Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (4 page)

Fifty miles from New York, rimmed by the Ramapo Mountains on the one side and the Hudson River on the other, the enormous gift mansions of the Center’s rambling estate, where not enfiefed by geography—or perhaps intellect—were so by regulation. Some of the most valuable scientific facilities in the world were here, plus the kind of government research which, though the Center wasn’t state-owned, inevitably went with such. Visitors of note came often, guests of the staff also. Some were heralded; others came quietly; all were met with aplomb. Nobody felt himself followed. Yet in such a few square miles, no matter how irregularly and munificently landscaped, there were only so many private houses to go to, each cot rather clear in its vale—and so many faces to see at them. Against the marble of the greater buildings, moonlight was sharp, shadows black, and even in rain or snow, nothing clandestine. And the bushes were so often barbwired.

It would be one of the new men, since he knew so intimately her opinion of the present staff—the one uxoriousness of their affair had been the sharing, suddenly open to two single strangers in a community largely paired, of those infinitely cozy malices of the newly married. Not long before, he himself had been new. At the Center, aside from the women and a few men in outmoded corners of the humanities like his own, the procurement of its very special scholars was exaltedly international and the turnover small—of last year’s six new male staff members, two had promptly been hijacked to California and two had been of that advanced age which sometimes still did accompany distinction. A few members, of whom he knew nothing, had been on leave. Of the two who were left, Meyer, one of those tall, rawboned Jews of Lincolnian feature, Meyer Spilker—anthropologist, had seemed more likely, until Linhouse, invited to dine, had seen both that organizational household—where in that schedule would there be time for adultery?—and better, had seen Meyer with Lila. There remained: Anders, who in himself seemed a remainder of the race itself, of those of its more questionable qualities which since the days of
Pithecanthropus erectus
had been debasing its limbs to the glory of its head—unless Anders were something unconscionably new. Anders was preferable. As one’s successor, a freak always is. And there still would have remained Anders, after all, theoretical physicist, latest hero of post quantum mechanics theory, and possibly of women—who by nature and history were always updating the Hero—if not for the last evening on which Linhouse, or anyone else, had seen Janice Jamison.

That had been in the February of what now, in early December, scarcely seemed the same year. Looking back, the last two years of his life fell as neatly from him its core as the segments of a fruit artificially forced. The two terms of his first year here and their affair, broken only by his annual summer visit to England, mother, and Sloane Street. His early return in August to the Center, where Janice had stayed on in her cottage. Their easy resumption, during an Indian summer slowly bronzing to fall, of that fixed rhythm of time, ergo of love and a good many other things, which was more often than scholarship the real secret of a scholar’s devotion to the academic life—faint monastic reflection as it was, for some only a religious one, of seasons and duties pre-ordained. Her avoidance of him had begun that November; then came that period when he glimpsed her now and then in the way of things here, but no longer by arrangement. His way home from office to flat lay straight down the lane on which she lived; it was only after he realized that they no longer met there even accidentally that her “vagueness” ceased being vague. The scheduled life could of course also be marvelously useful in nurturing the first tucked-in smiles of amorous interest—in the beginning he’d seemed to encounter her everywhere. How the same could be managed in reverse was now brought home to him in those walks, increasingly wintry, on which each day detached its brittle leaf, delivered its more umber dark.

He could have phoned, but didn’t. The walks kept up both his dignity and the thread of what he refused to name. No one who saw him embark down the untrafficked lane need know that he now passed her door without entering it. From remarks passed idly, “Where have you two—?” she seemed to be staying as socially quiet as he, and gossip still had them together. Others here were also being retiring; though there were no students here, hearts were still sensitive to the academic systole and it was now between terms, that lull of the year when people left and returned on plans accomplished before these were public, and Argus gossip even slept. She hadn’t gone away. He was still here. On his lone walks, these facts—though later at home he saw himself as the lone undergraduate in a forest of senior sense—served to make him feel that they were still together.

Mountain climate is for teatime, and tea had been their time for love, replacing the siestas that would have been Tuscany. Her house, originally a gate cottage, later on in its modest history remodeled by the estate owner for a lady retired from La Scala, had the characteristics of both eras. All its downstairs sitting-room life, like that of most saltboxes not overshrubbed, was accessible to the passerby. On the three sides of its second story, the little bedroom windows with their priscilla curtains flared against the dark like an open picture book. But at the rear, a story-and-a-half addition looked out through harlequin-leaded windows on a high close of pine, its one room blind to the road unless the passerby knew the pattern cast by the panes when there was a light behind them, a motley shine scarcely connected with them, more like a watermark of a perilous coastline beyond the trees. Each evening, though he wanted neither to see her nor be seen, the lights, bright on three sides, dark at the rear, gave him all the silhouette of what he wanted to know.

On the first night he saw that pale watermark, he walked on faster than usual. There was, he told himself as quickly, no agony. Though he’d never known her to use that room when alone, imagining her to be doing so was no easier, since he’d never seen her there in clothes. In that atticless house, this room had served for one, holding whatever of Jamison’s collection hadn’t gone to museums, plus all of hers which would never be asked for, including that couch. A great many objects, grinning, sawing the air and pendulous, were in that room, large ones—made of wood, fur, teeth, hair, shell, stone, bone, and all full of the ferocity of our beginnings, also numbers of those sadder exquisites of domestic use, or the whittlings of a primal afternoon—the buttons, pipes and shards now offered up from merged hands and now all ideographed to the same communication. It was a superb place to make love, not out of any lechery of the exotic, but because, tossed there on all that wrack, the survivor felt himself that supreme exotic, the man who was still alive. Against the La Scala lady’s mantel, at either end of which a carved Italian cherub, affixed rather clumsily, flew and hung, she always leaned for a minute, standing between them like a third carving budded there—one no good at flying but resolute of foot, smaller than angel, larger than cherub—and of more definite pudenda than either.

For a few nights after, he drove home, through town. When he resumed his walks, each evening that faint flotsam of rear light still shone, like the phosphor of a wreckage seen only by him. Whoever was visiting her must walk there also; there was never a car standing. Her Renault had been disposed of some weeks ago, this overheard by chance at the town garage, where he hadn’t dare ask further. Yet he’d never encountered anyone on the path. Twice he had seen her at a distance, once only the back of her lime-colored suit far ahead of him on the supermarket line, then gone, the second time from across the library reading room, where he had raised his head from study of a catalog to see her staring at him gravely—before he could smile, she had moved one hand from the wrist
comme-ci comme-ça,
and disappeared into a carrel. Then and there he’d disposed of her; only his own celibacy had continued her charm. He’d arranged to be away over the coming weekend and had alerted some rackety friends in New York. Selection here, he now saw, could be so highly unnatural. Let Anders continue the marathon.

But before the weekend, on the snowy Thursday dusk before, as he sat under the flaring chandeliers of the much more ordinary hall where the entire Center was gathered for a speech by a visiting eighty-year-old astronomer, of the customary distinctions, who was to be Linhouse’s guest for the night—there, in that public light, with all faces tipped toward that rather delightful old whale-spout on the platform, sense was at last granted him. It came like a grace, smarting but welcome, fallen on him. from those advanced universes of which old Sir Harry was now speaking. Before Linhouse stole away, ostensibly to go on ahead in preparation for his guest and the drinks to honor him, he looked over the hall once more, row by row. No, she wasn’t here. Everyone else was.

Sir Harry’s expressed mission in this country was to woo home those British scientists who had been bled away from their country’s service by gross American offers; the Center’s privately expressed hope was to bleed away him. Both sides were delicately showing their medals. All the Center’s luminaries, attended by every scrap of staff, were here. Over there was Meyer, marshaled at the head of a departmental claque from which only one was missing. And there—He had no trouble finding him. Anders was on the platform. She was the only one not here.

As Linhouse tiptoed out, the speaker, stretching his cosmorama so that even the secretaries might see its limits, had just dubbed the sun a third-generation, run-of-the-mill star. From Sir Harry’s tone, it seemed doubtful, in that case, that he would consider spending his declining years up the Hudson. But the old man could be thanked in another quarter.
Houseguest.
Absurd that it hadn’t occurred to Linhouse before. Whomever she’d had there all these weeks, perhaps months, was being harbored in the house.

Outside, snow was falling steadily, helping him obscure his real reason for driving instead of walking. On that quiet lane a car motor could be heard, and he would see to it that a car door was slammed. In the far corner of himself that had still been critic, he wished more than anything not to see Jack Linhouse sink to an even lower level of Paul Pry. To those who, like his former self, had never had such an obsession, he could now report that its sensation—as of helium in the head and lead in the shoes—was desperately tiring. Especially so if, with the same schizoid keenness, its owner disapproved of it as highly as if it had belonged to somebody else. On her doorstep, the car motor left chugging, he waited in what he did recognize—an onslaught of the tenderness, false as hope, which could vine any doorway in one’s mental life, no matter how dubious a one, let one only know for sure that one was leaving it.

Later on, from the short vantage of the next night (in his plane seat as emergency duenna to the suddenly taken ill Sir Harry) he’d seen how lucky his own awkwardly hiccuped greeting might have been for her, allowing her to cover, with his confusion, some very much more grave lack of it in her. There’d been no scene—for one thing, she’d been fully and calmly clothed. If, instead, she had come to the door in any one of the snatched-up mandarin-coats or cleverly managed serapes in which, during his own tenure, she’d used to answer an inconvenient bell, he might have learned more than what he had—that in this house there was something important to be learned. But not many embarrassments were harder to bridge than the formal meeting, after some estrangement, of two parties who’d last seen each other in the nude.

“All that wiggery!” Sir Harry, opening his eyes after takeoff and refusing a pill, resettled himself. “No—I don’t mean all this—” The takeoff had been extra deluxe, in fact floated on music. “—and I’ll keep my seatbelt, theng kew. I meant last night.” Under the eye of last night’s doctor, he had told the provost that if popping off was the question, it had come to him that now
or
later, he would rather wait for that event at home. The provost, much disappointed, had declined to bear the responsibility of Sir Harry’s making it there alone.

“Good of you to volunteer, though,” said Sir Harry now, “to accompany me.”

“Glad to,” said Linhouse, smiling truthfully. Toward such sound old persons as well-seasoned with the oils-and-vinegar of life as this one, those who above all still carried their hardness of mind like altar boys the holy vessel, Linhouse had the veneration of a man who dared to hope for an old age of the same. “Also, free ride home to mother. She won’t visit me here.” He looked outside. “Here” was already well over the Atlantic.

“Ah?” Sir Henry stretched one long, tentative leg into the aisle, his fists still grasping the armrests. He’d waived the windowseat to Linhouse. Despite his elaboration, last evening at the party, on the undoubted existence, as admitted by most astronomers of his school, of life on those hidden stars behind the cosmic dust, beyond the Milky Way, the immediate heavens, dark blue and drifting, seemed to interest him not at all. It came to Linhouse, sharply watching his charge—could it be that the old boy was afraid of flying?

“Ah—?” He turned, just enough to scrutinize Linhouse. “Good to know that some of, er—us—still want to stay at home.” Head forward on his neck, he made that most English and useful of sounds, a hairy, noncommittal snuffle—“Mmmph?”—as far toward interrogation as he could decently go.

Linhouse smiled. His quarter-cousins, the English, wore their politeness as they wore their braces, and for the same reason, to hold in and up a part of the natural man—in this case a curiosity not as innuendo as the French, nor as loose as the American, but as savage as either—and in their own gaming way quite as well rewarded. The old man wouldn’t dream of asking what any young native chit at the Center would have chirped out of habit, and been given the answer to with her handshake—as to exactly what Linhouse, clearly a hybrid,
was.
Indeed the old boy would be more content to dart at it from corners, puzzling it out. This game of origins and professions could last the trip—which for Linhouse, mentally still back on that snowy doorstep, might have been preferable. But his job was to sustain the old man, not exhaust him. He’d therefore given his dossier as ingenuously as the States had accustomed him to doing, as freely as once, holding a hand he had been made to give it to
her.