Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson, Steven Moore Read Free Book Online

o'clock in the afternoon, I saw somebody at a window, lurking.
    There was nobody at the window, which was a window in a shop selling artists' supplies.
    It was a small stretched canvas, coated with gesso, that hadhighlighted my own reflection as I passed.
    Still, how I nearly felt. In the midst of all that looking.
    Though as a matter of fact where I saw my own reflection may well have been in a bookstore window.
    At any rate the two stores were adjacent. The one with the books was the one that I chose to let myself into.
    All of the books in the store were in Greek, naturally.
    Possibly some few of them were actually books that I had even read, in English, although naturally I would have had no way of knowing which ones.
    Possibly one of them was even a Greek edition of William Shakespeare's plays. By a translator who had been under the influence of Euripides.
    Gesso has such a silly look, for a word, when one types it.
    It would have helped to prevent my canvases from warping if I had not shot holes into those skylights, obviously.
    Had the smoke backed up, winters there at the Metropolitan would have been difficult, however.
    Actually one can be saddened, letting one's self into a store full of books and not being able to recognize a single one.
    The bookstore on the street below the Acropolis saddened me.
    Although I have now made a categorical decision that the painting is not a painting of this house.
    Assuredly, it is a painting of the other house, farther down the beach, which burned.
    To tell the truth I cannot call that other house to mind at all, any longer.
    Although perhaps that house and this house were identical. Or quite similar, at any rate.
    Houses along a beach are often that way, being constructed by people with basically similar tastes.
    Though as a matter of fact I cannot be absolutely certain that the painting is on the wall beside me any longer itself, since I am no longer looking at it.
    Quite possibly I put it back into the room with the atlas andthe life of Brahms. I have a distinct suspicion that it had entered my mind to do that.
    The painting is on the wall.
    And at least we have verified that it was not the life of Brahms that I set fire to the pages from also, out on the beach.
    Unless as I have suggested somebody in this house had owned two lives of Brahms, both printed on cheap paper and both ruined by dampness.
    Or two people had owned them, which is perhaps more likely.
    Perhaps two people who were not particularly friendly with each other, in fact. Though both of whom were interested in Brahms.
    Perhaps one of those was the painter. Well, and the other the person in the window, why not?
    Perhaps the painter, being a landscape painter, did not wish to paint the other person at all, actually. But perhaps the other person insisted upon looking out of the window while the painter was at work.
    Very possibly this could have been what made them angry with each other to begin with.
    If the painter had closed her eyes, or had simply refused to look, would the other person have still been at the window?
    One might as well ask if the house itself would have been there.
    And why have I troubled to close my own eyes again?
    I am still feeling the typewriter, naturally. And hearing the keys.
    Also I can feel the seat of this chair, through my underpants.
    Doing this out at the dunes, the painter would have felt the breeze. And a sense of the sunshine.
    Well, and she would have heard the surf.
    Yesterday, when I was hearing Kirsten Flagstad singing The Alto Rhapsody, what exactly was I hearing?
    Winters, when the snow covers everything, leaving only thatstrange calligraphy of the spines of the trees, it is a little like closing one's eyes.
    Certainly reality is altered.
    One morning you awaken, and all color has ceased to exist.
    Everything that one is able to see, then, is like that nine-foot canvas of mine, with its opaque four white coats of plaster and glue.
    I have said that.
    Still, it is almost as