William Gaddis - The Recognitions

— Oh yes, I mean always, he'll always be here.

— It remain a great pity his family cannot have him back, down in the Armenium where they reside, put him in the nice groung of his homeland where he belong to be.

— Seven years. He's been there, I mean, here, seven years. He was here when I bought this store, I mean the business. 1 write letters to his family, but they can't send money out of Armenia to pay the rent, I mean to pay his. my keeping him here like this. I'm not even sure there is such a country as Armenia any more.

— I wish some day I could aid him to return to his homeland, Fuller said, as he put out his hand. — Goodbye, he said. — I leavin you to God to watch over and proteck you. And the Armenium.

— Goodbye Fuller, come around Thursday night if you can, there's going to be a big… I mean. The little man had looked forward to the greatest day in his career when Fuller's master was given over to him for the last shave and costuming, and had no doubt Fuller would see that he got the commission. It had never been discussed between them. Nevertheless it was understood. Fuller had rehearsed the scene in his own impatient imagination many times. — Goodbye Fuller, he said, disappointment in his voice. — Send me a picture postcard, Fuller.

The black companions returned to hear their master's voice echoing the words God damn it down the halls. Fuller was greeted with the phrase when they appeared in the doorway.

— God damn it, Fuller. Do you know what time it is? The poodle ran up to his side, where it stood muzzling his hand. — You're late. Where the hell have you been? That God damn undertaker's? Fuller looked at the poodle, who was betraying him even as he stood there.

— I stop to say somebody hello, sar, he admitted.

— Bring in the glasses, Fuller. Then go to bed.

— But Mister Brown I don't mean to…

— Bring in the glasses, Fuller.

A few minutes later, Fuller entered, bearing the tray in white-gloved hands, With three glasses, two clean linen towels, and a bucket of ice. He put them on the bar across the room, behind

Recktall Brown and Basil Valentine who were sitting before the fireplace. He stood fussing at the bar. Then Recktall Brown realized that he was still in the room, waiting like a hopeful shadow to be assigned some attachment in the light.

— Before you go to bed you'd better give me that ticket, Fuller.

—^Ticket, Mister Brown?

— Give me that ticket you bought for Utica New York.

— Ticket please. Mister Brown?

— God damn it Fuller, give rne that ticket you bought this morning for Utica.

— But Mister Brown I don't mean to… Fuller was shaking.

— Fuller!

Fuller reached down into an inside pocket, and drew the ticket out slowly, handed it over. — Now go to bed. And no lights. Remember, no lights.

Fuller looked, at him- and then at the poodle, and turned to trudge up the stairs.

— Crazy old nigger's scared of the dark, Recktall Brown said. — He says he's "visited by the most terrible creatures in the whole of history," he laughed, tearing up the ticket to Utica. He threw the bits into the fireplace. — He thinks anywhere must be on the way to Barbados.

— Your occult powers are rather impressive.

— Occult? Recktall Brown grunted the word, and paused his cigar in the air between them abruptly so that its ash fell to the Aubusson carpet like a gray bird-dropping. He looked through his thick lenses and through the smoke: there were moments when Basil Valentine looked sixteen, days when he looked sixty. In profile, his face was strong and flexible; but, when he turned full face as he did now, the narrowness of his chin seemed to sap the face of that strength so impressive an instant before. Temples faintly graying, distinguished enough to be artificial (though the time was gone when anyone might have said premature, and gone the time when it was necessary to dye them so, instead now to tint them with black occasionally), he looked like an old person who looks very young, hair-ends slightly too long, he wore a perfectly fitted gray pinstripe suit, soft powder-blue Oxford-cloth shirt, and a slender black tie whose pattern, woven in the silk, was barely discernible. He raised a gold cigarette case in long fingers. Gold glittered at his cuff.

— How did you know, that he had a ticket for Utica?

— This morning he asks me very carefully, Mr. Brown, do they use United States of America money in a place called Utica? Recktall Brown laughed, and Basil Valentine smiled, took a cigarette from the case, and laid the case on the low table before him. There was a long inscription, worn nearly smooth, on the surface of the gold, and he ran a fingertip over it before leaving the case on the glass-covered painting, on the slender column separating the tableaux Avaritia and Invidia. He raised his eyes slightly when he lit his cigarette, to the table's center, and blew a stream of smoke toward the underclothed Figure there with its maimed hand upraised. — You keep it too warm in here, he said finally.

— I like it this way.

— Not for you, not for you. I wasn't thinking of you. The paintings, the furniture. This steam heat will warp everything you have.

— Not before I sell them. And what the hell? Whoever buys them puts them up in steam-heated places. Recktall Brown ground an Aubusson rose under heel, turning to cross the room toward the bar. It was a small hexagonal pulpit, furnished with bottles. The carved oak leaves, and the well-pinioned figure of Christ on its face (which gave him occasion to remark, — He was innocent, and they nailed him) were stained with tricklings of gin. — Gin?

— I'd prefer whisky. Basil Valentine did not look up from the magazine he'd drawn toward him and opened again on the table. He studied the reproduction on the two-page spread of the centerfold, and his lips moved. Then he pushed the open Collectors Quarterly away and stood abruptly, to demand: —Is he always this late? accepting the glass from the heavy hand mounting the two diamonds.

— Nervous? Brown laughed, a sound which stopped in his throat, and sank back in a chair. — With somebody like him you can't expect.

— You've been quite successful in your efforts to keep me from meeting him, Basil Valentine interrupted. — One might think.

— Just watch your step with him, Recktall Brown muttered from the chair he filled, and Valentine, muttering something himself, turned his back and flung his cigarette into the fireplace, and stood looking at the carved letters beneath the mantel.

The chimney piece was a massive Elizabethan affair, ponderous like the rest of the furniture, the chairs standing out from the carpeting which stretched from wall to wall, and the two refectory tables, giving the place the look of an exclusive gentlemen's club; but only at first glance: for Recktall Brown, owner and host, was implicit everywhere. More than one guest had been provoked to make obvious remarks on the generic likeness between the head of the wart hog, mounted high on one wall, and the portrait of the host hung across the room. And even though he had been rallied often enough over that portrait (when he had been drink- ing), Recktall Brown would not remove it. Instead he could pause and look at it with fond veneration. They looked, too, over his shoulder, but none could find the youth he reverenced there. Instead they saw an unformed likeness of the face turned from them, ears protruding but erect, only the hands too similar. There were other paintings, especially the Patinir on the other side of the doorway, in whose neighborhood this portrait would at best have been an intrusive presence; but there was something in the thing itself which made it absurd, though it took a moment to realize what had happened. It had been painted from a photograph (the sitter too busy to sit more than that instant of the camera's eye) in which his hands, found in the foreground by the undiscriminating lens, were marvelously enlarged. The portrait painter, directed to copy that photograph faithfully and neither talented, nor paid enough, to do otherwise, had with attentive care copied the hands as they were in the picture. And pausing, passing it hundreds of times in the years since, often catching up one hand in the other before him, his hands came to resemble these in the portrait, filling out large and heavy, so apparently flaccid that they had been referred to once, and repeated by other voices in other rooms, as prehensile udders. And the diamond ring? It appeared; though none but himself knew that its double gleam had been added long after the paint of the portrait was dry.