Conrad Aiken: Great Circle

— Turn right here — up Plympton Street.

— Yes, sir, I always do miss that turn.

He leaned forward, staring, watched the flight of buildings, wet poles and trees, an empty yard with a forlorn and ruined car standing in gleaming mud, broken palings of a white fence, Mount Auburn Street, the Lampoon building. Here with a snowshoe once. The polychrome marble of the basement floor. The green lampshade full of Mib’s homemade punch. Dooley, with a roller towel around his neck, “pully-hauling down the bay.” And the midnight operas, with Tom at the piano, the screams of bumwad, bumwad, Heeney’s Palace of Pleasure, falling down the thickly carpeted stairs, out of the shower bath, with a cake of soap in his hand—

Bumwad, bumwad, bumwad, bumwad. The first step toward Haydn, and a more refined appreciation of music. Oh, yes! Oh, yes, indeed.

— All right — stop here.

Enter, to grow in wisdom.

A dollar, ten cents for the tip.

And now to take the rain on the chin, and the world on the heart. The solar knockout. Through the Yard? Through the Square? But Tao is round and square by turns, and perfectly indifferent to its participant particles: what does it matter: salute the cheerful lights of the Square: walk under them: bathe in the lamplit perpendiculars of the rain: count the drugstores: the restaurants: the dealers in athletic goods: the skates in the windows: the fur-lined gloves and neckties. In that lighted room up there, as a freshman, I carved my initials on the window sill, meanwhile saying over and over to myself, “ tu pupila es azul, y quando lloras —” I who had never wept, to whom tears were unknown, whose little griefs were the merest trifling creak of growing wood. Christ. How things change. And here, all of a sudden, it was almost half past nine, a hundred years later, and gray hairs beginning to show above his ears, rain falling on a row of yellow taxis beside the subway entrance, and now a deep swirling bell striking the half hour, half past nine, half past God, and only a ten minutes’ walk between him and a new destiny with a new dragon shape and new dragon eyes. Be calm, old fellow. Look at it carefully and quizzically, from a distance, measure it with a calculating eye, count the hackles and spines on its back, offer it a tin of condensed milk. Perhaps it will be friendly. Perhaps it will curl up before you like a pet cat, and go to sleep. Why worry? Will a mere disaster kill you? Is love so damned essential? Or pride?

But you should have called her up on the telephone. You should have called her up. It isn’t fair. You aren’t giving the poor girl a chance. Girl? Don’t make us laugh. Yes, just the same, you know it’s true, you should have called her up. Why not do it now. Here at the drugstore. What difference does it make? Even over the telephone, if she’s guilty, she’ll know you know she’s guilty. Say you’ll be home in five minutes: that wouldn’t give her time to put things to rights. All the little telltale things: the caught breath, the changed voice, the ill-chosen word, the overdone welcome, and then the hairpins on the pillow.

He stood at the counter, put his wet hand on the edge of nickel, looked down at the rows of cigars in cedar boxes, the gaudy paper covers with lithochromes of Cuban beauties, flags, palm trees. The row of telephone-booths were just beyond, at the back, beside the little tables and chairs of twisted copper. He saw them with the corner of his right eye. Come on Andy, be a good guy and call her up. Give them a chance. But whose funeral was this? It wasn’t Bertha that was going to suffer — it wasn’t Tom — it was himself. This was nothing but cowardice, cowardice, cowardice masquerading as consideration. The thing must be cut off instantly, with a knife. Fsst: and done. Antiseptic. A pure and beautiful therapeutic murder, severance of connections now no longer real or useful, in order that each of them, released, might continue to grow. Of course. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? Just the same—

— Yes, sir.

— A package of Camels.

Just the same—

His eyes were full of rain. Unreasonable. Church Street, where the lilacs used to be, and were no more, and the gray wooden steeple of the Unitarian Church, pointing upward toward the low bright illuminated clouds full of Cantabrigian and Bostonian rain. And the old gymnasium there, among the stables, and the huge book on physiology which they had all read in secret. Sex! Good jumping Jesus, to think of the nuisance, and nothing but nuisance, that sex had been. And after all this time, after a hundred years, at half past nine, or half past God, this final climax. This banal climax.

At the corner of the old graveyard, beside the milestone, he paused in the rain, hung hesitating, watched the brightly lighted Belmont bus splash through a wide sheet of water. Garden Street, or through the Common? Common or Garden? What on earth did it matter? Better take the shorter way, and get the thing over. Past the cannons, which he used to straddle. Past the baseball-field, where he used to strike out every time he came to bat. And the Civil War monument, about which the French architect had said, “ Ah! Il est sorti! ” This is your life here, here are all the days and nights, the sunlit afternoons, the school mornings, the bird-hunting expeditions to the Botanical Gardens or the Observatory, here was the dancing-school, misery of miseries, where later too, in freshman year, were the Coffee Parties, the Cheap and Hungries, all your past life here lies about you, cauchemar of echoes and whispers, here palpably still vibrating in the rain and darkness. Take hold of them. Resume them. Immerse yourself in them. Pull yourself, as it were, together. You are only a football field in the frost, the hard frozen turf, the raw knuckles, the mud on the cleats, the baseball-glove rubbed with olive oil, the baseball with scarred skin. You are only a drawing of a bowl of nasturtiums, the flowers drawn faintly and delicately, with tenderest self-love, the leaves heavily and boldly outlined, black-leaded, the veins deliberately varicosed. Here you are still bringing across the dance floor a glass cup of lemon sherbet to your darling Bertha, who waits for you in a varnished folding chair, with a white shawl drawn across her young shoulders, the violets pinned to her waist, her eyes still looking up at you shyly as you approach, as you continue forever approaching, like an eternal variable which never reaches its ultimate in God. Shall we sit this one out? Shall we go down to the steps for a breath of air? It’s so hot in here. You know, I’m so afraid I bore you. Bore me! You couldn’t bore a hole in a wall. I saw you yesterday on Brattle Street. Did you really — why didn’t you come and speak to me? I saw you walking with a girl by Fresh Pond. Oh, yes, we went to see the pumping station. And the algae. The algae? The algae. You know, Miss Wentworth is so interested in lichens and algae. Well, it seems a harmless taste, doesn’t it? Would you rather have had chocolate ice cream — I ought to have come and asked you, but there was such a crowd packed round the table that I thought I’d better get what I could. Tom wants the next dance — I think I’d better let him have it. It would look better. Here he is, coming now, laughing as usual, with that long athlete’s lunge of a step, his beautiful slippers turned inward in studious imitation of the Indian walk. Another variable approaching another limit — and now — no no no no no no. But it couldn’t be. No. This is not that time, that year, this is later, another world, another place, another pause between star-ruins, there is no connection, no logic. You are here alone in the cold rain, under the lighted windows of the new apartment house, under those very windows where a fortnight ago the man and girl were found shot in a suicide pact. Two dead in Love Nest. You tear open the package of cigarettes, breaking the blue stamp with your forefinger, pinch the edge of a cigarette between two finger nails, draw it forth, light it on the corner of Concord Avenue and Follen Street. This is you, Andrew Cather: you have changed: you are no longer there, in that dance hall, nor there at Arlington Heights looking for star flower and False Solomon’s Seal and anemone, nor do you still wait patiently for hours in the Botanical Gardens with a pair of opera glasses, hoping to see the scarlet tanager or the grosbeak. These have nothing to do with you. This is dead. You are dead. You are at most a shadow of those events, they no longer concern you: cut yourself off from them: give up forever that pale Narcissus who everywhere wants to walk beside you: beat him down, away, break him as you would break a false mirror, walk freely away from the shining fragments, which still would whisper to you their intriguing lies. This is you, this being whose steps stagger just slightly with alcohol, whose hands just now again trembled as you again lit your cigarette, in whose hip pocket the flask of gin is beginning perceptibly to grow warm: taste it and see. Why this desperate and eleventh-hour attempt to recapitulate? You are engaged in a victory, an exodus, not a recapitulation. Cut them off with a word. Blow them out of the window, out of the world, out of bed, with a word. One ringing word like Roland’s horn, winding among the wind-worn Pyrenees.