The Heavens

by Sandra Newman

  Then a lot of time passed and then more time passed. Occasionally a nurse appeared, and Sabine would rear up to accost her. Then all the others would stand up, too, as if ganging up to intimidate the nurse. The nurse would talk about contractions and dilation; the upshot was, pretty soon but not yet. If it was a nurse they hadn’t spoken to before, she would instantly ask if the father was here and look at Ben or José. Then Ben or José would shrink, abashed, and a variety of people would bark, “No, he’s not,” and when the nurse had gone, Sabine would take out her phone and try Martin again. His cell phone kept going straight to voice mail.

  She said to his voice mail, “Get here, Papa, or I’m stealing your baby.” She said, “This is your parenting? This is your fresh start?” She said, “I’m going to tear your throat out, Martin. I will feast on your goddamn heart.”

  And more time passed or dissipated or got lodged and didn’t go anywhere. It didn’t seem to even be time, at least not the same time people had outside. Raya stopped crying and fell asleep. Amina gave up on her textbook and went in search of a cafeteria. Ben fell into a pre-hypnotic state, only disturbed when one of the South Asian women caught his eye and smiled; then, as sometimes happened when he met South Asians, he was visited by the memory of the Indian film festival his father had taken him to the week after his mother’s death in a misconceived attempt to compensate Ben for the loss of his Indian parent. The lead actress in the movie had resembled Swati (the kind of unhappy coincidence that inevitably befell Ben’s father) and the Swati look-alike was beaten by her husband, then raped, then blamed for her rape and ostracized, then finally hanged herself from a tree, and Ben wept from only one eye through the movie, freakishly, inexplicably, as if only one hemisphere of his brain had really loved his mother.

  And time passed, longer and longer. Amina returned with sweet potato chips. Sabine called friends of Martin’s and sent them to hunt for him in his favorite bars. Kate was drawing babies in her checkbook, while José watched over her shoulder apprehensively, as if concerned she might introduce a deformity and hex the approaching birth.

  To Ben, it was increasingly unclear why they were there. Someone had to be there, and maybe you’d expect the mail-order brides to be there for Oksana, but not Ben, Kate, or José—or even Sabine, who’d never seemed to like Oksana. He had a melancholic sense of waiting for nothing, superfluous and unwanted. He was there because he had nothing better to do. He needed a real job. He was twenty-eight, he had to move on with his life. To reassure himself, he looked at Kate—who might represent moving on with his life—and was instantly comforted by her serenity, her look of gleaming health. He and Raya and Sabine were slouching, lopsided, looked like broken machinery, and Amina hunched condor-fashion over her book, but Kate was effortlessly upright like a beautiful horse. José was, too, Ben couldn’t help noticing, but that was military training, it wasn’t the same. Still, the likeness was annoying. Ben decided to take Kate home. He’d had enough.

  But at that moment, a nurse appeared and headed straight for Sabine with a look of happy purpose. The passing time stopped neatly on a dime. They all stood up, feeling totally different.

  “Miss Takova has given birth to a healthy boy,” the nurse said to Sabine; then she faltered and said to Ben, “Are you the father?”

  Sabine said, “Hold up. The baby’s two months premature. That’s not a problem?”

  “No,” said the nurse, confused. “The baby isn’t premature. Unless … You are here for Oksana Takova, right?”

  “Oops,” said Kate, and made a face at José.

  José said, his voice cracking weakly, “It’s for certain that he isn’t premature?”

  Then a shock went through them all, a pricking of the hairs on the backs of their necks. (So Ben felt and almost laughed as he realized. Amina’s mouth was open in wonder, while Raya grimaced and looked more Russian than ever, hard-bitten and undeceived. Kate was gazing at José commiseratingly—José who was visibly sweating, exposed—and it suddenly all made sense.)

  Sabine turned to José and said, “You’ve got to be shitting me. It’s your baby?”

  The nurse said, “Should I give you guys five minutes?”

  “No,” Sabine said. “The father’s going to see his baby.”

  José said, “I don’t know if Oksana wants to see me.”

  But he went with the smirking nurse obediently, looking as if he’d been apprehended and was being taken into custody by the nurse. Kate touched Ben’s shoulder and said, “I couldn’t tell you. José made me promise,” and it all made sense. Of course José had confided in Kate, because everyone did, even strangers did. Of course it was José’s baby. Ben even had room to care about the baby, to be perversely relieved that the baby was José’s—not the offspring of a legal contract and a cake-decorating syringe, but an outlaw baby, a love child, the natural expression of mischievous Eros. And in the grip of that high, Ben suddenly decided he wanted to marry Kate.

  14

  It began with the memory of a long afternoon with Southampton; a day of tippling and banter, a scene with a few spare noblemen sitting on the floor. Sad Will stood like a sadly observant hawk at Southampton’s gold-embroidered elbow. Two servants were taking down the tapestries from the walls of Southampton’s chamber, preparing for his departure from court. Sweet wine from Spain and gossip from France; the sun in the windows dimmed, sorrowed prettily as the day declined, until the candles’ light was mirrored in the glass. Their dabbling flames were like guesses at a feeling, the hearth’s fire like the feeling itself. It was a beautiful pastime she had missed; hours that had stepped light-footed on Emilia’s memory and passed on.

  They were ahorse in the night. It was two days later, and Southampton had invited her to his country house, Cowdray. They were having a sudden friendship, because they were lonesome and so young, and neither had a thing in the world to do. So, the night with its moon and hooting owls, odd rustles in the trees that might have been brigands but weren’t, again and again. From a burnt-out cottage they passed rose a frail excitable twinkling of bats.

  Some of the men rode ahead, some behind. Southampton rode beside her, as if courting her, although he wasn’t courting her. He was complaining, as the beautiful do: of the girl he was expected to marry, who was no maid, who had lain with two men of his certain knowledge; ay, and he had known her from a child, she was a serpent of luxury. He complained of the court, a stew of slow-headed ruffians who thought it a great jest to piss in the fireplace; blockheads all, whose most manlike work was feigning to be the old Queen’s lovers. Nay, their most manlike work was sleep, where they might dream they were men. Nay, it was playing at flapdragon.

  He took a hand from his reins to mimic the flapdragoner’s hasty gesture of snatching a raisin from a burning cup of brandy. Emilia laughed and said, “Indeed, we are prodigal of our time, that we spend it in such flapdragons and flatteries. But, good my lord, is not all life beneath the heavens an idleness? For, as the prophet saith, all is vanity: Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas.”

  “Yet we need not be idle-witted. We may pray; we may become wiser by study.”

  “But wisdom is also vanity. ’Tis a nonsense that passeth and is no more. So the prophet writes: There shall be no remembrance of the wise, nor of the fool forever: what now is, shall all be forgotten.”

  Then the earl agreed with her, grew heated and glad, and complained of his studies at the Inns of Court, and the scholars there who, every night, turned a dozen hogsheads of wine to piss and a dozen fresh country maids to whores. “But there must be something in the world yet pure, must there not be one thing pure?”

  “Well-a-day. If there be a pure thing, ’tis not a man.”

  Then Southampton swore she was a spleenish wench—but his voice was luxurious, friendly. And he sighed and said again, “Yet is there no thing pure?”

  They rode in silence a while then. Emilia kept expecting to be prompted to her task; but the dream was tender, it gave her time, and the pleasure u
nfolded and grew like a real sky. Sad Will rode behind. Her doing: he’d written a letter to the Earl of Southampton and used her name, as she’d said he might. Everything fit. Felt right. Felt real: the rocking, meditative carriage of her horse, the night clouds and the half-seen blowing of the grass. They passed a yeoman’s cottage, black and asleep, with the scent of wood smoke still lingering about it. Its warm life lingered in the air, its breath in her breath. She was on the right track at last—she felt it—riding secretly, directly, to save the world. She would make the world perfect—so she felt—and the wild night meadows of its youth acquiesced. She was a candle in the night, a bright seed of heaven.

  But then what was strange was that nothing happened. Nothing felt important and she didn’t wake up. It went on just like life. They rode another hour and stopped for the night at the house of a gentleman Southampton knew. They were given cold meat. All talked of the plague. It didn’t matter that Emilia felt stymied, aimless; that she felt the point slipping away. It went on. She was given a bedchamber to herself and paced there, trying to perceive her task. She stood in the middle of the room and shut her eyes. The floor trembled gently as servants passed. Her body was sore and tired from riding. The thigh that was turned to the hearth was hot; the other thigh was cold. Nothing more.

  She tried to think of mistakes she could have made. Perhaps the task was nothing to do with Southampton; perhaps it was back at Nonesuch Palace. She wondered if she ought to flee into the night, if she could have missed the moment, being tipsy and aroused. She was afraid to fall asleep; she might wake in New York, and she wouldn’t have accomplished anything. Then the world might end—here she looked into the fireplace, expecting to see the blasted city. It was a homely little fire, haunted only by smoke. Nothing more. It was just real.

  At last she did sleep, giving up, assuming she would wake with Ben—and was woken by a drunken man pounding on her door. There were other voices dissuading him. He said, “God’s death! It is a whore, hold me not.” The other voices rose, and the drunk cried out, “Wilt thou cut my throat?” in a shrill, disbelieving voice that made the others burst out laughing. It all died away amidst thumping and grunts; the other men had dragged him away. Then from the hall came Southampton’s soft thrilled voice: “I hope thou wert not affrighted, madam.”

  She went to the door in bare feet, the dry rushes catching between her toes. She put her palm to the door. She could feel him there. There was the moonlit window, the embers of the fire. The room was cold and real.

  She said nothing. There was no one she knew in this world.

  And she might live a lifetime here, and die, and never see Ben or her parents again. Perhaps this was the only world. Perhaps Kate was the dream.

  His footsteps went away. She went to bed again and curled up terrified. Fell asleep again and woke in the same low chamber, with the fire burnt out and the chamber pot beginning to stink, still lost in the dream.

  Another day. They rode out as the sun rose. It was raining and the earl rode ahead. Everyone was silent, plagued by rain. She kept praying to wake, or for the dream to skip and reveal itself as a dream. It didn’t. The rain went on, until it seemed impossible there was so much rain in the sky. She was tired and her hips hurt more and more. Woods and meadows and sheep. She wanted Ben. How did anyone bear the time?

  But then Sad Will began to sing, his voice a smooth baritone that sounded from his chest: a well-trained actor’s voice. The song was “Tom o’Bedlam” that everyone knew. One by one, they began to sing along. Emilia sang, it was a pleasure and she licked the rain from her lips. Took deep wet breaths. She improvised a harmony as Kate never could; her voice was sweet and powerful as Kate’s never was. She closed her eyes and let her hood fall back, let the rain stream down her face and sang:

  With a host of furious fancies

  Whereof I am commander

  With a burning spear and a horse of air

  To the wilderness I wander

  When they finished, Will started to sing it again. Then they saw it for a joke; they laughed and sang with him; they sang of their madness and the mad wild road. They were singing it a third time when the roofs of Cowdray were spied. Then they all kicked up their horses and shouted. The horses wouldn’t gallop, but managed a heavy-footed, mud-spitting canter and that was enough. The rain blowing in her eyes, the relief; this would be it, she thought. Now her task must appear. She could do it in an instant and wake in New York. She would reach out and there would be Ben.

  Nothing happened. They rode through the gates and nothing. There was the business of giving the horses to grooms, the stilted ceremonial of any such house. The stewards and sewers and ushers must bow and be greeted, the guests be taken to view the features of the house—the Great Chamber with its nautical paintings, Buck Hall with its eleven stags carved in oak, the knot gardens and the Neptune fountain. Then Emilia was shown to a chamber. A fire was built in its hearth. She was brought a clean smock and a basin of water. She endured every dullness of Emilia’s life, and sang under her breath:

  By a knight of ghosts and shadows

  I summoned am to tourney

  Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end

  Methinks it is no journey

  And she was led to supper in the Great Hall, where all the household was noisily arrayed, a hundred people at ten long tables; and seated at the corner of the lowest table, disappointingly far from the Earl of Southampton, across from a plump gentlewoman and beside Sad Will.

  Will greeted Emilia, then was silent. The gentlewoman talked and talked. Her name was Mistress Bewley; she was the widow of a steward, living now by the kindness of my Lord of Southampton. Dishes were set and passed, and Mistress Bewley talked very merrily, nodding so her face joined into her double chin, then rose distinct again.

  Emilia sat next to Will. He was real: like sitting beside a deep well. For the first time, she wondered what it meant that he was real. Surely everything was real here, or nothing was. But when she tried to focus on it, the difference vanished. He was nothing. An unemployed actor. Just a man.

  Meanwhile, Mistress Bewley was speaking of the slowness of a country place, so dull the birds fell drowsing from their perches and dropped into the mouth of the yawning fox. “Why, even the plague neglecteth us here; it hath spied us from the road and scorned our dullness.” Mistress Bewley herself passed the time in the making of masks, which she sold to gentle ladies through a glover of the town. Masks were never more in fashion—as Emilia must know—for preserving of the skin from weather. The fairest skins of the court were kept white by their aid; without a mask’s protection, no lady would hunt. Here she looked hintingly at Emilia; it was clear she was hoping for a sale.

  “I fear no mask will serve me,” said Emilia. “I was tawny in my mother’s womb. I might lie in a dungeon a year and walk forth again as brown as bread.”

  “Then a mask may hide thy brownness,” Mistress Bewley said. “It is more sure than paint.”

  The gentleman beside Mistress Bewley—a man with an extravagantly lacy ruff and cuffs that made him look as if he were frothing over—objected that masks inclined ladies to vice. “For a lady dons a mask when she will meet a gentleman in secrecy. This wearing of masks is no Christian matter.”

  “True, a harlot may wear a mask,” said Mistress Bewley, “but she also wears shoes. She sups on meat. Shall we now blame the shoes and the honest beef for her ill-doing?”

  “But a mask she wears only for the business of harlotry,” the gentleman said.

  “Am I then a harlot?” said Mistress Bewley. “’Tis well. I am grateful to be instructed.”

  The gentleman smiled primly. “I said not that. But these disorders cannot be winked at.” He looked at Emilia, implicitly singling her out as an example of a harlot. Will saw it and laughed softly. Familiarly—as if he had teased her about her harlotry many a time. She suddenly suspected him of being the impediment, the thing that was preventing her from seeing her task. But when she looked at him ag
ain, he was nothing again. Just a man.

  Emilia said in a deliberately courteous voice, “I fear me the gentleman is right. Nor is it only ladies that will mask for evil purpose. For in Venice, there are boys that wear a mask they call the gnagna. It hath the face of a cat, and such a mask is the sign of a masculine whore. The gnagna boys go garbed as ladies and lead gentlemen into unnatural vice—as, I am told, do the boy actors of London.”

  In her peripheral vision, Will was smiling, but unpleasantly.

  “Gnagna,” the frothy gentleman repeated. “It hath the very sound of popish naughtiness. An ill-sounding word for a worse thing.”

  “Boys?” said Mistress Bewley. “I sell no masks to boys. I am a plain English harlot, as the gentleman saith. I sell nothing to boys.”

  Then the men all around laughed at the pun—nothing was slang for pussy—while Mistress Bewley made a face of great innocence, and put a fresh forkful of meat in her mouth.

  “But you had not done with your tale, I think?” Will said to Emilia.

  She felt his voice like a familiar touch, and frowned. She said without looking at Will, “How it went on … the lady whores of Venice conceived a great hatred for the gnagna boys, as being their rivals for the pockets of gentlemen. So the whores took their grievance to the bishop of Venice. By his judgment, the lady whores now be allowed to lean from their windows bare-breasted, that gentlemen might know them for women, and not be tricked into lying with boys.”

  She finished her speech breathless. The men laughed again and Mistress Bewley praised the bishop of Venice for a merry priest. Will said, “A very Solomon. God send that our boy actors of London be so wisely served.”

  There the conversation halted. Mistress Bewley excused herself and went to fetch her masks. The frothy gentleman finished his meat and gazed dully at his empty plate. People all around were sitting back from their tables; the supper was coming to a close.