Starcarbon

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “Just go on up there then and collect your little girl and bring her home. It’s your car, isn’t it?”

  “She didn’t sound too enthusiastic when I told her I was coming. I think she’s afraid to let me meet this boy.”

  “You just be careful, boss. Don’t do anything you’ll be sorry for. Most of all, stay off booze so you won’t say anything you’ll be sorry for.”

  “Okay. That’s good. Okay. Here, put that suitcase down. I can carry it.”

  “I want to carry it. I got to do something. There’s nothing to do around here anymore.”

  “You could clean out the pool and sweep off those tennis courts and get the weeds out of the flower beds. That’s to do. If you didn’t think doing it was beneath you.”

  “You never told me you was going to turn me into a yard man when you made me come stay here for the summer. You never said a word about I’m supposed to be somebody that weeds the flower beds.”

  “Then call someone and get them over here. You can call someone to come and weed the flowers, can’t you? I guess that’s not too much to do, now is it?”

  “I want to go back out to the country and be there when they start working with the horses. The vet’s coming this weekend. I hate to miss it when he’s there.”

  “Then go on out there.” Daniel was at the front door now. He took his suitcase from Spook and started down the front steps. “But you get it fixed up around here. I want it pretty when she gets home.” He walked on down to his car and threw the suitcase in and got behind the wheel and started driving. He turned on the radio. “Soviet troops are on the streets of Moscow. Crowds, mobs, are all around the government buildings.” That’s about par, Daniel thought. You can’t depend on a goddamn thing.

  On the plane he ordered a Scotch and water, but when the stewardess brought it, he sent it back. “Get this out of here,” he said. “Take this out of here.”

  He sat back. He opened a Sports Illustrated he had bought in the airport and began to read about John Daly’s unbelievable win in the Indiana Open. He quit boozing, Daniel said to himself. Look what happened when he quit. Well, goddamn, this is one hell of a plane ride.

  The plane was bucking up and down, then began to climb. “What’s this wind all about?” he asked the stewardess. “Where’s this coming from?”

  “It’s a front from Canada. It’s been getting worse all day. This will make some weather for somebody before it’s over.”

  Chapter 54

  IN Boston, it was Mike and Helen’s wedding day. Mike’s brothers and his twelve-year-old nephew had arrived the day before from Dublin and were staying in the guest room of the apartment. They had awakened to the news from the Soviet Union and were huddled around the television set and a shortwave radio while Helen served them scrambled eggs and bacon and toast and tea.

  “If the Lithuanians can do it, Ireland can too,” Michael’s youngest brother, Paul, was insisting.

  “You’re a hothead, Paul,” his brother Devin put in. “It’s not the same situation. This has been coming for a year. It doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Who has their army?” the nephew, William, kept asking. “Who’s got the bombs and the submarines?”

  “I wish you’d drink some orange juice,” Helen said. “We’re going to have a long day ahead of us. We have to take the wine to the restaurant and I have to get my hair done and we need to clean up the apartment in case anyone comes here afterward.”

  “The Soviet slaves are rebelling.” Mike reached over the sofa and pulled her into his lap and held her there. “Don’t cook any more. We’ll clean that up for you, won’t we, boys? I won’t have my bride cooking and cleaning on her wedding day. I love this woman, Devin. I pray every day that she keeps on being crazy enough to stay with me. Now she’s going to marry me. Don’t get up.” He held her on his lap and kissed her hair where it grew around her ear and stroked her with his hand. “I’ll have to go to the school for a while this morning. We have a lot of students from these countries. I imagine they’ll be meeting sometime today. You can go with me, Paul. All three of you. It will be educational for William.” He stroked Helen’s leg. He kept her with him, feeling her heart beating like a captured bird. He had fallen in love with her the day he met her, in Anna’s apartment a week after Anna’s suicide. In a rainstorm, soaking wet, wind beating against the boards of the house. Helen had looked at him with those wide, sad eyes, standing before him holding sheafs of Anna’s wild and lovely prose. “I don’t know what to do with all of this,” Helen had said. “I don’t know where to begin.” Within an hour they were in Anna’s bed, on Anna’s gray silk sheets, their bodies plastered against each other, love filling up the space that death had blown into their lives. Our relationship to nothingness and death, Mike thought now. That’s what everything is about. He held Helen on his lap and would not let her go, while the people of Moscow vented their years of rage.

  “Let go of me,” she giggled. “I have to go get ready to get married.”

  “Look at that,” Paul yelled. “They’re tearing down the statue of Lenin. My God, who thought we’d live to see this happen. What a day for the world.”

  “Ireland’s next,” William said. “We’ll be next. You wait and see.”

  Helen’s wedding day wore on. The men turned on a second television set in the guest bedroom. The president of the United States held a press conference. Mike and Devin and William and Paul went to the university to talk to students. Niall came in from the hotel where he was staying and helped Helen straighten up the apartment. Helen went to the beauty parlor and had her hair done. The temperature reached eighty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. Then eighty-nine, then ninety. The men returned. A political scientist and his wife came over. A couple of journalists from South Africa. Helen began to hate the Soviet Union and its people. She went into her bedroom and shut the door and polished her fingernails and called two of her children and apologized for not inviting them to the wedding. “It’s just a small ceremony,” she told them. “Uncle Niall is here and Mike’s brothers. It’s really just a formality.”

  “I hope you have a good time, Momma,” DeDe had answered. “I want you to know I really hope you’re going to be happy.”

  “Dad’s real sad about it,” Winifred had not been able to resist reporting. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so sad. He’s lost about fifteen pounds.”

  At five in the afternoon, Mike sent all the political people away and everyone started getting ready for the wedding. At six o’clock they piled into two cars and started driving. They drove through the beautiful hot streets of Boston. Helen sat between Mike and Niall. She leaned her face into Mike’s blue serge jacket. She laced her fingers into his and held on very tightly. This day she reminded herself. This moment, this is what I wanted, this is mine.

  She looked up and Niall was smiling at her, his face so like the face he had worn when he was a little boy. Beloved face of my brother, she told herself. The exact same face he wore when he was a scrawny, tanned Boy Scout, wearing his lanyards, going out into the garden to collect his specimens. The day he quit pinning them to cardboard. “They smell bad and it hurts them,” he had said. “I’ve started feeling bad when I do it.”

  He wasn’t pinning her now, only looking at her with the deepest love. I don’t care what Anna said about the family, Helen decided. They love us. They are all we have to keep us from the dark.

  “Are you okay?” Mike squeezed her hand and pulled it toward him.

  “I’m fine. I’m happy. I really am.”

  “Want to back out?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “I can’t believe this is me. Is this me, Niall?”

  “It’s you. Only you could have gotten me to Boston in this heat. Only you would look so pretty doing it.”

  “My hair looks terrible. It went limp the minute that they did it.”

  At six-fifteen they arrived at the church and went into the vestry and were met by the minister, a
sweet-looking woman Helen’s age who had been the first female Episcopal minister in the state of Massachusetts. She was wearing a black smock and a white lace surplice that was hanging haphazardly from one shoulder. Her smile was dazzling. Helen fell into the smile.

  “I’m Sylvie MacArthur. Welcome. What a day for the world. Niall, I’m so glad to see you.”

  “You know Niall?” Helen asked.

  “We’ve been at conferences together. I knew he was your brother. I kept forgetting to mention it when we talked. I’m getting so forgetful lately.”

  “Undifferentiated consciousness,” Niall said. “Seventh chakra.” He and the minister giggled and hugged each other until the already precarious lace surplice fell down the lady’s arm.

  “Our party is right behind us,” Mike said. “Is there anything we should know? What do you want us to do?”

  “Let’s go in my office and talk. Then we’ll go into the church and have a wedding. We’ll tie your hands together. I’m a fan of yours. I might as well tell you that. ‘The Moth on the Gate’ is one of my favorite poems. Never a week goes by that I don’t think of it.”

  “I’m glad. Thank you.” His voice deepened as he considered his work. Helen took his arm.

  “I try to forget he’s famous,” she said. “It makes me nervous.”

  “You might have been used to it, after your sister.”

  “That’s what makes me nervous. She’s gone, isn’t she?” It was dark in the hall and fragrant, light came in the stained-glass windows from the far altar and from the portals above the doors. The smell of lilies and of prayerbooks, hope of the earth.

  “This conversation is too serious,” Sylvie said. She pushed open the door to the front lawn. Devin and William and Paul were walking up the stone path. “Here comes your party. Now the celebration can begin. Solemnity and celebration, prayers and vows.” She held open the door with the arm on which the surplice had fallen down.

  “My brothers,” Mike said. “And my nephew.”

  “Handsome people,” Sylvie answered. “Well, collect them and let’s go into my office and talk about the ceremony, shall we?”

  At six-forty-five they filed into the sanctuary and arranged themselves around the altar. Mike and Helen standing before Sylvie holding hands. Niall on Helen’s right. Devin beside Mike, with Paul and William beside him. “Will you light the candles for us, William?” Sylvie handed him the matches and a taper. Very slowly the boy lit all the candles behind the altar, then handed the taper back to Sylvie and returned to his place. Sylvie opened the Book of Common Prayer and began, “Dearly Beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God and in the face of this company, to join together this man and this woman in Holy Matrimony. . . .”

  By the strictest rules of the church she should not have been performing this marriage but Sylvie made her own rules. “Two people make a wider stream for life to flow through,” she had told the bishop. “I know this man’s poetry. I want to marry him to this woman that he loves. Add to the store of goodness in the world. Say yes. They were both raised R.C.s. Someone has to make them feel like God is still in the world and on their side.”

  “Roman Catholics, Sylvie. Please. I wish you wouldn’t do that. It sounds so haughty.”

  “I’m haughty. What’s wrong with that? If I wasn’t haughty, I wouldn’t have to work so hard at being humble.”

  “Which is an honorable estate, instituted of God . . . ,” she read, her beautiful voice falling upon the bowed heads of these hopeful people. “. . . and not to be entered into lightly, but soberly, reverently and in the fear of God . . .”

  I should have told him I am pregnant, Helen thought. I have to tell him. I should have told him before we did this. I don’t know how to tell him. Maybe I’ll tell him tonight. She bowed her head even deeper into her chest, feeling so deeply, terribly embarrassed and guilty, so ashamed of her body and its endless cycles and how it always took her life away. Because I wanted it, she knew. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death . . . Hail Mary, Mother of God.

  Maybe now she’ll be happy, Mike was thinking. Maybe she won’t mind if I have to go to Ireland. Someone has to go. We have to begin the talks. There must be a beginning and an end to war.

  “Signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and His Church; which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with His presence and first miracle that He wrought in Cana of Galilee. . . .”

  Chapter 55

  HALF the stormclouds that were causing the bad weather in Tahlequah were blowing up from the Gulf of Mexico. The other half were in a jetstream moving across the Midwest. In that weather Bud Tree was riding the front seat of a Greyhound bus. He was sitting opposite the bus driver. He had a small suitcase on a rack above his head and a box beside him on the seat. It contained the belongings of a young man who had been in jail in Iowa City with him. Bud was going to deliver it to the young man’s mother. Adair Wilson, it said on the box. Rural Route Three, Pine Bluff, Arkansas. “Let me take it to her,” Bud had asked the jailer. “I’m going that way anyway. You don’t want to be sending something like that in the mail.” Now he had it on the seat beside him and he was sorry that he did.

  “I’m going to have to stop before we get to Tulsa,” the driver was saying. “I got caught out here in some winds one afternoon. I thought we were done for.”

  “I’d sure hate to stop in a field.” Bud looked behind him. There were only four other passengers on the bus, two old people sleeping and a young couple reading a newspaper. “Still, you’re the driver, what can I say?”

  “There’re tornado warnings out for half of Oklahoma. I’ll have to stop in the next town. So tell me some more about this guy that shot himself. No one knows how he got the gun?”

  “Not a clue. He was in the cell next to me. It was about five in the afternoon and a shot rang out. Then another and another. Hell, I was in Nam. I dove under the bed. I can only half remember it. The deputy was in the cell when he fired the third shot. He saw him do it. Three shots with an automatic pistol into his own heart. I think it’s why they went on and let me out. It silenced everyone. Hell, I’ve seen some terrible things, I’ve seen kids blown apart, but I think it was the worst thing I ever witnessed. He was as sweet as a kid, he was a kid. No one knows how he got the gun and no one knows why he did it. He was only in for armed robbery. He held up a convenience store. He had these sweet eyes, this big sweet smile, and he was smart. Smart as a whip. So now I got to take these things to his mom. His boots are in here, and a Bible. Hell, I put that in. The sheriff and I decided there ought to be a Bible.”

  “Sounds more like a boarding school than a jail. Where was this?”

  “Iowa City.”

  “We’re going to have to stop. There’s a town up here a few miles with a shed for the buses. We’ll stop there and call for some weather. I can’t get this set working.” The bus driver tried the radio again but there was only static. Rain was pelting them now, turning into hail. Bud got up to stand by the driver. “There’s nothing but flat land from here to Tulsa. What a country. Goddamnedest weather in the United States, but what can you do? It’s where I live.”

  Chapter 56

  AT one o’clock Zach started driving to Tahlequah. The skies were darkening and the wind was picking up but he had decided against turning on the radio. Concentrate on my girl, he decided. God, she’s so excessive, excessive brilliance, excessive mess. Like the skies, one minute she’s sweet as pie, the next she’s cold as ice. Overeducated, that’s the problem. What did Jung say? “There aren’t any women psychiatrists because intellect isn’t their long suit, and true love, which is, is invisible.” He should have met Georgia before he wrote that down.

  My God, wild weather. Electromagnetic fields. Well, it’s all energy. Ch’i, prana. Just thinking about her makes me want her. Put that in your cosmic pipe and smoke it.

  By the time he got to Tahlequah it was raining. By the time he got to Ge
orgia’s house it was pouring down. By the time he had taken off her blouse the wind was beating against the house. The cheap wooden walls seemed to pulsate with the rain. Georgia pulled the covers off the bed. She took off her clothes, talking the whole time she was undressing. “Did I ever tell you about the Bonobos, Zach? Pygmy chimpanzees in Africa. They’re matriarchal. The males exhibit no aggression toward each other or any other living thing. They never kill. The mothers nurse the babies for four years. Even after they grow up the children can get milk any time they want it. They live on sugar cane in the forests of Zaire. All they do is eat sugar cane and fuck. Even the little chimps do it. They climb on the adult females and have at it. The females stay in estrus most of the time and come back in a year after the babies are born.” She pulled off her underpants and lay down beside him and began to touch him. “Listen, Zach, this is the missing link to heaven. These animals love each other. They never fight and they are fearless of other animals. The natives love them so much they have been known to go to war to keep anyone from harming them. A matriarchal chimpanzee, Zach. Imagine it. If I wasn’t going back to practicing medicine, I’d go join the research. They are just being studied. I saw some early photographs. A guy who works for National Geographic sent them to me. God, look at this weather. Is this perfect for fucking, or what, as Olivia would say.”

  “Come here, Georgia. Come here to me. Oh, honey, I’ve been missing you so much. Come to me. Come live with me. Stop all this madness about leaving me, all this nonsense, all this needing attention. That’s the only reason you’re doing this. To get attention. Well, you’ve got it.”

  “Pretend you’re a regular chimpanzee,” she said, “who wandered into a group of Bonobos. I’ll be the Bonobos. Oh, Zach, I love you so much. I can’t do without you.” She was all over him now. In the kitchen the roof had started to leak onto the table, but neither of them was going to notice that.