Impossible Views of the World

by Lucy Ives

  Whit was again moved to speak. “I take it you two used to finger-bang during budgetary meetings?”

  I kicked Whit’s ankle, but lightly, a warning.

  “Ow,” Whit breathed. Then, bringing his mouth distastefully close to my ear, he hissed, “No, I get it. He’s had his fun. After all, Stella, let’s not forget: You’re a rough seven who’s going through a messy divorce, making you a temporary six and a half. Not that anyone’s keeping score.” Whit paused. “But I bet you’re still fucking in love with him.”

  I pretended to be deaf. Fred meanwhile lingered on his theme of thrilling newness for several additional phrases. You got the impression that it was of the utmost professional importance to him to designate whatever work he did as a potential innovation, fresh and necessary though not precisely creative, just the natural result of tapping into whatever were the finest mores of his time. This is what he was, basically gratis, bringing to all of us. I mean, at the rate of roughly $200K per annum. All we had to do was like the museum that was fortunate enough to house this receptive, synthetic juggernaut (i.e., Fred) and choose its needs for our write-offs. Anyway, how many of us didn’t know how ridiculously wealthy Frederick Lu was? Zero? Except that of course his reputation alone was worth more than any of this.

  I was feeling like a bitch, actually and genuinely, as if I were just about to get hit with my three days a month of uterine distress, except that this wasn’t the time. I was forcing myself not to think about what Whit had said, instead looking at Fred’s face, just studying it, no longer hearing his words, when for some reason something shifted, his eyes moved, became fixed, and I had the distinct impression, nearly impossible though this was, that though he was at least twenty feet away on the other side of the courtyard, he was looking right at me. Fred was staring at me as if, and not just as if, he could make me out. Part of the reason this was apparent was because—certainly only for someone who really knew his face, but still—he looked, under the mask of magnanimity, distressed, cut, even. My heart tightened. It wasn’t that I was waiting to feel something for him. There was just this opening for a second, and I saw him see, which is to say, I saw him see something, which is to say, me, his unfortunate former fling—apparently relapsing with a man both he and I knew to be beneath her.

  I am not proud of it but I panicked. I turned and mouthed, Bathroom, handing Whit my glass.

  My turd of a husband, satisfied with the insults he had managed to land thus far, made no comment. He accepted the object and did not attempt to follow as I slipped out of the clutch of enchanted auditors.

  I was thinking I was pretty smart.

  “This exhibition is a great reward, the culmination of years of progress in our field, and it is for this reason that I am more than simply grateful, I am indebted, and this is not a word I use often, indebted to our colleagues at WANSEE Holdings, whose generous support makes it possible for thousands of visitors to come into contact with remarkable works of art. I am so proud …” Fred was saying as I walked out of range of his voice, a feather that mysteriously touched me, and through the glass doors that led to the center of the museum, the European collection.

  —

  THE WOUND WAS OPEN AGAIN. Even in spite of the donor-directed filler that Fred talked. It had been disturbed. I thought again of his eyes. It was entirely possible that I was inventing their indications.

  The wound moved a little, was touched by air. What did he feel, I wondered. Did he also sometimes have thoughts, visions even, of hours in the day in days that did not exist, during the course of which he and I spoke to each other and explained this to ourselves? What did he think of, when or if he thought of me? How elaborate and important was his life, really—with what kind of ease was he granted the ability not to think of me at all, and when he did not think of me, how did he smile when he recognized, somewhere at some slight distance from him in the ether of proximate human minds, my own unceasing thoughts of him? How great was his surprise that I could find nothing better to do with my affection? Did this stupidity on my part further convince him of the sagacity of his decision to turn away from me? What if I were something other than what I was? What if I had successfully recognized my soon-to-be nonhusband’s long-term philandering at a point in time at which I still had a heart that was whole? When could this have been, what was the last possible day, hour, and/or minute on which I could have looked Whit in the eye and said, You’re wrong about the choices I am making with my life. I am not making the wrong choices. I am simply living with the wrong person. And walked away and forgiven myself for this, even without knowing that he was not honest with me, for I should have known that he was not honest with me, not because he lied to me about what he was doing with his dick, but because he informed me daily that I was a tragic fool as well as a person who did not really love him, and it was only later that I became either of these things.

  I grew calmer, as I passed among musty wood Madonnae et Christi and the reclining dead in effigy, their pointed shoes. I had no intention of going, directly or specifically, to the bathroom. I took out my phone. I went into SETTINGS > PHONE > BLOCKED and scrolled down and temporarily made Whit into a contact named “Shitty Shitface” so as to send him a text to the effect that he was now on his own recognizance for the rest of the evening and if he had further communiqués for yours truly please to be sure to address them to her BY WAY OF HER LAWYER, with whom she would also be discussing the meaning of his behavior tonight. As we no longer shared an apartment, making use of gala invitations mistakenly directed to my former permanent address was not just scummy—an abuse of the publicity department’s buggy database—but calculated injury. And don’t forget to sign the papers! And then I blocked him again, having succeeded in not refreshing my memory of his digits, though it was entirely possible that I could still recite them on cue.

  I felt all right, pretty nearly good. I was unlocking the side door to the department when I recognized that I was now also ravenously hungry. I fairly busted into our chambers, fell up the stairs. I threw everything I needed workwise into one canvas bag, shoved my work clothes into the other. I popped momentarily into the bathroom to check on my face. The lighting gave my skin a greenish cast, as if the face were made of some very fine metal, my features limned with a flat enamel.

  I retraced my steps, bared my totes to a lone guard in the lobby. It was a very young guy, ginger. He just nodded me through. Then I was out on the street with my umbrella, jogging in heels to 86th.

  —

  I WAS BORN AND RAISED in Manhattan, but the adult version of me, now under duress of an impending (I very ardently hoped) divorce, had relocated to Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The commute from the UES demands the collaboration of three trains, but it really isn’t that harrowing and costs something like thirty minutes all told.

  Tonight I was thinking a little, just sitting in my seat. There was a lot of new narrative to wrap one’s head around and I wanted to avoid the fantasy space to which I occasionally liked to retire to consider what it would be like if Fred and I were to reconcile in exactly the way I most enjoyed to imagine, if you can imagine. The problem of being, and/or totally not being, in love with someone you work with is that there is not very much wiggle room in which to figure this irksome dialectic out. The workspace in question had, however, lately been slightly enlarged by a certain vacancy in personnel. And I seemed to be more intrigued by the causes and results of the subtraction of Paul Coral from the Department of American Objects than almost anyone else I knew. When something big happens and everyone acts as if they do not care, then this is the time at which you absolutely must begin paying close attention.

  I had learned the significance of this truism by way of a heart that had not so much broken as become irrelevant to the various affective economies in which it made its living. I had ignored Whit’s episodes, choosing instead to understand this as some phase through which he was, as loudly and as drunkenly as possible, passing on his way to middle age, and I had amiably enou
gh elected to interpret my own short-lived romantic venture with a senior coworker as some kind of proof that I really was as wrong and malignant as my wildly critical partner portrayed me, to myself, to be. I had let the ends justify the means, and not even in my own self-interest.

  tuesday

  [ 8 ]

  The next morning I lit a cigarette, ambled to the G.

  The weather had settled into the hectic but snow-free spring for which the city is known. Clouds dodged in and out. I mean, the sun beat very briefly down, until cover made the temperature drop more than a decade. This was all in the course of twenty seconds.

  I was affecting a sense of well-being, and basically it was working for me. At the close of the previous evening, I had let myself into my railroad, consumed half a block of yellow cheese over the sink, and proceeded to pass out in my clothing. At 4:45 A.M., heart pounding, I bolted from a dream in which I found myself standing on an intensely green lawn in front of some sort of castle, observing the misty wedding of a pair of tall individuals who bore plausible resemblance to my friends Reihan and Cate, even as I was incongruously yelling, “YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT A MARRIAGE IS!” to Whit, who was slouched against some neoclassical decorative element nursing a drink.

  I just lay there on my back for a few minutes, panting, trembling. I reached over and checked my phone. It was the same dream. I mean, the setting was variable, the supporting cast, season, time of day, etc., but the basic events were intact and succinctly, cruelly repeated. Meanwhile, my phone told me nothing. There was a noteworthy sample sale coming up and a female friend I hadn’t spoken to in several years because of geographical distance missed me. I sat up in bed, switched the light on.

  The night before I had unfolded Paul’s xeroxed map and laid it out on my bedside table. It was possible that my dairy-drugged self was under the impression that through some process of osmosis I would absorb the import of the document while unconscious. The desired transmission had not occurred.

  I studied the page. I Googled, on the phone’s miniature browser, “Elysia,” turning up a genus of sea slug that feeds on green algae, an elegiac Wikipedia entry for a short-lived Tucson deathcore band that had broken up before releasing its first full-length album, and references to the Elysian fields of myth, the afterworld of the blessed. Enelysios means “one struck by lightning” in ancient Greek, and it is thought that the name for paradise might have come from a conflation of good fortune with that rare event of being hit by a bolt from Zeus, though this seems a bit overwrought to be a true etymology. Elysia is also apparently a woman’s first name, which was news. In a pathetic last touch, I tried adding “town.” No dice.

  It wasn’t until I went after the poem’s strange line of questioning, “Where is this paradise you seek, / Dear seeker, careful one, lover of the world?” that I got something: G. G. Hennicott’s Lorelei of Millbury, a novel from 1843. After this victory I was basically up, showered, and out the door, with a brief interlude to wing a message to Bonnie to say I might be perceptibly tardy, the dentist and so forth, how sorry I was.

  —

  IF YOU HAVE EVER BEEN inside one of the New York Public Library’s Manhattan branches then you know it is a total crapshoot as to whether the book you want will in fact be present in its shelving slot as advertised in the online “AVAILABILITY STATUS.” There are usually a certain number of funny smells in the building as well.

  But I was happy, because I did find what I was looking for. A man in a lumpy blazer making a stack of photocopies of a 2012 issue of something called the New York Psychic saluted me wordlessly as I exited via the north stairs.

  G. G. Hennicott’s first and only literary production was a slim volume. The edition was not the premier, but pretty close. The binding had been accomplished without too much ceremony in blackish-green cardboard. The endpapers were black and white, with a netlike design and elegantly drawn examples of the Simulium yahense, or blackfly.

  The frontispiece gave the full title of the book, Lorelei of Millbury, or Impossible Views of the World, a Romance. The accompanying illustration, described below its lower border as being “Engraved from the Daguerreotype by Paul, Giles & Co.,” showed an angelic young girl in a lacy series of crinolines staring up at a cloud of disembodied faces that steadily returned her gaze.

  The date of publication appeared in Roman numerals, and the publisher styled himself “Apud Gilbertium Lacunam Felicem,” with the “Apud” being Latin for “At the house of,” and the rest of it presumably indicating his name.

  I was on the train back uptown at this point, and even though I was slightly concerned about upsetting fellow commuters with the moldy reek and disintegrating pages of my reading material, I had to dip in.

  I turned to the first chapter:

  CHAPTER I: ONE MIDSUMMER’S OUTING AND ITS UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCE

  “Oh Father, it is simply too cunning for words!”

  So went the enthusiastic speech of a smiling young miss, Miss Lorelei Pleasant, as she rushed to embrace her beaming parent, the kindly Dr. Pleasant.

  It was a temperate afternoon in late July, when all of creation benefited from the redness of a setting sun, and weary wasps and damselflies skated and trembled upon a thousand emerald blades in every verdant lawn and blooming meadow. One heard the soft jubilation of the dove and scented dreaming lilies!

  Alas, for the Pleasant household, the beauty of this gentle season came not without remorse, for the arrival of that very date and hour at which we espy them here marked the memory of a tragic loss within their home, insoluble even to the medic’s art, alack! That of Lorelei’s beloved mother and Dr. Pleasant’s cherished wife, Mrs. Pleasant, whose passing was now grown a complete year old.

  Yet, rather than mark their mutual tragedy with further sighs and bootless lamentations, Dr. Pleasant, rendered the unique and doting protector of his lovely daughter, had devised a cheering diversion for the evening, that they two might at last conclude the period of mourning with some renewed fellowship and joy …

  I read on for a few more pages before glancing up. I was at my stop.

  Walking to the museum, I pondered the rest of the first chapter, in which Dr. Pleasant, a leading man of the town, gives his daughter Lorelei an elegant picnic basket. This makes sense because the two of them are about to head out to some Protestant social event ostensibly organized by Dr. Pleasant to help clear the air, re: the mother’s death. They’ve invited all the correct persons of the area, and they’re going to drink spicy cordials and eat tiny cakes and listen to people recite poems and other wholesome business.

  But, the reader must bear in mind, all this is going on out of doors, meaning that the limitations of polite society, with its damask shackles, are about to disappear. I thought back to one moment of sublime development:

  The dulcet tones of Patience’s song, along with the mellow accompaniment of the notes rising from Sigismund’s lute, lulled Lorelei, but only momentarily. For while all the company seemed joined as one in the enjoyment of this guileless country melody, Lorelei felt herself waken within herself, for she thought she heard another song more lovely and more true than the one to which she had first lent her ears. This other tune seemed a kind of chant, more than a proper song, yet Lorelei could not wrest her attention from it. She felt she must hear more and immediately! Quietly, she slipped from the assembled group of dozing companions and crept away into a little copse of saplings from whence the gorgeous music emanated.

  Back at my desk, I decided I might ignore my other work in favor of this unusual cultural document.

  Guided by the haunting song, as well as a dancing fairy light resembling a buzzing star, Lorelei passes through a vegetable barrier into another world. The prose offers “vivacious lengths of vital arabesque vine,” for example, or “the chortling, scent-drenched passage of a tree-bound breeze.” The heroine comes upon a gleaming model settlement named Elysia. Here, as among the Houyhnhnms in Gulliver’s Travels, all is order. This is a monoculture in wh
ich no one has a name, all citizens know no such thing as property, and, oh yes, all are expert practitioners of the séance. And, as I read with a jolt, all Elysian persons are female.

  I inadvertently bit the inside of my cheek; tongued the spot, kept on.

  Confusion arises at Lorelei’s insistence that she “is Lorelei.” Everyone speaks English, so it is not a problem of translation, rather a difficulty with what Lorelei means when she uses the verb “to be” in the sense of proper names. It’s a little preposterous, but, then again, Elysia is not located within the bounds and/or limits of reality.

  After a meal of imaginary fruits, a dance involving bells begins. Lorelei has a natural skill for the hopping steps. The utopians accord her the honorary title of “Expert in Movement,” and she receives an amulet carved from a walnut shell. Then the utopians progress en masse underground. In a vast grotto divided by a great number of rivers, all ebbing and flowing around multiple islands, they participate in a ceremony best described as Plato’s cave in reverse. Projected into the air are a bright host of mostly human figures. Occasionally they speak. One of the figures, a young girl, enlarged for the benefit of the audience, bears a striking resemblance to Lorelei. The doppelgänger maintains that the visitor is a long-awaited prophet and must be taught all the secrets of utopian society. A great hurrah goes up!

  Here I paused, remembering with the same mix of apathy and pedantic satisfaction that attended the majority of my interactions at the museum an email I had meant to send regarding a wall label in the narrow drawings salon that abutted the German-American suite in the period rooms. Were we, I inquired of Bonnie and Fairfax Cleeg, the department’s exhibition designer, employing the now-outmoded character Eszett (ß) in our transliterations of text? I noted that I had reread the house style guide, that it was ambiguous. I attached a list of pros and cons, titling my bloodless message “Orthography q.” Reflexively, I cc’ed Paul, a gesture that made the act of sending feel more than a little abstract.