The Laughter of Adam and Eve

The Love of Pygmalion

37 The Love of Pygmalion You can’t do anything that I could not imagine you would do, and I was tired already of myself, hence you, and hence your face, so featured, breasts depending so, ankles tapered, all to my design, each element selected out of what I’d seen, material to make the unseen visible: golden ratios to figure into limb and trunk, particulars I mused on, street and marketplace: the slender turn of a wrist, or maybe something sturdier, the buoyant curls of hair, or waves or straight fall of the black or fair or red . . . or . . . or . . . No sooner had I planned for any aspect one kind of beauty than I conceived another, and came back round to my first thought, circling for instance several times the same few answers to the question of your neck—whatever troubled, what could decide me ever, stalled often at the swinging gate of either this or that? Dilemma come down to hips, I glimpsed choice’s circuitry: if they were wide they’d be as wide as those I’d sat astride in infancy, if narrow, narrow as mine had been as a boy. Oh, how the goddess struck and struck—and struck, 38 I worshipped where I’d merely engineered perfection, at the mounds and in the grotto of difference, desperate that you be counterpart and other, and other more perfectly than any other could be. Then Venus unrelenting, even in mercy presumptive, brought you to life, where differences weren’t differences enough to rescue me. Your lips’ first trembling smile, déjà vu as on the moving face of water: the scene a pool at which I see myself almost as someone else who gazes down on one whom he thinks someone else but isn’t, so dives in to love himself. If by some vivifying miracle again, such acts had issue, you’d be it. ...