William Gaddis - The Recognitions

— Poor Charley, said Hannah.

— Was that Charley? Otto had noticed a scar across the boy's throat, and a glitter in his hair. — What's that in his hair?

— That's a silver plate, they put it there when they took the bullet out he tried to kill himself with. Did you see his throat? And his wrists are covered with scars. He was in the army, in a plane that dropped an atom bomb, and he has intense guilt feelings. He hated the army. It's a good thing he got out.

— I should think they would have sent him to a hospital if he's like this.

— Oh no, this wasn't the reason he was discharged, said Hannah. — When he was still in he stayed at the place I was staying one night on leave. The next morning he went out to get some coffee, but his own clothes were a mess because he'd been sick the night before so he put some of my warm underwear on under his uniform. The M.P.'s picked him up at Nedick's and when they took him in and found him with girls' underwear on they thought he was queer. He was discharged.

— Oh.

— I think he's going to have a lobotomy, said Hannah. — What do you think of the painting? she said, looking above the mantel.

— The colors are good. Very bright.

— Bright?

— Well, I mean the orange and the green. Of course, a painter is limited by his materials, isn't he. I mean, there are pigments you can't just mix together in certain mediums and expect them to bind. There are certain pigments you can't lay over others and expect them to hold, I mean of course they break up, you have to know your materials and respect them, but modern painting.

— I think it's the saddest thing Max has ever done. It's an epitaph.

— Léger, I mean Chagall.

— The emptiness it shows, it hurts to look at it. It's so real, so real.

— Soutine, of course, Chagall and Soutine, Otto continued, — there won't be one of them in sight anywhere in a hundred years, they'll break up and fall to pieces right on the canvas. Inherent vice, I believe they call it. There are certain pigments…

— I think it's the saddest thing Max has ever done.

Otto stopped speaking: who was Max? He remembered Max as someone he did not particularly like, someone he felt unsafe with. Aware of an unshaven face over his shoulder, he took out a package of his impressive cigarettes, and did not turn until the unshaven boy, not included in their conversation, went away rubbing a badly blemished chin. — Who was that?

— He's a drunk, Hannah said, — his name is Anselm. He gets all screwed up with religion.

In one corner of the room stood a thin young man with a heavy mustache which seemed to weigh his round head forward. At that moment it was being weighed toward a dirty window, which he studied wistfully. His coat was belted behind, and too short. His trousers fell in wrinkles, and dragged frayed cuffs on his shoe-tops. A candid look of guilt hung about him, as though he knew he should not be there, but saw no way of leaving but osmotically, through the translucent window glass. At his back a group, bulging with laughter, threatened to upset him. They were arguing. Then one of them called, — Is it "Us vont prendre le train de sept heures" or "de huit heures," Stanley?

— Weet, he answered, and returned to the dirty window muttering, — How could it be anything but weet? Then he turned his eyes, and stared at whoever was seated on the couch, out of Otto's view.

— If modern painters won't study their materials, Otto took up, fingering the figure of the emu on the cigarette packet, and he spoke with urbane hesitations, indicating concurrent thought worthy of his words, — if they can't waste the time, a sculptor of course has to study every property of his medium before he…

— Do you know him? Hannah asked.

— settles down to his, what? Who?

— Stanley.

— No, is he a sculpt…

— Stanley? Why should he be a sculptor?

— No, but um. and as Praxiteles.

— What?

— I was just going to say, as Cicero says of Prax. — Music, he writes music, organ music. — Who?

— Stanley. Him. She pointed. — This one thing he's been working on a long time, a mass, he's trying to finish it in time to dedicate it to his mother. She's got diabetes, in the Hospital of the Immaculate something, it's around here, they just took her leg off, it had gangrene. She just lies up there with all these souvenirs in bottles around her, her appendix and her tonsils and something they took out of her nose, she wants to take them with her, she just lies there staring at her false teeth in an empty glass, gumming memories.

Otto offered a cigarette. Hannah did not smoke; and so the only way to impress her was to blow some in her direction. She coughed and stopped talking.

The funeral spray on the mantel had wilted, and the wires which held it taut were apparent. It had not been an expensive one. The clusters of guests moved vaguely before it and back like limp flowers dying in the earth where they had grown, shifting in the dust. Otto was looking over the room for someone he knew to talk with, or someone he did not know, to talk to. For just that moment he saw the face of a girl who was sitting alone on the couch, looking with a smile of newness over this moribund garden, allowing herself to be hidden by it. Then she was gone, with the silent consciousness of a painting obscured by a group of nattering human beings. He had stared at her in that moment of exposure: her eyes had been looking at him; and then they were not: and her smile went beyond him, like a face he knew so well he could never recall it to memory.

— She got fed up with him screwing the Sunday roast, so she shot herself, do you blame her? Anselm was saying suddenly at his elbow speaking, to Hannah, of the stooped man in the green wool shirt, whom he'd just left. — That's what breaks my heart, he added, and rubbed his chin.

— Who is it? Otto asked, turning.

— A half-assed critic, Hannah said, — he thinks he has to make you unhappy before you'll take him seriously.

— A three-time psychoanaloser, Anselm added, — for Christ sake. He just told me Bildow's going to sell The Magazine. Tragedy. Hannah reached for the yellow book he carried. — Have you read it, Justine? he asked, holding it back. — I brought it to show Stanley.

— Leave him alone tonight, Hannah said.

— There's a nice part, in this Benedictine monastery, where the abbot puts the holy wafer up her and defiles it…

— Listen, Anselm. — Hey Stanley, come here, I got something to show you, Anselm called, and Hannah repeated, — Leave him alone, as Stanley worried his way toward them. Otto smoothed his own mustache with a fingertip.

— What are you reading? Anselm took the book from under Stanley's arm. — Malthus, for Christ sake. Do you want to get excommunicated, carrying that around in public? The next thing, you'll be peddling rubbers in the street.

— Malthus doesn't recommend. those, when he speaks of moral restraint.

— Moral restraint! Anselm laughed, waving his yellow book. — If you think the Church wouldn't do an about-face on contraceptives if it owned a block of stock in Akron rubber! And how much real estate do you think they own in this whorehouse of a world? Here, you ought to read this, he went on, opening Justine, —there's somebody in here you'd like, named Roland, he has a crucifix with a girl on it face-to.

— Listen, Anselm, Hannah commenced.

— can play hide-the-baloney.

— I heard you sold another book title, Stanley interrupted him.

— "Except for Fornication," fifty bucks. Matthew nineteen, nine, "Except it be for fornication. "

— I'm having a little difficulty, with a title, Otto lied.

— A novel?