The Recognitions

by William Gaddis

  Left hand; right hand: they moved over her with equal assurance. Undistinguished here they raised her flesh, and Esther rose to reconcile them, to provide common ground where each might know what the other was doing.

  A year later, they had been married for almost a year; which was unlike Wyatt. He had become increasingly reluctant wherever decisions were concerned; and the more he knew, the less inclined to commit himself. Not that this was an exceptional state: whole systems of philosophy have been erected upon it. On the other hand, the more he refused to commit himself, the more submerged, and the more insistent from those depths, became the necessity to do so: a plight which has formed the cornerstone for whole schools of psychology. So it may be that his decision to marry simply made one decision the less that he must eventually face; or it is equally possible that his decision to marry was indecision crystallized, insofar as he was not deciding against it.

  Knowing that extraordinary capacity for jealous hatred which men so often have for a woman’s past, Esther was in a way grateful that he never asked her about hers. Still, she did not disown it, though much as she wanted to go everywhere she had never been, she as fervently never wanted to revisit any scene in that past, a frantic concatenation whose victim she remained, projecting her future upon it in all the defiant resentment of free will, in a world where she had been victimized by every turn of the die since her father had first cast it. Where Esther’s mind had gone since, her thighs had followed with errant and back-breaking sincerity, in civilized correspondence to that primordial cannibal rite performed by sober comrades who eat their victims in order to impart to themselves the powers with which those victims had, as enemies, threatened to overcome them. (It is not simply hunger: those driven by hunger alone have been heard to remark afterward, —I should have preferred pork.)

  Not hunger? One of the more fastidious comments risen in her past had sported the phrase vagina dentata. Still it was not hunger, but an insatiability which took this hanger as its course, seeking, in its clear demand, to absorb the properties which had been withheld from her; and finding, in its temporary satisfaction, and the subsequent pain of withdrawal, insatiability. Year after year the emancipated animus of free will labored its spinneret, spun out this viscous fluid of causality which had rapidly hardened into strands fatal as those of the tarantula’s silk-lined burrow here in the sandy soil of native hope. She did not question it; no more than the trap door which the tarantula leaves open at the top, or the victims who tumble in, affirming her woman’s part in deep despair over their common lot, expressed in a resentment of men for the success of their casual fortunes where her devouring continued, but not for love.

  At no time was Esther unprepared for those attempts which the lives around her made to rise to tragedy; though by the time they managed it, they had escaped it, and through their ascendance she had come rather to see herself as the conglomerate tragic figure, since it was she who was always left. It confirmed something. Esther had spent little time with women. She seemed to find in their problems only weak and distorted plagiarisms of the monstrous image of her own. Thus it seemed very odd to many who knew her that she should choose a woman analyst. It became a very deep attachment, so long before any completion of her analysis that it was evident to both of them who had the upper hand. When Esther met Wyatt, she asked if she should marry, and was forbidden. She demanded, and was pled with. She married, and her analyst was a suicide. It was a way things had of working out for Esther. It confirmed something.

  Call him louder! Call him louder! Trumpets sounded, and the roll of drums.

  —And why you like Handel, Esther said quietly after their argument, or to continue it. She had a cold, which broke her voice low with apparent emotion.

  —Handel?

  Is not His voice like a hammer . . . ?

  —Mozart . . . She coughed.

  Like a hammer that breaketh the stone

  She swallowed. There was a magazine open in her hands, as there was a book in his; but she was watching him, to see if the intent strain in his face were for his reading, or tense suspension waiting, borne upon the chords of music, for the next sound of constriction and release in her throat. He did not move. Her throat drew tighter, its strictures embraced, and she swallowed with difficulty. At that, as though it were a signal of release from restraint, a hand rose to hide the intent corner of his profile. —And Tosca! . . . she murmured, as her throat bound up again, and she swallowed quickly. He did not move. The book was a large one, but she could not make out its title. It might have been anything; just as his tension must be for her presence, since he appeared to read everything with the same casual concentration. When she interrupted, there was no way of knowing whether he was looking up from Diogenes Laërtius or No Orchids for Miss Blandish. She might be breaking a thread in Berkeley’s New Theory of Vision, joining a rain of falling objects from the supercelestial geography of Charles Fort, or only echoing a voice in some cheap paper novel like Les Damnés de la Terre. Mendelssohn’s Elijah continued from the radio. She swallowed. Immediately, he cleared his throat, a vicarious measure which left her unrelieved. If she asked, he might look up with, —Fort says, “By the damned, I mean the excluded” . . . but she would have to ask, —Excluded from what? —“By prostitution, I seem to mean usefulness . . .”

  She studied him now as though he might not be reading at all, but peeping at her through fingers of the hand shielding his eye. She cleared her throat. There was no way, as Elijah came to a close, to reopen their discussion: unless the next composition should be something by Beethoven or Mozart. If the radio voice should announce, Mozart’s Symphony Number 37, Köchel Listing 444 . . . He turned a page. Since their discussions seldom lasted long, she often carried them on in her own mind, reconsidering now (and certain she saw the glint of his eye between his fingers) her thralldom to the perfection of Mozart, work of genius without an instant of hesitation or struggle, genius to which argument opposed the heroic struggle constantly rending the music of Beethoven, struggle never resolved and triumphed until the end. —Genius in itself is essentially uninteresting. —But the work of genius . . . —It’s difficult to share in perfection. —You, to share? she’d commenced; but that was all. He was reading. She swallowed, and caught the glitter of an eye. Elijah was finished. Still in her mind, “By prostitution, I seem to mean usefulness,” Esther said:

  —What are you reading?

  —Eh? His surprise was a look (she would think of it one day, remembering, or trying to remember) indigenous to his face, either that immediate anticipatory surprise, reflecting sudden foretaste of something past (as when she asked him when he’d been in Spain: —I? I’ve never been in Spain); or it was this look he had now, the surprise of one intruded upon. And year after year as their marriage went on, the first came less and the other more often, until one day, remembering him, or trying to remember, it would be this one which would come to her, this face of confusion, of one intruded upon, an anxious look. He said, —Nothing.

  —Nothing? You can’t read nothing.

  —It’s a book on mummies.

  —Mummies?

  —Egyptian mummies.

  —Why are you reading a book on Egyptian mummies?

  He cleared his throat, but said nothing.

  —But what I gave you of mine, the story I’m writing, you haven’t read that yet.

  —Yes, I did read it.

  —And . . . well? What did you think?

  —It was . . . you seemed quite partial to the word atavistic.

  —Well that, is that all?

  —Well Esther, the um, and double adjectives, cruel, red anger; hard, thin lips; dark, secret pain . . .

  —But . . .

  —But women’s writing seems to get sort of . . . Sharp, eager faces; acid, unpleasant odor . . . listen. He turned toward the radio, where a poet whose work they both enjoyed was about to read. She looked at him a moment longer, and the book which had gone closed in his hand the instant she’d spoken
to him. It had happened as directly as when once she had said, —You have wonderful eyes, and he turned them from her. What was it? As though to protect whatever lay beyond them until he could solve it himself, betraying the fear that in one lax moment his eyes might serve her as entrances. Even taking up a book she had read (Esther admired Henry James, but she trusted D. H. Lawrence), he did so anxiously, as though he might find the pages blank, the words eaten away by that hunger.

  —Do you want to follow it? she asked, coming toward him with the Collected Poems opened in her hand. He shook his head, but did not look up, listening; and she sat down nearer him.

  The poet read, in modulated tones given a hollow resonance by the radio. Esther’s thumb was drawn down the page, following one line to the next, bent over the book, and her lips moved, forming around the poet’s words as he spoke them, clear separate syllables which her lips, meeting and parting, moistened by her tongue, allowing exhalations in vowels, wet clicks from the roof of the mouth on d, brought into viscous consonance with her absorbedness, unrestrained by those lips clamped tight beside her until he cleared his throat and suddenly got to his feet. Before she could speak he had reached a door.

  —But what? . . .

  —I have some work, he said quickly, and left her there sitting, hunched over the pages, staring after him, while the poet read on in clear separate syllables. She blew her nose, and returned to the page before her, but her lips did not move, for she did not hear another word of the reading. Neither did her eyes, for she was gazing at the backs of her hands.

  The room Wyatt had entered was as large as the bedroom, but had only one window which would have opened on an airshaft if anyone had bothered opening it. During the first year or so, the room served various vague purposes. Though between them they hadn’t a great number of books, not great enough, that is, to warrant a library (for a library, to Esther, was a roomful of books), it served as that for awhile. However, this was not practical, for reasons of which each privately accused the other in refusing to admit his own. Esther liked books out where everyone could see them, a sort of graphic index to the intricate labyrinth of her mind arrayed to impress the most casual guest, a system of immediate introduction which she had found to obtain in a number of grimy intellectual households in Greenwich Village. Her husband, on the other hand, did not seem to care where his books were, so long as they were where he put them. That is to say, separate. No doubt Boyle’s Skeptical Chemist, Jalland’s The Church and the Papacy, Cennino Cennini’s Libro dell’ Arte, or La Chimie au Moyen Age would have dressed up Esther’s shelves; no doubt the Grimorium Verum and the Turba Philosophorum would have been dusted down their spines regularly. No doubt these were among the reasons he kept them on his own, or strewn among the litter which had gradually filled the undetermined room until it belonged to him. Things were tacked on the walls there haphazard, an arm in dissection from a woodcut in the Fabrica of Vesalius, and another sixteenth-century illustration from the Surgery of Paré, a first-aid chart called “the wound man”; a photograph of an Italian cemetery flooded by the Po; a calendar good for every day from 1753 to 2059; a print of a drawing of the head of Christ by Melozzo da Forlì; a ground plan of the Roman city of Leptis Magna; a mirror; and rolls of paper and canvases on stretchers leaning in the corners.

  When he started to work at restoring paintings, in addition to his regular job, the littered room changed only slightly. There had always been piles of drawing paper, and canvases on frames, prepared and clean or the composition begun in black unfinished lines, most prominent, or most familiar among these the initiated portrait of Camilla. The gessoed surface had cracked here and there, and got unevenly soiled, but the composition was very clear in lines unaltered since he’d put them there some fifteen years before. Occasionally this was hung on one of the walls, as though being studied with an eye to completion. Other times it remained stacked with the other empty and besmirched canvases against a wall. There was a wide flat drafting table, and a heavy easel stood erect in the middle of the room under the bare electric bulb. But the most noticeable change was not to be seen: it lay heavily on the air, the smell of varnish, oils, and turpentine, quickened by the pervasive delicacy of lavender, oil of lavender which he used sometimes as a medium.

  Esther had admired the drawing begun on that large soiled cracked surface, the fine-boned face (so unlike her own) whose fleshless quality of hollows was elevated by heavy earrings, archaic hoops of gold she had seen in a leather box where her husband kept odds and ends; admired the drawing not for what it was but, as she said, for what it could be. He stood looking at it, and they were silent, for he knew she was looking at him. The only work he had ever finished, those paintings shown in Paris years before, had ended up in a warehouse in New Jersey. Esther had never seen them. They seldom discussed painting, for like so many things upon which they might agree, they never managed to agree at the same moment; and as the conversations of the early months of their marriage went on, their ideas and opinions seemed to meet only in passing, each bound in an opposite direction, neither stopping to do more than honor the polite pause of recognition.

  The poet’s clear tones had given way to the ingratiating pillage of the announcer, and she rose, the charm broken, with no word of the poet in her head but, for no apparent reason, “By prostitution I seem to mean usefulness.” She picked up The Royal Mummies and blew her nose as she crossed the room toward the half-open door, where she put her head in, and the book, saying, —Do you want this in there?

  —What? Oh that, thank you.

  —What are you doing?

  —Nothing, just . . . this work. He motioned toward the plans pinned on the drafting table.

  —Don’t they give you enough time down there, to do your work? But he lowered his eyes from hers, shrugged and turned back to the table. —If it were something real, but this, going to this silly job every day, year after year.

  —It’s not a silly job, Esther, he answered soberly, without turning.

  —Copying lines, copying plans, one bridge after another. Oh, all right, it isn’t silly but you could do better, you could do more. Honestly Wyatt, the way you go day after day with your job and your reading and your . . . fooling around, and you could do more. It’s not . . . you’re not waiting to discover something, are you. Waiting to be discovered, aren’t you? Oh I hate to go on like this, sounding like this . . . She paused, watching his narrow black-suited figure bend as a vertical line came down the paper. —It’s this . . . seeing you like you are sometimes now, she went on slowly, —I see you with your head down and, I don’t know, but it upsets me, it makes me unhappy to see you that way.

  —Why? he asked in a voice near a whisper, his face close down to the paper.

  —Because you look so lonely and that’s what I can’t bear, she brought out at his back. Then her eyes lowered to the floor when he did not turn, and she brought the damp knot of the handkerchief to her nose. —Don’t you want anything . . . any of the things, that other people want?

  —Other people? he demanded, turning.

  —Oh . . . , her throat caught. —Never mind. There. I’ll leave you with company.

  —That? the mirror?

  —I love that, you having a mirror in here.

  —But that . . . to correct bad drawing . . .

  —Good night, I’m going to bed when I’ve done the dishes.

  —I’ll do them, if you’re tired, he offered. —Your cold . . .

  —Don’t be silly. I’ll do them. She left him there, knotting a piece of string in his hand. A few minutes later, when she’d turned out the lights in the living room, the light from the half-open door drew her eyes and she saw him standing, running the fingers of his right hand over his rough chin, up one cheek and then the other, as though to wake after the night needing a shave made sense, but finding his face rough with growth after a day’s well-lighted consciousness a strange thing. Then he said aloud, —How safe from accident I am!

  She had once heard
him mentioned, with little more than curiosity, by people whom neither of them knew now. Then, when she came to asking more pointedly about him, there were anecdotes enough (someone she met at a party had heard he’d jumped off the Eiffel Tower, and with drunken persistence marveled at his survival). In and out dodged the vagrant specter, careering through conversations witness to that disinterested kindness which other people extend to one who does not threaten them with competition on any level they know. Costumed in the regalia of their weary imaginations, he appeared and vanished in a series of images which, compacted, might have formed a remarkable fellow indeed; but in that Diaspora of words which is the providential nature of conversation, the fugitive persisted, like those Jewish Christians who endured among the heathen, here in the figure of a man who, it appeared at last, had done many things to envy and nothing to admire.

  —Wyatt, what is it? What’s the matter?

  —A dream? . . .

  —Only a dream?

  —But . . .

  —It’s all right, darling, whatever it was it’s all right now.

  —It was . . .

  —What was it?

  —At home, in bed, that parsonage was a big empty house and I know every step in it, I woke up and I could hear footsteps. I woke up there hearing very heavy footsteps in an even tread and I knew where they were going, I heard them down the stairs and through the front hallway and into the living room, across the living room and through the back hall past the dining room toward the kitchen . . .