If that man followed her home?
Years ago, a student in London, she had modeled for a class. They were sketching heads, torsos. The instructor had been a peculiar man—middle-aged, wheedling, argumentative, but enormously talented, a big man with hairy arms. He had always spilled coffee on the floor, knocked ashes everywhere. Pauline had sat there in the center of a circle, motionless. She had never been shy or self-conscious. Her face, protected by its film of impersonality, was invulnerable . . . The instructor’s name was Julius. She had sat on a stool, relaxed, and he had stood wrenching her into shape, turning her face one way, then another. “Remain like that. Don’t complicate our lives,” he said. Somewhere on the other side of the silent, working students he had stood, smoking, staring at her. He had a large ungainly, gracefully clumsy body. He never talked to anyone personally, he never bothered to look anyone in the eye. She loved him, with rushes of enthusiasm that did not last, imagining him kneeling before her, kissing her knees, in the pose of a certain decadent painting . . . and her staring down through mild, half-closed eyelids at him, uncomprehending. But nothing happened. One day she imagined he was about to embrace her—they were alone for some reason in the studio—she had an uncanny, terrifying moment when she was certain he was going to embrace her, pressing her face against his, his large hands wild in her hair . . . But he only opened a drawer and some objects inside rattled around. She had gone out into the wet air relieved, ready to weep, feeling totally herself once more.
Since that time she had thought herself in love with two other men, one of them a painter who still lived in this city but whom she no longer bothered to see, another a lawyer, the son of a wealthy couple in her parents’ set of friends. But nothing had happened. Nothing. She had approached them as if in a dance, she had noticed something in their faces, a certain intense yearning, and she had gracefully, shyly, permanently withdrawn, not even allowing the surface of her skin to register the excitement and dread she had felt. So it had ended. She was complete in herself, like the heads she made, and like them she felt her skin a perfect organ, covering her, a surface that was impregnable because it was so still and cold.
Statue of Mars. Brandishing a spear, attacking. The muscular body is in contrast with the graceful pose, almost a dancer’s pose. One hand holds the lance, the other probably holds a libation bowl. Lips are inlaid in copper and eyes in some colored material; helmet separate and attached. Gently modeled eyes, strange expression of mouth, almost a smile. Tension of body: elegance of face. Small, tight, careful curls descending around ear, down onto cheek.
EMERGENCY NUMBERS:
FIRE POLICE SHERIFF DOCTOR
STATE POLICE COAST GUARD
or Dial Operator in any emergency
and say “I want to report a fire
at————” or “I want a policeman
at————”
She was walking with a friend of hers, another art instructor, down a street of bookstores and bars and restaurants, student hangouts. While the man talked, her eyes darted about frantically. It was still cold. She had forgotten her gloves. Her fingers ached with something more than cold, because it was not that cold. Her friend—a married man with four children, a safe man—was talking about something she couldn’t concentrate on when Anthony appeared in a doorway ahead of them. He looked out of breath, as if he had just been running. Pauline had the strange idea that he had run around the block just to head them off. He was staring at them, but her friend noticed nothing, and as if this were a scene carefully rehearsed, everyone between them—students in sloppy overcoats, a Negro woman with her children—moved away, clearing the view. Pauline and her friend were going to pass Anthony by a few feet, pass right by him. There was nothing she could do. She stared at him, unable to look away, catching the full angry glare of his eyes, the tension in his head. Cords in his neck were prominent. His coat was open, his hands thrust in his pockets. He glared at her, his glare surrounding her as if the coldness were forming a halo, magically, about her body. The line of his jaw was very hard, his mouth was slightly open as if he were breathing with great difficulty . . .
He jumped out at them, grabbing her arm. She tried to break loose. In silence he swung a knife, the blade suddenly bright and decorative, and slashed at his own throat. Pauline screamed. Her friend yanked her away, but not before Anthony’s blood had splashed onto her. “What are you doing? What—what is this?” the man cried. Anthony, staggering, caught her around the hips, the thighs, as he fell heavily, and she had not the power to break herself loose from him; she stared down at the top of his head, paralyzed.
In a few minutes it was over.
He was taken away; it was over. Her friend answered the policeman’s questions. An ambulance had come with its lights and siren but now it was gone. “It’s all over. Don’t think about it,” her friend said, as if speaking to one of his own children. Pauline was not thinking about anything. She walked woodenly, looking down at her blood-splattered shoes. Her coat was smeared with blood in front. Her stockings might have been bloody also, but she could not see; she walked stiffly, not bending at the waist, her shoulders rigid.
“You’d think they would catch people like that before they do something violent,” her friend said.
Teen-aged girls, passing them on the sidewalk, stared in amazement at Pauline.
MAN SLASHES OWN THROAT IN UNI-
VERSITY AREA
Anthony Drayer, 35, of no fixed address, slashed his own throat with a butcher knife this noon on Second Avenue. He is in critical condition at Metropolitan Hospital. No motive was given for the act
TEMPERATURE HOVERS AT 32°;
WEATHERMEN PREDICT FAIR AND WARMER THIS WEEKEND
When she got home, she went right up to her bathroom, avoiding the maid. Safe. She tore off her coat, sobbing, she threw it onto the floor, and stared at her legs—blood still wet on her knees, on her legs, splattered onto her shoes. As if paralyzed, she stared down at her legs; she could not think what this meant. She kept seeing him in the doorway, his chest heaving, waiting, and she kept reliving the last moment when she knew unmistakenly that she dare not pass near him, it could not be done; and yet she had said nothing to the man she was with, had kept on walking as if in a trance. Why? Why had she walked straight toward him?
She was shivering. In horror, she raised her skirt slowly. More blood on her stockings. On the inside of her thigh, smeared there. It was a puzzle to her, she could not think. Why was that man’s blood on her, what had happened? Had he really stabbed himself with a knife? How could a man bring himself to draw a blade hard across his own throat, why wouldn’t the muscles rebel at the last instant, freezing?
She took off her stockings and threw them away. In a ball, squeezed in her fist, they seemed harmless. Blood on her legs, thighs. She stared. What must she do next?
She took a bath. She scrubbed herself.
She fell onto her bed and slept heavily, as if drugged.
On the table are four heads in a white material, a ceramic material. It shines, gleams cheaply, light glares out of the eyes of the heads . . . The first head is my own, the face is my own. A blank white face. The next face is my own, but smaller, pinched. Shocked. The next head, also white, is my own head again . . . my own face . . . the lips drawn back in a look of hunger or revulsion, the eyes narrowed. Can that be my face, so ugly a face? The fourth head is also mine. White, stark white. A band tight around the head has emphasized a vein on my temple, a small wormlike vein in white, standing out. The eyes are stern and empty, like the eyes in Greek statues, gazing inward, fulfilled. That head is in a trance-like sleep, like the sleep of a pregnant woman. I walk around and around the table as if choosing. My hands are itching for work of my own. I can feel the white clay beneath my fingernails, but when I look down it is not clay but blood, hardening in the cracks of my hands.
Driving to the Institute, she was overcome by a sudden attack of nausea and had to pull her car over to the side. Now it was Apri
l. She sat for a while behind the wheel, too faint to get out, helpless. The nausea passed. Still she did not drive on for a while but remained there, sitting, listening intently to the workings of her body.
The doctor stands above me. I am lying on an old-fashioned table, he is holding a large pair of tweezers, his glasses are rimmed by metal, he is bald, the formation of forehead shines, bumps shine in the light, I am ready to scream but the straps that hold down my legs also hold back my screams . . . This happened centuries ago. A slop pail is beneath the sink. The doctor holds up his tweezers to the light and blows at a curly dark hair that is stuck to them . . . the hair falls slowly, without weight . . . While teaching her class, she felt a sudden urgency to get out of the room. She went to the women’s rest room. Safe. She stared at herself in the mirror, seeing a tired, pale, angry face. Dull splotches of the metal that backed the mirror showed through, giving her a leprous look. She recalled a mirror like this in a public rest room, herself a girl of thirteen, pale and scared and very ignorant. She had thought she was pregnant. At that time she had thought pregnancy could happen to any woman, like a disease. Like cancer, it could happen.
For weeks she had imagined herself pregnant. Her periods had been irregular and very painful. She struck at her stomach, weeping, she went without eating until she was faint . . . One day, kneeling with her forehead pressed against her old bathtub, thinking for the five-thousandth time of the terrible secret she held within her, she had felt the first painful tinge of cramps and then a slight, reluctant flow of blood . . . So she was not pregnant after all . . .?
How did a woman get pregnant?
She lifted her skirt again to stare at the smooth white skin of her leg. Blank. Blood had been smeared there, but now it was clean; she showered every morning and took a hot bath every night, anxious to be clean and soothed and free of his blood.
The living cells of the blood, insatiably hungry for more life, flow upward. They rise anxiously, viciously upward . . . in test tubes they may be observed defying the well-known law of gravity. Also, blood splashed onto bread mould will devour it and be nourished by it. Also, blood on foreign skin or fur will harden into a scab and work its way into the new flesh, draining life from it. Also, blood several days old, dropped into tubes containing female reproductive cells, will unite with these cells and form new life.
At a dinner party one Saturday in April. Her escort was a bachelor, a lawyer. She rose suddenly from the table, trembling, careful to pull back her chair without catching it in the rug, her head bowed, demure, her diamond earrings brushing coldly against her cheeks. Not all the candlelight of this room could warm those earrings or those cheeks. She hurried to the bathroom, she clutched at her head, her face, she realized with a stunning certainty that she was pregnant.
She was sick to her stomach, as if trying to vomit that foreign life out of her.
On Monday, not wanting to worry her mother, she drove out though she had no intention of teaching her class. She parked around the university and walked for hours. She was looking for him, for evidence of him. Her breasts felt sore, her thighs and shoulders ached. She knew that she could not be pregnant and yet she was certain she was pregnant. Her face burned. After hours of walking, exhausted, she called a cab and went back home, abandoning her car. She wept.
“I just found out about Drayer,” Martin said, stammering. “They said he cut himself and attacked a woman, and I knew it would be you, I knew it . . .” Pauline was silent, holding the telephone to her ear without expression. “I knew something like that would happen! He was very strange, he never appreciated what I did for him, he was forgetful, like a child—he was always forgetting my name and he had no gratitude—he was like a criminal—I would never have introduced you but he insisted upon it, he said he couldn’t take his eyes off your face—I knew I shouldn’t have done it, please, do you forgive me? Pauline? Do you forgive me?”
She hung up.
A woman in a stiff brocade dress, wearing jewels. Evening. Candlelight. Her face is shadowed . . . is it my mother, my aunt? She opens the window, which is a door, and a large dog appears. It is a greyhound, elegant and spoiled and lean, with a comely head. The woman takes hold of the dog’s head in both hands, staring into its eyes. The dog begins to shake its head . . . its teeth flash . . . foam appears on its mouth . . . I turn away with a scream, slamming my hand flat on the key-board of a piano: the notes crash and bring everything to a stop.
Her mother was packing the large suitcase with the blue silk lining. Weeping, her mother. Her back is shaking. A friend of her mother’s talks patiently to Pauline, who lies hunched up in bed, rigid. “If you would try to relax. If you would let us dress you,” the woman says. Her own son, at the age of seventeen, once tried to kill her: so she has had experience with this sort of thing. No doubt why Pauline’s mother called upon her.
“You understand that you cannot be pregnant and that you are not pregnant,” the doctor says. He shapes his words for her to read, as if she might be deaf. She feels the foreign life inside her, hard as stone.
Bleeding from the loins, she aches with cramps, coils of cramps. The blood seeps through the embryonic sack, not washing it free. How to get it free? She has a sudden vision, though she is not sleeping, of a tweezers catching hold of that bloodswollen little sack and dragging it free . . .
Dr. Silverman, a friend of her father’s, visits her in this expensive hospital. He talks to her kindly, lovingly, holding her stone fingers. He is a very cultured man who, having lost most of his own family in a Nazi death camp, is especially suited to talk to her, arguing her out of madness and death. No doubt why her mother called upon him.
Her hair has been cut off short. She cannot hear him.
The nurse says sourly, “You’ll get over it.” She is lying in warm water, frightened by a terrible floating sensation, as if her organs are floating free inside her, buoyed up by the water. Only the embryo is hard, hard as stone, fixed stubbornly to her arteries. She tries to scream but cannot scream. Anyway, it is dangerous to open her mouth: they feed her that way, tearing open her mouth and inserting a tube.
. . . He is an ancient Chinese, his face unclear. He stands fishing in a delicate stream, his heavy, coarse robe pulled up and tucked in his belt. He catches a fish and pulls it out of the water, pulls it off the hook with one jerk of his hand . . . he tosses the fish onto the bank where the other fish lay, bleeding at the mouth, unable to close their eyes . . .
Her mother brings a box of candy. Cheeks haggard, spring coat not very festive. She is a widow, and now it is beginning to show. She sits by the bedside weeping, weeping . . .”Do you hear me? Why don’t you talk to me? Do you hate me unconsciously? Why do you hate me?” Her mother weeps, words are all she knows, she turns them over and over again in her mind. “That man . . . you know . . . the one who stabbed himself, well, it was in the paper that he finally killed himself, in the hospital where he was being kept . . .
Why don’t you hear me, Pauline? I said that man did away with himself. He won’t bother you any more, he can’t bother you. Are you listening? Why aren’t you listening?”
She lies listening.
It is a monument in dark stone. A body is being cremated. Birds in the air, crows. It is finally spring and everything is loose. Children are running around the base of the monument, with no eye for it. What do children care about the monuments of the world! They throw flowers at one another . . . Atop the monument is a statue, two figures. One is a youth with curly hair, a thick torso, protruding blank eyes. The set of his mouth shows him both angry and frightened. The other figure is an angel of death, a beautiful woman with outspread wings, though her body is shaped unnaturally from the waist down. She holds out her hand to the young man.
I am standing before him. He sinks to his knees and embraces me, he presses his face against me. Leaning over him, with lust and tenderness that is violent, like pain, I clutch him to me, I feel the tight muscles of his shoulders, I press my face against the top
of his head . . .
We kneel together. We press our faces together, our tears slick and warm . . . warm . . .
Running Down
M. JOHN HARRISON
I knew Lyall, certainly, and I was in the Great Langdale Valley at the time: but I had no place in the events of that Autumn in the late 70s—no active place, that is; and I could no more have prevented them that the eroded heather of the rhacomitrium-heath can “prevent” the wind. More important, perhaps, I could not have foreseen, much less averted, Lyall’s end. He may have been insane long before the nightmare of Jack’s Rake, but that does not explain why the earth shook; he may have murdered the hapless woman who lived with him to further some fantastic metaphysical image he had of himself, but that relates in no way you or I could understand to what I saw on the summit of Pavey Ark in the early hours of a haunted morning, the ascent that has remained with me, waking or sleeping, ever since.
Lyall was never more than an acquaintance of mine even at Cambridge, where we shared a room and might have been described as “close”; in fact, there were times when we found it difficult to disguise our dislike for one another. Nevertheless, we clung together, embittered and hurt—neither of us could make any warm contact with our contemporaries. To be honest: no-one else would put up with us, so we put up with each other. It’s common enough. Even now, Cambridge is all comfortable November mists, nostalgic ancient quadrangles, the conspiracy of the choir practicing at King’s—pure, ecstatic, and a constant wound to the outsider. It was inevitable that Lyall and I press those wounds together to achieve some sort of sour blood-fraternity. I suppose that’s hard to understand; but it must be a common enough human compulsion.
Strangeness Page 18