The Solitudes

by John Crowley

  “Syrinx,” said Pierce when the piper stopped to shake spit from his instrument.

  “What say?”

  “The pipes,” Pierce said. “Syrinx is their name. She was a girl, a nymph, that the god Pan loved. And chased.” He paused to swallow. “She was chaste, I mean she tried to get away, and just as he reached her some other god or goddess took pity on her and changed her into a bunch of reeds. At the last moment.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Yup. And Pan made his pipes from the reeds. Syrinx. Same word as ‘syringe’ by the way—a hollow reed. And he blows her to this day.”

  “So who calls the tune?” the piper asked. He tried a note. “You can’t play much on it.”

  “You can play,” Pierce said, “the Music of the Spheres. In fact.”

  “Maybe after a few lessons.” The curl of his mouth and his light, husky voice made it seem he was about to laugh, as though he and Pierce shared a secret joke. “I was trying for ‘Three Blind Mice.’”

  Pierce laughed, thinking of octaves and ogdoads, Pythagoras and Orpheus’s lyre. He could go on. It was the smoke; he rarely smoked these days, it only made him paradoxical and cryptic, he had found, whatever clarity it seemed to create within him, which made him doubt the clarity. The piper looked at him as though trying to make him out, or remember who he was, still smiling that smile of pleasant complicity. “I’m a stranger here,” Pierce said. “Name’s Pierce Moffett. I came with Spofford.”

  “My name’s Beau.” He offered no hand, though his smile broadened.

  “I’m not supposed to be here,” Pierce said.

  “Oh yes?” Something about Pierce or his explanation tickled the piper more and more.

  “I was headed somewhere else entirely. I was buswrecked. So.”

  “So you’re a crasher. Just broke right on in.”

  “Right.”

  “Not hurt, though?”

  “Hm?”

  “Hi, Rosie,” Beau called into the darkness. “Come talk.” Pierce looked into the crowd of people passing. A dark girl walking away, beer in her hand, glanced back at him just then and caught his eye, and smiled as though she knew him, and went on.

  “Well,” said Beau, fingering the stops of his pipe, “if you’re here, I guess you put yourself in the way of it. Right? One way or another.”

  “Well, that’s so,” Pierce said. He set down his plate, and instantly there was a dog to investigate it, who found nothing of interest. “That’s so, I suppose, in a way.”.

  The child in Beau’s lap lifted his head, wanting more music. Beau played. Pierce rose and wandered away after the smile he had seen, which had disappeared amid the partygoers. Syrinx. Now what would an item like that go for around here, that was a real hot item, special this month. Only he would have to show his wares in order to sell them, and showing them gave them away. What would you pay to know where, why that pipe, what that pipe’s intervals can be made to picture or echo. … She sat on a log down by the shore, a little apart it seemed; when she twisted her long hair in her hands, he knew her. He heard someone passing say to her:

  “Hey, is Mike coming, do you know?”

  She shrugged, shook her head, Mike wasn’t coming; or no, she didn’t know; or she refused the question. Or all three. She seemed briefly embarrassed, and drank thirstily.

  “Hello, Rosie,” Pierce said, standing over her. “How’s Mike?” It was the smoke, the damned smoke and drink making him devilish.

  “Fine,” she said automatically, looking up and smiling again; her teeth were brightly white, large and uneven, long canines and one front one chipped. “I forget you,” she said.

  “Well hell,” he said, sitting beside her, “hell of a note.”

  “Are you in The Woods? I don’t know everybody there.”

  “In the woods?”

  “Well,” she said, looking helpless.

  “That was an imposition,” Pierce said. “A joke. You don’t know me from Adam.” And how will we know, when we get to Paradise, which man there is Adam, without being told? Special this week.

  She seemed to take no offense, only looked at him curiously, waiting for more. She had the long-nosed, plump-cheeked look of an Egyptian cat sculpture; the summer dress she had pulled on was pretty and childish. “No,” he said, “really. I’m a friend of Spofford’s. I came along with him.”

  “Oh.”

  “We knew each other in the city. I’m visiting. I’m sort of thinking of throwing in with him here, though. Getting into sheep.” He laughed, and she did too, it seemed like a punch line; at that moment Spofford himself appeared out on the little pier, with others, doffing his clothes.

  “So you know all these people?” she asked.

  “Not a bit,” he said. “I thought you would.”

  “It’s not exactly my crowd.”

  “But Spofford.”

  “Oh, well, yes.” Spofford was naked now, except for his broad straw hat; he was being challenged by the others; horseplay was threatened, but Spofford drew apart, holding them off.

  “Best-looking man here,” Pierce said. “I think.”

  “Do you.”

  “Far as I can tell.”

  “What about the guy I saw you talking to before?”

  “Cute,” Pierce said. “Not my type, though.”

  They watched Spofford whisk off his straw hat and skim it down the pier; then he poised himself, looking in fact (Pierce noticed) very striking, and dived.

  “Mm,” Pierce said. “I like that.”

  She giggled, watching him watch, holding her glass in both hands; she looked into it, and found it empty. Louder music was beginning, thud thud thud of a portable stereo, there were glad cries and encouragements for this. Pierce drew from his pocket a slim silver flask—a gift of his father’s, someone else’s initials were on it, it was worn plate but Axel had thought it just the thing for his son—and uncapped it.

  “I don’t usually drink hard stuff,” she said.

  “Oh?” he said, poised to pour.

  “It’s not good for me.” She moved her glass beneath the spout, and Pierce poured scotch, he had filled the flask and put it in his bag when he left the city, you never know, clever of him.

  “So how did you say I know you?” she asked, lifting her cup to stop him pouring, as priests had always done when he poured wine for them at Mass.

  “You don’t, yet.” He capped the flask, taking nothing. He suddenly wanted to be clear-headed. Among the Adamites there was no shame in nakedness; no sin for the saved. He felt goat-footed among them, uninvited but himself also, for other reasons, unashamed. “I never saw you before tonight.” He indicated the water. “Rising from the Deep.”

  “Oh yes?” she said, returning his look. The music chugged and rang, and her head moved to it, laughter in her eyes. “You liked that too?”

  They both laughed then, heads close together; her eyes—maybe it was the moon, which had come overhead and gone small and white but brighter than ever—her eyes glittered with moisture but didn’t seem soft; it was as though they were coated thinly and finely with ice or crystal.

  The music was both new and old, supplemented by a gang of instruments the people produced, rattles and bangers and cowbells and bongos. The dancing was eclectic too, with overtones of country clodhopping and Shaker ecstasies; everyone joined, or nearly everyone, Pierce sat it out mostly, in the city these days the dancing was done chiefly by semiprofessionals, wiry boys dashed with sweat and glitter you wouldn’t want to compete with—Pierce had no skill in it anyway, and for this happy corybanting he had no taste; even in the days of the great parade he had not been good at melding with the throng and going with the flow. A fogey. And it was of that parade that he was reminded here, by the bouncing folk and the homemade rhythms, as if a contingent or spur of it had split off back then and wound up here and kept on turning in happy ignorance of what elsewhere had become of their fellows; still piping, still corybanting, going naked but raising kids and vege
tables and baking bread and breaking it with others in the old new hospitality. Couldn’t be so, not really; it was the smoke (the old taste of it was in his mouth, sweetish and burnt, he had never been able to describe it, artichokes and woodsmoke and buttered popcorn) and the sense he had of having stumbled in among them, city dirt in his pores and city vices in his heart.

  Flirting. Only flirting. He could see Spofford nowhere in the maze of dancers or on the now-still water. Rosie turned and shuffled with the rest, impossible to tell if she had a partner, or if anybody did. The advantage to a watcher of this sort of dancing was that, since there were no rules of movement, it revealed character; there was no way to be good at it except to have a natural sense of rhythm and the knack of displaying it. Rosie moved dreamily and privately, erect, long hair aswing. She seemed to be unassimilated to the rout, though part of it, as though she had gone native amid a primitive tribe who, less graceful than she, knew better than she why they were doing this dance.

  At a change of music she came over to him, a little flushed, her high evident only in the brightness of her eyes. “Don’t you wanna dance?”

  “I don’t dance much,” Pierce said. “But save me the waltz.”

  “You still have that teeny bottle?”

  He uncapped it; she had lost her glass, and drank from the flask; so did he, then she again. She looked around herself. “There’s one thing about your friends,” she said. “They can be a little cliquish. No offense.”

  “They seem very hospitable to me.”

  “Well, sure. To you.”

  “Honest,” said Pierce, rising, “I just got here.” And for her information: “I’ll probably be leaving tomorrow. Or the next day. Soon, anyway. For good.” He began to walk down toward the water; she followed. Where had Spofford vanished to? Out on the water a rowboat turned lazily, full of children being rowed around. Another rowboat was tied to the pier.

  “No,” she said. “You were throwing in with Spofford. Getting into sheep.” She handed him the flask. “How come you keep changing your story?”

  “I live in New York,” he said. “Have for years.”

  “You think so?” Brightly.

  “So listen,” he said. “If it’s not your crowd, and it’s cliquish, why did you come?”

  “Oh, to swim. And dance. Just look around.”

  “For somebody in particular?”

  “No,” she said, regarding him as frankly as her strange crystallized eyes allowed, “nobody in particular.”

  Pierce drank. “Would you,” he said courteously, “be interested in going for a row? In the moonlight?”

  “Can you row?” And then, like a kid: “I can. I’m good at it.”

  “Well, good,” Pierce said, taking her elbow. “We can spell each other.” Another punch line, the smoke could transform any remark into one, he laughed at that and at the rowboat he was untying (the pointy end he remembered went first with the operator facing backward) and, also, at a warm certainty just then hatching within him. He took off shoes and socks and left them on the pier, rolled his pants to his knees and pushed off, clambering in himself with not quite the grace he had hoped for.

  He maneuvered the old boat out into the moonlight, gradually putting back into his muscles skills he had learned long ago on the Little Sandy River and its cricks and branches; once again that old road seemed to lead here, knock of oarlocks and gulp of soft night water on the bows. “So,” he said. “The Blackberry River.”

  “Oh, this isn’t the river really,” she said. She was straddling her seat, moving her feet to keep them out of the seepage at the bottom. “Just a backwater. The real river’s over there.” She pointed, thought, drew her finger along the bank. “Over there.”

  He looked over her shoulder, but could see no exit. “Shall we go see?”

  “If I can find the channel. More port,” she said. “No, more port. That way.”

  Pierce pulled, catching a crab and nearly tumbling backward into the bows; she laughed and asked if he was sure he knew how to do this, reminding him of his claim to know in the same disbelieving tone she had taken toward his stories of who he was and where he had come from. He ignored it, and composed himself, looking over his shoulder at what seemed an impassable thicket of tangled trees. The current tugged gently at the boat, and more by its effects than by her directions they slid into a tunnel made of moonlight and willows.

  Pierce shipped one oar, it was too narrow here to row, and the current knew the way. He kept them from the tangled feet of trees and tall bullrushes with the other oar, stilled and feeling enormously privileged. How had he deserved this, this beauty, how did they; she, who lived always within having distance of it, of these willows drowning their long hair, these water-lilies floating in their sleep? How could it not make you both good and happy?

  She trailed one hand in the water. “Warmer than the air,” she said. “How can that be.”

  “A swim?” he said, his heart all in a moment in his throat.

  “Well lookee here,” she said, hand in the single patch pocket of her dress. “I have found a number here in my pocket.” She held it up to him, between a V of fingers like a Lucky in an old ad. “Do you have a match?”

  In its flare she looked at him, her face changed or revealed further by matchlight; questioning or for some reason uncertain, afraid even. The match went out.

  “There,” she said, pointing.

  They entered onto the river, a wide avenue black and bordered with immense trees; an avenue of humid sky matched it above. The current turned them idly toward the mystery of the bank; Pierce unshipped his oars and dipped them. As faint as though proceeding from the blurred and goldish constellations, the tinkle and murmur of the party’s music.

  “You’re going to get stuck,” Rosie said calmly.

  He pulled his right oar, but the boat struck something projecting from the bank, and swung around. It was a little wooden landing stage, and the boat lay up there now ready to be tied, like an old horse who has led a new rider back to its stable.

  Okay. All right. The little pier led to stairs, though nothing could be seen at the top of them. “Explore?” he said. “Go ashore and forage.”

  “Oooh.”

  But he had thrown the painter around a piling in two quick loops, that boating trick at least he remembered. He rose to help her out.

  “What if somebody lives here.”

  “Friendly natives.”

  “Maybe a dog.”

  Her hand was small and moist, and he felt, hand on her back to put her ashore, the cotton of her dress slide against the silk of her skin. Beside her, he offered the flask again. They listened to the silence.

  “Don’t be a scaredy-cat,” she said, taking his arm. Slowly, in care for their bare feet uncertain of the ground beneath, they went up the stairs—logs only, forced into the soft earth, and a big root commandeered—beneath pines that warned them away in awed whispers.

  “A house.”

  A cottage; a big screened porch and a chimney, a swayed rooftree outlined against a moonlit open distance. The pineneedle-strewn path led up to it. It was dark.

  “Who’s doing that in the dark,” she whispered.

  “What.”

  “The piano.”

  He could hear nothing.

  “The piano,” she said. “Wake up.”

  There was no piano. They walked around the house; it was a strange composite, its patent moonlit side was stucco and had two stubby pillars supporting an entablature over the door and two arched windows. The big screened porch in back was an afterthought. Beyond what seemed in the moonlight to be velvet lawns and topiary but may have been only meadow was a tall house, many-chimneyed, on a wooded rise.

  “Their cottage.”

  “Probably.” The big house was dark too. Why were they whispering? Their tour took them back to the dark side, the screened porch. It needed repair: here by the door a hole big enough for a hand. Pierce put a hand through, and as though he were practiced at
this, a yegg, a spy, slid open the bolt.

  It was not, any of it, any choice of his, except the choice to do all that was offered. If he had been led by some shining psychopomp into a fabulous otherwhere, Elysium’s fountains and mountains, he could not have felt more removed from his daily self, less responsible. Drink this. Eat this. And she went ahead of him through the door, taking slow steps, wondering.

  The place had been long uninhabited. Two broken wicker chairs were all the porch held. Rosie tried the door into the house; it was locked. But the large window beside it, when Pierce pushed it up, gaped open, making a shocked noise like an indrawn breath. He stepped over the low sill.

  Odor of mothballs and mice, moldered wallpaper and dead summers past. When, where had he once before broken into a locked place that smelled so, a place where old summers had been left? There was a rolled rug like a cadaver in one corner, but nothing else. Moonlight lay in cool rhomboids on the floor.

  “What if it’s not safe.” Her voice was loud in the vacant indoors. She turned to face him, slashed with window light, and with a single step he was with her.

  She met him with no surprise but with what eagerness he couldn’t tell; he fed not greedily but wholly on her anyway, as though drinking water; when he was filled, momentarily, and drew away, she parted from him with a little drunken bob like a bee-visited blossom; and, her hand falling from his breast where she had pressed him but not pressed him away, she walked off. “This is the living room,” she said.

  There was another room after that, where a card table cocked a bad leg back as though favoring it, and a black stove had pulled its long arm half out of the hole in the wall. Kitchen. Bathroom. “Oh look,” she said. “Secret.”

  A door in the bathroom led to a further room. Another addition? There was no other way into it, it seemed, except through the bathroom. An iron bedstead stood askew there, stunned, caught out, a thin buttoned mattress sprawled across its springs. Pierce from the door watched Rosie approach it with slow steps. Then she looked back at him, sharply he thought, as though he had surprised her here, startled her—and then he had come up behind her and encircled her.