William Gaddis - The Recognitions

Things seemed to be going exceedingly well, better than Stanley would have imagined had he paused at the beginning of this undertaking to consider the practical difficulties it would so surely involve. Her passage, for instance: he was prepared to pay it, but no one had asked him to. And though he was relieved at the apparent lack of curiosity on the part of the other passengers, it had commenced to trouble him. No one, not even Father Martin, had asked her name; and though the fat woman had, at one point, risen in a gesture of myopic kindliness to include him in her own generation, asking if the "charming young creature" were his daughter, she had as quickly relapsed, clutching a shiny-surfaced paper book stamped with the Nihil obstat and Imprimatur, and entitled A Day With the Pope, and entirely forgotten that such a question, or any provocation for it, had ever entered her busy head. Licking her finger to turn each page of pictures, she visioned herself trundling in Vatican corridors, in the Court of San Damaso, and who can say where else? when she looked up to the boiling surface of the sea rising before her, and reached for a paper bag beside her deck chair.

Nevertheless, it was working out. Though Stanley, left alone below with his stack of palimpsests, and the clean scores onto which he was copying, made more mistakes than he had ever before, some of them maddening, copying the same bar twice; some strange, for here and there he found himself inserting grace notes which broke the admirably stern transitions, slipping in cadenzas which had nothing to do with anything, and, just this morning, writing in a throbbing bass which, as he realized when he stopped, was the steady vibration of the engines.

He could not get her out of his mind. When they were together, her smile, or often when she did not know he was looking the empty sadness of her face, forced him to lower his eyes, and fumble for something to handle, or something to say; and he usually found that tooth in his pocket, as he did now, and said nothing.

At all events, nothing had gone wrong yet. Even below, where they were at close quarters when they were together, being with her in illuminated silence or in prayer proved, in fact, less difficult than he had pictured, never having known temptation as it is usually succumbed to. And even at rising, or her going to bed, he found no temptation to touch her, or to tell her she was beautiful, though the warm brush of an elbow shocked him sometimes. But directly he was alone, it was all entirely different.

Directly he was alone, he was assailed by her simulacra, in all states of acute sorrow, or smiling, of complete abstraction or painful animation, of dress and undress, as he had seen her these last few days: directly he was alone, the images came to mock everything he had seen. Her sadness became shrieking grief, and her animation riotous, immodest in dress and licentious in nakedness, many-limbed as some wild avatar of the Hindu cosmology assaulting the days he spent copying his work on clean scores, and the nights he passed alone in his chair where, instantly the lights went out, everything was transformed, and the body he had seen a moment before with no more surprise than its simple lines and modest unself-conscious movement permitted, rose up on him full-breasted and vaunting the belly, limbs undistinguishable until he was brought down between them and stifled in moist collapse.

He woke in the morning exhausted, straightening his damp dis-arranged clothes, and there she lay, cool and unconsciously breathing and often uncovered; and when that was the case he covered her when he stood, no more allured to try her with his hand than he might have been a flesh-tone on canvas, and went out without washing, and up without even a pause on deck for the air of day, straight to breakfast. For there was that: he found himself with a great appetite, and sometimes he went to two sittings.

As yet, things were still under control, though he found himself avoiding Father Martin as carefully as he did the fat woman who sat drawing an enamel-nailed finger down her tongue each time she turned a page of a shiny-surfaced paper book stamped with the Nihil obstat and Imprimatur, and the title in yellow, The Vatican and Holy Year. (She had caught him at breakfast, starting off the day with a covetous reference to "the lily-white flower of her virginity" which the little Spanish saint-to-be had died protecting.) Now Father Martin passed behind, engrossed in what sounded in his murmurs to be a Psalm of David. With him, Stanley had formerly led off a number of interesting conversations: the etymology of "atonement" (at-one-ment); the Augustinian doctrine (this did not get too far) of the Crucifixion as a ransom paid Satan to release man from his power; of the decline of Satan (this got nowhere at all) from God's official tempter to His arch-enemy. But now Stanley avoided him, as though afraid he would b!urt out some betrayal of his state of mind, some image of its nature.

As for the Story of Barbara Ubrick, he had slipped that away and dropped it overboard, only to find her with Margaret Shepherd's

My Life in a Convent. "Wronged by a priest through the confessional" (he read), "when but a young girl, married to a priest, thrust into a convent with her baby and abandoned by the priestly brute who had promised to stand by her. It will hold you in its grip until through tears and heart-throbs. ." That went overboard too, and was followed by the tale of Rosamond Culbertson (an American girl at the hands of Popish priests in Cuba), and Rebecca Reed's Six Months in a Convent. And each time this happened, she looked up at Stanley with the same dismay anew, which sounded in her voice when she asked, — But isn't that how it's going to be?. .

He swallowed with an effort at constriction which ran right down through the hand clutching the wrapped tooth in his pocket, gazing below at the shifting surfaces of white foam, and startled to see that he was not watching Paradise Lost, but a man's hat afloat down there.

The touch of her hand on his clutching the rail startled him to withdraw it, and he watched her go down the deck, swaying with motions scarcely incurred by the roll of the ship, or even compatible with it, nothing at all to do with the sea, this brilliant unbroken expanse of sky and the sea bound only by one another, by now reality's only terms: she walked off with the gait of the desert, the movements of a gypsy, or the ease of those women (though he had never seen such a company) who follow camels, and acquit the camels' grace from behind, as they share the features before, with their own.

Stanley followed her. It was an abrupt decision, and he kept well behind and out of sight, hesitating round corners, behind ventilators, too heated to know if he feared being seen, or feared what he would finally see himself. At one turn he paused too long, and he lost her. He took a moment to congratulate himself on giving up such a reproachful pursuit, and then set off again frantically. He ran aft until he reached the set of outside steps leading up to First Class, and had already started up them when he saw her. She was standing alone at the rail below and she did not see him approach, nor see his humiliated retreat, for she was weeping.

Stanley went inside, and wandered vaguely through the Tourist Class smoking room. He stopped to read the weather report again, and he reread the same news bulletins that had been posted there in the morning. He had read the third item, a cargo ship which had broken in half and gone down off the Azores, twice, before he realized that he had read it earlier, and was only standing here, instead of working, waiting for first call to luncheon.

For the first time on the voyage, he drank down a glass of wine before a bit of food appeared; and during the meal he filled his glass four times from the carafe on the table. When he went below, he found her lying down. She appeared to him to be asleep, her face turned to the wall. Her figure lay entirely still on the bed, with no evidence of her breathing nor even any apparent response to the motion of the ship, which kept Stanley replacing his feet while he stood over her.