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Authors: John Crowley
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one.”
“Good. Got to go.”
On her way past him she gave the rose to Victor without any other farewell. Once again sun described her long legs as she crossed the floor (sun lay on its boards like gilding, sun was impartial), and for a moment she paused, sun-blinded maybe, in the garish lozenge of real daylight made when she opened the door. Then she reappeared in the other afternoon of the window. She raised her hand in a command, and a cab the color of marigolds appeared before her as though conjured. A flight of pigeons filled up the window all in an instant, seeming stationary there like a sculpted frieze, and then just as instantly didn’t fill it up anymore.
“Crazy,” Victor said.
“Hm?”
“Crazy broad.” He gestured with the rose toward the vacant window. “My wife. You married?”
“I was. Like the pumpkin eater.” Handsome guy, Victor, in a brutal, black-Irish way. Like most New York bartenders, he was really an actor, or was it the reverse?
“Divorced?”
“Separated.”
He tested his thumb against the pricks of the rose. “Women. They say you got all the freedom. Then you give them their freedom, and they don’t want it.”
He nodded, though it wasn’t wisdom that his own case would have yielded up. He was only glad now not to miss her any longer; and now and then, sad that he was glad. The last precipitate was that occasionally when a woman he’d been looking at, on a bus, in a bar, got up to leave, passing away from him for good, he felt a shooting pang of loss absurd on the face of it.
Volunteer, he thought, but for right field. And if standing there you fall into a reverie, and the game in effect goes on without you,well, you knew it would when you volunteered for the position. Only once every few innings the lost—the not-even-noticed-till-too-late—fly ball makes you sorry that things are as they are and not different, and you wonder if people think you might be bored and indifferent out there, contemptuous even, which isn’t the case at all….
“On the house,” Victor said, and rapped his knuckles lightly on the bar.
“Oh, hey, thanks.” Kind Victor, though the glass put before him contained a powerful solvent, he knew that even as he raised the glass to his lips. He could still fly, oh yes, always, though the cost would be terrible. But what was it he fled from? Self-indulgence, memory dearer to him than any adventure, solitude, lapidary work in his very own mines…what could be less novel, more secure? And yet it seemed dangerous; it seemed he hadn’t the nerve to face it; he felt unarmed against it.
Novelty and Security: the security of novelty, the novelty of security. Always the full thing, the whole subject, the true subject, stood just behind the one you found yourself contemplating. The trick, but it wasn’t a trick, was to take up at once the thing you saw and the reason you saw it as well; to always bite off more than you could chew, and then chew it. If it were self-indulgence for him to cut and polish his semiprecious memories, and yet seem like danger, like a struggle he was unfit for, then self-indulgence was a potent force, he must examine it, he must reckon with it.
And he would reckon with it: on that last Sunday in Advent, when his story was all told, the miracle granted or refused, the boy would lift his head from the books and blue-lined paper, the questions that had been set for him answered, and see that it had begun to snow.
Snow not falling but flying sidewise, and sudden, not signaled by the slow curdling of clouds all day and a flake or two drifting downward, but rushing forward all at once as though sent for. (The blizzard of ’36 had looked like that.) And filling up the world’s concavities, pillowing up in the gloaming, making night light with its whiteness, and then falling still in everyone’s dreams, falling for pages and pages; steepling (so an old man would dream in his daughter’s house) the plain frame convent on the edge
“Good. Got to go.”
On her way past him she gave the rose to Victor without any other farewell. Once again sun described her long legs as she crossed the floor (sun lay on its boards like gilding, sun was impartial), and for a moment she paused, sun-blinded maybe, in the garish lozenge of real daylight made when she opened the door. Then she reappeared in the other afternoon of the window. She raised her hand in a command, and a cab the color of marigolds appeared before her as though conjured. A flight of pigeons filled up the window all in an instant, seeming stationary there like a sculpted frieze, and then just as instantly didn’t fill it up anymore.
“Crazy,” Victor said.
“Hm?”
“Crazy broad.” He gestured with the rose toward the vacant window. “My wife. You married?”
“I was. Like the pumpkin eater.” Handsome guy, Victor, in a brutal, black-Irish way. Like most New York bartenders, he was really an actor, or was it the reverse?
“Divorced?”
“Separated.”
He tested his thumb against the pricks of the rose. “Women. They say you got all the freedom. Then you give them their freedom, and they don’t want it.”
He nodded, though it wasn’t wisdom that his own case would have yielded up. He was only glad now not to miss her any longer; and now and then, sad that he was glad. The last precipitate was that occasionally when a woman he’d been looking at, on a bus, in a bar, got up to leave, passing away from him for good, he felt a shooting pang of loss absurd on the face of it.
Volunteer, he thought, but for right field. And if standing there you fall into a reverie, and the game in effect goes on without you,well, you knew it would when you volunteered for the position. Only once every few innings the lost—the not-even-noticed-till-too-late—fly ball makes you sorry that things are as they are and not different, and you wonder if people think you might be bored and indifferent out there, contemptuous even, which isn’t the case at all….
“On the house,” Victor said, and rapped his knuckles lightly on the bar.
“Oh, hey, thanks.” Kind Victor, though the glass put before him contained a powerful solvent, he knew that even as he raised the glass to his lips. He could still fly, oh yes, always, though the cost would be terrible. But what was it he fled from? Self-indulgence, memory dearer to him than any adventure, solitude, lapidary work in his very own mines…what could be less novel, more secure? And yet it seemed dangerous; it seemed he hadn’t the nerve to face it; he felt unarmed against it.
Novelty and Security: the security of novelty, the novelty of security. Always the full thing, the whole subject, the true subject, stood just behind the one you found yourself contemplating. The trick, but it wasn’t a trick, was to take up at once the thing you saw and the reason you saw it as well; to always bite off more than you could chew, and then chew it. If it were self-indulgence for him to cut and polish his semiprecious memories, and yet seem like danger, like a struggle he was unfit for, then self-indulgence was a potent force, he must examine it, he must reckon with it.
And he would reckon with it: on that last Sunday in Advent, when his story was all told, the miracle granted or refused, the boy would lift his head from the books and blue-lined paper, the questions that had been set for him answered, and see that it had begun to snow.
Snow not falling but flying sidewise, and sudden, not signaled by the slow curdling of clouds all day and a flake or two drifting downward, but rushing forward all at once as though sent for. (The blizzard of ’36 had looked like that.) And filling up the world’s concavities, pillowing up in the gloaming, making night light with its whiteness, and then falling still in everyone’s dreams, falling for pages and pages; steepling (so an old man would dream in his daughter’s house) the plain frame convent on the edge
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