Wittgenstein's Mistress (3 page)

There is a painting of Penelope weaving in the National
Gallery, actually, by somebody named Pintoricchio.

I have said that quite badly, I suspect.

One scarcely meaning that where Penelope is doing her weaving is in the National Gallery. Where she is doing that is on the island of Ithaca, naturally.

Ithaca being in neither the Adriatic nor the Aegean Sea, incidentally, but in the Ionian.

The things that do remain in one's head after all.

I should also perhaps point out that the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery are not the same museum, even though they are both in London.

As a matter of fact they are not the same museum even though they are both in the same building.

Conversely I know next to nothing about Pintoricchio, though I once knew a great deal about many painters.

Well, I knew a great deal about many painters for the same reason that Achilles must surely have known a great deal about Hector, say.

All I can remember about the painting of Penelope is that there is a cat in it, however, playing with a ball of yarn.

Doubtless the inclusion of the cat was scarcely innovative on Pintoricchio's part. Still, it is perhaps agreeable to think about Penelope with a pet, especially if I have been wrong about her and the suitors.

I should have also perhaps said long before this that I harbor sincere doubts that that war did last those ten years.

Or that Helen was the cause of it.

A single Spartan girl, as somebody once called her. After all.

But what I am basically thinking about here is how disappointingly small the ruins of Troy turn out to be.

Like little more than your ordinary city block and only a few stories in height, practically.

Well, though with people having lived outside of the citadel too, on the plains.

But still.

In the
Odyssey,
when she is older, Helen has a splendid radiant dignity. I read those pages two or three times, where Odysseus's son Telemachus comes to visit.

Which means I could not have been tearing them out and dropping them into the fire, as I did when I read the plays.

Meanwhile I have just been to the dunes again. For some reason while I was peeing I thought about Lawrence of Arabia.

Well, I can hardly be said to have thought about him, since I know little more about Lawrence of Arabia than I do about Pintoricchio. Still, Lawrence of Arabia did come into mind.

I can think of no connection between making a pee and Lawrence of Arabia.

There is still that frisky breeze. It is early August, possibly.

For a moment, strolling back, I may have been hearing some Brahms. I would say
The Alto Rhapsody,
though I doubt that I remember
The Alto Rhapsody.

Doubtless there was a portrait of Lawrence of Arabia at the National Portrait Gallery.

And now I have the name T. E. Shaw in my head. But it is one more of those flitting identities that I cannot at all catch hold of.

None of that troubles me, by the way.

Very little does, as I may or may not have made evident.

Well, how ridiculous under the circumstances, should I let anything do so.

I do fret now and again, if fret is the word, over an arthritic shoulder. The left, which at times leaves me moderately incapacitated.

Sunshine is a help, however.

My teeth, on the other hand, do not speak of fifty years at all. Knock on wood, about my teeth.

I cannot remember anything about my mother's teeth, trying to think back. Or my father's.

At any rate perhaps I am no more than forty-seven.

I cannot envision Helen of Troy with dental problems. Or Clytemnestra with arthritis.

There was Cezanne, of course.

Although it was not Cezanne but was Renoir.

I have no idea, any longer, where any of my own painting materials may have gotten to, by the way.

Once during these years I did stretch one canvas, actually. A monstrosity of a canvas, in fact, at least nine feet by five. In fact I also sized it with no less than four coats of gesso.

And thereafter gazed at it.

Months, I suspect, I gazed at that canvas. Possibly I even foolishly squeezed out some pigments onto my pallet.

As a matter of fact I believe it was when I went back to Mexico, that I did that. In the house where I had once lived with Simon, and with Adam.

I am basically positive that my husband was named Adam.

And then after months of gazing set fire to the canvas with gasoline one morning and drove away.

Across the wide Mississippi.

Once in a great while I could almost see things in that canvas, however.

Almost. Achilles, for instance, in his grief after the death of his friend, when he covered himself with ashes. Or Clytemnestra, after Agamemnon had sacrificed their daughter to raise wind for the Greek ships.

I have no idea why Achilles dressing like a girl is a part that I always liked.

For that matter it was a woman who wrote the
Odyssey,
somebody once said.

When I was back in Mexico, all through that winter I could not rid myself of the old habit of turning my shoes upside down each morning, so that any scorpions inside might fall out.

Any number of habits died hard, that way. For some years I continued to find myself locking doors, similarly.

Well, and in London. Frequently taking the trouble to drive
on the British side of the road.

After his grief, Achilles got even by slaying Hector, although Hector ran and ran.

I was about to add that this was the sort of thing men used to do. But after her own grief Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon.

Needing some assistance. But nonetheless.

Something tells me, obliquely, that that may have been one of the notions I had, for my canvas. Agamemnon at his bath, ensnared in that net and being stabbed through it.

Heaven only knows why anybody could have wished for such a bloody subject, however.

As a matter of fact whom I really may have thought to paint was Helen. At one of the burned-out boats along the strand, when the siege was finally ended, being kept prisoner.

But with that splendid dignity, even so.

To tell the truth it was actually just below the central staircase in the Metropolitan, where I set that canvas up. Under those high skylights where my bullet holes were.

Where I had situated my bed was on one of the balconies, overlooking that area.

The bed itself I had taken from one of the reconstructed period rooms, I believe, possibly American Colonial.

What I had done about that chimney I had constructed was to wire it to the same balconies, so that it would not list.

Though I was still making use of all sorts of devices, in those days. And so had electric heaters also.

Well, and innumerable lights, particularly where the canvas was.

A nine-foot brilliantly illuminated Electra, I might have painted, had I thought about it.

I did not think about it until this immediate instant.

Poor Electra. To wish to murder one's own mother.

Well, all of those people. Wrist deep in it, the lot of them, when one comes down to that.

Irene Papas would have been an effective Electra, however.

In fact she was an effective Helen, in
The Trojan Women,
by Euripides.

Perhaps I have not indicated that I watched a certain few films while I still possessed devices, also.

Irene Papas and Katharine Hepburn in
The Trojan Women
was one. Maria Callas in
Medea
was another.

My mother did have false teeth, I now remember.

Well, and in that glass beside her bed, those final weeks in the hospital.

Oh, dear.

Though I have a vague recollection that the projector I brought into the museum stopped functioning after I had used it no more than three or four times, and that I did not trouble to replace it.

When I was still at my loft, in the beginning, I brought in at least thirty portable radios, and tuned each one to a different number on the dial.

Actually those worked by batteries, not electricity.

Obviously that was how they worked, since I doubt that I would have solved how a generator operated, that early on.

My aunt Esther died of cancer, as well. Though Esther was my father's sister, actually.

Here, at least, there is always a sound of the sea.

And right at this moment a strand of tape at a broken window in the room next to this one is making scratching sounds, from my breeze.

Mornings, when the leaves are dewy, some of them are like jewels where the earliest sunlight glistens.

A cat scratching, that loose strip of tape could be.

Where would it have been, that I read all of those bloody stories out loud?

I am fairly certain that I had not yet gone to Europe when I wore my last wristwatches, if that is at all relevant.

I doubt that wearing thirteen or fourteen wristwatches, along the length of one's forearm, is especially relevant.

Well, and for a period several gold pocket watches also, on a cord around my neck.

Actually somebody wore an alarm clock that very way in a novel I once read.

I would say it was in
The Recognitions,
by William Gaddis, except that I do not believe I have ever read
The Recognitions
by William Gaddis.

In any case I am more likely thinking of Taddeo Gaddi, even though Taddeo Gaddi was a painter and not a writer.

What did I do with those watches, I wonder?

Wore them.

Well. But each of them with an alarm of its own, as well.

What I normally did was set the alarms so that each one of the watches would ring at a different hour.

I did that for some time. All day long, every hour, a different watch would ring.

In the evening I would set all fourteen of them all over again. Except that in that case I would set them to ring simultaneously.

This was before I had learned to depend upon the dawn, doubtless.

They rarely did that anyway. Ring simultaneously, I mean.

Even when that appeared to be the case, one learned to wait for those which had not started ringing yet.

When I say they rang, I mean that they buzzed, more truthfully.

In a town called Corinth, in Mississippi, which is not near the Mississippi River, parking a car on a small bridge I divested myself of the watches.

I believe Corinth. I would need an atlas, to reassure myself.

Actually, there is an atlas in this house. Somewhere. Perhaps in one of the rooms I have stopped going into.

For an entire day I sat in the car and waited for each watch to ring in its turn.

And then dropped each as it did so into the water. Whatever body of water that may have been.

One or two did not ring. What I did was reset them and sleep in the car and then get rid of those when they rang for morning.

Still ringing like all of the rest when I discarded them.

To tell the truth, I did that in a town somewhere in Pennsylvania. The name of the town was Lititz, Pennsylvania.

All of this was some time before I rolled the tennis balls down the Spanish Steps in Rome, by the way.

I make the connection between getting rid of the watches and rolling the tennis balls down the Spanish Steps because I am positive that getting rid of the watches also occurred before I saw the cat, which was likewise in Rome.

When I say that I saw a cat I mean that I believed I saw one, naturally.

And the reason I am positive that this happened in Rome is because it happened at the Colosseum, which is indisputably in that city.

Where I believed I saw the cat was at one of the archways in the Colosseum, quite far up.

How I felt. In the midst of all that looking.

And so went scurrying to a supermarket for canned cat food.

As quickly as I realized I could not locate the cat again, that would have been.

And then every morning for a week, opened cans by the carton and went about setting them out on the stone seats.

As many cans as there must have been Romans watching the Christians, practically.

But next speculated that the cat might possibly reappear only at night, being frightened, and so rigged up yet another generator and floodlights, even.

Though of course I had no way of telling if the cat had nibbled at any of the food behind my back, since most of the cans had not seemed quite full to begin with.

Still, I felt that to be unquestionably worth checking on, several times each day.

What I named the cat was Nero.

Here, Nero, I would call.

Well, I suspect I may have tried Julius Caesar and Herodotus and Pontius Pilate at various moments, also.

Herodotus may have been a waste of time with a cat in Rome, now that I think about it.

Doubtless the cans are still there in either case, lined up across all of those seats.

Rains would have emptied them completely by now, assuredly.

Doubtless there was no cat at the Colosseum.

Though I also called the cat Calpurnia, after a time, when it struck me that I should cover all bases.

Doubtless there was no seagull either.

It is the seagull which brought me to this beach, that I am speaking about now.

High, high, against the clouds, little more than a speck, but then swooping in the direction of the sea.

I will be truthful. In Rome, when I thought I saw the cat, I was undeniably mad. And so I thought I saw the cat.

Here, when I thought I saw the seagull, I was not mad. So I knew I had not seen the seagull.

Now and again, things burn. I do not mean only when I have set fire to them myself, but out of natural happenstance. And so bits and pieces of residue will sometimes be wafted great distances, or to astonishing heights.

I had finally gotten accustomed to those.

Still, I would have vastly preferred to believe I had seen the seagull.

As a matter of fact it was much more probably the thought of sunsets, which brought me to this beach.

Well, or of the sound of the sea.