As he came, effortlessly as in any paradise, to each seamed, successive landscape, the ease of his arrivals added to his sense of strength, and each increment of strength to his sense of purity, so that his exercise fed his feelings about his heart and happiness. Though he had that day made the long drive from London, had his interview with Jane (as exhausting as it was stimulating) and done the hardest thinking of his life, though he had not slept (even in London he had tossed and turned all night, kept awake by the prospect of finally meeting Jane) in perhaps forty hours, he wasn’t tired. He wondered if he would ever be tired again. Or less gay than now. For what he felt, he was certain, was not mood but something deeper, a stability, as the out-of-doors was, as space was. He could make plans. If Jane would have him (she would; they had spoken code this afternoon, signaled each other a high language of commitment, no small talk but the cryptic, sacred speech of government flashing its secret observations over mountains and under seas, the serious ventriloquism of outpost), they could plan not to plan, simply to live, to be. In his joy he had forgotten her death, her rare, personal disease in which self fled self in ultimate allergy. Lupus erythematosus. It was not catching, but he would catch it. He would catch her. There was no need to survive her. Together they would grow the wolf mask across their eyes, death’s big spreading butterfly. It didn’t matter. They’d have their morality together, the blessed link-up between appropriate humans, anything permissible between consenting man and consenting woman — anything, any bold or timid configuration, whatever the one craved and the other yielded, whatever whatsoever, love’s sanctified arrangements, not excluding the deathbed itself. What need had he to survive her — though he’d probably not die until she did — now that he had at last a vehicle for his taste, his marriage?
He was in a sort of clearing. Though he knew he had not retraced his steps nor circled around, it seemed familiar. He stood on uneven ground and could see a line of low frigid mountains in the distance. High above him and to his right the great tear of the moon, like the drain of day, sucked light. At his feet there appeared the remains of — what? A feast? A picnic? He bent down to investigate and found a few clay shards of an old jug, a bit of yellow wood — like the facing on some stringed instrument and a swatch of faded, faintly Biblical cloth, broadly striped as the robe of a prophet. As he fingered this debris he smelled what was unmistakably bowel.
“Have I stepped in something?” He stood and raised his shoe, but his glance slid off it to the ground where he saw two undisturbed lumps, round as hamburger, of congealing lion waste. It came to him at once. “I knew it was familiar! ‘The Sleeping Gypsy.’ This is where it was painted!” He looked suspiciously at the mangled mandolin facing, the smashed jug and the tough cloth, which he now perceived had been forcibly torn. My God, he thought, the lion must have eaten the poor fellow. The picture had been painted almost seventy-five years earlier, but he understood from his reading that lions often returned to the scenes of their most splendid kills, somehow passing on to succeeding generations this odd, historical instinct of theirs. Nervously he edged away, and though the odor of lion dung still stung his nostrils, it was gradually replaced by more neutral smells. Clearly, however, he was near the beasts.
He turned but still could not see the castle. He was not yet frightened. From what he had already seen of Duluth he understood that it was a series of cunningly stitched enclaves, of formal, transistorized prospects that swallowed each other transitionlessly. It seemed to be the antithesis of a maze, a surface of turned corners that opened up on fresh surprises. He thought of himself as walking along an enormous Möbius strip, and sooner or later he would automatically be brought back to his starting point. If he was a little uneasy it was only because of the proximity of the animals, whose presence he felt and smelled rather than saw or heard.
Meanwhile, quickening his pace, he came with increasing frequency to experience a series of déjà vus, puzzling at first but then suddenly and disappointingly explicable. He had hoped, as scenes became familiar to him, that he was already retracing his steps, but a few seconds’ perusal of each place indicated otherwise. These were not places he had ever been, only places he had seen. Certainly, he thought, the paintings! Here’s Cranach the Elder’s “Stag Hunt.” Unmistakably. And a few moments later — I’ll be darned, Jean Honoré Fragonard’s “A Game of Hot Cockles.” And then Watteau’s “Embarking for Cythera,” will you look at that? There was E. Melvin Bolstad’s “Sunday in the Country” and then El Greco’s “View of Toledo” without Toledo. Astonishing, Ashenden thought, really worthwhile. Uh oh, I don’t think I care for that Constable, he thought; why’d they use that? Perhaps because it was here. Gosh, isn’t that a Thomas Hart Benton? However did they manage that odd rolling effect? That’s really lovely. I’ll have to ask Plympton the name of his landscaper. Jane and I will certainly be able to use him once we’re settled. Now he was more determined than ever to get rid of Franklin.
And so it went. He strolled through wide-windowed Wyeths and gay, open-doored Dufys and through Hoppers — I’ll have to come back and see that one with the sun on it — scratchy Segonzacs and dappled Renoirs and faintly heaving Cézannes, and across twilled Van Gogh grasses and faint Utrillo fields and precise Audubon fens, and one perfect, wild Bosch dell. It was thrilling. I am in art, thought Brewster Ashenden, pleased to have been prepared for it by his education and taste.
He continued on until he came to a small jewel of a pond mounted in a setting of scalloped shoreline with low thin trees that came up almost to the water. It was the Botticelli “Birth of Venus,” which, like El Greco’s “View of Toledo” without Toledo, was without either Venus Zephyr, Chloris, or the Hour of Spring. Nevertheless it was delightful, and he took a seat on a mound of earth and rested, thinking of Jane and listening to the sea in a large shell he had found on the beach.
“I’m glad,” he said, speaking from the impulse of his mood now that his wanderings were done and the prospect of his — their — death had become a part of his taste and filled his eyes with tears, “I’m glad to have lived in the age of jet travel, and to have had the money for tickets.” He grew contemplative. “There has never been a time in my life,” he said, “when I have not had my own passport, and never a period of more than four months when I was not immune to all the indigenous diseases of place for which there are shots. I am grateful — not that I’d ever lord it over my forebears — that I did not live in the time of sailing ships. Noble as those barks were, they were slow, slow. And Dramamine not invented. This, for all its problems, is the best age to be rich in. I’ve seen a lot in my time.”
Then, though he couldn’t have told you the connection, Ashenden said a strange thing for someone at that moment and in that setting. “I am not a jerk,” he said, “I am not so easily written off. Profound guys like me often seem naive. Perhaps I’m a fool of the gods. That remains to be seen. But answers are mostly simple, wisdom is.” He was melancholy now and rose, as if by changing position he hoped to shake off this new turn in his mood. He looked once more at the odd pool and spoke a sort of valedictory. “This is a nice place. Jane would enjoy it. I wish I still had those two folding chairs the Bank of America gave me for opening an account of five thousand dollars. We could come here tomorrow on a picnic.”
He did not know whether to go around the pond or cut through the thin trees, but finally determined not to go deeper into the forest. Though he suspected the animals must be all around him, it was very quiet and he wondered again about them. They would be asleep, of course, but didn’t his presence mean anything to them? Had their queer captivity and the unusual circumstances in which they lived so accustomed them to man that one could walk among them without disturbing them at all? But I am in art, he thought, and thus in nature too, and perhaps I’ve already caught Jane’s illness and the wolf mask is working someplace under my skin, making me no more significant here than the presence of the trees or the angles of the hills.