Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

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