William Gaddis - The Recognitions

— Covered! she burst out impatiently, twisting the letter in her hand.

— It has a cloth over it, I thought for some reason you might.

— It's a handkerchief drying, why didn't you just pull it off. And that, she went on, getting breath, — that terrible thing, it's dangerous to shave with, look at it, just because your father. You're like a child about it, this image of his.

— What was the letter?

— The letter? This? Yes, that warehouse, the place in New Jersey where you had your things, it burned. And here, they send you a check for a hundred and thirty dollars.

— Really? That's fine.

— Fine? Aren't you upset? Things like those paintings, they can't be replaced.

— No, they can't, he said quickly, a hand to his chin where the blood had already begun to dry.

— Where are you going?

— To wash. I have to hurry, I… I have some plans to take in.

She caught him again at the front door, where he paused with a roll of papers under his arm. — No coffee? Nothing?

— I had some earlier. He pulled at the knob, but she had a hand on his arm.

— I wish you could rest, she said, and when he turned, looking at her as though he had suddenly been stopped in a crowded street: —Are you all right?

— I? Why yes, yes I'm all right, Esther, I… you mustn't. Goodbye, he broke and hurried toward the stairs.

A few minutes later, when she was standing pouring coffee into the cracked cup, the doorbell rang. It was a delivery boy with a dozen eggs. She put them on the kitchen table, and then took out a handkerchief and stood, steadying herself with a hand on the table, staring at the coffee, whose surface was broken with the regular beats of her heart.

It was dark afternoon when Esther came in, bearing in the forefront of her mind fragments of a conversation she had left a little earlier (on Rilke, not Rilke's poetry but Rilke the man, who refused to be psychoanalyzed for fear of purging his genius); but over this, and through the rest of her mind, skated an image far more familiar, plunging and surfacing, escaping under the applied hand of her memory, reappearing when she turned elsewhere, echoing, among faces and lanterns and the prows of boats, — Maybe we're fished for., an image whose apparition she waited even now. Though it was dark in the studio, she opened the door and looked in there. Then she took off her coat, turned the radio on, and sat down, oblivious to the soprano singing nel massimo dolore, — Sempre con fè sincera la inia preghiera.

The door rattled, with muttering beyond it. She sat still. Finally he entered, in a state of some excitement. — I had trouble with the key, he said, and gave her a broken self-conscious laugh. She wanted time to study him before she spoke, but could not let him escape to the studio before she asked:

— Was it you I saw this afternoon? a little while ago?

— Me? Why? Where?

— Were you there, where they're showing Picasso's new.

— Night Fishing in Antibes, yes, yes.

— Why didn't you speak to us?

— Speak to who? You? Were you there?

— I was there, with a friend. You could have spoken to us, Wyatt, you didn't have to pretend that… I was out with someone who.

— Who? I didn't see them, I didn't see you, I mean.

— You looked right at us. I'd already said, There's my husband, we were near the door and you were bobbing.

— Listen…

— You went right past us going out.

— Look, I didn't see you. Listen, that painting, I was looking at the painting. Do you see what this was like, Esther? seeing it?

— I saw it.

— Yes but, when I saw it, it was one of those moments of reality, of near-recognition of reality. I'd been. I've been worn out in this piece of work, and when I finished it I was. free, free all of a sudden out in the world. In the street everything was unfamiliar, everything and everyone I saw was unreal, I felt like I was going to lose my balance out there, this feeling was getting all knotted up inside me and I went in there just to stop tor a minute. And then I saw this thing. When I saw it all of a sudden everything was freed, into one recognition, really freed into reality that we never see, you never see it. You don't see it in paintings because most of the time you can't see beyond a painting. Most paintings, the instant you see them they become familiar, and then it's too late. Listen, do you see what I mean?

— As Don said about Picasso. she commenced.

— That's why people can't keep looking at Picasso and expect to get anything out of his paintings, and people, no wonder so many people laugh at him. You can't see them any time, just any time, because you can't see freely very often, hardly ever, maybe seven times in a life.

— I wish, she said, — I wish.

How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible: to come up one day saying, — You see? I was right all the time. Or, — Then I was wrong, all the time. The radio is still busy with Puccini, Tosca all the way through: from the jumble at the end of the second act, Wyatt rescues her words, repeats them, — Questo è il bacio di Tosca! That's reality, then. Tosca's kiss, reality?

— I wish. she repeats (preferring Don Giovanni).

— Maybe seven times in a life.

Magic number! but she sits looking at him, waiting in the space populated by memory. One night when she was doing her nails, he came in. — Wyatt, you've never had a manicure? Never? Let me give you a manicure. But he said something in a tone apologetic, alarmed, and took his hands away one clutched in the other.

— But it can't really be that simple… (a discussion: did the coming of the printing press corrupt? putting a price on authorship, originality). — Look at it this way, look at it as liberation, the first time in history that a writer was independent of patrons, the first time he could put a price on his work, make it a thing of material value, a vested interest in himself for the first time in history.

— And painters, and artists? Lithography, and color reproductions.

— Yes, I don't know, if one corrupts the artist and the other corrupts. that damned Mono. Lisa, no one sees it, you can't see it with a thousand off-center reproductions between you and it. — But how. — I don't know, I've tried to understand it myself. Spinoza.

Mozart? The air is full of him, you've only got to have a radio receiving set to formulize the silence, give it shape and put it in motion: Sleigh Ride hurtles from the grid and strikes her. She suffers the impact without surprise. — I know you've never said you didn't want children, but whenever I've mentioned it you just look. you just get a look on your face. He puts his hand there, his right hand to his forehead and draws it down with feverish application, as though in this to pull away the features so long forming, revaluing for this moment; but above his hand, his face comes back into shape, the forehead quickly rises and recovers its lines, then the brows, and the eyes vividly devious permit nothing to enter. — I wish we were in the dark, you can talk to me in the dark, in the light you tell me things like. Zero doesn't exist.

— But you asked me…

— Or bad money drives out good.

Esther watched him now, standing in the middle of the room, drawing his hand down over his face as though, again, to wipe out some past, how long ago, or how recent, or all of it? She did not know, but sought one area among the German festivals, Handel at Breslau, Shakespeare at Stuttgart, Beethoven at Bonn, all in May; Egmont at Altenburg, Der Fliegende Hollander at Nürnberg in June; Die Ägyptische Helena at München.

— Munich, she said, — when you were in Munich?