Look at the Harlequins! (20 page)

I had a black headache and decided that a two-mile walk in the cool clear night would do me good. My dealings with space and spatial transitions are so diabolically complicated that I do not recall whether I really walked, or drove, or limited myself to pacing up and down the open gallery running along the front side of our second floor, or what.

The first person to whom my hostess introduced me—with a subdued fanfare of social elation—was the “English” cousin with whom Louise had been staying in Devonshire, Lady Morgain, “daughter of our former Ambassador and widow of the Oxford medievalist”—shadowy figures on a briefly lit screen. She was a rather deaf and decidedly dotty witch in her middle fifties, comically coiffured and dowdily dressed, and she and her belly advanced upon me with such energetic eagerness that I scarcely had time to sidestep the well-meant attack before getting wedged “between the books and the bottles” as poor Gerry used to say in reference to academic cocktails. I passed into a different, far more stylish world as I bent to kiss Louise’s
expertly swanned cool little hand. My dear old Audace welcomed me with the kind of Latin accolade that he had especially developed to mark the highest degree of spiritual kinship and mutual esteem. John King, whom I had seen on the eve in a college corridor, greeted me with raised arms as if the fifty hours elapsed since our last chat had been magically blown-up into half a century. We were only six people in a spacious parlor, not counting two painted girl-children in Tyrolean dress, whose presence, identity, and very existence have remained to this day a familiar mystery—familiar, because such zigzag cracks in the plaster are typical of the prisons or palaces into which recrudescent derangement merrily leads me whenever I have prepared to make, as I was to do now, a difficult, climactic announcement that demanded absolute clarity of concentration. So, as I just said, we were only six animal people in that room (and two little phantoms), but through the translucid unpleasant walls I could make out—without looking!—rows and tiers of dim spectators, with the sense of a sign in my brain meaning “standing room only” in the language of madness.

We were now sitting at a round clockfaced table (practically undistinguishable from the one in the Opal Room of my house, west of the albino Stein), Louise at twelve o’clock, Professor King at two, Mrs. Morgain at four, Mrs. King in green silk at eight, Audace at ten, and I at six, presumably, or a minute past, because Louise was not quite opposite, or maybe she had pushed her chair a sixty-second space closer to Audace although she had sworn to me on the
Social Register
as well as on a
Who’s Who
that he had never made that pass at her somehow suggested by his magnificent little poem in the
Artisan
.

I started to speak in the high, clear, insolent voice (taught me by Ivor on the beach of Cannice) by which I instilled the fear of Phoebus when inaugurating a recalcitrant seminar in my first years of teaching at Quirn: “What I plan to discuss is the curious case of a close friend of mine whom I shall call—”

Mrs. Morgain set down her glass of whisky and leaned toward me confidentially: “You know I met little Iris Black in London, around 1919, I guess. Her father was a business friend of my father, the Ambassador. I was a starry-eyed American gal. She was a fantastic beauty and
most
sophisticated. I remember how thrilled I was later to learn that she had gone and married a Russian Prince!”

“Fay,” cried Louise from twelve to four: “Fay! His Highness is making his throne speech.”

Everyone laughed, and the two bare-thighed Tyrolean children chasing each other around the table bounced across my knees and were gone again.

“I shall call this close friend of mine, whose case we are about to examine, Mr. Twidower, a name with certain connotations, as those of you who remember the title story in my
Exile from Mayda
will note.”

(Three people, the Kings and Audace, raised three hands, looking at one another in shared smugness.)

“This person, who is in the mighty middle of life, thinks of marrying a third time. He is deeply in love with a young woman. Before proposing to her, however, honesty demands that he confess he is suffering from a certain ailment. I wish they would stop jolting my chair every time they run by. ‘Ailment’ is perhaps too strong a term. Let’s put it this way: there are certain flaws, he says, in the mechanism of his mind. The one he told me about is harmless in itself but very distressing and unusual, and may be a symptom of some imminent, more serious disorder. So here goes. When this person is lying in bed and imagining a familiar stretch of street, say, the right-hand side-walk from the Library to, say—”

“The Liquor Store,” put in King, a relentless wag.

“All right, Recht’s Liquor Store. It is about three hundred yards away—”

I was again interrupted, this time by Louise (whom, in fact, I was solely addressing). She turned to Audace and informed him that she could never visualize any distance in yards unless she could divide it by the length of a bed or a balcony.

“Romantic,” said Mrs. King. “Go on, Vadim.”

“Three hundred paces away along the same side as the College Library. Now comes my friend’s problem. He can walk in his mind there and back but he can’t perform in his mind the actual about-face that transforms ‘there’ into ‘back.’ ”

“Must call Rome,” muttered Louise to Mrs. King, and was about to leave her seat, but I implored her to hear me
out. She resigned herself, warning me however that she could not understand a word of my peroration.

“Repeat that bit about twisting around in your mind,” said King. “Nobody understood.”

“I did,” said Audace: “We suppose the Liquor Store happens to be closed, and Mr. Twidower, who is a friend of mine too, turns on his heel to go back to the Library. In the reality of life he performs this action without a hitch or hiatus, as simply and unconsciously as we all do, even if the artist’s critical eye does see—
A toi
, Vadim.”

“Does see,” I said, accepting the relay-race baton, “that, depending on the speed of one’s revolution, palings and awnings pass counterwise around you either with the heavy lurch of a merry-go-round or (saluting Audace) in a single brisk flip like that of the end of a striped scarf (Audace smiled, acknowledging the Audacianism) that one flings over one’s shoulder. But when one lies immobile in bed and rehearses or rather replays in one’s mind the process of turning, in the manner described, it is not so much the pivotal swing which is hard to perceive mentally—it is its result, the reversion of vista, the transformation of direction,
that’s
what one vainly strives to imagine. Instead of the liquor-store direction smoothly turning into the opposite one, as it does in the simplicity of waking life, poor Twidower is baffled—”

I had seen it coming but had hoped that I would be allowed to complete my sentence. Not at all. With the infinitely slow and silent movement of a gray tomcat, which he resembled with his bristly whiskers and arched back, King left his seat. He started to tiptoe, with a glass in each hand, toward the golden glow of a densely populated sideboard. With a dramatic slap of both hands against the edge of the table I caused Mrs. Morgain to jump (she had either dozed off or aged tremendously in the last few minutes) and stopped old King in his tracks; he silently
turned like an automaton (illustrating my story) and as silently stole back to his seat with the empty Arabesque glasses.

“The mind, my friend’s mind, is baffled, as I was saying, by something dreadfully strainful and irksome in the machinery of the change from one position to another, from east to west or west to east, from one damned nymphet to another—I mean I’m losing the thread of my tale, the zipper of thought has stuck, this is absurd—”

Absurd and very embarrassing. The two cold-thighed, cheesy-necked girleens were now engaged in a quarrelsome game as to who should sit on my left knee, that side of my lap where the honey was, trying to straddle Left Knee, warbling in Tyrolese and pushing each other off, and cousin Fay kept bending toward me and saying with a macabre accent: “
Elles vous aiment tant!
” Finally I pinched and twisted the nearest buttock, and with a squeal they resumed their running around, like that eternal little pleasure-park train, brushing the brambles.

I still could not disentangle my thoughts, but Audace came to my rescue.

“To conclude,” he said (and an audible ouf! was emitted by cruel Louise), “our patient’s trouble concerns not a certain physical act but the imagining of its performance. All he can do in his mind is omit the swiveling part altogether and shift from one visual plane to another with the neutral flash of a slide change in a magic lantern, whereupon he finds himself facing in a direction which has lost, or rather never contained, the idea of ‘oppositeness.’ Does anybody wish to comment?”

After the usual pause that follows such offers, John King said: “My advice to your Mr. Twitter is to dismiss that nonsense once for all. It’s charming nonsense, it’s colorful nonsense, but it’s also harmful nonsense. Yes, Jane?”

“My father,” said Mrs. King, “a professor of botany, had a rather endearing quirk: he could memorize historical dates and telephone numbers—for example our number 9743—only insofar as they contained primes. In our number he remembered two figures, the second and last, a useless combination; the other two were only black gaps, missing teeth.”

“Oh, that’s good,” cried Audace, genuinely delighted.

I remarked it was not at all the same thing. My friend’s affliction resulted in nausea, dizziness,
kegelkugel
headache.

“Well yes, I understand, but my father’s quirk also had its side effects. It was not so much his inability to memorize, say, his house number in Boston, which was 68 and which he saw every day, but the fact that he could do nothing about it; that nobody, but nobody could explain
why
all he could make out at the far end of his brain was not 68 but a bottomless hole.”

Our host resumed his vanishing act with more deliberation than before. Audace lidded his empty glass with his palm. Though swine-drunk, I longed for mine to be refilled, but was bypassed. The walls of the round room had grown more or less opaque again, God bless them, and the Dolomite Dollies were no longer around.

“In the days when I longed to be a ballerina,” said Louise, “and was Blanc’s little favorite, I always rehearsed exercises in my mind lying in bed, and had no difficulty whatever in imagining swirls and whirls. It is a matter of practice, Vadim. Why don’t you just roll over in bed when you want to see yourself walking back to that Library? We must be going now, Fay, it’s past midnight.”

Audace glanced at his wristwatch, uttered the exclamation which Time must be sick of hearing, and thanked me for a wonderful evening. Lady Morgain’s mouth mimicked the pink aperture of an elephant’s trunk as it mutely formed the word “loo” to which Mrs. King, fussily
swishing in green, immediately took her. I remained alone at the round table, then struggled to my feet, drained the rest of Louise’s daiquiri, and joined her in the hallway.

She had never melted and shivered so nicely in my embrace as she did now.

“How many quadruped critics,” she asked after a tender pause in the dark garden, “would accuse you of leg pulling if you published the description of those funny feelings. Three, ten, a herd?”

“Those are not really ‘feelings’ and they are not really ‘funny.’ I just wished you to be aware that if I go mad it will be in consequence of my games with the idea of space. ‘Rolling over’ would be cheating and besides would not help.”

“I’ll take you to an absolutely divine analyst.”

“That’s all you can suggest?”

“Why, yes.”

“Think, Louise.”

“Oh. I’m also going to marry you. Yes, of course, you idiot.”

She was gone before I could reclasp her slender form. The star-dusted sky, usually a scary affair, now vaguely amused me: it belonged, with the autumn
fadeur
of barely visible flowers, to the same issue of
Woman’s Own World
as Louise. I made water into a sizzle of asters and looked up at Bel’s window, square
C2
. Lit as brightly as e1, the Opal Room. I went back there and noted with relief that kind hands had cleared and tidied the table, the round table with the opalescent rim, at which I had delivered a most successful introductory lecture. I heard Bel’s voice calling me from the upper landing, and taking a palmful of salted almonds ascended the stairs.

Rather early next morning, a Sunday, as I stood, shawled in terry cloth, and watched four eggs rolling and bumping in their inferno, somebody entered the living room through a side door that I never bothered to lock.

Louise! Louise dressed up in hummingbird mauve for church. Louise in a sloping beam of mellow October sun. Louise leaning against the grand piano, as if about to sing and looking around with a lyrical smile.

I was the first to break our embrace.