But, again, this was not to say that she was not present, gazing steadily at him from across the table, speaking or listening. She cared for him (and once more I must emphasize that she was not at all remote; it was more than pity which she felt for him). He hoped and imagined that she loved him; if he only could be sure that she did, he could go on easily down the long path of dreams, despair and useless hopes.
Everything she’d ever given him he’d kept, of course. They’d given one another books. At some point he’d begun to lend her some of his own books; needless to say, he would gladly have given them to her to keep, but feared making her uncomfortable by doing that, for she might well have felt awkward about accepting the things he treasured, since that would have deprived him of them (he wouldn’t have cared) or perhaps unduly encouraged him (about which he would have cared only too much). Sometimes he could in fact in a politely quiet sort of way give her things he treasured, but this bordered on dishonesty and he didn’t want to tell her any untruths. Why then didn’t he buy her mint-new copies of those books and be done? Some were out of print, but the main reason was once again that he didn’t want to overwhelm her by always giving and giving. She knew how much he loved her. At first she’d disbelieved, but now she believed (so he thought; she said that she didn’t believe him but he supposed she had to say this in order to avoid encouraging him). Wasn’t that enough? So he lent her books. After all, one of life’s best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more pleasurable still is rereading that book; most pleasurable of all is lending it to the person one loves: Now she is reading or has just read the scene with the mirrors; she who is so lovely is drinking in that loveliness I’ve drunk.
Amidst the other grey, red, greenish, black and orange volumes of various heights, this white book with the black lettering was perfectly proportioned in every way, neither showy nor insignificant. It was one of his favorite books (we can’t say his favorite since his life wasn’t over yet). He mentioned it, and she was willing to accept it; she was that kind, to read the book which he loved.
At the moment that it actually passed from his hand to hers they were sitting across from each other in one of the three or four restaurants where they usually met; and she, having gazed into his face with her usual richly intelligent seriousness, studied the book she now held with the same air of happy possession which he would have hoped to find had she been looking over his body before making love with him, which she would never, ever do no matter how long they both lived, a fact which made him want to utter a sound much softer and more leaden than any scream; and then, sitting within touching distance of her beautiful hands which he could not touch, he watched her open the book to the title page with its half-calligraphic brush-rendering by an unknown artist of a Buddhist pongmalai garland, probably of jasmine flowers, which was draped across a woman’s naked thigh. This was the most intimate moment that he and she would ever have (unless of course his one percent became a hundred, and she accepted him forever). He would not be at her side when she began to actually read the book; but from their frequent conversations he thought he could keep abreast of where she’d arrived each day. She’d promised to begin it that very night, when she was home with the other man, which meant that she would at least cross the frontier of the half-title page, followed by the dramatic double plant-stalks (connected by a leaf ), of the initial letter E. And now she saw before her those wide white margins and those generous white lines-between-the-lines which encouraged every word to preen itself like the treasure that it truly was.
I should mention that this beautiful volume, which was such a pleasure to hold, began its tale with a dazzling abruptness, as if the reader had just emerged from a dark tunnel into another world, a perfect world whose ground was a hot white plain of salt upon which the words lived their eternal lives.
I need say nothing about the plot, whose involutions (it’s a tale of obsessive love) progressed like the nested terraces on a Buddha-studded tower which narrows perfectly into nothingness. Once I visited a certain wat in Bangkok where although the day was exhaustingly hot and bright I grew enthralled by the sensation of wandering on a high place somewhere in the mist, a plateau exploding with ornately weathered crags. There were many towers, just as in this world there are many perfect books.
This book, well, it would be wrong to say that it contained everything, but it did hold a white wall which was frescoed with masked figures, demons and bare-breasted dancing girls all wearing golden-scaled armor. These characters, who presumably represented the various types of being which flourished during the author’s epoch, journeyed through strange adventures, of course, and more commentaries have been written about their chapters than about any others in the book, for their encounters with bandit leaders in the jungle, their dialogues with the Prince of Heaven, and their dangerous dives beneath the sea to obtain the One Pearl do not lack in beauty and even philosophical significance, but these personages remained the two-dimensional inhabitants of parables—universal shadows, to be sure, but dependent, imprisoned on that white wall (which was really a double spread of white pages). They won love, power and treasure when they followed the Right Path, but the happiness available to them was founded on an ignorance, mercifully instilled in them by their author, of the fact that they were not real, and that in the realm of the real, where the true forms of love, power and treasure endure forever, their bright flat strivings (imagine the animated lives of Matisse’s cutouts) would never, ever, ever find any hope; for the dreams they lived in could be transcended by the book’s protagonist alone, whose supernatural perfection began to evince itself in the fifth chapter. For now, he could hardly wait for her to get to the second chapter, whose words, so he had read in one of the antique commentaries, had been syntactically and typographically arranged to replicate heart-shaped lilypads in a vast vase before a golden wall. Between the lilypads, in the complex interstices of the water-mirror, she’d be able to look directly into that pure zone upon which the lines of print had been so evenly superimposed. He comprehended very well that every sentence she read brought nearer that moment when she would have finished the book, that moment when the extremest final tendril of orgasm elongates, tapers and begins to become a memory; but even this he could accept; he passionately longed to follow her from chapter to chapter like a lover hastily stripping off his clothes, seeking laughingly to overtake the one he loves who has already almost finished taking off everything as she stands before him in that small white room.
That week he found himself less often dreaming his way into that place of houses like white islands, which, if one gazes down on it from an airplane, like a reader soaring over an opened book, seems almost bluish-green, with occasional bright yellow rectangles of mustard fields, and cool rivers winding through the flatness, their richly grassy lips studded every now and then with trees. Where the fields shine most greenish, there too one of the rivers sometimes also goes green, but in one spot where the green has gone so rich as to rival blackness, the river retains its original lapis-grey character; and it’s there that the windowed tower of that narrow white house rises over the pear orchard to gaze across the levee. This house was empty now. But he wasn’t worried; he knew where she was. She was inside the white book. And as long as she dwelled there, she was with him. He was in ecstasy.