The Pattern

I lie on this great immovable bed — it is bolted down, I am nearly sure of it — and follow the pattern around by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you.

I start, we will say, at the bottom, in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless thing to some kind of conclusion.

I know a little about pattern. I made my living at it for eleven years. A repeating design is built on one of four things, or on a deliberate breaking of one of the four, and if you break one you had better know which one you broke. This paper was built on none of them. It repeats by the strip, and otherwise it is a free-for-all.

Looked at one way, each strip stands alone: bloated curves and flourishes waddling up and down in fat columns of their own self-satisfaction.

And then, on the other hand, the strips connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in long slanting waves of optic horror, like a bed of kelp in a fast current all going one way at once.

The whole thing goes horizontally too, or seems to, and somebody ran a border strip sideways along the top of the wall and called it a frieze, which is responsible for most of what is wrong with this room.

There is one end of the wall where it is nearly intact, and there, when the afternoon light goes flat and the low sun hits it straight, I can almost believe in a scheme after all: the interminable grotesques seem to arrange themselves around a common center and rush off in headlong plunges, all equally deranged.

It makes me tired to follow it. I will take a nap, I think.

I do not know why I should write this down. I do not want to. I do not feel able.

And I know Hollis would find it absurd. But I have to say what I feel and think somewhere, and the saying is such a relief.

Though the effort is getting to be greater than the relief. Half the time now I am awfully lazy, and I lie down ever so much more than the schedule says. Hollis says I must not lose my strength, and has me on protein at every meal, and bone broth, and a supplement the color of a taxicab, to say nothing of the iron and the pills.

Dear Hollis. He loves me very dearly and he cannot stand it that I am sick. The other day I tried to have a real, earnest, reasonable conversation with him about going down to the city for a few weeks, to Dov and Ines, to my old studio, to anyone. He said I was not able to travel and not able to stand it when I arrived, and I did not make out much of a case for myself, because I was crying before I got to the end of the second sentence.

It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness, I suppose.

And my dear Hollis picked me up and carried me up the stairs and laid me on the bed and sat with me and read to me until the reading made my head ache. He said I was his darling and his comfort and all he had, and that I must take care of myself for his sake and get well.

He says that nobody but me can help me out of this, that I must use my will and my self-control, and not let any silly fantasy run away with me.

There is one comfort, at least. The baby is well and happy and does not have to live in this room with the horrid paper. If we had not taken it, that blessed child would have had it. What a fortunate escape for him. I would not have a child of mine, an impressionable little thing, sleeping in this room for anything, and I say that as a woman who cannot currently be left alone with her own son for twenty minutes.

I never thought of it before, but it is lucky that Hollis kept me up here after all. In June I would have traded this room for the one downstairs in a heartbeat, and now I would not trade it for anything, and I cannot tell you when that changed. I can stand it so much more easily than a baby could. That is a strange sentence to be proud of and yet I am.

Of course I never mention the paper to them any more. I am too wise for that. But I keep watch.

There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, and that nobody ever will.

Behind the outside pattern the dim shapes get a little clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind the front design.

I do not like it a bit. I wonder — I am beginning to think — I wish Hollis would take me away from here.

It is hard to talk to him about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so.

But I tried it again last night. It was moonlight. The moon comes in all around this room the way the sun does, and I hate to see it sometimes, the way it creeps, always coming in by one window or another, as if it were working its way around the house looking for something.

Hollis was asleep and I hated to wake him, so I kept still and watched the moonlight on that undulating wallpaper until I felt creepy all over. The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, the way a person shakes a fence to see if it will come loose.

I got up softly to feel whether the paper actually moved, and when I came back to bed he was awake.

"What is it, little girl?" he said. "Don't go walking around like that, you'll get cold."

I thought it was a good moment, so I told him that I truly was not gaining here, and that I wanted him to take me away.

"Why, darling," he said, "it is the middle of August, the lease is up in three weeks, and I can't see how we would leave before that. The repairs at home aren't finished, and I can't get out of the city right now, and the covering physician for my service is on his own vacation. If you were in any danger I could and I would. But you really are better, dear, whether you can see it or not. I'm a doctor. You're gaining weight, you have color in your face, you're eating. I feel much easier about you than I did in June."

"I haven't gained an ounce," I said. "And my appetite may be better at dinner, when you're here, but it is worse in the mornings, when you are not."

"Bless her little heart," he said, with a huge hug. "She can be as sick as she likes after seven o'clock. Now let's use the shining hours to sleep, and talk about it in the morning."

"And you won't take me away?"

"How can I, dear? It is three weeks more and then we'll take a nice little trip of a few days while Nita and Della get the house in the city ready for us. Really, dear. You are better."

"Better in body, perhaps." And then I stopped, because he sat straight up and looked at me with such a stern and reproachful face that I could not get another word out.

"My darling," he said, "I am begging you, for my sake and for our son's sake and for your own, never for one instant to let that idea into your mind. There is nothing so dangerous for a temperament like yours, and nothing so attractive. It is a false and foolish fantasy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?"

So of course I said no more on that subject, and we went to sleep before long. He thought I went first. I did not. I lay there for hours trying to decide whether the front pattern and the back pattern really did move together, or whether they moved separately.

On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind.

The color is hideous enough and unreliable enough and infuriating enough, but the pattern is the torturing part. You think you have mastered it, and then just as you get under way, following it nicely, it turns a backflip and there you are: it slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and walks over you. It is the mistake I was trained never to make: a repeat that does not come back to itself.

The outside pattern is a florid arabesque that reminds me of something biological: a string of toadstools budding and sprouting in endless convolutions, grafted onto a kind of trellis.

That is, sometimes.

There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but me, which is that it changes as the light changes. When the sun comes in through the east windows — I always watch for that first long straight ray, it is the closest thing I have to a visitor — it changes so fast that I can never quite believe it. That is why I watch it always.

By moonlight — and the moon is in here all night when there is a moon — I would not know it for the same paper. At night, in any kind of light, at dusk, by the lamp, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars. The outside pattern, I mean. And the woman behind it is as plain as plain.

I did not realize for a long time what the thing behind it was, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure that it is a woman.

By daylight she is subdued and quiet. I think it is the front pattern that keeps her still. It puzzles me. It keeps me quiet for hours at a time, so it cannot be all bad.

There is a funny mark on that wall, down low, near the baseboard. A long even bar of a mark that runs all the way around the room, behind every piece of furniture except the bed, as if something had been rubbed along it over and over and over. Round and round and round. It makes me dizzy to look at it, and I look at it a great deal.

I want to know who did it, and how, and what for. Nobody in this family will tell me anything, and Hollis says it is where a rug was folded against the wall, which is exactly the kind of answer he gives, and exactly the kind I cannot argue with, because it is possible.

Possible is worse than wrong. I could stand it if it were wrong.