and her own taste was not classical. I learned even to like one song, the “Vilia” from The Merry Widow, that she spoke of lightly as hers.
And after that we had dinner, or she did, on a tray, while she turned on the telly for my delectation, though I would have been satisfied to watch the movements, never greasy, of her mouth; perhaps she knew this too. In some circumstances, a person of my transparent background and still fragile cellular construction might well have formed a prejudice against eating or ended up at best a dyspeptic; as it was, watching those small muscles move, pout, that face grow oh so delicately bland and perhaps a litle rounder, the little sips, dainty but never arch, and all of it with an economy as strong and neat as a cat’s, I yearned first to shrink to a cutlet, that I might lie on a plate, then, ashamedly remembering my I-ness, to eat her.
Saturdays—a kind of feastday, with, she said, the longest history of orgy, saturnalia to satyrs and all the rest—she had a large meal in the kitchen which she would not let me watch, and was, I thought, probably some training lapse of which she too was ashamed. It was at such times that I tactfully repaired for my own weekly carbonation to my little privy place among the rear grove of trees. Sometimes while there, I heard a footfall pause on the path that led past the front door, as if to note my faint glimmer, then pass on. But this was in the early weeks; then it ceased altogether. And since she was so keen on our secrecy, having already drawn the blinds, sold the car, stopped the milk, the paper and all but one weekly delivery, and now went out herself only for the mail and to the library—“We are not at home,” she would say to me, smiling, “the way Paris is not at
home in August”—I told her nothing of this. From tweaks of the kitchenmaid sensibility which comes from uncurbed reading, I thought I knew who. And romantically, Chanteclerically proud, and Moorishly jealous—would I have fallen in the snow or strutted?—I fancied how we might meet. We never did—or not out there. I never told. But those footfalls were a marked help to the growth of my feelings.
When I came in from the woods I had always to press the back bell or call out to her; this she said was for safety’s sake. But even within the routine of the house, we preserved a decorum of bathroom doors and bedroom ones, and if I never got into hers, she was equally observant of those courtesies which might yet help to make a man of me, and never came into the room she still called the “museum”—which was mine. Slowly, meanwhile, I built my picture of her. She was the most watchable of persons, who must never have known a time when she wasn’t being watched. In contrast, I suppose, my lack of definity was restful. And slowly, sent out artful-artless toward the quiet pink slope of my sympathy, her confidences came.
If she said “telly” and had other Anglicisms poking out like umbrellas from her storehouse of acquired patois and dialects, it was because Jamie her husband, a Scotsman who had required always and precisely to be termed Scottish—and who knew whether or not his profession-obsession mightn’t have started there?—had gone to Merton in his youth-time, and been a don there for part of hers.
“He’d had another wive?” I said—by this time, I knew about wives, up to a point, and never lost a chance to dwell on them.
She nodded, with an odd look at me that I never interpreted, but of this wive we spoke little more. I never saw Jamie either really, put his images together as I might, from grizzleskin to bush-moustache, as she told it. I never saw him except in the shadow of his small shadow—hers. They had met under a bush too. “Not a cabbage,” she said, laughing, having long since explained to me that context—but what was called a sparrowgrass bush, then a youthful evening haunt of hers, in a graveyard in Sunbury, Pa. I often made her repeat this story, I meanwhile standing proud and ever rosier, because of knowing all the contexts. How could she have known, she said, how many of his she had piqued and teazled, when she said to him afterwards—afterwards of what, I knew also—“Oh, ja, ’ch wis was du bis.” She had told him her tribe, and of her parents’ lapses—from wearing buttons to living in town and having the gas and electrisch, to her father’s drink and her mother’s earrings—for which they had been thrown off the grandfather’s farm. And how she herself had three languages. “’Ch hab Deitsch, und Deutsch”—how cleverly her dear little tongue must have made that turn—“und ’ch hab der good Englisch.” And she even knew what he was. “Ja, ’ch wis. Du bis Scotch!”
On the television, she never liked to look at the news, or listen—too much quack-quack. Jamie hadn’t been much of a talker, but had made talking dolls of his wives. One was still living—somewhere; it was the second one, the Maori girl, who had died. And it was her son by Jamie who had given Janice the woodcarving tools she had at long last found such a use for. Jamie had sons all over, though never a daughter by anybody at all. Just as well, and said so himself; could never keep his hands off a young girl. Give him credit though, he always went back along the trail, even years later, picked up the sons, as one by one they popped up out of huts, long-houses or island waters, and popped them back—into a good church school.
“Oh these half-breed Englishmen,” she said, “half-breed Irish, Scotch—I mean Scottish, or American—queerishest of the queer!” She gave me a sharp look. “Queerish queer, you understand, Eli, not queer-queer. Or at least, not all of them.”
I would have nodded if I could, but anyway, she seemed able now to tell so well what I was thinking—though we were wary of false alarms—that I often thought she could smell.
“Always on the move, too,” she added. “But keep in touch, is their motto. And they don’t in the least mind—going back.”
Jamie himself, whenever he had deceived her—this context like all moral ones, took a while, but finally, by rote, I got it—did so only with older women, or those along the trail already. She hadn’t deceived him ever, instead merely cultivating a taste, when she could indulge it, for never going back. “Queerish,” she said again, with a sigh. And that was the end of Jamie, though since then she had not pushed much forwarder in her own history.
Sometimes, her quick chatter—in which drama, character and gender were all of them mixed up together—put a strain even on my extended reading. I had a question or two, one of which I put forward with some awkwardness. “Shall I be, do you think—one of those half-breeds?”
She muffled what I feared was a laugh—though it could have been a sob—then said, with an expression that of all her many I liked the best, so straightforward, nothing roundish, “Whatever … you’ll be a dear.”
I swallowed the second one—I was swallowing more frequently these days. A half-breed. Was: Jack?
Or sometimes, as she sat down with the tray, and flicked the switch to a story or a dancing, she remarked that she didn’t really care for more news of a world she was leaving—and out of the complicated reasons she might have had for this, gave me one. “I’d like to move on forever. But not get any particular where.”
That was Ours, all right. I myself was all for progress, more and more. I felt I would do well here. But more and more it had to be at my demand that we had a Voco-Phono lesson; almost it seemed that she had lost interest, not in me, but in my getting on. Often I had to plead for it, with what I hoped was a little joke. “Well, let’s, eh—since we can’t play cards.” Was this piteous, tedious, or my worst bugaboo—coyful? Even from reading, I couldn’t quite get right all the attitudes. But, for a proper joke here, I did see that serious attitudes had to be taken seriously—and if my growthing went as predicted, I fancied I’d make good use of how to give and take a proper joke. I hadn’t yet puzzled out what was needed for the tragic sense of life, or even quite what it was, or whether people really wanted it. More to the point at present was that, evening by evening, I could see that my darling—she called me dear, but I had advanced ahead of her—was drifting. Was it tragic or comic, that nobody could know better than I—what and where she was drifting toward?
In the lessons themselves, now that my speech had advanced from the grammars, catechisms, recordings and verbalization tables she had first devised, I found it harder to keep her attention, and sometimes even had to resort to making old mistakes which had once amused her, saying “has-been” for instance for husband, or “woeman” for wooman, not expecting her to laugh, but hoping only that she would notice what I was doing, or perhaps even give me a beating for some reason—I was reading Dickens, de Sade, and Krafft-Ebing at the moment and could have given her any number of reasons—but all that occurred was my own recognition that I no longer amused even me. Which has not stopped me from trying; this is called a sense of humor. Meanwhile, more and more often, she went with me to my evening library stint at an hour she once would have thought dangerously early.
It was quite simple, the way we did it. There was a way across the fields, and she carried a woodsman’s lantern which when vigorously swung effectively reflected me out. We never had to cross the agora I had hit upon on arrival, but it could be seen in the distance, and remembering those cries of the aurora borealis, I hunted up manuals on camouflage, magic illusion, protective coloration, and like any young thing growing here, found many a little trompe l’oeil trick which helped me blend with my surroundings. One or two rainy evenings now and then kept us in, or she did, citing how the first Indians here on the continent had died of measles contracted from the Europeans, and how there was no need as yet to take chances with my unknown hardihood. Curious, how none of you ever think of yourselves as the aborigines—not even, I presume, the aborigines. How she could think we would not have primed ourselves with all the immunities was another of her innocences, but I kept my own counsel—and the weather marvelously held. Terrest
rial nature sometimes does that, before it stretches toward another adventure. So we two traversed the fields in our own light, and a lantern’s. She was always and ever staring upward on the dark map she had set her sights for, but to the traveler of many crossings, the night sky is sufficient if it but be known to be above him. So, an affair of two worlds had narrowed down almost to that idyll of a man and a maid—and a field—whose authorship is generally ascribed to the ages. So, at least, I had read. And so I hoped.
Then, at the library, in the door we went, via her key, up the backstairs, and into the stacks. Once in her cubicle, while she raided the shelves for me, I was safe, even against any possible scholar as late as we. And there, reading everything from Anthropology to Zoology—and though my rate of speed slackened slowly, slower ever slower, until toward the end I couldn’t read faster than a volume of Blackstone a minute and a good novel in forty—I spent the sea-green incorruptible hours of my Here youth. So I set myself to read your universe through, haunted only by the fear that I should too soon finish. A young person’s fear! Nature has its own ways, in retrospect all nobly simple. What slowed me down, ever more irreparably—until near the end I could read no more than the day’s supply of the ten or fifteen books she could load into two book bags—was of course my own delight, that first touch of the bibliophile’s hunger. Everything I read, or almost, was still pornography to me!
Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel Page 29