Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel by Hortense Calisher Read Free Book Online Page B

took over again was like those nights of his boyhood when, tucked down and ready, he waited before the red room of his sexual daydreams, half hating the curtain to rise. Then, once again her door opened to him waiting there, the motor chuffing away behind him, in the snow-still air. And once again he quavered out his sparkling first-and-only line, bubbled up out of him like the lackluster air in an all-night glass of carbonated water.
    She’d been clothed, of course; he’d had time to see that. It may have been for a moment they hung their heads over this. He’d had no time to sense whether or not the house behind her was swollen with man. The aura of sex, recent or to be, had always before seemed to him as apparent in that otherwise empty house as the echoes of a beautiful quarrel, but he’d had no time to stand there this day, listening. All his senses had been receiving the sense of what was no longer in her—vanished, he was somehow sure, not merely for him alone, but for all. For—he no longer felt himself particularly addressed. Nor would any other man feel so now—this was the surprise. For he could feel that it was not merely the case that she was lost to him only. She had managed to lose that gift which he had thought her powerless to discard.
    Sex had still been in the structure of that face well enough, in the willfully squared lip, the cabinet glow of the eye, the brow arched like a tiny lion whip over it. But could there be—for a woman or man—a willed menopause of the spirit, visible only in whatever it was the eye was now fixed on? As long as he stood still, that focus seemed to be through him and beyond him. But when he pressed forward to enter, her barring movement gave her away. Whatever she was vestal to—for that was the air of it—was in the house. It must be a person of course—whether or not this little island-craver understood it herself, her discipleship was surely, like his own, to the space that clotted about and in people. He had stood there transfixed however, in the full knowledge of all that this woman could push him to: first, obsession, and now such perversion as he’d never dreamed himself nearing, any closer to than in the worn grooves of his Greek translations. For if she were to ask him in, saying, “Stay!” with who-knows-what possibility in that subtly anthropological smile which the backroom had sometimes induced in her—he could see himself conniving. He could understand the emotions of a man willing—not eager, but willing—to undertake a ménage of three.
    In his airplane seat, Linhouse groaned. To occupy himself, he fiddled from his passport case a plastic wheel, souvenir from some other airline, which when properly spun and read provided the relative times of day between “representative cities”—i.e. airstops—everywhere. Only pick a station—Karachi, say—for in the midst of all this whirl of the wheel one must oneself be someplace—and the status of the entire rest of the world would then be clear, spooning its cereal, or deeply sleeping on the dugs of love. He spun the wheel. In San Francisco they were—, while in Bangkok—, while in Seattle—, but meanwhile, where was he? To use the wheel, one had to posit oneself somewhere.
    He glanced at the old man beside him, now perhaps roving those vast Alhambras which his inner vision was used to; what were the dreams of astronomers when not of nursegirls? In the Moorish tundra-dark at the back of, say Alpha Centauri—the only one of those sky-names Linhouse had heard of, as chief star of the nearest constellation, or perhaps it was galaxy—what were they doing there now on the peaks of their excellence, in relationship to, say—? Pick somewhere. He picked a doorstep under snow, on a Ramapo evening. Once more he waited there, dreadfully willing. Once more, from heights unscalable by him, she bent on him the traveler’s stare for the untraveled, before the door closed … And after a while, in the way of