Read Online Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Elizabeth Hardwick
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hour. One began to imagine the blind, with their pale flesh, soft and misted with blue, trembling in the corridors. A thousand little white canes tapping in panic, dogs growling in their harnesses.
My plants are brought in from their southern kitchen windows to rest in pots in the living room. The stationary schefflera in its heavy tub stands in its permanent corner, like a cat that never goes out, year after year, living its entire life in a few rooms. (“The plant can stand periods of poor light—north or east window or even interior location.”) The weeping greens of the city shine in the dark and survive in a great will to accommodate. There they are, everywhere, determined, hopeful, like the coolness of evenings in the desert.
I am alone here in New York, no longer a we . Years, decades even, passed. Then one is out of the commonest of plurals, out of the strange partnership that begins as a flat, empty plain and soon turns into a town of rooms and garages, little grocery stores in the pantry, dress shops in the closets, and a bank with your names printed together for the transaction of business.
I often think about bachelors. A life of pure decision, of thoughtful calculations, every inclination honored. They go about on their own, nicely accompanied in their singularity by the companion of possibility. For cannot any man, young or old, rich or poor, turn a few corners and bump into marriage?
Alex is coming for a drink; he has never married but whether he is a true bachelor or not is another matter. Henry James, unwed, and well known for dining out with a statistical fervor, made his decision early in life and was thereby free to pass sociable evenings, untroubled by the errors of the ambivalent and discontent who are always going out and yet forever asking what good it has done them. To be single and busy—nothing bad in that. Such people do much good.
The trim, conservative bachelor calls up a picture of neat clothes, shoes in wooden trees, mahogany desks with leather fittings and brass antique writing instruments; glasses and bottles and ice buckets, matching curtains and pillows chosen by decorators or women friends, striped materials on the sofa. Record collection dusted, alphabetical; a stale but tranquilizing symmetry—and certain absences, like the bathroom of a blind man, without mirrors.
Beethoven was not married, nor was Flaubert. Voltaire lived thirty years longer than his mistress, and Dr. Johnson thirty after Elizabeth. Both lived out life in a populated singleness. Good for them. More restful than the material-mad Goethe with Ulrike, Marianne, Christiane, Charlotte, Gretchen, Käthchen, Friederike, Lotte, Lili, Maximiliane, Bettina, and Minna.
Last week. A young man suddenly found that his own mother had been given to him as a present. He cried out in rage, saying: My mother has collapsed completely, collapsed. Do you hear, can you imagine what that means? Have you ever heard the sound of a body falling, falling on you? He swore, eyes furious, swore at his father for dying in upstate New York. The plot was explained. They, the parents, fought without ceasing, never got along well, not from the first. She hated nursing him, the half-nursing of someone half-sick. The mother’s face had for years worn a planning look: the face had been thinking of trips alone, when the father was gone, of insurance policies, of interesting assets to examine of an afternoon. “A rich widow weeps with one eye and laughs with the other.”
Death, however, arrived as a farce. In an instant, she announced herself as the broken partner of a splendid alliance, the frozen, demanding survivor of a warm past. The young man, with his blond hair and enraged eyes, suddenly became the disheartened, unwilling caretaker of the last half of a hallowed union upstate. He ground his teeth as he heard the hearse of love coming his way.
A lot of bachelors are “queer” and many lay claim to a spurious bisexuality based upon
My plants are brought in from their southern kitchen windows to rest in pots in the living room. The stationary schefflera in its heavy tub stands in its permanent corner, like a cat that never goes out, year after year, living its entire life in a few rooms. (“The plant can stand periods of poor light—north or east window or even interior location.”) The weeping greens of the city shine in the dark and survive in a great will to accommodate. There they are, everywhere, determined, hopeful, like the coolness of evenings in the desert.
I am alone here in New York, no longer a we . Years, decades even, passed. Then one is out of the commonest of plurals, out of the strange partnership that begins as a flat, empty plain and soon turns into a town of rooms and garages, little grocery stores in the pantry, dress shops in the closets, and a bank with your names printed together for the transaction of business.
I often think about bachelors. A life of pure decision, of thoughtful calculations, every inclination honored. They go about on their own, nicely accompanied in their singularity by the companion of possibility. For cannot any man, young or old, rich or poor, turn a few corners and bump into marriage?
Alex is coming for a drink; he has never married but whether he is a true bachelor or not is another matter. Henry James, unwed, and well known for dining out with a statistical fervor, made his decision early in life and was thereby free to pass sociable evenings, untroubled by the errors of the ambivalent and discontent who are always going out and yet forever asking what good it has done them. To be single and busy—nothing bad in that. Such people do much good.
The trim, conservative bachelor calls up a picture of neat clothes, shoes in wooden trees, mahogany desks with leather fittings and brass antique writing instruments; glasses and bottles and ice buckets, matching curtains and pillows chosen by decorators or women friends, striped materials on the sofa. Record collection dusted, alphabetical; a stale but tranquilizing symmetry—and certain absences, like the bathroom of a blind man, without mirrors.
Beethoven was not married, nor was Flaubert. Voltaire lived thirty years longer than his mistress, and Dr. Johnson thirty after Elizabeth. Both lived out life in a populated singleness. Good for them. More restful than the material-mad Goethe with Ulrike, Marianne, Christiane, Charlotte, Gretchen, Käthchen, Friederike, Lotte, Lili, Maximiliane, Bettina, and Minna.
Last week. A young man suddenly found that his own mother had been given to him as a present. He cried out in rage, saying: My mother has collapsed completely, collapsed. Do you hear, can you imagine what that means? Have you ever heard the sound of a body falling, falling on you? He swore, eyes furious, swore at his father for dying in upstate New York. The plot was explained. They, the parents, fought without ceasing, never got along well, not from the first. She hated nursing him, the half-nursing of someone half-sick. The mother’s face had for years worn a planning look: the face had been thinking of trips alone, when the father was gone, of insurance policies, of interesting assets to examine of an afternoon. “A rich widow weeps with one eye and laughs with the other.”
Death, however, arrived as a farce. In an instant, she announced herself as the broken partner of a splendid alliance, the frozen, demanding survivor of a warm past. The young man, with his blond hair and enraged eyes, suddenly became the disheartened, unwilling caretaker of the last half of a hallowed union upstate. He ground his teeth as he heard the hearse of love coming his way.
A lot of bachelors are “queer” and many lay claim to a spurious bisexuality based upon
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