I loved—and as if in this state not only did the primal motifs of nature have to keep sounding but also, along with the leitmotif of personal fate, its full theme, so in this love story there was a cool-jazz repetition of what had been a trumpeted marching song of my love for Christa (and was to be an atonal valse musette with Gaia): from building the nest to devouring the mate, from the blissful isolation à deux to the desperate effort to reattain someone who had become unattainable.

THE APARTMENT

(this time):

A model shell of insulated coupledom in the immediate nearness of the present, a spaceship for the icy spheres of absolute earthly happiness. We live in style, the ordinary style of the era: in splendid isolation, which screams to be published in all the relevant widely circulated magazines on the arts of living and interior decoration (Oeil, House and Garden, House Beautiful, Schöner Wohnen): the home of the successful screenwriter and his enchanting companion on this stretch-of-the-road-of-life (a star model from New England, to be seen repeatedly in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Grazia). Hence, the fragrance of the great big world even in the space-saving kitchenette: Chinese spices, hand-forged iron pots for Indonesian rice specialties, shashlik skewers, Swedish designer flatware, health foods (Bauhaus style of nutrition culture: purely functional wheat germ, soybean extract, sea salt, brown sugar). A yoga board for bathroom gymnastics. The house bar is a Hammond organ of luxury consumption: Drambuie and Izarra, Passover wine, tequila, raki. A record collection with early English church music, Vivaldi, Earl Garner, Strauss (Ariadne), Boulez. The furniture (two rooms plus sleeping alcove) showing cultural growth in fast motion: English walnut (Queen Anne) combined with Finnish pieces (mass-produced). The knickknacks: pre-Columbian, Gold Coast, Tang Dynasty, Dada. On the walls: samples of Arabic script, ancient Coptic woven fragments, and the works of masters in whose names Tarzan’s gurgling jungle shriek is abstracted into the flashing, smashing, crashing of the spaceship when it shatters against the satellite: BRAQUE! ARP! WOLS! . . .

I lay in the Le Corbusier armchair (an abstract warrior of steel, fur, and leather), holding the telephone (enameled in clinical white) to my ear:

from it I was drinking in the vast space of night: mythical: like a man who has to drink the ocean in order to reach an island where his happiness is exiled:

the space of night that separated me from Dawn.

She was in Paris in the Hôtel Épicure. Why didn’t she answer? Was she ill? Cheating on me? Was she wandering in a daze through the streets of the bright underworld? I believed that my voice had the power to call her back to me—Orpheus (Schwab had found this image; and I reveled in the way he flinched when I then quoted that line from Cocteau’s Orpheus with which the lovers are sent back to their lives:

“Go on! Go back home to your mud!”)