William Gaddis - The Recognitions

— What work?

— Haf to write a speech. Have you ever read The Trees of Home? It stinks, baby. It's a best seller. I've been writing speeches for the author of the best seller Trees of Home, baby. Moral regeneration, insidious influences sapping our very gzzzhuu huuu I'm going down to Dutch Siam yes I am… he sang.

— I haven't seen you since the boat docked! At this, Big Anna turned around. — Victoria! Where's Albert? I'm so glad to see you baby.

— He's dancing with an archbishop. But darling tell me have you seen a tall dark girl here? Her name is Seraphina di Brescia, I just hoped she might be here, I know she's in New York. I met her at the Monocle in Paris…

— No, but have you seen Agnes? Agnes Deigh?

— You're joking, darling. Tell me, did you ever get your little what-was-his-name over from Italy?

— Little Giono! said the Swede, wringing his hands again. — No, and I've been after the immigration people, but they won't help. Why he'll be Mteen by the time I can get him over here, and he won't do for a thing. I'm going to have to adopt him, it's the only way out. But before I adopt him I have to join the Church my dear, think of it. He has to have a Catholic parent. I'm going back next week.

— To Rome?

— Oh yes, I can't bear it here a moment longer.

Otto, seeing Feasley approach, struggled to his feet. — Let's get out of here, he said. — Where are Esme? and Adeline?

— The hell with them. Just wait a minute. There's a little colored girl here I want to take along. See if you can find her while I go to the head. She's in a purple dress.

— We met in Paris, someone said, — in the Reine Blanche. .

— In the Carrousel…

— In Copenhagen. .

— The Drap Dead…

— The Boof on the Roof…

— Seraphina? The one they call Jimmy? I know she has money, but what does she spend it all on? — Don't be silly. She spends it on girls.

— Yes darling, said Adeline's dancing partner into her blond hair resting against the grosgrain lapels. — We have to follow Emerson's advice to treat people as though they were real, because, perhaps they are. .

From somewhere in the middle of the floor, in a quailing voice, — Baby and I were baked in a pie, the gravy was wonderful hot. .

— Of course there's time, Agnes Deigh's voice said, — just take the key and hurry. And don't let me forget to give you my mother's address in Rome. .

— And the address of Monseigneur Fé, he has his own chapel right near the Vatican where he performs the most divine marriage ceremonies. .

So they danced, as though ridden with the conscience of the Tarahumara Indian, whose only sin can be not having danced enough.

Feasley said, — Come on, let's get out of here, not stopping as he passed the table. — Chrahst, I found her, the girl in the purple dress. Standing right beside me at the next urinal. .

— I hate women, a voice said. It paused. Then, — I hate men too.

And so, as the Lord prophesied through the Greek Clement: / am come to destroy the work of the woman, that is, concupiscence, whose works are generation and death.

It broke up and spread itself, in couples and threes and figures of stumbling loneliness, into the streets, into doorways, they all went into the dark repeating themselves and preparing to meet one another, to reassemble, rehearse their interchangeable disasters; and the place looked like a kingdom stricken by papal anathema, as when Philippe Auguste, cunning pitiless monarch of France, was excommunicated for marrying Agnes while his wife Ingeborg still lived, and in his kingdom under the interdict there was neither baptism, marriage, nor burial, and corpses rotted on the high road.

— Wasn't it fun, said Agnes Deigh leaning against a garbage can. Herschel, scratching the sotted front of an evening shirt beside her, agreed, with the sound of a thing drowning. He excused himself, and when he had thrown up in an empty doorway returned singing. No doubt about it: tonight he was going to manage it. — Your strip-tease danse was shocking, Rudy, he said. — Where's Tertullian? I can't lose him, Rudy said, and slipped a white hairless arm through Herschel's, pulled the evening cape tighter and with almost masculine ex?speration thrust the long blond hair out over the fur. — Call a cab, baby, for God's sake. I feel awful. I feel like I was going to have a miscarriage.

Agnes Deigh returned a moment later, from between two parked cars. She was talking. But there was no one to talk to. There was no one there at all. The sound of thunder approached from the street's corner, a Department of Sanitation truck stopping every ten or twelve yards to open the huge maw at its back and masticate the immense portions left out to appease it with gnashings of reckless proportions, glass smashed and wood splintered between its bloodless gums. Agnes, leaning alone there, was suddenly frightened less than ten bites away. She was, as much as her haze of consciousness would allow her, terrified, and set off up the street in the opposite direction, loping in frantic steps as though dodging among trees, an injured doe in a landscape of Piero di Cosimo fleeing the patient hunter. She reached a lighted doorway, struggled into the vast and empty interior, and collapsed into a pew.

Ed Feasley and Otto were moving at seventy-three miles an hour. But neither of them wanted to go to Connecticut, and when they realized that they were taking that direction the car swung about with a scream, and was saved from what might have been a fatal skid by hitting its sliding rear against a lamppost. It headed south. — I want to see how fast I can make that ramp around Grand Central, Ed said, full of spirit. As long as he was conscious, he liked to have a good time. He had been having one, continuous, for years, and never a moment of craven doubt in any of it. He was not afraid: not a grain of that fear which is granted in any definition of sanity. In college, he had entertained himself and others, quiet evenings in his rooms when his allowance was cut off, by beating the back of his fist with a stiff-bristled hairbrush, then swinging his hand in circles until the pressure of descending blood broke small capillaries and spotted the rug and ceiling with spots turned brown by morning; or standing before a mirror with thumb and forefinger pressed against his carotid arteries until his lace lost all color and he was caught by consciousness as he fell; or dropping lighted cigarettes into the trouser turn-ups of a friend's two-hundred-dollar suit; or setting fire to his hand dipped in lighter fluid; or setting fire to the extended newspapers of people in subways just before the doors closed, leaving him on the platform overcome with laughter at the fugitive conflagration. He liked a Good Time.

The car stopped so suddenly it might have hit a wall. Otto straightened up from the dashboard holding his head. They were in front of a hospital. — What is it? he asked, brushing at a spot on his sleeve until he realized that it was a band of light from the streetlamp above.

— I've always wanted to pat a stiff on the head. They shave them, Ed Feasley said. A minute later they were in a basement corridor of the hospital, talking to the watchman. He was lonely. They just wanted to know how to get to Connecticut. They were told. The watchman left on his round.

In a large refrigerated room, Ed Feasley raised a sheet and stroked a smooth pate. He groaned with pleasure. Otto opened drawers, and closed them. Then he turned with his prize. It was a leg, small enough to be a woman's, quite old, slightly blackened around some of the toes and its detached end neatly bound with tape. But Ed's felicitous imagination had been busy too: with some effort, he had brought together two lonely corpses of opposite sex, erected now in the act of life. But even that mortal pleasure failed to change their expressions, leveled into disconsolate similitude by their shaven heads.