Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas (3 page)

There’s no point in going on. The plot, which is the soul, as Aristotle says, remains the same. Only the body undergoes a change. If we could X-ray that painting, I’m sure we’d find there every level of unclothing, like the layers of Troy, beneath its radiantly naked top. Adam—wheedle by wheedle—in the same way, got existence.

Now the careful reader will have noticed—

Bless me. The careful reader. I had forgotten him.

Does anyone remember me?

Well … My typewriter rests on a great oak plank between two sawhorses. In the old days, when the first volume of
Vines and Memorial Porches
had appeared and I was, in a manner of speaking, famous, I had been pictured in the colored pages of a national weekly working on
Trumpet to the Dawn
, then shortly to follow
Hurst’s House
as the middle of my masterpiece (and a thumping success, as it turned out), shirtless, the hair on my back, which was bleached by the sun, making quite an effect in Kodachrome, puffing at a cigarette, a bluish string of testimonial smoke wreathing my clenched eyes, hands descending roughly toward the keys, face screwed with the effort of creation and my nails trimmed, rope belt tightly cinched and tied as a pirate would with a looping bow above the hip … I was vain … god … it cut into my waist and raised, or rather while indenting the skin seemed to raise nevertheless, a weal, which reproduced itself in the photo as an irregular pale splotch contiguous with the top of my tan shorts … not a bit flattering; and as I remember, I wore clogs and had my legs spread straight as sticks, as I have since seen pregnant women spread them when they dared, and my desk in that photo was just such a desk as this, exactly the one my knees are under now, as a matter of fact, for I felt obliged by the picture to use it sometimes, though I don’t wear a thing when I write but work naked and compose by staring at my cock and balls, alternatively, first one and then the other; and that sense of obligation, the sight of myself in the picture, put me under it so often that I began to compare my wooden horses to the feathered dray-pulls of the
Phaedrus
: the right-hand horse a stallion, graceful as a skipping girl, blond and clear-eyed, yet thick-maned and large like the lion, with the lion’s deep throat and tubular teeth, swift and tireless, moreover, as a coasting bird, as farsighted, patient, and implacable,
with a regal neck which lifted at every sound like a deer’s, and with wings to satisfy an angel glowing from their passage through the air; while the left … oh dear, the left a shambling, drunken mare with a cropped tail and a coarse shaggy coat made of hairs with darkened ends, sore-footed, foulmouthed, fattish and nobby, with short, uneven legs and a snub face and white-webbed eyes, nervous, sly, her inner organs cruelly eaten by disease, given to rhythmic swaying like a bear, inclined to bite, her dwarfed wings so closely folded to her sides she never flew at all but fell as crudely as a stone, as brutally, as eager; and as I say, this obligation sent me back and back again until sitting to the trestle became automatic, necessary even when bitter (as now), it was a track so deeply worn; and I can reach with a pencil end the words I have carved in the wood by tracing them a hundred thousand times, my doodles too, always the same, cutting a canyon like a stream, dark at the bottom with graphite, beautifully smooth (for graphite is a handsome lubricant), in beautifully turned calligraphy:
cunt
, for instance, with many curlicues … (here is something funny: I had begun that particular tracing first, so it was rather permanently down when I began the final volume, and it really happened that on the day I composed its most famous scene, that tender lovers’ parting on the porch of Mt. Lion, Parker kissing the tines of Carol’s parasol (OK, anything sounds absurd when outlined simply, and there’s a lesson for us all in that), then folding it abruptly as a sign that he is leaving the Mount forever; while I was composing this tender, sentimental scene, I say, restlessly stirring my words around and wondering how I should manage the business, my pencil was continuously, thoughtlessly, idly tracing
cunt
still more darkly in the oak—imparting a rhythm to my hand and arm, rocking my shoulder, affecting … what? my brain? (which reminds me of the technique of
Madame Bovary
and of Flaubert’s startled whore, cigar ash on her belly, formal hat on
him—the supremely cool equestrian), well … and Covenant, which was the name of an historic oak beneath whose boughs a treaty, depriving some Indians of land in return, I believe, for their enjoyment of an interlude of peace, was signed by some Quakers and those Indians with an
X
; and when the oak, having fallen prey to drought, wind, age, or some disease (I wonder was it the same disease as mine?), was cut down (bands played, doubtless; there were solemn speeches in rented hats from wooden stands while pennants snapped in the rhetorical winds), a long heart slice was sent to me, though god knows why, I hate both covenants and trees, and this accounts for the incision of
Covenant
, and for
fuck the Indians hurrah
, a bordering phrase, etched small.

I am an inveterate pencil carver and I consequently understand the qualities of wood. I know how, for instance, the grain will cause the most determined line to quake and wriggle. My first attempt to engrave the letter
c
in the plank from the Covenant tree left a very bent and shaken
l
, though you would never guess it now, the original is so overlaid with flourishes. The secret is to proceed by a series of gentle scratches, repeated often; never an impatient deep gouge, which the wood will surely put a crick in, but always the patiently light scratch. A painted surface is tricky. Oh, it’s easy enough to make pencil marks on a fine enamel, but that’s not the aim, you know. Get under the skin, that’s the idea. You must watch that the paint doesn’t flake or you will spoil the clarity and decision of your line. I’m not much interested in images myself. I always carve letters or abstract designs: five-pointed stars sometimes, the capital
L
, which in script curls its edges like a sheet of stamps, or
f
or
k
, or the word
Isabel
, or thickety black scrawls bunched like tumbleweeds, and mazes of dizzily turning lines like the spill and flow of hair, whole worlds really, the track deepening as you journey on, as if at any moment you might penetrate
something, find yourself inside the sacred wood, say, or simply, like Alice, land thump in another part of the soul where a voice is exclaiming, my, my, my, as you arrive, and there is a vague flash of white from something running or a pink glow from the lobe of an animal’s ear or the faint but steady ringing of a distant alarm. Then frequently: balloon.

Traveling, I’ve returned to stations where I’ve stopped for gas and found my stars still there, sometimes even darkened, or deepened, by those who love, as I do, to slip into a path and feel the rhythm of another mind, a stranger’s, once sitting where you are, tracing some secret of his life on the wall or in the toilet seat, not always cheap or vulgar either, for after all it is form and not the content that matters, though there are those who scratch haphazardly, concerned to get their filthy message over (in art and life the same), but they aren’t everybody, thank god, for I’ve seen the masculine member drawn by a genius, and a vagina rendered strangely like a daisy, and once, as high as you could reach, like the bragging claw marks of a bear, exquisitely formed, the word
lemonade
, by a divinity.

Three a.m. It’s begun to snow. Could I have the time where you are? Strange. It may be morning, hot already, sweat in all your creases. Whew. Your bare legs have stuck to your chair. That time of year. In me large flakes are sailing single file. Hear the hiss? Isn’t that the purply misssst?

There is a small hotel in town. I remember the dirty marble floor, cold and noisy, the nails in my worn heels clicking. I skirt bucket rings and patches of drying mop water, one in the shape of Spain, to escape the remote lamps of the lounge and keep my shadow out of corners while I flee on strips of carpet to the stairs where bumping down sedately through the door marked
WOMAN
I say I beg your pardon to the wielder of the mop though she is gone or not yet come and the booths are empty, idle, unobscene, unscatological. I try one out but there is nothing
to it. My deeply yellow urine, like the light from those brass lamps, spills in the bowl and I leave it as a sign of my passing. Oh I am a foul left-handed fellow, Phaedrus, rarely ambidextrous. As I go I hear my feet … the wealthy author walks.

Did I discover much?

No, not much: stale powder, strong discharges, cheap perfume, moist hair. They write on the walls with lipstick. I’ve little interest in that. It’s painting of a crude sort; nothing’s clear. It has no permanence and lacks the shaping resistance of a decent medium. But where the women water in a public playground I did follow a track in the shape of a symbol from the Isle of Man that made my hair stand on end. There was something superb scratched in plaster with a bobby pin … somewhere … I’ve forgotten … while another time, in a roadside park, I encountered a painting, a silhouette in menstrual blood entitled
Sam
. Not much luck. Yet I keep on. Don’t laugh. My god, remember I’m supposed to think and feel and see for everyone—imagine!—that’s the true author’s business; and all the time Christ snoozes in his chair. There’s no patron for left-handed wretches. It’s bottoms up, buddy, for us. All right, snicker. You’ve never seen your face in Leonardo’s mirror. Laugh away. But poking about takes guts, all the same. Don’t pay for anything less.

Some, of course I’ve never learned their names, anonymous Samoans maybe, saintly impersonal artisans who sit cross-legged braiding leaves to hang athwart their middles, take advantage of the natural terrain, incorporating, in the manner of collages, nails (around two such were drawn the feet of Christ, one nail for each, as though He had been hammered to the letter
H
, His hands represented in the same way except the fingers of the left were bent across a corner where a nail came through the wallboard from the other side, a shred of scarlet ribbon fluttering from the point like a trickle of blood, and I must say, though images don’t excite me very much, this one gave me a turn), and
every other accident and feature: bubbles in the paint, badly patterned plaster, the tracks of mounting tape, untanned squares where notices were hung, desperate old erasures and the paths of rags; flecks, picks, cracks, the heads of screws; stains, smudges, nicks, dents, pieces of paper; chips, smears, mars, knots, tears, condom and comb dispensers; scrapes, bumps, chinks, scars, furrows, burns, and the webs of spiders; clots of lifeless flies, mineral growths at the joints of pipes, even objects hung in space, dangling strings and naked bulbs and wires, for instance (in the toilet of a rural bar and billiard hall, incredibly forlorn, when I sat down to shit, the bulb blew me hugely on the wall, humped, rising out of the shadow of the stool like a giant out of granite, something by Rodin, brutish and primordial, and then I saw an outline on the wall, faint, in chalk, unsteady, often smeared, of someone else’s body, bent like mine, nearly the same, but with an arm outstretched and fingers fanned, though whether as a plea for aid or in salute or benediction it was impossible to say, and strangely compelled, I reached out cautiously, enclosing my shadow in the lines, and they fit like Cinderella’s slipper, they fit; that nameless idiot and myself, we fit; and when I examined the drawing more carefully I saw that the outline had been dotted in with something like the soft tip of a billiard cue, the points then joined with ordinary chalk; and so observing, I wiped myself and rose and spoke boldly to the giant as I stuffed my shirt into my trousers: but do you speak the language of the French,
mon frère
?), and, well, simply every imaginable matter: boards and pipes, hooks and other kinds of hardware, even previous compositions, whatever elements are given, just as the Aurignacian painters in their caves.

Is there a groove where I may rest my sensitive arm? I know the joke: the grave. But what selection shall I play this three a.m. in honor of the snowing? There are twenty degrees of aged light and fat young snow. A gauge grins at me through a window whose
face frost is blearing. I shall play Ella Bend swaying in her shoe, a moronic look on her face. Silly fool. I hate her. I hate them all. That’s not a manner of speaking. I have only to write down their names and I hate them. They make my stomach turn …

Except for Pister Welcome. There’s a possibility there. For something new. No need to hang another doodad of a moon in the morning sky. Do Greece? do Babylon?
Of Mice and Men
again? Pister Welcome was built like Gregory Peck, only he had the head of a chicken. The irony in his name was that Pister was a hermit. He lived in the woods beneath a huge pile of brush.

Ah, thank the lord—Phil! It’s you. (Phil, a friend, is knocking at the gate of my heavenly study; doubtless he wishes to come in, to see me, visit a bit.) Come in …

There is a film of dust on everything. It is August. The roads are dry. No. It is August. The roads are dry. There is a film of dust on everything. It settles slowly as the snow falls softly on my window. But dust is more enduring, stays the seasons, surfaces the wings of birds, persists through fiction, drifts from Ella Bend to me, and in an hour or so, though Ellareen has dusted thoroughly, I shall write my mene mene tekel upharsin on her dining room table, my fingernail like the skate of a ghost. Dust out of the dry August roads. Dust blown out of the dry August sky. It will dampen the ball of my thumb if I mark on the window. What might I write there? Heat from my hand will melt the frost. The gauge will grin through the lines. Does the shoe fit, princess? Let me feel the instep. You’ve an ugly ankle. Couldn’t I have done any better by you? No promise in the leg either. An ungenerous thigh. Well, look at your mother. Bad blood somewhere. I mean the albino. And your father—furious for it. Shall I trouble to describe you? How shall I describe you if I trouble? Dust drawn from the dry August roads. Ah, Theaetetus, I fear I have brought forth a wind-egg. I have few positive opinions but I’ve opinions on that … somewhere … I’ve
thought of it often. Don’t I keep a journal? Foolish oversight. Notebook? No? It’s this pain in my belly that puts me off.