Love and Sleep (25 page)

"Axel. Are you real familiar with these places?"

Axel managed an expression of sly indignation. It was just a phenomenon Axel thought would interest Pierce, to whom nothing human was alien, was it? Of course they would not participate, there were many who didn't. “Just stick with me,” Axel said. “Like Virgil with Dante. You might learn something."

Pierce declined. He had no particular wish to look upon the incomprehensible lusts of other men. Glad as he was that Axel was getting his share of modern or latter-day fun, he wasn't sure he hadn't preferred Axel in the more repressed and guilty mode he had found him in when he had first come down from Noate, in which Axel's adventures (when described late in the night to Pierce, and probably to his own soul as well) had been rare dramas charged with tragic necessity, and not merely goods he had found on the common counter.

"Actually I'm going to try to pay a call,” Pierce said. “Go visit somebody."

"Who?” Axel demanded, at once miffed and crestfallen, a look which Pierce doubted any great thespian (as Axel would have put it) could have improved on.

"A woman. Uptown."

"The one you used to. The Gypsy."

"Part Gypsy. Yes."

"Still carrying a torch? Oh Pierce."

"Oh I suppose,” Pierce said, searching his pockets for a dime. “In my fashion."

"I have loved thee, Cynara! in my fashion,” Axel gave out, adopting instantly a
fin-de-siècle
languor. “Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng."

” ‘
Been faithful to
thee,'” Pierce said, “is how it goes. I'll be back in a minute."

"Non sum qualis eram.
I am not as I was in good Cynara's golden days,” Axel went on, not to be stopped now, Pierce could hear him going on behind him as he sought the phone. “I have forgot much, Cynara! Gone with the wind..."

He found the phone number, written in her hand on the inside of a matchbook, her seven with the little line through the upright, where had she learned that. He had brought it with him from the Faraways though he had urged himself strongly not to use it, and perhaps he would not have if it hadn't been for the second bottle of wine.

"All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat. Nightlong within mine arms in love and sleep she lay. O God."

On the day in March when he had left the city for good, Pierce had got to his knees in his emptied apartment and with absurd solemnity had made a vow: that in his new life he would spend no more of his heart's energy (to say nothing of his money and his time) on the hopeless and hurtful pursuit of love. No more.

Some men are born eunuchs, some are made eunuchs; Pierce chose celibacy for survival's sake. Love had almost killed him, and when he awoke and found the dawn was gray, he had decided to save up the little strength he felt he had left to make a life, just for himself. He was
hors de combat,
and he would shape his own ends hereafter.

She (it was just the one woman who had extracted Pierce's hopeless oath from him, he had never been a philanderer, hard as he had tried to fling his roses with the throng) had a little apartment uptown to which she had moved from Pierce's tower of steel and glass; it was an Old Law flat, he understood, in the last unrehabilitated building on a chic block, and cost near nothing. He had never been in it but he could imagine it in detail; a certain amount of his imaginative life was spent there.

"Ah but I was desolate and sick of an old passion,” Axel declaimed, near tears. “Hungry for the lips of my desire."

It would be lit by candles in peculiar holders (she had not had the electricity turned on, didn't have the money for a deposit, had no desire to be officially listed anywhere, a habit left over from her days as a small dealer in cocaine, all over now as far as he knew). For a bed there would be a block of foam on pallets rescued from the street, but clothed in faded figured stuffs and piled with souvenir satin pillows where pink sunsets occurred over blue lakes and green pines. The walls too were probably hung with cloth. And everywhere there would be the things she found in rummage sales and junkshops, and resold at a profit, the advertising dolls and costume jewelry, scarves, toys, statuettes of cartoon characters, risque party favors, plastic tortoiseshell, postcards, “smalls” as the dealers called them; they would be arranged in ever-shifting subtle combinations, tableaux, miniature dioramas, accidental-seeming but really as consciously self-referential as a modern novel. There would be (he remembered this combination from her dresser in the apartment they had shared, though perhaps it had been dispersed) a Gypsy cigarette smoker on a painted cocktail tray, offering her pack or herself or both, and a jeweled cigarette holder on the tray, along with a poison ring, an Eiffel Tower and an Empire State Building in pot metal; and a Sphinx, in plaster, which she had painted white, with rouged cheeks and cat's eyes, pink claws, and a hooker's rosebud mouth; and around its neck a little gold watch on a band.

He let the phone ring long in this place that he imagined, let it go on ringing after it was evident no one could be there; and even after he hung up it went on ringing for some time within him.

Long past midnight and far from dawn he awoke with a start in his old bedroom in Brooklyn. The wine, maybe; but what he thought of first was Julie Rosengarten, and what he had proposed to her. He felt the seducer's guilty doubt, that he had promised too much in order to win her, and had been believed; or worse, had not really been believed at all, would not be until he acted on his promises.

He rolled over in the little bed where he no longer fit, and closed his eyes; but soon opened them again and rolled back.

Why should he try to impose this shape on time? For surely he was imposing it. Wasn't he?

In the room beyond, his father snored and whistled in long classic snores out of funny movies. The old air-conditioner panted out the window, but the air was close, the smell of his old home. Pierce at length got up, and pushed open the casement.

Warm air and the street's smell; new tall apartment buildings and office towers visible above the street, still alight, having watched through the night. New gleaming futuristic streetlights. Brooklyn had been much renewed since he was a kid here; yet it looked older, worn out; when he was young it had looked fresher. So it seemed.

Frank Walker Barr, his old teacher and mentor, had once written a whole book (
Time's Body
) showing how we have always conceived time as having a shape. Maybe in this day and age (Barr had written) the only shape most of us conceive time having is a simple geometry, a big bow-tie at whose infinitesimal knot—the present moment—we stand, with past and future opening out infinitely before and behind us. But other conceptions have been potent at other periods, not only determining how people have imagined history but determining what became of them: Cortez arrives in Mexico just as an old Age (the Mexicans are sure of it) is declining and growing feeble, and a new young Age is waiting to step forth.

Why have we always supposed that time has a shape? Pierce asked the night. Couldn't it be that we believe time has a shape because it
does
have a shape?

There was that patient of some famous psychoanalyst he had read about who was tormented terribly by the delusion that he could sense time experiencing its own passing, and that the experience was intensely painful—not to him but to time. That time suffered in the birth and death of every second, the secretion of every daybreak and nightfall.

It was
not
a dumb idea, not just food for the gullible, though it was maybe not a history: it was something both more and less, a critique, an essay, it was perhaps not even actually a book at all, it was a compound monster, a mammal, a person even, himself or someone like him. Whatever it was its central trope was one rooted deeply (he thought) in the human heart, one of the unremovable ones:
An old world dying, and a new world being born; both able just for a moment to be seen at once, like the new moon seen held in the old moon's arms.

His narrative too was an old one, that had never failed to hold readers, had once held readers through romances many volumes long:
The search for something precious, lost or in hiding, waiting to be found.
If he failed in the end to deliver it, so had those old romances sometimes, and they were still held in honor.

So he had everything in ready now, stores of weird knowledge prepared, notes piling up, pencils metaphorically sharpened.

Why then did he feel so heartsick this morning, and so unready to begin?

He was afraid, is what it was.

For it now seemed to him clear—more clear in the dry light of hangover—that in fact the passage time was over; it had come and gone, and it had left the world unchanged. More or less the same.

Yes not long ago the world had turned over in its sleep, muttering, and seemed to wake; yes he had seen it shiver, startled by the hot flashes of some sort of climacteric. He had seen it, it had passed right through the open windows of the apartment across the river which he had shared with Julie Rosengarten, when he had thought nothing would ever be the same again.

But after that—had it not grown more obvious with every passing week, every daily newspaper?—Time had just gone on continuously opening his packages; and none of them were turning out to be what he had been guessing, or was being paid to prophesy, they would be. The new was in fact looking a lot like the old; shabbier even, like the new horizon above his old home street; deeply ordinary.

And as the new passage time evanesced, the old one started to look less convincing too; the more he learned about it, the less any sort of an age it seemed to be, the less subsumable under any myth, including his new one. It was probably just history after all.

Maybe if he had been able to write his book as fast as he had conceived it. But it would be months, years, till it was done, and already it was beginning to seem shamefully belated.

What Kraft somewhere said can happen to books: their fires can go out, eternal truths whose day is over, turned to ashes, gone with the wind. It had happened to his own even before he had seen it into print, and reaped his reward, turned his trick.

No no no.

Julie still felt herself to be living in a time of manifestation, and she had said to him that lots of others did too: the time when the next age becomes visible, mankind coming out of the dark wood, finding the bright path unrolling before, the path over the hill, where the sun is rising: she had suggested such a picture for his book's cover.

But she had always stood there, for as long as he had known her she had stood just there, always expecting dawn. Pierce envied her, sometimes. She had talked to him of other books that also prophesied wonders: but he had seen that they too were already wrong.

The time was over when all things are possible. He had actually felt for a while now that, despite his luck and the happy changes he had wrought in his life, he had somehow entered onto some sort of dull plain, a featureless changeless wasteland where progress was impossible to measure. Not a wasteland
out there;
out there was still as fruitful, really, still as full of this and that; a wasteland
in here,
in his own interior country.

But if that moment of possibility was gone (was not anything but illusion now, and therefore had not ever been anything but illusion), then what was it that had come close to him in his sitting room as he looked out at the roses? What had brushed by him, and touched his cheek?

Only the wind of its passage away.

On Midsummer Day he sat once again at Kraft's little built-in desk before the pile of yellow typewritten sheets without a title page. He was reading them all again, more critically this time, and half expecting them to have changed their contents in the meantime, withdrawn the offer they had held out to him. The day beyond Kraft's mock-leaded windows was so brilliant that the darkness inside the house glowed like light, as though Pierce had thrown a switch at the door to turn it on.

In Book One the runaway Dominican monk Giordano Bruno (a real person of course, all of Kraft's characters, in this book anyway, were real persons or at least had the names and did the deeds ascribed to real persons) crosses Europe, expelled from one country after another, instructing anyone who will listen (and pay) in the Art of Memory, an obsolete mnemonics that Bruno, probably because he had a naturally tremendous memory himself, believed could revolutionize thought and bring new powers into the soul. There were close calls with the Inquisition, a trip over the Alps in snow.

In Book Two (which lay before Pierce) he would arrive in England, in the reign of Elizabeth, meet poets and magicians, and become a spy, or at least an intelligencer; and there would be plots, an execution, a severed head.

And yet in a sense there were really no people at all, no events in the book; all that was solid was thought; the characters were nothing but intimations of change in human form. The only real character was time; it was time that went through the transforming agonies of the hero, was bound, made to suffer, learned to change and arise again. Time's body.

Maybe that's why Kraft had left the book unfinished; maybe he had never intended it to be a book, a book with a plot and settings, at all. It was an abstraction, a kind of brilliant cartoon nonexistence infused with this shameful need, for the world to be able to change; to be subject to desire. As though the whole huge dry-smelling word-packed thing, all the potent jewels and angel voices and sailing ships, castles, armor, bound books, breadloaves, pisspots, the dogs, stars, stones, and roses really occurred within one instant of awful longing.

Well Pierce knew. He knew. That's why he and not another had found the book, and read it.

If it were really possible to find oneself in a story, one of that small number of stories of which the world is made, this was the only one he could have found himself in.

In a faraway land, at once green and wasted, in the sanctum of a castle on a hilltop, a foolish wise hero finds and loses again some sort of something, preserved or guarded by a priest or king at once dead and alive. And by asking the right question finally (
What is this? What is it for?)
he frees the, wins the.