I CONTINUE TO ORGANIZE and file Elizabeth’s notes; I want them all readily available should she request something. Just this morning I found notes marked “Test of Courage,” which included the following passage from The Victorian Chaise-Longue:
Time may be going not in a straight line but in all directions and in no direction, and God may have changed the universe so that it is my body that lies here and no dream, or not my body and still a dream from which I shall be freed.
The test of courage is still valid, said her conscience, you must know, you must look. So she lifted her head and looked down at her body.
There, framed by the crumpled clothes, set on ribs barely covered with skin, rose two small breasts. My breasts? cried Melanie, or not my breasts? Dare I touch them, these breasts that may be mine and alive, or will they crumble, will they rot if I touch them with my living hands, my hands on long-dead breasts? These are whiter than mine, she said, smaller, sadder than mine, and in a convulsive movement she laid her hands beneath them and they did not rot, small hot living breasts, and, pulsing through them, the too-fast-beating heart.
One night in the Essex Hotel, Elizabeth came to bed quite late but I was still awake, reading, which book I can’t recall. “What I love most deeply about Marghanita Laski’s novel,” she said, “is how you discover the relationship between unforeseen psychological incidents and the memories they cause, and how Melanie finally realizes what is happening to her. It’s all so upsetting and so exciting and so strange. Some days, it’s like I live in this book and at night I visit us here in the hotel. Do I seem locatable to you, darling? Am I all present and accounted for? Because if I’m not, I’ll toss this goddamn novel in the trash and do something else. I want to be here with you. With us. Am I?”
“You can’t get through this dissertation, Elizabeth, without being preoccupied. You want to teach at university. How else can you go about things but the way you’re already doing?”
“The part I’ve been most obsessed with recently”—she picked up the novel from her desk and read the above paragraphs—“it’s like Melanie exists between being a woman and the ghost of a woman. It’s something in between. I have to think it through.”
Elizabeth lifted her nightgown over her head. She drew my hands to her breasts. “Just touch, here.” She had her eyes closed. It was as if she was trying not only to banish the paragraphs, but to make herself be locatable.
“With your mouth now,” she said.