The Heavens

by Sandra Newman

  When he told Kate, he was braced for opposition. But Kate just said, “What’s Exxon?” and then she seemed bewildered by his answer. She objected that oil was a thing of the past, because you couldn’t burn oil because of global warming. Ben said he thought oil still had a few good years left in it, and Kate said no, but then became unsure and said, “People still use oil?”

  “You may have noticed these things called cars.”

  “Cars still run on oil?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “But you’ll be contributing to that? You’ll be contributing to keeping oil going?”

  “I’ll also be contributing to rent.”

  And she said she guessed it wasn’t really Ben’s fault, and he said, “That’s how I plan to sleep at night,” and by then they were laughing and Ben was relieved. The job had taken on a sort of pink unreality. Kate forgave him, and that was all that mattered. He could live with the jeers from Sabine.

  But he couldn’t help noticing it was strange. And in the following days there were more strange things, or specifically lacunae in Kate’s memory. Kate was startled to hear England still had a queen. She claimed not to know what “plastic” was, and when Ben showed her a plastic spoon, she said, “Oh—you mean celluloid.” She thought the Louisiana Purchase hadn’t taken place until the 1930s and that was why Americans still spoke French, and when Ben said they mostly didn’t speak French, and for instance he didn’t, Kate said, “You did when I met you,” and then got upset and remote and refused to explain.

  On May Day, they were on Sabine’s rooftop, waiting for the fireworks to begin, and Sabine was complaining in her usual way, and she mentioned President Gore. Kate said, “Wait, Gore’s president?” But when she saw Ben’s and Sabine’s reaction, she pretended she’d only been expressing a feeling that Gore was ridiculous in that role. Sabine said, “We campaigned for Gore. You campaigned for Gore.” Kate looked surprised and even faintly resistant but said, “Well, I know I campaigned for Gore.”

  She hadn’t known. Ben could have sworn. But afterward, he couldn’t exactly believe it. Of course Kate knew who the president was, it was an Alzheimer’s symptom if you didn’t know that. And Kate wasn’t doddering. Her parents weren’t worried. It had to be a misunderstanding.

  Nonetheless, it left him with a terrible doubt, a fear that inhabited every scene. He would argue against it in his head at work while he edited press releases and endured pep talks about “Exxon culture.” At Martin’s, he compulsively cleaned up after everyone. He couldn’t let anything go. He started to run five miles each morning, a practice Kate called fascist, and Ben was weirdly comforted to be called fascist, as if it meant he could exercise control; if he was willing to be evil, he could have control.

  Meanwhile, May turned into June and became oppressive, listless, mephitic. Martin had never installed air-conditioning, and Sabine wouldn’t pay for it because of the environment, and everyone else was broke. They took Qued to the park, to the zoo, but they were groggy and sweaty and irritable. They had fights about nothing; about ten dollars. And one night, when the humidity had turned into a bank of sinister gray-black clouds, and the air was charged with a steamy malignity, Ben and Kate went out to a poetry reading.

  They had gone with the glee of being free for the night, but the reading was immediately galling. It was in a slick, loftlike hipster bookstore, and the poet was a rich girl who wrote confessional poetry about her anorexia, the poetry mediocre and the poet suspiciously not that thin. There were a hundred people there—more than Ben had ever seen at a poetry reading—all spindly hipsters who cheered indiscriminately after every poem. In the Q and A, they revealed themselves to be the poet’s college friends; they addressed her as “Sammy” and referred to things that had happened in their Indonesian shadow puppetry seminar. The event had been catered by a Williamsburg taco stand, and after the reading, the hipsters chatted knowledgeably about the swordfish tacos, not the poems. As Kate said in the line for tacos, it made you feel like life was a great big sham, a form of Indonesian shadow puppetry gone wrong. But she said it good-naturedly (as Kate would); she didn’t mind humanity’s vacuousness, while Ben felt hateful, despairing, and vulnerable among the cheerful hipsters, who reminded him of the bullies at his middle school who’d called him Pocahontas and Tarzan and cheered him on the soccer field with Indian war whoops—they couldn’t even light on an appropriate racial slur. Of course, the hipsters weren’t really like the bullies—but no, they were alike somehow. They were alike in how they made Ben feel.

  In this mood, he had to find an argument that made his reaction reasonable. He started by commenting sourly that everyone here, apart from Ben and Kate, was white. Kate said, “You’re right. That’s weird,” and added that of course it wasn’t weird that it wasn’t full of Persians, but this was an Afro-American neighborhood, and yet there seemed to be exactly zero Afro-Americans there.

  “Afro-Americans?” Ben said.

  “What?”

  “It’s just a kind of outmoded term.”

  “Oh, well,” Kate said fatalistically. “Celluloid. I know not your words, Earthman.”

  Then Ben went on a detour of accounting for the absence of African Americans, going all the way back to the slave trade, with the strong implication that the hipsters were complicit in the transatlantic slave trade, while Kate frowned and looked unnerved, as if she might be hearing about the slave trade for the first time.

  “Anyway,” Ben said in conclusion, “that’s one thing, but what really gets me is the poems. Not just that they have no artfulness or wit, it’s how they fetishize mental illness. They’re treating mental illness as something profound, when really it’s ugly and meaningless. It’s all that post-Plath wallow. I find that bullshit hard to take because of my mother.”

  Kate nodded; she was along for the ride. She was good about things like that. She seemed to be marshaling supportive arguments as she turned to discard the paper basket from her taco.

  But when she turned back, what she said was, “Have you talked to your mother lately?”

  He felt as if someone had poured ice water down his back. He wanted to just walk away. He couldn’t do this.

  He said in a tenuously calm voice, “Kate. You don’t remember that my mother is dead?”

  She winced, then thought very carefully about it, her black eyes cowed and serious. “I’m sorry. Somehow I thought she was alive.”

  “No, seriously. How could you forget that?”

  “I didn’t forget it.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “I really thought you said she was alive.”

  Ben said, “We’re going home right now and you have to see a doctor tomorrow.” His voice cracked. He stepped back from Kate. She was petrified and tearful immediately. Ben turned and Kate came after him, Ben walking stiff legged, blind, through the crowd. All the people continued talking and laughing, they were having their normal evenings. Now they didn’t seem like hipsters; they were people trying to have a good time like normal people. Ben felt an unbearable nostalgia for them. He wanted to run from her. His whole body wanted it.

  Out in the street, the sky was black and thick with rain clouds, the hot wind pulled crazily at their clothes. It felt like a storm already, though the air was dry. Ben’s mind raced, insisting it wasn’t that serious. Her parents weren’t worried. Kate walked by his side, she was smaller than him. He couldn’t look at her, but he wanted to hold her. He wanted to make her be okay.

  As they came under a restaurant’s storefront awning, there was a crash of thunder. The sky flickered. They instinctively stopped beneath the awning, braced against a downpour. But the rain didn’t come.

  And Ben remembered Oksana at the skating rink: Oksana dusty pink and hunched and poor and invincible, skating out and bisecting the rink, so quick it was as if the other skaters were frozen to the ice, as if they weren’t people but clumps of dirt. Because crazy people weren’t weaker than you—he’d often thought this about his mothe
r—they were stronger. They outlasted you, even when they died. They would tread you underfoot without noticing.

  “I love you,” Kate said. “Ben? I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

  He couldn’t say anything. The sky gleamed balefully, black and gray. The wind fell still.

  Then they stepped out from under the awning and the rain came.

  II

  16

  She was asleep in the dream, but she was at Cowdray. She slept and wouldn’t wake; she was afraid to wake. Something bad happened here. It was a thing that couldn’t happen.

  But one night she woke and the foreboding was gone. She was warm in bed; the bed curtains were open. Mary was asleep on a pallet on the floor. Emilia paused to remember how Mary had come, to remember the ordinary days that had passed, the hours of walking in the gallery while rain beat on the windows, of sitting at needlework. She’d finished a cushion of Irish stitchwork with a picture of a lion lying down with a lamb. They had talked of the plague, of the wars in France. Emilia had played on a virginal that had fallen out of tune, so that Southampton complained at the off notes and fidgeted; at last he had risen to hold forth tragically about the misfortune that it was to be alive.

  Now the still night. There was a night robe on the bed, a long linen shift with fur-lined sleeves; she pulled it on and crept to the door. On naked foot, stalking in my chamber haunted past her mind; she stopped with her hand on the latch, her throat tight and dry. There and then, she almost cried about Ben. (They’d run home from the poetry reading in the rain, but they hadn’t been laughing. The rain had soaked and weighed down her clothes and she’d fallen behind. He didn’t look back.)

  She opened the door and took a deep breath. At the end of the blind-dark hall, the moonlit entrance to the gallery hung like a picture. She stepped into the colder rushes outside and walked to the light with a feeling like climbing effortlessly out of a well. Then the gallery was silent, its windows silent. Outside, a vista of neat knot gardens: a quincunx of little trees and flowers, then a flower-shaped pattern of hedges with pale rocky pathways woven through. In one of the squares, deer grazed, their movements uncannily delicate, tentative, as if they had that instant come to life. Above, the stars were a child’s stars, big and friendly and simple.

  And down the broad stairs. Each step had been made by a person with a chisel; each step had been shaped by hand. It was a small world here, you could live in it. Safe. A world where everyone slept at night, and the sounds outside were frogs and owls. There was nothing but God above.

  And perhaps she was meant to be riding forth to perform some heroic feat. In stories, there was always a tyrant to be slain, a war to be prevented—an obvious move. But this was reality, occluded and delicate. She felt her way, she groped among instincts—and Emilia was human, with an animal heart; she was a thing that couldn’t concentrate when it was thirsty. She wanted to know what to do, but she didn’t. She knew she was going to Will.

  These past days, he’d waited for her in every company. She’d dressed for him; she’d woven ribbons in her hair. He’d looked up as she entered the room, and something physical occurred that no man saw. Between them was also the conspiracy of all poor scholars and performers and companions, living on a lord’s munificence, on the insubstantial goodness of the great. They were the children of the house, or the pets, and if they crept from their masters’ feet at night, what they did in their ramblings was illicit only because it was so insignificant. Nothing so small should care for itself; must every insect raise its banner and make war against every other insect?

  But their eyes met and she hurt with knowledge. He was real. It was the hope of the world.

  He was sitting on the floor by the drawing room hearth. The room was moonlight and he was firelight, changeable and red. The chimneypiece was painted with grotesques: a rabbit pulled an imp’s long nose; a little dog bit a manticore’s tail; a mermaid matter-of-factly doused a flaming salamander with a bucket. They all seemed to move in the firelight, so he looked to be surrounded by his curious thoughts. He’d been watching the fire and, hearing her step, looked up into the darkness blind.

  She said, “It is I, the fair Israelite.”

  At first he blinked, mistrustful; he was trying to see her in the dark. Then he knew her and smiled. He reached back for a cup he’d set by the fire. She came forward to take it from his hand: spiced wine. She settled on the floor beside him, arranging her robe around her knees. He was a plain-looking man with big-knuckled hands. Just a man. She thought: They put them self in danger to take bread at my hand.

  “Lady Israel,” he said. “Why so late waking? Art thou called to the Jewish Sabbath?”

  She answered lightly, “Nay, I wake not. I lie asleep, and thou art my dream. As I have told thee, in no other wise may Jew and Christian meet.”

  “I am thy dream—but mayest thou not instead be mine?”

  “I can answer for no other man’s dreams. But that I am asleep, I can well swear.”

  “Well, if I am thy dream, what I do now is not my doing. It is only the making of thy dream.”

  “So it follows.”

  They passed a precarious moment then. She could see his intensity, but not his thought. Her mind ranged through superstitious guesses, while her body expected his hands.

  But at last he said, with the same brisk lightness, “Well, I have passed this time in writing, so thy dream must answer for my poor verse.”

  She smiled. She wouldn’t show her disappointment. “But thou hast no paper. I have dreamed thee an absurdity. Or dost thou write in ash?”

  “No, I am the son of an unlettered father. I can write in my fancy and read the air.”

  “And what dost thou write?”

  “What may be a play, if it go well. I have only a few fair lines.”

  “Fair lines and few,” she said politely. “’Twould be a shame, then, didst thou not speak them.”

  He paused. She could see he was thinking; perhaps he was editing his new-made lines. In that pause, she was Kate, who didn’t see why he mattered. It was pleasant by the fire and the spiced wine was pleasant—but ultimately just a waste of time. Like the ride to Cowdray, like all these days. He was nothing, after all: a minor poet. Just a man.

  Then he collected himself and said, “It is a scene of the sad king Richard. He receiveth ill tidings of his wars, such that he must despair of his throne. His officers bespeak him courage, but the king is stubborn in desponding. Now he speaks:

  For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground

  and tell sad stories of the death of kings;

  how some have been deposed, some slain in war,

  some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,

  some poison’d by their wives: all murder’d.

  For, within the hollow crown that rounds

  the temples of a king, keeps Death his court …

  He spoke the lines with the rich and mournful timbre of a tragic actor. It went on a little while, and coursed and grew and left a hole when he fell silent. Then Emilia was chilled. Wrong-footed. It was as if she had heard the words before, in a time of great happiness that was now lost. It was fey, it was familiar. It was like nothing else.

  But she said with forced calmness, “Marry, a sad prince indeed. It is my Lord Southampton to the life.”

  Will laughed. “Nay, malign him not. It is myself.”

  She laughed in return; there was a spark. She stretched her hand to the fire and his eye followed. Her body expected his hands.

  “Well,” she said, “thy verses are wondrous fair; ’tis as if sugared raindrops fell into my mouth. But thou makest a goodly heap of dead princes. Her Majesty will like that not. Nor will her officers smile at such a hecatomb.”

  He frowned. He seemed ready to explain why she was wrong. But he said, “No matter. ’Twas writ on air and will be gone when the next wind goes.”

  “’Tis like the psalm: ‘The wind goeth over it, and it is gone, and the place the
reof shall know it no more.’”

  But when she smiled at him, he’d shrunk from her—retracted like a snail. There was a chill. The sexual spark was gone. And Emilia remembered his death—the fact printed baldly in a book, A Companion to Tudor Literature, which Kate had read at the New York Public Library: Buried at St. Leonard’s Shoreditch, London, September 1593. Kate had read it and been spooked and titillated. Kate who was still like a child.

  As she thought it, he said in a soft, cold voice, “There was a man of my company that lately died, of eating over-much pickled herring.”

  “Herring?” She laughed from nerves. “What man?”

  “He was called Rob Greene. A wit of the taverns, a writer of pamphlets, an unthrift maker of plays. Even as he lay a-dying, he delivered his confession not to a priest, but to a printer, and made of it a pamphlet to sell for sixpence. I know the book well, for he railed on me in it. He named me upstart crow and thief. He was one who could not speak, but he railed.”

  Will had pinched up a few rushes from the floor. Now he tossed them into the fire. They writhed and became a bright scribble and shrank to ash.

  “’Twas a toad-like, sulphurous wretch,” he went on, “and a whoremaster and a drunkard. ’Tis said, ‘The fox fareth best when he be most cursed,’ and Rob Greene was a fortunate fox; he never lived a week that he was not cursed seven times by all who knew him. ’Twould seem, he was little enough to mourn.

  “Yet in the market, I have lately seen some pages from Greene’s six-penny confession, where they were used as a paper to cover mustard pots. On the crowns of the pots stood the words: Black is the remembrance … black as death. And I wept for pity, that any man’s life should become such a mustard-paper. It hath troubled me, these days.”