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

if one might paint the entire world, and in any manner one wished.
    Letting one's brushing become abstract at a window, or not.
    Though perhaps it was Cassandra whom I had intended to portray to begin with, on those forty-five square feet, rather than Electra.
    Even if a part I have always liked is when Orestes finally comes back, after so many years, and Electra does not recognize her own brother.
    What do you want, strange man? I believe this is what Electra says to him.
    Well, it is the opera that I am thinking about now, I suspect.
    At the intersection of Richard Strauss Avenue and Johannes Brahms Road, at four o'clock in the afternoon, somebody called my name.
    You? Can that be you?
    Imagine! And here, of all places!
    It was only the Parthenon, I am quite certain, so beautiful in the afternoon sun, that had touched a chord.
    In Greece, no less, from where all arts and all stories came.
    Still, for a time I almost wished to weep.
    Perhaps I did weep, that one afternoon.
    Though perhaps it was weariness too, behind the veil of madness that had protected me, and which, that afternoon, had slipped away.
    One afternoon you see the Parthenon, and with that one glance your madness has momentarily slipped away.
    Weeping, you walk the streets whose names you do not know, and somebody calls out after you.
    I ran into an alley, which was actually a cul-de-sac.
    Surely that is you!
    I also had a weapon. My pistol, from the skylights.
    Well, when I was looking, I almost always carried that.
    Looking in desperation, as I have said.
    But still, never knowing just whom one might find, as well.
    Not until dusk did I emerge from the cul-de-sac.
    And saw my own reflection behind the window of an artists' supplies shop, highlighted there against a small stretched canvas.
    To tell the truth, one book in the shop next door to that one did happen to be in English.
    This was a guide to the birds of Southern Connecticut and Long Island Sound.
    I slept in the car that I was making use of at the time. Which was a Volkswagen van, filled with musical instruments.
    Kathleen Ferrier had very possibly died even before I had purchased that old recording, I now believe.
    I have forgotten whatever point I might have intended to make by mentioning that, however.
    Veil of madness was a terribly pretentious phrase for me to have written, too.
    The next morning I drove counterclockwise, among mountains, toward Sparta, which I wished to visit before departing Greece.
    Not thinking to look into the book on birds for what it might have told me about seagulls.
    Halfway to Sparta, I got my period.
    Throughout my life, my period has always managed to surprise me.
    Even in spite of my generally having been out of sorts for some days beforehand, this is, which I will almost invariably have attributed to other causes.
    So doubtless it was not the Parthenon which had made me weep after all.
    Or even necessarily my madness temporarily slipping away.
    Already, obviously, the other had been coming on.
    And so somebody called my name.
    I still do menstruate today, incidentally, if irregularly.
    Or else I will stain. For weeks on end.
    But then may not do so again for months.
    There is naturally nothing in the Iliad, or in any of the plays, about anybody menstruating.
    Or in the Odyssey. So doubtless a woman did not write that after all.
    Before I was married, my mother discovered that Terry and I were sleeping together.
    Was there anybody else before Terry? This was one of the first questions my mother then asked me.
    I told her that there had been.
    Does Terry know?
    I said yes to that, also.
    Oh you young fool, my mother said.
    As the years passed I often felt a great sadness, over much of the life that my mother had lived.
    What do any of us ever truly know, however?
    I can think of no reason why this should remind me of the time when having my period caused me to fall down the central staircase in the Metropolitan and break my ankle.
    Actually it may not have been