The Steps of the Sun

by Walter Tevis

  I think that place reflected my time in prison more than anything else. I had learned to shoot passable nineball in jail and I had a billiard room put in my mansion, with a fine nineteenth-century mahogany table. I almost never played anymore, but I loved looking at the way the green baize surface glowed under the Tiffany lamps. I had been claustrophobic sometimes in my cell and couldn’t sleep; I had a whole floor of that place as my master bedroom, with a huge bathroom each for me and Anna and an unfinished pine floor big enough for basketball. I furnished the main living room in eighteenth century; I had fallen in love with that from a picture book at the prison library: English Eighteenth-century Houses. There were gold armchairs with white brocade seats and cloisonné snuffboxes and clocks with cherubs on their faces. I bought two Fragonards, and a chandelier from a French palace. But all I remember using that room for was playing three-card stud with my accountants. We didn’t entertain. Anna spent most of her time in the bedroom, reading or making hooked rugs.

  During the redecorating Anna was living with her parents upstate, in their parsonage in Watertown, and on the night before she and our daughter Myra were to come and make a grand attempt at living with me, I went to the place and poured myself a tumbler of Japanese Campari in the cathedral-ceilinged kitchen and walked around in a kind of euphoric daze for hours. I allowed myself to imagine being a paterfamilias on the grand scale. Since Anna and I had only one child, it would be necessary for us to start breeding fast, but that seemed okay at the time. There was a big nursery on the top floor. What the hell; we could have six or seven kids and reverse the trend. I didn’t know anybody else who had children. There alone in that big spooky expensive place I visualized the bustle and warmed to it. Moonlight came through high casement windows onto the floor of my cavernous living room and glistened on the cherrywood grand piano. I sat on the bench and played “Stardust” and “Bridge over Troubled Waters” soulfully and drank more Campari. I got up and went to the billiard room and played myself a game of nineball. I still remember: I ran the first seven and then miscued on the eight. I walked down to the wine cellar and counted the whites, took the walnut and brass elevator up to the fourth floor and surveyed the guest suite, done in early twenty-first century, with everything pastel and puffy, even the kitchen and butler’s pantry. I smoked a Japanese cigar, drank a glass of Japanese whisky, turned on my Japanese music system for a while, glanced through the Japanese section of the Wall Street Journal and thought briefly of buying a resort hotel near Osaka. But I wasn’t really interested, and Japanese investments troubled me; I knew her depression would worsen from buying American coal, as indeed has happened. My spirit was troubled there in my mansion and I didn’t know why. Yes, I did. It wasn’t going to work out, and I knew it then.

  I still had my methane-powered Bentley in those days, and I used it to pick up Anna at Grand Central the following morning. She had traveled second-class on a wood-burner, sitting erect on one of those plastic seats by dirty windows, and had brought exactly one small suitcase with her. Samsonite. That was Anna. It wasn’t exactly religion with her and she had taken no vows of poverty. But my God, did she gall me. Yet she wasn’t really stingy in the soul—just closed off somewhere. Often I would wind up spiritually on her side and cursing myself for being oafish and rich. Her suitcase was half full of books.

  Anna and Myra and I lived in that mansion for eight months. Toward the end of it the student riots began. Things were bad all over and the students had decided capitalism was to blame. I had no real quarrel with that, although I felt the scarcity of fuels deserved at least equal billing. For a few days of it a lot of the sons and daughters of the upper-middle class decided I was the enemy, and I got edgy when they started chanting things like, “Belson go home.” Hell, I was home.

  They hanged me in effigy, and it was a damned good effigy too. Art students. I’ll never forget that stuffed manikin with my steel-rimmed eyeglasses and my characteristic lumberjack shirt and the cigar. It looked so mournful being hanged under the gaslight there at Sixty-third and Madison, my replica head at one side as if in a daydream and my feet jumping around as drunken students jerked the rope. I stared at it a long time from my billiard-room window. Then they burned it and I gasped as it blackened. What a sensation! What a deadly preview! Still, I liked being the star of the show.

  Anna saw that effigy too, I’m certain, from her bedroom window. She was a lot more cheerful the next morning. At breakfast she joined me for her Rice Krispies, and for a moment she even hummed a tune. But when I suggested we bounce around in our Louis Quinze bed for a while it was nothing doing. She wanted to finish Proust. I should have divorced her on the spot, citing cheerfulness toward effigy burning as grounds. Denial of conjugal rights. Overweening literacy.

  I had never paid much attention to television, but when I moved into that mansion I decided to install the best. People told me the technology had been improved a lot and it was patriotic to patronize it. Since the death of Hollywood in the first part of the century and the demise of General Motors at about the same time, the United States had led the world in only two technologies: fast food and television. During the Depression of the 2050s holographic TV had improved enormously. So I had an RCA set installed in what had once been a third-floor sitting room. It consisted of six projection posts against the room’s longest wall, and I’ll never forget how I jumped when I first turned it on after the installers had left. A group of real people—dancing and singing frenetically—suddenly appeared in the room, life-sized and skimpily dressed, all of them grinning at me like idiots. The sound was real too, loud and sexy and terrible; it was Broadway synthetic music of the worst kind. It turned out they were doing a commercial for life insurance. I’d had no idea. And the whole thing only used a hundred and fifty watts. I left the set on, went to the bar in the next room, got myself some whiskey, and came back and joined my illusory guests, now a middle-class family in turmoil. A soap opera. It was quite a sensation to move among them, a drink in my hand, and hear talk of their electronic hysterectomies and multiple infidelities. They were very earnest. Things were pretty low in my life at the time. I seldom saw Anna, and Myra spent all her time with doctors and lovers. I ran my businesses pretty much from my head, and a dozen phone calls a day made up my labors. I was on hold-both financially and emotionally; I got hooked for a while on television. It was a sign that things were falling apart, that my plan of settling down in New York was unreal. Something in me welcomed the riots when they came. I haven’t watched TV since. I do believe that shooting morphine is better for the soul.

  ***

  Anna was the child of an improbable marriage between a little dandy of a Presbyterian minister and a big-boned grand-lady Episcopalian. Her mother, who had never attended her father’s church, was far too grand to get out of bed before noon; she had lain on satin with her quilted robe and quilted eyepads while Anna took charge of two younger brothers.

  I visited them one summer vacation, when Anna was home from Elmira College, where she studied French Literature. Her family kept her so busy, fixing this and taking care of that, that we hardly had any time together. She spent one morning preparing a Fourth of July picnic for all of us, and when the Fourth came her mother decided that Anna should put away the chickens she had roasted the day before and cook a ham instead.

  “Mother,” Anna said, in despair, “I have to hang up the wash. And where will I get a ham on the Fourth of July?” She stood there looking at her mother, trembling.

  “You’ll work it out, dear,” her mother said. She turned and walked back up the stairs to her bedroom.

  And Anna did in fact work it out. She got the clothes dry and bought a ham and cooked it and had a picnic dinner for six people. That evening she cleaned up the kitchen, fixed the damper on the wood stove and rearranged the books in her father’s library.

  “That girl sure is a wonder,” her father said sweetly, puffing his pipe. At the time, I thought so too.

  ***

  I
spent two days after they hanged and burned me in effigy getting police protection and having steel shutters put on the windows of the bottom two floors. It was a private police firm, a subsidiary of Cosa Nostra. There already was a high wall around the building with a stand of barbed wire on top. During this activity I hadn’t seen Anna or Myra, but when it was all over and I was in the billiard room one evening idly shooting the three ball around on the table, thinking things over, who should walk in but Anna. She was wearing a faded green housedress and she looked tired.

  “Hi,” I said. “Where’ve you been lately?”

  She frowned a little. “Around the house,” she said. “Staying out of your way.”

  “You wouldn’t have been in the way. I’ve just been telling men where to put things.”

  “You should have asked me to help.” Her voice was weary. “Ben, pour me a beer, will you?”

  She seemed so relaxed and tired and familiar that my tension dissolved. “Sure, honey,” I said. I went to the little bar at the end of the room and got two bottles of Peruvian beer and two glasses. Anna seated herself in a big velvet easy chair. I set the glasses on the table beside her and poured them both full, with big foamy heads. I pulled a smaller chair over to face hers, took one of the glasses, and sat down. Anna seldom drank, and I took this present willingness as a good sign. I sipped my beer slowly and waited for her to start a conversation. She clearly had something on her mind.

  Finally she spoke up. “Ben,” she said, “I think I could go crazy in this house. There’s nothing here for me to do.”

  I stared at her, crestfallen I guess. I had been hoping for something positive. “You should get out more,” I said. “Meet people. We could go to the theater or the ballet.” I felt stupid immediately, saying it. There were riots and demonstrations out in the streets of New York and I was one of the prime targets of them. My wife should hardly be out at soirees or politely applauding the ballet. I always seemed to be saying stupid things to Anna.

  She just looked at me wearily. “It’s like it was when we lived at the Pierre, Ben,” she said.

  “I don’t drink as much as I did then. And I’m home a lot more.”

  She looked at me fiercely for a moment. “You were drunk all the time,” she said. “Or at least whenever I saw you, which wasn’t often. Now you’re drunk only part of the time.”

  That was her first acknowledgment that I had cut down, and I was glad to hear it. “Look,” I said, “we could read books together, the way we did when we were first married. We should take a trip to Europe and go back to some of those places in Florence. Or that house in Brussels.”

  She just looked at me and sipped her beer thoughtfully.

  “Hell,” I said. “In a week I can be finished with these damned mergers and with a coal deal I’m trying to make. I’ll have time on my hands. We can get… can get reacquainted.” I looked toward the big casement windows that faced Madison Avenue, where my new floodlights made the tops of the two big maples glow theatrically, as though for a stage setting. Then I looked back at Anna and saw that she was crying. “What’s wrong, honey?” I said.

  She went on snuffling for a minute and then took a substantial-looking handkerchief from the pocket of her dress and blew her nose powerfully. “Ben,” she said, “I had a miserable time when we went to Europe. I hated that house in Brussels. I spent the time hooking rugs and trying to get some heat in that kitschy place while you paced around and fretted and made three-hour phone calls. It was horrible.” She blew her nose again, more softly this time, and then looked at me balefully. “What makes you think it’ll be any different if we do it again?”

  “I didn’t know…,” I said. “I thought you liked Europe that time.”

  There was hatred in her eyes now and in her voice. “I told you a half-dozen times when we were there I wanted to go home. I told you I hated Belgium. I felt uncomfortable in the restaurants, and the movies were insipid.”

  “Honey!” I said. “I remember.” Actually I hadn’t, until she spoke of it. I felt immediately guilty. But, damn it, it had been ten years before. “And didn’t I have French movies brought over and we showed them in the living room? And I got a good cook and we ate in.”

  She stood up all of a sudden, with her half-finished glass of beer in her hand, and stared at me and said, levelly, “You son of a bitch, Ben. It was just like that. You did this for me and you did that. You were telling me then how you were going to straighten things out and how you were going to change. Well, you didn’t change and you’re not going to and I’m ill with it. I have a sickness unto death of hearing about you and what you are going to do and how things are going to be different. There are only two things you do, Ben; you make money and you talk about yourself. And I’m sick of both of them.” She stopped and finished her beer.

  Something in me was cringing. I knew what she said was true. I was obsessed with myself and with making money. But, damn it, I did pay attention to her when she spoke up loudly enough to compete with the three-alarm fire that was sometimes going on in my head. I felt wretched. “Anna,” I said, in all sincerity, “what do you want?”

  And then she did something I had never seen her do. She gripped her beer glass, swung her arm, and threw the glass like a hardball against the far wall. Straight as a rocket. It crashed, fell, tinkled on the floor.

  “Jesus!” I said, impressed.

  “What I want,” Anna said, “is for those rioters out there to come and get you personally and hang you. And then burn you. I hate your insides, you self-centered son of a bitch.”

  I just stared at her. I had sensed that she was furious for a long time—years, I think. And there it was. It seemed to clear the air in the room.

  “Damn your egomaniacal soul,” she said, and then turned and left the room.

  I sat there for about twenty minutes. Then I got up, went to the pool table, racked the balls into their triangle, broke the rack, and started shooting straight pool. I ran all fifteen of them. But my stomach was in a knot. I was a son of a bitch. Self-centered and money crazy.

  When the Mafia first came out of the closet, merged with the Teamsters and listed itself on the New York Exchange, I stayed away from the stock. Cosa Nostra Industries. I was suspicious, despite the predictions of better shipping of goods across the country. Well, as usual, I was right; shortages got worse in New York, and the arrival of food and goods became even more whimsical. During that time in my mansion there were never any potatoes available except on the black market, but there was an abundance of pears. Damned good ones top. After I finished running that rack of balls on the pool table, I went down the elevator to the living room, where there was a big Sèvres bowl of yellow and red Bartletts. I began eating them and pacing around, dripping juice on the floor for a while until I got a plate and held it under the current pear. They were remarkable—as succulent as fruit could be—and I must have eaten a dozen of them. “Orally deprived,” the Great Orbach had said of me, “lacking in deep and vital nourishment inside.” It was sure true. My mother’s breasts had looked like rotten turnips to me. When I drank I drank seriously. Planning a real estate sale or a merger I could chew my thumbs until they blistered. If I didn’t have the metabolism of a Brazilian fire ant I’d be fat. But I only sleep three or four hours a night and I’m normally pretty lean.

  So I gobbled down those pears in my guilt and anger and helplessness and remorse over Anna. We had been married fifteen years and it seemed to be only grief. I ate another pear, dribbling juice down my chin, striding across the living room in my lumberjack boots. Jesus! I thought, what does she want?

  I said that aloud, What does she want?, several times, and then realized I was fighting back the answer. It was obvious: she wanted me to care about her. And the truth of it was that I didn’t. Not anymore. Anna bored me. There was a sweetness in her somewhere—a kind of lost child—that appealed to me strongly. There was that intelligence that had drawn me to her in the first place. But right now it was all dust and
ashes. It wasn’t enough. I ate another pear, more slowly this time. It would have tasted better with a little hard cheese, but that was two floors below, in the kitchen. I pictured Anna’s face as it had looked in that parsonage with her cultivated, genteel family. She had seemed so smart, straightforward and fresh. So unlike anybody else I knew. She’d had a nice round bottom then too, and big, amused eyes. Talking to her was like talking to an old friend. She didn’t flirt. She wasn’t devious. I felt I should grab her right then and marry her.

  I proposed after we had known each other three months and she accepted. She told me the truth: she wanted to get out of that place near Canada, see the larger world. She didn’t want to finish college and be a schoolteacher. She wanted something “different” she said. Well, I never found out what that “different” thing was—although God knows I tried to. And she never did either. She didn’t know what she wanted; how in the hell was I supposed to?

  I took her to an inn in Jamaica for our honeymoon; we stayed in a suite with a private swimming pool and private dock and our own croquet course. The bedroom was enormous, with white furniture and beds and white walls. There were nineteenth-century British paintings of flowers and horses and landscapes on the walls and three vases of flowers in the room. We had two bathrooms, tiled and huge, with a giant bowl of hibiscus in each—pink for her and blue for me. There was a stone balcony forty feet long over the rocks where the Caribbean splashed in clear blue and foam.

  It was our wedding night. I had undressed quickly in my bathroom and was lying, wearing only a pair of black briefs, on one of the two king-sized beds, my hands behind my head. I was pretty inexperienced sexually myself, and Anna was a virgin.

  So much for the Fergusson pill and the “liberation of the body”—I was as scared of sex as they had been in the Middle Ages. So was Anna. We had talked about it.