“Do you think? I didn’t. I analysed it for myself. It said to me—like a commandment—consider the surfaces. Care for the surfaces. Don’t dig under.”
“Did you? Can you?”
“It can be done. All that white paint was a surface—a visible skin, laid on a surface. I went out and saw the lake. I looked at the light on the surface. Something said to me, if you can see the surface well, you are in a right relation to the world in which it is.”
“But the lake has depths. Trees have insides. So does the earth.”
“We can know that, yes. But I know I must live by staying on the surface. Like those flies that walk on water. Like a painted flower on a plate.”
“So you gave up being analysed?”
“Everyone said it would be very dangerous, but I insisted. Then there was a lot of trouble with Dr. Gross, and Herr Jung was preoccupied, and my parents sent me here to come to my senses, which I thought I had done, myself, quite adequately.”
He laughed, and Florence laughed with him.
“You should found a school of painting,” she said. “Or of philosophy.”
“I think more, of rigorous contemplation. I should like to be a Buddhist. I do paint, but I cannot paint the surfaces I see. Living on the surface is
Florence suddenly thought that her own surfaces were not the truth about her and the creature growing inside her. She looked away, and began to weep. He said
“I did not mean to distress you. Rather the opposite.”
“I am in a state of permanent distress. It is tedious.”
“You are not naturally a… superficial person. But as an exercise, it is good. Look at the wind on the surface of the meadow, and how all the surfaces of all the grasses turn in the light…”
It was absurd, and yet, when she turned her gaze on the meadow, it was somewhere between a wonder and relief. She looked at the surface of the juice in her glass tumbler, and how it appeared to be suspended between the walls, an oval ruddy-gold coin. She looked at the sun on Gabriel Goldwasser’s hair and beard. She had sensed him as an incomplete person, not in the real world, and talked to him for that reason, because there was no threat in him. Now she saw how deliberate was this absence of threat.
On another occasion she said to him “I can’t live like you.”
“I think not, no, that is so,” he said, calmly.
One bright day, some weeks later, he said “Forgive me, but I think I have a superficial answer to a superficial part of your problem.”
“My problem?”
“I think you are an unmarried lady, expecting a child, and you cannot take your child back to your own country, because of social disgrace—for you, and for your esteemed alchemical father.”
“That is so. If I tell you the whole silly—the whole mad—story, you will despise me. I have almost decided I must give away this—this child—without even looking at it. Immediately. But that is a hard thing to contemplate.”
“You will harm yourself if you do so. As well as the child. Has it no father?”
Florence’s face, which for the last weeks had been grave and somewhat vacant, puckered into tearful rage, which was then mastered.
“I dislike him. It’s weaker than hatred, it’s pure dislike. Do you understand? I made a very foolish mistake. It is horrid, the whole thing is horrid.”
“But your father cares for you.”
“He has a young wife. The same age—as me. She is expecting a child. They are very happy. Or they were, until I made my mistake. I have ruined their happiness and my own.”
“These children will be born and will have their own lives. They are not ruined. But human children are helpless. They must be cared for until they can stand on their feet. I sound sententious. But you have forgotten this.”
Florence was silent. Gabriel said
“I think you would be better if you had a husband?”
“I can’t. I have to face that, too. No one will…” She said “I was engaged to be married. I sent the ring back.”
Gabriel Goldwasser’s silences provoked truth-telling.
“I didn’t love him. I always knew that. I’ve ruined his happiness, too.”
“Only if he allows that. You are not a Fate, Frau Colombino, but a young woman who has made one or two mistakes. If you had a husband, you could go back to your museum, with your child—”
“I don’t know that I want to go back—”
“Or make a life somewhere. I want to suggest—to propose myself, as a suitable Austrian husband.”
“But you—”
“I know it is odd. I am proposing myself because I am living on the surface. I shan’t want to marry in the way people marry—for—passion, or for—social reasons. My best hope is to continue living lightly, on the surface. But I should like to give you—a viable identity.”
