The Blue Image

by CRARY MOORE

BEN LANDRY had come South from Now York, which Julia thought a very Babylon, to marry her and take her far from home. They lived in the bleached, dusty town surrounding a prairie university, where his fellowship in mathematics afforded Ben an empyrean solitude. He was twentyseven, six years older than Julia, and long since resigned to the nourishment of his genius. Like the mythical pelican’s offspring, it had to be fed with his blood. All day, joyfully, he worked in a library cubicle; and all day she dreamed at home: queer tumbleweed dreams of love and possession.

“I won’t ha’ave a vile old baby,”she said, “to take me away from you,”and saw that he was flattered and apprehensive.

She was tall: ruddy and gay, sometimes volcanic, much too thin, with a variously lilting Tidewater voice that made h’oos of house and dwelt long on darling. She had loved parties, and amazing coincidences, and scenes: to exchange a flower for a compliment, to court and appease, to stalk offstage in a very fine dudgeon. When Ben was working she was filled with wonder and desire, and would not leave the room. She longed to compass what he compassed, literally to touch the force which brought sweat to his brow; shortened his otherwise happy temper for days at a lime; and made him, to her \asi amusement, count on his lingers. Until he had solved his problem, he was only a soulless entity to be fed and massaged - since thinking made his back ache and tricked into changes of linen, lie said crossly that he thought better when he was dirty. She was enchanted.

“IIow does it feel . . . your stuff? What’s it like? ”

He tried enthusiastically to explain it. Li the early months of their marriage, she struggled with calculus and solid geometry’, but the air was too thin. She was not stupid, he said indignantly; just hadn’t the knack of manipulating symbols. The essence of mathematics, he said, was being unlike any thing at all: being pure.

“Pure?”

“Relevant only to itself.”

“Sometimes,'’ she said, her brow piteous, “I feel irrelevant.”Not at all fooled, he reassured her anyway . She was amazed and grateful that he should be “on" to her, and still love her so much. To Julia, things were banal as soon as understood.

Not so to him. He spent hours marveling at familiar monuments: the elegance of Newton, the power of Gauss, the “beauty,”as he put it, of Euclid, so delightfully combining scope and rigor. This capacity for wonder was the keystone of his temperament; in him, “delight" was a profound, a general emotion, and alertness to fun redeemed his lack of humor. He was ardent and generous. The bloom of Julia’s apricot cheeks was positively blatant; she smirked knowingly at the looking glass. She had also acquired new reticences, and would blush at a low limerick. Julia insisted that she grew pale during his creative fits, when for days there was only her mood to fill the living room.

He said constantly, “You are my happiness.”

“But I don’t make it.”

“Be content to own me, Judy. Don’t try to be me.”

Since a wedding trip in the Tirol, they had not stirred. Strangely for her, she delighted in the constriction of three rooms. He suggested that she send for her horse, or at least for a dog to walk, and she would not. The housework was done by a grim Swedish woman they called “Moby Dick,”whom Julia loathed and admired. Toward the close of the long, barley-colored afternoons, when her hectic daydreams grew stale, Julia would be possessed by random frenzies, resulting in towering arrangements of carnations, for instance, which lacked only bugs and cut peaches to look like Savory paintings. Or she glutinously polished their furniture, which was extremely good. He liked, she worshiped, “nice things,” and she cherished them with violence, often killing what she loved. The casualties in Waterford glass were tremendous. Her furious domesticity surprised Ben and often made him bilious, since she was an extravagant cook; she licked the spoon and penciled rude remarks in Tante Marie. She loved a feast, and made a great thing of their first wedding anniversary.

He rose to the occasion with a handsome present; to the spirit, not at all, for his work was then in full spate and he dared not interrupt it. A lost train of thought was fatal. Julia’s celebrating, they later discovered, had been typically hyperbolic; she eventually produced a magnificent, leatherlunged son. Ben was overjoyed, and so, to his great surprise, was she — better than overjoyed: happy. She insisted that the deed was done that very night and no other, that their anniversary had been a milestone in more ways t ban one.

“That is true,” he said. “But don’t be confused by epiphenomena.”

2

is anniversary present was a Chinese ancestorportrait, probably of the late Chien Lung period, about 1780. Il represented a blue-robed Taoist, a minor official of middle age, seated in the traditional manner on a carved, lacquered chair; since it was at least six feet by two, they unrolled it, that morning, on the hall lloor. It was stained and creased, seeming too shabby for the rich little room. Julia was hostile at once.

“It looks,” she said, dissembling politely, “as if it had been prayed to.”

“It looks a damned nuisance,” he said, undeceived. “I hadn’t thought about where to hang it. Shall I take it back?”

“No!” Contrarily, she was beginning to want it.

“Really it’s not a proper present. You should have a piece of jewelry,” he said. “I somehow couldn’t walk by that shop once more and leave the old boy behind. Ugly or not, he does have power.”

“I gly!” she cried, outraged. “It’s a very fine kakemono.”

“Chu,” he said, “is apparently ihe Chinese word. Well,” hastily, “keep it rolled up, then. Probably the man’s own descendants did, and only hung it on \ on era (ion Day, or whatever.”

“Funny ... to find a queer old thing like that, way off here. Maybe it was sort of meant to belong to us, Ben.”

“‘Meant’! Southern comfort! Slone Age!” lie picked up his briefcase.

“Ben . . . do we go dancing this evening?” She saw his face draw in.

“If I finish. I don’t dare stop. Judy, I’m awfully sorry.”

“There’s no oaf like a mathematical oaf,” she said, but kindly, and he left.

That morning, determined to hang the scroll somewhere, she ranged the apartment, growing increasingly nervous. Finally she remov ed a Carolean silver mirror from the chimney piece and replaced it with the scroll.

“You look like hell,” she said aloud, and stamped her long veiny foot. The kakemono fell down. Inanimate objects were apt to mock her. Standing precariously on the peau-de-peche mantelpiece, she rehung it firmly, then jumped off with a thud and backed away to the windows, for a long look.

It was too blue, too plain, too crude. And barbarously big.

All day she was cross and hasty, harassing “Moby Dick” almost beyond endurance. She kept interrupting her own preparations to gaze again at the saturnine blue image. Unframed, flapping in drafts, it looked insubstantial and arty, a specimen, not a decoration. But she could not help responding to the occult air of authority possessed by excellent things; this was unquestionably “good.” She would not admit to hating it, but wondered at Ben’s choice: was it a flaw or a new facet in his taste?

Loss of the mirror was a loss of light, for it had faced the western windows, diffusing, from its soft depths, a pale harvest shimmer over the lovely room. The scroll, dark at six o’clock, seemed a great tare against the wheat-gold walls. She turned away, jealous, to dress for Ben’s return. If he had not finished his work, she would be alone all evening with this gross intruder for company. Hearing her husband’s step, she hurried, jerking at her russet hair, and ran out in a rush of silk tissue. On the study doorstep she halted.

Merely by the position of his cropped oval head, she could tell how he sat: slouched loosely in the pink chair, like someone beginning a day s ride. He was well away. The nape of his neck was austere, like a small boy’s.

She passed him, deliberately rustling, sat down opposite, and took up a magazine. He smiled brilliantly at the ceiling.

On the carpet, harsh against its patina, his black notebooks were tumbled open, the white pages speckled with minute symbols. Dimly, she understood these to be the maps, as it were, of actual, unimaginable worlds, where his mind could stroll like a surveyor. It was much more fascinating, to her, than any derring-do. Sometimes Ben was unnerved by her wonder to the point of cruelty. You just think it’s classy,” he said often, “or are you jealous? Or have you a holy longing for essences?” By which he meant: stick to what belongs to you. And that was everything she could touch, his person included. She could make him fat or thin or clean or dirty, and he was delighted to be relieved of the bother of choosing his clothes. She could make him laugh until he helplessly slapped his knee, which, with a Circean satisfaction, she thought the most vulgar of gestures. She could invest surrender with such sweetness that he wept for joy. His physical awareness of her was so keen that she could exacerbate his nerves with perfume. Yet, when he worked, and she turned her eyes on his averted head, he reacted like a horse trying to twitch off a fly.

Even his person, she thought, was mathematical, having “economy” (in his sense), “elegance,”“symmetry.” His black hair was like a Norman helmet, its definite horizontal repeated by his eyebrows. It was a face without superfluities, the ears small and close, the nose one arched stroke. She washed him with her attention as the sea washes a rock.

“Cut it out, my darling,” he said suddenly, “or go away.”

“Cut what out?”

“You know what. I can’t concentrate.”

In a great rustle, to indicate injury and hauteur, she withdrew, and doggedly set about transferring his dishes from the living-room table to a tray. Rising from a table by his elbow, the sacrificial smell of food and wine sometimes distracted him. He would not move to eat, and, whether it was the divine madness or only a dry summer, he was drawn too fine.

It was nice to know, she thought in quotation marks, that he paid her more mind than his dinner; and she turned to the looking glass, aware of nostrils and cheekbones, to see if irony became her. Rut instead of her hot histrionic face, she saw the kakemono.

It was a cold shock. The Taoist was sarcastic.

She blew out the candles and turned again. Now, in lamplight only, he looked benign. It was eerier than a portrait which follows you with ils eyes, than a fine mask which changes expression with each angle of view. She knew that eh us were not painted from life; there was a superstition about it. The painter would knock at the gates of a bereaved house, carrying his sketchbooks full of noses and eyes and whatnot; then the family would choose from these until they had a full complement of resemblances. The “portrait” was only a facsimile of facsimiles, and still it was alive after almost two hundred years, and not to be trifled with.

It occurred to her that Ben’s present was demanding and inconsiderate. It looked like hell over the fireplace, where her lovely mirror should by rights have been; it drank all the light, it devoured her room, it had made a fool of her. If you cast an important glance at a mirror and there is no mirror, you have been caught out and mocked. It was an unpresentable present, and she was angry.

Must she rearrange her house, her whole life, around his passing fancy? Her eyelids began to tickle, but even as she had the thought, it occurred to her that she might have had to love a Great Dane or something. She was promptly overcome wit h affection for Ben, and a longing to look at him. Self-pity, for Julia, was like a drug: alluring, then degrading, then no fun at all. In her long hours alone she could indulge it at length, and rave, if she pleased, like Hecuba; but the relief was always surprising when she* stopped. Sometimes, at night, for no reason at all, she cried on her husband’s shoulder; but it was not worth it. His unfailing kindness shamed her. Sometimes she thought of firing the abominable “Moby,” and doing all the housework herself, earnestly, well: like an acolyte.

The only times that utterly abolished her loneliness were the fleeting lapses between his ideas. Waking from the long deep sleep that followed a completed exploration, he was enchanting, with a mind as sweet as morning; some special air hung about him. Its clarity, the exhilaration they both felt, reminded her of the Alpine wind above treeline she remembered from their wedding trip. She had thought, at the time, that she could actually smell ozone: not a fragrance, more a coolness.

It was of those times that she had her happiest daydreams here, in the long afternoons, in the shimmering room filled with the light of a northern harvest.

3

HE COOKED up smiling when she brought in the tray.

“Do you miss me,”she said, “when you’re wherever you are? ”

“Not at the time. Afterwards, very much. You know that.” He looked at her directly with large leaf-shaped eyes, answering the plea in her voice but still impatient.

“Good. Where are you now?”

“In Hilbert space. It has an infinite number of dimensions.”

“That’s very fancy,” she thought. “In fact, that’s impossible.”

“On the contrary, it’s necessary, or other things I know are true aren’t true. It works, you see,” laughing, “and it describes other things that work.”

“Things you can touch? Any?”

“Well . . .”

“The least sign of usefulness, and you’d stop?”

“Someday, there will be a science which can’t be born without my — no, these — mathematics.”

“Science about what? Galaxies and fusion bombs?”

“That’s pedestrian. Probably, some unforeseeable class of facts.”

“What if we blow ourselves up, in our pedestrian way?”

“Well, not here then. Wherever there is intellection.”

He took a deep, unthinking gulp of soup, and opened the notebook again. She ran her hand in circles over his skull, with the whorled grain of his hair. “Don’t,” he said. “Have patience, darling.”

Without quite willing to, she rubbed harder. His scalp stiffened.

“Judy— don’t — tease,” he said tonelessly, in real anger. His voice frightened her, and she went quickly out, to pace the living room under the gaze of the unwelcome Taoist.

After her hectic indoor day there was no hope of sleeping until midnight at least. At home she would have been worn out even by this hour, with riding and swimming and parties—and she thought of white curtains astir in a breeze smelling of tobacco flowers; of high clouds and moonlight and the wide estuaries. Night in this splintery town was hideous. As the northern sky at last grew black, it gave the bug-haunted screens an ominous look, and beyond them the windows of strangers seemed hostile. As it grew late, the light indoors was harsh. Now the scroll was black, against a wall drained of color.

She took it down, with great pains to prevent its rattling, and again hung the Carolean mirror: instantly, the room was beautiful again. She put the kakemono on the floor, weighting its corners with books, and for the first time closely scrutinized her enemy.

In spite of its wide yellowing borders, the scroll filled her eyes with a flood of blue. The seated figure looked as long, from waist to hem, as though he had been upright; hence the robe was tremendous. It was simply a flat expanse of unshaded blue, with only a few bold black lines to indicate folds. It was exactly the blue of a kingfisher’s wing in shadow: not dark, not pale, not green, not purple — a pure, an intense blue, softened a little by age and dust and creases. Painted on dense silk, it neither held nor reflected light: no sky could be that color. This in itself, she thought, accounted for a certain strangeness: that the scroll was painted, as il were, in a lightless world without weather, for even the background was a strange murky color, not so warm as the color of earth. Against it, while looked oddly like pearl. The upeurving toes of the boots were white: their black uppers scarcely showed under the immense robe. The Taoist’s feet were planted firmly on the rung of his chair. Only the tips of its arms showed beyond the vast blue sleeves. These were bordered heavily with black.

The long-nailed boneless hands, not white, yet pale as melon rinds, curved about a long white stick which was held a little to one side. It was curved also, not so deeply as a crescent, its flat tip projecting above the sloped blue shoulders. On one side of the figure, as if suspended, was an incense pot whose white legs looked like the root, of a great tooth; on the other was a blue-and-white urn containing a stunted tree covered with fiat pinkish flowers. Both the pot and the urn were boldly badly drawn in false perspective. The urn’s rim was an awkwardly tilted ellipse.

It was like staring at a light bulb.

The priest’s throat was obscured by a sparse black beard, each hair precisely drawn, and framed by the curved wide border of his robe. The hat was extraordinary, like a red and blue crown, for in the center there was black, perhaps the top of his head. A tremendous pin, nearly a foot long, and apparently of bone, projected at dead-level to either side.

He sat in the traditional pose, hieratic and serene; and of course, intentionally majestic. The generations had been destined to esteem this tall person as almost a god, and his portrait did not so much glorify as remove him, from pettiness to a plane of awesome repose.

The reverent beholder was meant to see not a person, not even the memory of a person, but the idea of a person. There was no testimony of deeds; his long nails, in fact, contemned them. The white stick was not a weapon but a badge of position.

Yet he was not dead and he was not a symbol. There was nervous force in his monumentality; the stick was held with too much vigor, and something about the rhythmic folds of the sleeves, the asymmetry of the stick’s position, hinted that he had drawn it back preparatory to a violent gesture. The face was too human. Under heavy peaked eyebrows, the uptilted, surprisingly deep-set black eyes looked keenly out, staring with a curious directness, bracketed with crow’s-feet which suggested a squint. The nose, indicated merely by two strokes, seemed unduly long and thin for a Chinese. The mouth was bright pink, plump and a little pursed under the sparse mustache.

She was passive, now, before the Taoist, and no longer hostile. Without thought or activity, her mind was full.

Silently, with a somnambulist’s soft gestures, she climbed to the mantel, again removed the mirror, and laid it face down on a chair seat. Then she hung the scroll, for a moment holding its face close to her own. He, the priest, the official, was not precisely smiling, yet had an air of secret irony, of a wisdom more practical than celestial. He had, in fad, the face of a chess player or negotiator.

Above the baroque mantelpiece, vertical once more, the man seemed bigger, and less amiable; his face, ten feet above her, was elongated, and looked scornful. She had an impression of profoundly masculine energy only temporarily in check, of pride and self-command. Magnetized, a little dizzy, she could not turn her back.

For a long time, Julia and the scroll were face to face and did not come to terms. Confrontation had become a question of acceptance, not of knowing. She simply stared without speculating. By now the Taoist had dominated her mind. He was no longer a symbol of anything extraneous, nor a clue to Ben, nor a decoration, nor an intrusive person.

Somehow, eventually, she realized that she had fulfilled all the demands of the scroll, and she was exhausted as if by a violent emotion. Her legs ached, and she was suddenly shaken with chills. She turned away, and went into the bathroom for her nightgown; shivering at the touch of satin. Still in a daze, she washed, brushed her teeth, forbore to scent herself, and returned for a last look at the kakemono. Its imprint on her had not softened. Lightheaded, unconscious of anything but the blue presence, she glanced into the darkened study, then went silently into the bedroom.

It was very cool. The leaves rustling outside were faintly lit by the street lamp, and their shadows flickered on the dim white bed. Under the window, the carpet shone a speckled silver. Very softly, she crept into the low enormous bed and wearily turned her cheek into the pillow. Then she remembered t hat the lights were still on in the living room, and thought of the Taoist’s night vigil with a smile, as if it were a mild joke. His blue image was still whole before her eyes. There was nothing to be thought about the scroll, and no thought came to her; she took it comfortably, unconsciously for granted that she would in time make some disposition: find it a better place, or keep it rolled up to en joy at her pleasure.

It was all over now. She could not sleep, yet was not restless. She was conscious of her own pulse, of the blueness that shimmered behind her eyelids, of being cold, of gooseflesh on her shoulders, and all these seemed phenomena of great clarity and intenseness.

The faint warmth to her left was Ben, sleeping like a stone, flat on his back. She raised herself on one elbow to look at him. The sheet was drawn up to his chin. She could just make out the hollows of his eye sockets, the marble, convex lids. His breathing was even and barely audible. Something in his sleeping face was impregnable, and she was more awake and more alone than ever in her life. Pulling the covers over her shoulders, she felt enclosed in his warm lent, and became conscious of the faint clean smell of his body, something like walnuts, and the starchy smell of his pajamas.

Very cautiously her hand stole out, her knuckles supporting the sheet, the fingertips turned down to touch his thin warm wrist. He did not stir at first, and then she realized with a shudder of delight that he was looking at her with wide-open eyes.

“ Where were you ?”

“Looking at the chu. I’m still dizzy.”

“The door was shut. Was I right not to come in?”

“Yes. Thank you for not.”

“I missed you.”

“Ben! Have you finished?”

“Yes, have you?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I just. do. How beautiful you look. Are you tired?”

“Yes.”

“Too tired?”

“No.”

“Come close, I am so happy.”