Gore Vidal - Messiah

"I'm sure you do. In any case, the girl has been here over a month and you must see her as soon as possible."

"I'd like to."

"Of course you would. I still have my plot, you know. Oh, you may think I forget things but I don't: my mind is a perfect filing system."

"Could you tell me just what you are talking about?"

She chuckled and wagged a finger at me. "Soon you'll know. I know I meddle a good deal, more than I should, but after all this time it would be simply impossible for me not to interfere. I see it coming, one of those really exciting moments and I want just to give it a tickle here, a push there to set it rolling. Oh, what fun it will be!"

Hastings crept back among us, diffidently pushing a star and a producer in our direction. "I think you all ought to know each other, Clarissa… and, ah, Gene too. This is Miss… and Mr… and here in Hollywood… when you get to New York… house on the river, wonderful, old… new film to cost five million… runner-up for the Academy Award." He did it all very well, I thought. Smiles gleamed in the patio's half-light. The star's paste jewels, borrowed from her studio, glimmered like an airliner's lighted windows. I moved toward the house, but Clarissa's high voice restrained me at the door: "You'll call Iris tomorrow, won't you?" and she shouted an exchange and a number. I waved to show that I'd heard her then, vowing I would never telephone Iris, I rejoined the party and watched with fascination as the various performers performed in the living room to the accompaniment of a grand piano just barely out of tune.

I waited several days before I telephoned Iris. Days of considerable activity, of visiting friends and acquaintances, of attending parties where the guests were precisely the same as the ones I had met at Hastings' house: every one of them bent upon combating boredom with boredom, creating a desert in a dry land. But I was capable of evoking mirages which decorated for me their desert, made unusual (for myself at least) what, with familiarity, might become impossible.

I met Iris at the house where she was staying near the main beach of Santa Monica: a fairly decorous Spanish house, quiet: among palms and close to the sea. The day was vivid; the sea made noise; the wind was gentle, smelling of salt and far countries.

I parked my rented car and walked around to the sea side of the house. Iris came forward to meet me, smiling, hand outstretched, her face which I had remembered as being remarkably pale was flushed with sunlight.

"I hoped you'd come," she said, and she slipped her arm in mine as though we'd been old friends and led me to a deck chair adjoining the one where she'd been seated, reading. We sat down. "Friends let me have this place. They went to Mexico for two months and lent me the house."

"Useful friends."

"Aren't they? I've already put down roots here in the sand and I'll hate to give it back."

"Don't."

"Ah, wouldn't it be wonderful." She smiled vaguely and looked beyond me at the flash of sea in the flat distance. An automobile horn sounded through the palms; a mother called her child: we were a part of the world, even here.

"Clarissa told me you've been out several months."

Iris nodded. "I came back. I think I told you I was going to."

"To see the man?"

"Would you like something to drink?" She changed the subject with a disconcerting shift of her gaze from the ocean to me, her eyes still dazzled with the brilliance of light on water. I looked away and shook my head.

"Too early in the day. But I want to take you to dinner tonight, if I may. Somewhere along the coast."

"I'd like it very much."

"Do you know of a place?"

She suggested several. Then we went inside and she showed me a room where I might change into my bathing suit; we were to swim.

We walked through the trees to the main road on the other side of which the beach glowed white in the sun. It was deserted at this point although, in the distance, other bathers could be seen, tiny figures black against the startling white, moving about like insects on a white cloth.

For a time we swam contentedly, not speaking, not thinking, our various urgencies (or their lack) no longer imposed upon the moment. At such times, in those days, I was able through the body's strenuous use to reduce the miserable demands of the yearning self to a complacent harmony, with all things in proper proportion: a part of the whole and not the whole itself, though, metaphorically speaking, perhaps that which conceives reality is reality itself. But such nice divisions and distinctions were of no concern to me that afternoon in the sun, swimming with Iris, the mechanism which spoils time with questioning switched off by the body's euphoria.

And yet, for all this, no closer to one another, no wiser about one another in any precise sense, we drove that evening in silence to a restaurant of her choosing on the beach to the north: a ramshackle place filled with candlelight, the smell of tar, old nets: "atmosphere" which was nearly authentic. After wine and fish and coffee, we talked.

"Clarissa is bringing us together."

I nodded, accepting the plain statement as a fact. "The matchmaking instinct is, I suppose…"

"Not that at all." Her face was in a half-light and looked as it had when we first met: pale, withdrawn, all the day's color drained out of it. Above the sea, Orion's belt dipped in the deep sky. The evening star all silver set. We were early and had this place to ourselves.

"Then what? Clarissa's motives are always clear, at least to herself. She never does anything that doesn't contribute to some private design… though what she's up to half the time I don't dare guess."

Iris smiled. "Nor I. But she is at least up to something which concerns us both and I'm not sure that she may not be right, about the two of us, I mean… though of course it's too soon to say."

I was conventional enough at first to assume that Iris was speaking of ourselves, most boldly, in terms of some emotional attachment and I wondered nervously how I might indicate without embarrassment to her that I was effectively withdrawn from all sexuality and that, while my emotions were in no way impaired, I had been forced to accept a physical limitation to any act of affection which I might direct at another; consequently, I avoided as well as I could those situations which might betray me, and distress another. Though I have never been unduly grieved by this incompletion, I had come to realize only too well from several disquieting episodes in my youth that this flaw in me possessed the unanticipated power of shattering others who, unwarily, had moved to join with me in the traditional duet only to find an implacable surface where they had anticipated a creature of flesh like themselves, as eager as they, as governed by the blood's solemn tide: I had caused pain against my will and I did not want Iris hurt.

Fortunately, Iris had begun to move into a different, an unexpected conjunction with me, one which had in it nothing of the familiar or even of the human: it was in that hour beneath Orion's glitter that we were, without warning, together volatilized onto that archetypal plane where we were to play with such ferocity at being gods, a flawed Mercury and a dark queen of heaven, met at the sea's edge, disguised as human beings but conscious of one another's true identity for though our speeches, our arias were all prose, beneath the usual talk recognition had occurred, sounding with the deep resonance of a major chord struck among dissonances. We crossed the first division easily. She was, in her way, as removed as I from the flesh's wild need to repeat itself in pleasure. There was no need for us ever to discuss my first apprehension. We were able to forget ourselves, to ignore the mortal carriage. The ritual began simply enough.