The Recognitions

  —Business is business, said Benny, raising his glass.

  —What do you think of the idea?

  —Terrific.

  —I’ve got the guy all lined up. We’re going to pay his family when he goes through with it, half now, half on delivery. But it’s got to look accidental.

  —Listen to this, said Benny. —I thought of this last night.

  —What? An angle?

  —Well, I didn’t know whether you wanted to gag it up or make it arty or what. You know. We could have built a nice artistic number around it. Some ballet, with a story line in the background. Sweet. Or I thought if you wanted to gag it up we could make a kind of musical out of it. You know? Girls. Exploding cigars.

  —Yeah but look, that’s not quite . . .

  —I know, we couldn’t do that angle anyway, the cigars. We’ve got a couple of good cigar accounts that would yell. No. The more I thought about it, the more I thought, what you guys really want is stark human drama. The real thing. So listen to this. I thought of this last night.

  —Yeh . . .

  —From a church. He does it from a church steeple.

  —Christ! Benny, you’ll win the Nobel Prize for that. It’s a natural.

  —I figured how we can make it look accidental enough. There’s this church up in the Bronx right across from a dancing school. We’ll have the cameras up there doing a show on kids learning ballet dancing, see? Then when we get the word all we have to do is break in and dolly them around right out the window. Beautiful camera angle.

  —But what about the priest? He might screw it up if he’s around.

  —He’ll be around. He’ll be busy inside, saying a Mass.

  —It’s terrific. That’s all I can say. Ellery spoke with his eyes lowered, in thoughtful admiration. Then he raised them. —You deserve a drink. Where’d you think of it, alone or in a story conference?

  —In church, said Benny.

  —But Anna baby, came a voice from the end of the couch, filling the gap of Ellery’s marveling silence, —they boiled Sir Thomas More’s head for twenty minutes just so it would hold together, before they stuck it up on London Bridge . . .

  —Right there, said the tall woman, nearer Esther, —in front of God and everybody. That’s the way those things always happen. Do you think I have on too much perfume? I have sinus trouble and I never know. Isn’t it warm in here.

  —Well, your furpiece . . . Esther began, turning to face her.

  —I know, my dear, but to tell you the truth I don’t dare put it down anywhere.

  —I’m sure it would be safe in my bedroom.

  —Oh, then you’re Esther. My dear I’m sorry, I didn’t mean . . .

  —It’s all right, you’re probably right. I don’t know a lot of the people here myself.

  —Tell me Esther, has he come yet?

  —Who?

  —Your guest of honor, of course . . .

  —Do you know him?

  —Hardly. But I’ve seen his picture so many times. And I own his book. I heard him speak once, about families, I mean about having children and that sort of thing. I can’t bear them myself. I mean bear them, literally you know, she laughed. —A tipped uterus, you know. There seem to be so many nowadays, you run into a tipped uterus wherever you turn . . .

  They both turned hopefully to look across the room, where the door opened. —My dear he is probably someone quite notable. You have to be, to go about with an alarm clock strung around your neck . . .

  —Mendelssohn Schmendelssohn, someone else said. —I’m talking about music.

  —Wasn’t that silly of me, said the tall woman, watching Esther cross the room toward the couch. —Telling her a thing like that when here I am two months gone. It just goes to show what habit will do.

  —I think Sibelius’ fourth is his best.

  —Fourth, schmorth; it’s his only.

  —It just goes to show that you can’t trust nature.

  Across the room, Mr. Feddle already was engaged, inscribing a copy of Moby Dick. He worked slowly and with care, unmindful of immediate traffic as though he were indeed sitting in that farmhouse in the Berkshires a century before.

  Maude looked up and said, —Isn’t it funny, how dark it seems over there, I mean where they are, do they make the corner dark or did they just gather there because it’s dark there . . . Then she saw that the heavy-set man was in uniform, and said, —Oh. What are you? —Army Public Relations, he said, looking up again at the group in the dark corner. —They look like something out of a Russian novel, he said. —Chavenet, said Maude, looking up at him with wide unblinking eyes. —Yeh, him, said the officer. —Just because I’m not an intellectual don’t mean I don’t read books. Together they stared across the room; and Maude, feeling his warm hand on the back of her neck, relaxed somewhat.

  A few years before, someone who had once seen one rather unfortunate print of Mozart (it was in profile, the frontispiece in a bound score of the Jupiter Symphony printed in Vienna), and soon after looked once at the profile of the man now standing stoop-shouldered across the room in an open-collar green wool shirt, remarked that he looked (for all the world) like Mozart. Safe away by a century and a half, this was repeated often, most especially by those who persisted as his friends, wished to say something complimentary about him, and had never seen the frontispiece to the Vienna-bound Jupiter Symphony.

  —I know him, the tall one, Maude said. —He’s been around a long time.

  He looked up, as though he might have overheard her, and he looked offended; but if she had seen him more often, anywhere, and in any circumstance, she would have realized that he always looked offended. Bildow, who was talking, looked slightly offended. So did the stubby young man whose belligerent interest was poetry. They might have been offended by the conversation immediately beside them, a group as unattractive as their own but in another way: crackling with brittle enthusiasm, these guests pursued one another from the Royale Saint Germain (across the street) to the Deux Magots; out to the Place des Vosges and back to the Flore; across the river to the Boeuf sur le Toit and back to the Brasserie Lipp (—It was Goering’s favorite place in Paris you know); briefly to the Carnavalet and back to the Reine Blanche (—That’s where I saw how tough the French police can be . . .).

  —And laundry so expensive, eighty francs a shirt . . .

  —Of course none of us had baths in our rooms, but there was a charming boy from Virginia whose bathtub was always free after eleven in the morning . . .

  —I managed very well, just washing in the bidet . . .

  Wherever encountered, it seemed that their one achievement had been getting across that ocean once, and getting back to retail wares which they deprecated but continued to offer, all they had in stock at present though a sparkling variety was on order (—Cyprus sounded like a marvelous place, I heard that they have these trumpets there, and at night when they go to bed they put one end out the window and the other end . . .).

  —We didn’t get time to do Italy this time, anyhow it’s really more important to get to know one place really well, we were in Paris for almost a whole week . . .

  Each one inclined from wistful habit to say, —Well I’ve only been back a couple of weeks, and . . . or, —I just got back recently, and . . . or, —Well I’ve only been back a little while, but . . . , realizing in the back of their minds that seasons had changed since their return, that the same season they had spent there was approaching again here, realizing, in spite of those vivid images which conversations like this one refurbished, that they were back, and their wares not for sale, but barter only, and in kind.

  —I guess it was Corfu I meant, anyway when you walk down the street in the evening you hear these really mellifluous sounds from these trumpets . . .

  —Well we were there when our ambassador laid a wreath on the grave of the unknown soldier. He dropped to his knees, and everybody in the crowd was so touched by his reverent act, then he fell flat on his face . . .

&nbs
p; —You’re talking about my hus-band! cried the one who had thanked Esther for her lovewy party, in passing, paused then to make a face at Don Bildow over their shoulders, and went on.

  —I never saw anything like that, even at the Au Soleil Levant. What was it?

  —The Duchess of Ohio.

  Bildow turned his unimpressive back. —There isn’t a good lay in this whole room, said their stubby companion, with a look as though recalling some severe unkindness done him privately years before. It was, in fact, a look he seldom lost. The tall stooped one undid the next button of his wool shirt, and said, —What about Esther, what about her?

  —It’s funny you never knew her. She was around a lot, before she got married. That summer your wife shot herself, Esther was all over the place.

  —I was at Yaddo, said the critic. He smoothed the hair on the back of his head, but it stood up again immediately he lowered his hand; and the likeness to the Mozart print was remarkable again, not for the heavy and long upper lip, and the prominent nose, but the weight of the hair which he wore as consciously as the eighteenth-century man, though not for reason of that infestation of daunted vanity known as fashion, but for his own unintimidated reason: it made his head look bigger, inferring its contents to be a brain of the proportions which Science assures us we all might have, if we had wings. —I heard you sold out, he said to Bildow.

  —What did I have to do with it? You know how much it costs to run a magazine.

  He smoothed down and released his obedient hair. —Are you using my Dostoevski piece in this issue?

  —Ahm . . . not in this one, but . . .

  —Jesus Christ, you’ve had it up there for over a year. I’ll finish the book before you print it, probably.

  —Well, you know. There’s politics up there like everywhere else.

  —Who’s out to get me?

  —Well, you know that piece you did on Rilke last year, a lot of people . . .

  —Jesus Christ, whose fault was that? Everybody knows I wrote that Rilke’s references were occasionally obscure, and that dumb Radcliffe girl I had typed obscene when she copied it. I’d like to know who the hell copy-read that. And putting a t in genial . . .

  —I was at Yaddo, said Bildow.

  Someone from the neighboring international set tried to join them, offering, —Just imagine Victor Hugo wanting the whole city of Paris renamed for him! This credential earned cold stares, frightening, not for their severity, but for the very bleakness of the faces engaged.

  —I hear you’re going over, said Bildow’s shorter friend, bleakly accusing.

  —Yes, in a month or two. I want to see for myself, said Bildow, fingering his brown and yellow tie, bleakly defensive. Then he added, —It’s funny that Max isn’t here.

  —What’s so funny about it? That wise bastard . . .

  —He usually shows up at these cocktail parties, said Bildow.

  —What the hell ever made you print that poem of his, in the last issue? The one about Beauty disdaining to destroy him, that one.

  —Well, we . . . It was . . .

  —Did you see his paintings? Crap, all of them, even if he has got a sense of form.

  —She looks like a good lay, said the stubby poet. —That blonde over there.

  —Do you know who that is? It’s that dumb God damn Radcliffe girl, Edna, the one who screwed me up on that Rilke piece, the one thing I’ve written that’s worth everything else put together, because I understood Rilke, I understood him because he understood suffering, he respected human suffering, not like these snotty kids who are writing now . . . He put his glass down empty, saw another, full, and picked it up before its owner had finished saying, —It’s like the movies because there’s everything spread out for you, and you just have to react, like at the movies you don’t have to pay with your real emotions, you don’t have to do anything . . .

  —And who’s that over there, with all the queers around her? Agnes Deigh? Jesus Christ, I should think she’d get sick of playing mother to every God damn fairy in the city.

  Esther had sat down on the couch because it was the only place in the room to sit. At one moment, she had thought that if she did not sit down, she might fall; but even now, sitting, she felt that she was falling, and she forced her back against the back of the couch, raising her chin as though trying to surface, for it was not a sense of tumbling through air, the limbs absurdly extended and unaccounted for, toward sudden impact which would so abruptly account for their ridiculous efforts in an unalterable pattern of incongruous torsions; but of falling in water where no bottom waited to delineate finality. With penetration peculiar to distance, every sound seemed to reach her, though it was perhaps her own doing, trying to escape the sounds nearest her by straining for those beyond.

  —Maladjusted? To this? Well thank God I am. If I wasn’t I’d go crazy, someone said across the room, while she listened.

  —But you’ve got to understand New York, it’s a social experience.

  —That’s why I like her, she’s part woman, came a tittering asthmatic voice; and someone else was whistling slightly delayed accompaniment to a stretch of Handel’s Water Music. The door opened, and she raised her head in hopeful anxiety, still unaware of how he would appear, the writer whom she had invited, and as afraid that he would not; and she lowered her eyes in disappointed relief, for the man who came in was carrying a baby, and immediately met by the girl with the bandaged wrists. —What did you bring it for? she greeted him, then turned to say, —This is my husband. He’s late because he’s been tight-rope walking. He has one set up in the apartment and he says he can’t practice when I’m around and I’m around most of the time . . .

  In the middle of the room someone greeted the boy who had been looking for razor blades in the medicine cabinet with, —Charles Dickens, my God, they told me you’d gotten a job as publicity agent for the Hiroshima tourist bureau, Come see the Atom City and all that kind of thing . . .

  The kitten tore at the arm of the couch. Esther caught it, and drew it to her, Ellery’s voice still the clearest in the room. He was talking to the blonde a few feet away. —Hollywood’s through, honey. Why go way the hell out there when TV’s right here in town. What do you think, Benny? Don’t you like her for a spot in Lives of the Saints when it goes on video . . . ?

  Esther realized that all this time the quiet seated presence beside her had been eating. He followed a stuffed egg with a small hot frankfurter, then a fresh carrot. —I beg your pardon, she said. He made a sound, eating. —Are you a friend of . . .

  —Hors d’oeuvres. All I ever get, hors d’oeuvres. I keep thinking Penny will take me somewhere where we’ll eat, an invitation to dinner somewheres, but all I get is cocktail parties, all we do is drink, all over town.

  —Are you in television too?

  —No, God help me. Benny and me went to school together. He coughed, and took another small hot frankfurter, as though annoyed at this interruption in his meal. —Benny and me went to school together, he repeated. —See this suit? This is Benny’s. He gave it to me.

  —It’s a lovely suit, Esther said, looking at the gray flannel sleeve which came halfway down the man’s forearm. —A very nice gift.

  —Now it’s too conservative for Benny, he can’t wear things like this any more he says. Honest, you can’t imagine a different guy than Benny when we went to school together, quiet and real serious. He was going to do great things then, he was going to design the most beautiful bridges you ever saw, and look at him now. Even a year ago I saw him and he was real, like the guy I used to go to school with. He isn’t real any more. The tray was abruptly lifted away, and he grabbed two frankfurters and a stuffed egg. —Look at them, he said, watching casual hands pick up stuffed eggs, frankfurters, an occasional carrot. —You’d think they were hungry, the way they eat. Look at that woman with the white fingernails, does she look hungry? His meal was done, and he turned to Esther for the first time. —Do you know anything about player pianos?

&nb
sp; —I’m afraid not, I’ve never really been interested . . .

  —I’ve written a history of the player piano. A whole history. It took me two years, it’s got everything in it. What’s the matter with people. What do they want to read about, sex all the time? Politics? Why, did you know, he went on in a spicy tone, —the Crown Princess of Sweden, the Queen of Norway, the Sultan of Johore, all of them had piano players? And Anna Held, Julia Marlowe, President McKinley, they had player pianos. And Pope Pius X, the Wright brothers, the ships of the Russian navy . . .

  —If you want something to eat, Esther interrupted, —I’m sure that out in the kitchen . . .

  —Anything, he said, but his eagerness was weary, for just then art had taken appetite’s place. —Some day I’m going to have it printed myself, on Japanese onion-skin, bound in vellum . . . I don’t know. Am I the only one that’s hungry? Doesn’t anyone else ever eat in New York? He stopped to pick some egg off the flannel sleeve. —White vellum with gold stamping . . .

  —I’m sure that in the kitchen . . .

  —Well, here you are! Benny stood over them, unsteadily, with a dripping glass in each hand. —Are you all right? He leaned over and spoke to Esther in a low tone, —Are you keeping my friend here supplied? He always needs a drink, poor fellow. We went to school together. I’ve had to take him to every party in town the last two weeks, I don’t know what he does with himself when I’m up at the studio.