Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick

miscalculation in the political universe. Dragons with seven heads and ten horns: were they not seen this year? A leopard came out of the sea and sank back down. But patience, patience.

PART SEVEN
    L AST YEAR a large new office building began to go up on my small, narrow street in New York. It is an odd street, filled with old apartment houses of modest size which were built just after the turn of the century for the accommodation of artists. “Des Artistes,” as one of the buildings is named, were to work and live in the same quarters, to paint in their ateliers like Frenchmen with little pointed beards, and to eat in their dining rooms off the kitchen like Americans.
    The large windows of the studio room were then covered with opaque glass, according with the theoretical beliefs of the time. The light was dimmed—to free the mind for the light of the imagination? A northern smoothness and easels upon which stood half-finished portraits waiting for the sitter or the model, a colorful old man or a loosely draped girl, or still lifes from the fruit bin.
    I have seen several paintings done here in the house long ago in the grayed daylight. One took as its subject a picnic in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. The women were wearing fashionable clothes of the 1920’s. All was sunlight, flowers and trees and dresses with mauve ribbons.
    The thick glass is gone from most of the windows, but now a new building roars up across the street, arriving with a hideous grinding. Exquisite machinery stands about all day and night, and the steel skeleton with its artful modernity is more fit to decorate the city scene than the new building itself. The noise of construction will one day die down, and yet the light will never return to the artist-building. It is back in its glassy opacity. Perhaps some sort of preservation is taking place.
    The Bois de Boulogne, the picnics, the apples and oranges on tables covered with paisley shawls, agreeable memories recorded in twilight: it is just as well the old painters have slipped away, leaving the space to be occupied by the brilliant electric glow of more recent tenants, the photographers.
    It has happened that someone I do not know is staying in the apartment with me. One of those charitable actions insisted upon by a friend. The stranger, thin as the elegant crane outside the window, casts a shadow because she has arrived when I was thinking about the transformations of memory. She fills the space with both the old and the new twilight, the space reserved for thoughts of my mother. My mother, whom I lived very close to for more than thirty years, is this morning dimmer to me than this friend of a friend.
    Louisa spends the entire day in a blue, limpid boredom. The caressing sting of it appears to be, for her, like the pleasure of lemon, or the coldness of salt water. A striking stasis can be seen in her eyes, nice, empty, withdrawn, and staring eyes—orbs in a porcelain head. At such moments she looks her best, very quiet, her face harmoniously fixed, as if for a camera to which these rooms are now appropriate. My brown, skinny cat stares at her, with a yellowish Oriental gaze much like her own. They often look deeply at each other, but it is a look without seeing, just like two mirrors exactly placed on opposite walls. This morning, her second here, she watched the cat fall asleep, his lids suddenly closing, tightly, quickly, strangely calling upon the operations of a mysterious brain. She said, They can sit for hours, years in front of the television set, but they don’t see it. I cannot understand how it is that nothing changes them.
    Then she would take a cigarette out of the pocket of her smock, a bright piece of colored silk she put on in the morning and changed into immediately after returning from her excursions into the streets. She drew on cigarettes as if they were opium, an addition to the opium within her, the narcotic of her boredom, that large, friendly intimate, so dear and