Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  He thinks ahead to their destination, now five minutes away. Feels a flush of anticipation thickening in his groin. With Catherine out of harm’s way, they will be more relaxed. They will fight back, push back the gloom invading the house. He will take down a fresh bottle of port from the wine rack in the dining room, throw a quick glo-log on the hearth, fill one goblet brimful with thick, dark grape. He will feel her lips, still chapped with cold, nuzzling his throat, release a warm slippery dram from his lips into hers. As husband and wife sink into firelight her slate-blue eyes will widen—once again the madcap tomboy playing Indian with the older boys. He will hear the sweet laughter he has heard so many times at the top of their toboggan ride—ohh, no-o-two drawn-out tones of complicity; they gather speed—precious peals of throaty laughter, so-o-o unlady-like. Then the long, smooth glide … his silence, her murmurings for each dip and rise. Like closed captions for the hard of touch. Never words, just her soft hum of ecstasy. She has given so much, these ten years. How much has been returned?

  Where is she, is she laughing now?—he strains to hear her laughter as he writes….

  He has just seen how close he’s come to falling in love with his wife.

  The black car pulls up the driveway and stops at the garage door. He switches off the headlights. They sit for a moment longer, reluctant to break the spell. He rolls down his window. Snow continues to fall past the blue-green light at the street corner. A sovereign weightlessness falls from nowhere to nowhere, under a law more like whimsy than gravity. He angles his head out the window and looks up to catch a flake on his tongue. Overhead, a vast hopper of flakes tips through the dark in a soft hurtling of owls….

  He rolls the window up.

  As he switches the car off, the announcer is introducing Bach, a fugue in D minor.

  He starts to open the door and looks at her. She has not moved, has been watching him. He pauses expectantly.“Have we brought this on ourselves?” she asks.

  “No. Don’t say that.”

  “Something we did to each other years ago? Something still in this house?”

  “Madeleine … let’s go in—come on.”

  She looks just past him out the car window, begins again. “I shoplifted some clothes when I was thirteen. A white camisole and a pair of blue jeans. I had the money. For weeks I wore them everywhere, they became my favourite things. One night I lost my mind for five minutes and told Mom. The next day she made me take them back. I’d worn them already a hundred times. Can’t I just pay for them? No. We’re going to give them back together. She told me to wash them but I couldn’t. I ran the washer and dryer empty. I remember inhaling the scent from the paper bag they were folded up in before we got out of the car.

  “Then I gave them back, Don. I feel like that now, you know?”

  He reaches over to take her hand. “We’ll get through this.”

  “Maybe I didn’t earn it, maybe I haven’t paid enough …”

  In her face it is clear how badly she needs to believe whatever he will tell her next. He walks around the car to her door. Opens it. Takes her by the hand. She follows him up the front steps, not letting go. He leads her through the living room of the life they have built. He feels there isn’t much time. It is true. He does not take the time to light the fire, does not even turn on a light. A thin bluish glow falls between the drapes. He does not go to the wine rack, does not open port. He leads her to the couch, leaves her boots and long suede coat on, flakes dwindling to mist. He fumbles at her fly, pulls her jeans down to her ankles and kneels her on the couch. Their need is great, they have so little time, just enough light. There is no laughter tonight. He bends her like a bow. The melodic line he now plucks from her is of a woman toiling over a long, broken slope.

  In the darkness, his own silence is intact.

  Later, when much has changed, he will tell himself she was right, that there was something in the house, let in long before, a cruel spirit to be propitiated that cared nothing for reprieves. But at the time, for the briefest instant, his shame is intense. He burns with a black self-loathing. The moment passes.

  Lovers are cruel sometimes. It’s unavoidable, he tells himself. They find ways to apologize.

  In the bluish light he glances across to the cold fireplace. He gets up and places a glo-log on the grate, turns on the gas, lights it and lowers the flame. Another candle’s truth would be too much.

  He brings over a glass of port. She is still on the couch, sitting now. She asks for her own glass. She has taken her boots off. Her jeans are stretched out on the floor. He is dressed, his belt unbuckled. A shiver, a deep swallow, she wraps her long tan coat tightly around her. She puts her white-stockinged feet side by side on the glass-brick coffee table, her chin on bare knees pressed tight together. With a quiet dignity she says they had better talk while they still know how.

  “Okay.”

  “The truth.”

  “All right.”

  “Why you?”

  “She’s obsessed.”

  “There’ve been others. They never did this.”

  He has his answer ready.“I’m not sure, but she may have convinced herself I’ve stolen her work—some of her ideas.”

  “Did you?”

  “She’s confused.”

  “Confused? She’s nuts, Don, crazy as a fucking loon.”

  “Is that a professional opinion?”

  “As a loon. You heard her.”

  “Maybe I did,” he says, “but that was a long time ago.”

  Her voice is very soft. “I said, heard.”

  He blinks.

  “But she wasn’t like the others, was she, Don.”

  “It wasn’t all craziness back then,” he begins. He is looking at her feet on the coffee table.

  “Not like them at all. Was she.”

  “She was … gifted. But I would not stay on as her advisor. It’s never easy to watch a career blow up. In a case like that, it was criminal. A terrible, sickening waste.”

  “Did you use her work?”

  “No. I mean she got me started in a new direction, but no. Our approaches, our interests were completely different. You know how bored I was with what I’d been doing….”

  “How many dozens of times have we sat together on this couch and talked about work? You’ve read to me snippets from a hundred papers. Lazy ones, dumb ones, plagiarized, bright … Have I ever once heard you talk about this great prodigy?”

  “Her name—”

  “Don’t … don’t say it.”

  “Madeleine, you’re acting like—”

  “Don’t say anything. Think how much easier that’ll be for us both.”

  “I swear to God, I have had no contact whatsoever with this girl for over a year.”

  “I’ve never asked you to lie to me. I’m not asking now.”

  “Will you listen?”

  “Christ knows, I’ve been no angel.”

  “It’s over. I swore on Catherine’s eyes. You never asked me for that, either,” he says. Her eyes shimmer. “That much you know about me … Don’t you?”

  She nods, drawing her lips together, biting down.

  “No more, I told you,” he says. “I love our life.”

  He kisses away the tears that start down her cheeks when she smiles.

  “I’m proud of us, Don. We found a way to give ourselves a second chance. How many people can say that?” she asks fiercely, her small chin lifting. “You know how rare that is?”

  “First thing tomorrow I call the phone company—then her parents. Just ask them how she is, say we had a worrisome call. Leave it at that. If we spot her within a mile of this house, we call the cops.”

  “We can’t take any chances. Not with Catherine.”

  “Never.”

  “I need to know you support me in this.”

  “Completely,” he says. “In the meantime we leave the machine switched off—business calls be damned for a couple of days, if that’s okay.” She nods. “Unplug the bloody ph
one too.”

  “No, what if mom calls? About Catherine.”

  “Then let’s bring her home. Tomorrow.”

  “I want to hear what the police have to say first.” She sees his reluctance. “Why? Why do you keep avoiding this?”

  “I just don’t want to send the stormtroopers crashing in on her.”

  “After what’s she’s done to us you still want to protect her?”

  “She hasn’t done anything yet.”

  “How can you say that? Can you have the slightest fucking idea what she’s got planned for us?”

  “She said Easter—”

  “That’s weeks away. No, it has to be sooner. I can feel it,” she says, her voice low. “I can’t keep doing this. I’m afraid to answer the phone—every noise in the house. I can’t sleep … and you can’t either.”

  “I’ll deal with it. Tomorrow.”

  “Fine,” she says, voice flat. Getting up abruptly she takes one of the glasses off the coffee table and starts towards the kitchen.

  He gets up to follow her, snatching up his glass from the table. Though she has rounded the corner, the kitchen light has not come on. “We can call them anonymously any time we need to,” he calls after her.

  Later, two months later, when it is much too late, he will wonder how they could be caught so devastatingly off guard by a thing they had thought about constantly for days.

  He nearly collides with her in the darkness as he comes around the corner. She is standing still. Her glass gleams dully in one hand. He sees the blue clock readout on the dishwashwer: 11:46. Another light blinks red, a call counter reads: 1.

  “How?” She has half turned to him as his hand touches her shoulder.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You said you’d switch it off!” Her eyes are wide in the darkness.

  “I did. I’m telling you….” But he does know how, if not yet why. “There’s a feature,” he says.“For emergencies. You can switch these things back on over the phone.”

  “You knew that?”

  “It has to ring something like thirty-eight times.” He hears a faint note of pleading.

  The loose stone, the rotted rung, minute deflections of a life’s chosen course.

  He starts forward. She intercepts him, her small hands spread wide on his chest. Her eyes look searchingly into his face. “Erase it, Don. Let’s just erase it.”

  “No.”

  “You like these messages—is that it?”

  He feels something going tight within him. “It’s probably not even her.” He closes his hands over her wrists and steps by.

  “Don’t do this.” She elbows past him and stands with her back to the counter. “What if I erase it?”

  They face each other for an instant, chests rising and falling. He glances away. Through a window he sees snow falling, a dim gesticulation at the outer reaches of the backdoor light. Their eyes have adapted to the darkness. He is about to say he needs to figure things out—what she’s up to. How to protect them. How to fix this.

  “Not one fucking word. It’s all over your face.”

  “I’ll just listen. You go on up.”

  He will wonder, when he has lost the right to ask, whether it might have made the slightest difference—made it all less final, so much less inescapable—if they had not just made love, her hopes lying so near the skin. If she had not felt, just then, the stretched barrels of her vitals collapsing, the cold tracks down her thighs, her cries and his silences still in her ears.

  “Just call, Don—get it straight from the whore’s mouth. What are you afraid of? Call her! Go on.”

  He feels a whiteness fluttering up behind his eyes. He is afraid of the violence it contains. He feels it all coming to pieces. “Go to bed.” It’s all he can trust himself to say. How can he fix things, get it all back the way it was, if she won’t let him listen?

  She stands in the darkness in the kitchen of her house, her cheeks burning with fury, smarting at the indignity. In her house. “Don’t forget where you’re sleeping.” She brushes past him and stops at the bathroom door beside the stairwell. She turns on the light but turns back to face him, light spilling over her shoulders, darkening her face. “You listen. Go ahead. But you get her out of our life, while we still have one. You get her out of your head….”

  He cannot see her face, but will remember until memory fails, the gesture like a dancer’s plié, right knee bent, left out-turned, propped on the ball of an arched foot … the way the right wrist is flexed, the scooping, scouring motion between her legs as she hunches slightly forward. He will remember the light glistening on her fingertips as she raises them to him. Her voice rasps, breathless.

  “You get her out of me.”

  He has not moved, he does not speak.

  She closes softly, a bar of light under the door. He hears the water running, presses play. As he listens he does not notice the light go out and the door silently open. Hating herself, she too listens. When she has heard the end, she calls out a question, from the bottom of the stairs. He turns, startled to find her there.

  “Donald … Those guests of hers, this party. Were they … gods?”

  He sits in the living room until the fire burns out. He wraps himself in the yellow blanket and walks into the den. He puts on jeans and a T-shirt. The hardwood floor is icy under his bare feet. He lies on the leather couch but does not sleep. After an hour or two he gets up and listens again. The voice is coaxing, hushed. He will remember it more clearly than the precise order of the words.

  He erases the message, unplugs the machine.

  JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ

  Alan Trueblood, trans.

  Diuturna enfermedad de la Esperanza,

  que así entretienes mis cansados años

  y en el fiel de los bienes y los daños

  tienes en equilibrio la balanza;

  que siempre suspendida, en la tardanza

  de inclinarse, no dejan tus engaños

  que lleguen a excederse en los tamaños

  la desesperación o confïanza:

  ¿quién te ha quitado el nombre de homicida?

  Pues lo eres más severa, si se advierte

  que suspendes el alma entretenida;

  y entre la infausta o la felice suerte,

  no lo haces tú por conservar la vida

  sino por dar más dilatada muerte.

  Hope, long-lasting fever of men’s lives,

  constant beguiler of my weary years,

  you keep the needle of the balance poised

  at the still centre between joys and fears.

  You hover at the midpoint, disinclined

  to move this way or that, lest your deceit

  allow too free a hand to either state:

  unbounded confidence, abject defeat.

  Who was it claimed you never killed a man?

  That you’re a slayer anyone can tell

  from the suspense in which you keep the soul

  poised between lucky and unlucky chance.

  Nor is it true your aim is multiplying

  our days on earth: it’s to protract our dying.

  GOD’S WAR

  A year after concluding his forty-day interrogation of Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Inquisition’s chief censor is dead. Sor Juana’s secretary, Antonia Mora, tries to persuade her to take up her work again.

  17th day of February, in the Year of Our Lord 1695

  FILLED WITH HOPE I come directly with the news, of Father Núñez’s death early this morning. After an operation for cataracts the patient must lie absolutely still in a darkened room, avoiding the slightest strain or worry lest the eyes start oozing blood.

  I hurry to bring her word, to be the first to tell her I stayed up all night crouched beneath his window, whispering your name, Juanita, so that he died, his ears filled with her, his eyes brimming blood.

  After another night of heavy rain, the day dawns so calmly. In the morning chill, I pause at a street corner as a vast flight of sw
allows pulses overhead, like a liquid, seeping, blotting out the sky with their banking and wheeling—hysteria’s emblem in the air.

  But by the time I reach the convent of San Jerónimo, my ripe news of Núñez is half-forgotten. The streets are filling with the first whispers. People have gathered outside the convent of Jesús María, and again at the approaches to San Jerónimo—why do we come to the convents first?

  The news is of a horrid pestilence that flared up on the coast a few weeks ago then disappeared, smouldering now in the Indian communities of Chalco and Xochimilco. Seemingly overnight, a grim market of tattered awnings and gnarled tent poles has sprouted in the shadow of each convent’s walls. Stalls selling amulets to be worn as pendants: walnuts filled with quicksilver. Charms, poseys, and fragments of holy scripture copied out and tightly scrolled, to be placed beneath the tongue. Nosegays of spices and medicinal herbs. My eyes dart everywhere. I take note of everything, to make you explain it all to me. Talismans, crosses, images of Guadalupe. A row of copper palladiums engraved with the number 4. Xylographies in another row—small woodblocks inscribed with pious scenes—to be swallowed whole, the vendor tells me. At the next stall, an old woman sells phylacteries: pouches stuffed with sacred verses, or else the powdered flesh of scorpions, spiders and toads. Seeing my interest, she whispers that during the Black Plague in Italy, Catherine de Medici had her pouch made from the skin of a newborn infant girl. Only as I walk away do I think to ask the cause of death.

  At the portería, they open the gate for me without a word, as though I had only been away on one of my trips to the market…. I have been away a year. It feels like centuries.

  As I come down the long corridor, the mood in the gran patio is sombre, the figures there strangely seized, like statuary—all across the patio, sisters stand in tense clusters of two or three, as if the muscles of a single torso straining at a block. Many of the faces are familiar.