[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter Read Online Free PDF Page A

cups, of fine bone china,
each with an identical crack. One day she arrived lugging
an ancient radio that she had salvaged from the garage.
She played with it for hours, gliding across the stations,
mouth a little open, eyes fixed on nothing, while Hungarian
disc jockeys or Scots trawlermen gabbled in her
ear, and the day waned, and the little green light on the
tuning panel advanced steadily into the encroaching
darkness.
    I think more than sex, maybe even more than love,
she wanted company. She talked. Sometimes I suspected she had got into bed with me so that she could talk. She
laid bare the scandals of the neighbourhood: did I know
the man in Pierce’s pub was sleeping with his own
daughter? She recounted her dreams in elaborate detail;
I was never in them. Though she told me a lot about
the family I learned little. The mass of names and hazy
dates numbed me. It was all like the stories in a history
book, vivid and forgettable at once. Her dead parents
were a favourite topic. In her fantasy they were a kind
of Scott and Zelda, beautiful and doomed, hair blown back and white silk scarves whipping in the wind as they
sailed blithely, laughing, down the slipstream of disaster.
All I could do in return was tell her about Newton,
show off my arcane learning. I even tried reading aloud
to her bits of that old Galileo article of mine—she fell
asleep. Of course we didn’t speak much. Our affair was
conducted through the intermediary of these neutral
things, a story, a memory, a dream.
    I wondered if the house knew what was going on.
The thought was obscurely exciting. The Sunday high
teas became an institution, and although I was never
comfortable, I confess I enjoyed the sexual freemasonry
with its secret signs, the glances and the covert smiles,
the way Ottilie’s stare would meet and mingle with mine
across the table, so intensely that it seemed there must
grow up a hologram picture of a pair of tiny lovers
cavorting among the tea things.
    Our love-making at first was curiously innocent.
Her generosity was a kind of desperate abasing before the altar of passion. She could have no privacy, wanted
none, there was no part of her body that would hide
from me. Such relentless giving was flattering to begin
with, and then oppressive. I took her for granted, of
course, except when, exhausted, or bored, she forgot
about me. Then, playing the radio, brooding by the
stove, sitting on the floor picking her nose with dreamy
concentration, she would break away from me and be
suddenly strange and incomprehensible, as sometimes a
word, one’s own name even, will briefly detach itself
from its meaning and become a hole in the mesh of the
world. She had moments too of self-assertion. Something
would catch her attention and she would push me
away absentmindedly as if I were furniture, and gaze
off, with a loony little smile, over the brow of the hill,
toward the tiny music of the carnival that only she could
hear. Without warning she would punch me in the chest,
hard, and laugh. One day she asked me if I had ever
taken drugs. “I’m looking forward to dying,” she said
thoughtfully; “they give you that kind of morphine
cocktail.”
    I laughed. “Where did you hear that?”
    “It’s what they give people dying of cancer.” She
shrugged. “Everybody knows that.”
    I suppose I puzzled her, too. I would open my eyes
and find her staring into the misted mirror of our kisses
as if watching a fascinating crime being committed. Her
hands explored me with the stealthy care of a blind man.
Once, gliding my lips across her belly, I glanced up and caught her gazing down with tears in her eyes. This
passionate scrutiny was too much for me, I would feel
something within me wrapping itself in its dirty cloak
and turning furtively away. I had not contracted to be
known as she was trying to know me.

    And for the first time in my life I began to feel my age.
It sounds silly, I know.