William Gaddis - The Recognitions

There the little girl stood before Mr. Pivner in long white stockings, and stared out at his dozing face wistfully, for the harsh newspaper reproduction, sent by radio, made her look cross-eyed.

— Friends, don't take our word for it. You owe it to your own health. .

The newspaper slipped to the floor, and Mr. Pivner sat up as though called. A half-pound of ground beef waited in the kitchen, for his supper. (—Is it all beef? he had asked insistently; and assured that it was, did not ask how old it was, and so was not told that it had got its succulent redness from sodium sulphite rubbed into it when it had turned toxic gray the day before.)

— Exhaustive scientific tests have proved. .

He breathed, a sigh, and sat back, his senses glazed, insulted and injured, a brave man, assailed on all sides, supporting with his last penny those things which tore from him the last sacred corner of his privacy, and with it the dignity which churchmen called his soul.

— Prominent medical specialists agree. .

He looked at that letter again, on the chair arm, and his eyes widened as the stain of perfect metal in his alloy cried out for perfection.

— tastes better, looks better, smells better, and is better for you. .

And that perfect particle was submerged, again satisfied with any counterfeit of itself which would represent its worth amongst others. As his eyes closed again, the letter slipped from the chair arm to the floor, and with it the precious metal of youth which it had suggested, alloyed in age with weariness, doubt and dread, circumstances constantly unpropitious to any approach to perfection. Gold was never seen, never passed from one hand to another, no longer currency, not only unexpected but against the law: only the compromises worn smooth which Exchangers do not even bother to ring but pass on, giving and receiving or losing and taking reciprocally their leaden counterparts.

Worth his weight in gold, Mr. Pivner would have brought seventy-four thousand and four dollars (at the official rate; $105,720 on the black market). But somewhere in the shadowy past, in that penumbra of Science called chemistry, lay the assurance that his body was worth ninety-seven cents: a faint sigh led him nearer sleep, a sound of anticipation, as though awaiting the strategic moment to sell out.

Even in sleep, he was waiting, a little tense like everyone waiting within reach of a telephone, for it to ring. And still, even in sleep, he knew there would be time. Adam, after all, lived for nine hundred thirty years.

Beside the empty cradle of the white telephone, a vase held erect against green six bird-of-paradise flowers, Strelitzia reginae, also called wild banana in South Africa where they grow naturally profuse, blue-tongued exotic orange protrusions from the deep purple-green bill, silently mating there among the native white pear, the red ivory, black stinkwood, and umzimbiti.

Mickey Mouse pointed to four o'clock.

— Am I in a state of Grace? But darling. . Agnes Deigh paused, to reach beyond the oval-framed miniature of a young man in uniform, for the cigarettes on her desk. She got one and put it into her mouth at an extreme angle and, lighting it, listening, looked for that moment like a billboard picture into whose lips someone has stuck a cigarette. — Yes I know, that's sweet but I can't pray for you, she went on, the cigarette bobbing. — I know, darling, another time. But thank you for the divine flowers just the same.

When she'd hung up she sat staring for a moment at the news clipping one of the girls had sent in as a joke: Offer Husband's Heart in Evidence. A woman named Agnes Day of Mouth, Mississippi, was on trial for stabbing her husband to death. It was not funny. She crumpled it to throw in the basket, and rummaged in-her bag, took out a French enameled thimble case, set it aside, and looked until she found another pill box. Then as she poured water from the carafe, she stared at the miniature in the oval frame. It was her brother, whom she'd known only in the intent intimacy of childhood, before he ran away, before she was sent away to school; and she found herself again counting the months since he'd been listed missing in a war which no one spoke of but as a political blunder. She turned her chair away from the desk to take her pill.

Across the court from Agnes Deigh's office there were two windows she could look directly into. One, she was certain, was a psychoanalyst. The Venetian blinds were usually drawn, but she had seen the couch, and the sight of its familiar length upset her. Her own analysis had taken three years, under one of the best analysts (he had made a name for himself with a paper he had published on one of his patients, a nun, who became a bear trainer when he had done with her). But there were still moments, when she thought of her husband, or when she looked at the picture in the oval frame, when Agnes Deigh was unsure whether she had correctly reassembled the parts he had spread out before her, as when a novice dismantles a machine, and putting it back together finds a number of parts left over, each curiously shaped to some definite purpose.

The other window was a dentist. Late every afternoon he appeared there in an undershirt, to shave before the mirror hung in the window frame. For some reason she always thought of her husband, Harry, when she looked across at him. But he never noticed her, he never glanced across the court, never anywhere but the mirror, not even when, one day, exasperated at his sloven obduracy, she had stood at her window with her blouse undone, pretending, as a breast slipped into conspicuous sight while she watched him from her eye's corner, to be adjusting an undergarment. He'd neither looked over nor seemed consciously to keep from doing so, but went on to shave, the flesh of his arms hanging loosely, suspenders dangling to his knees. Every time she looked up he was there, absorbed in some activity of the body, his own or someone else's, now washing his hands, now drying them, talking to someone unseen.

She returned to her desk to put down the glass of water, took a macadamia nut from the jar there, and sat exposing a face where time weighed out unconscious of exposure, a face even she herself had never seen in her mirror. Then her telephone rang.

— Yes? she whispered, and then, getting her voice, — Send him in.

Otto had left a copy of his play for her to look at (one of four made at alarming expense by a public stenographer, which he carried in a proportionately expensive pigskin dispatch case). When he arrived late that afternoon, he could hear her voice from an office or two away, ringing from the dark green walls, ricocheting off the white plaster approximations to tropical plants which were the indirect lighting fixtures, glancing from one unsympathetic modern surface to another, skipping across the edges of other sounds to attempt escape through the jalousies of the Venetian blinds, caroming off the absurd angles of the hats on other women who infested the place and who, themselves, rebounded among telephones. The whole scene, on the long-piled dark green carpet bore grotesque parody to those earlier caricatures of Nature sponsored by shades of the Sun King, where women of exhausted French sophistication dressed as shepherdesses to toil weary sins in new silks across carpets of false grass.

— Simpotíco, came that voice, — I say they're so simpótico. . what? Harry? Oh God no, not for months, he's still in Hollywood where they're filming his novel. . yes, it was changed a little. What?. . yes, the homosexual boy to a Negro and the Jew to a cripple. Sensitive minorities… Of course I'm interested in politics. . Don't be tiresome, I couldn't care less about Harry using me in his ghastly book, but giving me a name like Seraphina. . No, of course I don't need the money, I'm just suing him because money is the only language he understands. .