Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel by Hortense Calisher

laughing, perhaps blowing out a bit of thistledown he isn’t aware of: “Secret agent?” and she replies, on a laughing breath back to him: “That was his private nickname for her—Jamie’s first wife. We started a correspondence over the estate, and once in a while we still write.” Jamie had kept his vow never to marry another beaky intellectual; after that, as Linhouse must recall, there had been the Maori girl who died—“and then, me.” And he replies, “Nonsense!” puffing it into the ear he then kisses: “—that man never exactly built you up, did he!” and she shrug-smiles, with the look that can’t help being jampot, and he almost takes her in the back room again—oh witness, that he was no better about her than Jamie—but she, head downcast, the blue airmail letter still in her fist, says no. And “What’s the name mean—EC et cetera,” he asks, in the random of a man so refused, and she identifies it, not that she knows what it means —as Jamie had, to her.
    And this is how he is now able to identify—not that he knows what it means either—the most famous equation in Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.
    On that note, as good as any other, he had left her. The next time they spoke, it was on that doorstep. But—no … But no. Just before he leaves, happening to glance at the familiar red-blue border of the same form his mother always writes on, he says, negligent of his own last words: “British, is she?” Last words, last words. And, indifferent to her own, she says them. Hers. “No, her husband is, they live there, sometimes. No. French.”
    And now intuition creeps up from behind, up and onto the shoulder blades of a man who personally has never even been able to stand the modern way of referring to it, the way they like to beg the question by saying a person “intuits”; it hops up, and there, leg around his neck, it sits. The women. The women, the women, the women—lost and/or disappeared, the women. Somewhere he had missed the connection and somewhere he has got it, the Trojan women, the Trojan—It is four o’clock of a darkish afternoon in Hobbs Hall, not Hades, and we have been gathered here, tympani, tympani, and the doors are closed—tympani- tum. And the voice on the stage is still going on, elegantly furnishing credits and summaries; is boredom the potion we’re being given? Mille basia, Lesbia, oh, give me a thousand kisses and all that—or phrase it more simply— hop! Two thousand years of it since ever they can remember, and all very nice too—they accept the universe. And issuing from them meanwhile, all the little Galileos, sons husbands brothers fathers and uncles—all the only ones getting to look into the lens. Est. But what if a too sudden century or so unbinds not only the feet of the mothers, the girdles, but their pencils—their brains?
    Oh, Catullus. Is this blue-airform informed, bluestocking voice, from wherever she now is, or was—Janice? Who wanted a physicist. Oh Catullus, is this Lesbia now?
    “—and in conclusion,” said the voice …
    And what does she want of us?
    “—If it shall appear that I have said anything worthy—”
    Trust the women not to take over the world without a great deal of preliminary conversation.
    “—do not attribute any such wisdoms to me, please—”
    Or was that still a male idea—taking over? … Say please, Johnnie dear.
    “—but credit my teacher.”
    Who was in all probability Jamison. And this archaic, Indo-European utterance, with its overlay of Philadelphia or perhaps a touch of Merton, was merely some Uncas he had picked up and educated, his final chef d’oeuvre, excavated from the customary Gold Bug spot on the usual archipelago between the two significant rocks.
    Then why does intuition … sit?
    “—and should we not credit all of them from our earliest days, those mistresses of the infinite detail—”
    And what does the witch-bitch want of me, leg-necking me here?
    He glared out at