The Recognitions

by William Gaddis

  —Sit down. Merry Christmas, said the man who sat beside the only empty seat in the bus. Mr. Pivner sat down. He was very tired, and nervous. He lifted the wet portion of his trouser away from his leg, and looked out the window. His destination lay some fifteen blocks on.

  —I congradulate you. You’re the first man I’ve met, said his companion. —D’you want to read the Bible? I got it right here. He disappeared for a moment under a flurry of newspaper.

  The bus bore on, block after block. Chapter six, How to Make People Like You Instantly: (“So I said to myself: ‘I am going to try to make that chap like me . . . What is there about him that I can honestly admire?’ . . . I instantly saw something that I admired no end”), —What a wonderful head of hair you have, said Mr. Pivner. The man beside him looked at the thin hair on Mr. Pivner’s head, and then clutched a handful of his own. —Lotsa people like it, he said. Then he sat back and looked at Mr. Pivner carefully. —Say what is this, are you queer or something?

  Mr. Pivner’s eyes widened. —I . . . I . . .

  —Where you going?

  —I get off here, said Mr. Pivner, and got out of the bus when it stopped, six blocks from his destination. It was a cold night, and the wind blew, concentrating on the wet spot on his trousers. How could he explain that, to his son? He walked on, suffering, more weary, against the wind, hoping now that the wind would dry that place before he reached the hotel.

  He stopped outside its doors, to pull the green muffler from his coat. The wind helped him to whip it into plain sight.

  —Whhhhelllll, here we are, said a familiar voice beside him. —My friend! Merry Christmas!

  —Not now, said Mr. Pivner, quivering a hand in the air. He stepped toward the hotel.

  —That’s the idea. A drink for Christmas, said his companion, accompanying him. —Merry Christmas! You know, I’ve got a religion too, my friend.

  Mr. Pivner paused at the revolving door. He said, —Go away.

  —We’re going to have a Christmas drink, friend. We’re going to be friends. Like Damon and Pissyass, ha, hahahahaha . . .

  The revolving door swung, emptying Mr. Pivner into the lobby where he stood weaving from the shock of the warm air, blinking his eyes, looking. The revolving door continued its round: —Whhhay, Merry Christmas!

  Mr. Pivner reeled. He fell toward the tall bellboy, who caught him by the shoulders. He tried to speak; but he only gurgled. He was barely conscious. He was being taken out of the lobby.

  —Whoooufff . . . I have a religion too gentlemen . . .

  —Get them out of here, out the side door.

  —Merry Christmas gentlemen . . . what’s this, the policemen’s ball?

  —It looks bad for the hotel, taking them out the front way.

  —I seen the little one, standing out in front there, fooling with his clothes, said the tall bellboy when quiet was restored.

  —It’s no good for the hotel, that kind of thing. Too early yet, said the manager. —Even so, you got to be charitable for them.

  —He passed right out in my arms, just like my old man. Some of them you can’t keep away from it, like my old man, you could blindfold him and tie him to the bed, but he always finds it.

  They both stepped aside to let a breathless young man pass. One arm was concealed under his coat. He stopped to pull at his muffler, looking round him. Then he checked his coat and went into the bar with the muffler still around his neck.

  —Don’t tell me that kid ain’t had one too many, said the tall bellboy.

  —So it’s Christmas, said the manager.

  The mirror behind the bar was tinted, and of such a slight convexity that those who appeared within its confines wore healthy complexions, figures not distorted but faces slightly slimmer, and he appeared the more grave, she assumed delicacy, lost weight and the years gathered conspiring under the chin. Otto’s pale lips, drawn in tension, appeared as thin dark lines of determination, the straggle of hairs on the upper lip a diffidently distinctive mustache. He raised an eyebrow. He moistened his lips, and curled the upper one. Left eyebrow raised, eyelids slightly drawn, lips moistened, parted, down at corners, his quivering hand anchored by the glass, he turned to look at the woman beside him. She was staring straight ahead. He returned to the mirror, where her eyes in ambush caught him and he felt tricked, out-maneuvered; and he quickly returned his eyes to their own reflection. Kettle drums rolled in some semi-classical pursuit from hidden untended amplifiers, rolling to crescendos which manifested capture, then withering as the prey escaped.

  The blonde coughed. It was not the delicate unnecessary cough of a lady, drawing attention which she snares with her eyes, but a visceral sound of submission to reality. Nonetheless, looking at her he saw only her eyes as she turned and got down from the bar stool. She retreated in two directions at once, and Otto chose the mirror image to follow her short bobbing steps, and the ceding insinuation of her thighs. Among images of tables and portières she escaped in the tinted glass, but established him as the hunter and he drew breath, deeply, as though the air were fresh.

  In the mirror again he saw himself as he had seen himself from two thousand miles away. —How brown you are, Esther said. —And all in white . . . There was still time.

  As a child, Otto had had a phantasy which, in all of the childish good faith which designs such convictions, he passed for fact to himself and his friends. At about the time he learned that he had a father, or should have one, Albert, King of the Belgians, was killed mountain-climbing. It was not difficult to relate the two: he told that his father had been killed mountain-climbing, and so took upon himself the peculiar mantle of a prince.

  Looking hastily round the room now, and down the bar, the sudden apprehension of royalty filled him, royalty about to be shoved from the throne room to the scullery, where the pretender belonged. For royalty’s blunders always glisten with extraordinary foolhardiness, that makes them royal, distinguishes them from the common subjects who only make mistakes. And what blunderer more absurd than he who dethrones himself? So it has happened; a prince or a king may do it (but find a princess who would not at any cost be queen! a woman who would confess for no reason, who would step from shadows to), dare that reality which is the fabric of damnation, as men who have ruined themselves, for no reason, will tell you.

  Down the bar, a man of better than middle age took Otto’s attention. His suit was flannel, too light for the season, but bearing other seasons in other lands, as though it were spring now, in London, and he had stepped in from Saint James’s Street for a drink; that when he walked out it would be to cross the Mall, and into Saint James’s Park, across the turf, to pause for a moment and note the swans there, and other springtime foliage. (London and royalty wove close in Otto’s mind.) The man signaled the bartender, raising a hand which caught Otto with the gold flash of a signet ring, an affirmation, a summons which drew taut the muscles in his legs, ready to stand and deliver, do homage, receive from that hand the clasp of recognition, pledge fealty, inherit the signet and the kingdom its seal perpetuated. Undeterred by the man’s glance which turned to him, piqued quickly and moved on without curiosity or surprise (so the visage of monarchy, does not deign vulgar response), Otto looked and found resemblance. About the eyes, was it? the bridge of the nose? Clearer correspondence than the device hung from his own neck, wool proclamation of plebeian kinship, green signal of the multitude, its verdant undiscriminating growth.

  He drank off the whisky in his glass, lightened the anchor which held him still. Beside his hand lay a pair of black gloves and a gold cigarette case, next to the half-finished cocktail in its long-stemmed glass, smeared red at the lip. Engraved on the gold in generous longhand was the word Jean. There was still time.

  He lit a cigarette. His hand was weighted down with a full glass, and he relaxed slightly, looking down at his ringless fingers. He took the cigarette in his left hand and rested his slung-up elbow on the bar. The muffler got in his way. There was still time to destroy it.
If he telephoned Esther, he might get her husband; if he called him, Esther. He looked quickly over the room again. There was still time to destroy the muffler before it sprang the trap which he had laid himself, before Procrustes appeared to fetter him, with no more than a shock of recognition, to the bed of reality, stretch him or cut him down to fit, release him then, and publish him abroad. He drank down half his drink, and tucked the green muffler under his jacket collar. Walking (so he believed, quickly) toward the telephone booth, his fingers sorting the change in his pocket for the right coin, he rehearsed his conversation. —Esther? Listen . . . yes, it’s me, I told you I’d come back . . .

  He rested against the side of the booth, and closed his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them, lifted the receiver and dropped his coin. Before he could dial, he heard

  (—And so I says to him, you can’t ever tell what she’s going to do, she’s so psychological . . .

  (—Nobody asked me, but I could have told you . . .

  —Hello, Otto said. —Hello?

  (—Hello, said another voice, a young woman, —darling, is that you?

  —Hello? Hello?

  (—I think we got a crossed wire, would the other parties mind hanging up? . . . So then he says to me . . . where was I . . .

  Otto hung the receiver back on its hook, and clung to it himself. The door opened, and the light went out. Then as he started to the other telephone booth, he pressed his wrist against the breast pocket of his jacket, for assurance, the papers of identity, the money, the manhood implicit there. His wrist pressed against his chest. There was no interruption. There was no weight of that presence more familiar than his own bones, all he felt now with his wrist. The left hand leaped from the sling as he tore open his jacket with the other, and the bandaged wrist worked frantically down into the empty pocket, where his fingernails snagged rolls of dust. Then the left arm fell limp in the sling.

  When he felt the empty pocket he had said no, quite clearly in the tone of no, of absolute rational denial. He repeated it again, this time not the thud of negation but no with a shape to it, rising in the middle, a convexity of complaint and disbelief. His upper lip quivered and he raised his right hand, and put his forefinger along its length to stop it. Then he turned quickly into the other telephone booth, dialed, and stood bent rigid before the mouthpiece. —Hello? he said. He gripped the receiver and listened. He heard a clock ticking. —Hello? hello? Then he heard a sound which froze his hand on the receiver, and he stood paralyzed with it jammed against his ear: it was the sound of someone salivating, lips opening and closing, the tongue dropping in fluid from the roof of the mouth.

  He left the receiver swinging at the end of its cord, and turned seeking support, as he had in the subway threading a slow career down the veering deck where a man in shirtsleeves, swinging from pole to pole with tattooed arms, called out, —Hey buddy, could you tell me what’s the name of this ship we’re on? . . . and a spattering of lights signaled their next port of call. He disembarked with the man’s question filling his mind: unanswered and undiminished it lay there, static and insistent as a piece of ugly furniture, its place appointed, only to be dislodged by another more hideous when he stepped out on the quay, —Merry Christmas, hey, who got sick on your tie? . . . and climbing the mole, —You’re looking good too. Who’s your embalmer?

  —You’re going to be the richest woman in the graveyard, said the bartender, smiling. —How long since you’re back?

  —Two days, she answered, turning her head, smoothing her blond hair back over the separate mink pelts swung at her shoulders. The upper part of her face was attractively drawn, the lines of her forehead and nose simple and sharp. Her mouth, and below her mouth, lay heavy, and the jaw no forceful prominence but thickset.

  Lips parted, left eyebrow raised, he looked at her, but the eyes themselves stared out in an intent lunacy graduated by lust: he heard his own voice as one hears a voice far down the beach during a hesitation in the surf. The untended amplifiers threatened Aïda, and they drank. —My arm? he murmured. —Nothing, a scratch . . . and as he lowered his glass swept his forearm along his chest to feel only the corrugations of his ribs. He offered a cigarette with cool clumsiness, brandishing the sling. —Yes . . . they’re a regular occupational hazard down there, you know.

  The bartender laid the bill face down before him; and he glanced at it as though it were a splinter cast ashore, raising his eyes to the tinted horizon, and her indefinite profile afloat there, while his voice came on from far down the beach where the edge of the sea receded, to gather force from the mass and crash in again.

  —As a matter of fact, I’ve just recently finished writing a play, he went on, and took his eyes from her image in the glass to that of the figure beside her whose familiarity he acknowledged without haste: rather, he approached it carefully, with the controlled enthusiasm of a painter advancing upon an unfinished portrait put away for months while he has, all that time, studied it and completed it in his mind. Slight alteration of an eyebrow, a touch at the lips, embellished with a slight flaring of the nostrils, and he’d turned and presented this portrait to her.

  Her voice came in gusts, bringing them closer. —I don’t think you really ought to read a play, it spoils it when you see it . . . But somehow when I own a book, it’s almost like I’d read it . . . In the Modern Museum of Art, it was supposed to be a painting of a woman and he told me it was very valuable, but even my knees are better than hers were . . . The music had not stopped; had, in fact, been pounding its way into Aïda all this time, and by now reached “The dance of the little Moorish slaves.” —Isn’t just the word poem beautiful . . . ?

  Staring into the loose top of her dress, he stroked his mustache with a fingertip, and sat closer, to hear, —I couldn’t live without Christmas . . . as her knee came against his and lay there in warm confidence, like the plain gold cross whose stem sprang from between her breasts. —Yes, I turned into a Catholic when I got married . . . Shoulders drawn back, the cross climbed from between the cumulous embankments. —But then I got a divorce and I don’t know if I’m still one or not. He gave me this . . . The cigarette case was snapped open and closed in metallic rumination. —It’s all he ever gave me, it’s supposed to be gold but I have to go and have it redipped every two or three months, I keep it because it’s a kind of a sacred memory, that being the only time I was married and all.

  —I know what you mean. He squeezed her knee in gentle affirmation. His eyes settled on the bill, and seeking something more pleasant rose to the tinted mirror which showed his hair mussed, the green muffler askew: but neither hand dared leave its duty, to the casualty, and the casual prey. —Back to Central America, he heard his voice echo, minutes later, —South America, really. Boru and northern Polivia . . . And he sat staring into the mirror at the person who had made this statement. He waited; as one may in polite conversation, for it to be corrected. But the figure he saw there in the glass made no such effort, simply sat, as though facing destiny on equal terms at last.

  —Yes, my name’s Jean, she repeated. —And you?

  —My name? he said. —My name? His tongue clung to the roof of his dry mouth. He opened his lips and ran the end of his tongue over them. He started to raise his left arm to look at his watch, and the hampering sling surprised him as though he’d wakened bound. He did not look at his watch then, but thought he could hear it tick. He heard the sounds of his mouth recovering fluidity, heard his name but could not repeat it now, no more than the king who abdicates repeats the name he took when he assumed the crown. —Look . . . he murmured. She had a room in the hotel. The one next to it was empty. The bill for their drinks had mounted quite high: if he took the empty room he could sign for it. He looked down the bar quickly, to where the man in light gray flannel sat thoughtfully picking his nose with his thumb. —What time is it?

  She leaned forward. —Your watch says twenty minutes of eight.

  —Well then it’s stopped, it must have stopped . . . He drew o
ff the green muffler, and commenced to stuff one end in his pocket. —I’ll see about the room. But he sat still for a moment longer, watching the man in light gray flannel, to see if he had been noticed during all this time. The man had no green muffler; and as Otto drew off his own, a contract of necessity disappeared: the Damastean robber took his bed and was gone, slain by Theseus, that hero who identified himself to his father with the sword his father had left behind, Aegeus, King of Athens.

  Here the man in the light gray flannel suit signaled the bartender. The seal ring flashed, connoting monarchy; and turning away, the prince, to some extent, relaxed, as the Protean image of his father, after two decades of transforming itself, settled again prepared to change as soon as grasped, just as Proteus, rising from the sea at midday to sleep in the rock shade, assumed every possible shape and form to escape prophesying, when the curious caught him.

  Otto let himself down from the bar stool slowly, intent intending dignity, posturing peril; and then he hung there, staring, as the revolving door swung into the lobby. Santa Claus entered, propelled with a whack from behind, and stood unsteadily for a moment. Then he saw what he was looking for, and started for the bar just as the tall bellboy caught him and inserted him again into one of the revolving compartments, pushing him back in as he came round again, and finally getting in with him to help him out the other side, and send the red-clad saint to other hearths. The dining room swayed gracelessly, and as Otto’s feet rested upon the floor it seemed to shudder, like the deck of a ship as the hull lowers upon a ragged sea. He steadied himself for a moment; and then with his whole hand he felt for his inside breast pocket, as though the wallet must have been there all the time, its absence illusory, caused by witchcraft; and he glanced quickly at the blonde, as those medieval inquisitors, fingering the pages of the Malleus Maleficarum may have glanced at the witches who seemed to deprive men of their virile members, when they found that “such members are never actually taken away from the body, but are only hidden by a glamour from the senses of sight and touch.”