The Recognitions (113 page)

Ed Feasley nodded but did not look up. And then Hannah asked him, —Was that true? what we saw in the paper? Was that your father in the Times this morning? —How do I know, I don't read the Times. Chrahst. I suppose it was. Then he looked up. —Have you got a cigarette? They both looked blank. —What do you mean? he broke out again. —About all this . . . these charges of collusion with a foreign government, and the whole works going to hell, and then my old man has a stroke on top of that? Is that what you mean? I mean Christ say what you mean. —She . . . she didn't mean anything, Stanley said putting a hand out. —Well Chrahst nobody means anything, Feasley drew away muttering, and stood rubbing the floor with his shoe. —But you . . . you're all right, about money? you did have plenty of money, if you could buy an airplane . . . ? —That thing, it crashed in Florida. Were you ever in Tampa? I mean to Chrahst what a lousy town that is, Tampa. They were nasty as hell about it. —You crashed? in a plane crash? —I was taking off, I hit this flock of lousy birds. —But you got out all right? you weren't hurt? —Chrahst no, I never knew what happened after I saw those white birds right in front of me. I was drunk. I mean Chrahst, what a Chrahst-awful mess everything is, everything at once. Ed Feasley stood watching his toe rub the floor board, grinding a cigarette stub there into the wood, and would not look up until their continued silence provoked him. He looked up, and they looked down. —I mean, my old man, Chrahst I never liked the old bastard, but I ... I hate like hell to see him like this, just . . . just sitting there and he can't move a thing, he just sits there. When Hannah started to speak, Stanley looked at her apprehensively as though he expected some note of acid triumph (and she had, at that, been referred to in a news item on her arrest the night she was doing her laundry in the subway washroom, as a Stalinist, or Trotskyite, or the parent that combined them both, some such); for each of these two seemed to feel that they had suddenly lost a friend, or at the least an affluent acquaintance upon whom they could call in some moment of extremity, as indeed they had: or say that someone of those dimensions had simply gone out of their lives, and someone else, bearing superficial resemblances, come in. So Stanley was surprised to see the same expression on Hannah's face that he felt on his own; and her tone, which could not help but be bitter, perhaps the more so for all this, was a relief for she changed the subject abruptly with, —Do you remember that fucking faggot that knocked me down at Max's party that night? Have you heard about him? —Herschel . . . what? —He's a movie star. —Him? —He's a movie star. He's the new most eligible bachelor in Hollywood. —Good Chrahst. —He's going to be Saint Sebastian in a movie about the Virgin Mary. —But he was . . . Saint Sebastian was third century . . . Stanley complained feebly. —Good Chrahst. I mean, this is like a post mortem, like the night that Otto and I ... Chrahst. I don't know. Ed Feasley looked round him. —I mean when I come down here all these people remind me of parts of me that never grew up. —We live in a country that never grew up. —We live in a whole God damn world that never grew up, said Ed Feasley. —And everybody's leaving. I mean, he looked round again, —everybody's gone. Where are they going? What are they going to do when they get over there? —Bildow's going over to get laid, said Hannah. —I mean Chrahst, I almost don't blame him. You know? The only use I ever found for a condom was to fill it up with water and roll it around on the floor. We used to do that in college. I mean you'd be surprised how tremendous they get. It's like a big piece of water with nothing around it rolling around. —Do you think there would be so many queers around if there were a few good whorehouses in town? Hannah demanded sharply. —No, here they'd rather see their boys go to bed with a picture of some movie star with big boobs, and go on a five-fingered honeymoon like Anselm used to say, with a movie star. —I know. I mean Chrahst, every time I've gone out to bars looking for a girl I end up drunk talking to some old man. All three of them stood staring at the floor. Don Bildow left, looking as vengeful as plastic rims would allow. He had just learned that someone he knew had been arrested trying to charge a three-hundred-dollar suit to the account of someone neither of them knew. Someone else discovered that the old man in black coat, black hat, black rubbers, and black umbrella, was not the art critic for Old Masses at all, but had been hired to go round 748

to galleries because he looked the part (and could keep warm this way); the columns were written by someone in Jersey City, who mailed them in because she never came to New York. The old man left, carrying a glass of beer with him. And down the bar, the Big Unshaven Man was offered a job writing the lonely-hearts column for a newspaper in Buffalo. —What I get a kick out of is these serious writers who write a book where they say money gives a false significance to art, and then they raise hell when their book doesn't make any money. —Here, put this in the juke-box. Play Return to Sorrento. —That's what's playing. —Play it again. —Chrahst I wish they'd stop playing that and play On the Sunny Side of the Street. Stanley had been simply standing there dumbly, staring at the dirty floor, until Hannah asked him what he was going to do next day. —Well first I, I guess I'll go over to Bellevue, he said. —Why? —I thought maybe you'd go with me to get a passport. —But you, you're going too? To Rome? —Rome, for Christ sake? I'm going to Paris. All he could say was, —But . . . looking at her. Hannah looked straight up into his face; and then as suddenly as he had turned, she stood on her toes and kissed him. —Because I may not see you again, she said, and was gone. He stood there, his mustache trembled, and he pressed a finger against it where she had kissed him. —You know? said Ed Feasley beside him, —I mean I feel like I've left little parts of me all over the place. Like I could spend the rest of my life trying to collect them and I never could. These pieces of me and pieces of other people all screwed up and spread all over the place. I mean there are people you ... do something with and then you never see them again. Like Otto, you know? Where the hell is he? —I don't know, Stanley said clearly, but he continued to stare at the floor. —I mean he's probably raising hell and having a good time somewhere, you know? But Chrahst, a good time! I mean like the night we went to that party up in Harlem with all the queers, that seems like ten years ago, that little nigger in the lavender dress standing at the next urinal. And then there was this blonde, a woman, I mean I can still hear her singing, If you can't get Maxwell House coffee by the can get Lipton's tea by the balls, I mean Chrahst I can hear it now. I never got over that night somehow, it got me somehow, I even remember what the soap smelled like, this kind of medical smell, I mean why does the soap always have a medical smell in a place like that? You'd think it would be scented. Where you going, you leaving already? —It's late, Stanley said. —I'm going home. —Yes but home, I mean late, and then there was this marathon walker, but I mean Chrahst I mean, how long? —Half an hour, Ellery said thickly. —I'll meet you there. —One of us better go with you, Morgie said. —You can hardly walk. —I told you, like I told you, I told you I'm just going to drop up there alone for a minute, I'll meet you at the whatever the nightclub I'll meet you. They helped him into a cab, which got him to Esther's address before he went to sleep in the back seat. He had difficulty getting out, but he managed, staggering into the doorway, and pushed the first button his thumb found. Then he climbed, stopping every now and then to try to count the number of flights he'd come up, and finally knocked at the door halfway down the hall. There was no answer. He put his hand on the knob, it turned, and there stood a little girl with a fly swatter. —Rose? She stared up at him. —What's the matter, is she asleep? —Yes, the little girl said. —She's still asleep. He followed her in mumbling, —Rose, Rose, you're like a kid, Rose. There was a strange smell in the place. It became stronger as he approached the bedroom. —See? She's still asleep. The little girl pointed with the fly swatter at the figure in the bed, and repeated, —She's still asleep. The sme.l was overpowering. Ellery almost fell on the bed; but he steadied himself and stared. He got out a cigarette, but dropped it. —She's still asleep, and I'm keeping the flies off her. —Rose. Christ. Jesus . . . He turned away heaving. —They say at school there aren't flies in winter, the little girl went on, while he was sick over the back of a chair, —but there are, and I'm keeping them off her. He hung there for a minute, and then pulled a dresser scarf close enough to wipe his mouth on it. —Because there are flies in winter, here there are . . . He turned slowly holding his head in his hand, staring at her, and then pulled himself up and started for the door, where he fell against the door frame turning to look at her again. —Rose, listen, Rose . . . Breath was pouring into him and out of him. Then in one motion he turned himself out the door and reached the stairs. 75°

He stopped three or four times on the way down, to prevent himself from falling headlong, and finally did fall about three steps at the bottom. It was enough noise to bring out the janitor, who helped him up and demanded, —Do you know anything about fifty tons of sugar? Ellery just stared at him. Then he raised a hand and pointed up the stairs. —Somebody's been trying to deliver fifty tons of sugar here all day. Ellery let his weight go back against the wall, still pointing up the stairs. Then his hand dropped as though too heavy a weight to hold suspended so, and he got out the door, found a cab, and finally got to the nightclub, where some of the movie people had also come, for it was still comparatively early. —My, that really was a verklärte Nacht, said Mr. Schmuck's musical director. —It was bad publicity. Mr. Schmuck was tapping his fingers impatiently on the table, waiting for his order while beside him Mr. Sonnenschein engaged a Baked Alaska. Mr. Schmuck had simply ordered filet de mignon. —I told you we'd ought to have just bought our pictures and gotten out of there, said Mr. Sonnenschein, blowing a delicate meringue filigrane across the table through the word pictures. —A real Walpurgis . . . Mr. Schmuck's assistant commenced. —Shut up, said Mr. Schmuck, —so I could see the lady singing. —Si-hilnt nite. Holy-y nite. Alll is calm . . . she sang, in a blue gown with sequin-studded bolero jacket to match, filling a selective circle of blue spotlights with a song which had proved such a favorite Christmas Eve that she was singing it again. In the reverent shadows, the Alabama Rammer-Jammer man salted a steak with Venus de Milo. Morgie pushed a glass over to Ellery. —Drink that and you'll bounce back. Ellery mumbled, staring blearily into nothing. From a mouthful of steak across the table came, —Come on, if you can't eat you got to ... From a nearby table came, —We were here Christmas Eve too. We tried to get into Saint Pat's for the High Mass but you should have seen the mob. And from the floor, hea —Slee pin vun peece ... lee —What happened this morning? It's like it was a thousand years ago, Morgie said, and added to Ellery, -It's the first time I ever knew you were so goddam sensitive. 75i

—And that, Ellery mumbled, going on despite the floodlit applause. —His face, I just keep seeing those beads of sweat on his face, understand? like a God-damned wreath of ... beads of sweat around his forehead, do you get me? —Tonight we have with us that famous star of stage and screen . . . Spotlights fought each other over the surface of blank faces. —It's a little late, but I know everybody still has some of the Xmas spirit . . . how about a word of Xmas cheer for everybody . . . ? Hanging onto the microphone, the star entertained: —Merry Xmas everybody. Glad to see everybody making merry. Just watch out Mary don't go home with somebody else. He paused for laughter, and breath, swaying. —It was the most beautiful Xmas I ever saw . . . when I got up Xmas morning ... it looked so nice out I left it out all day ... —That bastard! —I've got a broad waiting for me down at the Fritz-Carlton . . . the star babbled on. —That bastard! He killed it! said the Alabama Rammer-Jammer man, but neither of his companions appeared to notice. Ellery was trying to sit up straight and drink. Morgie stared dully into his glass. —Look, what did Schmuck's number-one boy want over there, when you stopped and talked to them. —They made me an offer. Ellery's shoulders sagged again. —The life of the Virgin Mary. They're shooting it in Italy. They want me on publicity. —Look Ellery, for Christ sake, you're a swell guy. I'd hate like hell to see you get mixed up with the movies. —What the hell, Ellery said. —You have to make a change once in a while. —A change? You think it's going to be any different out there? It's the same goddam thing only it's worse. Here at least you know the people you work with, they know who you are, you got friends. Out there nobody knows you. Morgie was staring at the same blank place on the tablecloth where Ellery was staring. —You got to stop trading in some time. You trade in your goddam car, you trade in your goddam wife, and the minute you get used to the goddam thing some bastard puts out a new model. Just go to the goddam bank. Eye-bank. Blood-bank. Bone-bank. —That's a nice idea for a show, the old Alabama Rammer-Jammer man interrupted. —Banks as a symbol of progress. Money-banks. Bone-banks. Eye-banks. Blood-banks. —We just bought a canned show on the march of science, Morgie said, speaking slowly. Neither of them had raised his eyes. The plaintive quality in Morgie's voice was that defiant disappoint-ment in the radio voice which has predicted clear only hours before, and returns to admit the possibility of scattered showers un-humbled by the fact that his listeners are staring through closed windows at driving rain. —Did you know that a handkerchief and a cannonball fall at the same goddam speed in a vacuum? Well that's where we are, in this great big goddam vacuum where a handkerchief and a cannonball fall at the same goddam speed, you know what I mean? Their companion was watching the floor, the hollow plastic figurine clutched in his hand. H is thumb moved from one salt vent to the other and the lights dimmed again and went out. A ghostly emanation took their place, withholding reality, as an undelineated naked woman came forth, a pair of pink hands described in phosphorescence cupping her buttocks, which she ground at her audience as though the heavy hands of love (fleeting, groping, failing under other tables in the darkness) were kneading them in orgiastic violence. —He's on, said Mr. Schmuck's assistant to Mr. Schmuck. Then he turned to Mr. Schmuck's musical director. —You're right. Verk-lärte . . . — You're right. Walpurgis . . . Mr. Schmuck's musical director commenced. —Shut up, said Mr. Schmuck, —so 1 could see the lady dancing. Out there, she turned and bobbed an undulant front, blossoming at its tips in phosphorescent roses. —What do you want to get mixed up in that for? It's the same goddam handkerchief and the same goddam cannonball in the same goddam vacuum. —Travel, Ellery muttered. —See why the other half lives. Six months: Elmira was one postmark, and her lips formed the words silently. The marking on the other letter was indecipherable, though the stamps were Spanish, and she held it up to the light, lips tightening as nothing interrupted the translucency but the jumble of a florid hand. There was no return on it. She put it aside, and took the first letter with her on her trip across the room, there to press it up under her armpit as she adjusted the radio with one hand, and tuned in her new hearing aid with the other. Then she sat down, resting her head back, lips twitching again on "six months," the letter gripped still unopened in her hand as the radio warmed up to Sweet Betsy from Pike sung in Yiddish, and she stared at a crack in the ceiling. By daylight, the crack appeared to have just lengthened another whole inch or even more, and Stanley almost bounded out of bed for his string measure. Then he sank back under the blanket (his sheet was packed), closed his jaws tight on the throbbing tooth to hold off the image it conjured as well as the pain, and then lay waiting, as though for instructions from above on something near at hand which he could not quite grasp, and with little time remaining him to do so. His forehead creased with the effort of trying to think clearly what it might be, and as the effort rose to that part of his face his jaws relaxed and immediately the pain in the tooth penetrated him sharply, and the image, close upon it, intruded. Within the half hour, he was wandering among hospital corridors. —But baby, taking that one to Ischia would be like taking an ow-wel to A-thens, he heard, approaching her door, and he stopped. —And don't permit me to leave without the key to my box, all those brrrr-beautiful things, I just couldn't show up over there na-ked. He heard someone say, —Agnes, I'm glad you're all right . . . and then, —Baby do you call that all rwight? all strung up like an exhibi-bition in a shop window! Cru-wel boy! Stanley stood there, after a glimpse at the group round her bed, pressing the deep pain in his jaw, listening. —Arny baby you must try to stand up, or they'll put you in a little box here and you'll never never never see the normal outside world again. Arny-marney-tiddley-parney, what have you got in your pocket? Then he heard her voice, giving someone an address, her mother's address, on the Via Flaminia in Rome. —Rubbing alcohol! You should be spanked! Stanley turned away with sudden resolution: he had heard of there being a chapel in Bellevue, and set off to look for it, rescued from the prospect of actually seeing her, by the more abiding, and surely more prudent reflection, that he might burn a candle for her recovery. And he was well on the way to doing so, moving through the corridors with apprehension, as though afraid of being hustled into a ward, or a straitjacket, himself. But as he came down that hall, where the three western faiths have their depots, he was stopped dead by an apparition in a red and white candy-stripe bathrobe emerging from the synagogue, her face so abruptly familiar, delicately intimate in the sharp-boned hollow-eyed virginity of unnatural shadows, like those priestesses ot Delphos in subterranean silence transfixing what might have been fear on a face in the light but there paralyzed in prophecy (until one of them was raped: then they were replaced by women over fifty). —Hello, Stan-ley, she greeted him as she had always, as a stranger whom she knew. —But ... I didn't kno\v you were . . . Jewish? he said, and looked even more surprised, having meant to say, —I didn't know you were here . . . —It is so beautiful in there, she said, and smiled, as one foretelling death by falling pillars, death at sea. Zealous, importunate, he pressed her. —But here? he recovered. —She has always been just here, but just here, Stan-ley, she said to him; and then lowered her eyes and turned her face away. —But now they are going to send her away. —When? he asked quickly. —Yesterday, or today, so soon. She looked at him, in an instant looked about to cry. —Where? Stanley asked her; but she looked at him. —Wait, he said, and started to speak rapidly. —You, you see you can come with me, yes, can't you, you can come with me. He took her wrist, and she looked at him. —You see because . . . yes and then everything, then you'll be save . . . safe I mean, you'll be safe . . . Now . . . wait, first . . . He pressed the pain in his jaw, as though to communicate its urgency. —This, I have to take care of this first, I have to go to a dentist but then I'll come back and we, and you'll be ... all right. You see I ... we're going away . . . The question lay only in his eyes, searching the large still pupils of hers. After that he moved with compulsive certainty. And only on going through the pales outside, pressing his jaw but carrying his head up, and passing the delegation which had forestalled his intended visit, he remembered that he had not asked for his glasses and then, that he had not lit a candle. —Arny-parney-tiddly-marney, he passed quickly, —stand up! What ever made you try and telephone your wife, even if the line was busy? The telephone was still ringing when Maude got in. She'd heard it from the hall, and almost broke her key trying to fit it in upside-down. —Yes, what? she said breathlessly into it, —I? Me? ... As she spoke her eyes rose slowly to meet those of the figure gently swinging in the bedroom door. —But you . . . why did you choose me? she brought out finally. —But no, no ... no, she cried, and even with the last word the telephone was back silent where she'd got it, and she stood with her weight on it staring and still, as though supported by those eyes which held her across the room. It was only in wilting, as the energy which the telephone, so long silent, had flooded her with, ebbed away, and she came to rest in her spinal support with a twinge, that the bond of their eyes broke, and she ducked round the suspended figure, into the bedroom to take off her coat. And the baby hung there, sitting silent in a sort of breeches buoy which she had made from a pair of Amy's shorts and some cord, a breeches buoy pulling neither to ship nor shore, moving gently, never more than enough to intensify the repose of its occupant whose only activity was to fix Maude and hold her with clear blue eyes. In the bedroom she stood looking vacantly at the thing curled on the dresser top: only that morning, trying to find her bank in the telephone directory, she had come helplessly upon the Guarantee Truss Company, thrown the book down, and never called to find what remained of her tiny bank balance. And here the thing lay, a circle of swathed steel tapered, to broaden an end in a cushion which rose just enough from the top of the chest to liken it to an open hood, and the whole tensely coiled length a cobra in devious wait: and she hurried past it jabbing a hand to the light switch. The kitchen sink was stacked with dishes. On her way in there with the baby, she tripped over a pair of Arny's shoes which she kept out, empty, in the middle of the floor. —The most popular hostess of the week . . . ! she said in a faint tone as she washed, first a dish, then a tiny foot, then a cup. —They telephoned me to ask me if I would like to g-give a luncheon for my . . . and they would bring everything and do all the work and afterward s-serve . . . s-sell their lunchware to my . . . my . . . And I asked them how they picked me and she said we blindfolded a girl, and found your name in a telephone book, it's a great . . . a great honor to be ... to be chosen the most . . . The eyes did not move from her. The baby's head was not conical nor, looking at it, did one have that impression; but immediately upon looking away such an image formed in the mind, and no amount of looking back, of studying it from strategic angles, served to temper the placid image which remained. When most of the dishes were done she had reached the neck, and suddenly she applied both thumbs at the base of the baby's head. —It should go in more here, she whispered, then applied the heel of a hand there, and finally stepped back and turned away from the fixed gaze as though breaking fetters. She left the baby there in the sink with what dishes remained and went into the living room, where she turned the radio on, tripped again over the empty shoes, and stood thoughtfully for a moment before she picked up the telephone and dialed, reading the number of the druggist written on a bottle in her hand. —Friends, the time to sell your diamonds is now ... —Hello? Could I buy some morphine from you? What? No, I mean just some plain morphine . . . ? It was a long struggle, as though the image itself were holding him back in the chair while the dentist worked. And there was time for the agony of remorse, since Stanley had simply got off the cross-town bus and gone to the first dentist whose sign he saw, up a flight, someone he had never heard of and who had, surely, never heard of him. They strained and tugged at one another, Stanley at the chair, Doctor Weisgail at Stanley, and the longer it went on the more alarmed Stanley became, for the dentist seemed in an unsettled state himself. He had heavy arms, was in need of a shave, and perspired freely in his white coat. And then, while Stanley still lay back, gripping the arms of the chair in a rigidity of concentrated terror, he heard a voice and opened his eyes to see the thing held before him in a pair of heavy pincers. —Is it out? he tried to say, —Is that it? But he could not control that side of his mouth. Nonetheless he asked for it when he left, to take with him wrapped in gauze and a piece of newspaper. Out on the street, the dead side of his tongue nudged the numb hollow on his jaw, and he stopped to spit blood in the gutter. Passers-by glanced at him with distaste, the contempt bred of Fourteenth Street's familiarity with such exhibitions, for he made a bad job of it, a stream blown against his chin, hung dripping from the uncontrollable side of his mouth, for he had no handkerchief. In the window above, Doctor Weisgail watched him stagger, collide with a trashbin, a child, another staggering figure who tried to embrace him as a companion in arms, and finally disappear from sight. Then he took off his white coat and stood there rubbing his chin for a minute. Then as though he had put off for long enough some alien, fortuitous, but no less constraining duty, he picked up the letter he had received that morning, opened it, and stared at its pages as he called the police to report this anonymous persecution: Dear Doctor Weisgail. The I, what does it stand for? your first name, what is it? The book I am going to write will be called Flowers of Friendship, because do you re-member Before the flowers of
friendship faded friendship faded, well that is what my book will be about. We are the great refusal, doctor. Why do they love us and trust us for all the wrong reasons, reasons often we know nothing about and then they are disappointed. They are always disappointed. Sometimes I want to just stop, just stop everything and thank everyone. What they do, they free us when they betray us. Is that too easy, doctor? Is it because we can share a part of Ourself with each one we know, the part he demands for the rest we do not offer because he would not recognize the rest and more important even would not believe it is us, so we think better perhaps to simply put it away and do not bother him with it. Then see him, with all his might and main and all of his necessity he builds a whole Us out of his fragment, an Us we may have trouble to recognize too but respond kindly to it but better fearsomely, better beware and afraid for one day he will face us with it and then who can say, This is not us at all, why he has depended upon that Us he made with such loving care did he not? Oh surprised he is and disappointed! How we failed how we failed! He is angry and deeply hurt, betrayed! Betrayed! Do not trust Us, flowers of friendship. All the while we search beyond him for what he thinks he has offered so honest, so honest is he, so honest. Finding in him and everywhere some where where we may share a part but no more, is there anyone you can share nothing with? Is there then who you can share everything with? No no no no— but they do not understand. There were too many of them, doctor. There, there, you see? Your kindness is hypocrisy. They gave you everything, he shared everything he had with you. Did you ask him? No, he gave it so honest is he and so sincere. And some day he finds, you never did accept from inside do you understand? Only outside like a handshake you accepted. He is angry and reduced, not for you now but of you then who pretended to share, and did not share but gave, and gave in the giving only a fragment in exchange you see. How little of us ever meets how little of another. As one day he recalls his confidence to you as weakness, and to cast it out he will cast you away because you did accept it from him, so you served him well, and he is older now, and better unfriendship and weakness so cauterized than friendship which remembers. Why after this long time have you not answered me? What do you demand? Why do you treat me as they do, as though I were exactly what I want to be. Why do we treat people that way? But we do, everyone treats anyone that way, saying I have had these defeats and disappointments, but you whom I encounter you know what you will say, moving, in accord with your nature which is here in bloom, but I do not yet understand, I, for myself, do not yet understand. Since my problems are not yours therefore you must have none, but live alone inside yourself, therefore here are my problems and we shall share them. So honest are they, picking the flowers with such ease and such concern. If you have walked out in a summer night, you will understand this, walked out with your face bared to the darkness and then, a spider's web hung heavy with moisture between magnolia and the yew claps its sodden delicacy over your face, then you will know what I mean. Here, he makes friendship in spite of things, worming confidences as they say, he does lose no opportunity to find your frailties, where you fail and how weak, nor lose opportunity to make you know he knows these, at last to lose no opportunity to assure you of his friendship in spite of them, and always in spite of them and so how fortunate you are to have him a friend! feebly saying nice things about you behind your back. Or elsewhere, never live at the end of a straight road lest you be always looking down it. There in the distance two meet and do battle, where are you? They do battle about you, faded, faded, One says, That is my friend, but you and I are so different, that That cannot be your friend too, then each says secretly, if That is his friend That cannot be my friend too, then they look at one another saying this, We are so different (they say because they do not know each other) that That can be friend to neither of us, but shall be our common hypocrite, and nevertheless and recognized now must be thanked nevertheless for bringing us together and we, being different we shall be friends but honest friends, for you see there are things we do not share. O doctor, how the meek presume. Then why after so long have you not answered me? It is forbidden to enter the garden with flowers in the hand. That was a sign in french at the gate of a french garden, you see, and read it well and you will understand. As though to understand were to forgive! We find the ones with whom we can share nothing. Oh, hold them up and cherish them for they will never come saying, I have found you out! Oh. Oh. They will, doctor. Even they, they will come saying, I have found you out! for from the first you knew we had nothing to share, and that is what we shared, not the nothing but the knowing we had nothing, that I shared with you, but, you, what did you give me in exchange but the nothing: I have found you out! They will murder you for that they will. So good doctor do a favor to your friends and go away and die and so unite them. It is all going to get much worse before it begins to get better, doctor. Glowing they gave you things you did not want, their scarcest treasure. We will not tell, we will not tell, until one day they take it all and nail it frabjously upon another, and your betrayal will be another nail in the coffin of love. The satisfaction of being found out. It is a very relaxing satisfaction. Oh I have read so much, doctor. So many sensitive things, how sensitive they are, the ones who do not suffer. They wish themselves very well, sincere people. Not with trumpets, doctor, but I see the Lord of Hosts putting his enormous head round a promontory on the northeast end of the Island where a point rises from the water, and here all of us are on the beach, somewhat sheltered. They will all know what to do, the others on the beach, for they will recognize Him and follow some satisfactory prescription but doctor you and I, what will we do but look surprised, look up from a paper-backed edition of something that sold well twenty years ago, or the serial story with no beginning and no end in a magazine found on the veranda, the sole of a beach shoe needing mending, that or the cigarette lighter which won't work for the sand in it or the face of the dollar watch we always take there which tells the time with sand in it, look up and look surprised and mildly so at that. You and I doctor, on the beach. He speaks of you and wonders where you are. Calls you Indy, in his selfish voice which is mild with disappointment. Why are the meek so selfish? You would be surprised how important bars are to people who don't read books, doctor. Sometimes I could weep, and other times I do. I remember The Deserter, a drama acted by dogs and a monkey at Sadlers Wells in 1785, and I could weep. I remember Freddies Football Dogs, and I could weep. I remember the round of names, names taken from popular books for naming of children, and taken back from them grown-up for books which no one reads, and I could weep. Somewhere in Africa I believe they made a mermaid from a monkey and a codfish, I have seen its photograph. I remember the dampness there. I remember cherries in a blue ceramic dish, specked with water and mold, the cigarettes were delicate to smoke, specks of brown appeared on the white paper as it burned, and left a wet line on the stone tray and all the while the green working outside like a blanket, the grass, honeysuckle, clematis, ferns, tall weeds including Queen Anne's laces, the rosebush and the blackberry out of control without flowers or fruit so busy growing, and tomatoes fallen into the high grass, cobwebs formed and hanging heavy with dampness, the clothes clinging with dampness and without stockings the shoes hollow and damp. Every surface needed paint, and the damp wires sent elec-tricity free through the lampstands. Dust worked into pages of the books left open for them. We invited them, they did not come but they re-membered the gesture. Doctor, eventually the importance of breeding. Do you remember Rue Gît le Coeur? What did he say? What did she say? Three of them are there, which is intolerable. Witness three must leave the room so that ambiguity may enter, and in such company one talks assuredly to two since they are now safely alone with mistrust. Names are very important. How can you deal seriously with a person named—? they ask me. If I owed you money, then you would be interested in me, then you would follow my career with interest. I have thought of that, doctor. For upon contraction of debts, you must expect to pay. You will have to, and probably in a way worse in proportion to the ease and faith with which they were contracted. Do you understand her, doctor? Raped across three state lines, in a back seat in her uncle's car for her uncle with whom she lived was dead on the kitchen floor, raped in an empty movie house and in a cornfield where the police finally cornered him and killed him with a hail of bullets and rescued her, she protested, I only wanted Romance, doctor. And even then no matter how you love, you cannot repay the debts contracted in the loved one's past, nor interfere with how the loved one tries to repay them. But you must pay, you do though you cannot. Doctor, your honesty's showing. Well then, do you know the worst thing? When he confirms your accusa-tions. You accused him, then how violently he sets upon you to prove otherwise, then you can do no more than stand and watch, in spite of himself watch him work out all of the things of which you accused him and did you, all the while, hope he would prove you wrong? Watch him unable to leave the scene without making it worse, and the more he insists upon his right the more he disintegrates it until it ends in all he feared most, he recreates and proves you right. How helpless you are when you are right. For hard times and difficulty do not make a stronger person as they told us children, good fortune makes him stronger but the others make him weaker and more crafty you see, and they make his circumstances which when good fortune comes he will resist by making circumstances which will make him what he is neither good nor strong. That is what happens from hard times and disaster. Those bad circumstances are the only ones where we can recognize ourselves, and when good fortune comes away, away, we cannot face it, to see ourselves abroad in good fortune and there is no alternative, there is none but in the face of good fortune to flee, and in the terrifying comfort of solitude find the devices to con-struct the familiar landscape of bad fortune where we step forth in certainty, so it mounts, gets worse and in spite of ourselves we see our-selves more fully and there we are precious again. What would I have done in his place? People say that, and they mean it because they do not understand it. Sometimes I clean my pocketbook, and that is a wonderful feeling though a task. That is why I do not telephone you, telephones are dangerous things, they separate us from one another and is that simply because we put them to the wrong use? Human, we treat them as we treat others, take for granted services to which they did not pretend. But we force telephones to corrupt intimacy while they pretend to preserve it by keeping alive only its dangerous immediate symptoms. Say a word, say a thousand to me on the tele-phone and I shall choose the wrong one to cling to as though you had said it after long deliberation when only I provoked it from you, I will cling to it from among a thousand, to be provoked and hurl it back with something I mean no more than you meant that, something for you to cling to and retreat clinging to. There, now we are apart! Doctor? That is why I did not telephone you, send only a symptomatic fragment of me to you in my voice where you cannot see my face but instead sit and stare upon matters of your own intimate self arranged like furniture but not my face which I have been so long in forming for just this moment, writing you a letter where you will see my face doctor and all of me laid out, what can I give you more for forgiveness? That's all right, we serve them better than they know, if only we exist for them to reject, for they do not understand as you and I do, doctor, and to be certain of accepting one thing they must reject another. I remember, we serve them well. Many of them must make you unhappy before you will take them seriously, so honest are they. Do you remem-ber envy when it called itself admiration? We serve them well, icons of their desperate and idle manufacture, and Oh! when we betray them by being other selves, and the icon is broken, doctor, do they grow? Or fashion it again and elsewhere, so detailedly the same, different only enough to prevent their recognizing it for what betrayed them once. We serve them well, doctor. That is what I did, ex-tended my vanity where I thought it would be held in trust, and found it taken with desperate seriousness in all the confidence that envy en-genders. Then you have accepted a confidence, and laid ground for mistrust. Do you read, doctor? Do you read so far? Are you, too, always certain that you have found the answer at hand, demanding it so, articulate and incarnate? and then you are betrayed? and who betrayed you? How many have you around you, who have never feared you? nor mistrusted you for fear of your being more than one? How many who will share what can be shared but do not fear to expose, simply expose without confidence, nor the secret sharer, those other things which must be worked out alone in privacy, knowing they exist but respecting you for respecting that privacy as the matter of fact indeed it is, doctor have I trapped you? Are you there, an island in their past, afloat, or a rock shoal, and sailing back do they sight you with cries of happiness and recognition? Indeed, do they cruise back just to reach you, to land and enter the same pleasance with recognition even delight, share it with others who have languored there, or meet those others upon the beach and do battle? Or cruising somewhere else beyond do they sight you casually, remark your presence with a smile, or do they mark you severely upon the chart and sail by far to leeward and out of sight, to meet further on others bound forward and warn them of your dangers where you lie in the past there though it is for these bound forward the future and they will set their course accordingly. Or sailing back do they sail past however near or far offshore with a shrug and a glance of dismissal recalling nothing but an arid coast. Or do you