And, strangely, it enabled him to see the text of his lecture with new eyes. He detected in the sentences and paragraphs subtleties of thought, felicities of expression, which for some reason had escaped his attention till now.
And it enabled him, as he delivered the lecture, to play with the thing. He paused now, and he emphasized, where before no emphasis or pause had existed. He teased out the length of vowels, clipped the consonants, rolled the words up from his diaphragm to his throat and then down along his tongue. Tonight the words were notes of music; tonight he was the instrument and the musician who played them.
The nap had helped him, certainly. But more important, she was here tonight.
“The basis of our work in England is that we have brought together the handicraftsman and the artist. Think not that these can be isolated. They must work together. The School of Sculpture in Athens and the School of Painting in Venice kept the work of these countries at the head of the world.”
She sat, she and Tabor, in the box seats at stage right. Behind them in the box were a few other Denver luminaries, four men looking as stiff in starched collars and black ties as Indian maharajahs. Perhaps they were bankers, or perhaps they were dead.
Tabor was not grinning tonight. He sat in his red plush chair with the epic seriousness of a monumental bronze, his lower lip protuding thoughtfully below the stuffed sparrow of a mustache, his balding, egg-shaped head nodding from time to time in ponderous approval.
Tonight she wore a flounced dress of gray satin, a broad bonnet of matching silk, a stole of elegant ermine, white as a snowbank below the Titian fall of her hair. She sat demurely, her hands clasped together on her lap, and no one who observed her now could possibly imagine that only this morning those hands had been stroking and kneading his trembling flesh and groping between his legs. Oscar could scarcely imagine it himself.
But on her red lips played that small, knowing, Gioconda smile.
“All the arts are fine arts. There is no art that is not open to the honor of decoration and the rules of beauty.”
Her white breasts are perfectly rounded at the bottom, and they slope down along their upper surface in a graceful arc to broad, pale pink, puckered aureoles and stiff fragrant nipples the thickness of fingertips; and, kneeling upright and naked on the huge four-poster bed, her long body at once lean and voluptuous, she offers them to him cupped in slender hands as he buries his head between them and inhales the impossible dizzying scent. Moans like small trapped animals move in his throat. Neither of them has said a word since her “Afterward” and his “Ah.”
“Think of those things which inspired the artist of the Gothic school of Pisa. The artist saw brilliantly lighted palaces, arches and pillars of marble and porphyry. He saw noble knights with glorious mantles flowing over their mail as they rode along in the sunlight.”
He lifted the glass from the lectern, raised it to his mouth. As he sipped—the water was cold and tasted faintly but not unpleasantly of sulfur—he glanced around the dim opera house.
The room was full tonight, row after row of silent disembodied heads and shoulders rising in tiers to the shadows at the far wall; more people, these equipped with arms and legs, crowded the aisles.
And they were enrapt, all of them, gazing up at him as though mesmerized.
And it was not the message (despite its patent brilliance and profundity) that so bedazzled them; it was the messenger. He could have—had he chosen to—declaimed a string of nonsense syllables. For some of them, doubtless, he was doing so now.
There was this to be said about an audience: it reflected back to the speaker his own excellence, his own power. Like a mirror. Like a lover.
For the first time, Oscar understood the terrible addictive intoxication of the actor, the priest, the demagogue.
“He saw, too, groves of oranges and pomegranates, and through these groves he saw the most beautiful women that the world has ever known.”
Astride him, the slick strong walls of her sex gripping at his stiffness, her red hair draped in curtains along his face, she turns her head slightly to the right and sucks in through pursed lips and clenched teeth a long shivering sibilant breath. He lifts his own head from the satin pillow and locates her wide wet mouth, her adroit slippery tongue. His hands, amazed at their good fortune, stagger across the opulence of pliant, and compliant, flesh. He can feel his spine becoming molten as, too soon, too soon, unstoppable, his climax builds.
“One of the most absurd things I ever saw was young ladies painting moonrises on a bureau and sunsets on a dinner plate. Some consideration of the use to which the article is to be put should enter into the mind of the artist. It is well enough to have moonrises and sunsets, but we are not particularly pleased to dine on them.”
Appreciative laughter rippled through the audience—followed, as often happened on the tour, by the isolated lunatic chortle of some buffoon who had finally seen the point, or finally seen that he was supposed to. (Perhaps, lecture after lecture, dogging him from city to city, it had been all along this same buffoon.)
He glanced at her theater box, casually, not lingering on any of the faces, even hers; the lecturer calmly surveying his audience.
Her smile had widened now.
He felt a tremor of pride and triumph. And felt also, under his knee britches, behind the providential shelter of the lectern, a stiffening in his crotch. He took another sip of water.
Pity he couldn’t dip behind the curtain and douse poor Freddy.
“These things, and many others, are what your schools of art should teach your young people.”
Afterward, his mind is fragmented. An inchoate surge of feelings—none of them attached to any rational thought—lashes around the rubble like waves around splintered rocks. Gratitude and awe seem to be the major streams, but there is also disbelief and guilt and even a small measure of unease.
She lies beside him curled in a comma, head on his shoulder, leg across his stomach.
“I am,” he says, “astonished.” His voice is not yet his own.
Along the skin of his upper arm, he feels her lips move in a smile. Then she turns her head and her small pointed teeth bite lightly into his flesh. “It was Fate,” she says.
He smiles; he shares the sentiment, of course. “But which, exactly, was fated? My astonishment? Or this?” He waves a hand to indicate their bodies, the bed, this particular moment into which the storm of previous moments has swept them, driftwood, jetsam.
“Both,” she says. “All of it. Everything.”
“I know that this is absurd,” he begins. “We met only yesterday. But I really must tell you—”
The tip of her finger lands softly atop his mouth, closing it.
“Don’t,” she says. “I know already. Don’t say it. If you put it into words, it will start to die.”
“We will teach our youths to love nature more. When we can teach them that no blade of grass and no flower is without beauty, then we will have achieved much.”
She is sucking his left nipple, her tongue moving in small, even, maddening circles along its compacted crust. Taut thin ligaments within his body, their existence previously unsuspected, connect this nipple to the back of his neck, to his spine, to his groin, to the soles of his feet.
While she silently suckles, he silently sulks. He is still smarting at her prohibition. There is so much nameless new emotion dawning within him. There is so much to be said. And how will he ever know what all this actually is, unless he shapes it with language?
Words for him are toys, tools, currency, plumage; they are his métier. Denied them, how will he win her?
Could he ever really wish to win someone who refuses him the means to do so?
For the moment, the answer clearly is yes.
Her soft thick hair trails against his chest as her mouth licks and nips and sucks down along his belly. Chills unfold at his back. Finally, she engulfs him.
“What you have daily before you, what you love most dearl
y and believe in most fondly, that is where your art may be found. All around you lie the conditions of art. No country can compare with America for its resources of beauty.”
She is sprawled across the satin coverlet, her arms outstretched atop the red gleaming outspread fan of hair, her legs apart, one knee drawn up. His kisses explore the crook of elbow, furrow of rib, hollow of throat, swell of shoulder, curve of jaw. The vulnerable V formed by opened lips at the corner of her mouth. The cunning coil of cartilage at her ear.
His heart pounding against his temples, he does things he has never done before, because they were forbidden; does them now because they were; because somewhere they still are.
With his tongue he licks the salt from her armpits, traces and retraces the tufts of her hair. He savors the taste of her navel. He tastes the savor of her toes. (At this little piggy stayed home she sighs his name; and that portion of his soul not suffused with lust suddenly fills with manly pride.) His fingertip pries and prods between the cleft of her globular buttocks. His face roots in the fur and the folds at the juncture of her legs and he swallows her sweet astringent juices. Soon he employs not only tongue and lips but also nose and chin and fingers: a mole. He is crawling, Good Lord, back into the womb.
She moans and her hands clutch at his hair.
“Oscar,” she says, and her voice is frayed, hurried. “Come inside me. Please. Now.”
“Let it be for you here in America to create an art by the hands of the people that will please the world. There is nothing in the world around you that art cannot ennoble.”
Their mutual rhythm grows more rapid as their bodies, locked at the hip, buck and wallop. Her legs are coiled around him, her fists grasp at the sides of the pillow as though she fears she will soar off it into the air. Her lower lip is caught between her teeth and she is panting, her chiseled nostrils flared.
He is climbing, climbing. Once again that invincible energy begins to coalesce in the pockets and burrows of his body, the secret vents and channels. Soon, soon, soon.
She moans from low within her throat, moans once, then moans again, longer this time and at higher pitch. The moans become a wail, a slowly rising keen as she arches her body toward his, as tense as a hunter’s bow.
And he is there to meet her. Ball lightning rumbles down his spine and up his legs, trembles for an instant at his center, then all at once, as he lunges deep deep deep inside her, into her very core, it erupts through him in an explosion of infinite overwhelming sweetness and power that shatters the structure of his being and sends shards and shreds and blistered fragments spinning out across the universe.
The applause began off toward the left of the auditorium—curious how it arose each time from some new locus—and then undulated to the right, growing in strength.
He stepped aside from the lectern and with slow solemn dignity he bowed once from the waist toward the crowd.
The applause thickened most satisfactorily.
He turned to the left, to the box that held a handful of beaming frontier nonentities in formal wear. He bowed.
He turned to the right, toward the box that held her and Tabor and the local eminences. Tabor had rediscovered his grin and he was clapping his small hands with a furious delight. The eminences, while showing somewhat less exuberance, in their stiff way still seemed eminently satisfied.
And she, she was smiling widely as daintily she clapped, as her violet eyes met his.
He bowed. And although he took care not to bow even a millimeter more deeply than he had before, this time as he bent forward his blood rushed, hot and thick, to his head.
AURID GLARE SPILLED FROM the windows of the saloons, splashed across the crooked wooden sidewalks, sputtered A through the churning crowds that bumped and jostled him as they babbled by.
The smells here were worse than any he had ever encountered. The sour, feral odor curling off the unwashed bodies of the gaunt-faced cowboys and the grime-coated metal workers. The stinking sulfurous smoke of the smelters, hanging overhead in a low gray perpetual cloud, blotting out the stars. The reek of blood and manure and animal terror drifting from the nearby stockyards. And—dense, vile, almost palpable—the mephitic stench of raw sewage floating from the river.
More intense even than the smells was the endless noise. Freight cars rumbled, locomotives groaned and hissed. Horses clopped, carriages rattled. Children bawled and whooped and screamed; grown men chittered and chattered, bellowed and roared.
It was all too much: the crowds, the stink, the confining walls of clatter.
The garish light.
He needed the darkness. His work demanded the darkness.
The dirt street on which finally he found himself was narrow and dim, lighted only infrequently by gaslamps overhead. On each side of it, wooden shacks and shanties stood in low, cramped, uneven file, like a row of worn and rotten teeth. The smells still lingered—the slaughterhouse, the smelter, the sewage—but here only a few people moved about, drunks and derelicts slowly puzzling their way through the desolate shadows.
Where is the whore?
Soon, soon, he assured the sudden harsh voice within him; and he smiled.
This was a new and astonishing thing: a benefaction. The entities who shared his dominion over the primal forces, the Lords of Light—they now communed with him directly. They permitted him, at last, to hear their speech, low and guttural yet thrilling. In recognition of his own authority, his dedication, his adamantine purpose, they had granted him this unique gift.
There were two voices, one basso profundo, resonant, gravelly; the other, higher in pitch, slightly less raspy. One day he would work out their exact connection to each other, and to him. One day that might be amusing.
Astonishing that they would finally speak; yes, but he had of course not been astonished. When first heard, they had come to, him as naturally, as inevitably, as the sound of his own breath. He had been—all along, but unwittingly—preparing for them; he realized, at the first moment he heard them speak, that all along he had been expecting them.
He was grateful for their presence. For lately he had been—not confused, no. But lately the cloudy moments—those periods when time itself somehow guttered out and a blackness engulfed his mind—those moments seemed to be growing longer and more frequent. One moment he would be walking calmly along, wrapped securely in the familiar pretense of day-to-day, hiding, hidden; and then suddenly, unaccountably, the blackness would sweep over him. Later, ten minutes, half an hour, he would abruptly find himself, as though hurled there by some silent and invisible tempest, in a different neighborhood, on an unfamiliar street.
It never happened during the quest itself, of course. While he was stalking, nothing at all could diminish the power of his concentration: this was as focused then, and intense, as the hissing white barb of a welder’s torch.
No, only during the dismal day-to-day, when discretion demanded that he mask himself, masquerade as merely one more puny, ineffectual nothing, indistinguishable from the others.
It was the result, no doubt, of the massive, superhuman energy he expended during the quests. No one, not even he, could share the furious energy of the gods, meld his own flame with the Infinite Flame that roared at the core of the cosmos, without somehow suffering.
He was prepared to suffer—had he not suffered for years? Had he not undergone exquisite torments of flesh and spirit? The flails, the belts, the ropes that dug into his skin until it sweated pus and blood? Chafing in his own foul excrement, blistering in the sting of his own sour urine. And hearing all the while, in the background, the mocking laughter of the Red Bitch.
The suffering had strengthened him. Yes: purified his will, cleansed him of the dross, the pollution, that held mere mortals captive, earthbound.
If need be, he would suffer again. He would survive it; he would prevail.
But the voices helped. They strengthened his resolve, refined his purpose.
Not that his purpose had ever faltered. Not that he ha
d ever, even for a moment, doubted the necessity, the urgency, of his mission.
No, but by their presence the voices added strength to a strength that was already incalculable.
Where? Where is the whore?
It was near now, the creature destined for him: he knew this. Already he had seen others of its kind, only a few feet from the sidewalk, leaning out the windows of their squalid shacks, their slack faces feigning desire, their flaccid breasts draped like rotting fruit between the open folds of their gowns.
Perfect. The night was perfect. Only a few souls stumbled through the streets, and these were debased, furtive beings so blinded by their own sordid lusts that he would be invisible.
Oh, it was delicious, was it not? Could anything, could even the ritual itself, the joining, the union, could even that be sweeter than this triumph of secrecy? To walk as softly as a shadow among them, unknown, unsuspected—
The whore!
Yes, yes. Yes.
This one!
This one, yes, was perfect.
Its face grotesquely powdered and painted, it leaned toward him from its window, its fat red mouth twisted in a leer. A small oil lamp on the sill beside it cast a trembling yellow light that seemed to set the creature’s bright red hair aflame.
“Only three dollars,” it said, its voice tattered from a lifetime of debauch. “Ten dollars gets you all night.”
He glanced up and down the street. No one watching.
Dare he do it?
Always, before, in the alleyways, in the dim sidewalk alcoves rank with the fumes of rotten garbage, he had found union quickly, performed the ritual as swiftly as possible. Detection loomed in every passing moment, in every approaching footfall. He had never been allowed—he had never permitted himself—to prolong it. To bring it to a level of perfection, of artistry, about which, he now suddenly understood, he had always dreamed.
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