You don't have to take my word for it
Nov. 19th, 2008 08:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maculategiraffeWho else watched Reading Rainbow as a kid?
Here, for reasons obscurely related to my writing process (I'm working a lot on chapter 50 of "Lee," but it's fighting me, and I'm somewhat especially anxious for this one not to suck), are some of my favorite passages from some of my favorite books. In order: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, East of Eden by John Steinbeck, Iodine by Haven Kimmel, Possession by A.S. Byatt, and The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.
I. Denise spent the next summer in the Hamptons with four of her dissolute college hallmates and lied to her parents about almost every aspect of her situation. She slept on a living-room floor and made good money as a dishwasher and prep drone at the Inn at Quogue, working elbow to elbow with a pretty girl from Scarsdale named Suzie Sterling and falling in love with the life of a cook. She loved the crazy hours, the intensity of the work, the beauty of the product. She loved the deep stillness that underlay the din. A good crew was like an elective family in which everyone in the little hot world of the kitchen stood on equal footing, and every cook had weirdnesses concealed in her past or in his character, and even in the midst of the most sweaty togetherness each family member enjoyed privacy and autonomy: she loved this.
Suzie Sterling's father, Ed, had given Suzie and Denise several lifts into Manhattan before the night in August when Denise was biking home and almost rode right into him where he stood, by his BMW, smoking a Dunhill and hoping that she might come by alone. Ed Sterling was an entertainment lawyer. He pleaded inability to live without Denise. She hid her (borrowed) bike in some bushes by the road. That the bike was stolen by the time she came back for it the next day, and that she swore to its owner that she'd chained it to the usual post, ought to have given her fair warning of the territory she was entering. But she was excited by what she did to Sterling, by the dramatic hydraulic physiology of his desire, and when she returned to school in September she decided that a liberal-arts college did not compare well to a kitchen. She didn't see the point of working too hard on papers that only a professor ever saw; she wanted an audience. She also resented that college was making her feel guilty about her privileges while granting certain lucky identity groups plenary indulgences from guilt. She felt guilty enough already, thank you. Almost every Sunday she took the cheap slow proletarian combo of SEPTA and New Jersey Transit to New York. She put up with Ed Sterling's paranoid one-way telephone communications and his last-minute postponements and his chronic distraction and his jaw-taxing performance anxieties and her own shame at being taken to cheap ethnic restaurants in Woodside and Elmhurst and Jackson Heights so as not to be seen by anyone Sterling knew (because, as he told her often-- running both hands through his mink-thick hair-- he knew everybody in Manhattan). While her lover teetered closer to utter freakout and inability to see her anymore, Denise ate Uruguayan T-bones, Sino-Colombian tamales, thumbnail crayfish in red Thai curry, and alder-smoked Russian eels. Beauty or excellence, as typified for her by memorable food, could redeem almost any humiliation. But she never stopped feeling guilty about the bike. Her insistence that she'd chained it to the usual post.
The third time she got involved with a man twice her age, she married him. She was determined not to be a squishy liberal. She'd quit school and worked to save money for a year, had taken six months in France and Italy, and had returned to Philly to cook at a thronged fish-and-pasta place off Catharine Street. As soon as she'd picked up some skills, she offered her services at Café Louche, which was then the most exciting place in town. Emile Berger hired her on the spot, on the basis of her knife work and her looks. Within a week, he was complaining to her about the borderline competence of every person in his kitchen except her and him.
Arrogant, ironic, devoted Emile became her asylum. She felt infinitely adult with him. He said he'd had enough of marriage his first time around, but he obligingly took Denise to Atlantic City and (in the words of the Barbera D'Alba she'd been drunk on when she proposed to him) made an honest woman of her. At Café Louche they worked like partners, experience flowing from his head into hers. They sneered at their pretentious old rival, Le Bec-Fin. They impulse-bought a three-story town house on Federal Street, in a mixed black and white and Vietnamese neighborhood near the Italian Market. They talked about flavor the way Marxists talked about revolution.
When Emile had finally taught her everything he would ever teach her, she tried to teach him a thing or two-- like, let's freshen up the menu, how about, let's maybe try that with a vegetable stock and a little bit of cumin, how about-- and ran smack into that wall of irony and ironclad opinion that she'd loved as long as she was on the happy side of it. She felt more skilled and ambitious and hungry than her white-haired husband. She felt as if, while working and sleeping and working and sleeping, she'd aged so rapidly that she'd passed Emile and caught up with her parents. Her circumscribed world of round-the-clock domestic and workplace togetherness seemed to her identical to her parents' universe of two. She had old-person aches in her young hips and knees and feet. She had scarred old-person hands, she had a dry old-person vagina, she had old-person prejudices and old-person politics, she had an old-person dislike of young people and their consumer electronics and their diction. She said to herself, "I'm too young to be so old." Whereupon her banished guilt came screaming back up out of its cave on vengeful wings, because Emile was as devoted to her as ever, as faithful to his unchanging self, and she was the one who'd insisted they get married.
By amicable agreement she left his kitchen and signed on with a competitor, Ardennes, which needed a sous-chef and which, in her opinion, was superior to Café Louche in all things except the art of being excellent without seeming to try. (Unperspiring virtuosity was undeniably Emile's great gift.)
At Ardennes she conceived a desire to strangle the young woman who prepped and held down garde manger. The woman, Becky Hemerling, was a culinary-institute grad with wavy blond hair and a petite flat body and fair skin that turned scarlet in the kitchen heat. Everything about Becky Hemerling sickened Denise-- her C.I.A. education (Denise was an autodidact snob), her overfamiliarity with more senior cooks (especially with Denise), her vocal adoration of Jodie Foster, the stupid fish-and-bicycle texts on her T-shirts, her overuse of the word "fucking" as an intensifier, her self-conscious lesbian "solidarity" with the "latinos" and "Asians" in the kitchen, her generalization about "right-wingers" and "Kansas" and "Peoria," her facility with phrases like "men and woman of color," the whole bright aura of entitlement that came of basking in the approval of educators who wished they could be as marginalized and victimized and free of guilt as she was. What is this person doing in my kitchen? Denise wondered. Cooks were not supposed to be political. Cooks were the mitochondria of humanity; they had their own separate DNA, they floated in a cell and powered it but were not really of it. Denise suspected that Becky Hemerling had chosen the cooking life to make a political point: to be one tough chick, to hold her own with the guys. Denise loathed the motivation all the more for harboring a speck of it herself. Hemerling had a way of looking at her that suggested that she (Hemerling) knew her better than she knew herself-- an insinuation at once infuriating and impossible to refute. Lying awake beside Emile at night, Denise imagined squeezing Hemerling's neck until her blue, blue eyes bugged out. She imagined pressing her thumbs into Hemerling's windpipe until it cracked.
Then one night she fell asleep and dreamed that she was strangling Becky and that Becky didn't mind. Becky's blue eyes, in fact, invited further liberties. The strangler's hands relaxed and traveled up along Becky's jawline and past her ears to the soft skin of her temples. Becky's lips parted and her eyes fell shut, as if in bliss, as the strangler stretched her legs out on her legs and her arms out on her arms...
Denise couldn't remember being sorrier to wake from a dream.
"If you can have this feeling in a dream," she said to herself, "it must be possible to have it in reality."
II. In the afternoons she sat in the kitchen with Lee and helped him to string beans or slip peas from their pods. Sometimes she made fudge and very often she stayed to dinner rather than go home to her parents. There was no subject she could not discuss with Lee. And the few things she could talk about to her father and mother were thin and pale and tired and mostly not even true. There Lee was different also. Abra wanted to tell Lee only true things even when she wasn't quite sure what was true.
Lee would sit smiling a little, and his quick fragile hands flew about their work as though they had independent lives. Abra wasn't aware that she spoke exclusively of herself. And sometimes while she talked Lee's mind wandered out and came back and went out again like a ranging dog, and Lee would nod at intervals and make a quiet humming sound.
He liked Abra and he felt strength and goodness in her, and warmth too. Her features had the bold muscular strength which would result finally either in ugliness or in great beauty. Lee, musing through her talk, thought of the round smooth faces of the Cantonese, his own breed. Even thin they were moon-faced. Lee should have liked that kind best since beauty must be somewhat like ourselves, but he didn't. When he thought of Chinese beauty the iron predatory faces of the Manchus came to his mind, arrogant and unyielding faces of a people who had authority by unquestioned inheritance.
She said, "Maybe it was there all along. I don't know. He never talked much about his father. It was after Mr. Trask had the-- you know-- the lettuce. Aron was angry then."
"Why?" Lee asked.
"People were laughing at him."
Lee's whole mind popped back. "Laughing at Aron? Why at him? He didn't have anything to do with it."
"Well, that's the way he felt. Do you want to know what I think?"
"Of course," said Lee.
"I figured this out and I'm not quite finished figuring. I thought he always felt-- well, kind of crippled-- maybe unfinished, because he didn't have a mother."
Lee's eyes opened wide and then droooped again. He nodded. "I see. Do you figure Cal is that way too?"
"No."
"Then why Aron?"
"Well, I haven't got that yet. Maybe some people need things more than others, or hate things more. My father hates turnips. He always did. Never came from anything. Turnips make him mad, real mad. Well, one time my mother was-- well, huffy, and she made a casserole of mashed turnips with lots of pepper and cheese on top and got it all brown on top. My father ate half a dish of it before he asked what it was. My mother said turnips, and he threw the dish on the floor and got up and went out. I don't think he ever forgave her."
Lee chuckled. "He can forgive her because she said turnips. But, Abra, suppose he'd asked and she had said something else and he liked it and had another dish. And then afterward he found out. Why, he might have murdered her."
"I guess so. Well, anyway, I figure Aron needed a mother more than Cal did. And I think he always blamed his father."
"Why?"
"I don't know. That's what I think."
"You do get around, don't you?"
"Shouldn't I?"
"Of course you should."
"Shall I make some fudge?"
"Not today. We still have some."
"What can I do?"
"You can pound flour into the top round. Will you eat with us?"
"No. I'm going to a birthday party, thank you. Do you think he'll be a minister?"
"How do I know?" said Lee. "Maybe it's just an idea."
"I hope he doesn't," said Abra, and she clapped her mouth shut in astonishment at having said it.
Lee got up and pulled out the pastry board and laid out the red meat and a flour sifter beside it. "Use the back side of the knife," he said.
"I know." She hoped he hadn't heard her.
But Lee asked, "Why don't you want him to be a minister?"
"I shouldn't say it."
"You should say anything you want to. You don't have to explain." He went back to his chair, and Abra sifted flour over the steak and pounded the meat with a big knife. Tap-tap-- "I shouldn't talk like this"-- tap-tap.
Lee turned his head away to let her take her own pace.
"He goes all one way," she said over the pounding. "If it's church it's got to be high church. He was talking about how priests shouldn't be married."
"That's not the way his last letter sounded," Lee observed.
"I know. That was before." Her knife stopped its pounding. Her face was young perplexed pain. "Lee, I'm not good enough for him."
"Now, what do you mean by that?"
"I'm not being funny. He doesn't think about me. He's made someone up, and it's like he put my skin on her. I'm not like that-- not like the made-up one."
"What's she like?"
"Pure!" said Abra. "Just absolutely pure. Nothing but pure-- never a bad thing. I'm not like that."
"Nobody is," said Lee.
"He doesn't know me. He doesn't even want to know me. He wants that-- white-- ghost."
Lee rubbled a piece of cracker. "Don't you like him? You're pretty young, but I don't think that makes any difference."
"'Course I like him. I'm going to be his wife. But I want him to like me too. And how can he, if he doesn't know anything about me? I used to think he knew me. Now I'm not sure he ever did."
"Maybe he's going through a hard time that isn't permanent. You're a smart girl-- very smart. Is it pretty hard trying to live up to the one-- in your skin?"
"I'm always afraid he'll see something in me that isn't in the one he made up. I'll get mad or I'll smell bad-- or something else. He'll find out."
"Maybe not," said Lee. "But it must be hard living the Lily Maid, the Goddess-Virgin, and the other all at once. Humans just do smell bad sometimes."
III. Every morning Jacob makes me coffee in a French press pot he brought back from a conference in Seattle; the coffee is so strong and dark it makes my toes curl and yet I have come to love it and it's the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning. I turn, and if he iis beside me he is the first thing, but if he's gone I know he's making the coffee, and he'll bring it to the bedroom with orange juice and fresh bread and cheeses, he does this every day. Like the original Ianthe Covington I was born in March and my birthday is tomorrow and when Jacob asked me this morning to describe the best birthday I ever had I tell him that my Grandmother Covington once made me a cake that was half lion, half lamb. Not one of Hicks's Peaceable Kingdom paintings; more like the weather. The weather of my ephemera: sun, moon, ascendant. I tell him the icing on the lion's half was close to the color our bedroom had been in January, and the lamb had been frosted with white buttercream in little swirls and arcs. Was I close to my grandmother? he asks. And I tell him I was, I adored her; I say she was from very old Philadelphia money, much of it made on Civil War bonds, and that she had memories of speakeasies. To her dying day she believed that the way one cast a vote in a presidential election was a secret as sacred as any told to a priest. Democracy, I tell him. I imitate her accent, just a few words, and I describe the scent of her house, her favorite style of shoes. He asks if I ever dream of her and I tell him most assuredly: I dreamed of her only a few nights ago. I was lost in Center City, far from her neightborhood, and I tried to call her on a pay phone but there were no numbers, no buttons. I set out walking and all the row houses looked alike. I saw a man named Tony and I knew him to be a tailor in the garment district, and as I passed him a man was hit by a car right beside me. The man flew into the air and vanished. Eventually I found my grandmother in a park, sitting on a bench someone had crocheted out of cobwebs, and she told me to go home, she said, "This isn't even your zip code."
"What was her first name?" Jacob asks, spreading butter on his bread.
"Cecile."
"You're lying. Every word. You are an orphan and alone in all the world."
"That is correct."
"You have no grandmother Cecile Covington, and you had no such cake."
"Also correct."
He moves the tray aside and slides closer to me. He presses his face against mine, and he loves me so dearly I can hear his heart pounding just because we're sitting so close, on this ordinary day.
"That is perfect on you," Jacob say, standing back to admire the dress he has just given me. It's a simple, flattering design of soft black cotton with a boatneck and a narrow skirt that stops just above the knees. He has also given me a pair of black patent leather boots that zip up the back and reach nearly to the hem of the dress, and a pair of lavender topaz earrings. The closet in our bedroom, painted now the gray of a dove's chest, can barely hold all the clothes he's given me; they fit me like a second skin, and they resemble a palette in the middle range: black, white, gray. And shoes. All black, some of buttery leather, some that are punishing and make me taller than any other woman in the room, taller than women. Tonight we're having a party, a coming-out as it were, and this is what I will wear.
[...]
Living with Jacob is infinitely more satisfying than taking a class with Jacob, because I can ask him a question, any question, and we can talk about it as long as we want to, we can go around and around; he quotes from sources he could never ask a class to read, but I read all of it, anything, our conversation never ends. We spent an entire Sunday on The Dream and the Underworld, and at a particular moment we both felt it-- the scope of Hillman's idea that the figures of the Underworld are autochthonic-- they aren't condensations or compensations; they aren't symbols or the fulfillment of wishes. They do not guard our sleep. They are not Jung's objective "the people themselves," or his subjective "the characterological essence," of whomever we see. My former neighbor, in the Underworld of my dream, is neither a piece of me nor a reflection of himself. The images are the dead themselves, they are literally autonomous. "What one knows about life may not be relevant for what is below life," Hillman writes, he says there is a downward love, he says, "The less underworld, the less depth, and the more horizontally spread out becomes one's life." I am shaking by this point, the horror of the horizontal life, my dream of an infinite horizon, and Jacob comes around the table, takes me by the shoulders, and leards me to the living room. We sit on the couch and he gathers me up. He will ask me a question about my imaginary family-- my lies bring him enormous pleasure, as if he were a child and every day I give him a new tale-- and it will be calming to me, as well, I can forget the ramifications of Hillman, and not just in that book but in the others as well, and Jacob asks me, "So who was your best friend growing up?"
I see it very clearly, the story I should tell about the strange girl who invented her own language because she was raised by wolves; how she had been found and institutionalized, and eventually sent to the Catholic orphange where I lived; I see the shape of her birthmark, the deformity of her feet from running in a pack, I will give her curiously colored hair and a name like-- "Candy Buck was my best friend," I say. "Candace." I tell him everything: the coyote, the picnic, the chicken, the mulberry pail, the rock in my neck. I run up to the top of the hill and over the rise and there she is on her grandfather's porch and we know one another right away, and when her grandfather offers to drive me home he asks where I live and I tell him the truth: I don't have the slightest idea.
Jacob rubs his lips over my shoulder, my collarbone. "You're a liar."
"That is correct."
"You had no friends, no kin, you are alone in all the world."
"Also correct." I take his hand, I hold it against my heart, my cheek, my lips. "Not anymore, though. I'm not alone anymore."
"No, no, you are now two, I am your permanence. It is fixed."
The caterers arrived on time and began setting up in the dining room. Jacob had ordered shiitake-mushroom-and-goat-cheese-filled miniature puff pastries; chicken satay; smoked salmon topped with mild green horseradish sauce, in butter lettuce cups; a fruit salad; small hummus sandwiches; caviar, sour cream, water crackers. There were two cases of claret, two of chardonnay, and Italian lemon soda for the nondrinkers, whoever they might be.
Ianthe zipped the back of the black boots; they fit her perfectly and added an inch to her height. She slipped in the earrings, brushed her hair. Jacob stepped out of the closet, knotting his tie.
"Sweetheart?"
"Yes?" Ianthe turned to him, hoping he didn't need help with the tie, as she had no idea how they worked.
"I got you a little something-- I wonder if you'll try it?"
"Of course."
He took a white box out of the closet and brought it over to the ornate vanity table they'd found at an antiques store. "I took three photographs of you to a woman at the Lancôme counter, and she put together this collection of cosmetics specifically for your skin tone. I got one of everything, just to be safe, and in case you like it. You start with this-- just a dot under the eyes, yes? It brightens, I think. And then you move on to this liquid foundation but only a tiny bit because your skin is perfect. Hmmm." He watched as she smoothed the foundation over her cheeks, following his directions. "That's lovely. And then this powder-- I bought the softest brush they had, it's like-- it feels almost like feathers. Now. Use this eyeliner-- I don't want to get near your eyes." Ianthe applied it quickly. "Wow, you're really good at that-- you did that so fast. Now look at these colors, aren't they...? The silver-gray goes on your lower eyelid, the lighter up near your brow. Right-- and this is the pièce de résistance: at the fold of your eyelid, make a single streak of this wine color and watche what it does to the color of your eyes." He stepped backward, clutching at his chest. "My heart. Now the mascara-- you don't need much, your eyelashes are already so dark. Whoa, though, that really-- they seem twice as wide, they're magnificent. And finally, try this shade of lipstick, it's a silvery plum... flawless. She recommended this clear gloss over it, to keep it from drying out. Let's... okay, look away from me, and then turn your head quickly and look me in the eye." She did so, and Jacob knelt before her. He studied her face, her throat, the fit of the dress. "That sound you hear, beloved, it isn't bells. It isn't music. That's Aphrodite laughing, she is rising from the sea, laughing with joy, because of you. You."
IV. They faced each other over the packages in the library. It was bitterly cold; Roland felt as if he should never be warm again, and thought with longing of articles of clothing he had never had occasion to wear: knitted mittens, long johns, balaclava. Maud had driven out early and had arrived, keen and tense, before breakfast was over, well-wrapped in tweed jacket and Aran wool sweater, with the bright hair, visible last night at dinner in the Baileys' chilly hall, again wholly swallowed by a green knotted scarf. The library was stony and imposing, with thickets of carved foliage in its vaulted roof and a huge stone fireplace, swept and empty, with the Bailey arms, a solid tower and a small clump of trees, carved on its mantel. Gothic windows opened onto a frosty lawn; these were partly clear glass in leaded frames and partly richly stained Kelmscott glass, depicting, in central medallions, the building of a golden keep on a green hill, fortified and bedizened with banners, entered, in the central medallion, by a procession of knights and ladies on horseback. Along the top of the window ran a luxuriating rose tree, bearing both white and red flowers and blood red fruit together. Round the sides vines were rampant, carrying huge purple grape bunches on golden stems amongst curling tendrils and veined spreading leaves. The books, behind glass, were leather-backed, orderly, apparently immobile and untouched.
There was a table in the middle, leather-topped and heavy, ink-stained and scratched, with two leather-seated armchairs. The leather had been red and was now brown and powdery, of the kind that leaves rusty traces on the clothes of those who sit there. In the centre of the table was an inkstand, with an empty silver pen tray, tarnished, and greenish glass vessels, containing dried black powder.
Joan Bailey, wheeling round the table, had laid the packages on it.
"I hope you'll be comfortable. Do let me know if you need anything else. I would light the fire for you, but the chimneys haven't been swept for generations-- I'm afraid you'd suffocate with smoke, or else we'd set the whole house on fire. Are you warm enough?"
Maud, animated, assured her that they were. There was a faint flash of colour in her ivory cheeks. As though the cold brought out her proper life, as though she were at home in it.
"Then I'll leave you to it. I long to see how you get on. I'll make coffee at eleven. I'll bring it to you."
There was a frostiness between the two of them when Maud brought out her proposals for the way they should proceed. She had decided that they should each read the letters of the poet who interested them, and that they should agree conventions of recording their observations on index cards according to a system she was already using in the Women's Resource Centre. Roland objected to this, partly because he felt he was being hustled, partly because he had a vision, which he now saw was ridiculous and romantic, of their two heads bent together over the manuscripts, following the story, sharing, he had supposed, the emotion. He pointed out that by Maud's system they would lose any sense of the development of the narrative and Maud retorted robustly that they lived in a time which valued narrative uncertainty, that they could cross-refer later, and that anyway they had so little time, and what concerned her was primarily Christabel LaMotte. Roland agreed, since the time constraint was indeed crucial. So they worked for some time in silence, interrupted only by Lady Bailey bearing a thermos of coffee, and the odd request for information.
"Tell me," said Roland, "did Blanche wear glasses?"
"I don't know."
"There's a reference here to the glittering surfaces of her gaze. I'm sure it says surfaces in the plural."
"She could have had glasses, or he could have been comparing her to a dragonfly or some other insect. He seems to have read Christabel's insect poems. People were obsessed with insects at that time."
"What did she really look like, Blanche?"
"No one really knows for certain. I imagine her very pale, but that's only because of her name."
At first Roland worked with the kind of concentrated curiosity with which he read anything at all by Randolph Ash. This curiosity was a kind of predictive familiarity; he knew the workings of the other man's mind, he had read what he had read, he was possessed of his characteristic habits of syntax and stress. His mind could leap ahead and hear the rhythm of the unread as though he were the writer, hearing in his brain the ghost-rhythms of the as yet unwritten.
But with this reading, after a time-- a very short time-- the habitual pleasures of recognition and foresight gave way to a mounting sense of stress. This was primarily because the writer of the letters was himself under stress, confused by the object and recipient of his attentions. He found it difficult to fix this creature in his scheme of things. He asked for clarification and was answered, it appeared, with riddles. Roland, not in possession of the other side of the correspondence, could not even tell what riddles, and looked up increasingly at the perplexing woman on the other side of the table, who with silent industry and irritating deliberation was making minutely neat notes on her little fans of cards, pinning them together with silver hooks and pins, frowning.
Letters, Roland discovered, are a form of narrative that envisages no outcome, no closure. His time was a time of the dominance of narrative theories. Letters tell no story, because they do not know, from line to line, where they are going. If Maud had been less coldly hostile he would have pointed this out to her-- as a matter of general interest-- but she did not look up or meet his eye.
[...]
The stained glass worked to defamiliarise her. It divided her into cold, brightly coloured fires. One cheek moved in and out of a pool of grape-violet as she worked. Her brow flowered green and gold. Rose-red and berry-red stained her pale neck and chin and mouth. Eyelids were purple-shadowed. The green silk of her scarf glittered with turreted purple ridges. Dust danced in a shadowy halo round her shifting head, black motes in straw gold, invisible solid matter appearing like pinholes in a sheet of solid colour. He spoke and she turned through a rainbow, her pale skin threading the various lights.
"I'm sorry to interrupt-- I just wondered-- do you know about the City of Is? I.S. I.S.?"
She shook off her concentration as a dog shakes off water.
"It's a Breton legend. It was drowned in the sea for its wickedness. It was ruled by Queen Dahud, the sorceress, daughter of King Gradlond. The women there were transparent, according to some versions. Christabel wrote a poem."
"May I look?"
"A quick glance. I'm using this book."
She pushed it across the table.
Tallahassee Women Poets. Christabel LaMotte: a Selection of Narrative and Lyric Poems, ed. Leonora Stern. The Sapphic Press, Boston. The purple cover bore a white linear image of two mediaeval women, bending to embrace each other across a fountain in a square basin. They both wore veiled headdesses, heavy girdles and long plaits.
He scanned The Drowned City. This had a prefatory note by Leonora Stern.
He flicked across the pages of the text.
And so they worked on, against the clock, cold and excited, until Lady Bailey came to offer them supper.
V. They waited patiently for what seemed a very long time, stamping in the snow to keep their feet warm. At last they heard the sound of slow shuffling footsteps approaching the door from the inside. It seemed, as the Mole remarked to the Rat, like someone walking in carpet slippers that were too large for him and down-at-heel; which was intelligent of Mole, because that was exactly what it was.
There was the noise of a bolt shot back, and the door opened a few inches, enough to show a long snout and a pair of sleepy blinking eyes.
"Now, the very next time this happens," said a gruff and suspicious voice, "I shall be exceedingly angry. Who is it this time, disturbing people on such a night? Speak up!"
"Oh, Badger," cried the Rat, "let us in, please. It's me, Rat, and my friend Mole, and we've lost our way in the snow."
"What, Ratty, my dear little man!" exclaimed the Badger, in quite a different voice. "Come along in, both of you, at once. Why, you must be perished. Well I never! Lost in the snow! And in the Wild Wood, too, and at this time of night! But come in with you."
The two animals tumbled over each other in their eagerness to get inside, and heard the door shut behind them with great joy and relief.
The Badger, who wore a long dressing gown, and whose slippers were indeed very down-at-heel, carried a flat candlestick in his paw and had probably been on his way to bed when their summons sounded. He looked kindly down on them and patted both their heads. "This is not the sort of night for small animals to be out," he said paternally. "I'm afraid you've been up to some of your pranks again, Ratty. But come along; come into the kitchen. There's a first-rate fire there, and supper and everything."
He shuffled on in front of them, carrying the light, and they followed him, nudging each other in an anticipating sort of way, down a long, gloomy, and, to tell the truth, decidedly shabby passage, into a sort of a central hall, out of which they could dimly see other long tunnel-like passages branching, passages mysterious and without apparent end. But there were doors in the hall as well-- stout oaken comfortable-looking doors. One of these the Badger flung open, and at once they found themselves in all the glow and warmth of a large fire-lit kitchen.
The floor was well-worn red brick, and on the wide hearth burned a fire of logs, between two attractive chimney corners tucked away in the wall, well out of any suspicion of draft. A couple of high-backed settles, facing each other on either side of the fire, gave further sitting accomodation for the sociably disposed. In the middle of the room stood a long table of plain boards placed on trestles, with benches down each side. At one end of it, where an armchair stood pushed back, were spread the remains of the Bader's plain but ample supper. Rows of spotless plates winked from the shelves of the dresser at the far end of the room, and from the rafters overhead hung hams, bundles of dried herbs, nets of onions, and baskets of eggs. It seemed a place where heroes could fitly feast after victory, where weary harvesters could line up in scores along the table and keep their Harvest Home with mirth and song, or where two or three friends of simple tastes could sit about as they pleased and eat and smoke and talk in comfort and contentment. The ruddy brick floor smiled up at the smoky ceiling; the oaken settles, shiny with long wear, exchanged cheerful glances with each other; plates on the dresser grinned at pots on the shelf, and the merry firelight flickered and played over everything without distinction.
The kindly Badger thrust them down on a settle to toast themselves at the fire, and bade them remove their wet coats and boots. Then he fetched them dressing gowns and slippers, and himself bathed the Mole's shin with warm water and mended the cut with sticking plaster till the whole thing was just as good as new, if not better. In the embracing light and warmth, warm and dry at last, with weary legs propped up in front of them, and a suggestive clink of plates being arranged on the table behind, it seemed to the storm-driven animals, now in safe anchorage, that the cold and trackless Wild Wood just left outside was miles and miles away, and all that they had suffered in it a half-forgotten dream.
When at last they were thoroughly toasted, the Badger summoned them to the table, where he had been busy laying a repast. They had felt pretty hungry before, but when they actually saw at last the supper that was spread for them, really it seemed only a question of what they should attack first where all was so attractive, and whether the other things would obligingly wait for them till they had time to give them attention. Conversation was impossible for a long time; and when it was slowly resumed, it was that regrettable sort of conversation that results from talking with your mouth full. The Badger did not mind that sort of thing at all, nor did he take any notice of elbows on the table, or everybody speaking at once. As he did not go into Society himself, he had got an idea that these things belonged to the things taht didn't really matter. (We know of course that he was wrong, and took too narrow a view; because they do matter very much, though it would take too long to explain why.) He sat in his armchair at the head of the table, and nodded gravely at intervals as the animals told their story; and he did not seem surprised or shocked at anything, and he never said, "I told you so," or "Just what I always said," or remarked that they ought to have done so-and-so, or ought not to have done something else. The Mole began to feel very friendly towards him.
When supper was really finished at last, and each animal felt that his skin was now as tight as was decently safe, and that by this time he didn't care a hang for anybody or anything, they gathered round the glowing embers of the great wood fire, and thought how jolly it was to be sitting up so late, and so independent, and so full; and after they had chatted for a time about things in general, the Badger said heartily, "Now then! tell us the news from your part of the world. How's old Toad getting on?"
"Oh, from bad to worse," said the Rat gravely, while the Mole, cocked up on a settle and basking in the firelight, his heels higher than his head, tried to look properly mournful.
[...]
"Well, it's time we were all in bed," said the Badger, getting up and fetching flat candlesticks. "Come along, you two, and I'll show you your quarters. And take your time tomorrow morning-- breakfast at any hour you please!"
He conducted the two animals to a long room that seemed half bedchamber and half loft. The Badger's winter stores, which indeed were visible everywhere, took up half the room-- piles of apples, turnips, and potatoes, baskets full of nuts, and jars of honey; but the two little white beds on the remainder of the floor looked soft and inviting, and the linen on them, though coarse, was clean and smelled beautifully of lavender; and the Mole and the Water Rat, shaking off their garments in some thirty seconds, tumbled in between the sheets in great joy and contentment.
Here, for reasons obscurely related to my writing process (I'm working a lot on chapter 50 of "Lee," but it's fighting me, and I'm somewhat especially anxious for this one not to suck), are some of my favorite passages from some of my favorite books. In order: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, East of Eden by John Steinbeck, Iodine by Haven Kimmel, Possession by A.S. Byatt, and The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.
I. Denise spent the next summer in the Hamptons with four of her dissolute college hallmates and lied to her parents about almost every aspect of her situation. She slept on a living-room floor and made good money as a dishwasher and prep drone at the Inn at Quogue, working elbow to elbow with a pretty girl from Scarsdale named Suzie Sterling and falling in love with the life of a cook. She loved the crazy hours, the intensity of the work, the beauty of the product. She loved the deep stillness that underlay the din. A good crew was like an elective family in which everyone in the little hot world of the kitchen stood on equal footing, and every cook had weirdnesses concealed in her past or in his character, and even in the midst of the most sweaty togetherness each family member enjoyed privacy and autonomy: she loved this.
Suzie Sterling's father, Ed, had given Suzie and Denise several lifts into Manhattan before the night in August when Denise was biking home and almost rode right into him where he stood, by his BMW, smoking a Dunhill and hoping that she might come by alone. Ed Sterling was an entertainment lawyer. He pleaded inability to live without Denise. She hid her (borrowed) bike in some bushes by the road. That the bike was stolen by the time she came back for it the next day, and that she swore to its owner that she'd chained it to the usual post, ought to have given her fair warning of the territory she was entering. But she was excited by what she did to Sterling, by the dramatic hydraulic physiology of his desire, and when she returned to school in September she decided that a liberal-arts college did not compare well to a kitchen. She didn't see the point of working too hard on papers that only a professor ever saw; she wanted an audience. She also resented that college was making her feel guilty about her privileges while granting certain lucky identity groups plenary indulgences from guilt. She felt guilty enough already, thank you. Almost every Sunday she took the cheap slow proletarian combo of SEPTA and New Jersey Transit to New York. She put up with Ed Sterling's paranoid one-way telephone communications and his last-minute postponements and his chronic distraction and his jaw-taxing performance anxieties and her own shame at being taken to cheap ethnic restaurants in Woodside and Elmhurst and Jackson Heights so as not to be seen by anyone Sterling knew (because, as he told her often-- running both hands through his mink-thick hair-- he knew everybody in Manhattan). While her lover teetered closer to utter freakout and inability to see her anymore, Denise ate Uruguayan T-bones, Sino-Colombian tamales, thumbnail crayfish in red Thai curry, and alder-smoked Russian eels. Beauty or excellence, as typified for her by memorable food, could redeem almost any humiliation. But she never stopped feeling guilty about the bike. Her insistence that she'd chained it to the usual post.
The third time she got involved with a man twice her age, she married him. She was determined not to be a squishy liberal. She'd quit school and worked to save money for a year, had taken six months in France and Italy, and had returned to Philly to cook at a thronged fish-and-pasta place off Catharine Street. As soon as she'd picked up some skills, she offered her services at Café Louche, which was then the most exciting place in town. Emile Berger hired her on the spot, on the basis of her knife work and her looks. Within a week, he was complaining to her about the borderline competence of every person in his kitchen except her and him.
Arrogant, ironic, devoted Emile became her asylum. She felt infinitely adult with him. He said he'd had enough of marriage his first time around, but he obligingly took Denise to Atlantic City and (in the words of the Barbera D'Alba she'd been drunk on when she proposed to him) made an honest woman of her. At Café Louche they worked like partners, experience flowing from his head into hers. They sneered at their pretentious old rival, Le Bec-Fin. They impulse-bought a three-story town house on Federal Street, in a mixed black and white and Vietnamese neighborhood near the Italian Market. They talked about flavor the way Marxists talked about revolution.
When Emile had finally taught her everything he would ever teach her, she tried to teach him a thing or two-- like, let's freshen up the menu, how about, let's maybe try that with a vegetable stock and a little bit of cumin, how about-- and ran smack into that wall of irony and ironclad opinion that she'd loved as long as she was on the happy side of it. She felt more skilled and ambitious and hungry than her white-haired husband. She felt as if, while working and sleeping and working and sleeping, she'd aged so rapidly that she'd passed Emile and caught up with her parents. Her circumscribed world of round-the-clock domestic and workplace togetherness seemed to her identical to her parents' universe of two. She had old-person aches in her young hips and knees and feet. She had scarred old-person hands, she had a dry old-person vagina, she had old-person prejudices and old-person politics, she had an old-person dislike of young people and their consumer electronics and their diction. She said to herself, "I'm too young to be so old." Whereupon her banished guilt came screaming back up out of its cave on vengeful wings, because Emile was as devoted to her as ever, as faithful to his unchanging self, and she was the one who'd insisted they get married.
By amicable agreement she left his kitchen and signed on with a competitor, Ardennes, which needed a sous-chef and which, in her opinion, was superior to Café Louche in all things except the art of being excellent without seeming to try. (Unperspiring virtuosity was undeniably Emile's great gift.)
At Ardennes she conceived a desire to strangle the young woman who prepped and held down garde manger. The woman, Becky Hemerling, was a culinary-institute grad with wavy blond hair and a petite flat body and fair skin that turned scarlet in the kitchen heat. Everything about Becky Hemerling sickened Denise-- her C.I.A. education (Denise was an autodidact snob), her overfamiliarity with more senior cooks (especially with Denise), her vocal adoration of Jodie Foster, the stupid fish-and-bicycle texts on her T-shirts, her overuse of the word "fucking" as an intensifier, her self-conscious lesbian "solidarity" with the "latinos" and "Asians" in the kitchen, her generalization about "right-wingers" and "Kansas" and "Peoria," her facility with phrases like "men and woman of color," the whole bright aura of entitlement that came of basking in the approval of educators who wished they could be as marginalized and victimized and free of guilt as she was. What is this person doing in my kitchen? Denise wondered. Cooks were not supposed to be political. Cooks were the mitochondria of humanity; they had their own separate DNA, they floated in a cell and powered it but were not really of it. Denise suspected that Becky Hemerling had chosen the cooking life to make a political point: to be one tough chick, to hold her own with the guys. Denise loathed the motivation all the more for harboring a speck of it herself. Hemerling had a way of looking at her that suggested that she (Hemerling) knew her better than she knew herself-- an insinuation at once infuriating and impossible to refute. Lying awake beside Emile at night, Denise imagined squeezing Hemerling's neck until her blue, blue eyes bugged out. She imagined pressing her thumbs into Hemerling's windpipe until it cracked.
Then one night she fell asleep and dreamed that she was strangling Becky and that Becky didn't mind. Becky's blue eyes, in fact, invited further liberties. The strangler's hands relaxed and traveled up along Becky's jawline and past her ears to the soft skin of her temples. Becky's lips parted and her eyes fell shut, as if in bliss, as the strangler stretched her legs out on her legs and her arms out on her arms...
Denise couldn't remember being sorrier to wake from a dream.
"If you can have this feeling in a dream," she said to herself, "it must be possible to have it in reality."
II. In the afternoons she sat in the kitchen with Lee and helped him to string beans or slip peas from their pods. Sometimes she made fudge and very often she stayed to dinner rather than go home to her parents. There was no subject she could not discuss with Lee. And the few things she could talk about to her father and mother were thin and pale and tired and mostly not even true. There Lee was different also. Abra wanted to tell Lee only true things even when she wasn't quite sure what was true.
Lee would sit smiling a little, and his quick fragile hands flew about their work as though they had independent lives. Abra wasn't aware that she spoke exclusively of herself. And sometimes while she talked Lee's mind wandered out and came back and went out again like a ranging dog, and Lee would nod at intervals and make a quiet humming sound.
He liked Abra and he felt strength and goodness in her, and warmth too. Her features had the bold muscular strength which would result finally either in ugliness or in great beauty. Lee, musing through her talk, thought of the round smooth faces of the Cantonese, his own breed. Even thin they were moon-faced. Lee should have liked that kind best since beauty must be somewhat like ourselves, but he didn't. When he thought of Chinese beauty the iron predatory faces of the Manchus came to his mind, arrogant and unyielding faces of a people who had authority by unquestioned inheritance.
She said, "Maybe it was there all along. I don't know. He never talked much about his father. It was after Mr. Trask had the-- you know-- the lettuce. Aron was angry then."
"Why?" Lee asked.
"People were laughing at him."
Lee's whole mind popped back. "Laughing at Aron? Why at him? He didn't have anything to do with it."
"Well, that's the way he felt. Do you want to know what I think?"
"Of course," said Lee.
"I figured this out and I'm not quite finished figuring. I thought he always felt-- well, kind of crippled-- maybe unfinished, because he didn't have a mother."
Lee's eyes opened wide and then droooped again. He nodded. "I see. Do you figure Cal is that way too?"
"No."
"Then why Aron?"
"Well, I haven't got that yet. Maybe some people need things more than others, or hate things more. My father hates turnips. He always did. Never came from anything. Turnips make him mad, real mad. Well, one time my mother was-- well, huffy, and she made a casserole of mashed turnips with lots of pepper and cheese on top and got it all brown on top. My father ate half a dish of it before he asked what it was. My mother said turnips, and he threw the dish on the floor and got up and went out. I don't think he ever forgave her."
Lee chuckled. "He can forgive her because she said turnips. But, Abra, suppose he'd asked and she had said something else and he liked it and had another dish. And then afterward he found out. Why, he might have murdered her."
"I guess so. Well, anyway, I figure Aron needed a mother more than Cal did. And I think he always blamed his father."
"Why?"
"I don't know. That's what I think."
"You do get around, don't you?"
"Shouldn't I?"
"Of course you should."
"Shall I make some fudge?"
"Not today. We still have some."
"What can I do?"
"You can pound flour into the top round. Will you eat with us?"
"No. I'm going to a birthday party, thank you. Do you think he'll be a minister?"
"How do I know?" said Lee. "Maybe it's just an idea."
"I hope he doesn't," said Abra, and she clapped her mouth shut in astonishment at having said it.
Lee got up and pulled out the pastry board and laid out the red meat and a flour sifter beside it. "Use the back side of the knife," he said.
"I know." She hoped he hadn't heard her.
But Lee asked, "Why don't you want him to be a minister?"
"I shouldn't say it."
"You should say anything you want to. You don't have to explain." He went back to his chair, and Abra sifted flour over the steak and pounded the meat with a big knife. Tap-tap-- "I shouldn't talk like this"-- tap-tap.
Lee turned his head away to let her take her own pace.
"He goes all one way," she said over the pounding. "If it's church it's got to be high church. He was talking about how priests shouldn't be married."
"That's not the way his last letter sounded," Lee observed.
"I know. That was before." Her knife stopped its pounding. Her face was young perplexed pain. "Lee, I'm not good enough for him."
"Now, what do you mean by that?"
"I'm not being funny. He doesn't think about me. He's made someone up, and it's like he put my skin on her. I'm not like that-- not like the made-up one."
"What's she like?"
"Pure!" said Abra. "Just absolutely pure. Nothing but pure-- never a bad thing. I'm not like that."
"Nobody is," said Lee.
"He doesn't know me. He doesn't even want to know me. He wants that-- white-- ghost."
Lee rubbled a piece of cracker. "Don't you like him? You're pretty young, but I don't think that makes any difference."
"'Course I like him. I'm going to be his wife. But I want him to like me too. And how can he, if he doesn't know anything about me? I used to think he knew me. Now I'm not sure he ever did."
"Maybe he's going through a hard time that isn't permanent. You're a smart girl-- very smart. Is it pretty hard trying to live up to the one-- in your skin?"
"I'm always afraid he'll see something in me that isn't in the one he made up. I'll get mad or I'll smell bad-- or something else. He'll find out."
"Maybe not," said Lee. "But it must be hard living the Lily Maid, the Goddess-Virgin, and the other all at once. Humans just do smell bad sometimes."
III. Every morning Jacob makes me coffee in a French press pot he brought back from a conference in Seattle; the coffee is so strong and dark it makes my toes curl and yet I have come to love it and it's the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning. I turn, and if he iis beside me he is the first thing, but if he's gone I know he's making the coffee, and he'll bring it to the bedroom with orange juice and fresh bread and cheeses, he does this every day. Like the original Ianthe Covington I was born in March and my birthday is tomorrow and when Jacob asked me this morning to describe the best birthday I ever had I tell him that my Grandmother Covington once made me a cake that was half lion, half lamb. Not one of Hicks's Peaceable Kingdom paintings; more like the weather. The weather of my ephemera: sun, moon, ascendant. I tell him the icing on the lion's half was close to the color our bedroom had been in January, and the lamb had been frosted with white buttercream in little swirls and arcs. Was I close to my grandmother? he asks. And I tell him I was, I adored her; I say she was from very old Philadelphia money, much of it made on Civil War bonds, and that she had memories of speakeasies. To her dying day she believed that the way one cast a vote in a presidential election was a secret as sacred as any told to a priest. Democracy, I tell him. I imitate her accent, just a few words, and I describe the scent of her house, her favorite style of shoes. He asks if I ever dream of her and I tell him most assuredly: I dreamed of her only a few nights ago. I was lost in Center City, far from her neightborhood, and I tried to call her on a pay phone but there were no numbers, no buttons. I set out walking and all the row houses looked alike. I saw a man named Tony and I knew him to be a tailor in the garment district, and as I passed him a man was hit by a car right beside me. The man flew into the air and vanished. Eventually I found my grandmother in a park, sitting on a bench someone had crocheted out of cobwebs, and she told me to go home, she said, "This isn't even your zip code."
"What was her first name?" Jacob asks, spreading butter on his bread.
"Cecile."
"You're lying. Every word. You are an orphan and alone in all the world."
"That is correct."
"You have no grandmother Cecile Covington, and you had no such cake."
"Also correct."
He moves the tray aside and slides closer to me. He presses his face against mine, and he loves me so dearly I can hear his heart pounding just because we're sitting so close, on this ordinary day.
"That is perfect on you," Jacob say, standing back to admire the dress he has just given me. It's a simple, flattering design of soft black cotton with a boatneck and a narrow skirt that stops just above the knees. He has also given me a pair of black patent leather boots that zip up the back and reach nearly to the hem of the dress, and a pair of lavender topaz earrings. The closet in our bedroom, painted now the gray of a dove's chest, can barely hold all the clothes he's given me; they fit me like a second skin, and they resemble a palette in the middle range: black, white, gray. And shoes. All black, some of buttery leather, some that are punishing and make me taller than any other woman in the room, taller than women. Tonight we're having a party, a coming-out as it were, and this is what I will wear.
[...]
Living with Jacob is infinitely more satisfying than taking a class with Jacob, because I can ask him a question, any question, and we can talk about it as long as we want to, we can go around and around; he quotes from sources he could never ask a class to read, but I read all of it, anything, our conversation never ends. We spent an entire Sunday on The Dream and the Underworld, and at a particular moment we both felt it-- the scope of Hillman's idea that the figures of the Underworld are autochthonic-- they aren't condensations or compensations; they aren't symbols or the fulfillment of wishes. They do not guard our sleep. They are not Jung's objective "the people themselves," or his subjective "the characterological essence," of whomever we see. My former neighbor, in the Underworld of my dream, is neither a piece of me nor a reflection of himself. The images are the dead themselves, they are literally autonomous. "What one knows about life may not be relevant for what is below life," Hillman writes, he says there is a downward love, he says, "The less underworld, the less depth, and the more horizontally spread out becomes one's life." I am shaking by this point, the horror of the horizontal life, my dream of an infinite horizon, and Jacob comes around the table, takes me by the shoulders, and leards me to the living room. We sit on the couch and he gathers me up. He will ask me a question about my imaginary family-- my lies bring him enormous pleasure, as if he were a child and every day I give him a new tale-- and it will be calming to me, as well, I can forget the ramifications of Hillman, and not just in that book but in the others as well, and Jacob asks me, "So who was your best friend growing up?"
I see it very clearly, the story I should tell about the strange girl who invented her own language because she was raised by wolves; how she had been found and institutionalized, and eventually sent to the Catholic orphange where I lived; I see the shape of her birthmark, the deformity of her feet from running in a pack, I will give her curiously colored hair and a name like-- "Candy Buck was my best friend," I say. "Candace." I tell him everything: the coyote, the picnic, the chicken, the mulberry pail, the rock in my neck. I run up to the top of the hill and over the rise and there she is on her grandfather's porch and we know one another right away, and when her grandfather offers to drive me home he asks where I live and I tell him the truth: I don't have the slightest idea.
Jacob rubs his lips over my shoulder, my collarbone. "You're a liar."
"That is correct."
"You had no friends, no kin, you are alone in all the world."
"Also correct." I take his hand, I hold it against my heart, my cheek, my lips. "Not anymore, though. I'm not alone anymore."
"No, no, you are now two, I am your permanence. It is fixed."
The caterers arrived on time and began setting up in the dining room. Jacob had ordered shiitake-mushroom-and-goat-cheese-filled miniature puff pastries; chicken satay; smoked salmon topped with mild green horseradish sauce, in butter lettuce cups; a fruit salad; small hummus sandwiches; caviar, sour cream, water crackers. There were two cases of claret, two of chardonnay, and Italian lemon soda for the nondrinkers, whoever they might be.
Ianthe zipped the back of the black boots; they fit her perfectly and added an inch to her height. She slipped in the earrings, brushed her hair. Jacob stepped out of the closet, knotting his tie.
"Sweetheart?"
"Yes?" Ianthe turned to him, hoping he didn't need help with the tie, as she had no idea how they worked.
"I got you a little something-- I wonder if you'll try it?"
"Of course."
He took a white box out of the closet and brought it over to the ornate vanity table they'd found at an antiques store. "I took three photographs of you to a woman at the Lancôme counter, and she put together this collection of cosmetics specifically for your skin tone. I got one of everything, just to be safe, and in case you like it. You start with this-- just a dot under the eyes, yes? It brightens, I think. And then you move on to this liquid foundation but only a tiny bit because your skin is perfect. Hmmm." He watched as she smoothed the foundation over her cheeks, following his directions. "That's lovely. And then this powder-- I bought the softest brush they had, it's like-- it feels almost like feathers. Now. Use this eyeliner-- I don't want to get near your eyes." Ianthe applied it quickly. "Wow, you're really good at that-- you did that so fast. Now look at these colors, aren't they...? The silver-gray goes on your lower eyelid, the lighter up near your brow. Right-- and this is the pièce de résistance: at the fold of your eyelid, make a single streak of this wine color and watche what it does to the color of your eyes." He stepped backward, clutching at his chest. "My heart. Now the mascara-- you don't need much, your eyelashes are already so dark. Whoa, though, that really-- they seem twice as wide, they're magnificent. And finally, try this shade of lipstick, it's a silvery plum... flawless. She recommended this clear gloss over it, to keep it from drying out. Let's... okay, look away from me, and then turn your head quickly and look me in the eye." She did so, and Jacob knelt before her. He studied her face, her throat, the fit of the dress. "That sound you hear, beloved, it isn't bells. It isn't music. That's Aphrodite laughing, she is rising from the sea, laughing with joy, because of you. You."
IV. They faced each other over the packages in the library. It was bitterly cold; Roland felt as if he should never be warm again, and thought with longing of articles of clothing he had never had occasion to wear: knitted mittens, long johns, balaclava. Maud had driven out early and had arrived, keen and tense, before breakfast was over, well-wrapped in tweed jacket and Aran wool sweater, with the bright hair, visible last night at dinner in the Baileys' chilly hall, again wholly swallowed by a green knotted scarf. The library was stony and imposing, with thickets of carved foliage in its vaulted roof and a huge stone fireplace, swept and empty, with the Bailey arms, a solid tower and a small clump of trees, carved on its mantel. Gothic windows opened onto a frosty lawn; these were partly clear glass in leaded frames and partly richly stained Kelmscott glass, depicting, in central medallions, the building of a golden keep on a green hill, fortified and bedizened with banners, entered, in the central medallion, by a procession of knights and ladies on horseback. Along the top of the window ran a luxuriating rose tree, bearing both white and red flowers and blood red fruit together. Round the sides vines were rampant, carrying huge purple grape bunches on golden stems amongst curling tendrils and veined spreading leaves. The books, behind glass, were leather-backed, orderly, apparently immobile and untouched.
There was a table in the middle, leather-topped and heavy, ink-stained and scratched, with two leather-seated armchairs. The leather had been red and was now brown and powdery, of the kind that leaves rusty traces on the clothes of those who sit there. In the centre of the table was an inkstand, with an empty silver pen tray, tarnished, and greenish glass vessels, containing dried black powder.
Joan Bailey, wheeling round the table, had laid the packages on it.
"I hope you'll be comfortable. Do let me know if you need anything else. I would light the fire for you, but the chimneys haven't been swept for generations-- I'm afraid you'd suffocate with smoke, or else we'd set the whole house on fire. Are you warm enough?"
Maud, animated, assured her that they were. There was a faint flash of colour in her ivory cheeks. As though the cold brought out her proper life, as though she were at home in it.
"Then I'll leave you to it. I long to see how you get on. I'll make coffee at eleven. I'll bring it to you."
There was a frostiness between the two of them when Maud brought out her proposals for the way they should proceed. She had decided that they should each read the letters of the poet who interested them, and that they should agree conventions of recording their observations on index cards according to a system she was already using in the Women's Resource Centre. Roland objected to this, partly because he felt he was being hustled, partly because he had a vision, which he now saw was ridiculous and romantic, of their two heads bent together over the manuscripts, following the story, sharing, he had supposed, the emotion. He pointed out that by Maud's system they would lose any sense of the development of the narrative and Maud retorted robustly that they lived in a time which valued narrative uncertainty, that they could cross-refer later, and that anyway they had so little time, and what concerned her was primarily Christabel LaMotte. Roland agreed, since the time constraint was indeed crucial. So they worked for some time in silence, interrupted only by Lady Bailey bearing a thermos of coffee, and the odd request for information.
"Tell me," said Roland, "did Blanche wear glasses?"
"I don't know."
"There's a reference here to the glittering surfaces of her gaze. I'm sure it says surfaces in the plural."
"She could have had glasses, or he could have been comparing her to a dragonfly or some other insect. He seems to have read Christabel's insect poems. People were obsessed with insects at that time."
"What did she really look like, Blanche?"
"No one really knows for certain. I imagine her very pale, but that's only because of her name."
At first Roland worked with the kind of concentrated curiosity with which he read anything at all by Randolph Ash. This curiosity was a kind of predictive familiarity; he knew the workings of the other man's mind, he had read what he had read, he was possessed of his characteristic habits of syntax and stress. His mind could leap ahead and hear the rhythm of the unread as though he were the writer, hearing in his brain the ghost-rhythms of the as yet unwritten.
But with this reading, after a time-- a very short time-- the habitual pleasures of recognition and foresight gave way to a mounting sense of stress. This was primarily because the writer of the letters was himself under stress, confused by the object and recipient of his attentions. He found it difficult to fix this creature in his scheme of things. He asked for clarification and was answered, it appeared, with riddles. Roland, not in possession of the other side of the correspondence, could not even tell what riddles, and looked up increasingly at the perplexing woman on the other side of the table, who with silent industry and irritating deliberation was making minutely neat notes on her little fans of cards, pinning them together with silver hooks and pins, frowning.
Letters, Roland discovered, are a form of narrative that envisages no outcome, no closure. His time was a time of the dominance of narrative theories. Letters tell no story, because they do not know, from line to line, where they are going. If Maud had been less coldly hostile he would have pointed this out to her-- as a matter of general interest-- but she did not look up or meet his eye.
[...]
The stained glass worked to defamiliarise her. It divided her into cold, brightly coloured fires. One cheek moved in and out of a pool of grape-violet as she worked. Her brow flowered green and gold. Rose-red and berry-red stained her pale neck and chin and mouth. Eyelids were purple-shadowed. The green silk of her scarf glittered with turreted purple ridges. Dust danced in a shadowy halo round her shifting head, black motes in straw gold, invisible solid matter appearing like pinholes in a sheet of solid colour. He spoke and she turned through a rainbow, her pale skin threading the various lights.
"I'm sorry to interrupt-- I just wondered-- do you know about the City of Is? I.S. I.S.?"
She shook off her concentration as a dog shakes off water.
"It's a Breton legend. It was drowned in the sea for its wickedness. It was ruled by Queen Dahud, the sorceress, daughter of King Gradlond. The women there were transparent, according to some versions. Christabel wrote a poem."
"May I look?"
"A quick glance. I'm using this book."
She pushed it across the table.
Tallahassee Women Poets. Christabel LaMotte: a Selection of Narrative and Lyric Poems, ed. Leonora Stern. The Sapphic Press, Boston. The purple cover bore a white linear image of two mediaeval women, bending to embrace each other across a fountain in a square basin. They both wore veiled headdesses, heavy girdles and long plaits.
He scanned The Drowned City. This had a prefatory note by Leonora Stern.
In this poem, as in "The Standing Stones," LaMotte drew on her native Breton mythology, which she had known from childhood. The theme was of particular interest to a woman writer, as it might be said to reflect a cultural conflict between two types of civilisation, the Indo-european patriarchy of Gradlond and the more primitive, instinctive, earthy paganism of his sorceress daughter, Dahud, who remains immersed when he has taken his liberating leap to dry land at Quimper. The women's world of the underwater city is the obverse of the male-dominated technological industrial world of Paris or Par-is, as the Bretons have it. They say that Is will come to the surface when Paris is drowned for its sins.
LaMotte's attitude to Dahud's so-called crimes is interesting. Her father, Isidore LaMotte, in his Breton Myths and Legends, does not hesitate to refer to Dahud's "perversions" though without specifying. Nor does LaMotte specify...
He flicked across the pages of the text.
There are none blush on earth, y-wis
As do dames of the Town of Is.
The red blood runs beneath their skin
And feels its way and flows within,
And men can see, as through a glass
Each twisty turn, each crossing pass
Of threaded vein and artery
From heart to throat, from mouth to eye.
This spun-glass skin, like spider-thread
Is silver water, woven with red.
For their excessive wickedness
In days of old, was this distress
Come on them, of transparency
And openness to every eye.
But still they're proud, their haughty brows
Circled with gold...
Deep in the silence of drowned Is
Beneath the wavering precipice
The church-spire in the thickened green
Points to the trembling surface sheen
From which descends, a glossy cone
A mirror-spire that mocks its own.
Between those two the mackerel sails
As did the swallow in the vales
Of summer air, and he too sees
His mirrored self amongst the trees
That hang to meet themselves, for here,
All things are doubled, and the clear
Thick element is doubled too
Finite and limited the view
As though the world of roofs and rocks
Were stored inside a glassy box.
And damned and drowned transparent things
Hold silent commerce...
This drowned world lies beneath a skin
Of moving water, as within
The glassy surface of their frown
The ladies' grieving passions drown
And can be seen to ebb and flow
In crimson as the currents go
Amongst the bladderwrack and stones
Amongst the delicate white bones.
And so they worked on, against the clock, cold and excited, until Lady Bailey came to offer them supper.
V. They waited patiently for what seemed a very long time, stamping in the snow to keep their feet warm. At last they heard the sound of slow shuffling footsteps approaching the door from the inside. It seemed, as the Mole remarked to the Rat, like someone walking in carpet slippers that were too large for him and down-at-heel; which was intelligent of Mole, because that was exactly what it was.
There was the noise of a bolt shot back, and the door opened a few inches, enough to show a long snout and a pair of sleepy blinking eyes.
"Now, the very next time this happens," said a gruff and suspicious voice, "I shall be exceedingly angry. Who is it this time, disturbing people on such a night? Speak up!"
"Oh, Badger," cried the Rat, "let us in, please. It's me, Rat, and my friend Mole, and we've lost our way in the snow."
"What, Ratty, my dear little man!" exclaimed the Badger, in quite a different voice. "Come along in, both of you, at once. Why, you must be perished. Well I never! Lost in the snow! And in the Wild Wood, too, and at this time of night! But come in with you."
The two animals tumbled over each other in their eagerness to get inside, and heard the door shut behind them with great joy and relief.
The Badger, who wore a long dressing gown, and whose slippers were indeed very down-at-heel, carried a flat candlestick in his paw and had probably been on his way to bed when their summons sounded. He looked kindly down on them and patted both their heads. "This is not the sort of night for small animals to be out," he said paternally. "I'm afraid you've been up to some of your pranks again, Ratty. But come along; come into the kitchen. There's a first-rate fire there, and supper and everything."
He shuffled on in front of them, carrying the light, and they followed him, nudging each other in an anticipating sort of way, down a long, gloomy, and, to tell the truth, decidedly shabby passage, into a sort of a central hall, out of which they could dimly see other long tunnel-like passages branching, passages mysterious and without apparent end. But there were doors in the hall as well-- stout oaken comfortable-looking doors. One of these the Badger flung open, and at once they found themselves in all the glow and warmth of a large fire-lit kitchen.
The floor was well-worn red brick, and on the wide hearth burned a fire of logs, between two attractive chimney corners tucked away in the wall, well out of any suspicion of draft. A couple of high-backed settles, facing each other on either side of the fire, gave further sitting accomodation for the sociably disposed. In the middle of the room stood a long table of plain boards placed on trestles, with benches down each side. At one end of it, where an armchair stood pushed back, were spread the remains of the Bader's plain but ample supper. Rows of spotless plates winked from the shelves of the dresser at the far end of the room, and from the rafters overhead hung hams, bundles of dried herbs, nets of onions, and baskets of eggs. It seemed a place where heroes could fitly feast after victory, where weary harvesters could line up in scores along the table and keep their Harvest Home with mirth and song, or where two or three friends of simple tastes could sit about as they pleased and eat and smoke and talk in comfort and contentment. The ruddy brick floor smiled up at the smoky ceiling; the oaken settles, shiny with long wear, exchanged cheerful glances with each other; plates on the dresser grinned at pots on the shelf, and the merry firelight flickered and played over everything without distinction.
The kindly Badger thrust them down on a settle to toast themselves at the fire, and bade them remove their wet coats and boots. Then he fetched them dressing gowns and slippers, and himself bathed the Mole's shin with warm water and mended the cut with sticking plaster till the whole thing was just as good as new, if not better. In the embracing light and warmth, warm and dry at last, with weary legs propped up in front of them, and a suggestive clink of plates being arranged on the table behind, it seemed to the storm-driven animals, now in safe anchorage, that the cold and trackless Wild Wood just left outside was miles and miles away, and all that they had suffered in it a half-forgotten dream.
When at last they were thoroughly toasted, the Badger summoned them to the table, where he had been busy laying a repast. They had felt pretty hungry before, but when they actually saw at last the supper that was spread for them, really it seemed only a question of what they should attack first where all was so attractive, and whether the other things would obligingly wait for them till they had time to give them attention. Conversation was impossible for a long time; and when it was slowly resumed, it was that regrettable sort of conversation that results from talking with your mouth full. The Badger did not mind that sort of thing at all, nor did he take any notice of elbows on the table, or everybody speaking at once. As he did not go into Society himself, he had got an idea that these things belonged to the things taht didn't really matter. (We know of course that he was wrong, and took too narrow a view; because they do matter very much, though it would take too long to explain why.) He sat in his armchair at the head of the table, and nodded gravely at intervals as the animals told their story; and he did not seem surprised or shocked at anything, and he never said, "I told you so," or "Just what I always said," or remarked that they ought to have done so-and-so, or ought not to have done something else. The Mole began to feel very friendly towards him.
When supper was really finished at last, and each animal felt that his skin was now as tight as was decently safe, and that by this time he didn't care a hang for anybody or anything, they gathered round the glowing embers of the great wood fire, and thought how jolly it was to be sitting up so late, and so independent, and so full; and after they had chatted for a time about things in general, the Badger said heartily, "Now then! tell us the news from your part of the world. How's old Toad getting on?"
"Oh, from bad to worse," said the Rat gravely, while the Mole, cocked up on a settle and basking in the firelight, his heels higher than his head, tried to look properly mournful.
[...]
"Well, it's time we were all in bed," said the Badger, getting up and fetching flat candlesticks. "Come along, you two, and I'll show you your quarters. And take your time tomorrow morning-- breakfast at any hour you please!"
He conducted the two animals to a long room that seemed half bedchamber and half loft. The Badger's winter stores, which indeed were visible everywhere, took up half the room-- piles of apples, turnips, and potatoes, baskets full of nuts, and jars of honey; but the two little white beds on the remainder of the floor looked soft and inviting, and the linen on them, though coarse, was clean and smelled beautifully of lavender; and the Mole and the Water Rat, shaking off their garments in some thirty seconds, tumbled in between the sheets in great joy and contentment.
