It was the very last time Breavman let go the past and hard promises which he could barely articulate. He did no writing. He suspended himself in the present. He read an architectural survey of New York City and was surprised at his capacity for concentration and interest. He listened to lectures without thinking about the professor’s ambition. He built a kite. He strolled through Riverside Park without coveting the solitary nurses or growing the destinies of children in toy racers. The trees were fine as they were, losing their leaves, both Latin and common names unknown. There wasn’t much terror in the old women in black coats and lisle stockings sitting on the benches of upper Broadway, or the mutilated vendors of pencils and plastic cups. He had never been so calm.
He spent many evenings in the Music Room of World Student House. Thick blue carpet, wood panelling, dark heavy furniture, and a sign commanding quiet. The record collection was only adequate but it was all discovery for him. He had never really listened to music before. It had been a backdrop for poems and talk.
Now he listened to other men. How they spoke! It made his own voice small and put his body back into the multitudes of the world. No images formed while he listened, nothing he could steal for his page. It was their landscape where he sat guest.
He was following the flute in a Schubert quartet. It climbed and returned and ascended again, launched and received by low powerful strings. Shell opened the door, stepped into the room, turned to the door to give her attention to closing it softly. She quickly crossed the silent carpet and sat in a chair beside the french windows, through which she could see the darkening park, walls, and street.
He noticed the way she tried to relax her body, to make herself like a child hearing a favourite story. But her hands tightened on the carved wooden arms and for a hundredth of a second she was suffering in an electric chair. Then she sank back again and tried to annihilate herself in the melody.
Some women possess their beauty as they do a custom sportscar or a thoroughbred horse. They drive it hard to every appointment and grant interviews from the saddle. The lucky ones have small accidents and learn to walk in the street, because nobody wants to listen to an arrogant old lady. Some women wear moss over their beauty and occasionally something rips it away — a lover, a pregnancy, maybe a death — and an incredible smile shows through, deep happy eyes, perfect skin, but this is temporary and soon the moss reforms. Some women study and counterfeit beauty. Industries have been established to serve these women, and men are conditioned to favour them. Some women inherit beauty as a family feature, and learn to value it slowly, as the scion of a great family becomes proud of an unusual chin because so many distinguished men bore it. And some women, Breavman thought, women like Shell, create it as they go along, changing not so much their faces as the air around them. They break down old rules of light and cannot be interpreted or compared. They make every room original.
He believed she was in some kind of pain, or rather, defeat. The loveliness she composed seemed to rebel and escape her, as sometimes a poem under the pen becomes wild and uncontrollable. This did not modify his wonder at her. What she created was still remarkable. Into that he wouldn’t dare intrude. But perhaps he could have some part in comforting her.
She recognized him and met his stare, having learned that this was the best method to greet the public seducer, and immediately perceived that there was in his eyes nothing that tried to make her an indifferent means, an object. She was simply being adored. For some curious reason she remembered a certain dress she had worn when she was at school and wished vaguely to be wearing it or know where it was. His head was inclined, he was smiling. He’s ready to watch me all night, she thought. Not speak, not ask anything. She wondered who he was. His face was young but there were unusually deep lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth. It was as if all his experience were recorded there. The mouth would have been too full and sensual without the chastening lines, like those idiotic fat kissing lips of Hindu gods.
Well, what was she doing thinking about his lips? And what was she doing in this chair sitting so stilly for him? She should be back at her apartment, thinking, considering her future, learning a language, sorting things out, or whatever people who live alone are supposed to do when they come back at night.
She realized that years ago this was exactly how she would have liked to be observed, with music, before a window, with light made soft by old wood.
Soon she wouldn’t be able to see the separate stones in the wall, or the iron fence against the bushes. The sidewalks were mother-of-pearl, and although she could not see it, she knew the sun was dragging darkness as it cut behind the rose-edged New Jersey hills. Would he never turn away?
She closed her eyes and could still feel his stare. It had the power of defenceless praise. It did not call her beautiful, but called her to delight in her beauty, which is more understandable and human, and it pleased her to contemplate the pleasure she created. Who was the man who did this to her? She opened her eyes and smiled her curiosity at him. He stood up and
