I didn’t frame it thus to myself, but as I sat blindly groping through the smoke of her words, I knew that I would fling myself like a madman into every gap in her story. She was spinning a web too delicate, too tenuous, to support the weight of my prying thoughts. Another woman acting thus would have aroused my suspicions. I would have branded her a skilful liar. This one was not lying. She was embroidering. She was stitching—and now and then she dropped a stitch.
Here a thought flitted through my head which had never formulated itself before. It was one of those larval thoughts which scud through the mind like a thin moon through mutton chops. She has been doing this always! Yes, it had probably occurred to me at the time, but I had dismissed it instantly. The way she leaned over, the weight of her resting on one arm, the hand, the right hand, moving like a needle—yes, at that moment, and again several times later, an image had flashed through my mind, but I had had no time, or rather she had given me no time, to track it down. But now it was clear. Who was it that «had been doing it always»? Fate. There were three of them, and there was something sinister about them. They lived in a twilight and they spun a web: one of them had assumed this posture, had shifted her weight, had looked into the camera with hand poised, then resumed that endless stitching, spinning, weaving, that silent talk which weaves in and out of the spoken web of words.
A shuttle moving back and forth, a bobbin ceaselessly bobbing. Now and then a dropped stitch-Like the man who lifted her dress. He was standing on the stoop saying good-night. Silence. He blows his brains out…. Or the father flying his kites on the roof. He comes flying down out of the sky, like a violet angel of Chagall’s. He walks between his race horses, holding one on either side, by the bridle. Silence. The Stradivarius is missing….
We are on the beach and the moon is scudding through the clouds. But before that we were sitting close together in the motorman’s box in the elevated train. I had been telling her the story of Tony and Joey. I had just written it—perhaps because of her, because of the effect of certain vaguenesses. She had thrown me hack suddenly on myself, made loneliness seem delectable. She had stirred those grape-like bunches of emotion which were strung like a garland on the skeleton of my ego. She had revived the boy, the boy who ran through the fields to greet his little friends. There was never any actor then! That boy ran alone. That boy ran to throw himself into the arms of Joey and Tony… Why did she look at me so intently when I told her the story of Joey and Tony? There was a terrible brightness in her face, that I can never forget. Now I think I know what it was. I think I had stopped her—stopped that incessant spinning and weaving. There was gratitude in her eyes, as well as love and admiration. I had stopped the machine and she had risen like a vapor, for just a few minutes. That terribly bright look was the nimbus of her liberated self.
Then sexual plunges. Submerging that cloud of vapor. Like trying to hold smoke under water. Peeling off layer after layer of darkness in the dark. Another kind of gratitude. A bit horrible, though. As if I had taught her the prescribed way to commit hari-kiri…. That utterly inexplicable night at Rock-away Beach—in the Doctor Caligari hotel and bathing establishment. Running back and forth to the lavatory. Swooping down on her, scooping it out, piercing her… plunging, plunging, as if I had become a gorilla with knife in hand and were slashing the Sleeping Beauty to life. The next—morning—or was it afternoon? Lying on the beach with our toes in one another’s crotch. Like two Surrealist objects demonstrating a hazardous rencontre.
And then Dr. Tao, his poem printed on fire-cracker paper. Encysted in the mind, because she had failed to meet me in the garden as she promised. I was holding it in my hand while talking to her over the telephone. Some of the gold had rubbed off and clung to my fingers. She was still in bed—with that slut Florrie. They had drunk too much the night before. Yes, she had stood on a table—where? somewhere!—and had tried to do the split. And she had hurt herself. But I was too furious to care whether she had hurt herself or not. She was alive, wasn’t she, and she had failed to show up. And perhaps Florrie was lying there beside her, as she pretended, and perhaps it wasn’t Florrie but that guy Carruthers. Yes, that old fool who was so kind and thoughtful, but who had still enough gumption in him to stick daggers in people’s portraits.
A desolating thought suddenly assailed me. The danger from Carruthers was past. Carruthers had helped her. Others had helped her before him no doubt… But this was the thought: if I had not come that night to the dance hall with a wad in my pocket, if I had had just enough for a few dances, what then? And putting aside that first grand occasion, what about that other time in the empty lot? («And now for the dirt..!») Supposing I had failed her then? But I couldn’t have failed her, that was just it. She must have realized that or she would never have risked it….
In cold-blooded honesty I was forced nevertheless, to concede that those few miraculous sums I had managed to produce at the right moment had been an important factor. They had helped her to believe that she could rely on me.
I wiped the slate clean. Damn it, if one were to interrogate Fate that way everything could be explained by what you had to eat for breakfast. Providence puts opportunities in your path: they can be translated as money, luck, youth, vitality, a thousand different things. If the attraction isn’t there nothing can be made of even the most golden opportunity. It was because I would do anything for her that so many opportunities were afforded me. Money, shit! Money had nothing to do with it. So much anfractuosity, or defectuosity, or impecuniosity! It was like the definition of hysteria in Dr. Onirifick’s library: «an undue permeability of the psychical diaphragm.»
No, I wasn’t going to get off into these complicated eddies. I closed my eyes to sink back into that other clear stream which ran on and on like a silver thread. In some quiet part of me there was a legend which she had nourished. It was of a tree, just as in the Bible, and beneath it stood the woman called Eve with an apple in her hand. Here it ran like a clear stream, all that really constituted my life. Here there was feeling, from bank to bank.
What was I getting at—here where the subterranean stream, ran clear? Why that image of the Tree of Life? Why was it so exhilarating to retaste the poisonous apple, to kneel in supplication at the feet of a woman in the Bible? Why was the Mona Lisa’s smile the most mysterious of all human expressions? And why should I transpose this smile of the Renaissance to the lips of an Eve whom I had known only as an engraving?
There was something which hung on the fringe of memory, some enigmatic smile which expressed serenity, beatitude, beneficence. But there was also a poison, a distillation which exuded from that mystifying smile. And this poison I had quaffed and it had blurred the memory. There had been a day when I had accepted something in exchange for something; on that day a strange bifurcation had taken place.
In vain I ransacked my brain. However, I was able to recall this much. On a certain day in Spring I met her in the Rose Room of a large hotel. She had arranged to meet me there in order to show me a dress she had bought. I had come ahead of time and after a few restless moments I had fallen into a trance. It was her voice which brought me to. She had spoken my name and the voice had passed through me, like smoke through gauze. She was ravishing, appearing suddenly like that before my yes. I was still coming out of the mist. As she sat down I rose slowly, still moving through a fog, and knelt at her feet, mumbling something about the radiance of her beauty. For a full few minutes she made no effort to rouse me. She held my two hands in hers and smiled down at me, that effulgent, luminous smile which spreads like a halo and then vanishes, never to reappear again. It was the seraphic smile of peace and benediction. It was given in a public place wherein we found ourselves alone. It was a sacrament, and the hour, the day, the place were recorded in letters of gold in the book of the legend which lay at the foot of the Tree of Life. Thenceforth we who had united were joined by an invisible being. Never again were we to be alone. Never again
