#129

What tired musings, whisps of cloud and dark foreshadowing, arise with Stephen on the second day? A sliding mirror door: wardrobe, flesh, and artist. The office windows a palimpsest of rain. Of rain, thinks Stephen, not yet but certain to come. The red-and-green umbrella from the wooden box by the landing's door. Moss-green sweatshirt as he walks, its empty hood not centered but flat across his left shoulder. Rain. In pinpricks. Wind. There, in the west, is a dark cloud grumbling. And with his steely mind and patterned paper and books aplenty in his bag, he enters The Chapterhouse, orders a coffee, milk - decaf - and spreads on one of the back's square tables what we might call - why not? - Stephen's genius.

He writes. Not of the spinning fan's three blades above, nor the dog - a mutt - that licks at crumbs beneath the empty chair that shares his table. Not the man in sandals, hole-y jeans, the Times spread open in his lap. Bespectacled, who reads in rapt attention Tuesday's pre-election news. But Stephen writes. And neither of the gray-eyed woman, dressed in red, a seashell bracelet, her body hunched forward, studying. A children's book on birds: white crane alone in a shipyard; next page, an owl at dusk. She reads, but Stephens writes. And the bearded gaze that comes across, dispatched from the corner's cushioned chair, falls on Stephen unobserved, and finds no place amongst his words. For he writes and does not read, and all his phrases are bare, are ethereal in their transcendence.

Which is, as I try to tell John over tea, the point of Stephen's folly. The mis-taking of his inspiration. For when, I ask him - citing Joyce while Erica, in tickled indifference, steams cauliflower - is one an artist? Amiable, with Anglican ease, his tongue dismantles what mine sets forth. Politics, economy, material production. And Erica, placing tomatoes and green beans on the table before us, tells us, her eybrows contracting, "Do not eat them all." The afternoon is ending, stretching slowly into evening, and my mind goes with it, so that my spars and sallies are suddenly too tender for John to heed. "Transcendence," he says, the battle won, "is fantasy that begins and ends in history." And Erica nods, a broad impish smile, as she takes John's dinner from the stove and gathers her things to leave.

The dark, my bed. Trees. And flowers in vases. Window frames. My bare apartment full. Transcendence. Here, in the movements of my body, in the rush and flow of my blood, there is the presence of another. And along the back and forth of time that surrounds me, there is every moment something outside: the pledge of another's name. Inspiration. Mine. And his. And this is Stephen's error. This is the when of the artist. "Transcendence," I say, rising from John and Erica's tiny kitchen table. "Without it, how can there be love?" They falter, stumble, laugh: incredulous. No such thing, they answer. A social construct. Familial conditioning. And - they concur - a marketing ploy. But I have them, and as the three of us part - John to his dinner, Erica to a restaurant in Chinatown, and I to the gym - I can hear behind their words a silence. An affirmation not ready to be sung - but an affirmation that echoes nonetheless far beyond - and even prior to - the moment of its sounding.