Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (37 page)

S
O, INTO THE MAZE
we went. The world was all before us—as once was said of those either facing Eden or leaving it; now this must be forever amended: Worlds. And it will be for you, the audience, to say how much this means or how little; the threads will all be coming together soon.

It was in February, that afternoon when I and a few snow-flakes first brushed through her door. It is—as you all know—December now. This was the period of time, she said that we—and of course the others—had. Until One day? I asked. She nodded. And aside from the others en masse, I inquired, were there other couples, like us? She professed not to know, not being a member of the inner council, but thought it likely; in a world grown to the scope and complication of this one it was scarcely believable that the authorities would start with just one couple—not again. Meanwhile and whatever, she said, her face warm with it, we should have to take our solo-duo isolation and our destinations both de facto, and work very hard in order to come into our kingdoms. Since this still accorded more with your legend than ours, I was willing—being eager for anything of yours I could get.

“So much is available.” I sighed.

“Yes,” she said, glancing past me and acurve, an irritating habit which began the first day. “We’re like rich people, who prefer to work.”

“What is ‘rich’?” I asked, and she sighed. Not for the hour’s disquisition ahead of her, but because of the hairsplittings. Inching along physically was nothing, compared with what I was learning to do with the mind.

Her main duty—and this she held with passion—was to induct me, at least through hearsay, into the collective misery of the world. Misery, she said, was by far the better organized here, if not by nature, then certainly by men; pleasure, much more at random, had to be picked like bluebells along the road. But for one of my sanguine temperament—and once I got my appendages of course—the latter could be learned without training. For training, misery was the thing. I refrained from observing that by that time my temperament might have sadly straightened itself out. (Like many who early desert the orthodox for the worldly, she was still more innocent than she knew.) No matter. As she sternly declaimed for me all her catechisms of births and deaths, wars, starvations and other killings, it was the passion she did it with that I held it my duty to be interested in. She found this amoral.

“You mean to say, babies could be
boiled,
and you wouldn’t—”

“What is a baby?” I said. “Is it a child?” I was more comfortable with my own innocence now, having long since increased my own expectations of it.

“—could be gassed, one could be stewing right here—and all that you’d care about, or be fascinated with, is
my
attitude!”

How they hate their own humanism! It was my job to teach her the real nature of the almost sublime, but I sometimes despaired of it.

“Where there’s no difference, there
is
no morality,” I said. “I’ve come a long way even to know what
amoral is.
” And if I got my appendages soon, I thought privately, maybe far enough. Meanwhile I had my first image of a yawn, delightful the first time or so; after that, a la your-style, I just let ’em rip—and without having to hide them either, in this case having the best of both worlds—nothing showed. But that never lasts long here, does it.

“Let’s have one of my Voco-Phono lessons, why don’t we?” I asked. “Or better still, when are we going to start lessons for you? It’s begun to worry me, which is scarcely useful. I can learn to worry elsewh—otherwise.”

But she would have none of it, asserting that one didn’t learn a vacuum—and that whereas my course was to learn, learn, learn all the accessories of a variable existence, hers was merely to divest herself of them. Until, as she said, she should be as serenely passive as a round bubble in a rill of them, in a pond.

The trouble with converts is that they always regard the new world as the opposite of the old. Young as I was here, halfway through my journey I had learned otherwise. But it was not up to me to hint that the opposite of a world which regards itself as positive, does not necessarily regard
itself
as negative. Or that, though the whole sound and Omphalos of our creation is O, it is just that veriest subtle flattening at its ends, and of its beings too, which makes Us all what we are. I hoped she hadn’t the idea that it was circular. Or that we were zero. Willy-nilly, though I should like to have been consulted on the grooving track she constructed, and perhaps to show her a few practice turns on it, I was never allowed in the bedroom.

Meanwhile, as for me—in my past life, neither events nor any other accessories of yours had been so plentiful that I could afford to ignore them; indeed I had a tendency to greet one and all with equal ardor and no prejudgment, so that the question of whether I would turn out warm or cold of nature, fool or genius, was as open as it might be with any—excessively intelligent, of course—child. In truth, limited though my
mise en scene
might temporarily be in terms of what can really be done here with a trifle more brio, I was living a life of simple enchantment.

I can best get at the tone of it if I say that the first man I ever had an opportunity to study up close was the milkman. Through the chute. A most clever contrivance, it had as strange an optic as many of your more complex devices for viewing nature near and far. And, since I had to get down to it by extending myself along the floor, the situation had as much geometrical and philosophical amplitude as anyone could wish—and since it was
me.
But I had by now discovered that this is the way such situations were always experienced here, so therefore gave up describing them to myself, in favor of merely having them. As for the milkman, socially or aesthetically he did me no harm. Indeed he did as well as any. He had a long slide of a nose, a chin which the eons had meditated upon well, and had at last lengthened. Some days he had only a roundish eye—set more toward eternity, I always thought, than milk. Later I found him, feature by feature and all of a piece, on one of her shelves, in a most expensive volume of plates marked: Breughel. So I discovered art and the milkman together, and as a lucky child might, quite without shock or pain. Art is a finding.

But when I took my discovery to her, or rather directed her to shelf and volume, my surprise was that she was not at all surprised that in all your variation there was some repetition too. “What a child you are!” she said merely. (No, there was more to it—excuse me, this is an elegy, and I am still learning how to remember—or is that what elegy is?) She added thoughtfully, but with one of her grins also—“Or maybe you’re adolescent by now.”

By then I had learned all I could of your morphology, both historical and current; indeed it was her contention that my ontogeny had gone so self-consciously mad for my phylogeny that only her discipline might keep it from addling. Then too, I was forever coming to her with bruises or bumps I thought might be significant, until she said it was touch-and-go whether, via accident, excitement and ineptitude, I might not dispose of myself altogether, before having a chance to become a man, or anything else. Under this barrage, I began to keep my counsel, and from this began to do so generally, led by her chaffing from introspection to introspection.
Life
is a finding too, I thought, but other people didn’t want to hear about, preferring to find out for themselves, or pose as if they already knew. This was the sophisticate—and perhaps the contemplative—line. I might end up a contemplative, I thought, but not without a struggle first, for action. So, despite that I was not yet born to manhood, and she and I were only living together, I sometimes—according as how what I was reading swelled the heart-image or numbed the brain one—thought of this period of schooling as a courtship, even a honeymoon. I was mixed up, of course, but for me, that was progress. Emotively I was still more tentative than tangible, but at certain times I felt my potential as if it were biceps. Agreed—gestation, before too much happens to one, can be an introverted time.

So, when I stood before the fire of an evening, I tried to say little or nothing of the daily wonders, just as I try to do this now. Take for granted then, the green juice or cold swan-swoon of your seasons, or the bloom of your faces, swaying like history in the magic of your dust-coarsened air. Or there was the horse I’d seen, its hindparts cocked perky in a windy field, and like a horse I’d seen in a windy field in Bucks, and now both of them were the horse-in-a-field forever, its hind-parts cocked perky and permanent. No, no listings, else the poem would be endless and get nowhere, as perhaps it did. I contented myself with a brooding line of—not
thanks;
it can’t always be thanks—recognition. Between morning and evening fires, or breezes, what a ductile wonder is a day!

Dusktime of all moments of my day was the ritual one, the beautiful—the difficult. It was the hour when, until then locked in my study, for the safety of all, she said, though it was she who turned the key—I heard her at last give over those loud devotions which all the afternoon had echoed, though her bedroom was upstairs along a hallway and two doors down. So adept had she become in her grooving that after a few false starts I never heard her at it, which was alas as it should be. But when she practiced the stillness she so envied me, she was much too tense and frictional, so this, to my comfort, I yet heard.

Meanwhile, I lived in terror of her discovering that I wasn’t practicing the various exercises she had devised for me, all to small-scale radii and all designed to humanize—but instead day after day neglected them to lie indolently on the long bed, in daydreams inflamed by the vision which still clung to its cushions, and by the reading of the night before. Day after day, I set what I called the
two-two,
the two-headed automaton, to working there, but got no more than a Punch and Judy run-through of those few moments I had seen, or an impossibly Grand Guignol rendering of what I had not. No matter how devotedly I simmered over my zoology at the library or alternated this with the warmest romances, I could never get myself sufficiently aboil to complete the image of what I yearned to, and most needed for my development. That simplest, most singular episode, and of all your pornography the most prevalent—I could never imagine it straight on through. And when for a few exhausted moments I fell asleep, then my old former friend came up from underground indeed to take vengeance, providing allsorts of Barmecide illusion, but all of it oddities only—buttonhooks were nothing!—and thereby seeing to it that there were dangled before me all the sauces, but never the goose, all the cadenzas but never the main theme.

I decided I would either have to make it my business to see one of those movies of a sort not procurable at the library, or else—and here the circle I was in came round again—somehow get myself out of myself—and
live.
I was in despair of a sort. But to tell the truth, it was of the sort that could barely wait for the next afternoon.

After that came the dusk, when ambiguity flows best, and in the soft obscurity before the lamps brought us back to our own appearances, to the vast abyss still between them, measured with sidelong distant glances of evaluation, we had our most private conversations. To these we came as any couple might, each from his and her own afternoon and the ideas or emotions so stimulated—one from the slimming salon and one from the steambath. And like many a couple, I should guess, from our amiably tepid company, one might never have known. Topics we discussed were suited, she said, to any drawing room, yet would do for the humblest dwelling as well. We talked much for instance—rather like two distant blood-relatives met by severe chance, and one the much younger in the world—of what I would become. It was true of course that in not every drawing room, or hovel either, could a young newcomer discuss eagerly whether he would turn out to be white, red, yellow or black. A topic almost always avoided by the senior member, no matter how many times suggested by the other, was whether he
was
a he. Her own future shape was not discussable, there being only One. But she would talk endlessly of native customs, hers or mine, and in this connotation, if I wished, I could sun myself in her particularly high regard. Of all her past acquaintance, and certainly presently, I was the native she was most interested in.

And after that, perhaps, we would have a little music. The first morning, I had come out from my “museum” to hear the radio playing—a chorale of what I now know to be music. I had stood motionless, then dropping little by little, as if spelled, in a half-fainting return to my former angle—was not this my own, our own classical laughter, or faraway and cold, that poignance of the almost undesperate sublime? After that, she never turned on WQXR or any of the stations too devoted to the kind of music which might too much affect me with these intimations of my O-mortality—and her own taste was not classical. I learned even to like one song, the “Vilia” from
The Merry Widow,
that she spoke of lightly as hers.

And after that we had dinner, or she did, on a tray, while she turned on the telly for my delectation, though I would have been satisfied to watch the movements, never greasy, of her mouth; perhaps she knew this too. In some circumstances, a person of my transparent background and still fragile cellular construction might well have formed a prejudice against eating or ended up at best a dyspeptic; as it was, watching those small muscles move, pout, that face grow oh so delicately bland and perhaps a litle rounder, the little sips, dainty but never arch, and all of it with an economy as strong and neat as a cat’s, I yearned first to shrink to a cutlet, that I might lie on a plate, then, ashamedly remembering my I-ness, to eat her.

Saturdays—a kind of feastday, with, she said, the longest history of orgy, saturnalia to satyrs and all the rest—she had a large meal in the kitchen which she would not let me watch, and was, I thought, probably some training lapse of which she too was ashamed. It was at such times that I tactfully repaired for my own weekly carbonation to my little privy place among the rear grove of trees. Sometimes while there, I heard a footfall pause on the path that led past the front door, as if to note my faint glimmer, then pass on. But this was in the early weeks; then it ceased altogether. And since she was so keen on our secrecy, having already drawn the blinds, sold the car, stopped the milk, the paper and all but one weekly delivery, and now went out herself only for the mail and to the library—“We are not at home,” she would say to me, smiling, “the way Paris is not at home in August”—I told her nothing of this. From tweaks of the kitchenmaid sensibility which comes from uncurbed reading, I thought I knew who. And romantically, Chanteclerically proud, and Moorishly jealous—would I have fallen in the snow or strutted?—I fancied how we might meet. We never did—or not out there. I never told. But those footfalls were a marked help to the growth of my feelings.