Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel Read Free Page A

brows had a penciled, brushed look which, though natural, gave her face a made-up emphasis even when fresh from the washbasin. With men, she had that charged yet careless manner they recognized at once and returned to endlessly, to be addressed either as men or as “boys” of her own age, but never, with the usual stance of her countrywomen, as sons—since the age of six she had been a jampot for boys. Almost at once a man sensed that the usual ploys invited by her elusively median appearance—“Were or were not her eyes hazel? Was she really more of a redhead than a brown?”—had all been tried and returned many times before, yet she always answered as if these were new, causing her to be spoken of as “a French type” by those mistaking for flirtatious the warm-cool smiles which Linhouse had reason to know were not manner, but a personal thing no Frenchwoman of his acquaintance had ever been guilty of—somewhere, she didn’t care. Had she been a beauty, hers would have been of the kind that is either outside fashion or makes it; since she wasn’t sugarlump pretty, her attraction couldn’t be pinned down. This had been its fatality for him, God knows; she could not be pinned down.
    “Oh—” she’d been saying at a party where, unintroduced, he had stood at her elbow, “if I weren’t of the white race there’d be more names for my indefinite mixture— mahine, grayling —” and she had gone on to list several more abstruse but apparently similar terms he’d never heard of before. He already knew her to be an anthropologist, one of no special distinction—he’d been told that also. This was the way it went with the few women on the staff here; the Center, instead of choosing fearfully brilliant survivors of competition with the most distinguished male colleagues, discriminated rather more thoughtfully, tending to settle for a few mediocre women scholars who might then be taken as evidence that the others didn’t exist to be found.
    He recalled now that he had been smiling at this private thought when, finishing her sentence, she had seemed to address her smile particularly to him: “Guess I’m what might be called a white octoroon.” Even as their eyes met—she must really have been replying to some speech of the Austrian heavy at her other elbow—he had sensed that it was merely habit on her part, to make any man seem particularly addressed. Later, he thought of it as a power she couldn’t discard. At the time, he’d nodded, but not answered. In his own way, he was knowledgeable enough about women. And later on, as the campus had let him know, she had indeed singled him out.
    He had slept with her. According to gossip, since her widowhood no one else had. Still later, they’d become one of those couples who were invited together; in the easy droppings-in of the life here she’d been discovered at his flat, he at her cottage; since this was a civilized community the worst was known of them without comment, and the best—i.e. marriage—hoped for. And what had endlessly preoccupied him all that year together and beyond it, down to the very moment when her letter had led him back to her house to find the object now on the dais, was—what it could be, what in God’s name could it be, about which she didn’t care?
    In their sexual moments, though no grunting peasant girl for whom the exchange was nearest to the intake of food, she was normal enough, fully as much so, he suspected, as many of the nice matrons hereabouts and most of the fast ones, both of whom would have been disillusioned to the bone if told either that sexual exchange was quite Europeanly their own purchase money in the buy-marts of life, or that on this basis it might still be enjoyed. She too wanted her exchange, but whatever it was it wasn’t any of the usual, not marriage. He’d never had an affair in which there was less sense of the marriage topic coming up—and this was unnerving. She was always unnerving him.
    Once,