The King in the Tree

by Steven Millhauser

  More tea?

  Now this, too, may surprise you. My first thought was: Oh, no! Poor Robert! Not him! I mean, Robert, whose harshest word after amateur was banal—accent on the last syllable, to give it the true French stink. I could hear him mocking it all, in that way of his. Adultery, for Chrissake, in suburbia, for Chrissake. Doesn’t the poor sap have a sense of style? Pure kitsch, kiddo. Right up there with busts of Beethoven and bookmarks with Emily Dickinson poems printed on them. And so forth. Poor Robert! What a sad falling off. And so, creature of habit that I was, I wanted to comfort him, the poor man. I mean there he was, sitting all doomed and sort of crumpled and . . . and banal, so of course the only thing you want to do is reassure your husband, while at the same time it’s dawning on you what he’s actually said, and there’s a panic starting somewhere because this handsome man with his doomed look has gone and done something bad to you, if only you could stop comforting him and start concentrating long enough to figure out just what it unbearably is.

  I suppose I should have told you the house is haunted. Well, of course. All houses are haunted. It’s just that some are more haunted than others. Robert’s ghost is sitting right there, where you’re sitting now, and my ghost is sitting here, listening to his strangled confession. The air is full of ghosts. At night you can hear them: sifting through the house, like sand.

  I said nothing. I think he wanted me to say something—to scream at him, to burst into tears. I felt he wanted drama. I lowered my eyes. I could tell I was disappointing him. At the same time I felt threads of fire shooting through me, a wondrous fiery piercing, a kind of . . . a kind of exhilaration of misery. I thought I might die, and that dying might be a strange, exciting thing to do. And you know, I felt almost soothed, almost comforted in my private fire, because it protected me from him, from the words he had spoken.

  I think I exasperated him. The poor man needed something from me, blame or forgiveness or . . . drama, and there I sat, exalted in misery, a saint of suffering. Who knows? When the living have become the dead, who shall speak? There was too much silence in the room. The kitchen was no longer large enough to contain all that silence. It was pushing against the walls, cracking the plaster. I don’t think he intended to say more, but the silence was choking him. He spat out some words, the way you do when someone’s hands are around your neck. He told me things. I said nothing. He told me her name. That’s when I learned it was you.

  You seem upset. Of course you ought to be. Of course Robert would have sworn eternal secrecy. I wouldn’t be surprised if he made you prick your finger with a needle and sign a document in blood. Secret love! What could be better? What you failed to understand was Robert’s loyalty. It’s true that by taking you as his—do you mind the word mistress?—he had been disloyal to me. That’s what confused you. Your mistake was to assume that there were two separate facts: a disloyalty, to me, and a new loyalty, to you. No, whatever his feelings might have been for you, his disloyalty to me simply stirred up and even strengthened the old loyalty. He confessed to me because he was loyal and couldn’t do anything about it. He was stuck with it. Robert betrayed you. I want you to know that. It’s something we have in common.

  Do you know what else he told me? He told me you were nothing to him. Don’t you say anything. He told me you were a body, just a body. If he was trying to soothe me, he was failing brilliantly. But I want you to know what he said, sitting right there. Just a body. Men can be a little thoughtless sometimes, don’t you think? Of course you can choose not to believe me, if it makes you feel better. Or you can believe that Robert was lying. A good man, lying to spare the feelings of his wife.

  But let’s adjourn to the porch, shall we? There’s so much more to tell.

  BACK PORCH

  This was all open, when we bought the place. I used to hang a line between these two posts: I remember Robert’s socks dripping onto the handrail. On Robert’s salary and the little I picked up part-time at the library, we had to be careful—a dryer was the last thing we considered necessary. It was the mosquitoes that finally drove us to screen it in. I don’t think it’s too chilly out here, do you? We can sit a little. Sit, why don’t you. I just loved it out here, summer evenings. I’d come out with a book and sit with it facedown in my lap. You can hear a lot of sounds in the summer, and I liked all of them: children’s voices all woven together, a car radio suddenly loud and then fading away, a basketball hitting a driveway with that smacking sound, grackles in the trees—and the crickets, always the crickets, and always the lawn mowers. I used to think of the evening lawn mowers as big summer insects—a sort of bee. Robert never lasted long out here. I think it made him restless. But he always sat for a while, in the summer, to keep me company. Sometimes we’d talk about converting it to a full-time room—windows, heat, I imagined myself sitting out here feeling warm in winter—but my heart wasn’t in it. A porch needs to be open. You need to feel the air and hear the sounds. Don’t you think? The whole idea is to be outside and inside at the same time. That’s what a porch is.

  After Robert’s confession, I came out here. Sat right there where you’re sitting now. Who knows what I was thinking? It’s hard to remember things, even the most important things in your life. All you know is that they happened. I sat down. I felt dead. At the same time my mind was very sharp and alert. And this might strike you as odd, but I was in a state of—of surprise. Robert had killed me, a quick stab to the heart, and I’d come out on the porch to watch myself die. Why wasn’t I dead? It did surprise me. Or maybe the dead have their thoughts, as well as the living. Do you think so? My mind, as I said, was very alert. I heard Robert’s words, the words that I knew were going to change my life, and already I was judging them. You see, I heard in his confession a certain—well, a certain pride. He had said his piece—had come to terms with his conscience—he’d acted like a good man. He had performed well. I almost felt like standing up and applauding. Bravo, Robert! Now it was my turn—to act like a good woman. All I had to do was forgive him.

  I don’t know how long I sat out here. I remember noticing it had grown dark: a peaceful summer night. At one point I heard Robert’s footsteps in the kitchen. They stopped at the door of the porch, and I knew he was standing there in the dark kitchen, looking at me through that window. Then he went away.

  When I first met Robert, when I was twenty-four and he was thirty, he used to come into the bookstore where I was working. He wore jeans and work boots and flannel shirts. He looked like a skinny lumberjack. I thought he was my age—a student, maybe. Even then he was an interesting man. A teacher who hated teachers, an intellectual who made fun of intellectuals, a Jew with no ties to Judaism—unless you count the piano. Robert liked to say that all pianos are Jews. He didn’t sit comfortably in his skin. It’s one of the things that most attracted me to him.

  I thought about that time in a dim, puzzled way, as if I’d read about it in some book I could no longer remember.

  Then I recalled something that happened once at a party. A loud man was talking to Robert, a little way off. “Good old Robert,” I heard him say, with a friendly laugh. I saw Robert’s face tighten behind his little smile. Later I asked what that was all about. “Oh, he’s a fool,” Robert said. “But even so, he has no right to call me good.” At the time I thought he was just being—you know, being Robert. But now I wondered about it. Was it possible he wasn’t a good man? Of course I never thought he was a saint. I couldn’t have stood that. Robert was difficult. But I knew him—I knew him. Didn’t I?

  That’s what I asked myself, sitting right there where you are.

  What do you do when you’re dead-alive and your husband is a ghost? What do you do? You go up to bed. I went up to bed. I felt sluggish with weariness, but at the same time feverishly tense, as though I might explode. There was no question of sleeping in the same bed as Robert. But when I looked into the dark room and saw the bed empty, I felt . . . I wanted to . . . I mean, Jesus, to think that he’d gone to her—to that bo
dy—to you—well, it was too much. Then it all came rushing into me, a black wind. Do you know it, the black wind? It’s the wind after the first wind. It’s the wind that comes rushing in when you think the worst is over, sweeping you clean, till you feel like a room without furniture. I realized then that I wasn’t going to be spared. Not even a little. At that moment I heard a creak and realized that Robert had gone to sleep on the couch in his study. I felt grateful to him for removing himself from our bed—Robert was always sensitive, a very sensitive man— and fell with relief into a sort of half sleep.

  That was how it was for the next few weeks. I slept without sleeping, woke without waking. I ran a low fever. I felt . . . bruised all over, as if I’d been beaten up. Robert worried over me, without coming too close. He tried to show me that he wanted to take care of me but that he understood my desire to be left alone. A sensitive man, as I said. And you too—a sensitive woman. I can see that. I can feel that. Two sensitive people, giving off flames of hell. As for Robert and me, we barely spoke, though I didn’t shut him out. I think he thought I was punishing him. But I wasn’t doing something to Robert. I just—it was like—listen. Robert had gone away. Do you understand that? In his place was this—this man, a polite stranger, who hung around the house, making sure I didn’t . . . die, I guess. Or hurt myself. You can hurt yourself, in a house. I was very weak. Once I even fell down the stairs. Can you imagine? Falling down the stairs out of sheer unhappiness? Nothing got broken, but I think it alarmed him, this man who was always in the house, imitating my dead husband.

  Where was I? Sleep. Of course I didn’t only sleep. I moved about. I felt heavy, draggy—and light, very light, as if at any second I’d float right up to the ceiling. I lost my color; my skin was sickly white, like one of those old dinner plates you see glimmering out at you in a dark corner of an antique shop. I felt feverish and dead. Robert was—as I said, he was very good to me. I mean, what else could he be? He wanted me to see a doctor. Can you imagine that? Doctor, Doctor, my husband is seeing another woman. Do you have a pill for that, Doc? Maybe a shot in the behind? No, I’d never be able to keep a straight face. Besides, wasn’t Robert thinking of himself, as well as of his poor zombified wreck of a wife? Much better for him if she’s a happy, perky little wifey-wife. Thaaat’s all right, dear. Boys will be boys. A little fun never hurt anybody, for gosh sakes. All’s forgiven! Really! Not only that, you can bring her over here! Sure, why not? We have a big bed—there’s room for one more. I’ll make punch and sandwiches. Bring my binoculars. Well. Don’t get me going on that. If I was sick, if I was depressed, at least my sickness was mine. I wasn’t going to let him take that away too.

  But, as I said, I wasn’t thinking a whole lot about Robert, at that time. I was actually thinking about . . . you. Does that surprise you? It shouldn’t. It’s a natural thing. Up to that point, there had really been only the two of us—Robert and me. Now there were three. People say that about having a baby, you know: go in two, come out three. Well, we had you. There was Mommy, and Daddy, and cute li’l cuddly-wuddly you. So of course I thought about you. God, did I think about you. I thought about you all day long. I even thought about you that night I spent lying on the floor of the bathroom. Dizzy spell— lay there all night long, after coming downstairs at two in the morning. Do you know what it feels like, lying on the linoleum in the bathroom thinking about your husband’s cutie pie? Sometimes I imagined you as a big blond slut in a tight red dress. Other times you were a slim business-type in a snazzy skirt suit—you know, one of those jackets with a notched lapel and a trim skirt that zips up the side. Zip zip. Oh, darn, my zipper’s stuck. Would you mind giving me a hand, Robert? Of course it wasn’t you I thought about, exactly. Just: that woman. And so I thought about her. I became obsessed by her: by you. I tried to imagine you as Robert would: a desirable body. I . . . undressed you, in my mind. I looked at you. I . . . did things to you. Or rather, I did things to her, to them, to all women—no one was safe from me, in my mind. I’ve always thought of myself as a—a modest woman, but I wasn’t modest as I tried to find my way to the heart of Robert’s need. I imagined the friends of friends, women I didn’t know by name, wondering if she was the one. I unhooked their bras, I pulled down their underpants—the way I imagined Robert would. Just a body. What was a body? I had one, but it wasn’t the right one. Which one was that? Maybe a young one?— sophomore?—a no-bra, T-shirt kind of a girl—one of those hipless wonders, legs like a nutcracker. Could be. Who knew? Not me. There was one woman—a colleague of his. Someone without a name. Miss Colleague. I’d met her a few times, one of those touchy-feely types, always putting her fingers on everybody’s arm, as if she were afraid she wouldn’t be noticed unless she stabbed you to death with her nails. You know the type. Eyes too bright, chin too sharp, bra too pointy. Was she the one? Why not? What did they have, these phantom-women, that I didn’t have? I tried to picture things I’d never . . . well, I won’t say never. But they never concerned me, especially, the things other women did in bed. Why should they? Things were fine between us, in that department. I mean, weren’t they? Of course things weren’t exactly the way they used to be—not after twenty-two years. You get used to each other. You don’t feel crazy anymore. It’s actually a good feeling. But I mean . . . but I’m losing the thread. And so I made women naked in my mind. I tore off their clothes. I looked at their bodies. I turned myself into a man. My hips shrank. My arms grew hard. I was a lovely man; tense, dangerous. I was a lean teenager, mean and cool, prowling the suburban streets till dawn.

  Women’s bodies! They were out there, millions of them, and men wanted them. It was just that I had the wrong body. A shame, really. I’d always figured I had the right body, but it turned out I’d gotten the wrong one by mistake. A shipping error. Sorry, lady, no refunds. Earlier, we’d been friends, my body and me—at worst I’d treated it with a kind of skeptical affection. Now I became ruthless. I judged it mercilessly. Upstairs in the hall there’s an old mirror—framed in mahogany—shaped like a shield. It’s one of the pieces of furniture we inherited from Robert’s grandmother. One day I took the hand mirror from my dresser and stood in front of the hall mirror, in my underpants. I turned around and studied my figure in the hand mirror. I put my weight first on one leg, then the other. I tried to desire myself, I tried to imagine myself an object of desire. And as I stood there, studying myself coldly but feverishly too, it came over me that what was upsetting wasn’t so much the harsh judgment I passed on my body as the knowledge that I was entering willingly into a world of humiliation.

  Finally I couldn’t bear it any longer—I mean, not knowing what you looked like. And so one night I paid you a little visit. Oh, Robert neglected to mention that? How careless of him.

  It must have been toward the end of July, the second or third week after Robert’s famous little confession. I was still in a strange state, drifting through the house, never really sleeping, never really awake. Ghosts are like that, I imagine. Do you think ghosts are like that? I remember it was a hot night: a hot summer night, the kind I had always liked, back in the days when I was among the living. Robert was asleep in the study; I came down and sat here, on the porch. I was still running a low fever. I was dressed, I remember that, jeans I think and a blouse, and I tried to listen to the sounds of the night, but I was too restless for that. It was impossible to breathe, and I thought I’d go out and take a little walk.

  I was struck by the peacefulness of the night, and I thought maybe—just maybe the peace would enter me and calm me a little. And I was struck, you know, by how much it looked like a summer night. I could feel myself smiling, the way you do when something is so much itself that it seems a little . . . contrived. Somebody’d put a big white moon up there in the sky, and for some reason it reminded me of the round white top of a Dixie cup, the underside—the way the ice cream sticks to it and makes little patterns like mountain ranges—and you could see the shadows of chimneys slanting along roofs and the shadows of trees thro
wn up against the fronts of houses. I could smell things very sharply: the leaves of a big Norway maple, fresh tar from a driveway, wet grass and gravel under a sprinkler. Of course I knew where I was going. Robert had told me your name, and one night I’d looked it up in the phone book. Right here in town! How fortunate for both of you.

  I knew it was on the other side of town, out past the cemetery. I wasn’t exactly sure where. It seemed to me that I’d been walking for hours; it may be that I lost my way. But when you have a fever, when you’re walking in a waking dream, through a summer night made up of nifty stage props—streetlight, moon, tree—then what does it matter whether you get there sooner or later or never or always, your husband asleep in the study, your front door open, your mind disordered, your heart opening and closing like a fist, the hair of a dead woman streaming from a tree—or was it a kite string, a ball of unraveling twine, rope of a hanged man; not for me to say. Then I was there, in front of her house—your house—the house of the wicked witch. Go awaaay, my voices sang in me. Oh staaay, my voices echoed. I took in the front porch—wicker sofa, the two plants hanging like . . . oh, like anchors . . . and shutters . . . with those little grooves in them. I went around the side toward the back. Two garbage pails with little wheels, tomato sticks with nothing growing, one of those grills that look like a diving bell. Magnolia in back yard. Round glass table, metal chairs. Two doors! The back door at the top of the steps: locked. But the cellar door—really, people ought to be more careful, why only the other day . . . It opened so easily, as if you’d been expecting me. Were you? Up the little stairs. Moonlight in the kitchen. So tired! I was, you know: tired, I mean. Everything was strange. The edges of the plates in the dish rack caught the moonlight. I realized that I was in an enchanted cave. Clock ticking like a stick knocking. Bick bock. Bick bock. Knife handles sticking out of a block of wood, as though the knives had been thrown at a target. But where was the knife thrower, where was the woman on the turning wheel? I took one out—the sort of thing you do, in a fever-dream. The hall led to three doors, all open. Three: just like a fairy tale. I looked in the first. Empty! Looked in the second. Empty! Of course! I wanted to shout: Oh, I know where you’re hiding! Can’t fool me! Through the third door I could see you lying in your bed. I went in—just like that—and stood over the bed, looking at you. I was surprised to see a knife in my hand. Where had it come from? I felt that I was on a stage, and people were watching: the crazy lady with the knife, bent over the sleeping witch. You had stolen my husband. Broken my heart. Ruined my life. Why shouldn’t you die? I felt the moon turn suddenly red, bleeding great red drops into the sky. I was exalted. I was an angel: wrathful. I looked at you. Robert didn’t tell you this? Your face was on the pillow, turned a little to one side, your hair loose, flowing. You were younger than I was, but not young, not the way I had imagined. Light hair, straw not blond. The covers were partway down, sheet turned over the spread to form a border. Your hand on the edge of the sheet, as though you were stroking it. Your bare throat, your nightgown. Not the silky clingy thing I’d expected, but a cottony smocky sort of thing. I could see you were an attractive woman, handsome not beautiful, not drop-dead gorgeous, nothing little-girly about you—character in the mouth. I stood there. I stood there. What came over me then . . . it was . . . I had a sense that all this . . . the moonlight in the room, the stillness, the hair on the pillow . . . it was as if I’d crept into the room of a sleeping child, or . . . something along those lines. Call me a sucker for cheap effects. But suddenly I was the wicked witch and you were . . . only you. A woman sleeping. I looked at you. I tried to make you dream me. I saw something in my hand. I left the room and never looked back.