Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas by Gass William H

Author:Gass, William H. [Gass, William H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780804150910
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-08-07T04:00:00+00:00

EMMA ENTERS

A SENTENCE OF

ELIZABETH BISHOP’S

The slow fall of ash

Emma was afraid of Elizabeth Bishop. Emma imagined Elizabeth Bishop lying naked next to a naked Marianne Moore, the tips of their noses and their nipples touching; and Emma imagined that every feeling either poet had ever had in their spare and spirited lives was present there in the two nips, just where the nips kissed. Emma, herself, was ethereally thin, and had been admired for the translucency of her skin. You could see her bones like shadows of trees, shadows without leaves.

Perhaps she should have been afraid of Miss Moore instead of Miss Bishop, because Emma felt threatened by resemblance—mirrors, metaphors, clouds, twins—and Miss Moore was a tight-thighed old maid like herself; wore a halo of ropey hair and those low-cut patent leather shoes with the one black strap which Emma favored, as well as a hat as cockeyed as an English captain’s, though not in the house, as was Emma’s habit; and wrote similitudes which Emma much admired but could not in all conscience approve: that the mind’s enchantment was like Gieseking playing Scarlatti … what a snob Miss Moore was; that the sounds of a swiftly strummed guitar were—in effect—as if Palestrina had scored the three rows of seeds in a halved banana … an image as precious as a ceramic egg. Anyway, Gieseking was at his best playing a depedaled Mozart. Her ears weren’t all wax, despite what her father’d said.

When you sat in the shadow of a window, and let your not-Miss-Moore’s-mind move like a slow spoon through a second coffee, thoughts would float to view, carried by the current in the way Miss Bishop’s river barges were, and they would sail by slowly too, so their cargoes could be inspected, as when father yelled “wax ear” at her, his mouth loud as a loud engine, revving to a roar. All you’ve done is grow tall, he’d say. Why didn’t you grow breasts? You grew a nose, that long thin chisel chin. Why not a big pair of milkers?

Emma’d scratch her scalp until it bled and dandruff would settle in the sink or clot her comb; the scurf of cats caused asthma attacks; Elizabeth Bishop was short of breath most of the time; she cuddled cats and other people’s children; she was so often suffocated by circumstance, since a kid, and so was soon on her back in bed; that’s where likeness led, like the path into the woods where the witch lived.

Perhaps Emma was afraid of Elizabeth Bishop because she also bore Bishop as her old maid name. Emma Bishop—one half of her a fiction, she felt, the other half a poet. Neither half an adulteress, let alone a lover of women. She imagined Elizabeth Bishop’s head being sick in Emma’s kitchen sink. Poets ought not to puke. Or injure themselves by falling off curbs. It was something which should have been forbidden any friend of Marianne Moore. Lying there, Emma dreamed of being in a

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