Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (2 page)

And so Linhouse, still in the shock of having to do anything at all, had seen to the secretary, to the posted notices, the arrangements for the hall—to in fact everything, including last night’s experience. Or rather,
she
had, through her serenely imperative letter, awaiting him after so long. His judgment, admittedly already impaired, had been further taken in, he supposed, by the fact that her letter to him had arrived conventionally enough, through her bankers. And it had been after all what anyone strains to honor—a last request.

What he hadn’t been prepared for, was the press. Had he need to be? The publicity officer—whose name always escaped people, though they never managed to do the same with her—was always reassuring everyone that her function was as much to suppress; it was certainly the case that even the
Times
had a special reportage for such scholarly failings as might be called human. And what the tabloids could do with a vanished anthropologist, much less the picture of this one, was inexhaustible. He looked down in the audience at Miss What’shername, at that face flattened to a smirk by constant snubbing, and couldn’t trust it. Perhaps it shouldn’t trust him.

He reached up behind him and pushed number eight of the row marked “Lights” on the concert-size switch panel. The surgical glare muted to what seemed at first an ugly, nightclub rose. Number four produced a cinema dark of no use to him, but just right, he supposed, for the sound screen above the panel. He touched number eight again, as per the letter in which everything had been so femininely specified—the sheer silly gaiety of it even now reaching out for the works of him better than any pinch of perfume.

Number eight’s glow was opera intermission rose-velvet really, a Covent Garden glow. Clear enough, nothing furtive. In it, the large bell-glass covering the “object” looked, except for its size, harmlessly like two cherished ones on his own mother’s mantel, even to its base of some black stuff close enough to their polished teak. Did bell-glasses normally come, however, to a height of something under five feet, by a width of over two? Could they be blown as thick as this and still remain more pellucid even than his mother’s? And granted all this, could they then be—?

In the new light, he could still see the provost seat himself, other friends arriving. What might Linhouse be the agent of having brought here, to this storehouse where so much that was sinister to his eyes went unnoticed? Or, to the men out there, who hadn’t spent their lives nosing Greek as he had, was the object housed there in front of him (and even the one property which had made it so alarmingly easy to get here) so run-of-the-mill that any half-dozen of them could at once laughingly name it? From his world now so shaped by their alembic, he looked at them with humility, as men of his sort must nowadays. Jolly lucky he hadn’t at this point to name it to
them,
since the stigmata of his misspent life were apparently graven in him, even to his eyes. For ever since last evening, his eyes had kept telling him what the great shaggy oval under the glass was, and yet couldn’t be. In a certain shame he bent his glance away from all those sanhedrin out there in the front row, and stole another look. Yes, and for all its oddness. What it still seemed to him most to be, was—a book.

He’d never seen one like it of course, a cylinder book, or one shaped like a dirigible flattened at either end and resting upright on one of them. Between these, the concentric leaves or pages, thick as discs, came naturally to their broadest circumference in the central pages, declining at either end to the smallest, which were of about the size of a child’s phonograph record, or a modest lily pad. The gradual, elliptic curve of the page ends, or cross sections, was counterparted by that of the spine and covers, these shagged to a thickness too vaguely patterned to be called tooled, yet not coarse, as if the broad hand of its maker had sometimes dreamed of Florentine. It was a book made by a Brancusi, or else a very gifted aborigine. And he thought he knew what the leather was, of which its entirety seemed to be made. In his childhood’s home library in Wiltshire, there had been books and even other articles made of what had then been called Hungarian leather, alum leather, or plain “white leather,” this made, according to his grandfather, by a process called “tawing” that kept the natural color of the skin. In that library’s shelves of anything from early parish registers to proceedings of ecumenical councils, there’d been books which to a five-year-old child had seemed almost as large as this one and some of shape almost as queer. And as that child, he’d been bred early to the presence of a certain beingness that persisted through all their thicks and thins, from the quartos that could lame a toe, to the silk missal that lay on the table like a handkerchief. For all he knew, this one, when uncovered, might talk on tape, or hum in braille, or even shoot out some gamma or gas which would require a memorial service for everyone here—nevertheless, he still recognized that presence in it. It had the
beingness
of a book.

And now to face the music, in more than one way. An hour’s introit, to allow people to gather, was standard at these nondenominational performances. His watch now said two-thirty-five. The invitations had said three. He would give them an extra fifteen minutes for latecomers. Turning to the panel, he flicked a switch, to quick disappointment. The place was wired, like any other, for Muzak, which now began its mindless brain massage. He sighed. He’d been asked to sit with that thing over there from the time it was moved here. It had been almost dawn when he had settled it in place here.

Keep it company,
she’d written,
it’s quite a prize. Once the mechanism is moved, it must be allowed to regain equilibrium overnight, or for at least five hours, at a temperature of 71°.

He’d kept it company; by God he’d slept here, on a couple of turned-down seats, going out like a truant for his coffee and a washroom shave.

An hour beforehand, raise the temperature in the hall to 74.6°. Please be exact about that. Afterwards, you have only to lift the glass and it will function perfectly. Just give the crowd some music meanwhile. And there really ought to be a crowd, you know. I’d like about fifty. So invite perhaps a
h
undred. Any music will do.
With the sharpest ear for the spoken word, she’d had no ear otherwise.

Clearest of all, in the arrangements she’d foisted on him, was the evidence that she’d had absolutely no regard for what his feelings might be throughout them. Never had had much of course, at any time. As had been clear enough a year ago when they’d parted. Still, she might have remembered his severer musical tastes, and that it would have assuaged his feelings to—that he would have been happy to choose—Or had she known better how he, listening, was likely to memorialize her? Perhaps, with that sense of style which in women must be never wholly separable from intelligence, she’d known herself as not one best recalled in passacaglias. Listening—it was the “Vilia Song” beloved of Muzaks—he began to smile.

A
T FIRST GLANCE AN
olive type but not really, she had what Linhouse’s grandmother would have called a georgette skin—pale, without oil, not thin—and her brows had a penciled, brushed look which, though natural, gave her face a made-up emphasis even when fresh from the washbasin. With men, she had that charged yet careless manner they recognized at once and returned to endlessly, to be addressed either as men or as “boys” of her own age, but never, with the usual stance of her countrywomen, as sons—since the age of six she had been a jampot for boys. Almost at once a man sensed that the usual ploys invited by her elusively median appearance—“Were or were not her eyes hazel? Was she really more of a redhead than a brown?”—had all been tried and returned many times before, yet she always answered as if these were new, causing her to be spoken of as “a French type” by those mistaking for flirtatious the warm-cool smiles which Linhouse had reason to know were not manner, but a personal thing no Frenchwoman of his acquaintance had ever been guilty of—somewhere, she didn’t care. Had she been a beauty, hers would have been of the kind that is either outside fashion or makes it; since she wasn’t sugarlump pretty, her attraction couldn’t be pinned down. This had been its fatality for him, God knows; she could not be pinned down.

“Oh—” she’d been saying at a party where, unintroduced, he had stood at her elbow, “if I weren’t of the white race there’d be more names for my indefinite mixture—
mahine, grayling
—” and she had gone on to list several more abstruse but apparently similar terms he’d never heard of before. He already knew her to be an anthropologist, one of no special distinction—he’d been told that also. This was the way it went with the few women on the staff here; the Center, instead of choosing fearfully brilliant survivors of competition with the most distinguished male colleagues, discriminated rather more thoughtfully, tending to settle for a few mediocre women scholars who might then be taken as evidence that the others didn’t exist to be found.

He recalled now that he had been smiling at this private thought when, finishing her sentence, she had seemed to address her smile particularly to him: “Guess I’m what might be called a white octoroon.” Even as their eyes met—she must really have been replying to some speech of the Austrian heavy at her other elbow—he had sensed that it was merely habit on her part, to make any man seem particularly addressed. Later, he thought of it as a power she couldn’t discard. At the time, he’d nodded, but not answered. In his own way, he was knowledgeable enough about women. And later on, as the campus had let him know, she had indeed singled him out.

He had slept with her. According to gossip, since her widowhood no one else had. Still later, they’d become one of those couples who were invited together; in the easy droppings-in of the life here she’d been discovered at his flat, he at her cottage; since this was a civilized community the worst was known of them without comment, and the best—i.e. marriage—hoped for. And what had endlessly preoccupied him all that year together and beyond it, down to the very moment when her letter had led him back to her house to find the object now on the dais, was—what it could be, what in God’s name could it be, about which she didn’t care?

In their sexual moments, though no grunting peasant girl for whom the exchange was nearest to the intake of food, she was normal enough, fully as much so, he suspected, as many of the nice matrons hereabouts and most of the fast ones, both of whom would have been disillusioned to the bone if told either that sexual exchange was quite Europeanly their own purchase money in the buy-marts of life, or that on this basis it might still be enjoyed. She too wanted her exchange, but whatever it was it wasn’t any of the usual, not marriage. He’d never had an affair in which there was less sense of the marriage topic coming up—and this was unnerving. She was always unnerving him.

Once, when in his arms—was it their last day?—she had revealed herself so far as to say, of the sexual act itself, “Oh well, it’s the nearest, isn’t it, the nearest we can come in this world, to
nothing
”—and when she saw his face, full of attempted Freudian concern for her and real concern for his own vanity, had at once hopefully amended it. “Oh, I mean—to talk
your
language—” by which she meant philosophy, though he was technically a classicist—“the Something that is nothingness.” She often tried to talk what she thought of as his language, just like any respectable doctor’s wife or professor’s moll, and with about the same success. This effort had been one of the most womanly things about her. And the only proprietary one, if it was that, which he now doubted.

For it was earlier on this same occasion when they were as a matter of fact still lying together on the extraordinary couch she had brought back from New Guinea only to find out later it was fake—she
was
a poor anthropologist—that he’d discovered why she had singled him out.

“But
why!
” he’d said, outraged. She’d mistaken him, she said, for a physicist. No, not any special one—just a physicist. “Unless you were planning to go through the departments one by one!”

“Now, you know that isn’t so,” she had countered, calmly enough. “I’ve never wanted to be one of those academic how do you say it,
het
—
hetaira.
”

He’d had to laugh. And he supposed it was true enough; since the death of her husband, the Jamison who had been a good anthropologist, she hadn’t slept around. As an older man with whom she’d gone off so young, her husband had been willing enough to train her for the travel she was so eager for, and they had lived happily enough.

“He first got interested in me because I belonged to a tribe,” she had informed Linhouse on a still prior occasion.

“Uh-huh, of course,” Linhouse had answered—she was on his knee at the time—fully aware of what she must have been at eighteen. What the boys around the jampot must have thought of her going off with a fifty-four-year-old man, he could well imagine. And he knew that her name had been Wertham or Wertheim, that she had grown up in Pennsylvania.

“No, really. I’m from a religious sect, the Amish. That is, my grandparents were. The ‘plain people.’” She’d had to explain this to him, adding rather seriously, “
We
were lapsed ones. My parents, that is. There aren’t many of those who are lapsed, you know. But we were.” This was the one glimpse he had had of her earlier life, beyond a remembrance that once, when he’d suggested driving down to what he by then knew was referred to here as the “Dutch” country, meanwhile thinking of the trip British style as a picnic tour of, say Lancashire, with some good old churches on the way, and some inns of course—she had replied, “No, I never go back anywhere. The farm’s there, but
I’m
not. So why try?”

All his memories of her, of this woman who never went back anywhere, were like that, leading circularly into one another, heading him only to that nowhere in which he still refused to believe she was. On the couch, that later and last day, he’d been as furiously bereft and confused by her as any of those earlier, presumably non-Amish, wretched boys.