The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

  If I had stopped and thought about what work would give me the most pleasure, then it would have been this particular work and this particular kind of pleasure which I envisioned as the pleasure both of the structured and the free in a harmonious juxtaposition. I hoped to struggle with opposites and yet not resign them to each other. I thought I might title the work something like “The Persistence of Pleasure or, perhaps more realistically, “The Pleasures of Persistence.”

  The landmarks division had stipulated that the statue must be painted with one of the six landmark colors permissible. They had ordered that the “windows”—as they were referred to—of the blue, blue eyes be repaired and opened to the light, and that the pediment that is the brow be reinforced, the pilaster of the arm repaired, the tower of the upraised elbow made safe for at least four people.

  Some fears are logical. I did not tell myself that I should not have them. It is normal to fear heights when one has never worked on scaffolding or ladders. It is normal to fear women.

  I went out with Ursula the next weekend anyway. I suppose we made a strange couple—I in my suit and hat and she looking like some homeless waif. Considering that she lives in a statue, I suppose that’s true, she is. She said she was thirty-six and never married. I didn’t tell her I was forty because I worried that she might say I look even older.

  As part of my project I asked her if she would let me change her hair-do and if she would wear clothes that I picked out for her. (When I saw her for the first time in a dress I’d chosen, I thought, yes, yes, this is work for the “common good.”)

  Soon after that I asked her if she’d pose nude, but she asked, “Why?” I tried to use logic: “For the sake of the common good. For a higher purpose than you or I can name,” but there was no end to her whys. “Art makes anything permissible,” I said. “It stops at nothing.”

  “Why?” she said.

  “Why not!” I shouted.

  I was on the scaffolding at that time, almost at the level of the shoulder. I had polished the wood of the entablature to a copperish luster and I had actually stood on the sills of the eyes while doing so. “I’ll tell the truth,” I said. “I’m scared. I’m scared of the risk and I don’t know where all this will lead, but we both might be famous.”

  She knew enough about art not to argue with me about that, and I’m sure before I said it she had known I was afraid. Sometimes she had goaded me on up to the topmost scaffolding while she watched from the ground, her eyes fearless. But for all my resentment of her goading, I knew that art is never comfortable.

  I had saved the most fearsome task for last. The head was, after all, second only to the elbow in height. Clearly brachycephalic. The suggestion of a headband crossed it ear to ear. I had already dealt with that by adding egg and dart. At one time we had been taught that decoration was beneath contempt. Eclecticism, the same. But I was not any longer convinced of the form-follows-function of the Doric, and I did not want to ignore the Impressionistic, nor even Dada and Pop. I thought, What if I did the hair in an exuberant and eclectic version of Corinthian? And I set about, then, in rock-climbing shoes and rope, rappeling myself about the head. During the course of this, I overcame, to a large degree, my acrophobia.

  As it turned out, the city did not delight in this courageous hair, nor in any part of the statue. On the contrary. It took my gestures as mistakes and ignorance. Everyone wondered why I had, as it seemed to them, forgotten about the Ionic that topped each breast, and as it seemed to them, inadvertently switched to another mode. (Their very words.) I had not delighted or surprised or frightened anyone—except perhaps myself.

  Also they said, “The pilaster is a lie.” I knew that. But in this case the pilaster was not structurally dishonest at all, but a true arm and a true support. It was the breasts that were false. They supported nothing. They spoke (if one can say they speak at all) of the delights of pure form. They were “only” themselves.

  I thought, then, of all the things I might have named my work that would have alerted the city to its meaning: “Assemblage,” for instance, to show I knew very well what it was composed of; or “Uncomfortable Incongruity,” or—and even more apt—“Object Not Easily Recognizable,” for many of the people had not even known that it was the statue of a woman, just as we had not been sure of that ourselves when we first found it. Then, in a fit of Dada (though not entirely inappropriate) I wished I had called it “Hippopotamus.”

  Since I had not complied with any of the recommendations of the Landmarks Commission, they said they would not be responsible for the preservation of my work. They said that they no longer had jurisdiction over it in its present state. “And the elbow is unsafe still,” they said. “It should be torn down before somebody gets hurt.”

  Of course I wanted to stand on the elbow—on or in it—with weights and jump up and down to prove that they were wrong. And if it didn’t collapse, the work was true. But I felt sure, then, that art would be my downfall and I thought that I and only I would be under the elbow or on it or in it when it collapsed.

  In it? Strange that I had not yet gained access to the interior of my own work. I had been asked to enter only that one time and she had not asked me again.

  “I want to live inside the elbow.” I told her that. She just laughed. “I really do,” I said, “and it’s more than want. I need to be there. But if it has to be that I go in just once, then I’ll take only that.”

  It was just at the moment that I said this that I realized how fearless I’d become. Suddenly I knew I was not afraid of the dark, nor of rats in the dark, nor of overhanging rocks; not afraid of art nor of artists; not afraid of the rich and famous; not afraid of big words nor of long pauses; not afraid to leave the lowest of the locks on my door unlocked; not afraid any longer to wear a weird hat, and not even afraid of Ursula. (Had she goaded me on up to those heights for this very purpose? Was it all a trick to arrive at just this moment when I snatched the keys out of her hand and pushed on and in and past her?) .

  No sooner had I got inside than she made me feel as if I’d done something wrong. “Not yet,” she said, “not yet.” “It’s a mess,” she said, and, “I’m not ready.”

  The room was like any other living room… a lot of antiques, but they looked like they’d been found on the street. Nothing about it even suggested that it was the inside of a statue. For a moment I thought that I and all of my group had been wrong. It wasn’t a statue after all. Indeed, it was but a row of mismatched huts. The arrangement of the interior made that all the more clear. I had hoped to run around inside the breasts, sometime when Ursula wasn’t looking, but there was nothing here suggestive of such places. Just two alcoves side by side—one a kitchen, one a breakfast nook. For a moment I had in mind to spend a little time in each, but I wasn’t in the mood for that now. “Elbow!” I shouted. She pointed up and said again, “Not yet.” But I saw the stairway and pushed past her. This time she really tried to stop me, but I was too quick. “No,” she shouted, but I was halfway to the top, my head already in the upper room, which was lit by the soft and blue, blue glow of the round eye-windows. But it, too, was just a room-shaped room and like any other attic. There was dust, old boxes, two old trunks… but in the corner I saw a ladder that I knew must go to the elbow. And I thought that, if there was, indeed, an elbow, then this must be the statue of a woman as I hoped it was and feared it wasn’t, but no longer feared, for if it was a woman then chances were it also might be art.

  But now she really didn’t want me to go on. She fought desperately. She knocked me down… tripped me. And the more we fought, the more desirable became the inside of the elbow. It was as if that had been my goal from the very start. As if it was the only thing I ever really wanted. And I used all my strength against her. She was strong… surprisingly strong for one so thin and pale, but at last I threw her from me, making her tear my sleeve right off at the shoulder. She sat there with it dangling in the dust by her knee, looking up at me as I climbed the rickety lad
der.

  Everything wobbled. The ladder had several missing rungs. One came off as I stepped on it. Some just hung there by one nail, but I got up anyway. Nothing there but a rickety platform. Perhaps it was the danger that had made her want to stop me. Perhaps she was afraid for my safety. Maybe she cared about me and that was why she fought so hard. But now she was coming up after me. The platform was hardly big enough for one, and the whole thing was shaking even more than before and I knew the Landmarks Commission was right, it might fall at any moment. “I’m scared,” she said, but she kept climbing. “So am I,” I said, as she fell into my arms. And I could not then distinguish my own trembling from her trembling or from the trembling of the platform and of the whole elbow.

  By then we were both streaked with grime and our clothes were torn and rumpled. She looked more like the waif she had been—her hair mussed, her stockings ruined, her shoes… her high-heeled shoes down on some lower floor. I loved her better like this. I realized it then. I loved her like she used to be… like herself.

  There was just barely room for us up there, side by side, and I held her so that she wouldn’t fall off. The elbow rocked and shivered more and more and I think she’d said yes,just once, instead of no. But just exactly then there came a great crash and shortly after that another. The whole building shook and groaned. My first thought was that we had made the statue come alive, we two, together. My work of art was standing up and taking her elbow from behind her head… my statue down the street and out, who knows where? Splinters flew. Beams broke and sagged. It… she was walking, and every step was a great crackling. But by the fifth or sixth crash, I knew what was happening. It was the wrecking ball come to demolish the thing before somebody got hurt. A great gap had already parted right in front of us. We tumbled out, half naked, from the hole as the elbow sagged slowly to the ground. The wrecking ball, swinging above our heads, just missed us as we fell. We landed in a forsythia bush (in bloom!).

  We laughed because we still held each other. We laughed because we were only scratched and bruised and because the wrecking ball had not quite grazed our heads, and we turned and laughed (because what else was there to do?) to see the whole thing go down flat… all shards, even the blue, blue eyes.

  Then, still laughing, I pursued her through the bushes of the park. I flushed her from behind trees. I grabbed her and I let her go and she let herself be grabbed again. “Not yet,” she said, “not yet,” but I pushed on and on, no longer for the sake of women, no longer for the sake of art. Giggling. Giggling. Not for any reason I could think of at the time.

  Croton Review, No. 9

  Living At The Center

  THE BEACHED WOMEN of Omphalo… lolling, lazing, leaning back into the sand, raising their heads to the sun, eyes shut, eyes that, when they open them, are as round as fish eyes and the color of the water, whether gray or green or blue. Sometimes they darken even to the deep coppery shades of indigo, or so tis said, and, oh, the sing-song of their language and the sing-song of their songs… the clink of their wine glasses, the whiteness of the sails of their boats, and the blackness of the heads of their black-headed terns!

  The mountains behind them look as placid and stolid as the women of Omphalo might be themselves, there on their beach, but every afternoon clouds gather around the peaks and there’s thunder, fireballs rolling down. Those women would hardly understand how, now and then, a boulder, struck by lightning, might turn bright red, though that’s been seen and not just once. Hair sometimes stands straight up. Air is thin. As are the men and women who live there. Shoes hardly lasting even through one season. Marmots’ shrill clicks clang out warnings all day long. It’s from them that the mountain men and women learned to whistle and to beep out their own echoing calls from cliff to cliff.

  But, ah, those women of Omphalo! The mountain men have never seen them nor been down there, but they’ve heard tell, and they’ve only glimpsed the ocean from their eastern passes, but they’ve seen how it sparkles. They’ve seen how blue it gets or green or gray or, now and then, indigo, and they’ve seen the thin, white edge of the shore line, and they’ve seen what they think are the white sails, and once an old man said he saw—he’s sure he saw—a stately sea serpent swimming across the bay. Every evening those who live on the eastern slopes watch the lights flickering down there, and on still nights… on those rare, very very still nights, the mountain men even think they can hear those women singing, though how could that be?

  Send a boy down first. Look things over. Always send a boy down first just as they always send a boy up first, but how about a half-grown girl? Dressed as a boy? A thin one, not to be found out. Or an old lady? What about an old lady? She’d not be missed. One that can still jump around like a goat.

  The men keep talking about it, but they don’t do anything. They make a lot of plans. Sometimes they think to go on down there themselves, either alone or maybe two or three together, or maybe all of them, but they don’t do it. It’s as if they don’t really want to know too much about the women of Omphalo. It’s as if they just want to think about them a lot. They want to laugh and whisper about what those women might be doing and right now! Or might do if one of these mountain men came on down to show them a thing or two. And it’s as if they want some kind of women they can always be telling their wives they should be more like that, so they’re always saying that the women of Omphalo are, if nothing else, sexy. They even pick out one woman that they name Opal who’s the sexiest of all. It’s her they talk about the most, but nobody goes there to find out if there is an Opal. You’d think they’d want to, always talking, as they do, about those fandangoes and violas da gamba, cembali, and saxhorns, while up there they only have flutes a bec and little tambours and dances that are more like stamping, knees high and coming down hard on their heels, though sometimes those men get together and do a long, slow dance such as they think the women of Omphalo might do.

  Now there is an old woman who can jump around like a goat. She’d not be missed and she knows it, because she’s taking up good space in a small house. Sometimes she wishes she would be missed… had somebody who’d follow her off on those never used trails of the eastern slopes and say, “Come on home now, Ma,” and, “I’ve made you some broth. Come sit down,” and, “You don’t need to be doing this silly thing.” And she could answer, “It’s not silly,” and keep on going down. But she knows that, on the contrary, if they saw her they’d say, “Good, she’s going on down.” They wouldn’t be thinking ordinary “down,” but “down” like the old people do when they get useless—“down,” right off the cliffs, but that’s not what she’ll be doing, and if they want to look over towards Jem Lake for Grandma in her red hat, there won’t be anybody there.

  Even when she was young and her husband was alive, he’d not have been following her off somewhere—not that she needed or wanted anybody to do that then, since she was doing it herself for all the others, keeping the babies and the goats herded together as best she could. He, also, that husband, talked about Opal and the women of Omphalo and died—as they all do—not even knowing anyone by that name, nor any Sapphire, Ruby, Rose Quartz, Amethyst, nor Lapis Lazuli.

  She is thinking that, should Omphalo, by any chance, really be the center of the universe, as it’s said it is, how would anyone know? Though if it really is, then certainly the trip would be worth it just to see such a place. But then she’s wondering how and why the center of the universe has already been agreed upon and so long ago that no one remembers when or who decided? And why have the mountain men so easily taken “down there” to be the center and not, more logically, one of their own mountains? (The highest of all, for instance, Old Man Magic Mountain, would seem to her to be the logical center of the universe from which everything else fell down, the earth and branches—sometimes even trees—rushing down in the streams, the rocks rolling along beside them, the boulders tipping over, bouncing down, pulling others with them and knocking everything in their way to the bottom which is Omphalo a
nd which is perhaps why it’s called “Omphalo, low low, low” in the songs.) But perhaps they take “down there” for the center simply because it really is the center. And once they, on the other hand, a long time ago, with the seeds of the trees and the bushes and the wildflowers in their backpacks, had climbed up from there with everything. That’s possible, though not so logical.

  She worries about going down, not so much afraid that the journey is to be over unkept-up trails, but that she might learn more than she ought to know, or is good for her to know. Just how much should one know, that is, about the things the men were always whispering? And might she stay there forever? It’s said tis warm… that people lie around naked (except maybe for a scarf or two or a hat) even at night. So what if she never came back when, all her life she’s called the mountains, “Comrade, friend?” What would she call “comrade,” then, down there? The seaweed? The oysters? (She knows about those… or at least she knows the words for them, from the old songs, the “Down, down, bounce, bound, down, down,” and, “Doodle, doodle, going on down,” and, “Gooseberry, down, oh down oh,” songs from some other time when the mountain people and the people of Omphalo must have lived more comfortably together, exchanging treasures, and verses so that the mountain people had songs about seaweed and oysters that they haven’t yet forgotten. (No doubt that’s how silk scarves came to be among the mountain men, handed down, father to son, and how polished amber came to be among the mountain women, handed down, mother to daughter.) But, anyway, why shouldn’t she be, for once in her life, at the center of things? Perhaps Opal would be her friend.