Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

A strange thing happened. The impure thoughts left me and my blood retreated and I began to remember those original idylls, my calendar youth, the picnic and berry hunts, and all those placid times before fires, dozing on a couch, my head in Mother’s lap and her hands in my hair like rain on the roof and, My God, my little weewee was stiff, and it was stiff now too!

It was what I’d prayed for: shame like a thermal inversion, the self-loathing that is purity. The sailing lessons and horseback rides and lectures and daytrips came back tainted. I saw how pleased I’d been, how smug. Why, I’m free, I thought, and was. “I’ve licked it, Jane,” I said. “I’m pure, holy as a wafer, my heart pink as rare meat. I was crap. Look at me now.”

If she won’t have me, I thought, it’s not my fault. I rushed out to show myself to her and tell her what I’d discovered. I ran over it again to see if I had it straight. “Jane,” I’d say, “I’m bad, unsavory from the word go, hold your nose. To be good subsists in such understanding. So innocence is knowledge, not its lack. See, morality’s easy, clear, what’s the mystery?” But when I stepped outside my suite the house was dark. Time had left me behind. The long night of the soul goes by in a minute. It must have been three or four in the morning. I couldn’t wake Jane; she was dying of lupus erythematosus and needed her rest. I didn’t know where Plympton slept or I would have roused him. Too exhilarated by my virtue to sleep, I went outside.

But it was not “outside” as you and I know it. Say rather it was a condition, like the out-of-doors in a photograph, the colors fixed and temperature unfelt, simply not factors, the wind stilled and the air light, and so wide somehow that he could walk without touching it. It was as if he moved in an enormous diorama of nature, a crèche of the elements. Brewster Ashenden was rich. He had lain on his back on Ontario turf farms and played the greens of St. Andrews and Burning Tree, but he had never felt anything like Duluth’s perfect grass, soft and springy as theater seats, and even in moonlight green as billiard cloth. The moon, perfectly round and bright as a tennis shoe — he could make out its craters, like the eternally curving seams of a Spalding — enabled him to see perfectly, the night no more than the vaguest atmosphere, distant objects gyroscopically stilled like things glimpsed through the whirling blades of a fan.

What he saw was like the landscapes behind madonnas in classical paintings — one missed only the carefully drawn pillars and far, tiny palaces — blue-hilled horizons, knolls at the end of space, complex shores that trailed eccentrically about flat, blackish planes of water with boulders rising from them. He thought he perceived distant fields, a mild husbandry, the hay in, the crops a sloping green and blue debris in the open fields, here and there ledges keyholed with caves, trees in the middle distance as straight as the land they grew from. It was a geography of eclectic styles and landscapes, even the sky a hybrid — here clear and black and starred, there roiling with a brusque signature of cloud or piled in strata like folded linen or the interior of rock.

He walked away from the castle, pulled toward the odd, distant galleries. His mood was a fusion of virtue and wonder. He felt solitary but not lonely, and if he remembered that he walked unprotected through the largest game preserve this side of the Kenyan savannah, there was nothing in his bold step to indicate this. He strode powerfully toward those vistas he had seen stretching away in every direction from the manor. Never had he seemed to himself so fulfilled, and never, unless in dreams, had such seeming distances been so easily negotiated, the scenery changing every hundred yards or so, the hills that had appeared so remote easily climbed and giving way at their crests to tiny valleys and plains or thick, sudden clots of jungle. This trick of perspective was astonishing, reminding him of cunning golf courses, sudden doglegs, sand traps, unexpected waterholes. Everything was as distinctively charactered as foreign countries, natural borders. He remembered miniature golf courses to which he had been taken as a child, each hole dominated by some monolithic feature, a windmill, perhaps, a gingerbread house, a bridge, complicated networks of banked plains that turned on themselves, culs-de-sac. He thought that Duluth might be deceptively large or deceptively small, and he several miles or only a few thousand feet from the main house — which had already disappeared behind him.

As he came, effortlessly as in any paradise, to each seamed, successive landscape, the ease of his arrivals added to his sense of strength, and each increment of strength to his sense of purity, so that his exercise fed his feelings about his heart and happiness. Though he had that day made the long drive from London, had his interview with Jane (as exhausting as it was stimulating) and done the hardest thinking of his life, though he had not slept (even in London he had tossed and turned all night, kept awake by the prospect of finally meeting Jane) in perhaps forty hours, he wasn’t tired. He wondered if he would ever be tired again. Or less gay than now. For what he felt, he was certain, was not mood but something deeper, a stability, as the out-of-doors was, as space was. He could make plans. If Jane would have him (she would; they had spoken code this afternoon, signaled each other a high language of commitment, no small talk but the cryptic, sacred speech of government flashing its secret observations over mountains and under seas, the serious ventriloquism of outpost), they could plan not to plan, simply to live, to be. In his joy he had forgotten her death, her rare, personal disease in which self fled self in ultimate allergy. Lupus erythematosus. It was not catching, but he would catch it. He would catch her. There was no need to survive her. Together they would grow the wolf mask across their eyes, death’s big spreading butterfly. It didn’t matter. They’d have their morality together, the blessed link-up between appropriate humans, anything permissible between consenting man and consenting woman — anything, any bold or timid configuration, whatever the one craved and the other yielded, whatever whatsoever, love’s sanctified arrangements, not excluding the deathbed itself. What need had he to survive her — though he’d probably not die until she did — now that he had at last a vehicle for his taste, his marriage?

He was in a sort of clearing. Though he knew he had not retraced his steps nor circled around, it seemed familiar. He stood on uneven ground and could see a line of low frigid mountains in the distance. High above him and to his right the great tear of the moon, like the drain of day, sucked light. At his feet there appeared the remains of — what? A feast? A picnic? He bent down to investigate and found a few clay shards of an old jug, a bit of yellow wood — like the facing on some stringed instrument and a swatch of faded, faintly Biblical cloth, broadly striped as the robe of a prophet. As he fingered this debris he smelled what was unmistakably bowel.

“Have I stepped in something?” He stood and raised his shoe, but his glance slid off it to the ground where he saw two undisturbed lumps, round as hamburger, of congealing lion waste. It came to him at once. “I knew it was familiar! ‘The Sleeping Gypsy.’ This is where it was painted!” He looked suspiciously at the mangled mandolin facing, the smashed jug and the tough cloth, which he now perceived had been forcibly torn. My God, he thought, the lion must have eaten the poor fellow. The picture had been painted almost seventy-five years earlier, but he understood from his reading that lions often returned to the scenes of their most splendid kills, somehow passing on to succeeding generations this odd, historical instinct of theirs. Nervously he edged away, and though the odor of lion dung still stung his nostrils, it was gradually replaced by more neutral smells. Clearly, however, he was near the beasts.