The Recognitions

by William Gaddis

  —No, is he here?

  —Oh no, no baby. They haven’t been out together since the gas stove exploded. When they got married they both wanted to write. Everything was fine until the books came out, then they found they’d written about each other. That was the only reason either of them wanted to get married, to study the other one. They used to sit and ask about each other’s childhood, and all kinds of things, and they both thought the other one was doing it for love. Now they just watch each other’s sales, and whoever’s ahead takes all the cream at breakfast.

  —Is she . . .

  —When they have breakfast. Together.

  Otto strained for another look. He heard her saying, —It’s absolute heaven, the people are so poor they work for almost nothing. We had a maid who did the laundry too and do you know how much we paid her . . . Under the loosely fitted white dress she wore an open-top brassière (They all wear them like crazy down there, she said) bringing her front up to where it could be seen with little difficulty. On her browned wrist, complemented with gold in all the garrulous ugliness of the Modernism heresy, was a Mickey Mouse watch. Otto was perturbed by the flourishing color of her skin, which the dress and (the trouser-seat curtain parted again and he saw her fingernails) white nail polish set off to better effect than the rumpled linen and the black silk sling did his own. He ran a fingertip over his golden mustache. —She doesn’t look like she quite belonged here, he said. —That white gown.

  —Baby what about you in your jungle suit?

  —That’s not what I meant, in the Village I meant, in that gown, it’s so sort of formal . . . Otto faltered to a finish, awaited comment, and only heard someone say, —That’s the plot, briefly. Now do you think I can call myself a negative positivist? —I think you’d be safer calling yourself a positive negativist.

  —Everyone knows why the Bildows stay married, said a deep voice. —He’s impotent with anybody but her. —You know the real reason? she was challenged. —It’s because neither of them wash.

  —Is it true, Arny and Maude are going to adopt a baby? Otto asked.

  —Poor Arny, they’ve been trying for years, but they always feel too awful in the morning, poor Maude . . .

  —Boy or girl? demanded a girl’s voice behind them.

  —A boy. Oh Hannah, said Herschel, —Baby . . . He looked afraid and unhappy, as though this plainly unattractive girl were someone to escape and forget. She stood firm, in the peasant’s dress of the Village, a soiled man’s shirt tucked into denim pants on a bunchy figure composed of separate entities, calves, thighs, chest, and head, like a statue of soft stone whose blocks have been weathered apart.

  —He’s probably a homosexual, said Hannah.

  —The baby? Herschel asked helplessly.

  —No, the father. He’s the one who wants a boy isn’t he?

  —Do you know Arny?

  —Arny who?

  —Arny Munk. He’s the one who’s going to be the father.

  —No.

  —Then how can you say . . .

  —It’s psychologically obvious, that’s the only reason queer men want boy children, to perpetuate their own kind.

  —Hannah, please . . .

  Hannah muttered an unpleasant sound in greeting to a tall stooped figure in a green wool shirt, who was about to go on across the room when she saw the book in his hand. —What are you doing with that, The Trees of Home? Reading best sellers?

  The stooped figure stopped plodding and turned on her; so did his stubby companion, who stood looking slightly injured (he was a poet, with eye trouble, and since everything but the printed page was brought to a focus before it reached him, the world was simply a series of vague images and threatening spectacles, which he faced with lowered eyes as though seeking a book at hand to explain it all); he said, —A best seller! The guy that wrote it submitted it to a board that showed it to a cross-section of readers, the reading public. So the reading public doesn’t like the lousy end, so he puts on the kind of lousy end they suggest, and it’s published. A best seller, for Christ sake.

  —I’m reviewing it, the stooped man said, and started to plod off.

  —You read it?

  —No, he said over his shoulder, —but I know the son of a bitch who wrote it.

  —That poor bastard, Hannah said after him. —He wants to go to Europe. They both do, the poor bastards, ask them why. They won’t see anything, they’re both myoptic. Where you going? she said to Herschel.

  —I was just . . . Hannah . . .

  —Have you got your tattoo yet? she asked in a humorless tone.

  —No.

  —How’s your writing?

  —Movie magazines, simply all sex, Herschel answered, making an effort, —the most obvious perversions. I’m writing a whole series now on movie stars and God. They’re all exactly the same. They all believe that Something is carrying us on Somewhere, and they simply reek with the most exquisite sincerity.

  —You mean you interview them?

  —Baby, I just make a few notes on them and write these heart-to-heart confessions. The publicity agent looks it over and signs her name to it. She never sees it.

  —She? Otto asked.

  —She. These are lady movie-stars.

  —What happened to your senator? Hannah said.

  —The last speech I wrote for him, he never saw it until it appeared in the Congressional Record, and I said simply all the wrong things. Now he’s being investigated and he’s quite put out at me. Imagine! I’m simply going to have to write a novel myself.

  —You write a novel! Who’ll read a novel with no women in it?

  —But baby, there will be, I’ll do it just like Proust did, write it about simply everyone I know and then just go through and change boys’ names to girls, I know the perfect Odette . . .

  —You ought to go back to analysis. Or have a vagotomy and get it over with. Just because your analyst killed himself . . .

  —He didn’t kill himself, it was an accident.

  —An accident! He ties a rope around his neck and climbs out a window, but the rope breaks and he falls forty-six stories, so it’s an accident?

  —Hannah, I’m going, going to get a drink, Herschel said turning on the room, no idea where he was going, but away.

  —I didn’t know he was a writer, Otto said.

  —Writer! He ghosts. He just ghosted some army general’s autobiography. A writer!

  Otto looked after Herschel. —I’d say he was a latent heterosexual, he said, immediately regretted wasting such an inspired line on Hannah, and resolved to repeat it later to someone who would repeat it as his own. He even tried to think quickly of a spot for it in his play.

  —Dissociated personality, said Hannah soberly. —He’s not sure who he is any more, whether he’s anyone at all for that matter. That’s why he wants a tattoo, of course. Simply a matter of ego-identification.

  —So that when he wakes up he’ll know it’s the same person he went to bed with, said a young man who had been standing with his back to them, turning now his unshaven face.

  Herschel was coming toward them, leading a nice-looking confused boy toward the door. —You’d better go, he was saying, —on account of Agnes. Come on, baby. She asked me to help you go, she says you bore the tits off her and you wouldn’t want to do that . . . But as they reached the door Agnes Deigh was between them with an arm around the boy. —But darling where are you going? You’re not leaving? You can’t leave now, it’s so early. She plucked this petal back, and Herschel, mumbling something about her bosom, stumbled confusedly after.

  —Poor Charley, said Hannah.

  —Was that Charley? Otto had noticed a scar across the boy’s throat, and a glitter in his hair. —What’s that in his hair?

  —That’s a silver plate, they put it there when they took the bullet out he tried to kill himself with. Did you see his throat? And his wrists are covered with scars. He was in the army, in a plane that dropped an atom bomb, and he has intense guilt feeling
s. He hated the army. It’s a good thing he got out.

  —I should think they would have sent him to a hospital if he’s like this.

  —Oh no, this wasn’t the reason he was discharged, said Hannah. —When he was still in he stayed at the place I was staying one night on leave. The next morning he went out to get some coffee, but his own clothes were a mess because he’d been sick the night before so he put some of my warm underwear on under his uniform. The M.P.’s picked him up at Nedick’s and when they took him in and found him with girls’ underwear on they thought he was queer. He was discharged.

  —Oh.

  —I think he’s going to have a lobotomy, said Hannah. —What do you think of the painting? she said, looking above the mantel.

  —The colors are good. Very bright.

  —Bright?

  —Well, I mean the orange and the green. Of course, a painter is limited by his materials, isn’t he. I mean, there are pigments you can’t just mix together in certain mediums and expect them to bind. There are certain pigments you can’t lay over others and expect them to hold, I mean of course they break up, you have to know your materials and respect them, but modern painting . . .

  —I think it’s the saddest thing Max has ever done. It’s an epitaph.

  —Léger, I mean Chagall . . .

  —The emptiness it shows, it hurts to look at it. It’s so real, so real.

  —Soutine, of course, Chagall and Soutine, Otto continued, —there won’t be one of them in sight anywhere in a hundred years, they’ll break up and fall to pieces right on the canvas. Inherent vice, I believe they call it. There are certain pigments . . .

  —I think it’s the saddest thing Max has ever done.

  Otto stopped speaking: who was Max? He remembered Max as someone he did not particularly like, someone he felt unsafe with. Aware of an unshaven face over his shoulder, he took out a package of his impressive cigarettes, and did not turn until the unshaven boy, not included in their conversation, went away rubbing a badly blemished chin. —Who was that?

  —He’s a drunk, Hannah said, —his name is Anselm. He gets all screwed up with religion.

  In one corner of the room stood a thin young man with a heavy mustache which seemed to weigh his round head forward. At that moment it was being weighed toward a dirty window, which he studied wistfully. His coat was belted behind, and too short. His trousers fell in wrinkles, and dragged frayed cuffs on his shoe-tops. A candid look of guilt hung about him, as though he knew he should not be there, but saw no way of leaving but osmotically, through the translucent window glass. At his back a group, bulging with laughter, threatened to upset him. They were arguing. Then one of them called, —Is it “Ils vont prendre le train de sept heures” or “de huit heures,” Stanley?

  —Weet, he answered, and returned to the dirty window muttering, —How could it be anything but weet? Then he turned his eyes, and stared at whoever was seated on the couch, out of Otto’s view.

  —If modern painters won’t study their materials, Otto took up, fingering the figure of the emu on the cigarette packet, and he spoke with urbane hesitations, indicating concurrent thought worthy of his words, —if they can’t waste the time, a sculptor of course has to study every property of his medium before he . . .

  —Do you know him? Hannah asked.

  —settles down to his, what? Who?

  —Stanley.

  —No, is he a sculpt . . .

  —Stanley? Why should he be a sculptor?

  —No, but um . . . and as Praxiteles . . .

  —What?

  —I was just going to say, as Cicero says of Prax . . .

  —Music, he writes music, organ music.

  —Who?

  —Stanley. Him. She pointed. —This one thing he’s been working on a long time, a mass, he’s trying to finish it in time to dedicate it to his mother. She’s got diabetes, in the Hospital of the Immaculate something, it’s around here, they just took her leg off, it had gangrene. She just lies up there with all these souvenirs in bottles around her, her appendix and her tonsils and something they took out of her nose, she wants to take them with her, she just lies there staring at her false teeth in an empty glass, gumming memories.

  Otto offered a cigarette. Hannah did not smoke; and so the only way to impress her was to blow some in her direction. She coughed and stopped talking.

  The funeral spray on the mantel had wilted, and the wires which held it taut were apparent. It had not been an expensive one. The clusters of guests moved vaguely before it and back like limp flowers dying in the earth where they had grown, shifting in the dust. Otto was looking over the room for someone he knew to talk with, or someone he did not know, to talk to. For just that moment he saw the face of a girl who was sitting alone on the couch, looking with a smile of newness over this moribund garden, allowing herself to be hidden by it. Then she was gone, with the silent consciousness of a painting obscured by a group of nattering human beings. He had stared at her in that moment of exposure: her eyes had been looking at him; and then they were not: and her smile went beyond him, like a face he knew so well he could never recall it to memory.

  —She got fed up with him screwing the Sunday roast, so she shot herself, do you blame her? Anselm was saying suddenly at his elbow speaking, to Hannah, of the stooped man in the green wool shirt, whom he’d just left. —That’s what breaks my heart, he added, and rubbed his chin.

  —Who is it? Otto asked, turning.

  —A half-assed critic, Hannah said, —he thinks he has to make you unhappy before you’ll take him seriously.

  —A three-time psychoanaloser, Anselm added, —for Christ sake. He just told me Bildow’s going to sell The Magazine. Tragedy. Hannah reached for the yellow book he carried. —Have you read it, Justine? he asked, holding it back. —I brought it to show Stanley.

  —Leave him alone tonight, Hannah said.

  —There’s a nice part, in this Benedictine monastery, where the abbot puts the holy wafer up her and defiles it . . .

  —Listen, Anselm . . .

  —Hey Stanley, come here, I got something to show you, Anselm called, and Hannah repeated, —Leave him alone, as Stanley worried his way toward them. Otto smoothed his own mustache with a fingertip.

  —What are you reading? Anselm took the book from under Stanley’s arm. —Malthus, for Christ sake. Do you want to get excommunicated, carrying that around in public? The next thing, you’ll be peddling rubbers in the street.

  —Malthus doesn’t recommend . . . those, when he speaks of moral restraint . . .

  —Moral restraint! Anselm laughed, waving his yellow book. —If you think the Church wouldn’t do an about-face on contraceptives if it owned a block of stock in Akron rubber! And how much real estate do you think they own in this whorehouse of a world? Here, you ought to read this, he went on, opening Justine, —there’s somebody in here you’d like, named Roland, he has a crucifix with a girl on it face-to . . .

  —Listen, Anselm, Hannah commenced.

  —can play hide-the-baloney . . .

  —I heard you sold another book title, Stanley interrupted him.

  —“Except for Fornication,” fifty bucks. Matthew nineteen, nine, “Except it be for fornication . . .”

  —I’m having a little difficulty, with a title, Otto lied.

  —A novel?

  —No, a play I’ve just finished. I’ve called it “The Vanity of Time.”

  —Corny, Hannah commented. —What a lousy party.

  —It’s from a sermon . . .

  —Peanut butter, for Christ sake. Fifty million pounds of food a day eaten in New York, and what do I get? Peanut butter.

  —Do you like the painting? Stanley asked her.

  —The composition’s good. Max is good with composition, he’s successful with it, but he still works like painting was having an orgasm, he has to learn that it isn’t just having the experience that counts, it’s knowing how to handle the experience . . . what the hell are you smoking? sh
e coughed, looking at the cigarette in Otto’s brown hand.

  Stanley turned and asked timidly, —And, Anselm? what are you doing now?

  —I keep myself busy sawing toilet seats in half for half-assed critics, Anselm said without turning to him, without taking his eyes from the tall figure stooped in the green wool shirt.

  Otto cleared his throat. —That ahm girl on the couch, she . . . do you know her? Anselm looked at him for the first time, and he added —I mean, and cleared his throat.

  —That’s Phryne. Anselm watched the lack of response on Otto’s face. —Phryne. Don’t you know Phryne, for Christ sake? I thought I just heard you talking about Praxiteles.

  —Well yes I was but, I mean when Cicero says that Praxiteles, that all Praxiteles has to do is remove the excess marble, to reach the real form that was there all the time underneath, I mean inside . . .

  —And he reached Phryne. Haven’t you ever seen it?

  —Seen what.

  —Praxiteles’ statue of Phryne. Who the hell do you think was hiding inside his block of stone but a high-class whore. They’ve got it in the Vatican with the rest of the high-class whores. I just wanted to be Eve before the Fall, Anselm mimicked in a whimper, —for Christ sake.

  Stanley was staring fixedly at the floor.

  Anselm wiped his mouth. —Look at Agnes, he said, —with all the little faggots around her. Christ. He looked vaguely in that direction for a moment, then returned to Stanley. —When are you going to Italy? he demanded, and as quickly turned on Otto, who drew up his cigarette like a smoking weapon of defense, but Anselm merely said, —There’s this broken-down old church where he wants to play the organ, something he wrote he wants to play on their organ. “Seated one day at the organ,” hey Stanley? How does it go, “weary and ill at ease”? And your fingers running idly over the . . . hey! He was gone, after someone with a bottle. —Give me some beer.

  Somewhere a sober voice said, —I suppose you might call me a positive negativist. Elsewhere, —Of course he’ll never write another book, his bookshelves are crammed with books in different jackets and every one of them inside is that book of his. From a conversasation on the excellent abstract composition in isolated fragments of Constable, rose Adeline’s voice, —like the solids in Oochello . . . Above them all the Worker’s Soul hung silent, refusing comment; though the red lead recalled bridges built by horny hands, sexually unlike any that fluttered glasses beneath it now, the spots of rust a heavy male back straining between girders, generically different from any weaving here. For all its spatters of brightness, that canvas looked very tired, hanging foreign and forlorn over the sad garden. There, Anselm paused with a glass in one hand, treating his chin with a piece of (No. 1/2) sandpaper in the other.