Eight

 But he returned to his garden, called back to life by the children, now returning to find him. As he looked at them, he suddenly realized that he saw the seed of either his own fame, or the budding recollections of his own obscurity in their sometimes-glazed faces—a kind of infamy all unto itself. There were those praised for centuries for their ‘unflagging’ brilliance; some found this epitaph only because they died in obscurity—to be resurrected only in the course of their discoverer’s own search for fame. Those artists burned a second death, suffered at the hands of an Inquisition, but could neither confess and repent, nor recuse and repudiate. It was a forced birth, and therefore a tragically unnecessary death a second time. They had died, and had found peace, only to be disturbed by a forcefully requited love. Whole histories would have to be written or rewritten, retroactively, in order to restore their supposed and re-discovered brilliance.

Was it bitterness that stoked the flames of these purple lines, suddenly flowing through his mind? Perhaps it was just a compromise with his own moldering vanity, doomed to fade with the indifference of his many gathered years—they did whisper about the old man, after all. Well, he could not hope for anything else. It was a flagging brilliance that his guilt implied, a tattered cloth blowing in invisible but powerful wind, blowing towards something whose direction he had the grace to accept, to lose his ship to, breaking off the rudder to finish off the job.

It was getting somewhat late, and children have no place in the gardens much after noon. That was his rule. Perhaps when the sun went low, and was about to be extinguished, when the statuary here took on new life without the light of scrutiny these summer days gave forth, when his stories could emerge in the twilight and stir up new fantasies for them—statues come to new life—perhaps then they could return, he thought. But now was time for them to depart, and so with particular patience this day, he ushered them out, back through the house to the front door, which he gently clicked shut behind the last of them. It would be a melancholy afternoon.

He hated anything that had the regularity of a habit; but he had habits nonetheless. Being human is a habit, he said often, like a readymade prayer—and it’s habit enough. So he went for a walk through the garden. He was fortunate enough to have it at all. In the confusion of his younger years, when it was all happening to him, the whole swell of joy and despairing sadness, he had the fortune of meeting someone whom he could love only in that I-never-loved-them kind of way. They shared various things, and had a fair bit in common—until sometime towards the end of his life when a crushing depression moved in and divorced their relationship, with death. Was it a suicide? He had just disappeared, into the Russian River. Or something like that. A trip with friends had taken him there, two decades ago one late summer afternoon; he never heard from him again, nor had anyone they’d known in common. Well perhaps, he thought, someone knows where he went, someone who was not a friend-in-common. But in any case, through a strange loop in a legal arrangement they’d made a decade before that, he’d ended up with joint ownership of a cottage in the northeastern shore area of a rather distant country, one wrecked some time ago by various political stupidities, but which still managed to keep its ancient charm.

The house was thatched, and rather large for its type, which he hadn’t the first inkling about (nor did he much really care, though that part of his soul that harbored illusions of being an engaged, well-read and knowledgeable intellectual still hounded him for not reading up on the place, or the general location). It was occupied by two old lovers whose stories and intrigues occupied his, and his departed friend’s, attention on numerous occasions, but which was now just a dim and fading memory. He’d befriended them, but circumstances—those turbulent and chaotic circumstances that induce idiocy in even the hardiest of souls (went a line in an abandoned memoir he read in the house when he first acquired it)—led them to a falling out. They’d died a charmed coupled, it seemed, though he knew better, or rather, they themselves did. He knew that they knew their relationship was trying, and fraught with buried frustrations, impotence, and unhealthiness—but all quite glorious in their undertaking, he realized. They’d lived a full and rather rich life—at least as one lived it through their recounting of it. Everyone is their own kind of fabulist; some were more gifted in crafting the tales than others, and the two were geniuses. But a fabulist is only the more talented in proportion to the truth contained therein—certainly that aphorism stuck like the glue which held up his writing desk.

He knew that he himself was incapable, constitutionally unable, to have the kind of life he admired through the window, which was always rather carefully but freely dressed with the splendors of what seemed like endless recreation, in food, travel, reading, entertainments, conversations, friendships—even in their enemies it seemed that, though ruin sometimes threatened them, it was meaningfully integrated into their ongoing, vibrant life. He hoped that they saw some of this reflected back to them in his wistful and admiring glances, before their break. He always tried to communicate as much, but somehow, whatever he did for them, whatever he wrote to them, however long or sincere, there was always something they didn’t quite like, or approve of. Typical, he always thought—and yet, he ended up in his later years precisely where they’d finished theirs.

How they found their end, and under what circumstances, he had no idea of—they were some four decades and more older than he was at the time they met, and he’d never really made many friends in common with them. Perhaps it was this stupid, provincial sort of prejudice he noted in them (not without foundation, of course, for he shared their prejudices yet somehow thought himself exempt, as was the general rule in matters of self-understanding) that ultimately forestalled the possibility of building lasting relationships among the friends they kept. But the truth was that he really didn’t care one way or the other; they were older, stiffer, and insufferable in numerous ways—always set into a certain indistinct hierarchical order he couldn’t understand, like jewels in ancient cosmographs, out of reach, yet glittering with the rays of a distant sun which warmed the earth, his earth, but never their crystal.

To warm his heart, as the cold grey clouds now suffocated the sun, from the old creaking player he let play out his copy of the violin sonatas, composed by his own countryman Mr. I—, and he thought how the irony of intellectual devotion worked. His works were filled, like a stilted or lopsided archive, to overflowing with the themes and tunes of a fractious, tattered and failing experiment in an ancient Greek political idea from which he had escaped, exasperated, an idea which these people here never seemed to fully embrace—perhaps for some good reason or other; and yet this other occupation of his was the most ridiculously mundane, tedious and pedestrian: selling insurance, at which he seemed to also be a genius. A double-life such as this was redeemed, in their eyes, only by the genius of his art. Everything in its lines seemed to refute this small, little place (an island really) and their (in the end) rigid, insular way of life. Recreation for them, he realized, was a cultivated duty; but for him, puritanical under the hedonism he tried to exhibit, and even nourish, there could never be cultivated recreation. He had to create his life, everything about it, over and over, and it all seemed to bleed away as fast as he created it. It was hard to explain; but he felt the vast difference between himself and these two lovers, whose love he really had no access to (he confessed that he couldn’t even really use the term ‘love’ when talking about them). Yet this was all the difference, the difference—the essential thing. The industry of his homeland melded with the music whose legacy this place, extending over to the continent beyond, had bequeathed to Mr. I— and the insurance he sold in support of his life expended itself in the tedium not in its selling, but in the exchange which the music afforded him. What had drifted across the ocean centuries ago was what he saw in these two dead lovers whose cottage he now owned, and occupied: as they burned up their life in recreation, whiling away in retirement, gathering together the thousands of years of their collective and intertwined history into a great and admirable—and constant—fire, the ash collected on that other, distant and newer continent and became nourishment for something else altogether, but which appeared to be nothing more than a continuation of what had come from before, from beyond the ocean’s shores on the other side of the world. But in reality there was an absolute difference between them, a decisive break that took centuries to come into its own.