—How daze you look at me like that!
There is a noisy fire in the grate, its melody of warmth and well-being incongruously playing in the background, and above the mantel hangs the portrait of the mother and her child, signed by the deceiving génie mal.
— You think you can play God with all of us! You think your selfishness is a law unto itself!
The artist of the portrait that hangs a few feet above her had flattered her quite shamelessly, superimposing on her a substance and significance, the steady glow of self-possession, so that the real woman looks like a poor preliminary sketch for the portrait that hangs above. Inference from representation had gotten her all wrong, imputing the imperiousness of imaginary powers, all wrong.
Blond like her daughter, blonder than the portrait, her hair is piled high on her head, and she looks, feature for feature, not unlike the woman her daughter will become, though there is a quality more assertively womanly about her, more voluptuous and almost louche, in the pose that she holds on her black high heels, the thin straps around her ankles aglitter with tiny stones, the same glitter dangling from the jewelry at her ears, with one hip jutting outward in her narrow velvet skirt, and on top a filmy blouse, embroidered with all the colors of a winter's sunset, which opens low on her revealed chest, where she is breathing hard.
She is beautiful, though not so beautiful as my Dana, neither in spirit nor external guise. But yes, the mother is beautiful, and touching, too, she touches me, so tentative and bravely scared, Carlotta Mallach.
— How dare you play the wronged husband! How dare you!
And who would ever have inferred from the poise and presence of that portrait, the utter pathos of her thinly quavering voice, the vertical lines of frustration on her brow, the tremor in her vibrantly colored lower lip?
The artist has been most untruthful in rendering her eyes, which have more daze than depth, though perhaps she is very drunk, perhaps the daze and the watery gaze and even the wispy voice derive from drink, for one sees it now that she is observably drunk, and the tones of her voice have the shrill brittleness that the weak-willed grasp for when they must force themselves into ill-fitting defiance. So that even now, in her high moment of denunciatory drama, she sounds more a tinkle than a peal, and her eyes flit and flutter like moths that have come to die against the glass.
— You thought that the two of us would never dare to feel anything on our own, anything that wasn't useful to you.
— Carlotta, please.
Dietrich Spencer is sitting in a high-backed chair placed near the fire, looking so intensely miserable that he seems a crumpled version of himself, his pale eyes eloquently expressing the desire to be anywhere but here.
— Carlotta, please. It isn't necessary for us to make it worse than it already is.
— I'm not making it worse. Or maybe I am. Goody, then. Goody gumdrops.
She laughs and claps her hands together, her affectation of some gruesome gaiety intensifying the deep distaste in the one man's face, as if he were expectorating bile, dropping his eyes again, his head slightly forward, so that the firelight flickers on the glabrous skin of his skull, while the other sits crocodile still, his eyes like stones, his head several inches above Dietrich's, untouched by firelight, in the other high-backed chair, placed in perfect symmetry on the other side of the grate, one leg crossed neatly over the other, around which he has basketed both his arms, his fingers calmly intertwined, his back ramrod straight. And in this uneasy position he is unmoving and stares at her unmoved, his mouth drawn into a line silent on the subjects of sadness and despair and all other shadows on the soul, unshadowed and unmoved, uncannily unmoving.
— If I'm making things worse, at least I'm making things different, and that's got to be a thrill for me. It makes me feel as if I almost exist.
— Carlotta, please.
— No, Dietrich! No! Look at how he's looking at me! Look at him!
— Look at what, exactly, Carlotta? What is it I'm supposed to see?
— Look! Look!
Her voice has ascended into the region of frenzy now, it is all very difficult to hear, and with visible pain, Spencer turns his head slightly so that he can see the other, who doesn't turn his gaze to him but remains perfectly still, the emotionless expression frozen on his face.
There is a vast amount of fury enclosed in the rigidity. Spencer cannot see into his eyes, as Carlotta and I can see into his eyes.
Spencer looks at the husband obliquely only for as long as he can bear it, for he is dreadfully conscious of his ignominious role here, and his eyes drop with the weight of the indignity of his position before finally looking back again at her.
— He looks sad, Carlotta. To me he looks like a man who is sad to be losing his wife to someone whom he thought of as his friend.
Dietrich's voice is as muffled as his physical self is crumpled, so that, whether by intention or not, his characteristic force is well concealed.
— Oh, Dietrich, Dietrich, he's not sad at all, he doesn't know how to be sad, only angry!
She smiles quite suddenly at Dietrich, changing the incline of her head very slightly, cocking it at a coquettish angle, not subtle but very pretty, and Spencer, though still discomfited, takes note of the angle, he likes her better for it, though the other sits just as impassively as before.
— Come, Carlotta, it's enough. We've said enough now.
— No, I want you to see, I want you to see how he's not capable of sadness, how it's only fury at not getting his way.
— Carlotta, hasn't he a certain right to be furious? Really, Carlotta, doesn't he have the right?
Spencer's voice has gone over into pleading, the whining voice that reason makes.
— What right? He's the one who told me I was to become your lover, that I had to have my own lovers just as he has his, those stupid little girls of his. And Dora, our own housekeeper! Really, Samuel, Dora! And now he plays the wronged husband because I'm going to leave him! Now he wants to make me feel guilty, Dietrich, because I can't stand to be with him any longer, because I can't stand to play by the rules of his absolute selfishness, because I can't stand the very sight of him! Oh, Samuel, if you only knew how deeply I despise you!
— Carlotta, it's enough.
Weary, weary tones from Spencer, one would not guess the force he holds within.
— No, it's not, because look at him! Look at him! Dietrich, can't you see him? There's no hope at all for us if you can't see him.
— He looks only sad to me, Carlotta.
About Dietrich's tones there can be no doubt. He sounds a very elegy.
— Sad? Never, never! Ask him!
Spencer only shakes his head, his eyes cast down.
— All right, then, I'll ask him. Are you sad, Samuel? Are you sad that I'm taking our daughter away in the morning, that I'm leaving you for Dietrich? Or have I already served your purpose well enough? Have you gotten enough science out of all the misery and confusion?
— Carlotta, please.
— And if you have, Samuel, then what I want to know is, what I really want to know is, was it worth it?
Dietrich Spencer looks over at Mallach for a few brief seconds, and then down again at the gleaming dark wood of the floor, alit with the reflected radiance of the fire, such an inglorious role to play in the uninspired geometry of the three-sided polygon.
— Sam, please.
Carlotta's voice has quite suddenly lost all its edge, and she droops with supplication, one sees with how much effort she must have fortified her former pose, with how much effort and with how much drink, and she speaks in low and urgent tones.
— Please, Sam, please. You know I didn't mean it when I said I despise you. I only wish that I could despise you! But I have to go, you must understand me, I have to save myself!
She is infinitely pathetic, and it is infinitely hard to take this in, for she is the sort of woman whom my mother had reviled, enunciating obscenities in her girlishly sweet voice, coldly applying even the word that provokes the profoundest atavistic revulsion. An insubstantiality heavily dusted with the seductions of beauty, lacking susceptibilities to the subtleties of the cosmos that had moved the inner spheres of un-beautiful Cynthia, and yet, even so, inspiring a man on the order of Samuel Mallach to declamations of incoherence beside a frozen pond. The injustice had smarted intolerably, so that my mother had worshipped beauty in its every form except the feminine.
Mallach shifts his eyes at last away from the abject figure of his wife, his gaze on Dietrich Spencer, who only now can see the contents of Mallach's eyes, how they burn with the cold angelic blaze. No word more is spoken between any of them, and only Samuel Mallach is left sitting there, the fire still crackling on fondly of warmth and well-being. It makes a ghostly music in the freezing silence of the room.
— And was it worth it, Samuel Mallach?
— You know the answer to that as well as I do, Justin Childs.
— We never really knew anything at all.
— Nothing, nothing at all.
— And the essential fact?
He bends his gaze at last to merge with mine, and in the clarity of his light-streaming eyes I can at last unravel the fury of the passions that we are given to live.
The one eye's message is of the eros contained in the thought, injecting its fire into our yearning to know. And in the other is the knowingness that comes of love. We are things that would know and we are things that would love, and oh how fused is that entanglement, how fused and fierce and forever in our entangled passions.
— Of course, Justin, of course the essential fact.