ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
533
But I must interrupt, for one pretense I can maintain no longer.
I notice that I wander back and forth, speak of the pages which fol–
low, and yet, even as I have the illusion that I put words together
at a desk, and the little actions I describe have already happened to
me, or to others, still I do not know who I am nor where I am, nor
even if literally I write. Yet, just so soon as I suggest that I am with–
out particular embodiment I feel bubbles of laughter at the peculiar
present tense of my consciousness which sees into the past, is recover–
ing the future, and yet does neither, for perhaps I scramble the order
of Time in order to retrieve the order of form from what is formless
and yet over-real. Like the easily distractible feather of attention in
the gales of infancy, I move from dread to light amusement to meta–
physical certainty, and yet away again as if no one
is
so real to me
as the consciousness which leads me now, but for a moment prob–
ably, to the breath of my narrative, and I feel certain-I know not
exactly why-that it was after this party, after the conversation be–
tween Cara Beauchamp and the physicist, that Marion called for the
proper tuition to his instruction and made his demand: Cara was to
give a weekend party in Provincetown for a select two dozen from
their acquaintance, the guests to be flown up and back by chartered
plane, and this in the middle of November when the New York
season was on, and the weather in Provincetown was bound to be bad.
"Marion," she had answered, "explain what you're doing."
His extraordinary face (one of the handsomest cleanest most
sensual faces ever cut from a block of boyish ice) smiled back in arch
thought at her. "I feel in the mood for a party that will go on for
awhile." Then he yawned, and his groin in remonstrance for this
thespian's triumph of the casual, gave him a cruel pinch of a grip.
He was empty again, the charge was down, he was moving into the
late middle-age of some men's middle-thirties, a Dorian Gray whose
secret portrait was fleshed within, painted by the outrages he had ex–
acted of a hundred thousand nerves. He knew the prescription to
reverse the process on the portrait, it was the last of the nostrums
and it had worked once before; it was murder. Brave murder. Brave
murder gave the charge of the man one killed. Time potential and
Time dynamic- it was the grand connection, and the dead man's
Time became one's own Time, his energies regenerated the dead cir–
cuits of one's own empty-balled Time, and one moved away with
