Anderson paused to listen. Linck's group included one of the insurance people, the publisher Orris Kilian and his wife, and a man whose name he had forgotten -- one of the subcontractors, probably. The publisher's wife was saying something about the mystery of folk tales. Linck answered, "I think what you feel when you say a story like that is mysterious is that there's another story behind it. For instance, 'Beauty and the Beast.' That is mysterious, because it is covering up another story, the Amor and Psyche myth, and that one is mysterious too, perhaps, because it's covering up still another story that we don't know about."
"Who was the man who made that movie of 'Beauty and the Beast'?" the publisher asked.
"Cocteau."
"Cocteau, right. Wasn't he a fag? Why do you suppose so many -- "
Anderson' moved on. He knew the question and the answer already. He walked through the garden, past a man and a woman seriously engaged in kissing; he let himself into the dark workshop, out again at the back, and began to climb the hill. Behind him the house spilled its yellow lights out over the garden and the lawn: it was like someone else's house, in another country. The trees closed around him with their cool breath. He climbed as far as the footbridge, crossed it, and sat down on the far side, looking at the stars.
He remembered nights in the South Pacific when there had been, incredibly, more stars than this. It was really better to be on the ocean, he and Pongo the only sparks of human life in the great vacancy; then you saw the world clearly and knew just how large it was. But even here, knowing that St. Petersburg and the beaches were only ten miles away, it was good to look up at the night sky and feel the great globe massively turning under his body. The earth turned under the stars, and as it turned the little sparks that were human souls dimmed and brightened, like candles lighted and snuffed, endlessly, over and over, around the turning world.
If it was true, as the physicists seemed to be saying, that consciousness did not merely observe reality but helped to create it, then perhaps science was an impiety, and the original sin might have been, not eating the fruit of the tree, but cutting it down -- forcing God to disclose the structure of the rings which until then had not existed.
And if Western civilization were to be destroyed, if all that knowledge were lost in the cataclysm that was surely coming, would the universe then revert to a simpler model? The sky a crystal hemisphere over a flat earth? Sometimes he felt he could almost believe it. What if it were only human knowledge and belief that held the whole fabric together: with that gone, would time unroll again to the beginning? Would God walk again in the garden, in the cool of the evening?
It is a little after two o'clock. Pongo is in his living room, watched by the marmoset as he turns the pages of a bikers' magazine. Here is a photograph of a man with the usual beard and tattoos straddling a Harley-Davidson; swastikas and silver dollars are sewn to his black leather vest. Behind him stand two long-haired young women, bare to the belly. All three are smiling. The two women have big fruity breasts, pale and soft in the sunlight. The message seems to be that if you are a real man, you will wear black leather and ride a big bike; then the big-chested women will crowd around you and smile. Pongo's right buttock is itching, but he is too lazy to scratch it. He thinks about an afternoon at the Club de Pesce in Cartagena -- '73 was that, or '74? They were sitting on the terrace in the shade of the flowering trees, looking out across the bay at the rusty hulk of a Colombian naval cruiser. It was hot even under the trees, but there was a little wind from the water. The smiling indio waiter in his purple jacket had just served them a pompano en papillote, brown and tender in the husk of charred paper. He remembers the smell of the fish, and the water too bright to look at. Now he sees the two women sitting down at the next table, in the sun. Gene, with his back turned, does not see them. He tries to capture that first moment, but it will not come clear -- just the two women sitting down, and that one has glossy dark hair, the other a cap of short champagne-colored curls. The sun is behind her, and he sees that one breast is outlined clearly through her thin orange blouse; it is almost a perfect half-sphere, like a little grapefruit, and the nipple, thick and erect, is the size of a pencil eraser.
Irma, upstairs in the big house, is looking at one of the ads in "The New Yorker." Two tanned young people stand under a tree. They are both barefoot. The young man leans on a branch with his forearms crossed over an open book; the flap of the book jacket has been folded in to keep his place if he should decide to put the book down. There is a ring on the third finger of his left hand. He looks patiently at the young woman, who hangs onto the branch with one hand, while, with the other, she brushes a hibiscus blossom against her chin. She does not look at him, but at something off-camera, perhaps the sunset (this would account for the pumpkin color of their skins); perhaps she is making up her mind whether to give the young man any reason to put down his book. She is a slightly disheveled blonde with a biteable lower lip. Her adolescent breasts are concealed by two triangles of cloth, one blue, one violet: She also wears a gauzy floral skirt in the same colors. Behind them are two wicker chairs and a low wicker table on the brown-sugar sand; on the table are two artfully decorated rum drinks, maybe rum Alexanders, each with its straw; a pair of sunglasses; and another hibiscus blossom: beyond all that lies the baby-blue sea.
Margaret is sitting on her bed with pillows behind her. She has just had a shower, and feels cool and clean. She picks up a copy of "Cosmopolitan"; on the cover is a vapid teenager in a purple dress with the zipper pulled down to reveal the inner slopes of two melony breasts. One has been retouched to look much smaller than the other: why is that? She opens the magazine toward the back and finds photos of women in purple woolly wraps, a purple mohair sweater, a purple knitted tam. There is a two-page cigarette ad showing the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset. The water is purple. The eye-shadow in the cosmetic ads is purple. She reads a mail-order ad: "Yes, CONNECTING will show you how to find love the day you receive it -- not after you've lost 20 pounds, not after you've spent money on a new wardrobe, not after you've been rejected by fifty other men, but the day you receive it! Just the way you are." Then a diet article.
Linck is in the bathroom, a room he thoroughly approves of because it has a tub long enough to stretch out in, a rubberized headrest, and a reading light. He runs his bath, hot with a little admixture of cold, until it is within a few inches of the drain; then he turns off the hot, turns the cold water on full. Probably because of the frostbite he suffered as a child, his toes are less tolerant of heat than the rest of his body, and he has worked out this method of dividing his bathwater into zones.
When the tub is full he steps into it, carrying his bathtub book -- today it is "The Pound Era," by Hugh Kenner -- and lowers his buttocks with care into the water. When he is seated in the tub with his legs drawn up, he propels himself gently backward and lowers his body, with grunts of pleasure, until it is submerged.
In the few moments after he sits in the tub and before he lies down, he has noticed, as he always does in this house, that the light from the wall behind him makes visible certain curious turbulent shadows in the water. At first he supposed that oils from his skin, liberated by the heat, were swirling out into the tub; but by holding his forearm a few inches under the surface, he has been able to determine that the shadows come from a level higher than his submerged body, and it is now his opinion that these squirming ideograms are caused by the sudden admixture of the hot and cold zones of the bathwater.