The Recognitions

by William Gaddis

  When the devil appeared to Gerbert, to claim his soul, Gerbert resisted; and disappeared in a fork of flame.

  The tracking point of the pen moved on the paper, and it was gone, Esme had lost it, and lay in the agonized exhaustion of this recovery of her temporal self. Still, on the edge of the chasm into which she could not fall, Esme quivered with anticipation of a sound which would interrupt, waiting fearfully for the signal to recall her from that edge. In the silence of waiting, she recovered herself; slow, she stepped back; silence, she began to talk with herself; stillness, she moved with exaggeration as though she were being watched, needed to be watched suddenly, to have another consciousness present, aware of her, containing her, to assure her of her own existence. There was no one. Even her voice sounded with a disembodied quality which frightened her. She sat there quiet again with the pen over paper, reduced in despair, her face expressing nothing but empty misunderstanding at being alone.

  Across the air shaft from her closed window a woman ironed on a board. A man in underclothes appeared to stand beside her for a moment, talk silently and disappear. Then with no change in her expression Esme was crying and she turned her face from the window where she had been watching unbeknown. On the paper she wrote,

  In a nicely calcimined

  Apartment is a left-behind

  Opera chair against the wall

  Masquerading for a ball,

  an exercise as significant as those ceremonies carried out at the insistence of the people during papal interdicts in the medieval Church, when saying the Mass was forbidden, but “the brethren had only to ring their bells, and play their organ in the choir; and the citizens in the nave were quite happy in the belief that Mass was being said behind the screen.”

  Esme wrote regretfully, pouting,

  Your name is said in a far-off place

  By someone alone in a room

  You do not hear it

  but it was spent. And the miracle of transubstantiation? only a glimpse; and only the fragrance of its death remained, the heavenly fragrance, as of lilies, which rose from the body of Saint Nicolas of Tolentino, after he had reproved his sorrowing brethren who brought him a dish of doves on his sweltering deathbed, and with a pass of his hand restored their plumage and sent them flying out of the window of his cell; only the scent of lilies, rotting in the fruit jar beside her.

  She lit a spirit lamp, and sat beside it for a moment before finding a teaspoon in which to liquefy an injection of heroin, staring into the flame, and the lilies beyond it. —If I am not real to him, she said aloud, staring at the dead lilies, —then where am I real? And the book of Stevenson, which she had laid open on a pile of books beside the lamp, threatened to catch fire. She took it down, and read there, again, “You are a man and wise; and I am but a child. Forgive me, if I seem to teach, who am as ignorant as the trees of the mountain; but those who learn much do but skim the face of knowledge; they seize the laws, they conceive the dignity of the design—the horror of the living fact fades from their memory. It is we who sit at home with evil who remember . . . and are warned and pity . . .”

  knock knock knock sounded on her door, in ruthless precision of recall to time in its aseptic succession of importunate instants. Her lips tightened. —Who is it? she called.

  —Chaby.

  —Jesis Christ why don’t you put some lights on? he said when she let him in. He walked past her to the light cord.

  —Because I’m alone, Esme said. Her weight hung on him, and without a word he bore her down.

  As the afternoon ended, Otto was walking alone, south, on Madison Avenue, his own face expressing an extreme of the concentration of vacancy passing all around him, the faces of office messengers, typists turned out into the night air, dismally successful young men, obnoxious success in middle age, women straining at chic and accomplishing mediocrity who had spent the afternoon spending the money that their weary husbands had spent the afternoon making, the same husbands who would arrive home minutes after they did, mix a drink, and sit staring in the opposite direction. With his dispatch case, and an unkind thought for everyone he knew, Otto carried his head high. Affecting to despise loneliness, still he looked at the unholy assortment streaming past him as though hopefully to identify one, rescue some face from the anonymity of the crowd with instantly regretted recognition, and so rescue himself. He even strongly considered conversation with strangers; and with this erupted the thought of his father whom he had arranged to telephone, and appoint a place for their first meeting. With this, Otto took sudden new interest in every very successful middle-aged man who passed, coveting diamond stickpins, a bowler hat, an ascot tie, and even (though he would have been shocked enough if this were “Dad”) a pair of pearl-gray spats. It was a problem until now more easily left unsolved; and be damned to Oedipus and all the rest of them. For now, the father might be anyone the son chose. The instant their eyes met in forced recognition, it would be over.

  —I must call the Sun Style Film man, he thought suddenly. —Peru, and northern Bolivia . . . Someone beside him was asking him how to get to Vesey Street. Otto held the impatient man with long and intricate explanation, two sets of alternate routes and was commencing a third when the poor fellow retreated down wind, thanking him, retiring to a policeman to ask directions for Vesey Street.

  On the corner a tall black man with an umbrella towered in a hat of unseasonal straw, though on him no more out of season than the permanent attire of a statue. He stood as far as possible from the black poodle dog as their leash would allow, atolls of a formidable reef casting the white-caps to one side and the other. —He’s very handsome, Otto said of the strangely familiar animal.

  —I takin her to the veterinary, said Fuller, not looking at this young man whom he did not know but at the dog. —Seem like she sufferin with the worms, he added with relish, looking at the dog which ignored him.

  —That’s a shame, said Otto. —Beautiful dog.

  —Yes, mahn, said Fuller, looking up and back at the poodle, —seem like she sufferin from the worms, he repeated, watching her face as though hoping to see discomfort and embarrassment cloud it.

  The light changed, and the sea moved reuniting its currents, bore the reef away north and Otto south toward Esme. He had left her late the night before after what might have been an argument, except that he found no way to argue with Esme. He had worked for so long to develop his weak capacity for dialectic into equipment for a sophistical game that he was useless now against her blank simplicity. When she had asked him not to spend the night with her there, —because it’s so Greenwich Village . . . he realized that none of his cleverness would change her mind. Still he was jealous enough of her: she had a way of bending one shoulder down almost upon the table and looking up across at him, laughing, which rose into his mind now, and he hurried toward the pit of the subway.

  —Wait a minute, Esme called, after he had climbed her stairs wearily. Chaby was still fastening his clothes when he knocked.

  Otto and Chaby did not exchange any greeting. They had come to behave together like two animals of different zoological classes in a private zoo, each wondering at their owner for keeping the other. Otto made it evident that he was waiting. Esme treated the three of them together as though they were well-met friends, or as happily, thorough strangers, while Otto smoked industriously. Chaby left, after keeping Esme at the door in a conversation audible enough to drive Otto to turning on the radio, which he did with an air of long habit. After Chaby had gone, Esme sat down beside the truculent smoker on the daybed. He suggested that they go to dinner, making the invitation in a tone tired but duty-bound, as a gentleman, a concept which labored mightily in his mind as it does in many, who find it the last refuge for insipience.

  She agreed readily; at which he sulked more oppressively still. When she drew off her dress to change it, he tried to put his arms around her. —You don’t do that to ladies who are dressing themselves, she said to him. —Besides your funny bandage gets in t
he way.

  —I may have to go to Bolivia and northern Peru, Otto said soberly, and as though in direct answer. —Soon enough, he added, somewhat menacing. While she sought another dress, he opened his dispatch case and took out the play with business-like aversion. He separated the pages quickly to Act II scene iii, and immediately found the line. Enough times he had found it with a fond smile. Now he took his pen and drew it blackly through

  PRISCILLA (with tragic brightness): But don’t you understand, Gordon? These are the moments which set the soul yearning to be taken suddenly, snatched out of the heart of some fearful joy and set down before its Maker, hatless, disheveled and gay, with its spirit unbroken.

  He wrote in:

  Don’t you understand the sudden liberation that’s come over me?

  and sat pouring smoke down on the wet ink.

  Out on the street, Otto said, —How does it feel to be with a gentleman for a change?

  —Ot-to.

  —But he is such a ratty little creature, Chaby. How can you stand him.

  —Isn’t he bad? she said laughing, on Otto’s arm. —Do you know what he did when I first knew him? He had something in his hands, and he told me to reach into his pants pocket and get some matches, and I reached in and he’d cut the bottom of the pocket off, my hand just went in and in. Wasn’t that bad?

  —Yes. What did you do then?

  —I didn’t do anything.

  —Well what did he do?

  —I don’t remember.

  —Where do you want to have dinner?

  —At the Viareggio?

  —Esme, that place is always so full of . . . well, I don’t know, all the rags and relics below Fourteenth Street. It’s like Jehovah’s Witnesses when you sit down at a table there, everybody comes over. Why do you go there anyhow?

  —I don’t go there.

  —Esme!

  —People take me there, she said. And by now they were at the door of the Viareggio, a small Italian bar of nepotistic honesty before it was discovered by exotics. Neighborhood folk still came, in small vanquished numbers and mostly in the afternoon, before the two small dining rooms and the bar were taken over by the educated classes, an ill-dressed, underfed, overdrunken group of squatters with minds so highly developed that they were excused from good manners, tastes so refined in one direction that they were excused for having none in any other, emotions so cultivated that the only aberration was normality, all afloat here on sodden pools of depravity calculated only to manifest the pricelessness of what they were throwing away, the three sexes in two colors, a group of people all mentally and physically the wrong size.

  Smoke and the human voice made one texture, knitting together these people for whom Dante had rejuvenated Hell six centuries before. The conversation was of an intellectual intensity forgotten since Laberius recommended to a character in one of his plays to get a foretaste of philosophy in the public latrine. There were poets here who painted; painters who criticized music; composers who reviewed novels; unpublished novelists who wrote poetry: but a poet entering might recall Petrarch finding the papal court at Avignon a “sewer of every vice, where virtue is regarded as proof of stupidity, and prostitution leads to fame.” Petrarch, though, had reason to be irritated, his sister seduced by a pope: none here made such a claim, though many would have dared had they thought of it, even, and the more happily, those with younger brothers.

  —Is that really Ernest Hemingway over there? someone said as they entered. —Where? —Over there at the bar, that big guy, he needs a shave, see? he’s thanking that man for a drink, see him?

  —I suppose you’d call me a positive negativist, said someone else.

  —Max seems to have a good sense of spatial values, said a youth on their right, weaving aside to allow Esme to pass, —but his solids can’t compare, say, with the solids in Uccello. And where is abstract without solids, I ask you?

  While Otto looked dartingly for Max, Esme entered with flowing ease, and pleasure lighting her thin face as she smiled to one person after another with gracious familiarity. —There he is, Otto said, as they sat down. The juke-box was playing Return to Sorrento. Otto adjusted his sling, and smoothed his mustache. Esme sat, looking out over this spectral tide with the serenity of a woman in a painting; and often enough, like gallery-goers, the faces turned to look at her stared with vacuity until, unrecognized, self-consciousness returned, and they looked away, one to say, —I know her, but God knows who he is; another to say, —She was locked up for months, a couple of years ago; and another to listen to the joke about Carruthers and his horse.

  At Max’s table, among his and six other elbows, a number of wet beer glasses, a book titled Twit Twit Twit and a copy of Mother Goose, lay The Vanity of Time. Max rose, and came over with it.

  —What did you think of it? Otto asked, pleasantly, not getting up. He rescued the pages, and wiped off a couple of spots which were still wet.

  —Well Otto, it’s good, Max said doubtfully.

  —But what? What did you think?

  —Well, I’ll tell you the truth. It was funny sometimes, reading it. Like I’d read it before. There were lines in it . . .

  —You mean you think it’s plagiarized? Otto named the word.

  —Well, Max said, laughing like a friend.

  —Look, you had it out, I mean, at the table. Did they . . . I mean, did all those other people see it?

  —They were looking at it. I didn’t think you’d mind, and you see, I did want to ask them what they thought, about . . . recognizing it.

  —Well? Otto opened his dispatch case, turning it away from view so that it was not apparent that the play went in to join its duplicates.

  —What did they think? Pretty much the same thing, I think, Max admitted. —George said he felt like he could almost go right on with one of the . . . one of the lines. And Agnes . . .

  —Agnes Deigh? You mean you talked to her about it?

  —Well, it came up in conversation. I was up at her office this morning, talking with her about my novel. It’s coming out in the spring. She’s trying to arrange the French rights now.

  —But what did you think it was plagiarized from, if you’re all so sure I stole it.

  —Nobody said you’d stolen it, Otto. It was just that some of the lines were a little . . . familiar.

  —Yes but from what?

  —That’s the funny thing, nobody could figure it out, one of us would be just about to say, and then we couldn’t put our finger on it. But don’t worry about it, Otto. It’s a good play. Then he straightened up, taking his hands from the table where he’d rested them, and said, —I’m showing some pictures this week, can you come to the opening?

  —Yes, but . . .

  —Thanks for letting me read it, Otto . . .

  —There was one line I borrowed, I mean I put it in just to try it out . . . Otto called after him, but Max was gone to his table, where he talked to the people seated with him. They looked up at Otto.

  Esme ate quietly, across from Otto’s silent fury, weighted now to sullenness with four glasses of whisky, before his veal and peppers had appeared.

  —Hello Charles, Esme said looking up, kindly. —You look very well tonight. Charles smiled wanly. Silver glittered in his hair. His wrists were bandaged, his glass empty. —Do you want my glass of beer, Charles? Because I can’t drink it. She handed it to him, and murmuring something, without a look at Otto, he left.

  —Really, Esme.

  —What is it, Otto? she said brightly.

  —Well I mean, I can’t buy beer for everybody in the place.

  She smiled to him. —That’s because you don’t want to, she said.

  —You’re damned right I don’t, he said, looking round, and back at his plate.

  —Of course I know it’s near Christmas, said someone behind him. —For Christ’s sake, what do you want me to do about it, light up?

  There was a yelp from the end of the bar; and a few, who suspected it of being inhuman, tur
ned to see a dachshund on a tight leash recover its hind end from a cuspidor. The Big Unshaven Man stepped aside. —I’m God-damned sorry, he said. —Oh, said the boy on the other end of the leash, —Mister Hemingway, could I buy you a drink? You are Ernest Hemingway aren’t you?

  —My friends call me Ernie, said the Big Unshaven Man, and turning to the bar, —a double martini, boy.

  Though the place appeared crowded beyond capacity, more entered from the street outside, crying greetings, trampling, excusing themselves with grunts, struggling toward the bar.

  —Elixir of terpin hydrate with codein in a little grapefruit juice, it tastes just like orange Curaçao. What do you think I was a pharmacist’s mate for.

  —When I was in the Navy we drank Aqua Velva, that shaving stuff. You could buy all you wanted on shipboard.

  —Yeah? Well did you ever drink panther piss? the liquid fuel out of torpedoes?

  The juke-box was playing Return to Sorrento. A boy with a sharp black beard sat down beside Esme. —Have you got any tea? he asked her. She shook her head, and looked up at Otto, who had not heard, had not in fact even noticed the person sitting half behind him. —Sometimes I really hate Max, he said, then noticed the beard. —I mean, I mistrust him. There were no introductions. —That poor bastard, said the beard. —He’s really had it, man. So has she.

  —Who? Otto asked incuriously.

  —His girl, she’s getting a real screwing. She wanted to marry him last year but she wanted him to be analyzed first. Max didn’t have any money so she paid for it. Now his analyst says he’s in love with her for all the neurotic reasons in the book. It don’t jive, man. He’s through with her but he can’t leave her because he can’t stop his analysis.

  —Does she know it?

  —Who, Edna? She . . .

  —Edna who?

  —Edna Mims, she’s a blonde from uptown. He used to bring her down here to shock her, and then take her home and ball her . . .

  —Edna? said Otto, unable to swallow. —With him?