by James Lasdun
Victor frowned.
‘I don’t really see the connection.’
‘It’s the same situation.’
‘No. It’s the opposite of me and Oxana. She dumped me. If she hadn’t I’d have held on to her whether I thought I was the right man for her or not. I don’t have your self-sacrificing instincts. It’s not even a comparable situation.’
‘Well, but it could be.’
‘How?’
‘If you’d just allow yourself to be content with what you have. A lovely wife, a home, a child. That’s as good as life gets, Vic. Believe me. Why throw it away?’
Victor said nothing. The melancholy expression had returned to his face. The sun was going down behind the mountains. In shadow, the ruined walls of the farmhouse merged back into the rubble of rocks and scree they’d been built from. Thin grey trees grew out of the old cellar, snaking up over the weeds and brambles like solidified wisps of smoke.
Richard stood up from the cold stone seat, sensing obscurely that he was going to regret having told the story.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I guess we should get you to your train.’
**********
Sara, Richard’s wife, had been orphaned at the age of seven when a truck jackknifed across an icy road in Michigan, smashing into her parents’ car on their way home from a church supper. Distant relatives – a couple in their fifties – had adopted her, bringing her to their home in rural Minnesota where they ran a mail-order garden supply business. At sixteen, when the local school proved unsatisfactory, she was sent to live with another set of relatives in Scarsdale: a podiatrist and his wife from whose quiet home she graduated from high school and commuted for several years to classes at Parsons and then the Cooper Union.
Each set of surrogate parents had treated her kindly, attending to her needs as scrupulously as if she had been their own daughter. Against the indelible stain of sadness left by her bereavement was a feeling of being cared for, and this peculiar combination had helped to determine a certain unconscious conception she’d formed early on of her own existence: an idea of herself as the concern of others; a belonging whose fate involved two essential gestures: being cherished and being handed on. She had been her parents’ in Sioux City, then the Gardiners’ in Minneapolis, the Bences’ in Scarsdale … And a few months after meeting Richard in New York, she had become Richard’s.
In making herself over to him she had been swayed less by any overwhelming passion of her own than by his forceful certainty that she was the right person for him to be married to. Not that she hadn’t considered herself to be in love – she had – but her own feelings had never seemed of great importance to her, and it was largely in deference to the vision Richard presented, of a definite scheme of things in his life, in which a definite place had been created for her, that she had deeded herself, so to speak, into his possession.
At the time she moved in with him she was completing a masters in textile design and had a job waiting for her with a company in Long Island City. Richard was doing a stint training teachers at Ryden College. She had known this was only a temporary stage in his career – part of a larger plan – but she’d been surprised at the abruptness with which he decided, a few months before their wedding, to quit the college. She was even more surprised when he asked her, a little later, how she would feel about moving upstate to a small town where he’d been offered the position of principal at an ailing private school. Despite the job waiting for her in Queens, and despite the fact that she’d never had any particular desire to live in the country, she’d agreed without hesitation.
In her careful, practical way, she had examined her options and decided to take up weaving. Richard’s income was enough for them to live on comfortably, but she didn’t like the thought of not earning. She’d had a small studio built next to the house they bought, installed a loom, and began producing rugs and hangings, selling them at craft fairs and local stores. In choosing this new occupation she’d had in mind something that would be compatible with looking after a child, and three years later, after Daniel was born, this proved to be the case. As an infant he had slept and nursed and played with balls of yarn in her studio while she worked. As a small boy he’d been her companion as she sat at stalls selling her pieces or went on her rounds to the breeders of the various exotic animals – llamas, vicunas, merino sheep – whose wool she used. This social aspect of her work was from the start more interesting to her than the weaving itself. She had a real curiosity about other people, and enjoyed her contact with the farmers and other craftspeople she got to know. Reticent as she was, she found that, given enough time in her quiet presence, people took to her.
The sudden absence of Daniel from her side, when he started going to school, had been a blow. She’d grown so used to doing everything with her small son that she’d come to think of the weaving itself as a joint occupation. There were the weekends, of course, and the vacations during which, for the first few years, he would faithfully resume his former position. But gradually, inevitably, and under her own conscientious encouragement, he had developed other interests – first soccer, then karate, now basketball – and now that he was almost eleven it had long been clear that that intimately shared phase of their lives was over.
She had gone on with the weaving, partly out of habit, and partly because she felt guilty not using the studio, which, as Richard had pointed out to her in a moment of uncharacteristic bluntness, cost more to build than a lifetime’s production of rugs and hangings was ever likely to pay for.
But something in her had moved on, and even as she went through the motions of making new designs and working out their execution on the old wooden hand-loom, she knew that her heart was no longer in it and that for her, too, the time had come to embark on something new.
One afternoon in May the phone rang in her studio. It was Bonnie, one of the volunteers who worked for a neighbouring wildlife rehabilitator. Sara sometimes took in injured animals from the rehabilitator, a woman who’d moved to Aurelia a few years ago.
‘Hey, Sara,’ Bonnie said. ‘Carla has some news for you. Wait one moment, I’ll tell her I have you on the line.’
Sara waited.
‘Sara?’ came a commanding voice. ‘We have someone very special for you to meet.’
‘Oh?’
‘Royalty, my dear. You’ll see. Can you come right away?’
‘Okay.’
‘We’ll expect you shortly.’
Sara put down the ball of yarn she’d been threading onto her loom and went outside. It was a mild, cloudless day, and she was glad of an excuse to take a walk. She set off, smiling as she thought how typical it was of Carla to make a mystery of whatever creature she was summoning her to look at now.
Originally she’d agreed to take in these injured animals purely out of a sense of neighbourly obligation, but she’d soon discovered a taste for it. She seemed to have a knack for handling them. Her slow physical gestures and patient manner put them at their ease. They trusted her and repaid her attentions with clamorous attentions of their own that might have been no more than need but felt like affection. She liked getting out of the car when she came home and having a crow she’d nursed to health come flapping across the yard to land on her arm with a squawk, or a pair of orphaned squirrels she’d brought up run chattering down from their box in the horse chestnut tree and follow her to the door. Often the animals stayed around the house or came to visit, long after she had released them. There was a robin that returned every year and would still eat mealworms out of her hand. A buck she’d taken in as a fawn after coyotes killed its mother would sometimes materialise before her in the woods, standing there for a moment as if just to show himself.
The walk to Carla’s led through woods of maple and ash. It was cool in their shadow, but currents of warm air drifted through, carrying the scent of leaf mould. A woodpecker drilled into a tree, loud as a jackhammer.
In twenty minutes she arrived at Carla’s house, stepping out i
nto the backyard and making her way past the ramshackle outbuildings.
Bonnie, the volunteer, opened a door in the side of the big-bellied red barn, greeting Sara with her usual look of faintly disconcerting mirth.
‘Hey there!’
Bonnie was thirty maybe, with hennaed black hair cut in wisps, a notched silver feather dangling from each ear, dark eyes, sharp cheekbones.
‘How’re you doing? How’s Rich?’
Bonnie, Sara remembered, was putting a daughter through Richard’s school. She and the girl had recently moved to a cabin here on Carla’s property, which Carla let her have for free in return for the chores she did.
‘We’re well. How are you? How’s Caya?’
‘She’s great. We both are.’
There were two other women in the dimly lit interior of the barn; youngish, semi-indigent wanderers. Rainbow People, they called themselves. A steady stream of them drifted through Aurelia every spring and summer, camping in the woods and hanging out on the village green. Carla often had a few of them working for her. One, a redhead in dungarees whom Bonnie introduced as Tasha, was hosing down cages on the unfloored area at the back. The other, Jo, plump and pale with eyebrow rings and a tie-dye belly shirt, was feeding chopped fish to a family of possums.
‘Carla will be right along,’ Bonnie said, plugging in earbuds. ‘Make yourself at home.’ She danced off to the kitchen area where she began mixing seeds in tofu buckets.
Carla was seldom in a room when you entered it, Sara had noticed: it was she who had to make the entrance.
Waiting, she wandered from cage to cage in the timbered gloom of the barn with its watchful presences. A fledgling cardinal gaped its mouth as she approached. A rabbit limped to the back of its cage on three legs. Next along was a sleeping barn owl with a bandaged claw; its flat, kabuki-mask face with the strange recessed beak pale and motionless above its perch. Carla claimed that the face of these owls had evolved this way to resemble the disc-shaped scars of paler wood on tree trunks where branches have fallen. Long ago, she had offered this and other observations for publication to a number of scientific journals, without success: part of an ancient conspiracy, she claimed, to ‘deny permission’ to lay naturalists like herself. Staring at the owl, Sara could half-see Carla’s point, just as she could half-believe in the existence of this conspiracy to ‘deny permission’. But the other half of her reserved judgement.
She was an odd mixture, Carla, of the down-to-earth and the pretentious. The ex-wife of a state official in Albany, she had arrived in Aurelia five years after Richard and Sara, settling in the farmhouse at the top of their mountain road, where she’d embarked on a fairly public process of self-transformation, from a solitary, forlornly dignified figure still wearing the matronly uniforms of a former political hostess, to what could only be described as a New Age Priestess. She’d stopped dyeing her hair and let it grow long, which gave her broad face, with its sharp blue eyes and prominent, aquiline nose, the look of a cigar store chief. The well-pressed blouses and skirts were exchanged for robe-like outfits accented with large runic bracelets and rings.
She began giving talks at the town hall and the Ahimsa Yogaprananda bookstore – on Tibetan chanting, Siberian Shamanism, Native American healing practices, her own experiences in reincarnation. Flyers with her picture on them, advertising the talks, became a fixture on the town’s public bulletin boards. At a certain point she appeared to have decided it was necessary to extend her sphere of influence beyond the sizeable ‘spiritual community’ (as it called itself) of Aurelia, into the animal kingdom, getting herself certified as a wildlife rehabilitator; a move whose practical utility caught her detractors off their guard, though it didn’t diminish their scorn.
Among these detractors was Richard, a fact always troublingly present in Sara’s mind when she thought about the woman. He found her ridiculous – a self-aggrandising narcissist, motivated simply by a crude hunger for admiration, and a desire to have people in thrall to her, by whatever means. According to him she had merely identified the easiest route to prominence in Aurelia, with its large number of well-meaning, semi-educated people who regarded themselves as too smart to be taken in by the traditional sources of authority and were thus natural targets for every kind of charlatanism. As it happened, Sara didn’t altogether disagree with him, and yet she found herself drawn to the woman nevertheless, and, for reasons she didn’t quite understand, fascinated by her.
She claimed to have majored in natural sciences at college, and there was a bookshelf here in the barn full of books on natural history, though the more well-thumbed among them tended to have titles like Wolves and Other Spirits, or The Gospel of the Raven. She’d given one to Sara as a present once, Soul Makers. It was a memoir of a woman’s recovery from drug addiction through encounters with various animal ‘healers’; very corny and shamelessly anthropomorphic, but Sara had found herself unexpectedly riveted by it, much to Richard’s dismay. To placate him she’d agreed to read a book that he said had purged him of the last traces of his own lingering religiosity, leaving him, he claimed, with a paradoxically deeper appreciation of the natural world.
She moved on, listening to the girls talking and laughing, watching Bonnie sway to her silent music as she dipped her scoop into the paper sacks of seed and emptied it into the white buckets, dust and chaff rising up into the high beams of sunlight.
She liked being here – the quiet, easy sociability of people working together at something they enjoyed was a congenial element to her; more so, these days, than the solitude of her studio.
Next to the owl were empty cages, then a groundhog, nervously sniffing at her from behind its bars; a soft-looking smudge of an animal, like a brown shadow. A blowfly infection bulged under its forearm. She gazed in, settling the agitated creature with soothing whispers. A few years ago Richard had caught one of these in his vegetable garden; trapping it in a Havahart live trap. Sara had called Carla to ask what they should do with it. She’d told them to free it at once as it was either a baby that needed its mother, or a parent needed by its babies. When Richard picked up the extension to ask what he was supposed to do, in that case, about his vegetables, Carla had told him to find the burrow and talk to the animals; maybe ask them to just take the first plant in each row and leave the rest alone. She’d offered to come up and talk to them herself, even do a little ceremony in the garden with her bells.
His contempt for her dated from then.
Stepping away from the groundhog, Sara came to the cage where the girl with the eyebrow rings was feeding possums. The girl grinned at her.
‘Carla says these babies’ll just start eating each other if I stop feeding them before they’re done.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘Some asshole must’ve ran his truck over their mother – she was squished flat with her eyes all bugged out – but these three guys still alive at the back holding onto her tail. Isn’t that so cute? They were the size of my pinkie. Now they’d tear my pinkie right off if I let them near it!’
The girl gave a peal of giggles. The possums cringed back. Looking at them in their steel cage Sara thought of an image in the book Richard had made her read; an update on Darwinian theory in the light of modern discoveries about genes. In it the author invited the reader to regard all living creatures as occupants of a vast mathematical grid in which every combination of the sixty-four ‘words’ in the universal genetic dictionary had its own niche. Empty niches represented combinations that had failed to create viable organisms. Inhabited ones were those that had succeeded. The ‘words’ had no meaning: they were just molecular patterns that happened to have this property of self-replication, as other patterns might have the property, say, of adhesiveness. Plants and animals were therefore just complicated pieces of packaging evolved over time by natural selection for the chance advantages they offered in regard to the perpetuation of this arbitrary genetic code: that was all. So that to allow oneself to be ‘moved’ by them, to expe
rience tenderness or wonder in their presence, was to succumb to an illusion.
Sara had known all this, more or less, from high school biology, but the book’s relentless lucidity had brought it home to her with an unnerving force. For a while every time she looked at an animal she’d felt obliged to remind herself that the sympathy rising in her was being stimulated by an object that was nothing more than a mathematical formula applied in a physical universe over a vast amount of time. Eventually she had overcome this depressing compulsion with the thought that since she, by the same token, was also just the result of a mathematical formula applied in a physical universe over a vast amount of time, she was entitled to her feelings. But the image of that matrix or grid came to her often as she looked down the rows of cages in Carla’s barn, and there were moments, like this one right now, staring at these otherworldly opossums with their long white tapering faces, eyes close together like the seeds in a halved pear, when she seemed to glimpse the strange, desolate reality described in Richard’s book.
The door at the side of the barn opened and there stood Carla.
‘There you are,’ she said, peering at Sara in the dim space. ‘He’s ready. Come.’
Her voice was deep, with an imperiousness that people sometimes made fun of, though Sara herself enjoyed the sensation of being ordered around by it. She followed her out of the barn.
‘I hope the girls didn’t spoil our surprise,’ Carla said.
‘No.’
‘Good.’
Though she was only a fraction taller than Sara, Carla’s regal bearing gave an illusion of much greater height. Her long hair hung in two thick, white wings either side of her weather-bronzed face. She led Sara towards the house; a sprawling building with dark-stained cedar plank walls and green-framed windows.