William Gaddis - Carpenter's Gothic

Back to the fire, he threw in the canceled passport, the worn address book, added crumpled papers, crumpled snapshots where repetitive landscapes, glimpses of dips, outcroppings, curled and turned black, added a split piece of ash from the copper tub and sat back in the wing chair making a fresh cigarette, the glass at his elbow, opening the slight book's paper covers to page 207 where it was marked with a slip of paper, a list in an open and generous hand, milk, paper towels, Tampax, tulip bulbs, which he crumpled and tossed into the flames before he took up there, I distrusted romance. See, though, how I yielded to it.

A man, 1 suppose, fights only when he hopes, when he has a vision of order, when he feels strongly there is some connexion between the earth on which he walks and himself. But there was my vision of a disorder which it was beyond any one man to put right. There was my sense of wrongness, beginning with the stillness of that morning of return… while from the kitchen, the chords of Bach's D major concerto heaved into the room around him and settled like furniture.

She lay back on the bed as though she'd never left it, the damp sheet turned chill and fallen away, feet curled close in the frolic of sunlight through the trees outside and her nipples drawn up hard with a hand passing down her breast, out to the knee flexing up for its reach, gliding down slowly on a hard edge of nails to the rising fall and the warmth of breath lingering in the villous suspense of her legs fallen wide broken, abruptly, by the sound of her own voice. — It's an amazing thing to be alive, isn't it… catching the hand back to sequester the white of her breast — I mean, when you think of all the people who are dead? And then, sharply up on an elbow — was that true, what you said last night? about having malaria? But whatever his answer might have been was lost in the muffle of her breast where his lips came up opened, and his tongue — wait… She held his face away, fretting his profile there under the eye with a fingertip — just, hold still…

— What are you, ow!

— No it's just, hold still it's just a little blackhead… bent closer, eyes creased in clinical concentration, a sharp thrust of her nail and — there. Did that hurt?

— Just didn't expect it, what…

— Wait there's another one… but he had her wrist in a turn that sank her back on the pillow, his hand gathering her breasts closer again and his lips — wasn't that a strange dream? She held his face pressed against her, — but they always are aren't they, when they're about death, I mean when they're about somebody dying and you don't even know who it is? Her fingers brushed the forehead, the hard cheekbone, the hard line of the jaw's fixed appetite there at her breast, — when he used to read out loud to me and I thought all the books were about him, and he wasn't really reading to me at all. Huckleberry Finn, The Call of the Wild, those stories by Kipling and that book about the Indian, the last Indian? He was just turning the pages and telling the story the way he wanted to. About himself. They were always about him… and the touch of her fingers went harder, hard as the lineaments they traced — it must have been about him, that dream. Don't you think so?

— You told me last night he was pushed off a train. I asked you when your father died and you said he was in a train accident, he was pushed off a train. Maybe that was a dream too.

— No but isn't it strange? I mean how you always want to tell your dream to somebody in every exact detail? and they couldn't care less? He didn't want to tell his, he said, and no, they weren't bad, they weren't complicated, they were just dull, they were about this house, a lot of them, finding the porch caved in, or a whole side of it missing, finding somebody he'd never seen before in the living room painting the walls orange, his hand now slipping lower along the swell of her thigh, over the pelvic crest, or they were about things that had happened twenty years ago, nothing he could do anything about, nothing that was any use now, his hand idling further where white gave way in velutinous red, a fingertip seeking refuge in the damp — but did you ever think? She was up on that elbow again, turned to him so his hand fell still on the white of the sheet, — about light years?

— About what?

— I mean if you could get this tremendously powerful telescope? and then if you could get far enough away out on a star someplace, out on this distant star, and you could watch things on the earth that happened a long time ago really happening? Far enough away, he said, you could see history, Agincourt, Omdurman, Crécy… How far away were they she wanted to know, what were they, stars? constellations? Battles he told her, but she didn't mean battles, she didn't want to see battles, — I mean seeing yourself… Well as far as that goes he said, get a strong enough telescope you could see the back of your own head, you could — That's not what I meant. You make fun of me don't you.

— Certainly not, why would…

— I mean seeing what really happened back when…

— All right, set up a mirror on Alpha Centauri then, you'd sit right here with your telescope watching yourself four, about four and a half years ago is that what you…

— No.

— But I thought…

— Because I don't want to see that! She pulled away, pulled up the sheet, staring up at the ceiling. — But you'd just see the outside though, wouldn't you. You'd just see the mountain you'd see it go down and you'd see all the flames but you wouldn't see inside, you wouldn't see those faces again and the, and you wouldn't hear it, a million miles away you wouldn't hear the screams… What screams, he wanted to — No, no that one's too close, find one further away… and he subsided, looking at the sheet clenched to her throat and the length of her gone under it, recommending Sirius, setting up business on the Dog Star, the brightest of them all, watching what happened eight and a half? nine years ago? — I told you what happened… the sheet clenched firm, — I told you last night no, twenty, twenty five years away when it was all still, when things were still like you thought they were going to be?

— Oh… He gave a gentle tug at the edge of the sheet, she caught it closer.

— Because I could see myself then at Longview, I mean there were always people, he'd have shooting parties, George Humphrey, Dulles, people like that they'd go out in these wagons for birds and, I don't know, foxes? He had Jack Russell terriers, that was when things started to get mixed up, that station wagon with those Jack Russell terriers because we just adored him. When we were little we thought he could do anything and then when we got older, when we started to say things he thought were critical and he sort of drew away and he got those dogs, those hateful little Jack Russell terriers they just adored him, they followed him everywhere they'd do anything to please him and we never could and then Billy, after he was four Billy didn't even try. He'd put some mud on one of my little doll's plates he was pretending to feed one of them, like you pretend with a doll, and it bit him right under the eye and my father came in and, and he picked up the dog. He stood there on the telephone calling the doctor holding the dog, it was all trembling snuggled up under his chin telling the doctor that Billy was teasing it and it bit him, and could he come over and that's when, I mean it was strange. I mean he'd never read to Billy, he never even pretended. It was strange.

Was it? his hand idling its way under the sheet, returning unseen and as though unattended to pause at her breast, perhaps it had more to do with disappointment he said, not of being disappointed but the fear of disappointing someone else, his words unhurried as the straying of his hand, pacing it, of disappointing someone close, of living on the edge of some betrayal that was bound to come along sooner or later, one way or another, his fingertips failing that hard outcropping they sought over the soft unbroken rise under the sheet there and descending a corrugated path to the open plain cradled below, — even the smallest one. Even a gift, like giving the wrong gift and you're telling her you don't know who she is, or you want her to be somebody else. Get it going both ways, that fear of disappointing each other and those inadvertent little betrayals that poison everything else, isn't that it? Isn't that part of it? And his hand now, strayed down from hill to hummock poised there while his voice idled on each as though to recover what had been lost and found and lost again and again — last night, he went on, when they'd talked about letting yourself become the prisoner of someone else's hopes, wasn't that part of it? The weight of his hand sunk deep on the hillock, that whole presumption of taking the responsibility for making someone else happy, the rule of his finger measuring the furrow hidden there — and not just the presumption, the insult, the plain insult of it… he turned thrust hard against the length of her thigh, — the futility of it, even with children…