by Lucy Ives
I returned to the novel. The next sixty pages consisted of a Melvillean quantity of cultural explication. The utopians are artists. Their preferred media are light and glass. They pursue their livelihood and spiritual practices and craft at once, directing every effort toward the theater of the cave. Their most sacred belief is that no life is ever lost, and thus, perhaps, the lack of (reproductive) sex among the Elysian women, though no mention is made of this as a problem. All who die, the Elysians maintain, reenter the world as “clewes,” spectral presences whose traces can be picked up by anyone with talent.
Those blessed with the ability to distinguish clewes convey themselves every afternoon to “the place of achievement.” Here, in thatched huts, the gifted listen for the stirrings and voices of the dead. When someone has felt the approach of a spirit and, if she is very lucky and very competent, heard a voice, she trots back to the settlement, where the captured message is carefully transmitted to another member of the community responsible for disseminating the wisdom.
The utopians have no use for the written word. They do, however, have a storehouse of technological wonders, having invented an early form of cinema. They have also created crystal dishes with holographic properties, musical automata that play by themselves for hours on end, a daisy-shaped mouthpiece that transforms human speech into noise interpretable by insects.
As in all literary paradises, learning occurs with a magic quickness. Lorelei’s first sentence comes—she is meditating in her hut—from Dido, mythical founder of Carthage. “Sunt lacrimae rerum,” the queen explains, “yet in this place mortal things cannot touch you.” Such an honor, the utopians inform Lorelei, rewarding her with use of the daisy-shaped mouthpiece for an afternoon, during which time Lorelei attends a congress of the ants. NB: The irony of the utopians’ acquaintance with Dido’s famous “name” is not noted by the narrator and, therefore, not explained. Henceforth Lorelei, whose communicative abilities have been tested and approved, is inundated with communications—from Marguerite Porete, Joan of Arc, Agnès Sorel, Margaret Cavendish (who insists on reciting a one-thousand-line poem praising the hardness of ice), Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Deborah Sampson Gannett, Sacagawea, and many, many others, a pantheon of female artists and leaders.
In an echo of Dido’s first mollifying pronouncement, the story offers a consolation: Lorelei hears the words of her mother. At first, these are only singular words or fragmentary phrases, but in time whole sentences slip into the world: “What does my daughter do? Who will my daughter be? How does my daughter love? Does she love truly?” Lorelei lingers for many days on a certain island in the cave, receiving such longed-for questions, insensible to hunger, thirst, or fatigue. But one day, the tender maternal queries stop and, in this silence, overcome with a sense of duty to her father, Lorelei informs the anonymous utopians that she must depart. Backtracking through the thicket, she recalls her initial impulsive escape, the song and guiding bubble of bluish light. Chastising herself (“How angry Father will be!”), she notes dusk coming on.
But as Lorelei regains the clover-rich knoll, the picnickers are still eerily present, “like figures in a painting,” Hennicott writes. No time has passed in this world. Mortal things have indeed not touched Lorelei, with the odd effect that now her formerly familiar American life seems as if an eternal present one may exit and reenter at will, itself a mere partial reality, a projection. Time, for Lorelei, is now different! But the heroine’s reflections are interrupted by a new song finding its crescendo on the singer’s lips, and Lorelei insinuates herself among the formerly familiar horde, listening transfixed:
Where is this paradise you seek,
A place where no one mourns,
And nothing irreplaceable is lost,
And nothing lost is irretrievable?
Where is this paradise you seek,
With tears dry and wrongs righted,
Where nothing that occurs in dreams
Knows human fear or cruelty?
Where is this paradise you seek,
Dear seeker, careful one, lover of the world?
Where is this paradise you seek?
Where is this blessed Elysia?
[ 9 ]
I set the book down. This told me something. I felt haunted myself by the thought of that shadowy island, where Lorelei had remained for days, starving and thirsting for the sake of her mother’s words. I doubted, for example, that I would find Caro’s demise so inspiring, yet all the same I was, these days, far from free of persistent attachments. It was clear to me why one couldn’t linger forever in a colorless place like Elysia, feeding off of the past; there was horror associated with that kind of indecision, and yet—couldn’t one linger, just a little? Reality seemed, by contrast, rather limited, lacking in depth. It entailed picnics. Better not to hurry back.
I dipped into assorted databases, seeking some trace of G. G. Hennicott, as behind my chair Ozen marched up and down the hall, loudly in quest of a staple remover. Hennicott was, decidedly, a minor figure. Of course there were no studies that took her/him as their sole object, but I did manage to find one heavily researched cultural studies work on “sentiment and inheritance in the early United States and beyond.” Finest Feeling: Debt and Fantasy in Nineteenth Century American Feminist Fiction was by one Marina Gonzales Childe, assistant professor of English at Alabama State. I managed to get the page I wanted out of a sample chapter Princeton University Press had up on its website (in order to ingratiate the study with the eight or so scholars who would be into it enough to stomach the $78.95 hardcover price). I was almost annoyed with myself for having gone to the trouble, since really there wasn’t that much being said:
Stylistic mimeticism—a diverging foliate line or metaphor that effloresces into meaning—displays these authors’ interest in the lush liberties and ornamental value of nature. [ … ] This trend is also confirmed by less successful works, such as 1843’s Lorelei of Millbury, by G. G. Hennicott, a romantic, science-fictive fantaisie which, if read in its historical context, might well be paired with a work like George Sand’s La petite Fadette (1849), as it demonstrates an interest in bucolic freedoms—an interest perhaps most generously read as an allegory of social and political emancipation. This novel is the only known example of Hennicott’s writing and no other archival or administrative trace of this individual exists, prompting some critics to dub the name a pseudonym. In the context of the period such scriptural obscurity was unremarkable, particularly for the probable author, an educated woman of means who had no intention of venturing into the professional limelight.
By the way, I have actually read Sand’s La petite Fadette, a sort of limitedly optimistic Cinderella story set in the uncouth wilds of Napoleonic France. I also once saw a dress owned by George Sand at an exhibition in Paris. It was this amazing brownish-gold item, embroidered all over with tiny blades of wheat. I guess this is where my thinking on George Sand’s “interest in bucolic freedoms” begins and ends.
I was trying to remember if there was anyone I knew who had done research on intentional communities in the U.S. Utopia is, generally speaking, a pretty popular topic in academia, probably because it allows those who study it to express in an allegorical manner their misgivings about the society, school, or corporation, as the case may be, to which they belong. Still, I couldn’t remember there being anyone in particular I knew who was good on Protestant cults.
Premature though it probably was at this stage of my research, I was feeling a little dejected. Was the poem some sort of popular song? If so, why did it appear, as far as I could tell, only within the bounds of this novel and the map’s cartouche? And what of the discrepancy of nearly half a century between the date on the map and the novel’s appearance? Most pressingly, how could a place where people did not know what a proper noun was have a name? What was Elysia, if not a proper name?
I sort of wanted to wring G. G. Hennicott’s no doubt long and exceptionally shapely neck, but more than this I felt unnerved. Elysia was
a place where women lived together but did not have identities as we normally understand them. For reasons at once obvious and obscure, they processed messages from the beyond as their central cultural activity and economy, and also found the time to develop advanced audiovisual technologies in order to commune with nature. They seemed not to experience the passage of time, as such, but did acknowledge the difference between the now in which they resided and the infinite expanse of the past. Their world resembled a manicured kingdom in a fairy tale, however it wasn’t exactly that. I reflected on the nature of human memory, the ways in which it weirdly exceeds individual lifetimes, jumping from generation to generation. But what, in the present, learns? And does this learning actually take place anywhere save in utopia?
It was now midday and beyond having read this spooky piece of speculative fiction, I had not so far done enough with myself, workwise. Bonnie was nowhere in sight, which was one minor piece of luck. Having recognized my good fortune on this point, I suddenly remembered why I had been dreading this day since early on in the previous weekend: I was supposed to have lunch with Caro.
In addition to the normal miseries that attended our encounters, I was going to be twenty minutes late.
—
I TEXTED TO ADVISE CARO as to my delay and true to form she did not reply. This is how you know she is a lady. She is aware of what you know, and she does not, therefore, need to confirm her knowledge by insisting on it with you. She lets you make your sad dash to her table at Orsay without comment. She will as usual be making notes in a minuscule linen-covered notebook, obtained during the course of her last trip to Florence, when you arrive.
“Hi, Mom,” I said. For it is only within the confines of my brain that I refer to her by her first name.
“Hello, dear.”
Caro was wearing a black silk blouse with a boat neck, gold earrings in the form of ancient medallions, Caligulas belaureled in profile. She accepted my kiss on the air near her cheek. “Well,” she said, as I seated myself with a certain want of grace, causing the table to rock and her tea to chatter. “This is an interesting spring.”
I nodded. “Did you order already?”
Caro smiled. “I can’t believe it snowed only yesterday.” Her hair is short, a puff, undyed, very white. “And, no, I did not.”
I was panting a little, thumbing through the heavy menu, trying to convince the gloms of font affixed to its pages to resolve themselves into words.
“Have you been eating well, darling?”
“I’m still alive, aren’t I?” I looked up. I felt confident about an omelet.
Caro was unperturbed. “There is more to life than mere subsistence, of course.”
A waiter appeared and accepted our orders, Caro’s with a kind of shy joy and mine only on condition of my understanding that his libretto would soon be complete, at which point he would no longer need to come into contact with scumbags like myself at his place of work or anywhere else, for that matter.
“What an interesting young man,” Caro observed, after our server’s departure. She seemed to be asking me if I had ever known the joy of dating an artist.
I only nodded, attempting not to take the bait.
“You know,” Caro said, consuming more of her tea with a relish that suggested it might in fact be a life-giving potion distilled from the comingled blood of virgins and Nobel laureates, “I realize that you don’t know what it’s like to have a parent who wants to have a say in who it is you are dating. You really have no idea! I just want you to be happy.”
Now it was coming. There would be no way to avoid it.
“I remember, before I began going around with your father, the other men who would approach me and, I mean, darling, I always thought, he is very nice, but what is my mother going to think? He’s so impractical and what I really need is stability! I really need someone with a serious character, you know, not some jokester who likes to play fast and loose, because my all-knowing mother says I do, and that’s why I feel so fortunate that things have worked out with your father, because truly it could have been a disaster, and that’s what I admire about you, Stella, and I find so, you know, remarkable, because, where did you come from, Stella, whose child are you, because you, Stella, you think for yourself! I think I just really never even knew what the freedom to choose for myself was.”
I was gulping down water, the better to slow my speech. What Caro meant was that she had never liked Whit, who had been bent on playing the buffoon from day one, and therefore my willingness to go through with and subsequently conclude a marriage that she had disagreed with from the start was a mark of my independence. Also included in her observations was the delectable datum that she, Caro, had been right all along. She was wondering what the time frame to my acknowledgment of this point might be.
My water glass was empty. There wasn’t much I could do to hold myself back. “I saw him!” I blurted, choking.
“What?” Caro wanted to know. Her spine stiffened instantaneously. Clearly, I had her attention. “You are referring to Whitaker, and you are telling me that you have seen him? Has he still not signed? You aren’t possibly reconciling with this person?”
“Yes,” I said. “And no, he hasn’t. And no, I am not.”
“Oh my God,” Caro said. She was still stuck in her previous thought.
“Mom! You know I would never reconcile with him at this point!”
Caro was not listening. “After what he put you through—I mean, the humiliation you experienced. The thoughtlessness. The disrespect. The deception. To think that you were with him since you were, what, twenty-one?”
“Twenty.” I recalled, not without a certain anguish, the winter our junior year when Whit and I had realized that we might be more than study buddies, the annotated letters we’d exchanged though we lived less than two blocks apart in Columbia housing, the first kiss in a park replete with snow, walks up and down Broadway, carrying disposable cameras because we liked the quality of film, taking pictures of anything and nothing. Terrorism was all anyone talked about, but we were in love.
“Exactly. It’s just unfathomable.”
Caro’s voice has a high edge, and it carries, particularly in environments including numerous hard surfaces. Other diners were beginning to take note of our interesting discussion.
“I agree, Mom,” I hissed. “What I’m trying to tell you is that he showed up at the museum.”
“What? You invited him to meet you at work? At the place where you are employed?” Caro wasn’t exactly shrieking, because she is not capable of shrieking, but she might just as well have been doing so, judging from the looks of poorly disguised delight and prurient glee on the faces of the strangers around us. “Stella, dear, forgive me for saying this, but have you lost your ever-loving mind?”
“Mom,” I said, “what I’m trying to tell you is that he showed up unannounced. They must have mailed me an invitation at our, I mean, his,” I stuttered, “I mean the old address, and he ambushed me, basically. I couldn’t get rid of him. It was very”—I paused—“difficult.”
“Yes, I can well imagine it was difficult. You probably haven’t dealt with something of that nature before, poor thing. Men can be extremely persistent.” Caro pursed her lips. “I mean, you have no idea what hell I used to go through.” She sighed. “Well, now you’ve acquired a certain mature charm. I don’t blame that idiot for wanting to hold on to you. The present challenge, of course, is to find someone on your level. But that’s good, right? That’s sort of fun?”
Caro was letting me know that she was not available for further discussion of these matters. When I had a new beau to run under her nose for potential rejection I was welcome to consult her, but Whit’s case was, as they say, closed.
“Right,” I told her.
A greasy grayish-yellow log that was the restaurant’s rendition of an omelet was lowered before me. Caro received what I can describe only as the world’s most vivid, most heartbreakingly crisp Caesar salad. “Bon
appétit,” the waiter sneered, flourishing a tiny bow in Caro’s direction.
“Mmm,” Caro said, craning her neck to get a good look at my plate. “What a yummy-looking omelet!”
I grimaced.
Caro tucked crunchily in, but then paused, midbite. “So,” she said, “what else is new? With work and all? I’m sure you’re up to some extremely impressive things.”
I reflected, not without melancholy, on my meager recent achievement with respect to a certain administrative PDF. I felt, for a moment, a little like I might start crying, but then something occurred to me.
“Mom,” I said, “you know, actually something really strange happened?”
“Yes?” Caro answered, displaying her distinct ambivalence as regarded all that her daughter might deem out of the ordinary.
“Yes.”
Caro blinked.
I ignored her to the extent that this was ever possible. “On Monday, one of my colleagues in American Objects did not come into work.” I was already out on a rather thin limb.
“So,” Caro sighed, “you are saying that someone you work with was indisposed?” She turned a salad leaf over, absently stroking its curved spine with the tines of her fork. “I can imagine flu really gets around those cubbyholes where they like to stick you. How trying.”
“I don’t think it’s the flu.”
“You don’t?”
“No, I do not.”
“Then, did you upset this person? Is that what you are trying to tell me?”
I contemplated this suggestion. It was interesting to me how much damage I managed to carelessly wreak in my environs from day to day, in Caro’s mind. If you asked her, I had probably snatched a few purses, made multiple babies cry, and jaywalked repeatedly on my way to lunch, some of which was true.
“Yeah,” I pronounced, feigning agreeability, “except I don’t think it’s that!”
“Oh no?”
I forced myself to smile. “But gosh,” and here, via some nameless intuition, I saw an opening and went, breezily, right for it, “I must have mentioned him to you in passing before, no? Does the name Paul Coral ring any bells?”