But there have been other houses of joy in the world; every neighborhood has one; the gazetteer is riddled with their toponyms, although perhaps not all deserve the name. The center is where we are; thus in travelling we but change our peripheries. One traveller may rule (or be slave to) many, many worlds. And other travellers of course leave the flotsam of their extinguished secret planets and planetoids —a faded photograph, a doll, a lock of hair, a symphony, a mineral brought from who knows where, a baby, a gravestone, a pair of dirty underpants. When he met the surviving wooden panels of Gauguin's House of Joy from that dreamworld we call Oceania—les îles Marquises, to be precise (1901)—he remembered how priests had burned the rest as soon as the artist died, leaving orphaned his bas-relief girls with negroid shell-faces, idol-faces, who dwelled within the world he'd once called "Soyéz mystéieuses." A little yellowish-green pigment remained on their faces; their hair was painted red or bluish-green; one tawny-buttocked nymph grappled at a greenish darkness, gazing at another woman's face which shone in isolation like the moon; as it seemed, the nymph supplicated and the moon gazed back at her and the traveller, tight-lipped. On the far left another woman sadly drowsed, faded like so many of Gauguin's dreams—sentimental, pornographic dreams, yet not without merit; the man wanted to be loved, let's say; he was a traveller; he wanted to possess the alien; his flaw was that he was unwilling to be possessed by it. — The other traveller would have loved to see the viewers made up of Gauguin's elect, which is to say, laughing amorous couples, but by the time people got to Gauguin upstairs in Division Forty-Four their feet hurt and they had already seen ever so many images of nakedness. A whitish-grey rainy light came in. A man rushed down the scuffed tiles, following the camera implanted at the end of his arm. A businesswoman trod dully along, half-gazing at Gauguin's panels. Her fat husband pointed to the one that said SOYEZ AMOUREUSES—VOUS SEREZ HEREUSES* (a seductive snake basking round that message), and she touched her shoulder affectionately. That was good; he was being good; but she but half looked. Nor was she to be blamed; her legs ached, held so unnaturally angled in the high heels. So she passed on to Division Forty-Five without glancing to see whether he would follow, which assuredly meant that she took his following for granted, and that was not so good. But maybe he had failed to consider the high heels. The man gazed at the moon-woman for awhile, listening to the lines of her face, and then went on. For a long time, almost a full minute, the Maison du Jouir was empty, except for the traveller. Those squat naked women waved tirelessly—joylessly, he hated to say; almost grimly; had Gauguin disbelieved his own message? If so, what an unhappy man! . . . Across the hall, a glass case sheltered his head of Tehura, carved of pua wood and painted. Tehura was the first of his thirteen-year-old wives. Gauguin wrote home that her skin was "an orgy of chromes." Her shiny face was tilted back forever, her dark eyes almost pupilless holes the shape of seedpods. Light crawled upon her cheekbones and forehead. He wanted to kiss her calm, rich wooden lips. — In Division Forty-Five, smiling ladies were showing their little girls Aristide Maillol's La femme à I'ombrelle (1895). When they came to Gauguin, they peered at Tehura and the Maison du Jouir in silence. Perhaps they were hostile. Perhaps they understood what those women had been to Gauguin and they did not want their daughters to have anything to do with his joy. Perhaps they thought: Old lecher! — In Division Forty-Three, which displayed the works of the École Pont-Aven, they lingered somewhat longer, pointing out to their young females his safely unimpresive still-lives and the harsh Brittany women of his pre-Oceanic period. No danger that anyone would emulate them—and, if they did, no harm done! A landlady's calling is rarely despised. — Supposedly Tahitians, a Canadian woman explained. — His feet hurt, too. He returned to the glass case where Tehura's head lived. Behind it hung Et I'or de leur corps (1901), whose skin-hues rendered the title a misnomer, being brown rather than gold; Gauguin had achieved beautiful expressions for the two girls, whose heads were cocked in patient curiosity, seeking the traveller's eyes which they would never find. But Tehura was the one. In this new crowd there appeared to be a wave of wood-carving enthusiasts, since on his current circuit round the glass case he had leisure only to notice the shiny dark chisel-marks of her hair before eye-pressure and breath-pressure impelled him. Another orbit. That melancholy masklike thing never looked back at him. Even when he brought his head down against the glass and looked straight into her eyesockets, nothing looked back. It was not that she was nothing, only that she would not look. He was on the periphery of the world. Another orbit. This time he aimed his gaze according to a lesser anger of imperialistic intimacy, and was rewarded by her looking almost at him, her lovely, sullen lips not quite parted. Halfway through the next orbit, he glanced across the hall and saw how a crowd was grimacing at the panels of Gauguin's house. A man leaned forward and gazed at Soyez mystérieuses with respect. Another aped him, then walked away humming. What hateful and artificial places museums are! But in Division Forty-Three, a man leaned against a pillar and smiled so lovingly upon a Rousseau. That was good. — It was not (be it said) that the traveller wanted to smash the glass case and run off with Tehura's head, although that might well have been the most honest and committed thing to do. Possession is a myth. One enjoys something or someone for awhile, then ceases to enjoy, either because the loved thing is taken away or because life itself is taken away, or simply because enjoyment is taken away, at which time the fabulous head simply becomes a lump of ennui rendered in wood.
There was a yellow field of rapeseed, and then he had to change in Winnipeg.
They pulled out of Winnipeg at ten, the sky still blue but losing color, the lights on in the houses and buildings across the river. Contingent memories followed him like twin blotches of sunlight keeping a train company along the adjacent rails. Hegel writes about shapes of consciousness which have not yet attained to the perfect abstraction so dear to him; that was one way to characterize them; another was as simple crumbs and scraps one held onto, remnants of life's ceaseless giving, like the wasted golden light on the corners and in the veins of the ranked black concrete squares which floored the platform at the train station at Rome, goldness exploding upwards in tiny occasional spangles when a raindrop hit, while the black railings, though they shone as if varnished, remained still. Now the train began to move; the atlas opened, chancy shapes of light rushed down into the seams perpendicular to the direction of travel to make lines of light; then the bright entrance crept by, and then he was speeding on gravelly tracks between fences and trees, observing the widening slices of Italy between train-tracks . . . There was Arabic neon under a hand-painted mouth, the yellow letters crawling like dotted inchworms, policemen in black with white belts and flat black caps and white-striped sleeves, black boots, black moustached faces (Venetian red with a touch of yellow ocher). That was Cairo. I am very disconnected, another woman he'd loved had written, and within ten minutes of your departure wondered why I hadn't called your bluff about running off to Spain. I hope that you are not too sad about everything, and will forgive me for needing things you can't give—and for wanting to—as Ivan would say— "respectfully return my ticket" alone. Being alone is very important to me. I will look into finding you some daguerreotyping equipment next week. Everybody was disconnected. Everybody retained some meaningless recollection or other, like that part of Karl-Marx-Allee with darkish apartment buildings, the Stalin Wall; when Stalin died, they took down his sign quietly in the night.
The woman who'd respectfully returned her ticket wanted to get rid of ill-made furniture, too. How could he blame her for doing that? First of all, he didn't love her more than the others. She needed to be loved exclusively, because she was sad in a different way than he was. While his incompleteness and emptiness made him so lonely that he sometimes couldn't sleep outside of a woman's arms, her own disease was self-hatred. Once he sent her a photograph in which, so he'd thought, her beauty had been definitively proved, and she thought it ugly, although at least she didn't throw
it away. Some gray and cloudy species of dreariness, some foreign chemical or trace, had invaded her and inflamed her with listless sorrow long before they'd ever met, clinging to her like a poisonous mucus, and although he wanted to brush it away he couldn't; he didn't know how. His own need-driven selfishness, which she'd later name his culpability, only added to her hurt. Because she could not see her own excellence, his compliments rang sarcastic in her ears; sometimes he felt so guilty for hurting her that he wanted to kneel down and give her a revolver and respectfully request that she shoot him. How could he make her see how rare she was, how specially strange? Sometimes for a moment she'd smile at him through her guardedness and pain. But he could not be loyal only to her, and when he was with her he couldn't leave her alone. He'd take her hand on the subway, for instance, until she became angry, interpreting this as a kind of exhibitionistic possessive-ness or territorialism, like a dog marking ownership by means of pungent liquid irrelevancies, when in fact his was a different kind of selfishness, that same desperate loneliness which compelled him to take her hand again and again until she practically shook him off. He was not really bad, just greedy and unmeritorious. (She wasn't perfect, either.) Behind his screen of consideration, sincere though it was, he operated almost ruthlessly, so that his filthy love-claws hurt her again and again.
Clasping her pale amis behind her back as she gazed into a glass case filled with golden figures in some museum, she might have felt distracted from her struggle against the gray cloud if he were with her, because she truly liked someone to identify things to, thereby confirming her empire of names (when he asked what her favorite thing was, she said: Probably the funerary couch), but he just felt sulky and sorry for himself remembering the walnut-paneled hotel room in Philadelphia, with snow outside and the hazy peace inside from her cigarette smoke, the old room with its pale beige moldings, its browns and off-golds behind the netting curtains which hid the white sky and brick towers and roofs. The next morning all the snow had melted. The lobby's black and white floor-diamonds swarmed around her when she went out. In the window-ledges, the holes in the heater-grilles were as big as fingertips. The dark wood around them was cracked by the hot air which had fought so many winters. He stood watching her dwindle through the picture window; she was in a hurry to make her train. A rotund man in a black trench-coat stood with his hands in his pockets, his face pale, his eyes glittering like wet blackberries past their season; and the man was leaning beside the brass-bordered mirror. With a strange start of jealous anger, he understood that the man was watching her also. She never looked back. Possibly she didn't know he could see her. His own train, leaving, followed the parallel wildernesses of track, sooty arches and old snow. The blue sky clouded over with ugly birds. He passed buildings, bare trees old and dirty and dreary, crossed the wide straight river. Useless. He gazed at black tree-fingers in the reddish-brown dirt of spring. Broken-windowed houses looked back at him from over the railroad tracks; that was that. She'd said: You don't love me, and he said again that he did, and she said: I believe you think that you love me. I believe you love me as much as you can. — He sat there, sad and heavy and guilty. That was in the summertime when it was very hot. She made love with him only twice that time, once on the first night and once on the last. The first time he'd seduced her and afterward she'd said: It's not fair for you to make me want you. — The other time she'd done it as a surprise, probably out of pity. As soon as it was over she'd gotten out of bed, put on her clothes and sat staring at him from the other side of the room. The rest of the time they were at museums and she said: Come look at this calligraphy. — Memory-pictures crowded past like the high alert buttocks of cyclists speeding so silently down the river drive. Everything which he now recollected on that train was as clear as another glass of horseradish vodka with the meniscus trembling so alertly on the table whose red roses were less ruby-dark than the wine in the other goblets; the pianist sent out happiness in firm rhythms, turning his bald head in swivels of pleasure; the woman in the dress which was a meadow of black roses moved forward to kiss him, leaned back forking her mushrooms vol-au-vent, smiling, her shoulders shining; and the disk below the stem of his water glass burst into a dozen rainbows; and the beauty in the black dress was happy and frowned and ordered more wine, clasping her breastbone. That night the light had been a crooked bamboo pole in the red cushions of booths, and the woman in the black dress had brought his hand to her lips like autumn's river slow and strange. The crazy piano-notes sank into the coriander vodka; and after more coriander vodka he looked up and the woman in the black dress was gone, only the crumpled white napkin which had touched her mouth remaining to mark her. He sat still for awhile. Then he picked up the napkin and put his face to its lipstick stain. After he'd paid their bill he went outside and stood there for awhile gazing down the long street-canals which sparkled with cabs like square yellow beads . . .
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