The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (63 page)

—What you’ve done to this picture here, it’s a crime.

—A supralapsarian criminal.

Recktall Brown sat forward gripping his knees. —You mustn’t laugh like that, my boy.

—Why not? Tell me, tell me. Some time I haven’t laughed.

—It just don’t sound right, Recktall Brown muttered, and looked down at the damaged picture. Then he looked up again. —Are you all right, my boy?

—Yes, well. There is often now the sensation of weightlessness, or weighing very little. There. Weightless but well. When you live where I do, upsets of the liver are seldom occurrences.

—It wasn’t your liver I’m thinking about, Recktall Brown said looking down again. —Look, you got to paint this face in here again, the face on this woman. Ten thousand dollars you’ve taken right off the price right there.

—And dishonored death into the bargain, so they tell me. Could I have a cigar?

—You?

—A cigar.

—My boy . . .

Recktall Brown watched him tear the cellophane cover away, and commence to trim the end with his thumbnail. —Here, take this, he said and offered the penknife. —Don’t just stare at it, my boy. Trim the end of the God damn cigar with it.

—Indeed.

—My boy . . .

—Nothing moves in this room. If you had music . . .

Nevertheless, the smoke rises.

—There! something moved, intimate movement there on the far wall . . . He recovered with a shudder, to draw a hand over his eyes and whisper, —Never mind. I thought I saw Patinir hanging there, I keep forgetting he’s in mortmain, gone home and taken his wages. You see how the prospect draws us on? Making perfect dice. They have to be perfect before you can load them. Goodness! what beautiful diamonds. How their impurities dance with life! Not deceit just skin-deep, like this intricate, cunning field full of fraud separating us here, seven and deadly. It’s not even a very good copy. He stared unblinking at the table, and suddenly came forward to pick at the edge of it with the penknife.

—Here! Brown lunged his naked hand out. —It’s real, this table picture, stop scratching it. Don’t worry, right after Valentine shot
his mouth off about it I had some real experts look it over. Don’t worry, Brown grunted belligerent satisfaction, looking down at it. —It’s the genuine original.

—I can see, it is not, came the whisper distinct across the table of the Seven Deadly Sins. —Christ! to have copied a copy? and that was how it began!

—My boy, says Recktall Brown, and stands to his feet to light his own cigar and jam it among uneven teeth. The youthful portrait hangs still as he approaches it, and perhaps, as Basil Valentine remarked, serves in some measure to humanize the fragments of motion which compose his progress toward it. Immediately upon arrival there, Recktall Brown turns his back upon it, a gesture which leaves its expression unchanged as he obscures it with the one which has superseded it. —Maybe you need a girl.

—A girl?

—How long is it since you’ve had one?

—Had one?

—I don’t mean a God damn wife hanging around all the time. I mean just a girl. You can’t go around month after month with all this piling up inside you. Of course, hell anybody can see that will drive you crazy as hell. You got to release that once in a while, or it drives anybody crazy. Do you want me to send you a nice girl down there for a couple of nights?

—But the cost.

—The cost? Each foot planted upon a rose, Recktall Brown’s laughter might seem to rise the entire distance of his frame, a laborious journey, complicated by ducts and veins, cavities and sedulous organs whose functions are interrupted by the passage of this billowing shape which escapes in shambles of smoke. —You can pay for anything in this town.

—Barefoot on that vast acreage, for love or money.

—God damn it, my boy. God damn it . . .

—Without love?

—Do I fall in love with the barber when I get a haircut? God damn it, my boy.

—Reverend Gilbert Sullivan . . .

—God damn Reverend Gilbert Sullivan!

—Exactly.

Recktall Brown starts to turn away; his reversal is remarkable for its quickness, a feat of muscular cooperation which happens before his eyes can contain the reason. They do, though; his voice too. —Put that damn bottle down now and sit down.

—A hindrance to the working of reality. Ah, Brown, Brown, your daughters all were fair. But the youngest . . .

—Are you getting anything from Esme?

—There remains the complication of the mermaid men.

—Sit down. We’re both going to sit down and figure this out. Did he put you up to all this crap?

—I hear singing.

Sinking, on heavy tones into the depth of the vast room, come these weights, —Littel girl

—My bachelor room

—Fuller!

—Sar? drops from above.

—Stop that God damn noise.

—You and I, Brown. You and I. You are so damned familiar.

—You’ve got to get hold of yourself, my boy.

—If we are, as he says, projections of his unconscious. Then the intimacy is not at all remarkable, is it.

—Stop it. You got to stop talking this way. Valentine does the same God damn thing to me, he tries to wear me down. Did he . . . has he been bothering you, my boy? Now damn it talk to me, let’s get all this straight. What’s on your mind?

—The equation of x to the power of n plus y to the power of n has no nontrivial solution in integers for n greater than two.

—Sit down.

—That is Fermat’s last theorem.

—Sit down. What the hell’s the matter, is there . . . have you got a pain in you? The motion reflected on the thick lenses (and entering through aqueous chambers to be brought upside-down and travel so, unsurprised, through vitreous humors to the confining wall of the retinas, and rescued there, and carried away down the optic nerves to be introduced to one another after these separate journeys, and merge in roundness) emerges upon his consciousness in the constraint of slowed motion. —What are you grunting for?

—I’m pretending I weigh three hundred pounds.

—Sit down. Stop this. Give me that God damn bottle.

—It isn’t difficult.

—Sar?

Nothing moves but the intimate landscape of Patinir, a self-contained silent process which demands no attention, for the prevailing color there is blue.

—Sar? What I goin to do with these relics?

A full dozen of crosses lie massed in Fuller’s arms.

—Fuller, says Recktall Brown, with stolid deadly patience, —you take those little men you been rubbing and nail each one of them on a cross, and get them right side up, and do it quietly, and get the hell out of here, now.

—The little Jesus-men, sar?

—Get out. Get out. Get out.

—Saint Peter, upside-down. Wait, Fuller. Confirm me. Isn’t there, in every one of us, a naked man marching alone down Main Street playing a bass drum?

Recktall Brown limbers the heavy extensions which support him, and rises. —Did you hear me, Fuller? Are you crazy too? Did you hear me?

—I think perhaps in the condition he enjoyin now sar he can understand the language the toast . . .

—Get out!

Fuller and Recktall Brown diverge. The old crucifer treads with care and mounts the hill of stairs. Recktall Brown reaches a corner, where he takes off his glasses, and from eyes sharp and open as those of undersea he stares into the soft diffusion of the room. —No, he says toward the fireplace; and then pursues his word. —You can’t do this, my boy. You can’t go crazy on me now.

—Now? Now?

—God damn it, my boy. Not before you finish this Herbert picture. Wreathed in smoke, he stands above his property. —How’s it coming along?

—Beautifully. Excitingly. Wondrously.

—Good. Good, my boy. Good.

—But not van Eyck.

—What do you mean?

—Not Hubert.

—What do you mean, my boy? What the hell do you mean? The smoke itself hung on diffracted planes, and Recktall Brown sat down. —You want the credit for it, do you? Is that it?

—But not from you, and not from them, from the thing itself.

Recktall Brown rolled the cigar between thick fingers. Then he put it to his lips, and without relinquishing hold upon it, rolled it there. —You can’t do this, my boy. He paused. —You know God damn well if you tried to sell one of these pictures as your own it’s worth about forty dollars. Now wait, my boy. Don’t laugh like that. It don’t sound right.

—Suppose . . .

—God damn it, my boy. Did we make a bargain or didn’t we. We’re in business, you and me. Do you see that book over there on the shelf there, the yellow one?
The Trees of Home
. That guy is in business, and he’s in business with me. And you . . .

—I . . .

—You knew when you started, said Recktall Brown, —you couldn’t stop.

They were silent. The lines of their stares formed two sides of a triangle, that was all.

—God damn it, my boy, if it wasn’t for being in business with me, you’d float away. This God damn world of shapes and smells you say you live in, you’ll turn into one of them. Look at you, you almost have already. By God, Recktall Brown said, standing, so that the look from his eyes no longer needed cross the distance between them, seated, but fell like a weight with his words, —you can’t go crazy now. I won’t let you. He threw his cigar into the fireplace; and took out another. —Do I have to send Christ down there to model for you? His voice was rising again. —Do I have to send the Virgin down there to spread her . . .

—It’s too late now.

—Too late for what. Go on. Talk to me. I feel like I’m talking to myself here.

—The Steenken Madonna. Well there. When Hubert van Eyck painted that, it wasn’t just a man, painting a picture, of a woman.

—Well then what the hell was it, tell me.

—Feeling? Belief? Say sensation, then. Ask Caligula.

—Belief necessary? So is money, and look how many people have it, for Christ sake. You leave feelings to other people, you do the thinking. Look at them. They’d rather feel than think, and look at them. You let them do your feeling and believing for you, and you do their thinking for them, or you’ll end up the same creek all of them are. In his throat, the two veins, either of them vital, pulsated under rolls of flesh. The two before him stood out in invitation to any passing blade.

—It is too late now. “The finest painting, and perhaps the culminating achievement of the fifteenth-century genius Dierick Bouts.” You see? I have to tell them.

Recktall Brown lowered his voice. —Like you say, my boy, It isn’t that simple. Do you think they want to know? Recktall Brown did not take out his penknife, nor even look for it in the pockets swung against his belly, where it was a familiar tenant. He bit off the end of his cigar, and began to pace before the fireplace. —Eminent scientists agree, after exhaustive tests, that a fifteen-cents-a-gallon chemical in a fancy bottle with a lot of scientific words on it is proven superior. So they pay a dollar a bottle because they want to. These pictures of yours, do you think you could get two hundred dollars for one? No. But these poor bastards crawl all over each other trying to get them away from me for prices in the thousands. They don’t know, they don’t want to know. They want to be told. This guy whose picture you print with a stethoscope in his hand, he’s the same as your half-assed authorities. They want
credit for discovering one of these old pictures. So just like the people who are proud to pay a dollar a bottle for this chemical, the same God damn people are proud they can hire an eminent authority to tell them what they ought to buy for. art. If there aren’t enough pictures to go round . . .

—We sanction Gresham’s law.

—Don’t talk to me now about law, just listen to me. Who would gain anything if you ran around telling people you painted these things? They’d all be mad as hell at you, most of all the people who bought them. Do you think they’d even admit they paid forty or fifty thousand for a fraud? Do you think anybody would thank you?

—I’ll trade my cigar for that bottle of brandy, that bottle of cognac for this half-smoked Havana cigar which I am not enjoying.

—Do you think they’d even believe you? They’d lock you up, my boy. You could get up there and paint these things all over again, and they wouldn’t believe you. They’d think you’re crazy. That’s what they’d want to think. My boy, you’ve fooled the experts. But once you’ve fooled an expert, he stays fooled. Wait a minute. Sit down. I’m not finished. Who put you up to this?

—The midget who married the tall woman. Have you heard that one?

—Valentine’s doing this, is he? Answer me. I warned you about him, didn’t I? God damn it, I warned you about him. He’s jealous of you, my boy, can’t you see that?

—You and he are very close, Mister Brown and Basil Valentine.

—I know him, Recktall Brown said, looking down at the cigar in his hand. Its leaf had started to unroll, and he threw it so into the fireplace. —It’s a long time now I know him, and the one thing I know, he went on looking up, —you can’t trust him. Nobody can. He’s mixed up in a lot of things. Brown was fumbling in his pocket down front. —In God damn near everything. He’s too smart for his own good. Have you got that knife? Don’t get up, don’t get up, just hand it to me here.

—A brilliant man?

—He’s got the best education money can buy, I’ll tell you that.

—If we are priests, conspiring against you, do not be surprised.

—I . . . God damn it, I told you not to laugh that way.

—What is laughter?

—It makes me nervous.

—You don’t think about me when I’m not here. Well, should I be surprised at that?

—Where are you going now?

—To be with my wife. Sheer enterprise, as you will understand.
I wonder, when I step out of doors, how the past can tolerate us.

Recktall Brown came round the chairs, and their paths converged. He raised his arm, and it came to rest. —I can feel your bones right through your shoulder. Don’t you eat anything?

—Your reassurance strengthens me, for I have sensed I felt them there myself. But no one has confirmed me in some time. Would it have been beyond temptation then, to take a knife and dig for them, and prove they’re there?