Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (6 page)

Sex had still been in the structure of that face well enough, in the willfully squared lip, the cabinet glow of the eye, the brow arched like a tiny lion whip over it. But could there be—for a woman or man—a willed menopause of the spirit, visible only in whatever it was the eye was now fixed on? As long as he stood still, that focus seemed to be through him and beyond him. But when he pressed forward to enter, her barring movement gave her away. Whatever she was vestal to—for that was the air of it—was in the house. It must be a person of course—whether or not this little island-craver understood it herself, her discipleship was surely, like his own, to the space that clotted about and in people. He had stood there transfixed however, in the full knowledge of all that this woman could push him to: first, obsession, and now such perversion as he’d never dreamed himself nearing, any closer to than in the worn grooves of his Greek translations. For if she were to ask him in, saying, “Stay!” with who-knows-what possibility in that subtly anthropological smile which the backroom had sometimes induced in her—he could see himself conniving. He could understand the emotions of a man willing—not eager, but willing—to undertake a ménage of three.

In his airplane seat, Linhouse groaned. To occupy himself, he fiddled from his passport case a plastic wheel, souvenir from some other airline, which when properly spun and read provided the relative times of day between “representative cities”—i.e. airstops—everywhere. Only pick a station—Karachi, say—for in the midst of all this whirl of the wheel one must oneself be someplace—and the status of the entire rest of the world would then be clear, spooning its cereal, or deeply sleeping on the dugs of love. He spun the wheel. In San Francisco they were—, while in Bangkok—, while in Seattle—, but meanwhile, where was he? To use the wheel, one had to posit oneself somewhere.

He glanced at the old man beside him, now perhaps roving those vast Alhambras which his inner vision was used to; what were the dreams of astronomers when not of nursegirls? In the Moorish tundra-dark at the back of, say Alpha Centauri—the only one of those sky-names Linhouse had heard of, as chief star of the nearest constellation, or perhaps it was galaxy—what were they doing there now on the peaks of their excellence, in relationship to, say—? Pick somewhere. He picked a doorstep under snow, on a Ramapo evening. Once more he waited there, dreadfully willing. Once more, from heights unscalable by him, she bent on him the traveler’s stare for the untraveled, before the door closed … And after a while, in the way of these clockwork episodes where no one ever forgot his lines whether answered or not, the door reopened and his one line came round again.

“It’s I,” he said, or babbled, once more. “I saw the light.”

A
T LONDON AIRPORT, THE
old man was taken in charge by his Rachel, no disciple, but a wife of certain sharp, foreign strengths that were at once evident in the muted, soft-coal air. A woman with a nose, she stood tall and long-necked within full dark draperies, awaiting them at the gateway like a black flamingo, and when the two of them left, the effect was of Sir Harry being carried off—and vastly pleased at it—under one superb black wing. Linhouse, invited to dine with them the following week at their flat in Holland Park, found him much improved, looking jauntily younger, and thinking of returning to the States after all, spurred on by his wife, who had never been there.

Rachel—pronounced the French way, and otherwise called Madame (she refused to be a ladyship)—had actually been born Sinsheimer, a German refugee-from-Hitler, who by her service in the Resistance had long since been translated into French. A woman of somewhere between fifty and sixty, she had the self-contained beauty of one able to live up to such a magnificently hooked nose; all of her—sleek-knobbed hair, daubed brows and a strong skin now and then pink-wattled with energy—gave an impression of having been pomaded backwards from it. As Sir Harry’s third wife she was still his “young” one, no indication being given of where his place was in her succession of husbands—he was clearly so delighted to be the incumbent. If she wasn’t a disciple, then what was she?

To Linhouse she appeared first off as one of those foreign women who were translated very quickly but never lost the hard core of themselves; whether what they kept was a kind of femininity, he couldn’t say. It appeared to him that she too might be a traveler, and for this reason he studied her carefully. In her crow-satins and midnight crepes, always some Gallic manipulation of the many colors of black, she had as many pockets as a concierge (she must have had them made that way), these currently inhabited by one or more of the
Cahiers
of Péguy. She might be a Catholic convert then, at least some of the time—why Linhouse thought of it that way he couldn’t say either, at least not at their first dinner. When it came about that, because of a worrying illness of his mother’s, he wasn’t going to leave the country immediately, the three of them had several dinners.

On the second, it appeared that she was a Socialist, though not of the British variety, her husband’s, which she despised.

“They have no
clarté,
” she said, setting the word down on the cloth like a solid, where it sat like a small candle burning. “Look at him, he takes a title.”

“Before I knew you. And only for service in the War Department,” said Sir Harry. At other times he was driven to protest his lack of aristocracy by citing his background—father a brewer, and not a rich one—and his university—Leeds.

“I accept the aristocracy,” she said with a grin—and Linhouse for the first time was faintly
reminded.
“And the money, if we go to America, but it’s the lack of style. Politics,
yes—la politique d’abord.
But ’ere it ’ave no mystique.”

She drew out one of the notebooks, entitled
De la Grippe,
then another,
Encore de la Grippe,
and yet another,
Toujours de la Grippe,
while Linhouse, pocket-dazzled, wondered where she would light—nearer hypochondria or Christian Science?—until he was made to understand that Péguy had written these particular issues during a bout of influenza. They were dated 1900. When it came out that she was now, almost three quarters of a century later, a passionate Dreyfusard, he thought he understood her better. He’d met women, men too, who yearned impossibly backwards toward eras temperamentally theirs, couples knocking about Greenwich Village in raccoon coats, talking of what “Scott” said (and they didn’t mean Sir Walter), women who after the third bourbon of being some man’s “good sort,” spoke tearfully of bustles and
la belle époque,
and ordered a chartreuse. It was just luck even now for instance, if half the bright schoolboys in Britain got safely past the
Yellow Book
and out the other side. He himself, for all he knew, had come to his profession by some such pass, an early Greek or Roman one. There was only one trouble about Rachel—he couldn’t quite pin down her era. And the next time, what dropped from her, from reticule or marsupial pouch (how could he tell which?), was a mixed bag indeed: a pamphlet,
Tea Ceremony in Role of Japanese Women;
a reprint, this much-thumbed, of a lecture by her own husband, if Linhouse’s eye was accurate—;
also W. H. Hudson’s
Green Mansions,
and a volume by Chateaubriand. She tucked them all back.

Was she a feminist? Did she travel, or yearn to? He asked her.

To the first query, Sir Harry answered for her, making his wife the little bow of a husband so much at one that he could speak. “In a bisexual world such as ours, women physically own the civilization already. Both sexes spend their lives concealing that from each other.”

“Ah, we don’ want it, this world,” said Rachel. “We amuse ourselves—
s’amuser
?—watching you work for it. For what you could have by default.” She spread her hands.
“Non! Ce n’est pas ce que je veux
—
féminisme.
It is an invention of man, that.”

“What is it you want, nowadays?” Linhouse spread his own hands. It was catching. “Women, I mean.”

She inspected her nails, but tossed him a keen, kind look, as if aware that someone in particular had entered here. “For it
not
to be nowadays, mebbee? ’Arry is right. We are very civilize’.”

He looked up, to find ’Arry regarding him not nearly so kindly.

They were momentarily alone, she and Linhouse, when he asked her the second question, on the eve of the couple’s departure for Bucks, where Harry had a house, half observatory and almost all glass, built for him by Mary, the second wife and the rich one.

“Marie, I love ’er,” said Rachel. “A big damp
pavilion,
we cawn’ go there except summer. A mad, impossible ’ouse, not at all
convenable.
But we can watch the stars there. And if ’e get lumbago, it is Marie who get the blame.”

Though so critical of the country, she never expressed any wish to leave it. Indeed, after the manner of the country itself, which had a way of tricking foreigners into its own prides, she could be distressfully local, ranging over the whole flower field of English accent, for instance, like a lady-in-waiting hunting patterns for a lambrequin to be embroidered for the Queen. She was likely to inform them mysteriously that Wykehamists spoke through cotton wool, Harrow and Marlborough men through linen, or to hush the man on the telly with a cry of “Kent!” or “Bethnal Green!” Though her mischief was better than her ear, once more Linhouse was reminded; wasn’t anthropology after all only localism to the n
th?
One couldn’t of course imagine Rachel on any man’s knee. In bed, an odalisque a la Jacques David, was where his mind (if it was his mind) placed her. But a teasing kinship trembled in the room. Perhaps it was the mockery of those who belonged to a tribe.

A lurid thought struck him. “Marie?” he said, low. “Is she—does she
live
down there?”

“Oui.”

“Oh.”

She let him simmer in his own cleverness.

“In the spirit,” she said then.

“Oh,
dead!
” In his relief, he spoke rather loud. The aberrations of one’s friends could make one queasy, if they came too near.

“Non.”
Suddenly she burst into an uncontrolled laughter he’d never heard from her. All considered, it seemed to him a little late for it.

“Oh, it was very
comme il faut,
” she said, when she had finished. “While she was down there. In Bucks. And ’Arry,
grâce á Dieu,
was at a congress in Cairo. Before Suez. An’ before ’e meet me.” Her proud head equated the two.

“Oh.” No need to be that
spirituelle,
was his tone.

“Non”
she said “—not divorce.” She crossed her fingers over her mouth, and its belated smile.
“Disparue,”
she said. “She disappear.”

Had he held an icicle in his hand again, there for a moment? Even now, looking back, he couldn’t say that he consciously had. These days, even the most ordinary man walked under the weight of so many crowns he changed with every step and never even saw, the crowns psychologica, para-psychologica and perhaps even astrologica—clouds of wire-and-fireflies gathering in on him once again from all the phantasms at which men, since Erasmus, had been daring to laugh.

But he did ask his question. He must have thought he was changing the subject. “Do you never want to travel?” he’d said. “Elsewhere?”

She’d looked past him, out of the window, over her glass of valedictory champagne. From her expression, she might have been seeing luminous Barbizons above the gray-prickle London street. But what she said was, rather anxiously, “In America, they will take good care of Harry?” She even pronounced the “h.”

Just then, Harry himself reentered, carrying his farewell gift, a scholar’s compliment, that same pamphlet of which Linhouse would probably understand only the title. He presented it, then put an arm about his wife’s shoulder. “She wants me to go ahead of her to America, imagine! She thinks I’m strong enough!” His cheeks were slightly oranged by drink. He looked down at Linhouse, who was much the shorter man, with mettle. “And I may do. There’s an international congress at Berkeley in the autumn; they’re willing to pay my way.” He squeezed her shoulder, bare through its nun’s veiling. “But I’ll come back to bring you over, eh. Didn’t know I was training her up to be my assistant down at Bucks, did you, Linhouse? She had some math at Gottingen, before the war. I’ve some hobbies of my own down there; we may show that chap Anders a thing or two yet. Women are remarkable, you know, at some of these very painstaking operations. Getting so, once she gets down there, I can scarcely tear her away.”

They stood there, arms unexpectedly laced about each other’s waist in more than friendship, like the
mère
and
pire
of a family inexplicably not present in photographs, valiant couple in their separate primes, who were now about to ascend to a bed where they might still find comfort in some massive reticulation of limb. It came to Linhouse—such hot flashes of insight came to the deserted—what the resemblance was. The smile under that nose of hers could still pearl so freshly, and with the same perverse calm—of creatures who might have been promised the end of the world on Tuesday. They none of them knew what they did or didn’t care for. They merely had the pockets made, and kept them at-the-ready. They were all of them natural converts.