Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas (7 page)

he simply removed in the trunk of their car to cast on the dump or drop in a lake or bury: none of these acts move her because, she said, under torture matter could be made to say anything. Mud, mold, matter—what one called it didn’t count—but it had neither courage, nor loyalty, nor conscience. In her husband’s police state matter would moisten its tongue for its own ass, and she didn’t believe that was right, she refused absolutely to consider it, matter alone meant nothing, a calf of slime, she said, not an object of experience, of piety or speech; it was a convenient carrier at best, a carton for cats, and so she thought of it the way typhoid must have thought of Mary, no more, not even as a necessary ambience or elevation or so much as a stand for music, pediment for a statue or tower with an aerial, though that was closer, and what was he, then, in his dense maleness, a series of surfaces like a stack of plates, what was he with his bowling and his beer and his business—charging the living for their life and paying off only when death was a winner—what was he with his busy pencil and greedy teeth, in the flesh of his flesh, but the purest muck, individuation driven to the point of indifference, asafetida not energy, sheer dumb disagreeable stuff, unworked, unrealized, raw, foolish in its lean and teeter, its oils, wows, and ouches, as an Evereadied dolly, yet with a prick which led him on his little trot through life like a leash held at the loop end in the Pope’s fist? Butterflies leave laces in the air like a courtier’s cuffs, she said. Faugh. Easy to say such, harder to prove so. Still, in order not to shit, she would refuse to eat—intolerable the sounds of devoured food: unfeathered, fried, carved, bitten, chewed—therefore why was his pissing so productive? How about a belch, he’d ask her, much message in that? How about a fart? What can you read in a sneeze or the ooze of sweat, that color of water on the toilet pipe—ha—what do you say?—what about the petulant whine and then the frightened whinny of laboring machines? leap of
light from a mirror? unkinking cock? but she would smile her sad peacemaker’s smile at his coarseness, face him with a calm forbearing palm, explain that only the plainest idea could be contained in such a short intemperate sound as a sneeze, bereft of feeling and every fineness, say how often there’d be but blunt sense in the sharpest signal, because you never can tell about such things, Edgar, you must know that by now, surely you do, you do, surely, and though paint slides from a brush sometimes in a way that’s purely meditative, never mind, I have heard hush! in the batter of hammers, the clatter of cans, and please in the rasp of a file. I know every letter of the law, Hess said: L … A … —and I know of the awe in it, was her reply. It helped her to hit her, Hess knew that. Surely he knew that. Who had his hat? She hadn’t his hat. He had his hat. She wanted hitting in the worst way, although her surrender to his will was like another conquest of China. Still, what did it matter whether she was out from a blow or lost in her dizzy mind’s movies, since she could easily have dreams during dinner, trances during a doze? There was no place or moment she was willing to occupy the way Hess took over his air and hours—fully, heavily, persistently—so he was unable to feel there were any outlines to her—no weights, no volumes, no shifts—she was never anywhere. His wife might undergo visions while steaming a crease in his office trousers, plume out a chimney and disappear, receive visitations washing dishes, her thin hands gloved in suds as delicate as underclothes, or entertain omens and other astral submissions as though they were coffees set out in kitchens, as though one’s daughter or less likely one’s son had come home from a party and wanted to talk and you had perhaps pie and a bit of cheese to go along with the midnight signs and ciphers, the symbols and the codes, while you listened numbly dumbly to the life you’d passed by years ago like some display in a window turntabled once again—turntabled—ha—ha ha—and your
daughter or less likely your son awkwardly dancing to it as if it were a new tune and not a revival routinely fiddled by Old Bones and his Big Band. Ha, Mr. Hess thought. Ha ha. Articles in attics: so much for her visions. Voices spoke to him too, spoke to Hess, nicknouned the Hessian by his mates—ha—ha ha—they spoke to him from out of the past as hers did out of walls, because—it was true—what has gone before goes before like a hound, peeing a path, and damn if the old days didn’t dump on her, she was no different for all her fancies, because Hess knew from his own bitter history, hers too, that when today caught up with yesterday they would call it tomorrow. Visions, she said. Voices. Faugh. He had cause: cause like cotton is the cause of wounds. Blah. He knew. He had grounds. But his eyes did not step from the carpet where they were confined by stems and leaves to little curlicues. There was no need to look. Even if the room changed around him, it would be the same to his shoulders. I have cause, good cause, for what I do. My god, I’ve grounds, grounds like this floor here, concrete covered with fur, and beneath that earth forever and the few pipes we shit through. Listen, Father, I have cause. I do what I have to, always with cause, good cause, and only when I have to, only with cause. I’ve
grounds
. That’s why I wait/wait till I have to/to do what I have to … do. I wait while the years pile up and cause after cause comes like snow in a storm, so that now I may have too many, grounds too great like a park around a puddle, because they get suspicious if you have too many, they suspect that if you have too many, you haven’t any, and oh god, Father, I have many—many, many—still …. not too many, just enough, although they may ask what are these causes which never effect?
what is this mass which never moves? but I have many—many, many, many—and who can blame me if I run past complaint now as if it were a
STOP
I hadn’t seen? Visions. Indeed. Faugh. Blah. Visions of what, though? Never of gods and goddesses, never any angels, scarcely a cupid, beauty bare, the naked truth, not a single streak of light like the sperm of a star to pierce some window to where she was sitting, not Fate or a Fury or a vampirish mouse with a flat furry face like Bela Lugosi … nobodies, every one, not a name among them—Tyrone Power—not an old demon even, out of work or with an odd hour off and able to visit. No. Faugh. Don’t bet the farm on Mahatma Gandhi. Nooooh-bodies, boy. N
OO
ooo. The walls stood up around him, tan as a turkey, and the ceiling smirched along overhead as though in a day it might rain. It must be tiring to stay that stiff, he thought, for she wasn’t dead, that would be restful, the stiffness, the silence, of death. This was tense, this was a bellow, a huge howl which steadily grew and now contained the room which contained them. Father, she’s all right. I mean, she’s sick, and her soul is like a Cape Cod shingle, but she’s all right. Never could detect a pulse. Chest as still as a stove top. Fire’s out. Sick, then. Normal. She’s all right. Voices, she said. Messages. All right, messages: blah, where were they? what did they come to? sniffles and yipes from
Little Orphan Annie
, whining about lost dogs, weeping because there were boys away in the war, anxieties about men: boorish insensitive husbands like himself, brutal brothers, inconstant companions, faithless friends, lying lovers—bitching, bemoaning—nothing about the sweet thunder of the pins or the excitement of a homer, the comforting closure of a jaw in a bun, not a leaf from the tree of knowledge, not even so much as a mutter from the moral law, not even a helpful household hint—so—so much for the spiritual telegraph, for ESP, because only diseases sent
messages of any length and complexity—moment-by-moment readings, hourly bulletins, daily summaries, weekly releases—every sickness seemed to be somehow a triumph of the spirit, especially stopped-up sinuses, and migraines, like static on the radio, headaches so electric they haloed your hair, and it completely flummoxed Mr. Hess, who held his own head and groaned, even whimpered, while his missus felt giddy, had a spell of dizziness, or fell softly to the floor in a faint the way clothes slide sometimes from a hanger. Then there were discharges, menstrual moans, and the whites like a fog of sound. Mr. Hess hated to think about the others and couldn’t—didn’t dare—ask; nevertheless, what he gathered was that the ethereal world his wife loved was nothing but the loathsomely oozy body done into jiggles and jogs like the huff and puff of someone running. The books he consulted agreed in substance, though seldom in detail: it was a school of the dance, vibrations in vapors or ripples around rocks; it was streaks in cloth, they said; it was speeding clocks; it was clouds in chambers, ozone after lightning; it was wow, ow, ouch; it was apples on vacation from their cores. And the things in nature which proved most mute were therefore most sound, were in equipoise and balance like the billiard before its score, so equal and so uniform it was impossible to guess where a lean might come from or what tilt it might topple toward. Scrape, scratch, rasp: it was this inefficiency, this illness, this grumble in the works, which caused the uproar—indigestion, for instance, arthritis, epilepsy, ulcer—so that Hess felt sometimes that if the world would fall silent, she would be silenced. The hope led him to let his watch stop, although she said it kept on keeping time, and this was yet another reason why he double-washered taps, overoiled hinges, smothered the sharpener, and carried things out of the house tightly wrapped. He had long since ceased to smoke because Ella complained of
the foggy swowl in every draw, the ploan like a stormhorn in every puff. Now he went to the garage to grind his teeth. If you’re all so big about the spirit, Ella, he said, why are you all so physical, hey? why so gut and head sick, so eager to hear the earth? and why are you each so ugly: you’re either flat-faced or fat, thin-haired or moppy, lime-lipped, gun-gray—the lot of you—with teeth likely to be spilled in one of your mouths like a damp pan of beans; you guys ain’t elegant, you’re not opulent, not delicate, not shy, no ma’am, rather wart-, wen-, and liver-spotted, vein-roped, yeah, albino-eyed you bet, allergic, snivel-nerved and pukey, with tits loose and shriveled as emptied balloons, man-oh-man, or melted and sloping, uddery, why? drunk on disapproval, are you? and is every pain a blessing like a Boy Scout’s badge for merit? proud—I guess so—vain as if you were a Beauty, spoiled in the same way as a Jewish Princess, still I wonder how you came to be so fuckless if so female, hey? so juiceless, dry as oatmeal overboiled, oh even your stout ones like Madame Betz have dust bowls standing in their bellies, even in July when every skin is slithery with sweat because underneath the sweat the skin is dry, cunts closed and lying buried in their also sweaty secret hair like clams in silt, hey? and you have the gall to despise me for guzzling beer at the ballpark and playing with my toes. It was the only time Ella had ever raised her fist against him, and hadn’t he fetched her a good one, but there’s really no use talking to her, Father, to hammer some sense, because she won’t listen to me. She hears muscles jumping in my jaw; she will hear a hair gray, milli-inch by milli-inch; she covers her ears when the belly rumbles; she listens to my face flush and moistens her brow with a cloth; frequently she sings along: she hears all this, each secret part and public parcel, but she won’t pay mind to
me
or to any official broadcast. Father, Mr. Hess said seriously, I have cause to believe she’s committed
adultery with a drainpipe. Well she raised her fist that solitary time and said something overgrand and stucco like a thirties theater. It was really rather remarkable, come to consider it, how she seemed to gather the pieces together, various panels of her clothing, a collar, a pocket, a sleeve, each moving as separately as ants yet together like clasp and tie, too, all soft and hardbody at the same time, the way a scarecrow would grow if it grew, and her mouth opening, wider than when a muffin entered or a triangle of toast, and the muscles tensing along the length of her neck, the veins enlarged, quite blue, and the cry coming slowly out atop her tongue, in scraps, in flecks, the way she’d risen from the floor—A
YEEE
E—“shall” the only word which seemed to have a stop to it, curling up at the end like a pair of skies—beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—monsters in the movies wailed like that at the threat and showing of the Cross—freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—ha—ha ha—I shall be free. Not of me, he’d answer, automatically; not of mee, he’d said, with a depth of seriousness no dipstick was notched sufficiently to measure; not of
meee
, he’d said, shouting, and he fetched her a second and a better one. What are you at cards for, if you can hear so much? horoscoping, number-nosing, syllable counting, peering the leaves, or skittering out to consult that bubble-reading Madame Betz, all gyp, by god, no gypsy, just to show off to the competition what a better witch you are? and didn’t she call you a copy-cunt right in the pleasure of my hearing? and then didn’t I have to rough her up? how well you get along, you mystical ladies, pretending to concerns so delicate they can’t be seen but only seen through, like a pair of seductive panties. Well, none of that’s real, you hear me? I’ll tell you what’s real. I am. I AM REAL. And she had smiled at him from the floor, smiled a smile which spread like syrup, so full of slow sweet pity for him he could have killed her—well—and he did
give her a stern toe on account of it and his foot felt as if it were entering a basket of laundry. The idea that his missus had been chaffing for something like the same thing that he, Hess—knick-nacked the Penholder by his playmates—had, was … infuriating, it was … humiliating, it was … intolerable. Well, no, Father, truth to tell, it’s hardly been a successful union, a kind of side-by-side life, you might say, as close and on our own, each one of us, as two plants in the same row, stealing substance from one another, water and air and all the rest, what’s near, what’s by, that’s all, yet meeting, I suppose, once in a while, like leaves meet in a pile, for breakfast or in bed—ha—ha ha—never touching except, like I’ve said, when I reach out and whack her, and not even then, she sees to that, I think she knows days in advance—yes siree, no mistake—why, sometimes the bruise will be there, yellow and green like a young banana, before the day before the blow. The rug rolled. Goal or threat. Perhaps a promise. Designs slid out of the rim of his eye. Something to aim at: a telepathic bull’s-eye. I don’t ……. know. The shriek of the bird left silence foaming behind it like a boat’s wake and Mr. Hess thought of the boats he had seen in the showroom, turning slowly around and gleaming on their cradles like the girls he had ogled on the stage, paint too perfect for a world of logs and oil, and promising more escape than a plane. So. Well. Who had his hat? Mr. Hess thought he would apologize first for being so faithless—no—he wouldn’t put it like that—for being so irregular in attendance, whatever it was, but