Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel

by Hortense Calisher

  But tonight, when she entered, I said nothing, though not out of self-pride; these days I kept the sharpest, ever more self-conscious eye on my own conduct. And I knew myself to be ridiculous; this is the way you and I—we—are. But tonight I was quiet for another reason, and it wasn’t because, after our ice-picnic finding myself unable to read, I had no topic to draw upon. I was mute because—and this may surprise those of you more used to this curdle of events—because for once I had nothing to say. We at home were always required to have something. Until I understood the full significance of this new state, as I began gradually to do throughout that famous evening, the sensation was quite hurtful.

  She was wearing a conglomeration of garments—these days it seemed to me that in her abstraction she put one costume on top of another—which she had finished off with the Mexican serape she often referred to as her favorite, since it had been through so much with her. As she brushed past me, almost under the spot of me where I was intensifiedly cultivating nose imagery of the most Roman pretensions, I noted with some anxiety that this costume effectively blurred her figure at those very points it had been my luck to be able to dwell upon at my ease, though I sometimes thought that despite my lack of physiognomy she knew—she hadn’t been watched for years for nothing. On happier evenings, or more relaxed ones, she even rallied me, saying almost flirtingly, “Peeping Tom!” And it was these moments, I said to myself, which in the end would be more effective than any of their exercises, at least those that I knew. But one of the evenings was sure to be followed by one in which she made a great show of adhering to our intellectual program, and I already saw, from her brusque manner, that this was to be the case tonight. She bustled on past me—was she a little lame?

  When she returned from the kitchen with her dinner tray, I noted with relief that she was carrying it in two hands just as always, and that when she sat down her legs, perhaps because of her garments, were crossed not at knee but at ankle. Her face, bent over her food, looked fuller, but then it had done that when she had wept with laughter, that first time. I had a terrible thought—having nothing-to-say breeds them. I should like to see her weep the other way—and over me. Could she have smelled this? She did not seem to be relishing her food. When she looked up at me, those eyebrows of hers, lovely whips, were clenched in that ever-invisible fist—they had not changed.

  “Taking inventory?” she snapped.

  Oh let her not change, I thought. Let her leave that to me. Oh heresy.

  “No need to take stock of you!” she said. “One glance does it. Always redder than the last time. Like the Commissioner in South Wind—I suppose, having read everything, you’ve read that one.” She even got up, reached for the bookshelf, arm half bent, then thought better of it. “Never mind. Somebody remarks that he looks redder than when last seen, and somebody else answers, That is always characteristic of the Commissioner.’” She put the tray quietly to one side—she was never chattery, but how noiseless this evening!—and regarded me. “One would think I beat you.”

  Beat me.

  “Or tickled you. Incessantly.” She had the most peculiar expression, a snarl that at any moment might turn into a smile. How I envied her it. “Are you … ticklish … Eli?”

  I am, terribly. That is, We were. Laughing so much makes one so, at least this is the way it works with us.

  “My, my,” she said. “What a complexion. Why look at the great big—it looks like a gre-at big … Bavarian … Mädel!”

  That was cruel of her. She knows I know German.

  “But we mustn’t be coy, must we. At least not in that direction. Might disturb the—elements. Yes, I know—‘the elements so mixed’—Julius Caesar. You quoted it the other evening. Sometimes I wonder who’s being educated here. I could graduate from college, just on the books I’ve hauled since February.” She sat back. Her ways of sitting might not be as versatile as once—surely it was those Saturday orgies?—but even when she sat stiffly it was of interest to me. “Funny thing—” The snarl was almost a smile, now. “I always thought I didn’t like being made use of. This is the first time I—I suppose it’s because you’ve never looked down on me intellectually.” Her voice sank. “Or because I’m making use of you too.” To a whisper. “I suppose I always did that, to everyone really.”

  I dared not move. But she might see it for herself—that the willing slope of what someday might be a shoulder, was near.

  “Though why I’d want to make you see what bitches women can be, or I can—I ought to be spending all my time on the men.” She dropped again, her neck sadly shortened by that coarse garment, underneath which it must surely still stretch, as is said with truth of their necks, like a lily. “I can’t bear it. The good and bad in the world, in men, in me. I can’t go through it again, any more.” Did she glance at me for a minute, and quickly look down again? “I’ve had it. We all have. It’s too mixed.”

  I trembled, who only wanted to qualify. And I thought, with horror for her side, that before she came over to Us, she ought to be trembling too.

  Was she? If she were naked, I should know better. I had never before felt my lack of clothing, or seen the peculiarity of a domestic situation in which, according to your best art books, only one of us was A Nude. I wondered whether I might make her an artistic suggestion.

  “What’s the matter,” she said. “Cat got your tongue?”

  Oh cruel, when we hadn’t a cat, and I hadn’t a—But always with imagination.

  And still I had nothing-to-say, though I could now have said it in the most impeccable accents.

  She got up from her chair and strode the room as she always did when excited, though her paths were more oval than before. In spite of the hobbling garments, she could still fling around her those great sashes and skirtings of the emotion I so envied her. Never mind the clothing, it was these others I wanted, and perhaps there was a bifurcated version of them too.

  She paused in front of me. “What, no let’s have a lesson, Janice’ today?” She drew breath, perhaps to show me how her thought had smelled mine. Or perhaps to show me how a one of you could draw breath. “I suppose our young hopeful—thinks itself educated?” That time, she saw me flinch. “Yes, it. One doesn’t deserve the personal pronoun just from craving it!”

  She was wrong there, I thought. Want dignifies—almost anything. Especially in a world so full of possessions.

  There in front of me, she took a few steps backward, chin tucked in but her eyes still on me, the way a short, excited person tries to lord it over a large, poised one. Tall beside the mantel, I felt her words almost before she spoke them.

  “Sit!” she said. “Will you never! Why you haven’t even learned to sit down, and that’s not the half of it, barely a detail. Do you realize that nearly a third of our time here is gone, and you haven’t even seen the world yet, and all because—arrh-ah!”

  Or was it hah—IT—ah, that final explosion? Many as my pedestrian languages were, and on their way to perfection, I can never get right those jagged exclamations of yours, those hahs and bahs and eeows torn as it were out of the crude heart of variation—in place of which I had only my perfect O-pear!.

  “I sold the car,” she said, in the smallish, exhausted voice in which these small cries are apparently to be answered, particularly if they are one’s own. “But it’s not that easy, your transportation, young massa.” She tried to glare, making this last a satirical slap, but I knew better; never a slap did one of her hands give me, but there was a bit of sugar for me in the other.

  “I thought of a truck, but they’re too obvious for around here, and even out on the main roads, if I drive one.” And now, wonder of wonders, and of ponds shining and puddles no longer haunted, she smiled again. “Jack used to say I had no vanity. If one happens to be obvious and knows it, one often isn’t, you know.”

  You meant to say Jamie, didn’t you, I thought; or you always said Jamie before. But this time you said Jack.

  Was that why she frowned again?
“Bah!” she said. “You think you know the world because you’ve been in a cottage and a library. Wait till I show you. I know what you think of the world, don’t think I haven’t smelled that out. You’re like those Americans who want to see Stratford, but not Birmingham or Liverpool. Or like Jamie even, who never minded me seeing the truth for any part of the world but his—who wanted me to walk the ramparts in Edinbro’ with him prince-cock-a-feather, but kept me out of the slums of Glasga’. Or like those tourists inside the glass lounge of the hotel, looking over Corregidor Bay and drinking whisky sours, and all the old war might have been a flamingo flying over, and round the corner, not even in a slum mind you, just round the corner, the squatters living in the piled-up whisky cases. All the people who think the world’s all of a piece, or want to. Is, was, and ever shall be. I’ll not have you walk out on it like that, like them, hear?”

  Corners, always corners.

  She put her hands on her hips and looked up at me, her attempt to seem as tall as I forgotten. “And do you know why—no, don’t answer, how could you know. Because that’s the way I did.” She whispered it. “I thought the world was all of a piece, somewhere else. Or travel would make it so.” She folded her arms in front of her, settling down into her wraps and teetering on her ankles in a way that unnerved me. “And don’t say what you would say if you are what you think you are. ‘Oh, you were just a girl.’” She gave a short laugh, and trundled—yes, that was the word which came to me—to the window, pulled the blind up, and looked out. Her voice always softened when it came from there, and it did so now. Over her shoulder I could see, turning away from the mantel, that it was snowing again. The road, far as I could see it, was trackless, and filled with the half-blue, spectral winter light that oozed into the room like a power. “You’ve only known us in snow,” she said. It was a strange ending to such a speech but she repeated it. “You only know us in snow.”

  This wasn’t quite true, unless I wasn’t to count what I’d seen in Bucks, or from the air—but it was her soliloquy. How one saw ought to count too, I thought, watching how the little salon, holding fast all its seams, said, “Still safe, still safe!” to the window, and how the winter light strode through the window replying, “You are a trinket upon the world.”

  Her voice cut between the two. She was still looking out. “Women are the real travelers,” she said. “They’re afraid of nothing. Not even to stay at home. But if any being has too much of that, or even of the world—travel comes of it.” She turned away from the window, sat down by the telly, and picked up her tray. She looked down at the articles there, the fork, the knife and the glass, and on the plates, the food, a sight to me still faintly repellant, though they say here that food is the last pleasure to go. Then she leaned forward, flicking the switch on the telly. “I’ll find us some misery,” she said. “I’ll introduce you two yet.”

  She twirled the switch from arc to arc, turning up a crooner, on of those animated cartoons whose toy properties, as they zoomed, always gave me space nostalgia, a close-up of two human figures in what I always thought of as the swimming-pool moo-vie, two comic goons in boot camp—the telly vocabulary, running much to the oo sounds which were my easiest, was a constant enjoyment—and three very excellent shots of a perfect set of false teeth, a clogged nostril and a bloodshot eye. Early in my stay she had restricted my viewing, on the grounds that I was already misconceiving you from it, and would end by never being able to tell your shadowy attitudes from your real ones, or your teeth or your people, but I was quite able; nobody knew more about shadows than we do.

  She was studying the newspaper. “Here’s one! A documentary. On Hansen’s disease—I suppose your omniscience knows that’s leprosy.” Fork lifted, she watched the screen. “In Asia we saw it often.”

  I watched with intense interest, having read much about disease but never seen one.

  “Yaws, too,” she said in a teacherly voice of satisfaction. “In Ceylon called parangi, in Fiji coko, in the Malay peninsula purru, tonga in the Samoas or sometimes tono, in the Moluccas bouton d’Amboine.” She repeated this in soft carillon—lovely!—and added that the healthy children of sick mothers were the worst.

  From what I had read, this seemed to me scarcely the show for a being who was trying to acquire appendages, not discard them, but I need not have worried—we saw many leucocytes, many doctors, but no mothers and indeed no patients; no scabs appeared on the fine, metallic wood of the television box as I had expected, but then we had just been informed that the incubation period was long. She watched me narrowly, while the hospital angled whitely elegant along a soothing voice which brought us at last to a clean patient sitting with his back to us, reading a newspaper like her own. All that time, I had been covertly watching my own skin, expecting that the disease must surely appear there, but all was so pleasant that my nothing-to-say was lulled almost to the point of speech. You were not that instantaneous here. The screen did not suffer. Or anybody close to it, no matter how near.

  I was about to cry out, “Oh charming, see, he’s sitting,” but she reached forward to turn it off, with a scowl. “He’s right. One more try, then. The news.” Out of her own ennui, we seldom had the news, though I always listened with real listening, since she said it was real—though I never saw what she saw.

  “Ah, we’ve struck luck,” she said. She took up her fork again. “The war in Vietnam,” she said. “We’ve struck it rich.” And compared to other times, I suppose we had. We had had bombs before and after, but never now, and this was a village set fire by its own hand, before it moved on. And now, as a village, it was leaving, all close together, in the truck. I saw that.

  “Here’s your TV dinner, Eli,” she said. “Nummy-num. And meanwhile I’ll have mine—that’s how we do it here.” She watched me watch it and her, both of us imperturbable, and made sure I saw every morsel she ate. “They’re so thin,” she commented, “they’ve been starving. Ordinarily they’re a beautiful people.” I had not too many standards to judge them by. I had never seen so many together before. They had not a field of space measured out for them. I saw how close they could be to each other, in starvation. That is what I saw.

  “Eat!” she said. “Fill ’er up. That’s misery there, isn’t it? Isn’t it!” And my nothing-to-say rose up again, so I couldn’t answer her to say, I don’t see what you do, I can’t eat as you do, it’s only a screen to me. I’m not as human as you are.

  “I’m eating!” she said. “I’m hungry. That’s the way we do it here. And maybe that’s misery too.”

  So, each to each, we had our dinner. The village faded, the truck also; we came to a wayside station. We had a mother, babe in arms and three children, like paper cutouts that faded where they stood, and still stared.

  “This is Shartlesville Corn Pudding,” she said, looking down at what she was still eating. “From an old family recipe. And bacon drippings in the lettuce. I cook Dutch.”

  We had a dead body with the salad. It was then she smashed down the tray.

  If it were a simple mystery, a single one, I was thinking, perhaps I could understand it. Surely they could be taught to manage it that way, or perhaps I could teach them. Surely this they could manage here—only one by one.

  Then I saw that the tray had fallen and I could do nothing. And she said, “Don’t … it’s nothing. Don’t bother.” As if I could. “I was just clumsy,” she said and half bent down to pick it all up—and then didn’t. And then tossed her head and walked over to me where I stood, silent at the mantel. And then put her hand a little way out to touch me—and then didn’t. But I felt it. Like the other times, it burned. But it burned like a thought, not a feeling. We stared across it, as if we had between us but one large eye.

  I thought she said to me: Stay as you are. I’ll come to meet you.

  I thought I said to her: Stay as you are. I’ll come to meet you.

  Then she was at the tray, kicking the remains onto it with the point of her shoe, and there were no remains
for me to bother with, except later when I read about madness I understood it. It is a budding in the mind and a melting. It is a mutation that hasn’t been asked for.

  And then, outside on the road, a car door slammed.

  And then the bell rang.

  We had so few doorbells and telephone calls in our life these days that both of us looked at the television, but it had passed on now from war, and was quietly grieving out the stock market quotations. She crept toward it, and turned it off. “Who do you suppose that is?” she whispered. “Nobody comes round here, this hour of the day, who could it be?” We had had a peddler whom I had been too late to see. Today was Thursday. The week’s delivery, the post and the meter reader had all been. At these specified times I was required to go at once to the museum and stay there until the all-safe, but now I stayed where I was, the tumult of nothing-to-say meanwhile so loud in me that it was like a wind which took the place of speech.

  “The lamps!” she said, crouching toward the nearest one, then stood abashed. While we had been at our dinner-share of all the things in the world that could be happening simultaneously, on our side of it we had been moving forward into the shadows; outside, the blue light had moved on to that deepest Prussian-colored moment before the dark plunge. Inside, I was the only lamp. And the blind of the small window was up.

  I suppose there must always have been pulsings of mood, dimming of hesitation, which even in me told their story. She knew at once that I was not going to hide.

  She stole to the window, and stretching her arm as if her wraps dragged on it, silently inched down the blind. We heard someone stamp and shuffle on the square of paving stone that served for a porch, overhung with a lantern, just outside.