Conrad Aiken: Great Circle

— Saint Pandarus.

— Yes, fry, lechery, fry. Isn’t it wonderful. Along the banks of the Styx on the obscenic railway. In that room once, in that bed once. But it’s impossible that I should have willed it, Bill, impossible. Why should I want to do such a thing? Or half want to do it. Am I in love with Bertha? The angels are coming to tell me what love is. I can hear them: they are galloping along Massachusetts Avenue in a fleet of—. What. They are giving tongue. The snowflakes are their voices: innumerable: I hear them calling me. I shall attend the convention of angels in the ballroom of the Statler Hotel, and make an inaugural address on the nature of love. Love is cruelty. Love is hate. Love is a desire to revenge yourself. It’s a bloody great butcher’s cleaver, that’s what it is. It has eyes of a ferocity known only to comets, its hands are red, its feet are claws, its wings are scythes of jealousy. Its will is destruction: it tears out the heart of the beloved, in order that its own heart may break. Love is murder. It’s a suicide pact, and all for what? All for death.

— The little boy has been reading Latin poetry again. Odi et amo . Ah, yes, the cruel ambivalence of life, poor Andy. Where have I heard all this before. Who bit you.

— I bit myself, in the cradle, when I first puked my mother’s milk.

— I thought so. Little Andrew Suck-a-Thumb.

— So this is love: we reach a new conception of love, Bill, and one that does us credit. I see it exactly — exactly. It’s nothing on earth but a domestication of death. Our little domestic death. It’s a ballet. See them go to bed together — listen to them murmuring adoration — hear them whisper and kiss — O God, all that silken sinuosity and hypocrisy and ecstasy — the beautiful painful dance — which twinkles starlike, moves so swift and fine — and all of it a thin masque to cover the raw red tomb-face of primordial hatred. Skull purring at skull, death’s-head kissing death’s-head, the caress a strangle, consummation a swordthrust. It’s killed me: I’m dead. I’ve eaten my father’s skeleton and I’m dead. I shall never love again, any more than I’ll ever be able to stop loving. Christ, what a fix we’re in. Helpless. Burn off our hands. Drink ourselves into permanent unconsciousness. Love — don’t make us laugh. It’s automatic — no virtue in it — might as well praise the grassblade for being a grassblade — the weather vane for turning in the wind — the blood for pouring from a wound. In the spring the young libido lightly turns to thoughts of lust. Pressure of the seminal vesicles, and Tom falls in love with my wife. And meanwhile what am I doing? What indeed: the answer is nothing. I stand still like a whirlwind that hangs in one spot, uncertain where to go. Enormous concentration of energy, aimless, like an undischarged lightning flash. What in the name of God shall I do — where shall I go — tell me.

— Go back to Bertha. And hurry up about it. Try to be civilized. Or pretend to be, if you can’t. Give the poor girl a break, why don’t you. She probably hasn’t slept a wink for a week.

— Doesn’t deserve to, either. No. Plenty of time for sleeping later on. Let her lie awake for a while and think: she’s put it off too long. She ought to have done her thinking beforehand. Now it’s a battle of wits. And do you know what I think I’ll do? Gosh, I’ve got an idea. Yes, I see it all of a sudden, and it’s going to be good. This bottle’s empty. I’ll have to go back to whisky.

— Well, what’s the bright idea.

— I’m going to surround them.

— What do you mean.

— Just exactly that. I’m going to surround them. That’s my one great advantage, don’t you see? I know more about it than they do. I know more about Berty than Tom does, and more about Tom than Berty does. And there I am, and there by God I’ll stay, like a third consciousness, present at every damned thing they think or do. I’ll haunt them like a ghost. I’ll go to bed with them and get up with them. I’ll make them so self-conscious that they’ll go crazy. I’ll be everywhere — they’ll find me in the bathtub, at the piano, on the pillow, in the kitchen sink. My whole history constantly before them. How can they empty their memories of Andrew One-eye Cather, overnight? Can’t be did. All the habits they’ve shared with me for hundreds of years — the jokes, the odds and ends of intimacy each of them has in common with me — how can they escape? They can’t. And here’s the point — they love me. Don’t they? Well, that makes it all the worse. If I just stand aside with meditative irony now — if I just watch them cynically from across the street, as it were — saunter by from time to time — send them a picture postcard from Montreal or Timbuctoo — reappear before them at a Sander’s Theater concert, disguised as one of the bats that circle above the orchestra — speak to them from the forsythia bushes in the spring — eat hot dogs with them at John’s — laugh at them from the comic strips at breakfast — Christ, Bill, it’s going to be good. Don’t you see. I’ll surround them like a cloud. When Bertha kisses Tom, she’ll think — this isn’t Andy. This is Tom. He doesn’t kiss in quite the same way. He doesn’t place his arms in quite the same way. And what’s the result — she’s kissing two people at once. Now I ask you, Bill, can she be happy, doing that? For long? No. Nor Tom either. He’ll be thinking — she has kissed Andy like this. Ten years. Night after night. He has seen her in this hat, this dress, this nightgown, these tarpaulin knickers. He is here now. And is she thinking about him when I slip my arm under her left shoulder — is she wishing, at the bottom of her heart, that it were he. Will they discuss that, I wonder. And what good would it do if they did. None. They would at once begin to tremble on the brink of the unspeakable, the unformulable, the realm of doubts and suspicions, where passionate reassurances drop dead like birds into a volcano. Isn’t it wonderful? Hrrrp. Excuse me.

— You’re insane. I never heard anything so disgusting and cruel in my life. You ought to be ashamed.

— Not at all. All’s fair. Love and war. I think I’ll do it. But come to think of it, I don’t have to do it. It will do itself. I can’t even help it, if I wanted to. Automatic. Guilt. Suppose I decide to be a trumpeting little angel about it, take it all with good grace and magnanimity, tell them to go ahead and make a bright little affair of it for as long as they like, Andy standing meekly and beautifully aside — all right, you fool, suppose I do. What then. It will be all the worse for them. I was just exaggerating, you see. I really have nothing to do with it. Just one of those assumptions of imaginary power. The truth is, I can’t help it. Two rapid falcons in a single snare condemned to do the flittings of the bat.

— Nice. A wonderful vision. But there is something else—

— You’re asleep.

— No. But there is something else—

— Well, all right, all right, go ahead, spit it out. Don’t goggle at the ceiling like a pekingese.

— It’s my business to goggle, you poor prune. The Freudian technique of the colorless and dispassionate auditor.

— Dispassionate hell.

— But just the same, I’ll give you an idea.

— Oh, very kind of you, darling little Bill. How much will I owe you.

— Your life, very likely.

— Keep the change. Do you think we’ll have an early spring? Will the Bruins win the Stanley Cup? Or what have you.

— If you’ll shut up and stand still for a minute, instead of running up and down the room like a—

— Pterodactyl.

— I’ll tell you. That is, if I can get hold of it. Wait. This idea of the surrounding consciousness — there’s something in it. Yes, something in it. But not as you foresee, quite — no — because you want to use it as an instrument of revenge. That wouldn’t do any good — in fact, it would ultimately punish yourself most of all. But suppose you do it with real kindness — I mean, real love — for both of them. You admit you love them. Presumably, therefore, you want their happiness. Don’t you?