The Solitudes

by John Crowley

  “You know I’m working for Boney. The Foundation. Full time.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Mike said. “When you were with me you always had a lot of projects. You painted.”

  “I did not.”

  “That kind of thing. Maybe you’re too busy now.”

  The motels and restaurants of the Cascadia strip had commenced, the amoebic geometries of their signs and roofs. The Eaterie. The Morpheus Arms. The Volcano.

  “Actually,” Rosie said, “I’ve been planning a painting.”

  “Yes?”

  “A big one. A lot of work.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s a picture,” she said, improvising, “of Valkyries—is that what you call them, the women warriors who carry away the dead soldiers?”

  “Um, yes. Valkyries.”

  “Well of them. But not in battle. Afterwards. Valkyries disarming. Sitting at the end of day. Taking off their gear.”

  Mike had begun to grin, eyeing her sidewise, interested.

  “Big women,” Rosie said. “But not posing. Not dramatic. Just ordinary; hurting a little maybe; bending over, undoing their whatchamacallits, on their shins. Piles of armor around, like football gear.”

  “Girls’ locker room.”

  “Sort of. But not a joke. Just—realistic.” She had not ever before thought of this subject in fact, had just been handed it, but now could see it with great vividness: the dull glowing Rembrandt colors, a dark nowhere; big glossy bodies of ordinary women, talking, idly checking for bruises, their faces like those in candid snapshots, filled with private thoughts. Who were they?

  “I like it,” Mike said. “A look into the girls’ locker room. Something that’s always appealed to me.”

  “Not like that,” Rosie said. “Not what you’re thinking.”

  “No? So what would they be up to?”

  “They’re just there,” Rosie said. “They’re tired.”

  Mike went on grinning, at a painting of his own. Rosie felt a small familiar irritation, an impatience at being misread, especially misread by Mike’s omnivorous horniness. “So how are you?” she said, turn the tables. “How’s Vampira?”

  “Rosie.”

  “So are you guys going to get married, after this is over?”

  “It’s not really a topic of discussion.” He returned to looking out the window, stroking the place where his mustache had been. Poor guy, Rosie thought glancing over at him; caught in the toils of love.

  Mike had once told her that when he first took courses in psychology they were still talking about a “latency period” in boys, and Mike had been puzzled because he’d never had a latency period. There had never been a time, he said, when he hadn’t wanted to get into the pants of girls, or get girls into his; he’d spent his childhood trying.

  Funny in a psychologist, Rosie thought, that unreflective projection of his desires onto the world that Mike was capable of. His desires were sometimes—often—frustrated, and caused him pain (and dealing with the pain was what Mike called Growth, and Maturity); sometimes he would even say he felt at the mercy of his desires, and better off without them; but still he took them as simple givens, and the value they imparted to what he desired as well. He never considered that desire might make him misunderstand its object. He might say he considered it, but he didn’t.

  That was one reason for the silly threesome that Mike had inveigled her into, her and a counselor from The Woods whom Mike had become entranced with: the simple unquestioned value Mike put on it, his big night, as hard to refuse as an eager kid who wants to shovel your walk or rake your leaves.

  “It might not work out real well for you,” she said, suddenly meaning it. “I mean I know she’s your type, that dark tawny weird type …”

  “Actually she’s very sharp,” Mike said. He lifted his chin, a quick gesture, to free his neck from his shirt collar, a signal that he was talking seriously of himself and his enterprises. “She’s been doing research for me, using the Method. Climacterics. Applying the parameters to sort of random lives. She’s turned up some interesting stuff. She’s very willing.”

  That had been the other reason, of course: Rose, her willingness, her abstracted mild acquiescence. Mike just took it for heat, since he wanted it to be heat. But it was spooky.

  Her eyes somehow not there, not looking at what was there.

  That night had meant nothing to Rosie at the time, or seemed to mean nothing, she had only been surprised at how well it went, and how little aftertaste it left. But in the course of it she had shed something, she saw that now. She had stepped away. She had turned, and begun to walk away. And though maybe she had at first meant only to walk away from Mike and his needs, from her marriage, from Stonykill, she had somehow gone on walking ever since, farther maybe than she ever realized, always away, never toward.

  A huge shudder arose unrefusably within her, and shook her shoulders.

  “What,” Mike said.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Somebody stepped on my grave.”

  The Bison achieved the crest of the last low rise of the Faraways, and the strip leading into Cascadia unrolled across the valley, the gas stations and miniature restaurants and car-lots full of cars like a jumble of brightly colored toys; the road that divided them plowed ahead and was lost in the old gray city, from here almost like a cinquecento view, the crowded neighborhoods and blackened steeples, the dome of the county courthouse.

  If she ever wanted to negotiate hard, Rosie thought, if she needed to, she could hold all that over his head. Call Rose to the stand, and get Allan to force her to tell what Mike and she did together. For Rosie had herself been a Model Single Parent, had been good, had not been much tempted actually. She had done without since that night last summer, the party by the river, the Full Moon Party: when Spofford had slipped her into the shuttered hot-dog stand and laid her on his old brown Navajo blanket, while the party murmured on outside.

  Rosie had learned, in her appearances beside Allan Butterman in court and in arbitrations, why Allan seemed always burdened with intense emotions held just in check. In such circumstances Rosie felt herself awash in swiftly changing feelings, unable to avoid or mitigate them: rage when Mike lied, triumph when Allan answered cogently, guilt, embarrassment, loathing, none of which she liked feeling. These hearings did not seem to Rosie like negotiation at all but like some awful dark ritual in a Piranesi prison, a punishment only after which she would be free: you can go if you can stand this, can walk on these fiery coals, wash in hot bull’s blood. Allan, who surely didn’t feel any of this himself, probably just soaked it up from his clients and those he dealt with, excess vapors.

  “I don’t know how judges can tell,” she said to him during a pause (Mike huddling with his lawyer in a corner opposite). “How do they know if what they decide is right?”

  “They don’t,” Allan said, stretching out his legs and crossing his small feet shod in black. “A judge I know confessed to me once that it really bothered him, the fact that he didn’t know. Not that I was really surprised to hear it. He was very conscious, he said, that all he knew was what was put before him. The husband and the wife are both on their best behavior; the kid in his Sunday suit. If he was their next-door neighbor he’d be in a better position to know. But he has to make his decision based on what he does know, even if what he knows is nowhere near the whole story, or not even the right story, and even though his decision is going to affect all the parties for life.”

  Rosie felt a sudden awful perception, like a blast of cold wind. She might have been wrong in the decision she had made, so instantaneously, to take Sam. When it might really be Mike who after all and in spite of everything loved her more. A gulf seemed to open for a moment within her, beyond which Allan was hard to hear.

  “The only thing that gave this guy comfort,” Allan said, “is that he was pretty sure, if he did make a wrong decision, everybody would be back before him again eventually. And again. Until the whole true story final
ly came out.” He glanced over at Rosie. “I wonder,” he said.

  She tried to insist that Mike get a ride home with his little lawyer, but he argued (did he never get tired?) that he might have to wait for some hours for her to resolve her various courthouse business, and it seemed unreasonable for them not to share the same journey in what had been, until recently, his own station wagon.

  Maybe he was tired after all. He climbed into the back of the wagon, pushing aside the torn coloring-books, the galoshes and maps and ice-cream cups, the empty oil cans, and stretched out. His was the sort of body put to sleep by gentle forward motion and an engine’s noise. He didn’t even wake when Rosie turned off onto a Scenic Overlook and stopped, idling.

  My castle, she thought.

  It was shapeless and comical this close up, like a bunch of random chimneys, and shabby pale from winter, like the rest of the world. Butterman’s. Not hers really, of course, not actually, no matter how long it had stood in her soul like a castle in an allegory, standing for all that was hers.

  All that was hers.

  If she slipped out now, opening the door without waking Mike, she might leap the low barricade there, and make her way down to the river’s edge. She might find a boat there, a row-boat left accidentally, overturned on the shore, its oars beside it; and set out in it across the wrinkled river like gray silk, and reach the rocks of Butterman’s. And then.

  Silly, she thought: as if that pile were far enough away to run and hide in. She would only be found, after a search; and brought back, and made to go on with the life she led or pretended to lead.

  She had in fact done no painting for a long time, though it certainly wasn’t true she had been too busy. It was that she had somehow grown unconvinced of herself as a painter: not doubting her talent or her skill necessarily but only her reasons for doing it, unsure why she or anybody at all did it, painted. My art, my painting.

  It was like the station wagon and the savings bonds and the loan payments Mike wanted to negotiate over: you had to know why you did it in order to bring it off, or get it for your own.

  Mike knew. Mike knew what was his, and what he wanted, and what he loved; and if Rosie was sure that what Mike loved was mostly Mike—that he just went on making a simple mistake, like a kitten batting at its own image in a mirror—well, that might be what love really is, an illusion, but an illusion without which life couldn’t be carried on, like color vision or three dimensions, and Mike had it, and she had lost it.

  No that couldn’t be.

  It couldn’t be: yet she had grown alarmed, hands on the wheel of the wagon, Mike breathing rhythmically behind her.

  My painting. She looked within her for the warmth that the odd vision of Valkyries had given her, but it seemed to have gone. Sam, no, not Sam. My job, then. My dogs. My car. There seemed to be only a vacuum to which she named these things, a sad frightened wanting without an object, a nothing really, a nothing that sat beside her and ate up everything she put between herself and it.

  My dog Nothing.

  She put the car in gear, and Mike’s breathing altered with the engine’s; she carried him sleeping out onto the highway, and entered the stream of cars, homebound for the Faraways as she was herself. In her side-view mirror as she climbed she glimpsed Butterman’s castle, receding quickly to the south, and shrinking with distance.

  III

  FRATRES

  ONE

  In silvergreen rainy April they went down to Glastonbury on the long straight roads, Mr. Talbot on a swayback borrowed nag, Doctor Dee on his spotted mare, an oiled goatskin mantle on his shoulders and a broad plaited hat like a countryman’s on his head, and his son Arthur up behind him. The soft clouds gathered and parted again, the light rain was fresh and almost warm. As they rode Doctor Dee pointed out a flinty wall, an old, old church; he showed them how the Roman roads ran, straight and clear—and how another way went too, older far than that one, through towns and market crosses and churchyards, hidden and lost now but straighter than ever the Romans built. Alongside and beneath this green England there lay another country, made of time, old as this spring was young: time folded like the folded hills, back almost to the Flood, when men here knew no arts, nor speech, nor wore any clothes but skins.

  —A thousand years after that Flood, said Doctor Dee, and twenty or thirty after Troy’s fall, came that Albanian Brutus here to this septentrional isle.

  —Was that Brute of Troy? asked Mr. Talbot.

  —It was. And this Brute who had saved Troy from the Greeks (though later they conquered it), he found our forefathers in their ignorance, and yet pretty ready to learn, and of a good wit. And he, Brutus, became their King, the first that ever there was over the whole of this isle.

  —And Arthur was of his line, said Arthur Dee, who knew this story, and his own share in it.

  —He was. So you can see by his arms: three gold crowns in a field of azure, that were the arms of Arthur’s first kingdom of Logres; these quartered with the arms of Troy, which you may read of in Virgil. And so.

  —And the Saxons? asked Mr. Talbot.

  —No. They were out of Germany. Arthur was a thorn in the Saxon’s eye. He was a Briton, heir of Brutus. And this land, his land, could not be right ruled, not by Saxon or Dane or Frenchman, till Arthur come again: till a Welshman, of our blood, mount the throne again.

  —And so he did, said Arthur.

  —And so he did, when Harry Tudor took the crown. And his granddaughter now upon the throne, if Arthur could be woman, she were he.

  They rode in silence for a while.

  —Some there are, said Doctor Dee, who would deny there was any Arthur.

  —Let them try that, said Arthur, his cheek pressed against his father’s back, sheltering under his father’s hat.

  —Let them look into Saint Jerome, said his father. Who praised Ethicus his assertion, that the isles of Albion, this one and Ireland, should be called the isles Brutannicæ and not Brittanicæ. And old Trithemius says that Arthur’s empire covered twenty kingdoms.

  —But kingdoms were not so large then, said Mr. Talbot.

  —So they were not. Yet by the force of arms did this Arthur conquer the isles of Iceland and Greenland and Estotiland. Which by right should be under our Queen now, all of them in the mari Brittanico between Britain and Atlantis up even to the North Pole.

  Arthur Dee laughed aloud.

  —And so I have told Mr. Hakluyt. And so I have urged Her Majesty.

  Arthur Dee laughed again, a triumphant laugh, and hugged his father tighter, which made the doctor laugh too, and the three of them rode on laughing in the sun’s face who just then peeped out, only to withdraw again.

  Toward evening they passed a house by the side of the road, and an old woman in the doorway, under its dripping eaves, hands beneath her apron. There were daffodils and primroses in her garden; there was woodbine on the wall, and flowers bursting even in the moldy thatch of the roof, as from a meadow. She smiled at the travelers.

  —Good day to you, Gammer, said Doctor Dee, leaning a bow from his saddle. How goes it with you.

  —The better that your worship choose to ask.

  —I see a new bush tied to your stake there.

  —Your worship has eyes in his head.

  —Can you put up three travelers, and give them supper? One of them a lad.

  —I can do that, she said. I can give them white bread and brown, and cheese and new ale; and a bed all to themselves.

  —There is a straight line, Mr. Talbot said, from Upton-on-Severn to Glastonbury.

  —Yes, said Doctor Dee.

  A single rushlight guttered at the bedside. Arthur slept. Doctor Dee and his skryer sat together on the bed’s edge, their voices low not to wake the boy.

  —This straight line, Mr. Talbot said, cannot be seen but from high in the air. For a time a road will mark it, and then a hedge; a church will sit astride it, or a market cross; and then a road will run its way again. But only from on high can it be seen t
o run along, true, straight as though scribed across the earth.

  —Yes.

  —It seemed, Mr. Talbot said, that he bore me up. I thought to swoon. I saw this line from on high.

  —A dream, Doctor Dee said.

  —It seemed no dream. He bore me on his back. In form he was … in form he was like a dog, or a wolf; he had a hairy head, and hairy paws with brown nails on them. But for his shape I could not well see it, for he seemed dressed in a robe like a monk’s robe, of heavy stuff. Which I clung to when he flew.

  Mr. Talbot watching Dr. Dee’s face saw a thought in it. He said:

  —Whether he is a good spirit or not I know not. He has long been near me, not always in that form. I did not summon him. I know him to be the same in different forms because his face is always kind.

  Doctor Dee said nothing.

  —That line bore us its way, Mr. Talbot went on. As though it were a gutter down which a stone would roll, or a chase into which a hart is run. That straight line. So fast he went along it that the long brown robe he wore snapped behind him like a flag. And then methought I smelled the sea.

  The green sea-moors of Somerset, changeful and full of noon light, had moved below him (Had it been a dream? Had it been? He touched the stone jar he carried, hidden now within his coat.) And then, coming closer as they dropped toward earth together—he’d felt his heart sickeningly mount to his throat—a low bare hill and a tower, an abbey and a ruined church. The one he clung to stretched out his hairy hand, and as he pointed here and there, south, east, west, there came to be visible, rising up out of the earth, figures. Figures that lay upon the earth, made of the earth, made of the rise and fold of hills, the creases of sunken roads, the lines of ancient walls, of rivers and streams: a circle of great beings, man, animal, thing, with forests for their hair and glittering outcrops of rock their eyes or teeth; a circle linked, touching, every figure facing west. For a moment one of them would not be there, would turn itself back into farms and fields, and then it would be there again: lamb, lion, sheaf of wheat.