Leisure! Well, I suppose so. But from that moment I knew no peace, only the obscure ecstasy of creation. I made elementary errors, revised my mistakes, pushed on. Despite my vivid sexual imaginings in adolescence and beyond, despite Celia Ann Hodges, I had never made the attempt to visualize a girl or woman or any human being in exhaustive detail. I spent two nights and two days imagining her hands, summoning them out of vagueness into the precision of being. On the third night I realized that I had still failed to envision the exact pattern of veins on the back of each hand, the movements of the skin between the fingers, the intricate configuration of creases on each reddish knuckle. It seemed to me that only by an act of fanatical precision could I knit her into existence, rescue her from the continual tug of vagueness that is only one step removed from nothingness. I lavished a ferocity of attention on her eyelids, the folds and shadows of her ears, the muscles of her neck. Her clothes proved unexpectedly difficult to see precisely: the puckers of skirt at the waist, the arrangement of threads in the front and back of a button, the system of creases in the sleeve of a moving arm. Although she had appeared to me in a rather demure costume — dark blue denim skirt reaching to her knees, plain white cotton blouse with small transparent buttons — I rejected the temptations of modesty and applied to her breasts, her thighs, the folds of her vulva, the coloring and structure of her buttocks, the same rigor of attention that I applied to her eyebrows and toes.
Sometimes, in weariness, I removed my attention from her to contemplate some peaceful inner landscape. Then I returned in alarm to find odd gaps and distortions in her, as if without my sustained attention she tended toward dissolution. One night she walked from my desk to my reading chair and sat down; I realized that I had failed to imagine the precise system of motions that constitute a human walk, and threw myself into new feats of arduous imagining. Errors repeatedly erupted. One night when she walked from my attic room down two flights of stairs to the living room, I realized that I had been careless in managing her stair-by-stair descent, permitting her to fade away and reappear in the manner of a trite ghost.
It was these fadings, these absences of attention, that I found most difficult to overcome, in the laborious weeks that followed; and as the nights grew warmer, and through my attic window I smelled the dark green scents of summer and heard the shouts of children, the clang of a bell, the rush of roller skates on driveways, the soft thunk thunk of a dribbled basketball, I had the sense of being borne up by all the rich blue summer night and carried toward a far, desired shore.
On the night of July 16 my work was done. In the center of my dark room the unlit standing lamp with the bent brass neck stood looking down at the leather pad of my crowded desk. The cracked leather desk-chair where I had been sitting was partly turned to one side. I was lying on the bed by the double window, beneath the drawn blinds that reached to the bottom of the slightly raised windowframe. Bits of moonlight entered through the edges of the blinds and polished a leg of the mahogany desk, a few brass buttons in the back of the leather chair, a coffee cup resting on a book. She stood at the side of the desk, resting one carefully veined hand on a corner. She was gazing toward a window. Suddenly she lifted her other hand and swept a piece of hair back over an ear. It was a gesture we had practiced many times. Beneath the white cotton sleeve of her lifted arm I knew that a long vein in her forearm pressed through the skin and curved toward the inner bend of her elbow. Her nostrils tensed at the sound of a distant car; a faint breathing was audible. Perhaps it was a memory of the last feverish and draining months, perhaps it was the clarity of her presence there, perhaps it was the sense of a long task carried to fulfillment, anyway I felt in my chest a deep upwelling, my nose burned, my eyes prickled, and turning my face away I paid Olivia the dark homage of my tears.
I ask myself: was there a flaw, a little fatal flaw? Was there at the very outset an error in conception or construction that by the operation of unalterable laws was bound to bring my work to a disastrous end? Without arrogance I think I may answer: No. Oh, there may have been some very minor lapse here or there, some lack of precise imagining that spoke of Olivia’s kinship with all that is unshaped and unborn, but the vividness, the clarity, of her being was beyond all doubt. Indeed I would argue that insofar as our existence is confirmed or strengthened by our presence in a mind outside our own, her existence was far richer than that of the beings we call human. For we are imagined carelessly and in patches, you and I, we’re ghosts and phantoms all, fading away and reappearing at the whim of amateur imaginers, whereas Olivia — well, Olivia was imagined with an artist’s passionate exactitude. And just as the enticing vividness of a painting or statue derives in part from the intensity of our attention, so the creature I had pressed forth night after night from the malleable stuff of my imagination flourished by virtue of the accumulated acts of attention that I had lavished upon her. Then why, at the very moment of my triumph, did I feel a twist of anxiety?
For I was anxious, I won’t deny it. Slowly, night after night, I had brought my creature into being, and in the consuming passion of my task I hadn’t given much thought to exactly what was to become of her. The artist sells his painting, or leans the unsold canvas solidly against the unyielding wall. The writer multiplies his creatures in editions of many thousands, or perhaps places his heavy typescript, bound in black, in the bottom drawer of his desk where in its slowly spun cocoon of dust it grows secret rainbow wings as it prepares to burst forth into the light of posterity’s dazzling day. But what of those who summon into existence a being of the third realm? Aye, what of us? Do you think it’s easy for us, we solitary ones, we attic dwellers and noontime dreamers, with the mark of midnight on our brow? In the nights that followed it seemed to me that Olivia looked at me with a questioning gaze. Of course she didn’t just stand there always. I liked to send her off on little journeys into the midnight streets of my town, where she could walk unnoticed and undisturbed. But it was precisely these early wanderings that impressed on me a certain aimlessness in her way of life, and led me to construct for her a wondrous dwelling.
I chose the stretch of woodland at the north end of town beyond the park and the new shopping center. There, drawing on my architectural studies of a year ago, I built a many-roomed mansion in the full mad flower of late-nineteenth-century eclecticism, complete with towers and cross gables, Gothic windows with heavy drip-moldings, Italianate scrolled brackets under the projecting eaves. I laid the grounds with an overgrown English garden containing meandering paths, dim pools, and moldering statues. The images came with surprising swiftness, as if I had already created them and were now simply permitting them to realize their nature. The extravagance of it all struck me as peculiarly suitable for Olivia. For wasn’t it expressive of a secret extravagance in her nature that I had suspected from the beginning, despite her air of detachment? In any case Olivia now had a home to go to when she wasn’t with me or wandering alone through the streets of the town. She lived there with her handsome but solitary father who designed intricate electronic equipment and had a passion for chess problems, classic military battles, and cryptic crossword puzzles, and her rather dim mother who played the piano and was rumored to rise at noon. There was also a sickly grandmother with uncombed white hair who visited for months at a time and rarely left her room. They had a housekeeper, a Mrs. Nelson, who came every Thursday. In addition to her bedroom on the second floor, Olivia had a tower room all to herself, where she liked to read. No one paid much attention to Olivia, who came and went as she pleased, took occasional part-time jobs that she always quit within two weeks, read long Russian novels while drinking tea with honey, and appeared to be waiting for something.