by John Crowley
“Hm.” She was paying close attention, it seemed, though perhaps not to him.
“Of course it’s impossible to have perfect knowledge of somebody else’s spirit. So he has to convince the person whose spirit he wants to bind that he does in fact have such perfect knowledge.”
“Illusion? I thought you said.”
“Well all magic partakes of illusion. Shared illusion.” He drew the bill to his side of the table. “You have to have faith,” he said. “I said so.”
She seemed to ponder this silently, or maybe something else entirely, her own spell over herself; her hand, idly touching her neck and shirt, found a button that had come open, one top button too many, and her other hand moved to help button it.
“Don’t,” Pierce said. “Leave it.”
Her hands paused in mid-task, and her eyes, into which Pierce was projecting this little command, seemed to fill with something that made them no less transparent but also somehow sightless.
Then she put her hands down on the table, looking away from him and from them, head erect though; and neither spoke for a moment.
“So tell me,” Pierce said, but then only cleared his throat, having really nothing to say, speaking only to mask his awe, at his own daring, at its result. Good Lord it’s true.
A rattle and bang of firecrackers, this one loud, lifting them both a millimeter. They laughed together. Moment passed. And yet the little varnished pine stall they sat in remained levitated, not much but a little, and was now turning, like a rising airship, into some sort of wind, toward somewhere; its movement too gentle even to be vertiginous, and yet definite.
Out on River Street. The Library was to the left; down to the right was another street upward, a long way round to his apartment. “So is he, are you, planning a book?”
“What?”
“Climacterics.”
“Oh. Well. It’s not been discussed. I mean we haven’t even talked about this process I’m doing for weeks.”
“It seems like a natural,” he said, not missing the rancor in her voice. “Really.” He could, in fact, see it on the paperback rack at the Variety Store already, in grabber colors. Climacterics: Your New Ancient Guide to Life’s Cycles.
She turned to look at him, lips apart but not sure if she should smile or laugh, waiting for more.
“I happen,” he said, “to be represented by an agent, who. This would be precisely up her alley. More than anything I.”
“But it’s not a book,” Rose said, following him rightward. “It’s a, well. A practic. He calls it.”
“Not a book yet,” Pierce said. “They’re easily made. Listen. If you would like any help, on the historical part I mean, advice. Some books to look at. I mean it.”
“Well,” she said, laughing at his insistence.
“Hey,” he said, guiding her toward his street with a touch on her elbow. “Research is where you find it.”
Soon she stood at the door of his peculiar apartment, a string of three rooms: kitchen, little parlor, and (largest by far) the room that was both bedroom and study, where he worked: a piled messy desk, the powder-blue electric typewriter on its stand, and many books.
“You work in bed?” she asked, hands in her pockets, at the door of this room. Pierce laughed, thinking of answers to this. The bed was overlarge, brass, mounded with pillows, and clothed just now in dark Turkish-looking stuff.
“You have a sun-porch too,” she noted. She pointed to the door, beyond which was Robbie’s daybed, still unmade, where Pierce had spent the morning. “Nice.”
“Yes,” he said. “Everything I need.” Was Robbie cross with him? He checked to see. No not cross. Interested, actually; even eager. Pierce felt the warmth of his interest, his wide eyes and the curve of his mouth, and he nearly laughed aloud, made of glee by now and the effervescence of certain power. Why you little.
“Books,” she said.
“Books.”
He watched as she passed slowly into the bedroom, her hand moving over a case of them, touching their spines with her fingertips, making him think of a diver examining a coral reef or sunken ship. A small cloud crossed the sun; the undersea wavered, and then restored itself.
“You know,” he said. “I’ve never forgotten that river party. Last summer.”
“Uh huh,” she said.
“It’s a funny story, actually,” he said. “What I thought then. I’ll tell you sometime.”
She turned to face him, a look of perfect incomprehension and a dreamy lack of interest, as though it had nothing to do with her.
“Anyway I think of it often. The little cabin. Breaking in.”
“Cabin?” she asked.
He studied her, as coolly as he could amid the currents already flowing between them, and an odd certainty was handed him. “You don’t remember, do you?” he asked, smiling.
“Remember what?” she asked.
FOURTEEN
On that morning Rosie Rasmussen had awakened smiling, pleased, without at first knowing the reason. When Sam (who had maybe awakened her, stirring in the next room) saw that her mother was awake, she came to stand grinning up at her in her tall bed: and Rosie remembered the dream she had had, a ridiculous pornographic dream, impossible and gratifying.
“How come you’re up, Mom?”
“How come I’m up! You just woke me up. How come you’re up.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Oh.”
She had dreamed that she lived in some mild paradisal island or planet, warm sunshot forests populated by men, well by enormous creatures who looked like men; in her memory they almost seemed more like fruit, sun-warmed and smooth-skinned, pink as babies. She herself was one of another species, female, tiny and quick and cunning, who lived with and from the men; she and her kind spent their time trying to rouse the great big baby-like males, to get them hard so they could be sucked, which was somehow not only sex and procreation for the females but nourishment as well. So slow and bland were the men, though, that it took all kinds of cosseting and teasing to get them up, they hardly noticed the little females at work on them.
She did get hers, though; she remembered his sweet sleepy smile as he watched her clamber over him and work, not minding her but not real attentive, like a cow being milked (how it was even possible for her to fit him in her hand and mouth given the disparity in their sizes the dream didn’t bother explaining, it just was possible, even easy). And she remembered how at last the big thing gave up to her at last its flood, like a primed pump gushing: and the keen delight that had filled her in the dream filled her again, astonishment, accomplishment, gratification, nourishment all together. Crazy, crazy, crazy.
“The sun woke me up,” Sam said. “The sun hit my eye.”
“Like a big pizza pie.”
Crazy, when it wasn’t even anything she often elected to do in waking life, she was a good sport about it but it was he not she that got the big fun, after all. And the little dab of viscous goo, be brave, like swallowing medicine.
Not Mike, though: when it was his turn he used to dive right in.
“Is today a Daddy day?”
“Yup.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Oh go someplace.”
“With who?”
“What if it was by myself?”
“Is it with Spofford?”
“Maybe.”
Why do men like to give Oral Sex? Why did this stump her? She had a sudden vision of the dark boulder of Mike’s head lodged between her legs, of him surfacing momentarily, gazing up at her for her approval, and cross-eyed with bliss: why? She knew why she liked it, but why did he?
“Well anyway now we’re both up, so get in.”
“So get in,” said Sam in delight.
Sam climbed laughing up and under the covers, her sleepy-warm legs tangling with Rosie’s, her arms eagerly clasping Rosie’s neck. And Rosie knew, hugging her, that what she had dreamed of wasn’t Oral Sex or even sex at all, what she h
ad dreamed of was breast-feeding: not sucking but suckling. With the mother transformed into the slow gentle baby-like man, and herself made the baby. She knew it, because she knew, at Sam’s touch, that it had been, somehow, Sam she had dreamed of. And maybe of her own mother too: could a person remember so far back?
“Are these your breasts?” Sam asked, poking lightly with a forefinger at one, inside Rosie’s big T-shirt.
“Yes.”
“I have breasts too. See?”
She lifted her own T-shirt, and pointed to the unopened buds on her chest.
“Yes. I see.”
“For my little kid to get milk.”
“Uh huh.”
Mike always claimed he could actually remember the sensation of his mother’s breast in his mouth, the pressure of the nipple against his palate; he made this claim with a particular pleased expression, quite an achievement (Rosie always thought the expression meant) for a psychotherapist.
Maybe it wasn’t sex at all that men wanted, really, when they settled in that way, all smiles; maybe it was mother’s milk, and they were just a little confused.
She laughed softly, and the shaking of her ribcage shook Sam, who laughed too.
“Mommy. Is Rose coming with Daddy?”
“Gee I don’t know, hon. Rose is I think sort of out of the picture.”
“She can do a French braid.”
“Yes? I guess.”
“Yets go downstairs, Mommy.”
“You’re not happy here? I’m happy,” Rosie said, really unwilling to leave the sheets, warmed deeply at the root as you can only be by knowledge communicated in a dream.
She had learned when Sam was an infant that giving suck was like sex in a kind of a way; she had only just now thought that sex was like giving suck. No not like it: that was the secret, that was what the dream had told her: sex was it, not different from it. What she had thought to be two different things were going to turn out to be one thing: Sex, and nurture, sucking, succor, solace: all the same.
Yes!
“So yets,” said Sam.
“Okay okay.”
What everyone mostly felt, even the hot ones, especially the hot ones, and called sex was just the delight of solace and succor, the oblivion of nursing, the satisfaction of the watered root. That’s what hotness is. Sex just puts that delight to its own uses, for making babies.
Making more babies who want more nurture and succor. Because if we didn’t want to get and give nurture and succor, if that wasn’t what we mostly wanted, to suck and give suck and get life and give life, then we wouldn’t be here at all. Would we. If we didn’t want it more or less continuously. Would we.
Succor, the word had come into her mind unbidden, she wasn’t sure what it meant or what it had to do with sucking but she thought it was what she needed: what she had dreamed of having. God it was obvious, so obvious that as soon as it occurred to her she seemed to have always known it; so simple that either everyone knew it, or no one did. Probably everyone did; probably everyone just came to know it automatically as they grew up, never thought it needed pointing out, probably no one had ever seen the need to tell her.
“This oh Man he plays One, he plays knick-knack on my bum.”
“Thumb, hon. Thumb.”
Sam squealed with delight at her invention, and slid down from the bed. Rosie scrambled after her, to snatch her up, shushing and laughing. “He plays One,” Sam shouted out, “he plays knick-knack on my BUM!”
Piggybacking Sam through the dark of the living room, stopping at the little three-legged table where the big dictionary was.
Succor. Had a cloud come over the sun? No it was her own shadow getting between her and the day. Old familiar shadow, hi.
“What’s that book?”
“Dictionary. All the words.”
No: not something about sucking. Only help, aid, relief, in time of need or distress. From Succurrere, hurry to the help of.
Hurry, hurry.
Where would she get succor? She didn’t mind giving it, she had always known how to give it, it was no credit to her especially, since it had always used to flow out of her at a touch, as from a tap, and she didn’t mind. Only how was she to get it?
She thought with a spasm of dark contrary feeling: Succor yourself.
She didn’t know how to do that, though. Maybe Cliff knew. If Cliff asked her to make a list for herself, as he had asked Spofford to do, she would put that on it.
If Rose Ryder was not out of the picture, Mike had certainly changed his habits. The vehicle that turned in at Arcady to pick up Sam was not Rose’s little Asp as it had usually been in the past months, but a van from The Woods, tubby and shiny in the bee-loud morning. It came only as far as the turn-around, from where its horn was honked in a cheery beebeep, and Sam leapt up, always glad to ride in a new conveyance.
“Kiss?” said Rosie, and Sam turned back, brimful of delight, expectation, love, and gave her a happy goodbye; was this really going to turn out to be an okay way to live? When the sliding side door was opened and Mike got out to get Sam, Rosie saw that there were others in the van with him—three? Four? The tinted windows and brilliant morning made it hard to see. Mike lifted Sam into the air, higher, higher, till she shrieked; then he put her inside the dark van. Rosie watched her disappear within, and the door close behind her with a thud.
Hi, Mike, no wave hello even.
Who were those young guys? They had white shirts on, short-sleeved, and ties, but no jackets; trim haircuts. Trim smiles too. What sort of person was she reminded of, where, when? Jocks or salesmen or. She couldn’t place them.
“Bye-bye,” she said, and waved, not sure Sam was looking her way any longer. “Bye-bye.”
The van was gone.
This was the problem, she thought: that you might sometimes want to get away from love, might try to break the bond or at least tug on it to make it slacken. Only to find. That was what was hardest, for a heart like hers, not that you could not love or give love but that you couldn’t avoid it, couldn’t ever get out of the standing wind of love all around you, find shelter from it. When Mike lifted Sam into his arms she knew it: the hollow in her breast was caused by love, by whatever in her that had gone wrong about love. She had tried to heal it by hiding from love, but that only made it worse, because you almost couldn’t escape it, no one could, even if you became a nun or a recluse you would always know you’d done it because of sex ’n’ kids and avoiding all that; and anyway there would always be behind you your parents conceiving you, your father lifting you in his arms.
She thought for some reason of Pierce Moffett, so evidently hungry for someone to think about besides himself, but talking with silly pride about being reconciled to being barren, “without issue,” as he said, and meantime drying up in some kind of envy he didn’t even recognize; he wasn’t a bad guy, he was only ignorant, ignorant of what he could not be informed about. What parents knew about love and couldn’t tell other people, who thought it was a project or an enterprise, a passion, a contest you won or lost. It wasn’t. It was more like a wind, a steady wind, a wind you could not stand out of.
Love. She wanted to make a painting, a painting of love, of people, a family, living and at work say, but all of them standing in that constant and invisible wind. But of course you couldn’t do it. Because how could you paint an invisible wind?
And she thought then that actually it had been done, in that Giorgione painting, of the Tempest: three people, man woman and child, out in the open, under a dark and lightning-broken sky. He with his weapon apart, the two others together, the child sucking, oblivious. A family, certainly, alone together in the wind of love. Rosie’s heart filled with pity, and she wept.
In the dark house behind her an alarm clock rang briefly, and ceased. Boney’s, to remind him to take his morning pill. Rosie wiped her eyes on her shirt-tail. Ought to visit, see if there was anything she could do for him; and let him know (it made her feel guilty, though he would never object or ev
en hint at an objection) that she would be away most of the day. With her lover.
She got up, went into the cool and odorous house, down the hall to Boney’s office, which had been Boney’s bedroom too for the last two weeks. When she knocked and entered he looked up at her, startled and trembling in a way that frightened her, she always expected him to take sudden turns for the worse, and she would have to rise to an emergency she could not imagine in advance.
“Hi,” she said. “How are you?”
He appeared to ponder the question, or perhaps he hadn’t even noticed it, was still trying to place her. He sat up on his chaise longue, wearing a pretty extravagant bottle-green kimono with a great snorting grinning dragon on its back, and a white towel around his throat.
“I wanted to tell you,” she said. “I’ve made an appointment for today. Will you be all right for a while? Mrs. Pisky’s going to come at noon.”
“Certainly. Yes. Fine.”
“Need anything now? I could …”
“No nothing. Rosie. I wanted to say.”
She waited while he seemed to gather power; but then he only held up to show her the book he had in his lap. “Have you read this?”
She recognized it: Sit Down, Sorrow, Fellowes Kraft’s little book of reminiscences, privately printed, that Boney had offered to let her read when she first began to work for the Foundation.
“Well, I’ve read in it,” she said, Pierce’s handy formula.
He held it out to her, his hands shaking more than usual, the open book a caught bird in them. Rosie took it from him, and began to read at the first full paragraph.
It has often seemed to me that many men of the past—men of the sixteenth century anyway, men of power and responsibility—bore always in their hearts some sort of unassuageable sadness. Look into the eyes of their portraits—even official artists out to flatter them often seem to catch it, a kind of longing or incompletion. Psychiatrists now might say it’s not surprising, given the atrocious childhoods most hereditary nobles had to endure, given over to wetnurses and tutors, sent to live in the houses of other magnates not always friendly to them, subject to endless ritual obligations, their parents plotted against, murdered often enough if they weren’t themselves plotting against their children.