William Gass - Eyes - Novellas and Stories

During the long empty hours between customers, Mr. Gab sat at his desk at the front of the shop and drowsed or thumbed through the same old stack of photographic magazines he’d had for as long as his assistant had been near enough his paging thumb to observe what the pages concerned. Most of the time Mr. Gab sat there with the immobility of a mystic. Occasionally, he’d leaf through a book, often an exhibition catalogue or a volume containing a description of the contents of a great archive, such as Rüdiger Klessmann’s book on the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, over whose pages and pictures he’d slowly shake his head. Once in a while, his back still turned to his assistant, he’d raise a beckoning hand, and u-Stu would leave his stool in the rear where he was awkwardly perched while trying to read books slender enough to be steadily held by one hand, and come forward to Mr. Gab’s side where he was always expected to verify, by studying the picture, Mr. Gab’s poor opinion of the masterpiece.

The beckoning finger would then descend to point at a portion of a painting; whereupon Mr. Gab would say: look at that! is that a tree? that tangle of twigs? The finger would poke the plate, perhaps twice. It’s an architect’s tree! His voice would register three floors of disgust. It’s a rendering, a sign for a tree; the man might as well have written “tree” there. Over here, by “barn,” see “bush.” And the fellow is said to be painting nature. (It might have been a Corot or Courbet.) See? is that a tree? is that a tree or a sign, that squiggle? I can read it’s a tree, but I don’t see a tree. It is not a tree anyone actually sees. Twigs don’t attach to branches that way; branches don’t grow from trunks that way; you call those smudges shade? To a simp they might suggest shade. To a simpleton. There’s not a whiff of cooling air.

The finger would retire long enough for the assistant to make out an image and the book would snap shut like a slammed door: I am leaving forever, the slam said. A fake crack in a fake rock from which a fake weed fakes its own growth, Mr. Gab might angrily conclude: we are supposed to admire that? (then after an appropriate pause, he’d slowly, softly add, in a tone signifying his reluctant surrender to grief) that…? that is artistry?

The assistant spent many hours every day like a dunce uncomfortably perched on a stool he had difficulty getting the seat of his pants settled on because it stood nearly as high as he did and furthermore because the assistant was trying to bring a book up with him held in his inadequate hand. Once up, he was reluctant to climb down if it meant he’d soon have to climb up again. So he perched, not perhaps for as long as Mr. Gab sat, but a significant interval on the morning’s clock: with a view of the shop and its three rows of trestle tables topped with their load of flap-closed cardboard boxes adorned by beanbags as if they were the puffy peaks of stocking caps. The tables appeared to be nearly solid blocks since so many containers were stored underneath each one where with your foot you’d have to coax a carton to slide sufficiently far into the aisle to undo its flaps and finger through its contents. ROME I.

But Mr. Gab or his stupid assistant, whoever was closest, would rise or fall and wordlessly rush or rock to the box and lift it quickly or awkwardly up on top of the ones on the table, deflapping it smartly or ineptly and folding the four lids back before returning to chair or stool and the status quo. Mr. Weasel would occasionally come in and always want a box buried beneath a table in the most remote and awkward spot; but at least he’d pick on a container up front where Mr. Gab would have to say good day in customary greeting and then push cartons about like some laborer in a warehouse to get at PARIS NIGHTLIFE or some similar delicacy that Mr. Weasel always favored.

Customers who came to the shop more than once got names chosen to reflect their manner of looking or the shapes they assumed while browsing, especially as they were observed from the stool of the stupid assistant. Weasel slunk. He was thin and short and had a head that was all nose. His eyes were dotted and his hair was dark and painted on. The first few times Weasel came to the store the stupid assistant watched him carefully because his moves produced only suspicion. After a number of visits, however, the Weasel simply became the Weasel, and the stupid assistant shut down his scrutiny, or rather, turned it onto his page.

Part of the stupid assistant’s education was to study books which Mr. Gab assigned, not that they ever discussed them, and it would have been difficult for Mr. Gab to know, ever, if his assistant was dutiful or not, or was reading filth and other kinds of popular fiction. When he thought he had caught the Weasel, u-Stu was wading through Walter Pater. And Pater held a lot of water. U-Stu was wading waist-deep. Mr. Gab had not recommended any of what the assistant later found out were Pater’s principal works, but had sent him to a collection of essays called Appreciations where u-Stu learned of Dryden’s imperfect mastery of the relative pronoun, a failing he misunderstood as familial. All Mr. Gab asked of his assistant regarding the works he assigned (beside the implicit expectation that it would be u-Stu who would withdraw them from the library, now he had his own card) was that u-Stu was expected to select a sentence he favored from some part of the text to repeat to Mr. Gab at a suitable moment; after which Mr. Gab would grunt and nod, simultaneously signifying approval and termination.

It was not clear to u-Stu whether there were designs behind Mr. Gab’s selections, but Appreciations contained essays on writers whose names were, to u-Stu, at best vaguely familiar, or on plays by Shakespeare like Measure for Measure for which slight acquaintance was also the applicable description. The first essay was called “Style” and u-Stu supposed it was Mr. Gab’s target, but, once more, the piece was larded with references that, from u-Stu, drew a blank response of recognition. U-Stu resented having his ignorance so repeatedly demonstrated. To Mr. Gab he said: “this book is dedicated to the memory of my brother William Thompson Pater who quitted a useful and happy life Sunday April 24, 1887.” Quite to the quoter’s surprise, this sentence proved to be acceptable, and u-Stu was able to return the volume a week ahead of its due date.

This is not to say that u-Stu didn’t give it a shot, and in point of fact he was in the middle of trying to understand a point about Flaubert’s literary scruples (all of Mr. Pater’s subjects seemed to be neurotic) when his head rose wearily from the page in time to see the Weasel slip a glassine envelope, clearly not their customary kind, into the stock of a cardboard box labeled MISCELLANEOUS INTERIORS. Skidding from his stool he rocked toward the Weasel at full speed. Sir, he said, sir, may I help you with anything; you seem to be a bit confused. This was a formula Mr. Gab had hit upon for lowering the level of public embarrassment whenever hanky-pankies were observed. However, as u-Stu took thought, as Mr. Gab turned to locate his assistant’s voice, and as the Weasel looked up in alarm, u-Stu realized that the Weasel, so far as he had seen, was adding to, not subtracting from the contents of the container. Had u-Stu perhaps missed an extraction? Was this the latter stage of a switch?

It’s all right, Mr. Stu, Mr. Gab said urgently. Mr. Grimes is just replacing a print for me. Oh, said Mr. Stu, stopping as soon as he could and calming his good eye. Mr. Grimes, the Weasel, winked in surprise and backed away from Mr. Stu in the direction of the door. Something is up, Mr. Stu thought, thinking he was now Mr. Stu, an improvement surely, a considerable promotion, a kind of bribe, but an acceptable one, coming as it did at long — he thought — last. But what was up? what? Mr. Stu retreated to his stool and Mr. Grimes slid out of the shop with never a further word. In fact, Mr. Stu couldn’t remember a first word. But he’d been inattentive while tending to Walter Pater’s work, and to the peevish Flaubert, who had just vowed, at the point Mr. Stu had reached in his reading, to quit writing altogether.