The Recognitions

by William Gaddis

  When Esther came in alone she paused in the entrance to the living room, not listening to the music but sniffing the air. Then she jumped, startled. —I didn’t see you, I didn’t see you standing there . . . She sniffed again. —That funny smell, she said. The smell of the dog, weighted with cigar smoke, had penetrated everywhere. —Has someone been here? She turned on a light. —What’s the matter, who was it? She stopped in the middle of taking off her wet hat. —Recktall Brown? she repeated. —Yes, I’ve heard something about him. What was it. Something awful. She coughed, and got her hat off. —I’m glad I can’t remember what it was. As she crossed the room she said, —What is that music?

  In the doorway of the bedroom she stopped. —Do you remember that night? she asked. —In that Spanish place? . . . She stood looking at his back, and finally said, —Oh nothing. She put her hand to her hair. —Nothing, she repeated, turning toward the bedroom, —but I liked you better flamenco.

  “Most people make a practice of embellishing a wall with tin glazed with yellow in imitation of gold, because it is less costly than gold leaf. But I give you this urgent advice: to make an effort always to embellish with fine gold and with good colors, especially in the figure of Our Lady. And if you try to tell me that a poor person cannot afford the outlay, I will answer that if you do your work well, and spend time on your paintings, and good colors, you will get such a reputation that a wealthy person will come to compensate you for your poor clients; and your standing will be so good as a person who uses good colors that if a master is getting one ducat for a figure, you will be offered two; and you will end by gaining your ambition. As the old saying goes, ‘Good work, good pay.’ And even if you were not adequately paid, God and Our Lady will reward you for it, body and soul.”

  —What in the world are you reading?

  —I don’t know, Otto said closing the Libro dell’ Arte, staring at its worn spine before he put it down. —It was something of his.

  The telephone rang, and as she went in to pick it up he walked over to the mirror hung in the living room at his suggestion. He could hear Esther’s voice from the bedroom, where she’d had the telephone moved. —Yes, yes, but . . . I don’t know. To tell you the truth, it’s . . . some time since I’ve seen him myself. But . . . what? Well, I think he’s taken some sort of studio downtown, on the west side. I think it’s Horatio Street. What? Oh. I don’t know. To tell you the truth, honestly, I don’t know.

  —Who was that? Otto asked, ducking away from the mirror as she returned.

  —Somebody named Benny, it’s somebody from his office who’s been trying to reach him for months.

  —It’s funny, isn’t it, Otto said looking at the floor. —I mean it’s strange, without him anywhere.

  —Do you want to go out tonight? The Munks asked us down for a drink.

  —Do you want to?

  —If you do.

  —Well I, I ought to stay and get some work done.

  —I thought your play was going to be finished by the end of April.

  —Well it is, sort of.

  —Why don’t you do something with it?

  —Well it isn’t really . . . it’s all here, it holds together but . . . it doesn’t seem to mean anything. But I’ve got to do something, he said gripping his chin in his hand. —I’ve got to get hold of some money. They were both silent. Otto walked over, picked up a magazine and sat down beside her. The magazine was Dog Days. —What’s this doing here? he asked idly.

  —That, it’s something he brought in once, when we’d talked about having children. Oh, sometimes he used to be so . . . Oh! . . .

  —What’s the matter?

  —The dream I had last night, I just remembered it, she said. —It was about my sister Rose, we were flying kites in a vacant lot like we used to, and some boys were there with a kite with broken glass on the edge of it, and they cut our kite right down out of the sky.

  —But that doesn’t sound so frightening.

  —It was terrible, it was . . . Otto pulled her over and silenced her mouth with his. Finally she said, —Will you do something for me?

  —Shave before I come to bed?

  —How did you know?

  Later, he called from the bathroom, —This handkerchief drying on the mirror, can I take it off and fold it up? It’s dry . . . Esther? did you hear me? This handkerchief . . . ?

  —Yes yes, she cried out, suddenly, then caught her voice and controlled it. —Yes, take it down. She picked up Otto’s jacket from the couch and went toward the bathroom where she heard the sound of the electric razor.

  —It’s all right if I use this isn’t it?

  —Why yes. Yes, of course. I’m glad you’re using it.

  —There’s a straight razor here, he said turning to her where she stood in the doorway with his jacket, the machine whirring in his hand, —but I don’t think I could manage it.

  —I know, she said. —It’s strange. That he left that. Then she went in to hang up the jacket. —What’s this book in your pocket? she called out.

  —That? Otto stopped to look at himself in the glass. —It’s a novel, a French novel he gave me once.

  —Have you finished it?

  —Well, I . . . I haven’t got all the way through it yet. It’s a . . . I . . . Oh incidentally, I found a paper in it, he must have written it out when he was little. About the whole creation working to be delivered from the vanity of time, about nature working for this great redemption. It sounds like a sermon.

  —A sermon of his father’s, she said, hanging up the jacket as Otto came in and sat on the bed.

  —But it’s sort of nice. Even for a sermon, he said, taking off a shoe, which he sat there and held for a minute, staring at it.

  It was a dark night, especially for spring or so it seemed on the lower West Side, near the river where there is little illumination, and day and night the air carries in far above the city’s quota of black silt from the railway and the boats on the water. Sounds were few, for the later the night became the fewer were the sounds of wanton circumstance, the casual sounds of fortuity, the reckless sounds of accident; until all that rose on the silt-laden air were the sounds of necessity, clear and inevitable, which had earlier been so eagerly confused by those who had retired from the darkness now and slept, waiting for the dawn.

  Still, now, the sky contained no suggestion of dawn, in its absence a chimera to be dreaded in actuality by loneliness, and even that forsworn and gone to earth, carrying with it that substance of which all things eventually are made, the prima materia it had sought to deliver from the conspiracy of earth, air, fire, and water binding it here in baseness. “For me an image slumbers in the stone,” said Zarathustra, no more content to let it lie bound so than those since gone to earth, disappointed? or surprised were they? by fictions, and followers who summoned them back, vicars demanding of them vicarious satisfaction in life for that which they had suffered in the privacy of death.

  Itinerant drunkards and curious neighbors sometimes saw him at night, near the docks, and the slaughterhouses a block away, gathering the wood of broken crates to carry back to the fireplace which squatted at one end of the sub-basement room. Benny had stopped in every doorway looking for the name, and could not find it. Then he saw a figure, knew it a block away, and ran toward it, to take an arm and stop him before he could step into one of the doors and disappear. —Thank God I found you! Benny said, when he caught him standing under a streetlamp with broken wood under his arm. —Where have you been? It’s been months, we haven’t seen you in the office for months.

  Benny was an anxious man in gray flannel, single-breasted, a silk foulard tie which caught the wind, a cigarette in his hand.

  —What’s happened? What are you doing? Are you all right? You look fine, you look better than I’ve ever seen you, but wait, wait . . .

  —But wait, wait a minute for me, listen to me, are you . . . have you done any plans, have you done any more of them?

  —Bridge plans . . . don’t
you know who I am? Bridge plans, I have to have another one, I have to submit another one now.

  —But listen, I know it, I hardly know what I’m saying, but listen. We have one up now, a very important one, and if I bring you the location and the problem will you do it?

  —But listen to me. It’s months since I’ve submitted anything. Once. Listen, I submitted a plan of my own and they laughed at me, they laughed at me, they thought it was a joke, they said, You’re not serious with this are you Benny? After the Cooper City viaduct? and the bridge at Fallen Ark Gap? You used to be a genius Benny, what happened to you? Wait, listen to me, listen, just one more. Listen, old J. W. died last month, did you know that? He died. Don’t you see? I can be a vice-president, and I’ll never have to draw a plan again, a vice-president in charge of design, and I can do that. I can do that. You know I can do that. But it all depends on this, it all depends on this one new job, to show them.

  —Just this one, this last one. And I’ll pay you for this one, I know I never paid you before, but I’ll pay you for this one, I’ll pay you whatever you want.

  —Listen maybe I never thanked you right for all you did, but you know how much it meant. I can pay you now. I can pay you. You’ve got nothing to lose, and I’ve got everything.

  —Everything, and I . . . and you . . . Look at you. What is it? What are you doing, what are you doing to yourself? You like fine, I said you look fine but not like you, fine for somebody else but not like you.

  Benny reached out to take his arm again, and a nail in one of the broken crates tore his sleeve.

  —You’re the only one who can do this for me. You’re the only one who can save me. One more. And we can forget the whole thing, as though it never happened. . .

  The silk foulard stirred on the wind. Then Benny turned away too, leaving the cone of light empty, to east and the city where the flood caught him and the ebb bore him away, as though from an empty beach and no trace on it at the feet of the figure pausing for an instant to look at the tide’s recession and then going on, gathering driftwood.

  When Esther came in alone she paused in the entrance to the living room; then she jumped, startled. —I didn’t see you, I didn’t see you standing there. She turned on a light, and stood in the middle of the room taking off her hat, looking at his back. —Posing there, she said finally, and dropped her hat on a table, —like he used to. Like an old man.

  Otto turned from his reflection in the glass window, streaked into visibility by the spring rain. —Yes, he said, looking to the floor between them. —More than a year . . .

  —What?

  —And he used to warn me against youth. Did you know that? The trap of being young. He warned me about it. He said that youth is a trap that . . .

  —Please. I don’t want to hear any more about it.

  —But . . . I just can’t believe, a whole year’s passed, and I’m still . . .

  —Otto, if you spend all your time fretting and . . . fooling around . . .

  —But I’ve got to get hold of some money.

  —And this obsession you have about money . . .

  —Yes but money, you need money to . . .

  —You seem to take not having it as a reflection on your manhood.

  —But money, I mean, damn it, a man does feel castrated in New York without money. And this, I mean you say he puts plenty in your checking account, but it, I mean for me to, well not take it out and use it but to let you actually pay . . .

  —Otto, you know I’ve never understood why you’ve never looked up your father. If he lives right in New York, and you’ve never seen him. And I should think he could give you some money.

  —But I don’t . . .

  —And it would probably help clear up this obsessional neurosis you have about . . .

  Gordon: When we lose contact with the beloved one, we lose contact with the whole world.

  —What are you writing?

  —Just something I thought of. For this play. Otto had followed her in, and he sat on the foot of the bed which had become a refuge, no longer a beginning but a desperate end, no longer a vista of future conquest but sanctuary where failure in all else made this one possession unbearable, unearned and come too soon. —It’s all like a play, a bad play with nothing but exits and entrances. And your work, your novel, he mumbled contentiously. —You haven’t . . .

  —My what?

  He looked up at her. —Who is this guy Ellery that you keep seeing?

  —He’s in advertising, and he’s very interested in analysis. Haven’t you thought of going into . . .

  —Analysis! Haven’t we been over that enough?

  —I was going to say advertising.

  —Advertising! Do you think I’ve sunk that low? And what . . . what do you go out with him for anyhow? You’re going out tonight?

  —Yes.

  —But why?

  —It does me good to be seen in successful company.

  Otto cleared his throat. He was staring at the floor between them. He raised his eyes, slightly, enough to reach her feet flattened on the floor with her weight. He mumbled, —Sometimes I wish I was old, an old man.

  —Otto?

  —What.

  —You . . . Oh nothing but, I liked you better a boy, she said from the closet where she stood putting on her slip:

  The women who admonish us for our weaknesses are usually those most surprised when we show our strength and leave them.

  —I . . .

  —We . . .

  —You . . .

  —Esther?

  —Ellery? . . . Oh, Otto? Otto went away, says Esther from the closet where she stands, taking off her slip. —He went to Central America, to work on a banana plantation.

  Images surround us; cavorting broadcast in the minds of others, we wear the motley tailored by their bad digestions, the shame and failure, plague pandemics and private indecencies, unpaid bills, and animal ecstasies remembered in hospital beds, our worst deeds and best intentions will not stay still, scolding, mocking, or merely chattering they assail each other, shocked at recognition. Sometimes simplicity serves, though even the static image of Saint John Baptist received prenatal attentions (six months along, leaping for joy in his mother’s womb when she met Mary who had conceived the day before): once delivered he stands steady in a camel’s hair loincloth at a ford in the river, morose, ascetic on locusts and honey, molesting passers-by, upbraiding the flesh on those who wear it with pleasure. And the Nazarene whom he baptized? Three years pass, in a humility past understanding: and then death, disappointed? unsuspecting? and the body left on earth, the one which was to rule the twelve tribes of Israel, and on earth, left crying out —My God, why dost thou shame me? Hopelessly ascendant in resurrection, the image is pegged on the wind by an epileptic tentmaker, his strong hands stretch the canvas of faith into a gaudy caravanserai, shelter for travelers wearied of the burning sand, lured by forgetfulness striped crimson and gold, triple-tiered, visible from afar, redolent of the east, and level and wide the sun crashes the fist of reality into that desert where the truth still walks barefoot.

  —This place needs a good airing out. One look at that room in there and anybody can see that your husband . . .

  —My husband . . .

  —He . . .

  —I . . .

  The music is Mozart’s, the Concerto Number Seven in F Major for three pianos. —I wish . . . Esther says. In a feverish conspiracy of order the notes of the music burst from the radio in the other room where it is dark. They thrust there in the darkness against hard surfaces and angles as sharp as themselves. Possibly molecules are rearranged, set dancing, in a sympathy which lasts no longer than the duration of the note; possibly not, but there is the lighted doorway, to be entered in a concerted rush, the naked soles of a man’s feet hung over the end of the bed, calloused and unlikely targets. —I wish . . . Esther says. Her hand moves quickly, but too late, where she has been pausing, holding cloth. Her breast, bared, and not especially full but s
tanding out, centered and still, is very real to her and to no one else: her hand moves there quickly but too late as a note from one of three pianos strikes with the purpose of a blade, and has entered with the cold intimacy of a penknife in the heart. —I wish . . .

  —You don’t think he’d walk in, do you?

  —He?

  IV

  Les femmes soignent ces féroces infirmes retour des pays chauds.

  —Rimbaud

  In the dry-season haze, the hills were a deep blue and looked farther away than the sun itself, for the sun seemed to have entered that haze, to hang between the man and the horizon where, censured and subdued, it suffered the indignity of his stare. The heat of day was as inert as the haze which made it visible; and it only mitigated with the dissolution of the haze in darkness.

  From that darkness outside the window came a bird cry, staccato, sound of a large alarm clock being wound in the next room late at night. Otto was sitting in a pair of underdrawers, writing. When his door was flung open and a man wearing only faded dungarees, with a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other, entered, Otto put down his pen and said, —Hello Jesse.

  —Hello Jesse. How do you like that. Hello Jesse. What are you doin anyhow? said the tattooed man, and sat down on the other wooden chair.

  —I’m writing.

  Jesse put the bottle and glass on the table and looked around him. The corners of his mouth twitched, momentarily confused about something, but something which was going to be pleasurable. He looked over the table, littered with papers illegibly scribbled upon, and at the pictures on the wall.

  —Do you want a cigarette? Otto asked him.

  —Yeah, give me a cigarette. Jesse put out his hand, and then waved away the green package of MacDonald’s Gold Standard. —What do you smoke those things for? That ain’t even American-made stuff.

  —I don’t know, I . . . anyhow it is Virginia tobacco, I . . .