The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (162 page)

—I can’t go without my pants, for Christ sake. Give him a couple of minutes to sew the buttons on.

And then they silenced, each bending forth, closer and closer, to fix the book the other was carrying with a look of myopic recognition.

—You reading that? both asked at once, withdrawing in surprise.

—No. I’m just reviewing it, said the taller one, hunching back in his green wool shirt. —A lousy twenty-five bucks. It’ll take me the whole evening tonight. You didn’t buy it, did you? Christ, at that price? Who the hell do they think’s going to pay that much just for a novel. Christ, I could have given it to you, all I need is the jacket blurb to write the review.

It was in fact quite a thick book. A pattern of bold elegance, the lettering on the dust wrapper stood forth in stark configurations of red and black to intimate the origin of design. (For some crotchety reason there was no picture of the author looking pensive sucking a pipe, sans gêne with a cigarette, sang-froid with no necktie, plastered across the back.)

—Reading it? Christ no, what do you think I am? I just been
having trouble sleeping, so my analyst told me to get a book and count the letters, so I just went in and asked them for the thickest book in the place and they sold me this damned thing, he muttered looking at the book with intimate dislike. —I’m up to a hundred and thirty-six thousand three hundred and something and I haven’t even made fifty pages yet. Where’s your pants?

—Wait a second, he’ll be right out with them. I got a card from Max.

—Did he hear about Charles Dickens yet?

—I wrote a note to him about it on a review of his book I sent him.

—Your review? He’ll thank you for that.

—They cut it on me, for Christ sake, you know that. The hell with them, anyway, they’re all of them fucked and far from home, sitting over there right now pretending they’re in New York pretending they’re in Paris . . . hey wait, wait . . .

—I can’t, I can’t miss this guy, I’ll see you later, the Viareggio.

—That place, for Christ sake, it’s taken over by fairies. Wait . . .

Out on the sidewalk, Mr. Feddle hurried up fluttering the ribbons of newspaper. —Beat it, screw, go on you crazy old bastard, I heard all about your book . . .

—You did? you did? You’ve heard about it already? Yes, a beer? a beer to celebrate . . . ? And in his enthusiasm Mr. Feddle came too close. The book was snatched from under his arm and he fluttered here helplessly, listening to the laughter, and an instant’s more hope that it might not be opened, that the dust wrapper he had made so carefully, lettering his name with such meticulous clarity on the front, pasting a picture of himself taken forty years before on the back, might yet sustain it. Then pages flashed, the laughter broke. —
The Idiot?
That’s the title of your book?
The Idiot
 . . . the laughter came on, —by Feodor Feddle . . . ?

“ ‘Did you imagine that I did not foresee all this hatred!’ Ippolit whispered again . . .” Mr. Feddle wiped his eye, sitting at an empty cafeteria table a few minutes later, over a tomato cocktail he had made with catsup and water, trying to hold together the torn dust wrapper so that his picture and his name might be seen whole by anyone coming near, the book balanced upright as pages slipped under his thumb, and a smile as of satisfaction fixed to his lips, weary satisfaction for a work completed, as the last page turned and the last paragraph swam before his eyes. “They can’t make decent bread anywhere; in winter they are frozen like mice in a cellar . . .” He touched at his watering eye with the crook of a finger. “ ‘We’ve had enough of following our whims; it’s time to be reasonable. And all this, all this life abroad, and this Europe of yours is all a fantasy, and all of us abroad are only a fantasy . . . remember
my words, you’ll see it for yourself!’ she concluded almost wrathfully . . .” Someone approached his table. He swallowed hard, preparing to speak. It was a Puerto Rican busboy, with a hairline mustache. Pages retreated under his thumb.

“ ‘Pass by us, and forgive us our happiness,’ said Myshkin in a low voice.

“ ‘Ha, ha, ha! Just as I thought! I knew it was sure to be something like that! Though you are . . . you are . . . Well, well! You are eloquent people! Goodbye! Goodbye!’ ”

On the terrace of the Flore sat a person who resembled the aging George Washington without his wig (at about the time he said farewell to his troops). She was drinking a bilious cloudy liquid and read, with silent moving lips, from a small stiff-covered magazine. Anyone could have seen it was
Partisan Review
she was reading, if anyone had looked.

Paris lay by, accomplished. Other cities might cloy the appetites they fed, but this serpent of old Seine, pinched gray and wrinkled deep in time, continued to make hungry where she most satisfied, even to that hill where by night, round corners, she fed on most delicious poison, where, with, —Hey Joe, you see ciné cochon? deux femmes fooky-fooky? the vilest things became her still; where by day picturesque painters infested picturesque alleys painting the same picturesque painting painted so many times before: the spectral bulbiferous pyramids crowning the ascent where the first bishop of the city had approached carrying his head under his arm in a two-league march which centuries later would provoke a comment worthy any thinker before him, in a woman’s pen whose shrewd instant would, ever after him, define and redeem the people whose patron saint he became.

Now, her whole mien no more changed after another great war than those of her daughters parading the Grands Boulevards, quickly restored with cosmetics after their own brief battles, murmuring, like them, —Vous m’emmenez? . . . Paris prepared to celebrate an anniversary. It was her two thousandth anniversary, and that not one of birth, but of the first time, under another name, when she was raped: a morsel for a monarch, Lutetia succumbed after a struggle, and later on, like her daughters parading now between the Madeleine and the Café de la Paix, took a more gaudy name for her professional purposes, shrining the innocence of the maiden name in history.

Thus brilliant in flowered robes, like those Greek law decreed for courtesans, Paris soon gained the ascendancy, soon stood out like those prostitutes of Rome who, it was said, “could be distinguished from virtuous matrons only by the superior elegance of their dress
and the swarm of admirers who surrounded them.” As fashions have originated with courtesans throughout the ages, she soon became their arbiter. And since she was, like the better class of whores in ancient Greece, a trained entertainer, no more opprobrium attached to distinguished men visiting her than fell to Socrates visiting Aspasia: statesmen and generals came too, as Pericles came to Aspasia, and even after she had ruined him, and found herself accused of impiety, the great man appeared at her trial as her advocate, only to find his eloquence to fail him in court: “he could only clasp Aspasia to his breast and weep.”

Other lands were not slow to credit her reputation as the author of all civilized innovations in the western world, and as much as five centuries ago the English, Italians, and even Turks, readily acknowledged that civilization had been enhanced with syphilis by the French. Paris exiled her overcivilized members across the river to Saint Germain des Prés, which had now once more become a haven for those crippled by novel and contagious disease. They behaved in this sanctuary very much as they had then, prohibited, as they were in the fifteenth century, “under pain of death, from conversing with the rest of the world.”

On the terrace of the Flore, a passably dressed man who had compounded a new philosophy sat surrounded by some of the unshaven, unshorn, unwashed youth who espoused it. Four ruthlessly well-organized Hollanders, in the picturesque dress of their native land, sang
Red River Valley
from the sidewalk, and passed a cute wooden shoe among the captive audience. Someone whispered, —I’m actually going to join the church, the Roman Catholic. Someone else warned that the Pope and the whole works was going to Brazil. Someone else said that the Polar Icecap was growing, and would soon tip the earth over. Across the street on the terrace of the Brasserie Lipp, two pin-headed young men in gray flannel compared shiny green passports, thumbing forty-one blank pages. They were with two square-shouldered girls, whose small breasts were attached quite low to accommodate the fashion which the dresses imposed. One of the girls said, —I think my conçerage is returning all my mail marked ankonoo because I only gave her a thousand francs poorbwar. Behind them, another young man in gray flannels said he had known one of the girls, she was on the Daisy Chain at Vassar. On the terrace of the Reine Blanche next door, a golden-haired boy said, —I just want to say that being in Paris is a big fat wonderful thing . . . and beside him a youth whose plume of hair stood uncombed with painstaking care laid a hand on his and said, —Be-t tout nô ônelé etheur boïze frem dthe younaïtedd stétce in Paris is laïke kemming tout a bagnkouètt and bring yoûrze ône lennch.

On the terrace of the Royale Saint Germain, Hannah was told that a friend of hers was coming up from Italy, Don . . . what-was-it? And she responded, —Hey diddle diddle It bends in the middle, can you buy me a beer?

—I heard they hung one of Max’s pictures upside down at his show.

—So what, Hannah said and she sounded morose. —Nobody noticed it until today, it’s a real compliment to the coherence of the design. She was sitting at a table with an Australian sculptor who made leather sandals, a colored girl in the Stuart tartan, and a professional Mexican, who looked blank. Hannah was staring at a ribbon of newspaper, with a note scribbled in the margin.

—Who was that guy Charles that Max was talking about? He said he finally made it? under a subway? that he held up the IRT for twenty-five minutes . . .

—Will you shut up about it? Hannah responded, to amend her tone with, —and buy me a beer?

The Australian sculptor who made leather sandals said that Beethoven’s duet for viola and cello sounded to him like two bulky women rummaging under a bed. Behind him a girl said, —Of course I like music, but not just to listen to.

—And you know how he paints them? He climbs up a ladder with a piece of string soaked in ink, and he drops it from the ceiling onto a canvas on the floor.

—We’ve just bought a lovely big Pissarro . . .

—My uncle had one, it was so big he couldn’t park it anywhere.

—Max got good write-ups on his show. The critic in
La Macule
said . . .

—Why shouldn’t he? Hannah interrupted. —They came around asking for a ten per cent cut on anything he sold if they gave him good reviews, sure he said yes, any good publicity agent charges ten per cent.

—Look, is it true what I heard about Max? that his mistress is the wife of . . . (and here the name of a well-known painter was whispered in Hannah’s ear) —. . . who slips him her husband’s unfinished canvases that he’s discarded and forgotten about, and Max touches them up and sells them as originals?

—My uncle finally smashed it up one night, somebody on a motorcycle thought he was two motorcycles and tried to go between them.

—And then he told me he spent two days in bed with this real high-class whore he picked up in the Café de la Paix, after he told her he couldn’t pay in francs, all he had was dollars, and he flashes this roll of tens and twenties and fifties, so she paid all the bills at the George Sank and gave him a terrific time for a couple of days and then rolled him, he said he’d like to see her trying to change
Confederate States money in the Banque de France. What’s this, a review of his book?

Hannah pushed the ribbon of paper forth saying, —The poor bastard who wrote it sends it over to him. Read it, you can see he misses the whole idea. Somebody in the Trib compared it to
Nightwood
.

—Here he comes now, isn’t it?

Hannah looked up, to see Max approach, smiling; to ask, —Hey, can you buy me a beer?

At the next table a girl said, —Plagiary? What’s that. Handel did it. They all did it. Even Mozart did it, he even plagiarized from himself, just look at the wind instruments in the dinner scene with Leporello. Someone said he’d been knocked down by a priest riding a bicycle with a red plush seat in the Rue Zheetliquer; someone said she had been knocked down by a nun on a bicycle in Rue Dauphine street: someone with a beard said he had never seen either a nun or a priest on the left bank, and added, —I just got a new holy man myself. —A what? —You know, an analyst. Have you been up to the exhibition of paintings by nuts up in the Saint Anne hospital? We got a nice section, the ones by American nuts. Some of them are dirty as hell.

And someone said, —Nothing queer about Carruthers . . . to conclude, once for all, the story of that subaltern and his mare.

—Marecones, muttered the man in the sharkskin suit.

—Wie Eulen nach Athen bringen . . .

—Marecones y nada mas.

There, on the terrace of the Reine Blanche Rudy and Frank held hands under the table, and talked about the wedding banquet: Caviar Volga, consommé Grands Viveurs, paillettes, homard au whisky, cœur de Charollais Edouard VII, perdreau rôti sur canapé . . . champagnes, Mumm 1928, Château Issan 1925 . . . —And in the ceremony we just told him to leave out that vulgar part about the bodies of man and woman clinging to each other. They said afterwards that I was quite dewy-eyed.

—Sonny’s terribwy upset, so
jealous
! He trwied to do a
way
with himself, did he tell you?

—How?

—By hitting himself
savagewy
in the temple with a fountain pen. But where was Big Anna? Is that one jealous too?

—No baby, Big Anna telephoned from some absurd place in Italy. They were going to drive up in some nameless person’s new Renault, and they were somewhere in the Fremola valley when it didn’t go right, so they opened the hood to look at the engine, and there was nothing in there but an old tire, they must just have dropped the engine right out. So they just left it there, it was the
only thing they could do. In the Saint Gotthard Pass, it was the only thing they could do.