“Mushrooms don’t root,” Arthur said, and this added to his irritation, because he had explained to her a thousand times that a rhizomorph is not a true root.
“You’ve got to learn to be more self-sufficient,” Arthur said as he cut away at the thousand tiny tendrils that extended through her pores and into the rotten wood. Frances held the glass in her hand and drank the water.
She ate two coddled eggs he gave her after he brought her in and cleaned her up. (It had been dusty out there, and there were insects and what not.) But she threw them right up. She did a little better with the consume and Arthur let it go at that.
“It’s a matter of habit,” he told her. “We’ll start working up to solid food again tomorrow.”
He had missed her badly those four days, and held her close to him while he slept. She still didn’t sleep, but he had given her stern instructions not to get up and wander during the night.
He waked the next morning with a jetstream of sunshine in his face and a heaviness of Frances’ head on his right shoulder. He felt weak and convalescent. He’d done too much, after spending four days in a hospital bed.
He leaned up and Frances’ gaze shifted from the window to his face and she smiled with her coral mouth. “I’m attached to you,” she said.
“Yes, but you’re hurting my shoulder.” And as he went to turn over he saw what she meant.
She was attached to him.
He got his knife again, an awkward procedure as Frances was attached at his shoulder and hip, but it wasn’t as easy as hacking away at a rotten log.
It didn’t hurt when he cut the mycelia, but blood began seeping out and it soon became evident that it was his blood.
And for the first time he felt a wave of disgust for his wife. “You’re a parasite,” he said. “You’re no better than anybody else. At least most of them are willing to settle for money.”
It was then that Arthur decided to divorce his wife.
You will wonder, perhaps, why Arthur did not simply murder her. That is safe only in stories. Murder is illegal, and particularly unsafe among married couples, where the motive is obvious.
But divorce takes a long time and there had to be an immediate separation.
Arthur therefore called a doctor (partly to do this minor surgery safely, partly to serve as a witness that his wife had become a dangerous parasite).
Dr. Beeker had never (Good Heavens!) seen a case of this kind before and recommended (strongly!) that the two of them be brought immediately to a hospital to have the separation made.
But Arthur said No, it might be dangerous to wait, his wife had been acting very peculiar and he didn’t know what she had he might catch and furthermore he had just been ill himself and was feeling weak from loss of blood. (Though, indeed, she wasn’t stealing his blood, only the nutrients from it.)
“I don’t know,” Dr. Beeker said, slicing unhappily at the rhizomorphs with a scalpel, “what effect this is going to have on Mrs. Kelsing. I really feel she should be seen by a specialist. A . . . well, tropical diseases, maybe.”
“A botanist,” Arthur suggested. “My wife needs a good going over by a competent botanist, and although we will be separated, I intend to pay for it.”
But by the time Dr. Beeker had given Arthur a coagulant and an antibiotic and written a prescription, Frances had slipped out and attached herself to the tree stump again.
Dr. Beeker could not bring himself to cut her rhizomorphs again.
Arthur drove into Fayetteville, had a botanist and the police sent out to his cabin and consulted a lawyer.
As it turned out Frances was considered non compos (or non compost, as a cartoonist later put it). But Arthur had to retain the lawyer in any case, because the botanist became suspicious and called in a mycologist and the general conclusion was that Frances was not a natural phenomenon and Arthur in fact was accused of attempted murder.
Arthur’s lawyer was pleased no end as there were fascinating legal problems involved, one of which was that the Frances upon whom the attempted murder had allegedly been perpetrated could not be produced. She did not exist. On the other hand, she could not be considered murdered, as a most important element of the crime of murder was missing. No evidence of a dead body of Frances could be produced. The D. A., being in his right mind, would not accept the charge. As Arthur had figured, there were no statutes covering the situation. Or at least none except one most people had forgotten about.
By the time the scientists had finished their studies, Frances’ condition had proceeded to the state that it was not safe to separate her from the stump and indeed, she had no desire to do anything at all except be watered during dry seasons.
Eventually Frances became one of the eighth wonders of the world (it has been years, of course, since she has moved or spoken) and considerably enriched the state of Arkansas via the tourist trade, including a large number of artists, poets, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists and general aesthetes. And she remains—perhaps will remain forever—happy and famous and beautiful.
Whereas Arthur, who made all this possible, was convicted under an ancient and (till then) unused statute. It was the final ignominy for Arthur, that his life’s work and final triumph should be dismissed by the people of Arkansas as witchcraft.
And so he died, despised, misunderstood, a figure of tragic irony, but returning, we hope, to the reality from which he sprang, the eternal hallucination.
1964
THE ARTIST
There is something deeply terrifying about it—about sitting in a large, airy room full of reality and realizing suddenly there is something wrong with the corners of it—the room and the reality. And that is what happened to Eileen, sitting in the armchair and clutching at the stuffed arms.
EILEEN tried to concentrate on the corners of the room, because the terror she felt was so sudden and so deep and she needed to find out why she knew something was wrong with the corners of the room.
Not thought. Knew.
Reality doesn’t want to face me, she thought. It’s ashamed of itself, because of Tom.
Tom would be along in a minute. The key would turn in the lock and a block of brick colored flesh would become imminent in the lighted doorway, and Eileen’s vacation would be over.
“I’ve got a new kind,” he’d say. Not say, like other people. (What were other people really like? Like in novels? Like in movies?) More he’d drop the words in rough chunks.
And Eileen, who had obviously once been beautiful, would get up in a lithness of green velvet dress and take the brown bag. And there would be on his brick face a look of utter reproach. He felt that if she’d really tried she could have stayed lovely for him.
And the brown grocery bag. There was a time when the bag was full of magic for her. When she couldn’t wait.
But the corners of the room. Coming through them was a stream of . . . no, sounding in them were . . . but there was no sound, no stream. Only a sentience of something that was utterly incongruous with the rest of the universe. Something for which Eileen did not exist.
The lines of the meeting walls and the ceiling were . . . suggested . . . parallel lines that met and energy that could be created or destroyed.
But mostly it was the horror of something for which the world did not exist, and it recoiled Eileen upon herself.
It’s what ghosts are, when they say they’ve seen ghosts, she thought. And it’s here in my house and how shall I live with it. And Tom.
And how can I live otherwise because . . .
Just then the key turned in the lock.
EILEEN tried to get up, but all she could do was adjust the bodice of her dress over her wrinkled breasts and sit holding the rich velvet of the skirt between each set of five fingers.
Tom, massive, filled the doorway, the street light a looming gleam behind him.
He came in and let the door slam.
“Nothing,” he said. “I didn’t find nothing.”
“Nothing! Eileen
echoed, and then saw his face. It was the first time there had been nothing, and it had done things to his eyes. “You’re getting old,” she said exultantly, saying it before she had time to stop herself.
Tom thudded into the straight chair. “Don’t see that follows,” he said. “So there wasn’t nothing this time. So there’s next time.”
“There’s the party tomorrow night.”
“So drag out some old ones.”
“Everyone will know,” Eileen pointed out. “But of course we do have some lovely things.”
“Eileen!” Tom barked, sitting up suddenly, squarely alert. “You got something. You found something. Wait! Wait right there and I’ll get my . . .”
“No!” Eileen interrupted. Why hadn’t she known, thought, of that? “Oh, no. Everything else I’ve done for you. Everything. Even that corpse. You remember the corpse? But not this.” And she ran from the room, but he was inevitable, primordial. He was the solid brick building from which she could not escape, not even see out of.
* * *
“Why on earth don’t you leave him?” asked Marcia, at the party. She was shaking and the drink spilled in little sloshes, making dark dots down her taffeta dress. “I’ve seen funny things here, and outrageous things and beautiful things, but God nor man has seen what’s in there.”
“Leave him,” Eileen said, picking those words out of it. “Leave him. Of course I’ve thought of it. Once I did. But you see after thirty years, how could I? In thirty years I’ve become part of him and part of the house and part of his work and don’t you see I’d be like a baby naked in the snow? I’m not what I might have been, I am what I am. And if you removed all the parts of m-j that are Tom and the work and the house—don’t you see, there’s nothing left?”
“Oh, Lord,” Marcia said. She drained the drink and part of it trickled across her powdered throat, leaving a snail trail.
“I haven’t seen it yet,” said Gerald Smith-Haven, piping himself in with his own voice. “But I know it’s exciting. It always is and I don’t know how many times I’ve had to do my sitting room over because I was ravished by your colors. Ravished, darling.” He held his drink as though it had very small bones.
“Ravished,” Eileen said. “Perhaps, General, you should know that I’m not showing it any more this evening because several people . . . I’ve locked the door.”
“But my dear . . . Oh, really, you can’t do that. What is it? Too beautiful? Too exciting? Too shocking? But you know it’s decades since anyone has been shocked. Not since Hitler. And if you have something really shocking, why you owe it to the world.”
“It’s scary,” Eileen said. “It scares people.”
Gerald stood behind his large glasses, utterly nonplussed. “Scares!” And then he began to laugh. “O, how delightful. How original. I see. You don’t show it at all. You talk about it, hint darkly, and that’s the exhibit.”
“That is not it,” Eileen insisted. She hated his piano key teeth and the way they made mechanical laughter. “You’re only a little boy and you don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand,” said Avery Dart, “how you do it at all. What the process is. I mean, I’ve got a good-looking and understanding wife, but we’ve never produced anything like that.” And he waved an arm at a shadow picture over the buffet. “Even a simple little thing like that.”
Eileen ran her hand over her face, feeling the youth gone from it, touching her hair and wondering in what subtle ways her texture had changed. “I’ve tried to explain so many times,” she said, because Tom liked her to explain. “It started when I was modeling for him in London.” So long ago.
EILEEN lit a cigarette, needing the sheer frivolity of smoking. “There was nothing special about Tom then.” She always said that, but it wasn’t true, so she decided tonight to be more true.
“Yes, yes, there was something special about him. He was the only artist in the block that wasn’t an artist. I mean he didn’t know anything about art. He’d been a cook with the army there and after the war he stayed on and got a job as a coal man. Delivering coal. Before the war he was a garbage man in Davenport, Iowa.”
“Interesting,” said Avery Dart. He was a good kind of young man. He didn’t show his teeth or try to look as though he knew things he didn’t know. “I’ve never heard that before. I thought . . .”
“That he talks that way to be picturesque. No. He talks that way because he’s stupid.”
Avery looked uncomfortable. He didn’t like to be confided in.
He didn’t like the responsibility. “Everybody’s stupid in some areas,” he said. “I can’t spell.”
“Yes, but very few people are stupid in all areas.”
“Why, Toni’s a genius. Everybody admits that.”
“That’s different. That’s nothing to do with being stupid. Some stupid people have big muscles. It’s the same thing.”
Avery, who didn’t drink, moved his glass as though he’d been sipping it. “I don’t see anything there,” he said.
“Where?”
“You keep looking up in the corners of the room and I thought there’d be a spider web.” Eileen’s hand flew to her throat, where all her unspoken words were. “Oh, nothing,” she said. She had reached the point where she was no longer conscious of what was up there, or how afraid she was. It was just there.
Tom laughed, his thick, gutty laugh. “Eileen’s going a little funny,” he said. He felt this vaguely British expression made him sound cultured.
Eileen laughed back at him. “It’s Tom that’s upset,” she said. “His field trip was a failure this time. Ask him what he got.” Marcia swept by, her coat flapping a breeze as she slewed it over her shoulders. “I’m leaving,” she said. “I didn’t have a good time.”
“What was the subject this time?” Smith-Haven asked. “If Eileen won’t let us see your interpretation, at least we can see the subjects. I love them, myself.”
“So I wasted a few days, there wasn’t nothing this time.”
“Then it’s as I thought. There’s nothing in that room.”
“Oh, there’s something in there,” Tom said. “It’s all Eileen’s. Ask her where the original’s at. Where’s it at, Baby?”
“You see,” Eileen said to Avery, who by this time had unobtrusively put his full drink behind a row of glasses and lit a cigar which he did not smoke, “You see how stupid he is? He doesn’t even understand at all. He just reacts. That’s the process. That’s the whole secret and always has been.”
“You’ve got a new theory!” said Gerald Smith-Haven excitedly, and pulled out a mauve notebook and a little gold pencil. He did a column for Tomorrow’s Art and while he never did quite get the art he had a real bent for the theories.
“I’m just telling Avery how it really works. He wanted to know because he’d like to do it. He’s only sold one water color in all his life,” said Eileen.
“Money ain’t everything,” Tom said generously. “Anyway you got a good job. I never had a good job, only art.”
GERALD and Avery and a group of coagulated guests laughed appreciatively. Tom’s humor was famous.
Tom, as usual, shuffled his feet and blushed an even darker red.
“Back in London,” Eileen went on, feeling a spread of memories in her like the spread of the bourbon she’d been drinking, “I modeled for Tom as a joke. I thought he was hysterically funny, like lots of people do. Not interesting, not good in any way, only funny. Then he did the picture of me. The one in the Gallery, of course. And I looked at it and from then on . . . well, it was obvious Tom had gotten something of me and I’d never get it back, so I married him.”
Gerald Smith-Haven was loving this. He was scribbling avidly in his notebook and glittering all over with his own interpretations.
The group was quiet, letting the assembled tobacco smoke drift through them.
“But he’s not just done the one at the Gallery,” Avery said, having, at this point, to know more. “What about all the
other things?”
“Yes, the other things,” Eileen said. “I think Tom’s hobby started when he was a garbage man. Not a talent, really. A hobby. Collecting things. Beautiful things. Beautiful isn’t the right word.”
“Meaningful,” Gerald said. “Stressful.”
“Whatever,” said Eileen. “The fluted edge of a tin can that had been difficult to open. Bluegreen mold on a doughy biscuit. Ephemera like a tomato top on the edge of disintegration. He didn’t do anything with them. He just like them.”
Tom, who had been sure he was being insulted but not sure just how, burst briefly through his gathering annoyance. “I did do things with them. I made them into things.”
“Yes, but the tomatoes rotted and you couldn’t make the tin pieces stay in place and things lost color and form and went away. And you tried to make photographs and it was a total failure and then you tried to paint them and you couldn’t. And do you know why?”
“Sure I know why,” Tom said. “I needed practice.”
“Practice!” Eileen snorted. She had been hating him more and more and she wanted terribly to throw her drink at him. Her hand trembled a little with it and she went on talking, talking, because there was a gathering buzz in her ears and she didn’t know if it was inside her head or coming from the increased volumn of the alien spaces in the corners of the room. “The reason you couldn’t make a work of art was that you didn’t know what the subjects meant. The things you collected. I’ll bet Gerald knows people liked that. They don’t know anything about art, but they know what they like.”
“Yes, yes,” Gerald said, glittering rapidly. “I see it exactly.”
“Like hell you do,” Tom shouted. “Eileen don’t know nothing about art either. All she knew how to do when I picked her up was stand around naked in front of artists. Now ain’t that right, Baby?”
I DIDN’T say I knew anything,” Eileen said. “I was just getting to that part. You remember how it went after you did my picture. And it was fun. For years—you’d go out and get things and bring them home and make something for me to enjoy and I’d enjoy it and you’d paint my understanding of it. You’d paint what I understood and thought and felt and knew.”
Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 29