False Entry by Hortense Calisher Read Free Book Online Page A

winning comforts with which those who will not sink all for us show us the neat limits of their love. The overhead lamp glared on me in its center; in one of those dread starts of hyper-identity my right hand clasped my left, a stranger’s, and consciousness looked down on its body, saying, “This is I.” I picked up the envelope of money and ran out.
    Outside, I went into the privy and sat there for my needs, and a while longer. The sky, from a privy, is metaphysical; a wooden step away from the fields, one dreams oneself an animal again, crouching there in the ammoniac dark. I fingered myself, but it was not myself only that I wanted. Nor is it yet. I was passing through the strange borderland where one leaves the unconscious, tonal fugue of childhood and takes up the ceaseless, inner dialogue of oneself. I had a prescience that this black, supersonic thread of chatter would never leave me. And although I had not yet thought openly of women, I already wanted a place to lay it down.
    For me love is a place , not a person—why did I never see that before this moment that I write it here? The why is rhetorical. Nights ago, that night after I left Ruth Mannix, and, pressed beyond endurance, sat down to commune with—whom?—I who commune with no one—I did so because I knew how the act of the pen sometimes produces the submerged idea, like the hand trailing in the minnow stream. What I must hope for is that my hand, trailing in the stream of myself, will produce me. I cannot hope to be like my old preceptor, Frau Goodman, mulling over her heraldic place in life’s genealogical tree—that is for people who already have their place. And now I can no longer continue to live behind others, watching those who do. For safety alone now, I must see my own design clear. As for Ruth’s safety—even in the heroin-stare of that moment when, lying beside her, I heard her say what she had guessed about me, I did not need to think of her safety—I am no murderer. Violence—my own violence—is not my métier.
    No, I am in the position of a man who is his own inheritor—before I move on I must arrange my estate. And if I do not move on? If I stay for once, and marry Ruth, which is what she wants, or live with her, which is what she would accept? Then I must tell her what she would surely come to know, of which up to now not a soul has guessed as much as she. I would have to tell her the way it is with me, what it is I do, and that I no longer wholly know its meaning. Once I thought I knew; I thought I meant merely to be the manipulator behind the scene. But each time now is increasingly a rehearsal, a rehearsal for something, in a somewhere just beyond. Perhaps, in the end, with that extraordinary reed-sense of women to the timbre of whom they love, she could in the end tell me—and would that be the ultimate safety? In the end, might she come to be the place where the burden of listening is lifted, where the listener might learn to speak?
    Haply I think on thee. Thus is expressed for us forever that romantic folklore of the sexual love which we are all taught to anticipate, whether we are hinted it from the cinema or the sonnet. For in the physical loves of the most uncomplicated brute of a man there is a metaphysical hunting. He hunts for something lost, or only adumbrated, in the tangled scents of his beginnings. And from the first he is taught to name it in the language of persons, as the religieuse is taught to name her Lord.
    But if the lost quarry should be not a person, but a place? Then, even as he hangs successful on the body of his love, another part of him rises and walks away. Even as, lying loose in the after-quiet of love, I rose from Ruth. As, even while I listen, with men and women both, while I sit there storing and appraising in the familiar pattern, I walk away from them all.
    Then here it is, naked on the pen point, the first piece of me. All my excursions, then, into the lives of others, from that first time