William Gaddis - The Recognitions

— Wyatt?

— What.

— How are you?

— Fine.

— I mean how do you feel?

— Empty, he answered.

She said nothing, but pretended sleep. After minutes of sitting abandoned he turned open the disrupted covers, and was asleep before she was, dwelling close up against the exposure of her back.

The lust of summer gone, the sun made its visits shorter and more uncertain, appearing to the city with that discomfited reserve, that sense of duty of the lover who no longer loves.

Then, as someone in a steam-heated room (it was a woman named Agnes) said while mixing gin with sweet vermouth, — Christmas is almost down our throats.

In another apartment, a tall woman put down the telephone and said to her husband, — A party. I did hope we'd get to the Narcissus Festival this year. The Hawaii one.

On Madison Avenue, two deer hung before a shop by their hind feet, bellies split and paper rosettes planted under their tails.

On Second Avenue, a girl in a south-bound bus (her surname appeared 963 times in the Bronx directory) said, — But he don't even know my name. — Who don't? — The lipstick man, he was in today. I found out he's single. — Is he hansome? — He's not really hansome, he's more what you might say inneresting looking. With my hair and my complexion he says I ought to wear teeshans red. My favorite movie star.

On First Avenue, a girl in a north-bound bus (who used the same lipstick as her favorite movie star) said, — My doctor told me to ride this bus, he says maybe that'll bring it on.

In a Lexington Avenue bar, a man in a Santa Glaus suit said, — Hey Barney, let's have one here, first one today. The bartender was saying — It's just the same as in Brooklyn, irregardless. — That's what I say, if you serve food you gotta have a rest room for ladies as well as men. A woman said, — Where do you come from? — Out on Long Island, Jamaica. — Jewmaica you mean. — Yeh? So where do you come from. — Never mind. — Yeh, never mind, I know where, it's nothing but a bunch of Portuguese and Syssirians up where you come from up there. — Hey Barney, let's have another one here.

— OK Pollyotch, the woman called to Santa Glaus.

— Hey Barney.

— Hey Pollyotch, don't start singin your ladonnamobilay in here.

— I need this drink like I need a hole in the head, said Santa Glaus, interrupting the young man beside him who was staring at a dollar bill pinned on the wall, a sign which said, // you drive your father to drink drive him here, and his own image in the mirror. He turned and nodded agreement. — You know what I mean? What's your name? — Otto. — You know what I mean, Otto? Otto held up his beer glass, half emptied, and nodded. — Can I buy you a drink Otto?

— He tole me ahedda time he's gonna get drunk, the woman said.

— Who's kiddin who?

— Some people never learn.

— Listen to this guy you'll go crazy.

— Can I buy you a drink?

— No, thank you, really. I feel just the way you do. I'm just waiting-

— You won't drink with me, hunh? You won't drink with me.?

— Hey Pollyotch.

— Like I say, it's just like in Brooklyn, irregardless.

The juke-box came to life, and played The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise.

Fruit stores were busy. Taxi drivers were busy. Trains were crowded, in both directions. Accident wards were inundated. Psychoanalysts received quivering visits from old clients. Newspaper reporters dug up and wrote at compassionate length of gas-filled rooms, Christmas tree fires and blood shed under mistletoe, puppy-dogs hung in stockings and cats hung in telephone wires, in what were called human interest stories.

— Do I know him? We was like we was married together for four months, said a girl on Third Avenue. — I'm going to give him a presint this year, just for spite.

It rained; then it snowed, and the snow stayed on the paved ground for long enough to become evenly blackened with soot and smoke-fall, evenly but for islands of yellow left by uptown dogs. Then it rained again, and the whole creation was transformed into cold slop, which made walking adventuresome. Then it froze; and every corner presented opportunity for entertainment, the vastly amusing spectacle of well-dressed people suspended in the indecorous positions which precede skull fractures.

— Who made the first one? Will somebody tell me that? said The Boss at an office party in a suite at the Astor Hotel. His stiff dickey stood out like a jib as he flew before the winds of First Cause. — You may not have thought I'm a very religious guy, but I'll just ask that one question. Who made the first one? Then he dropped his glass on the carpet.

In a large private house on East Seventy-fourth Street, the girls entertained their gentlemen friends at a champagne breakfast. The gentlemen were away from home on business: at home, their aging children opened gifts bought by efficient secretaries, asked embarrassing questions, and were confounded to receive answers which common sense had told them all the time; they stared at their gifts, and awkwardly accepted this liberation from infancy, made privy to the reciprocal deceits which as children they had been taught to call lies. Miles away here, Daddy smiled munificently as the girl in the new housecoat ("Who gave you that?") said, — And even with my own name on it and all. Are they real di-mins?

Hundreds of thousands of doors closed upon as many single young women in single rooms: there, furnished with the single bed, the lamp, the chair, bookcase full of encouragement, radio, telephone, life stepped tacitly and took her where she never saw the sun. Who would send flowers? Not him! And relatives again? A handkerchief from a cold-nosed aunt. She telephoned her mother in Grand Rapids, and was surprised to note that Mother seemed to have been weeping even before she answered the telephone. The radio, unattended, played The Origin of Design. And she still had her hair to put up. Flub-a-dub-dub, she washed her girdle in the basin, singing alto accompaniment to the Christmas carols on another station. Every hour on the hour consciousness blanked, while the disembodied voice spoke with respectful disinterest of train wrecks, casualties in a far-off war, the doings of a president, an actress, a murderer; and then suddenly warm, human, confidential (if disembodied still) of under-arm odor. Hark the herald angels sing! she sang (alto) accompanying the body-odor song which followed very much the same tune. Flub-a-dub-dub went the girdle in the basin while she sang, not too loudly, fearful of missing something, of missing the telephone's ring. — Glory to the new-born King! she sang, waiting for the lipstick man.

As it has been, and apparently ever shall be, gods, superseded, become the devils in the system which supplants their reign, and stay on to make trouble for their successors, available, as they are, to a few for whom magic has not despaired, and been superseded by religion.

Holy things and holy places, out of mind under the cauterizing brilliance of the summer sun, reared up now as the winter sun struck from the south, casting shadows coldly up the avenues where the people followed and went in, wearing winter hearts on their sleeves for the plucking. Slightly offended by Bach and Palestrina, short memories reached back, struggling toward Origen, that most extraordinary Father of the Church, whose third-century enthusiasm led him to castrate himself so that he might repeat the hoc est corpus meum, Dominus, without the distracting interference of the rearing shadow of the flesh. They looked; but he was nowhere about, so well had he done his work, and the churches were so crowded that many were forced to suffer the Birth in cocktail lounges, and bars. So well had Origen succeeded, sowing his field without a seed, that the conspiracy, conceived in light, born, bred in darkness, and harassed to maturity in dubious death and rapturous martyrdom, continued. Miserere nobis, said the mitered lips. Vae victis, the statistical heart.