Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

He turned but still could not see the castle. He was not yet frightened. From what he had already seen of Duluth he understood that it was a series of cunningly stitched enclaves, of formal, transistorized prospects that swallowed each other transitionlessly. It seemed to be the antithesis of a maze, a surface of turned corners that opened up on fresh surprises. He thought of himself as walking along an enormous Möbius strip, and sooner or later he would automatically be brought back to his starting point. If he was a little uneasy it was only because of the proximity of the animals, whose presence he felt and smelled rather than saw or heard.

Meanwhile, quickening his pace, he came with increasing frequency to experience a series of déjà vus, puzzling at first but then suddenly and disappointingly explicable. He had hoped, as scenes became familiar to him, that he was already retracing his steps, but a few seconds’ perusal of each place indicated otherwise. These were not places he had ever been, only places he had seen. Certainly, he thought, the paintings! Here’s Cranach the Elder’s “Stag Hunt.” Unmistakably. And a few moments later — I’ll be darned, Jean Honoré Fragonard’s “A Game of Hot Cockles.” And then Watteau’s “Embarking for Cythera,” will you look at that? There was E. Melvin Bolstad’s “Sunday in the Country” and then El Greco’s “View of Toledo” without Toledo. Astonishing, Ashenden thought, really worthwhile. Uh oh, I don’t think I care for that Constable, he thought; why’d they use that? Perhaps because it was here. Gosh, isn’t that a Thomas Hart Benton? However did they manage that odd rolling effect? That’s really lovely. I’ll have to ask Plympton the name of his landscaper. Jane and I will certainly be able to use him once we’re settled. Now he was more determined than ever to get rid of Franklin.

And so it went. He strolled through wide-windowed Wyeths and gay, open-doored Dufys and through Hoppers — I’ll have to come back and see that one with the sun on it — scratchy Segonzacs and dappled Renoirs and faintly heaving Cézannes, and across twilled Van Gogh grasses and faint Utrillo fields and precise Audubon fens, and one perfect, wild Bosch dell. It was thrilling. I am in art, thought Brewster Ashenden, pleased to have been prepared for it by his education and taste.

He continued on until he came to a small jewel of a pond mounted in a setting of scalloped shoreline with low thin trees that came up almost to the water. It was the Botticelli “Birth of Venus,” which, like El Greco’s “View of Toledo” without Toledo, was without either Venus Zephyr, Chloris, or the Hour of Spring. Nevertheless it was delightful, and he took a seat on a mound of earth and rested, thinking of Jane and listening to the sea in a large shell he had found on the beach.

“I’m glad,” he said, speaking from the impulse of his mood now that his wanderings were done and the prospect of his — their — death had become a part of his taste and filled his eyes with tears, “I’m glad to have lived in the age of jet travel, and to have had the money for tickets.” He grew contemplative. “There has never been a time in my life,” he said, “when I have not had my own passport, and never a period of more than four months when I was not immune to all the indigenous diseases of place for which there are shots. I am grateful — not that I’d ever lord it over my forebears — that I did not live in the time of sailing ships. Noble as those barks were, they were slow, slow. And Dramamine not invented. This, for all its problems, is the best age to be rich in. I’ve seen a lot in my time.”

Then, though he couldn’t have told you the connection, Ashenden said a strange thing for someone at that moment and in that setting. “ I am not a jerk, ” he said, “I am not so easily written off. Profound guys like me often seem naive. Perhaps I’m a fool of the gods. That remains to be seen. But answers are mostly simple, wisdom is.” He was melancholy now and rose, as if by changing position he hoped to shake off this new turn in his mood. He looked once more at the odd pool and spoke a sort of valedictory. “This is a nice place. Jane would enjoy it. I wish I still had those two folding chairs the Bank of America gave me for opening an account of five thousand dollars. We could come here tomorrow on a picnic.”

He did not know whether to go around the pond or cut through the thin trees, but finally determined not to go deeper into the forest. Though he suspected the animals must be all around him, it was very quiet and he wondered again about them. They would be asleep, of course, but didn’t his presence mean anything to them? Had their queer captivity and the unusual circumstances in which they lived so accustomed them to man that one could walk among them without disturbing them at all? But I am in art, he thought, and thus in nature too, and perhaps I’ve already caught Jane’s illness and the wolf mask is working someplace under my skin, making me no more significant here than the presence of the trees or the angles of the hills.

Walking around the other side of the pond, he noticed that the trees had changed. They were sparser, more ordinary. Ahead he spied a bluff and moved toward it. Soon he was again in a sort of clearing and here he smelled the smells.

The odor of beasts is itself a kind of meat — a dream avatar of alien sirloin, strange chops and necks, oblique joints and hidden livers and secret roasts. There are nude juices in it, and licy furs, and all the flesh’s vegetation. It is friction which rubs the fleshly chemistry, releasing it, sending skyhigh the queer subversive gasses of oblique life forms. It is noxious. Separated as we are from animals in zoos by glass cages and fenced-off moats, and by the counter odors of human crowds, melting ice cream, peanut shells crushed underfoot, snow cones, mustard, butts of bun — all the detritus of a Sunday outing — we rarely smell it. What gets through is dissipated, for a beast in civilization does not even smell like a beast in the wild. Already evolution has begun its gentling work, as though the animals might actually feel compunction, some subtle, aggravating modesty. But in Plympton’s jungle the smells were uninhibited, biological, profane. Their acidity brought tears to Ashenden’s eyes and he had to rub them.

When he took his hands away he saw where he was. He had entered, he knew, the last of the pictures. Although he could not at first identify it, much was familiar. The vegetation, for example, was unmistakably Rousseau, with here and there a Gauguin calabash or stringy palm. There were other palms, hybrid as the setting itself, queer gigantic leaves flying from conventional European trunks. The odor was fierce but he couldn’t leave. At his feet were thick Rousseauvian candelabras of grass, and before him vertical pagoda clusters of enormous flowers, branches dangerously bent under the weight of heavy leaves like the notched ears of elephants. Everywhere were fernlike trees, articulated as spine or rib cage, a wide net of the greenly skeletal and the crossed swords of tall grasses. There were rusts and tawns and huge wigwam shapes and shadows like the entrances to caves, black as yawns. The odor was even more overpowering than before, and had he not seen the vegetation he would have thought himself at the fermented source of the winish world. Yet the leaves and grasses and bushes and flowers were ripe. He reached out and touched a leaf in a low branch and licked his hand: it was sweet. Still, the place stank. The smell was acrid, actually hot. Here the forest was made impenetrable by its very odor and he started to back off. Unable either to turn away from it completely or to look at it directly, he was forced to squint, and immediately he had a striking perception.