(Three people, the Kings and Audace, raised three hands, looking at one another in shared smugness.)
«This person, who is in the mighty middle of life, thinks of marrying a third time. He is deeply in love with a young woman. Before proposing to her, however, honesty demands that he confess he is suffering from a certain ailment. I wish they would stop jolting my chair every time they run by.
Ailment' is perhaps too strong a term. Let's put it this way: there are certain flaws, he says, in the mechanism of his mind. The one he told me about is harmless in itself but very distressing and unusual, and may be a symptom of some imminent, more serious disorder. So here goes. When this person is lying in bed and imagining a familiar stretch of street, say, the right-hand sidewalk from the Library to, say--" "The Liquor Store," put in King, a relentless wag. "All right, Recht's Liquor Store. It is about three hundred yards away--" I was again interrupted, this time by Louise (whom, in fact, I was solely addressing). She turned to Audace and informed him that she could never visualize any distance in yards unless she could divide it by the length of a bed or a balcony. "Romantic," said Mrs. King. "Go on, Vadim." "Three hundred paces away along the same side as the College Library. Now comes my friend's problem. He can walk in his mind there and back but he can't perform in his mind the actual about-face that transformsthere’ into `back.’ ««Must call Rome,» muttered Louise to Mrs. King, and was about to leave her seat, but I implored her to hear me out. She resigned herself, warning me however that she could not understand a word of my peroration.
«Repeat that bit about twisting around in your mind,» said King. «Nobody understood.»
«I did,» said Audace: «We suppose the Liquor Store happens to be closed, and Mr. Twidower, who is a friend of mine too, turns on his heel to go back to the Library. In the reality of life he perfoms this action without a hitch or hiatus, as simply and unconsciously as we all do, even if the artist’s critical eye does see—A toi, Vadim.»
«Does see,» I said, accepting the relay-race baton, «that, depending on the speed of one’s revolution, palings and awnings pass counterwise around you either with the heavy lurch of a merry-go-round or (saluting Audace) in a single brisk flip like that of the end of a striped scarf (Audace smiled, acknowledging the Audacianism) that one flings over one’s shoulder. But when one lies immobile in bed and rehearses or rather replays in one’s mind the process of turning, in the manner described, it is not so much the pivotal swing which is hard to perceive mentally—it is its result, the reversion of vista, the transformation of direction, that’s what one vainly strives to imagine. Instead of the liquor-store direction smoothly turning into the opposite one, as it does in the simplicity of waking life, poor Twidower is baffled—«
I had seen it coming but had hoped that I would be allowed to complete my sentence. Not at all. With the infinitely slow and silent movement of a gray tomcat, which he resembled with his bristly whiskers and arched back, King left his seat. He started to tiptoe, with a glass in each hand, toward the golden glow of a densely populated sideboard. With a dramatic slap of both hands against the edge of the table I caused Mrs. Morgain to jump (she had either dozed off or aged tremendously in the last few minutes) and stopped old King in his tracks; he silently turned like an automaton (illustrating my story) and as silently stole back to his seat with the empty Arabesque glasses.
«The mind, my friend’s mind, is baffled, as I was saying, by something dreadfully strainful and irksome in the machinery of the change from one position to another, from east to west or west to east, from one damned nymphet to another—I mean I’m losing the thread of my tale, the zipper of thought has stuck, this is absurd—«
Absurd and very embarrassing. The two cold-thighed, cheesy-necked girleens were now engaged in a quarrelsome game as to who should sit on my left knee, that side of my lap where the honey was, trying to straddle Left Knee, warbling in Tyrolese and pushing each other off, and cousin Fay kept bending toward me and saying with a macabre accent: «Elles vous aiment tant!» Finally I pinched and twisted the nearest buttock, and with a squeal they resumed their running around, like that eternal little pleasure-park train, brushing the brambles.
I still could not disentangle my thoughts, but Audace came to my rescue.
«To conclude,» he said (and an audible ouf! was emitted by cruel Louise), «our patient’s trouble concerns not a certain physical act but the imagining of its performance. All he can do in his mind is omit the swiveling part altogether and shift from one visual plane to another with the neutral flash of a slide change in a magic lantern, whereupon he finds himself facing in a direction which has lost, or rather never contained, the idea of `oppositeness.’ Does anybody wish to comment?»
After the usual pause that follows such offers, John King said: «My advice to your Mr. Twitter is to dismiss that nonsense once for all. It’s charming nonsense, it’s colorful nonsense, but it’s also harmful nonsense. Yes, Jane?»
«My father,» said Mrs. King, «a professor of botany, had a rather endearing quirk: he could memorize historical dates and telephone numbers—for example our number 9743—only insofar as they contained primes. In our number he remembered two figures, the second and last, a useless combination; the other two were only black gaps, missing teeth.»
«Oh, that’s good,» cried Audace, genuinely delighted. I remarked it was not at all the same thing. My friend’s affliction resulted in nausea, dizziness, kegelkugel headache.
«Well yes, I understand, but my father’s quirk also had its side effects. It was not so much his inability to memorize, say, his house number in Boston, which was 68 and which he saw every day, but the fact that he could do nothing about it; that nobody, but nobody could explain why all he could make out at the far end of his brain was not 68 but a bottomless hole.»
Our host resumed his vanishing act with more deliberation than before. Audace lidded his empty glass with his palm. Though swine-drunk, I longed for mine to be refilled, but was bypassed. The walls of the round room had grown more or less opaque again, God bless them, and the Dolomite Dollies were no longer around.
«In the days when I longed to be a ballerina,» said Louise, «and was Blanc’s little favorite, I always rehearsed exercises in my mind lying in bed, and had no difficulty whatever in imagining swirls and whirls. It is a matter of practice, Vadim. Why don’t you just roll over in bed when you want to see yourself walking back to that Library? We must be going now, Fay, it’s past midnight.»
Audace glanced at his wristwatch, uttered the exclamation which Time must be sick of hearing, and thanked me for a wonderful evening. Lady Morgain’s mouth mimicked the pink aperture of an elephant’s trunk as it mutely formed the word «loo» to which Mrs. King, fussily swishing in green, immediately took her. I remained alone at the round table, then struggled to my feet, drained the rest of Louise’s daiquiri, and joined her in the hallway.
She had never melted and shivered so nicely in my embrace as she did now.
«How many quadruped critics,» she asked after a tender pause in the dark garden, «would accuse you of leg pulling if you published the description of those funny feelings. Three, ten, a herd?»
«Those are not really feelings' and they are not reallyfunny.’ I just wished you to be aware that if I go mad it will be in consequence of my games with the idea of space. `Rolling over’ would be cheating and besides would not help.»
«I’ll take you to an absolutely divine analyst.» «That’s all you can suggest?»
«Why, yes.» «Think, Louise.»
«Oh. I’m also going to marry you. Yes, of course, you idiot.»
She was gone before I could reclasp her slender form. The star-dusted sky, usually a scary affair, now vaguely amused me: it belonged, with the autumn fadeur of barely visible flowers, to the same issue of Woman’s Own World as Louise. I made water into a sizzle of asters and looked up at Bel’s window, square c2. Lit as brightly as e1, the Opal Room. I went back there and noted with relief that kind hands had cleared and tidied the table, the round table with the opalescent rim, at which I had delivered a most successful introductory lecture. I heard Bel’s voice calling me from the upper landing, and taking a palmful of salted almonds ascended the stairs.
5
Rather early next morning, a Sunday, as I stood, shawled in terry cloth, and watched four eggs rolling and bumping in their inferno, somebody entered the living room through a side door that I never bothered to lock.
Louise! Louise dressed up in hummingbird mauve for church. Louise in a sloping beam of mellow October sun. Louise leaning against the grand piano, as if about to sing and looking around with a lyrical smile.
I was the first
