My major purchase was kilos of bright red beef.
When he awoke I fed him chunks from a great frying pan. Insel sat up and swallowed them with fairly bestial satisfaction.
“Why,” I asked to make conversation, “do you always want ‘Fleisch ohne Knochen’?”
I had taken it for granted he ordered boneless meat to avoid waste. But Insel began peering about shockingly as if suspicious of being overheard.
“When I am alone,” he explained, in an unexpectedly vacuous voice, “I do not eat like this — I have to drag bones into a corner — to gnaw.”
I felt curious to know how — without teeth—. But Insel beginning to shine again put off the animal, to become the clown of an angel.
Through the row of glass doors the ornaments in the hall looked like fish under water as a celadon tide of pale lamplight sluiced into the studio. From the shutters on either side, entangled reflections flickered into the halo that was now re-forming round Insel’s face.
Stark on the sommier he floated up from the floor of a pool with the wavering fungus he had sown there clinging to his cover.
He told me he had found the secret of perpetual motion if only he had the money to buy the stuff. To me it seemed he had rather discovered a slow time that must result in eternity.
I told him I had for some while been conceiving a ballet.
“It is the story of a maiden seeing her life in a crystal— It would look exactly as it does here, everything translucent.” I waved to Insel— “Yet as in the days when there were maidens they had no ‘life,’ what she sees is her future spouse sowing his ‘wild oats.’
“All dancers are terribly ponderable after Nijinsky — yet once I came across one who possessed a dual equipoise which threw him into a huddle with himself. That is how my youth would dance, with the wild oats springing up to the moon around him, whichever way he turned— But I should have to do maquettes — animated maquettes of the choreography — and I can’t make anything grow out of the floor,” I said deferentially.
“Of course he makes love to everything. A cocotte’s eye. The woman in the litmus petticoat forecasting the weather. A rainbow,” I continued, seeing Insel entranced. “The Queen of Fairyland— Mermaids and Medusae.” Envy was stealing into Insel.
“I dance divinely,” he said and I could see him crossing a ballroom floor propelled as if on invisible casters, as truly initiate acolytes, in reception and remittance of the Holy Book before the high altar.
“Always at the crucial moment the youth is intercepted. There comes floating in between him and the object of his concupiscence, a—” I stopped, as Insel, seemingly relieved by the frustration of a rival, closed his eyes, and waited till he came to. “Over and again I drop the idea in despair. Over and over again I find a solution so simple it constantly slips my mind. I have only to make some little people about five inches high and tell them what to dance.” Insel nodded comprehendingly. “Yet whenever I get to work I come upon some fundamental obstacle. It takes me hours,” I complained to Insel, “to remember it cannot be done. It is as if at the back of that memory stands another memory of having had the power to create whatever I pleased.”
Insel’s eyes enlarged in a ruminative stare. The stealthy oncreep of his visual lichen had reached the walls. We had no longer need of larynxes to converse. Insel thought at me. More precisely— vaguely conceived before me.
“To make things grow,” he conveyed on his silence, “you would have to begin with the invisible dynamo of growth; it has the dimension of naught and the Power of Nature. As a rule it will only grow if planted in a woman— But my brain is a more exquisite manure. In that time in which I exist alone, I recover the Oceanic grain of life to let it run through my fingers, multiple as sand.”
Then the silence of Insel took on voice once more — A voice which as if returning from diffusion among the mists — might be coming from “anywhere,” resumed his ever recurrent cries of horror on behalf of women who could no longer love him.
“For God’s sake,” I implored, for Insel returned to his “normal” state, I followed suit— “stop agonizing— Go to sleep— To negresses every white man looks — white.”
“It’s the teeth,” he groaned— “Die Mädchen—”
At least you’d have more chance with the girls if you got Bebelle to clean your suit—
“I’ll tell you what,” I said, overcome by my inherent conviction of personal blame for anyone not being able to get anything they want—. And in Insel it seemed his need was for something so sublime that over all his aspirations hovered crowns of glory—Mädchen—something entirely outside my zone of attraction, in his regret for them, took on enchanting attributes — even those in a mountain village who ate such quantities of garlic it breathed from the pores of their skin — so much so that Insel, with the heartiest will in the world, had found it impossible to “hug them close enough.”
“You’d better get into that couch and leave your suit in the hall — when I come home I’ll throw it into a bath of gasoline.”
Insel was horrified. “I don’t want anybody to see the dirt in that suit — let alone you — I’ve worn it for five years.”
“All I shall see is the gasoline go dark — it would seem just as dark if I were cleaning something that had only been worn six months.”
But Insel was actually writhing in a bitter determination to protect his own.
“Are you afraid,” I asked, in a sudden concern for his “rays,” “that it would interfere with your Strahlen? — I’m not going to wash it. You can’t short-circuit.”
On the contrary — I anticipated him distinctly renewed in an intenser radiance—
“Please,” I begged — enraptured as a nun seeking permission to lay fresh lilies before a shrine. “Ich bitte Sie.”
He was obdurate — it would seem, in shame. It did not occur to me that in cleaning him up one would be cutting a slice from his “beggar’s capital.”
“It’s not distinguished to be ashamed—”
Insel, in a way, gave in—.
“You try it,” he warned me. “Before your eyes the suit will turn white.”
“It won’t, or if it does, I’ll turn it black again.”
“You may clean it forever,” he intoned ominously— “the while it grows whiter — and whiter.”
“Mädchen,” I reminded him for bait— “or at least,” as for an instant Insel’s ravaged features showed through his ennobling aura— “better negresses.”
Insel was pacified. But he did not go to sleep. He evaporated.
I recognized a vapor whose drifting suspension of invisible myriads he copied so passionately with the overfine point of his pencil.
When it cleared off it had left him again an effigy straightened as the level of water.
The world of the Lutetia had materialized. An infiltration of half-light softly bursting the dark, a thin cascade, the ferns dripping into a green gloom. Here, where dawn and noon and midnight were all so dim and Insel lay sensitive to clarity as a creature of the deep sea; the closely shuttered studio with its row of glass doors was a real replica of the irreal “aquarium.”
Because I found the place somewhat chilly when sunless — I had thrown a great white blanket over my thin dress. This was due to no obsession for Insel’s white miracles. Simply, everything being put away in naphthalene, this had returned from the cleaners and the femme de ménage had not yet locked it up.