William Gaddis - The Recognitions

In the doorway of the bedroom she stopped. — Do you remember that night? she asked. — In that Spanish place?., She stood looking at his back, and finally said, — Oh nothing. She put her hand to her hair. — Nothing, she repeated, turning toward the bedroom, — but I liked you better flamenco.

"Most people make a practice of embellishing a wall with tin glazed with yellow in imitation of gold, because it is less costly than gold leaf. But I give you this urgent advice: to make an effort always to embellish with fine gold and with good colors, especially in the figure of Our Lady. And if you try to tell me that a poor person cannot afford the outlay, I will answer that if you do your work well, and spend time on your paintings, and good colors, you will get such a reputation that a wealthy person will come to compensate you for your poor clients; and your standing will be so good as a person who uses good colors that if a master is getting one ducat for a figure, you will be offered two; and you will end by gaining your ambition. As the old saying goes, 'Good work, good pay.' And even if you were not adequately paid, God and Our Lady will reward you for it, body and soul."

— What in the world are you reading?

— I don't know, Otto said closing the Libra dell' Arte, staring at its worn spine before he put it down. — It was something of his.

The telephone rang, and as she went in to pick it up he walked over to the mirror hung in the living room at his suggestion. He could hear Esther's voice from the bedroom, where she'd had the telephone moved. — Yes, yes, but… I don't know. To tell you the truth, it's. some time since I've seen him myself. But. what? Well, I think he's taken some sort of studio downtown, on the west side. I think it's Horatio Street. What? Oh. I don't know. To tell you the truth, honestly, I don't know.

— Who was that? Otto asked, ducking away from the mirror as she returned.

— Somebody named Benny, it's somebody from his office who's been trying to reach him for months.

— It's funny, isn't it, Otto said looking at the floor. — I mean it's strange, without him anywhere.

— Do you want to go out tonight? The Munks asked us down for a drink.

— Do you want to?

— If you do.

— Well I, I ought to stay and get some work done.

— I thought your play was going to be finished by the end of April.

— Well it is, sort of.

— Why don't you do something with it?

— Well it isn't really. it's all here, it holds together but. it doesn't seem to mean anything. But I've got to do something, he said gripping his chin in his hand. — I've got to get hold of some money. They were both silent. Otto walked over, picked up a magazine and sat down beside her. The magazine was Dog Days. —What's this doing here? he asked idly.

— That, it's something he brought in once, when we'd talked about having children. Oh, sometimes he used to be so… Oh!..

— What's the matter?

— The dream I had last night, I just remembered it, she said. — It was about my sister Rose, we were flying kites in a vacant lot like we used to, and some boys were there with a kite with broken glass on the edge of it, and they cut our kite right down out of the sky.

— But that doesn't sound so frightening.

— It was terrible, it was. Otto pulled her over and silenced her mouth with his. Finally she said, — Will you do something for me?

— Shave before I come to bed?

— How did you know?

Later, he called from the bathroom, — This handkerchief drying on the mirror, can I take it off and fold it up? It's dry. Esther? did you hear me? This handkerchief.?

— Yes yes, she cried out, suddenly, then caught her voice and controlled it. — Yes, take it down. She picked up Otto's jacket from the couch and went toward the bathroom where she heard the sound of the electric razor.

— It's all right if I use this isn't it?

— Why yes. Yes, of course. I'm glad you're using it.

— There's a straight razor here, he said turning to her where she stood in the doorway with his jacket, the machine whirring in his hand, — but I don't think I could manage it.

— I know, she said. — It's strange. That he left that. Then she went in to hang up the jacket. — What's this book in your pocket? she called out.

— That? Otto stopped to look at himself in the glass. — It's a novel, a French novel he gave me once.

— Have you finished it?

— Well, I… I haven't got all the way through it yet. It's a… I… Oh incidentally, I found a paper in it, he must have written it out when he was little. About the whole creation working to be delivered from the vanity of time, about nature working for this great redemption. It sounds like a sermon.

— A sermon of his father's, she said, hanging up the jacket as Otto came in and sat on the bed.

— But it's sort of nice. Even for a sermon, he said, taking off a shoe, which he sat there and held for a minute, staring at it.

It was a dark night, especially for spring or so it seemed on the lower West Side, near the river where there is little illumination, and day and night the air carries in far above the city's quota of black silt from the railway and the boats on the water. Sounds were few, for the later the night became the fewer were the sounds of wanton circumstance, the casual sounds of fortuity, the reckless sounds of accident; until all that rose on the silt-laden air were the sounds of necessity, clear and inevitable, which had earlier been so eagerly confused by those who had retired from the darkness now and slept, waiting for the dawn.

Still, now, the sky contained no suggestion of dawn, in its absence a chimera to be dreaded in actuality by loneliness, and even that forsworn and gone to earth, carrying with it that substance of which all things eventually are made, the prima materia it had sought to deliver from the conspiracy of earth, air, fire, and water binding it here in baseness. "For me an image slumbers in the stone," said Zarathustra, no more content to let it lie bound so than those since gone to earth, disappointed? or surprised were they? by fictions, and followers who summoned them back, vicars demanding of them vicarious satisfaction in life for that which they had suffered in the privacy of death.

Itinerant drunkards and curious neighbors sometimes saw him at night, near the docks, and the slaughterhouses a block away, gathering the wood of broken crates to carry back to the fireplace which squatted at one end of the sub-basement room. Benny had stopped in every doorway looking for the name, and could not find it. Then he saw a figure, knew it a block away, and ran toward it, to take an arm and stop him before he could step into one of the doors and disappear. — Thank God I found you! Benny said, when he caught him standing under a streetlamp with broken wood under his arm. — Where have you been? It's been months, we haven't seen you in the office for months.

Benny was an anxious man in gray flannel, single-breasted, a silk foulard tie which caught the wind, a cigarette in his hand.

— What's happened? What are you doing? Are you all right? You look fine, you look better than I've ever seen you, but wait, wait.

— But wait, wait a minute for me, listen to me, are you. have you done any plans, have you done any more of them?

— Bridge plans. don't you know who I am? Bridge plans, I have to have another one, I have to submit another one now.

— But listen, I know it, I hardly know what I'm saying, but listen. We have one up now, a very important one, and if I bring you the location and the problem will you do it?

— But listen to me. It's months since I've submitted anything. Once. Listen, I submitted a plan of my own and they laughed at me, they laughed at me, they thought it was a joke, they said, You're not serious with this are you Benny? After the Cooper City viaduct? and the bridge at Fallen Ark Gap? You used to be a genius Benny, what happened to you? Wait, listen to me, listen, just one more. Listen, old J. W. died last month, did you know that? He died. Don't you see? I can be a vice-president, and I'll never have to draw a plan again, a vice-president in charge of design, and I can do that. I can do that. You know I can do that. But it all depends on this, it all depends on this one new job, to show them.