by John Crowley
“Hm,” said Rosie. Rosie was a single mother, in the process of getting divorced from Sam’s father.
“But love is what everybody wants to know about. After money and health. No before money, anyway if they’re young. Love is oh Christ half my business. And there’s not really a House of Love. Weird, huh?”
Rosie examined the Pu Pu Platter she and Sam and Val were sharing for lunch, and chose a fried dumpling. “Weird,” she said. But in fact she didn’t herself just then see the need, or feel the press of questions about love and the prospect of love that needed answering. It was true, what Val said, that it was a big question for most people, but it had ceased to be one for Rosie. She felt herself to be (though she hadn’t always been) outside or beyond the preoccupation, as she was outside other things that occupied lots of people—oh sports, or politics.
It wasn’t the same, though.
“So there’s houses of health and money?” she asked.
“Sure,” Val said. “Lucrum is all about money and property and stuff. And Valetudo, the sixth house, is about Sickness. Diseases. So is Mors: that’s Death.”
“How about politics? Sports?”
Val drew back her head, affronted, the wingbone still held between thumb and medicus. “You trying to make a farce out of this?”
“We have sports in my house,” Sam said, nodding.
“Yes?” Val said.
“In my ode house.”
“Oh. Hey, okay.”
“Her old house,” Rosie said. “Some kids have imaginary friends. She has an imaginary old house. The house where she used to live, she says. She always had it. Since she could talk.”
“Well sure,” said Val. “So do you, if you could only remember it.”
Rosie tried to explain about love. “As though it were all happening someplace else, somewhere I’m not—as though I’m seeing it all through a screen or a glass, and I can’t hear very well. And what I do hear makes me afraid. Like football: I don’t know how it’s played, and everybody roars with excitement, into it, and I feel like I’m the only one who thinks it’s just dangerous and somebody’s going to get killed.”
“Well is it real surprising?” Val said gently. “When you’ve just gone through what you’ve gone through? I mean Christ.”
Of course that made sense. It made really too much sense; it accounted for what had happened to Rosie without explaining it. She dipped the dumpling in cold dark sauce.
“Mommy I said let’s GO,” said Sam, who had in fact been saying it, and had been heard but ignored now for some little time by the two grownups.
“God I didn’t tell you,” Rosie said. “We had a time the other night. Sam. She was sleepwalking. Yes. I was in my bed, and something woke me—you know how you can wake up from someone’s standing there? And there was Sam by the bed.”
Realizing that Sam was in fact asleep, blind, though her eyes were open, had caused Rosie’s back hair to thrill. To be looking at someone apparently present who was actually absent in the land of sleep.
“You won’t believe this. She came to the bed, and held something out. For me. Know what it was? An egg.”
“An egg?”
“She had I guess gone all the way down the stairs. In the dark, alone. And back up with this egg. She put it in my hand.” “What did you do?”
“I took it. I said—Thank you.” Rosie wondered at it now. “Did she wake up?”
“Nope. She turned and went. I got out of bed and followed her. She went back to her room and got in bed again. Pulled up the covers. Asleep.”
Sam, whose head alone came up above the table in the booth, looked up at the two grownups who marveled at her; not pleased or proud but not embarrassed either, content to hear herself described.
“You really don’t want to come with us?” Rosie said to Val. “I’m sure Boney would like a visit. And if he’s too sick for you to visit, then I won’t be able to stay long.”
“I can’t. I can’t leave her.”
“She’ll be all right. I can drive you in tomorrow.” “She” was Val’s aged Beetle, undergoing routine surgery at a shop next down along the Strip from the Volcano where they sat.
“Nope,” said Val. “I don’t mind waiting.” She lifted her drink, showing it to Rosie. “And reading matter. Look at this book I got out of the library.”
From the big sloppy crewel bag she was never without, Val pulled a large and old-looking volume—not ancient-looking, just old. “I’ve been doing some research on love myself. Filling in the gaps. I’m finding some insane stuff, I mean anyway it’s been a help to me.” Rosie noticed the distinctive white paint of the librarian who had long ago carefully lettered the call numbers on the spine, and was for a moment touched. Not many people took out books with such numbers on them.
“Check out the author’s name,” Val said. “Isn’t that wild? Like the villain in some bondage book. Not that you’d know.”
Val opened the book, and Sam clambered to her knees on the banquette beside her to look. “Listen,” Val said. “It’s like a dictionary or an encyclopedia. You look things up. When I looked up Love it sent me to Eros, who’s the you know the Cupid guy, with the arrows. Eros in Greek. Here’s what he says:
“‘According to Diotima’—whoever he is—‘Contrivance, the son of Invention, got drunk on nectar at Aphrodite’s birthday, and Poverty took advantage of this to seduce him and bear him a child: Eros.’” She lowered the book. “Isn’t that a hoot? All these words have capital letters, so they’re like people, carrying on. The son of Poverty and Contrivance: I love it.”
Rosie laughed too, but she had begun to notice a familiar tightening in her breast, right beneath the sternum, but why.
“‘Plato says’—hey, Plato, there’s a name I know—‘Plato says that Eros is not to be confused with the beautiful beloved, though men often make this mistake,’ women too I bet. ‘Rather his appearance presages the appearance of the beloved; he is the spirit who inspires love, who makes love unrefusable, who gives the lover his divine madness.’”
“Divine madness,” said Rosie. “Uh huh.”
“‘Far from being sensitive and beautiful, says Plato, he is hard and weather-beaten, always poor, a beggar shoeless and homeless, always sleeping out for want of a bed, on the ground, on doorsteps, and in the street … But as he is the son of his father Hermes, he schemes continually to get for himself whatever is beautiful and good; he is bold and forward and strenuous, always devising tricks like a cunning huntsman; he yearns after knowledge and is resourceful and a lover of wisdom, a skillful magician too, an alchemist.’” She lowered the book. “Didn’t know all that, did you?”
“Tough life for a kid.”
“Hey, love is tough.” She laughed her deep rough laugh. “But we knew that.” She found her place again. “‘To the oldest poets he was a dangerous winged spirit, like the winged personifications of Old Age and Plague: a Ker that disrupted ordered society, and did harm to living people. Later poets invented a dozen genealogies for him in addition to those given above, while some argued that he was the first of the gods and without a parent, since without him none of the others could be born.’ Now why is that? Oh, I get it.”
“Makes the world go round.” Rosie drank down her Mai Tai, more quickly and thirstily than she had intended to. “Speaking of legacies,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Didn’t you say legacies and inheritances? In the house about love?”
“Oh. I guess.”
“Boney,” Rosie said. “I’ve been trying to get Boney to think about all that stuff. You know I don’t think he’s even got a real will?”
Val closed the dictionary, and pushed it away.
“I hate to pester him,” Rosie said. “I mean it’s not really my business, in a way, but I’m sort of his secretary. And then Allan Butterman wants to know.” Allan Butterman was Boney Rasmussen’s lawyer, counsel too to the Foundation.
“Uh-huh.” Val had put on the pursed mouth and k
nitted brows she used to signify attention, or maybe used to compel her own attention when her mind wanted to head elsewhere. “Hm.”
“When I finally asked him about it, what he was going to do—I mean I thought for days how to put it—he said Oh he’d decided he was going to leave everything to an old girlfriend named Una Knox.”
Now Val was paying and not pretending to pay attention. “Who?”
“He said: My old girlfriend Una Knox. But he was smiling. A joke, maybe. He wouldn’t tell me any more.” She saw Val’s disappointment. “Well I wasn’t going to grill him,” she said.
Val felt absently within her bag for her cigarettes. It was hard to tell from her face whether what Rosie had told her meant something to her, or nothing at all; but Rosie thought she could see Val trying to find a place for this fact (if it was a fact) amid the store of secrets shameful and silly, humdrum and drastic, of the inward shop she kept. “Una Knox,” she said aloud.
“Are we going to see Boney now?”
“Yep.” Rosie reached across Sam’s lap to pull shut the door of the big old Bison station wagon she drove. She had an unreasoning fear of car doors and the crushing of small fingers; she thought maybe it had happened once, to someone she knew, but she couldn’t think who it might have been.
“Why doesn’t Val come?”
“I don’t know.” Why didn’t she come? Usually she liked a look into other people’s dramas. Rosie wondered.
“It’s not scary.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Rosie Rasmussen was Boney Rasmussen’s great-niece, daughter of his brother’s son. She had come to live at “Arcady” when she left her husband, Mike Mucho, and began the process of getting a divorce, which she had recently been granted; rather, she had been granted a “decree nisi,” which her lawyer assured her was virtually a divorce but which made her a little uneasy. “Nisi” meant “unless,” and nobody could tell her unless what, if anything; but not till six months after it would she have a real divorce. In the meantime she was neither divorced nor not: so she saw it. She had also been given custody of her daughter Samantha by the court. Unless.
“What’s that, Ma?”
“What, hon?”
“All around that store.”
A car dealership in early fig for the Fourth of July. “It’s bunting,” said Rosie.
Sam turned in her seat to look back as they passed it. The wind lifted wisps of her hair from her delicate skull. “Well it isn’t doing it,” she said.
“Isn’t doing what?”
“Bunting.”
Rosie laughed. God if she could only remember the things Sam said. But she never did.
The dark disease (as she thought of it) that had invaded her feelings, which she had tried to describe to Val and hadn’t described, had not touched her feelings for Sam, not yet at least, though like advancing frostbite it might yet; it might get everything. Every day almost she felt astonished to find herself still living with this beautiful, cheerful, passionate, fastidious person. Even as she grew daily more impatient with the (after all not really very awful) duties of washing dressing feeding amusing her, dreading the early hour of her waking, though often enough Rosie was herself already awake—even so she grew more dependent on Sam’s being there; needed like food or drink the sensible flow of Sam’s being into her own as she sat beside her, or watched her bathe, or fought with her, or traded inanities with her in bed in the morning.
What it was, what she had tried to say to Val, was that she had found herself no longer on the side of love. That’s what she should have said: Not on love’s side. She had been all her life on love’s side without thinking about it, because who isn’t? How could you even understand stories or life at all if you weren’t? Sam already knew why Cinderella stayed late at the ball, why the Prince searched the kingdom for her; the soaps that Boney’s housekeeper Mrs. Pisky watched would shrivel up to nothing without love, without the people watching being for love, somehow, automatically.
Rosie wasn’t. She had once been so, and now she wasn’t, and she didn’t know why. She went to the movies now and watched Her meet Him, and felt not mild approval or even ordinary impatience but a dark lassitude, an unwillingness to consent that made everything that followed meaningless. Worse when there was danger, or pain; when He and She couldn’t help it, followed each other into the dark, cheated on their barren worried bitter busy spouses, driven into each other’s arms by what seemed to Rosie to be a violent sickness. What’s the matter with you? Go home and make up. Lovers had come to appear to her as people turned into puppets, their sinews pulled by this insensate power, an artificial fire burning in their hearts.
Depression, said Mike, a psychotherapist, never at a loss for a name for black feelings. But it might just as well be wisdom; her friend Beau Brachman said it was, wisdom entering the soul to realize that the things we have wanted so long enchain or burden us, that the pain of wanting isn’t ever healed by having; it’s a relief, he said, like the throbbing noise of some endless engine outside your window suddenly ceasing, and silence and the world surging softly in. It didn’t feel like relief to her, though, like escape from difficulty; it felt like waking up from a dream or delusion of possibility, and finding yourself in prison, without possibility; becalmed on the dull sea or stranded in the desert of not wanting things.
No it wasn’t wisdom. But it might not be willfulness or wickedness either. It might not even be psychological, a block or a hangup. Maybe she was under a curse.
She laughed, softly, and struck the wheel of the station wagon. Sam looked up and laughed too, always ready for a joke.
A curse, or maybe a spell; sure, maybe it wasn’t her at all, maybe it was the whole world under a spell. That’s actually how she felt it, not as a bend or constriction of her own heart but as something she knew about the world, something she knew and others didn’t, not most of them anyway, not yet. They were still all feeling things, wanting to feel more things, their feelings pumped up with sports and art and politics. And love. Till one by one those things dried up too.
But if it was the world gone wrong and not just Rosie’s heart, then she couldn’t hope to fix it. So she’d better not believe that.
“Is that the hop-spital?”
“Yes. Hospital. How did you guess?”
“I saw an ambliance.”
“Ambulance.”
“Yep.”
It was a rambling, low brick building, neither new nor old, and somehow not discouraging; it hadn’t seemed to Rosie to be the sort of place people were likely to die in. It was a place for births and operations and get-well fruit baskets. The nurses were dressed unseriously in tees and tennis shoes; the voice over the intercom was sweetly hesitant.
Sitting nightlong in the waiting room of the Coronary Care Unit she had overheard real disasters unfold, though; had watched doctors in green operating clothes, feet sometimes still shod in paper boots, come out to explain in weary undertones what had happened to a husband or a father (all the patients seemed to be males, most of the expectant waiters women). She saw families gather, whisper together. But he seemed so good. They said he passed a good night. And now.
In the space of a few hours she acquired the rudiments of a new language. He’s holding his own, the doctor would say. They said he’s holding his own, the wife would say to her sister, to his sister, to her son. “Holding his own” seemed to mean desperately sick but not getting worse right now. He’s not out of the woods yet, the doctor would tell someone; Rosie would see in her mind the prostrate patient, hooked to blinking machines, while his absent spirit wandered in dark undergrowth.
No common bond like the nearness of death; no fellowship like mortality. Private as their griefs were, those gathered in the room, nowhere else to go, voyagers alone together, shared Kleenex and magazines, asked careful questions, sat fanny by fanny in the fiberglass chairs. It seemed to Rosie that every kind of person there was in the Faraways appeared in the room just in that night; tall delicate-fe
atured aristo gent in seersucker jacket and pipe; lots of blue-rinsed frightened ladies with chains on their glasses; lots of ordinary shapeless sweatshirted working people. It surprised Rosie that a majority—she had time to count—were seriously fat. Maybe you got a high percentage in Coronary Care.
It had not really been necessary for her to stay late into the night there, far from wherever they were doing whatever to Boney, but she stayed, afraid partly that he might take a sudden turn for the worse, frail as he was, and have to check out without anyone at all he knew nearby (she didn’t feel sure that she herself was the one he would want to look last upon, but just about everybody else he knew was dead already; there were far more ready to welcome him on the other side than to say goodbye). And she was captured by the front-line atmosphere of the room, where people found themselves in the gravest circumstances it was likely they would encounter in a peaceful world, and rose to them or didn’t. Once she came back from the nurse’s station to find a whole crew of bikers in the hall and the waiting room; one of their number in critical condition apparently; they sat on the floor tearfully hand in hand or hugged each other fiercely, thumping backs with leatherbound fists. Supportive. The others there looked at them askance, their own more private responses, be brave, pushed aside by the gang’s grieving rituals.
They were still there today, some of them anyway, their buddy apparently not out of the woods. Sam sat down amid their litter of munchies bags and soda cans, watching them with interest. Rosie was suddenly sorry she had brought Sam; she wouldn’t have if there had been any place to leave her, or if Sam had not wanted so much to see Boney, in whom she took an absorbing interest, her fabulous monster.