“There’s more wine,” she said. She no longer believed in him. In things he might say, yes, but not in him. She had lost her faith.
“Jeanine…”
“Good-bye, Nile,” she said. It was the way she ended telephone calls.
She was going to the nineties, to dinner in an apartment she had not seen. Her arms were bare. Her face seemed very young.
When the door closed, panic seized him. He was suddenly desperate. His thoughts seemed to fly away, to scatter like birds. It was a deathlike hour. On television, the journalists were answering complex questions. The streets were still. He began to go through her things. First the closets. The drawers. He found her letters. He sat down to read them, letters from her brother, her lawyer, people he did not know. He began pulling forth everything, shirts, underclothes, long clinging weeds which were stockings. He kicked her shoes away, spilled open boxes. He broke her necklaces, pieces rained to the floor. The wildness, the release of a murderer filled him. As she sat there in the nineties, sometimes speaking a little, the men nearby uncertain, seeking to hold her glance, he whipped her like a yelping dog from room to room, pushing her into walls, tearing her clothes. She was stumbling, crying, he felt the horror of his acts. He had no right to them—why did this justify everything?
He was bathed in sweat, breathless, afraid to stay. He closed the door softly. There were old newspapers piled in the hall, the faint sounds from other apartments, children returning from errands to the store.
In the street he saw on every side, in darkening windows, in reflections, as if suddenly it were visible to him, a kind of chaos. It welcomed, it acclaimed him. The huge tires of buses roared past. It was the last hour of light. He felt the solitude of crime. He stopped, like an addict, in a phone booth. His legs were weak. No, beneath the weakness was something else. For a moment he saw unknown depths to himself, he glittered with images. It seemed he was attracting the glances of women who passed. They recognize me, he thought, they smell me in the dark like mares. He smiled at them with the cracked lips of an incorrigible. He cared nothing for them, only for the power to disturb. He was bending their love toward him, a stupid love, a love without which he could not breathe.
It was late when he arrived home. He closed the door. Darkness. He turned on the light. He had no sense of belonging there. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. There was a skylight over his head, the panes were black. He sat beneath the small, nude photograph of a girl he had once lived with, the edges were curled, and began to play, the G was sticking, the piano was out of tune. In Bach there was not only order and coherence but more, a code, a repetition which everything depended on. After a while he felt a pounding beneath his feet, the broom of the idiot on the floor below. He continued to play. The pounding grew louder. If he had a car… Suddenly the idea broke over him as if it were the one thing he had been trying to think of: a car. He would be speeding from the city to find himself at dawn on long, country roads. Vermont, no, further, Newfoundland, where the coast was still deserted. That was it, a car, he saw it plainly. He saw it parked in the gentle light of daybreak, its body stained from the journey, a faintly battered body that had survived some terrible, early crash.
All is chance or nothing is chance. That evening Jeanine met a man who longed, he said, to perform an act of great and unending generosity, like Genet’s in giving his house to a former lover.
“Did he do that?” she asked.
“They say.”
It was P. The room was filled with people, and he was speaking to her, quite naturally, as if they had met before. She did not wonder what to say to him, she did not have to say anything. He was quite near. The fine wrinkles in his brow were visible, wrinkles not yet deepened.
“Generosity purifies,” he said. He was later to tell her that words were no accident, their arrangement and choice was like another voice speaking, a voice which revealed everything. Vocabulary was like fingerprints, he said, like handwriting, like the body which revealed the invisible soul, which expressed it.
His face was dark, his features deep. He was part of another, a mysterious race. She was aware of how different her own face was with its wide mouth, its gray eyes, slow, curious, clear as a stream. She was aware also that the dress she wore, the depth of the chairs, the dimensions of this room afloat now in evening, all of these were part of an immersion into the flow of a great life. Her heart was beating slowly but hard. She had never felt so sure of herself, so bewildered by the ease with which it all was opening.
“I’m suspicious and grasping,” he said. He was beginning his confessions. “I recognize that.” Later he told her that in his entire life he had only been free for an hour, and that hour was always with her.
She asked no questions. She recognized him. In her own apartment the lights were burning. The air of the city, bitter as acid, was absolutely still. She did not breathe it. She was breathing another air. She had not smiled once as yet. He later told her that this was the most powerful thing of all that had attracted him. Her breasts, he said, were like those of black tribal girls in the
THE DESTRUCTION OF THE GOETHEANUM
In the garden, standing alone, he found the young woman who was a friend of the writer William Hedges, then unknown but even Kafka had lived in obscurity, she said, and so moreover had Mendel, perhaps she meant Mendeleyev. They were staying in a little hotel across the Rhine. No one could seem to find it, she said.
The river there flowed swiftly, the surface was alive. It carried things away, broken wood and branches. They spun around, went under, emerged. Sometimes pieces of furniture passed, ladders, windows. Once, in the rain, a chair.
They were living in the same room, but it was completely platonic. Her hand, he noticed, bore no ring or jewelry of any kind. Her wrists were bare.
“He doesn’t like to be alone,” she said. “He’s struggling with his work.” It was a novel, still far from finished though parts were extraordinary. A fragment had been published in Rome. “It’s called
He tried to remember the curious word already dissolving in his mind. The lights inside the house had begun to appear in the blue evening.
“It’s the one great act of his life.”
The hotel she had spoken of was small with small rooms and letters in yellow across the facade. There were many buildings like it. From the cool flank of the cathedral it was visible amid them, below and a little downstream. Also through the windows of antique shops and alleys.
Two days later he saw her from a distance. She was unmistakable. She moved with a kind of negligent grace, like a dancer whose career is ended. The crowd ignored her.
“Oh,” she greeted him, “yes, hello.”
Her voice seemed vague. He was sure she did not recognize him. He didn’t know exactly what to say.
“I was thinking about some of the things you told me…” he began.
She stood with people pushing past, her arms filled with packages. The street was hot. She did not understand who he was, he was certain of it. She was performing simple errands, those of a remote and saintly couple.
“Forgive me,” she said, “I’m really not myself.”
“We met at Sarren’s,” he explained.
“Yes, I know.”
A silence followed. He wanted to say something quite simple to her but she was preventing it.
She had been to the museum. When Hedges worked he had to be alone, sometimes she would find him asleep on the floor.
“He’s crazy,” she said. “Now he’s sure there’ll be a war. Everything’s going to be destroyed.”
Her own words seemed to disinterest her. The crowd was pulling her away.
“Can I walk with you for a minute?” he asked. “Are you going toward the bridge?”
She looked both ways.
“Yes,” she decided.
They went down the narrow streets. She said nothing. She glanced in shop windows. She had a mouth which curved downward, a serving girl’s mouth, a girl from small towns.
