“But you’re…you’re…”
“Say it, Og!” I commanded, for it was very important that he acquire that ability, that honesty. “You must be able to say it.”
“Gone to a better world?” Knox Ogden tried. “Out of your misery?”
“Come on, man!”
“Passed on? Called home?”
“Og.”
“Dead?” he tried.
“Very good!’ I complimented him. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“But…” he said, “but…but…” He looked around at the dull walls, the many mirrors (in which he could no longer see himself), the bookcases, the things he’d never have to heft again. He saw, with detachment and what did not amount to pity so much as revulsion, the stiffening body sprawled out on the sofa, in one hand the sheet of yellow lined paper on which he had attempted unsuccessfully to scrawl his last poem, in heroic Drydenish couplets, “Ekaterina,” but indecipherable to you and to any except the critic Lawrence Brace, who would not attempt its decoding for another few years; and in the other hand the almost empty glass of Jack Daniel’s, tilted at a steep angle, its ice slowly melting.
“Ick,” said Og. “An odious corpse, aren’t I?”
“It will take you a while,” I pointed out, “to become accustomed to the new sense of aesthetics that we have on this side, where everything’s so beautiful that earthbound forms seem to be incomplete, if not inelegant.”
“Funny,” he observed, rubbing his plasmic hands along his gossamer arms, “I don’t feel dead. How do I know I’m not just blind drunk and you’re some joker pulling a trick on me?”
“There’s someone who wants to meet you,” I told him. “Someone who—if you’ll forgive the expression—is just dying to meet you.” I gestured dramatically with my hand, in presentation, and out of the ether the extract appeared in all its glory.
Og gasped. “Lawren!”
“Hello, old buddy,” said Lawren Carnegie, and I left the two chums to chew the fat, settle old scores, explain a few things to each other, and my colleague to undertake the business I didn’t want to handle: determining if Og desired to remain here and compete with him for the possession of this mansion or to accompany his remains to their burial in his home state, Utah, out west.
I returned to you and Kenny, who was fishing his keys out of his pocket and suggesting, “Maybe I oughta, like, open up and see?” And then, his voice quavering, he requested of you, “Would you go with me?”
“Sure,” you said, and went with him, hoping to find that, as he sometimes did when he’d been drinking too much, Knox Ogden was simply sleeping late. Kenny unlocked the door, and the two of you stepped inside and at once saw the odious body sprawled out on the sofa. His murphybed had not been pulled down from the wall. You were more interested in studying Kenny than in studying the corpse. You did not know whether the boy had ever had any encounters with death or how he would take it, and you were apprehensive; Kenny’s eyes were very large, and his mouth was open, and he could scarcely speak—just whisper to suggest that one of you, ideally you, not him, should shake the man. You went through the motions of shaking the man by his shoulder, just to buy time, just to give Kenny a few more moments to get used to the inevitable, because you already knew, from the moment you’d seen him, that Knox Ogden was dead. Your experience was great: In Svanetia, in Tbilisi, in Leningrad, and especially in Camp 39 at Ishimbay, you had seen dead people. You knew that the human body, once it is no longer inhabited by the kvin, is as harmless, as expired, as meaningless, as a fallen tree. Except that a fallen tree can be cut into firewood, or it can be left to nourish many generations of mushrooms, but a human body can do nothing, can do nothing, can do nothing at all, ever, anymore.
“Kenny,” you said as gently as you could, “Professor Ogden is not any longer living.”
“Oh, shit, no!” Kenny insisted. “How can you be sure? Did you feel his pulse?”
You lifted Ogden’s wrist, the one holding the sheet of yellow lined paper, as if to offer it to Kenny to feel. “You want feel?” you asked. He declined, and when you released the wrist it dropped obviously like a deadweight, but not before you’d grasped the sheet of paper and, attempting to read it, made out what appeared to be, at the head of a column of verses, your name. You were very sad, then, thinking that the last thing he’d done was to try to write something to you, or for you. And you’d never even been able to tell him what you thought of his poems. And now it was too late. Soundlessly, because you were not yet ready to make the sounds, you wept; your cheeks were bathed, and you had to turn your head so that Kenny could not see.
“Jesus,” Kenny said. “Oh, holy shit. I didn’t hate the dude. I mean, sure, I said some bad stuff about him, sometimes, and yeah, I, like, probably made him feel bad, I guess, but I didn’t hate him. He wasn’t so bad. Why did he have to go and die?”
You wiped away your tears so that you could turn and face Kenny. “Is not your fault,” you said. You saw that his own eyes were very wet, his mobile face very stricken, and he was clenching and unclenching his hands as if he wanted to make a fist and hit something.
But his lip began trembling, and then his whole jaw was trembling, and he stared at you beseechingly, as if there were something you could do to help. He said one thing more; it was like a question, not a statement: “He was probably a real good guy?” And then he sprang, lurched, fell into your arms. He wrapped his arms tightly around you and buried his face against your breasts. You tightened your arms around him. It was the first time you had been hugged since Dzhordzha had let go of you. It was the first time you had hugged someone with passion since you had last held Dzhordzha.
The two of you remained clenched there, thus, for a very long while, longer even than you actually needed just to comfort each other, while we three Magi, having seen the star in the east, turned our attention to the spectacle of the chemistry in your hormones, each of you, the rainbow-colored spectra, the atomic fusings and burblings, the microscopic kaleidoscopic splash and splurge.
“Hey,” remarked Og. “Is that boy getting an erection?”
“’Pears so,” observed Lawren.
“But isn’t that rather unseemly,” Og asked, “at a time like this?”
“Didn’t you ever get a bone on,” Lawren retorted, “when you got too close to a woman?”
“Can’t she feel it, up against her?” Og wondered.
“Of course she can,” I assured him.
Chapter eleven
Of course you could, dear Kat, and it took your breath away, and took the fiber out of your knees, and it dampened you in your groin and grabbed you by your heart and twisted and wouldn’t let go, and you knew that if Knox had left the murphybed down you would have tumbled into it despite the presence of his lifeless form, which couldn’t decorously be dragged off the sofa so that you could use it, and you began to disapprove of yourself angrily for such thoughts, you began trying very earnestly to ignore that darling bulge in the dzhinsy down below and concentrate instead on the practical matter before you: Somebody had to be notified.
The rest of that day that had been a surprise Christmas to you, was not Christmasy at all. The fact of a death on the premises sobered up Dr. and Mrs. Elmore sufficiently to get them to handle things: A coroner’s assistant had to come and supervise the removal of the corpse, and an autopsy had to be performed and a cause of death determined (advanced cirrhosis of the liver), and distant relatives had to be notified (distant only in the sense of the physical distance to Utah, from where a younger brother sent directions for transporting the body home). Kenny’s turkey was forgotten, and, as near as you could remember, the dinner was a quartet of Swanson’s frozen deep-dish turkey pies.
Knox Ogden’s kvin, to my modest disappointment, decided to accompany his remains to Utah for the burial, to enjoy the final tributes of kin and Mormon clergy, and to remain forever among the bees in that state of hives, hanging out at old boyhood haunts below the Wasatch Range and along the ri
ver and in the town named after his ancestor the trapper Peter Skene Ogden. Lawren and I were sorry to see him go, but, as we agreed, two’s company, three’s a mob scene, and we took leave of him by accompanying him on his last expedition in that great city—an expedition made for the purpose of testing his new powers, to put the whammy on his department chairman, or rather chairwoman, who had caused him some grief over real and imagined derelictions of duty. He shamelessly haunted the poor old girl for forty-eight hours, until the train with his casket pulled out, leaving her with a permanent case of halitosis that could be helped only by constant gargling of Listerine. We refused his request to spend his last night here as your incubus. You, observing the old Svanetian custom of providing sustenance for the departed in the afterlife, left out a tumbler of County Fair bourbon, and Og raged at his inability to consume physical spirits. After three nights, only a small amount was gone, possibly through evaporation, and you drank the rest yourself, discovering that bourbon is not at all bad or undrinkable.
For the rest of the holidays, until the winter term of classes began, you and Kenny were inseparable…Not literally, for you did not dare, either of you, to hug that tightly again. You didn’t have a good excuse. For his part, he kept trying to think of an appropriate pretext for hugging you, but it would have been premeditated, not spontaneous, and it wouldn’t have worked. He spent a lot of time in your room, or you in his—although your room was more private, with Knox gone and Edith Koeppe still on holiday, and his room, as Loretta kept saying, was “a disaster area” (and she was embarrassed for you to see it): the piles of clothes everywhere; his “toys,” some of them outgrown; his collections, some of them, too, outgrown; and, beneath his murphybed, a considerable pile of back issues of Playboy. Once, he let you borrow a few issues of his favorite reading matter, and you discovered that the magazine was much more daring than the one issue of Playgirl he’d given you, as if boys had different, or more profound, interests than girls. But both, true to their names, were play; and lishdral (or ludus in the Latin), play in all its forms—prelude, interlude, allusion, collusion, illusion, delusion, and ludicrous—was your heart’s delight.
Most of the playing that you and Kenny did, apart from an occasional silent hand-language game of rock, scissors, paper, was confined to chess, in which he was steadily learning how to hold back, wait, think, and attempt to reach a mating.
But during that interlude of the holidays, most of what you and Kenny did was talk. He had many questions. What happens when a person dies? Is it just a matter of the heart no longer beating and the lungs quitting, or does some other stuff start beginning at the same time the old stuff is ending? Does the dead person know when the other stuff starts happening, does he understand what’s going to come? If people didn’t die, there would be just too many people on the earth, wouldn’t there? Eating everything up? Everybody has to die, sooner or later, don’t they? Is there any such thing as somebody never dying? Have you ever been afraid of dying? What have you wondered might happen to you when you die? Would you rather die in your sleep or when you’re wide awake? If you had to choose, would you rather freeze to death or burn to death? What about dying in a car wreck? Or if the Bomb fell? Would you want to be shot? Or choked, or stabbed, or what? Do you think maybe when a person dies, everything just suddenly becomes blank or black, or just stops, like a movie or a book, and that’s all, there’s just not any more? Or do you think, like, you know, like you could always pick up another book or go watch another movie, there’s another life afterward? Is there any sort of life after death? Do you think that what I’m doing now, I don’t mean right this minute, but what I’m doing all the time nowadays, is going to determine what will happen to me after I die? You don’t believe in hell, do you? But don’t you think there might be some kind of heaven? I wonder, if a person goes to some kind of heaven, can they remember everything that happened to them when they were still alive? Or what do you think about the idea that maybe a person gets another chance here on the earth, only it’s as a different person? I mean, what if I come back but find out that I’m just a dog, or a horse, or a girl, or something? Who would you like to be if you could come back as anybody else? If I died all of a sudden, would you miss me? Would you try to find another friend right away to take my place?
Now, Kat, I suppose I ought to tell you about the experience that Kenny had already had with what is so charmingly called the “little death,” that brief exquisite pang that so many mortals, totally without any expertise at actual dying, have compared to it, as if there were any analogy at all. So far, alas, it had happened to you only a few times. The first time it happened to Kenny, for a terrible instant at least he wondered if he might actually be dying. And when the instant passed, he felt immortal, indestructible, everlasting, and couldn’t wait to die all over again. Of course all his little deaths so far had been suicides. Many of them had been abetted by the fold-out pictures in Playboy, the magazine that, indeed, had verbally implanted the original suggestion in his just-turned-twelve mind with an article, “Doing It Without Chicks”—or rather, doing it with a surrogate cutely identified as “Mary Fist.” Clumsy Mary had brought him, after several failures and dry runs, to his first little death, his first liquid death, a liquid that because of its composition and color had led him to suspect that if he wasn’t dying he had something virulent and pustulant. By the time you came into his life, six months later, he had already learned, from his magazine and from his less ignorant schoolfellows, the basic facts of life and loving, and he knew he was normal and healthy, and doing it all the time wasn’t going to cripple him or derange him or even leave telltale growths of fuzz on his palms…although he had been unable to resist the superstition that small amounts of the liquid applied to one’s chest would cause one to become hairy chested, which accounted for the musky, woodsy fragrance that sometimes emanated from him and drove you wild.
But you did not know the source of the fragrance, just as you did not know that he had already died a little, several times. You continued to hope, as you pictured your first seduction of him, that his initial experience of the little death would come at your hands or—let me rephrase that—with your presence beside him to explain to him what was happening and to vicariously share the thrill of it, as you had done with both Islamber and Dzhordzha—because the supreme joy of the older woman with a pubertal boy lies not in what he can do to you or for you but in your vicarious pleasure in what he gets from you.
Never had you experienced the “little death” yourself with another person, neither Islamber nor Dzhordzha. The few times you’d reached an orgasm had come from listening to music, specifically Tchaikovsky, more specifically his First Piano Concerto.
You wondered, but never aloud, why Kenny didn’t ask you any questions about sex—he was filled with questions about death and everything else, but not sex. Because, Kat, he already knew, or thought he did, all that was to be known about sex. But why didn’t he ever, on any of the numerous private occasions when it might have been possible, express a desire to see you without clothing? Both Islamber and Dzhordzha, at his age and at about the same stage of familiarity, had been all too eager to have a look at you. You could still see Islamber’s face at the instant he first beheld your breasts. And you recalled that first night you met Kenny, when he’d asked, so sweetly, “Could I stay and watch you take off that scarf!” If he could be so bold the first night, why had he not, more recently, asked, “Could I stay and watch you get ready for bed?”
The answer, and I’m sorry you’ve had to wait this long to learn the particulars from me, was simply that he did not need to ask. He had seen your head without the scarf. The hair on your scalp was growing back, and you would have been relieved to know that he did not find your bare head “gross,” to use his word. He had seen your entire body without clothing. More than once. How? In the hall outside your door, there was a small closet, a so-called broom closet, for the convenience of the upstairs maid (a comely Scottish lass named Christ
al) in the days when the mansion was inhabited by Lawren’s physical body. Kenny, familiar with every nook and cranny of this mansion, had discovered that it was possible to make a small hole through the wall of the broom closet that would, if he stood upon a box, provide him with an overlook of your murphybed. You never discovered the hole for two simple reasons: it was hidden by the machinery that held the murphybed to the wall in its closed position, and he always plugged the hole when he wasn’t using it.
By the time you wittingly gave him an erection, holding him close beside the body of Knox Ogden, you had already unwittingly given him a dozen or more erections, which he had served to Mary Fist, disguising her in his imagination as you, or part of you. It was a wonder, sometimes, that you hadn’t heard, through the wall behind the murphybed, the panting and the gasping.
In the Hirshhorn Museum of Washington, D.C., is a painting titled Eleven A.M. by the supreme American realist of the twenties, Edward Hopper, which depicts a girl alone inside her room, naked except for her shoes, sitting in a stuffed armchair, staring out the sunlit window. Her long brown hair obscures her face, which might be identical to yours. Her body, naked, not nude—and the distinction is important—is not as desirable as yours, but the painting’s mood, its theme, its gentle eroticism, and above all its loneliness will remind any viewer/reader of my Ekaterina, and it would certainly, years later when he saw it on a trip to Washington, bring back to Kenny the most haunting recollection of how he’d seen you in your room at the mansion, sitting in a chair like that, naked like that, enjoying your nakedness and the eleven A.M. sunlight warming it, staring out the window, thinking, remembering, planning,
Shocked at his recognition of the painting, Kenny would say to himself, “I wonder if what she’s thinking at this moment is how she can get me into bed with her.”
But what you were actually thinking at that specific moment was simply whether you ought, when you got your first paycheck, to buy a wig the exact color of your own hair, or to buy the auburn one and improve upon your already gorgeous looks. Then you heard sounds in the next room, Ogden’s room, and you got up from the armchair and clothed your nakedness and peered through your blinds at the people through the window of the room opposite, which because of the building’s staggered facade was at a visible angle to your own room.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 7