by John Crowley
“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” Rose Ryder said to Pierce. “Really I didn’t.”
It might have been an accusation, a charge, and if it were, he would not have known how to answer it; but it wasn’t a charge, it was something more like an apology, and not to him either.
“Well,” he said, attempting gentle gallantry, “I’m glad it did.”
She didn’t seem to feel deep regrets; she paid him a nice smile, searching idly amid the pillows and sheets for her clothes.
“Here,” he said. He found her skimpy underthings, this one, that one. Without asking, he lifted her foot and slipped her panties over it, then the other foot, and drew them up. She made no protest; her agitated hands, though, ceased their searching, and fell still. Then the bra. He hooked it for her in the back. His own hands only lightly strayed from the work.
“Where’s your, ah here.”
He shook out the rumpled shirt, and she held out her arms to have it put on. Buttons: she watched his unhandy big fingers do them, and he did too, and at the successful completion of each, they lifted their eyes to meet.
When the medieval physiologists (monks, most of them, after all) pondered the strange disease of amor hereos, crazy love, they used to put the question: How does a woman, who is so large, enter in through the eye, which is so small? For unless she could get in, and thus into the temple of the soul, the contagion couldn’t take hold. Actually of course they knew how; they only asked it that way in order to make clear the wonder of it, the astonishment of the transformation: a corporeal woman transformed at the frontier of the eye into a phantasm, incorporeal, made only of Meaning, which is the food of the soul, all it can ever consume.
He put her white sneakers on, and would have tied the laces too, but she withdrew from the game then and did them herself, returning the day and the scene to normal speed. She began to talk rapidly and inconsequentially: Her appointment. Her work.
“I don’t even know where you live,” he said.
“In Shadowland,” she said. “You know?”
“Good Lord,” he said. “No I don’t.”
“It’s not even a town,” she said. “Up the river toward The Woods.”
“A phone?”
“Not now. Soon.”
“Oh.”
She let him kiss her cheek on parting, chums; but not to let her out or come with her. But then at the door she turned again to him.
“Say,” she said. “Do you like fireworks?”
“You think of the strangest things,” Rosie said to Spofford, and starting to laugh nearly wept instead, so full of liquid that she overflowed. In the window of Spofford’s cabin, by his big lumpy bed, the sky had turned to evening green, but still bright, still day.
“Sure,” he said.
What she had been thinking about as they coupled, her head apparently entirely disconnected from the rest of her and free to amuse itself, was the old tower carillon at college, which her first real lover had played. The echoey stone tower-room and the polished wood of the bell levers; the spring hills and fields you could see and own from those open windows. He grunted and sang as he pushed the levers down, they nearly lifted him off the ground in their return; he sang the songs in the hesitant largo which was as fast as he could play. I come to—the gar-den—alone. When the dew is—fresh on—the roses. Press, press, and each press answered by a huge bellboom, whose echo swallowed up the next bell’s sounding and the next till the harmonics shook her ribcage and buttocks with delight.
“Oh. I’ve got to go, got to go,” she murmured.
“Naw,” he said.
She asked the transformed day What is this? How does the pressing of the big levers, becoming easier with every press, do this to things, make them translucent and welcoming, offering themselves to me, to change if I want them to, or stay the same if I want them to?
Wanting is life. Dreams are life. Only you weren’t to want things to remain the same, or dream they could.
She thought: If the world really were under a dark spell, was this all it took to wake it? And if she could awaken it—from within, from inside her own self—then could she push, just a little bit, the other way, and make it sleep again?
“Christ,” Spofford said, laughing lightly and regarding her absorption. “You look about stoned out of your bean.”
“Well that Cliff,” she said. “Some therapist, huh? Some kinda guy.”
From a house down the mountain that they could not see, a rocket arose into the lucent air, drawing an uncertain line of smoke behind; then stopped, and went off with a proud little pop.
“Take me down, will you.”
“Don’t want to. But okay.”
Another rocket, lofted from another backyard over the dark oaks of Arcady as Spofford drove in at the gate, ascended bravely, wavered, fell, went off; a handful of orange sparks fell earthward.
“Going to look in on the guys one more time,” Spofford said.
“I’ll walk from here,” Rosie said. “See you.”
“Hey. I might come knock on the back door. Get my goodnights.”
“Oh don’t, okay. Mrs. Pisky’s here.”
She slipped from the seat and started up the drive. There seemed to be no lights lit in the front of the house, usually there were by now, and the still-bright sky above made the house a blank darkness.
Now what’s this. Parked in the driveway by the front door was a Beetle, unmistakably Val’s: it had the plastic flower on its radio antenna by which Val found it in crowded parking lots. And the front door of the house, Rosie could see now, stood open.
She went in, the big cutout screen door swinging slowly closed behind her of its own or the breeze’s volition. The front hall went straight back through the house, living room, dining room, both dark, to the library in the back. Lights were on in there.
He’s dead, she thought, and she felt herself resisting her own quick progress toward the door, though her feet kept going. She pushed open the door.
Not dead. He looked at her, when she came in, with the same startled and uncomprehending look he had worn that morning. But he was different: sicker, a lot sicker.
Val sat on a straight-back chair near him; she too had looked up in guilty alarm when Rosie came in.
“What is it?” Rosie asked. “Did he have …”
“Don’t know,” Val said. “Doctor was here, I guess. Earlier. You weren’t here. He wanted him to go in the hospital right away. But I guess he said no.”
“Oh no really?” Rosie’s heart had begun to beat faster. “Boney are you sure.”
He made no response. Rosie wondered if he knew he was not alone.
“So a nurse is supposed to come,” Val said. “She should be here now. The housekeeper person—”
“Mrs. Pisky.”
“She went to call again.”
Rosie came to the couch. “Boney,” she said. He lifted a hand. He knew she was there.
“Now he says he has to pee,” Val said. “Go to the bathroom. Can we? If we each get an arm.”
“Well,” Rosie said. “Maybe with Mrs. Pisky.”
“Okay,” Val said. “He was getting kind of anxious.” She had put her elbow in her palm, and rested her chin on the knuckles of her hand; she looked down at Boney as the doctor in old chromos looks down on the dying child in the makeshift bed. Fading Away.
“Val,” Rosie said. “Why are you here?”
She had almost not come. She had not dared to leave the Faraway Lodge that evening until she had determined that the moon had exited her own sign and entered the next, afraid that in her own sign it might unsettle her or make her weep; then, after she had set out and gone a mile or two she stopped, her resolve draining away; and she had had to return to the Lodge, make tea, wait for herself to refill.
She hadn’t told Mama where she was going, and when Mama looked in on her there at the kitchen table with a mug before her (“Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” the mug said), Val spoke a little sharp
ly to her, to keep her away. If Mama got it out of her (and it trembled like a drop ready to fall, just inside her) then Mama would, might, forbid her to go; and contemptuously as Val usually treated Mama’s forbiddings and orders, she didn’t think she could flout that one easily; and she doubted she had the stuff to decide more than once to do this.
And any day now (it might have been any day in the last five years, he was way overdue) he might die, and she’d be left without it done.
She had imagined the scene taking place in different ways depending on the shifting state of her feelings; she had imagined it in different ways since she had been a teenager, living long with a single version of it, then suddenly changing to a different one for reasons of her soul’s that she often didn’t understand. Years went by when she didn’t think of it at all, and then months, summers, winters, when she thought of little else.
Angry, righteous, triumphant. Scornful. Sorrowful, reproachful. Needy and demanding for once in her life. Grave and judging. Cruel. What she couldn’t know, what was necessary to know for the playing of each of these scenes, was how he felt, what he knew, what he had thought over the years; she could only imagine, and as her feelings underwent changes, his imagined responses did too.
Mama said that he never denied it, never spurned her or told her she couldn’t prove it or that he could prove that it was damn unlikely and that there were a lot of other candidates; but then Mama always claimed she was highly regarded and had been treated with courtesy and kindness, not by the nobodies but by the somebodies or near- or sub-somebodies she had known over time, which included some local big men and a few entertainment celebrities so minor their very names raised giggles.
And Boney Rasmussen.
Growing up, Val had felt herself to be held within a flexible net of evasions and things poorly explained, a net which held her away from certain matters at certain ages and others later on. When she was very young (Mama still pretended to believe Val made up these memories) she’d been allowed into the cabins tucked away in the pines, to help Mama clean up; the women who sort of lived there were always sleepy and glad to see her. Then she was forbidden the cabins, and a little later they were all shut. When she was a teenager and nothing Mama said mattered much to her, she went into the cabins again, and smelled the dank smell of their spavined beds, looked into drawers lined with wartime newspapers where a few hairpins lay. Meanwhile Mama had put a little effort into describing her father, lost gone absent far away, not very much more effort than she put into the Tooth Fairy or the Sandman, and Val never pressed, for fear he would turn out to be wholly imaginary. But later the net expanded: on a night when a blind date of Val’s had made a cruel assumption based on ancient rumors about her past and Mama’s past, Mama had finally seen that she had to be enlightened. Which didn’t mean that Mama held nothing back.
How many stories had she read, or seen in the movies that Mama started taking her to at five or six, in which a girl finds out her real father is a lord, a duke, a millionaire, kindly and powerful in a velvet smoking jacket, aglow in the lamplight of his dark study? Her own was not a story, he was actual, he lived down the road from her, she ran into him at crafts fairs and summer-stock shows, and since Rosie Rasmussen had returned to the Faraways and become her friend she had gone to his house and played croquet for Christ’s sake, and nodded to him across the great green lawn.
I don’t want anything from you, she would say. I know you did a little for us through the years. It was enough, it wasn’t enough but never mind. I don’t want anything except.
What? To be acknowledged, finally. To be told he was sorry, that he had not done all he should have, that he had been afraid, maybe even cowardly, and that he had thought of her often over the years and been sorry.
So that she could forgive him, at least, the bastard, before he died. That much at least.
And so Val had come to Arcady; had pulled up to his door, her heart full, and knocked; and no one had answered, but the-door was open, and she’d come with trepidation down the hall (just as Rosie would at day’s end) and into the study at the end of the hall. Where had she got the nerve? There was no other house on this side of the Jambs, the right side, that she would dare to enter uninvited; but to this one she would not ever be invited, so. She pushed open the study door, certain for some reason that this was the right room, she could see the tall bookcases, the varnished wood. Where in dreams she had always.
Mostly it was a sickroom. Sheets over the big chaise longue, an oxygen tank and a respirator. Pill bottles at hand on a folding table. At first she didn’t even recognize that there was a person amid it all. He raised a hand slightly from his bed, and let it fall again.
“Mr. Rasmussen.” His face didn’t alter. She tried to guess if he actually saw her. He was lots worse than Rosie had said. “You know me, right?”
She came in a little farther. Still his aspect didn’t alter, he watched her with the careful dull interest of a lizard on a stone. He had been a tall man, he had always seemed tall to her, and now he seemed small, tiny; she thought of the person she had read about in the Dictionary, who got eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth, and finally dried up and shrank to the size of a cricket. Still alive though.
“Val,” he said at last, as though the name had surprised him, turning up on his tongue. “Valerie.”
O Christ let her not cry.
“I wanted to visit,” she said. “I’ve wanted to for a long time.”
He tried to lift himself from the chaise on an elbow, found he could not, and lowered himself again. “I’m afraid,” he said, “I haven’t been well.”
“I know,” she said. “I know.” O why couldn’t she have come earlier, why hadn’t she been braver, why hadn’t she listened to herself. “It’s awful to put things off, put them off and off, until. But you.”
He said nothing. Where had he got that silk dressing gown, like a fairy-tale emperor, it appeared actually to be empty, like a puppet’s clothes. What if. No his breast just then rose and fell.
“I wanted,” she said, “to ask you something, about something Rosie said to me, Rosie Mucho.”
He opened his mouth, but said nothing.
“She didn’t know, but I bet you can tell me. Who is Una Knox?”
She smiled when she said it, you gay dog, tell me your secrets. Boney made no sign he had heard.
“It doesn’t really matter,” she said. “I just wondered. Honest to Christ it is not something I wanted to plumb.” O stupid stupid tears, how irrelevant can you be, she had not meant to begin, she had not begun, and she would not.
“I don’t,” she said, “I don’t want anything from you. It’s just.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Val’s heart rose into her throat, forgiveness and love ready to be poured out even before they were asked for. She stepped closer. There were tears in his eyes, unfallen.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. And this time raised his hand to his ear, to cup it. “You said?”
I’m sorry, scuse me, come again: that’s all he had meant. Of course. Val swallowed, trying to dislodge her unpoured heart, which was stuck painfully in her throat. “No,” she said. “Nothing.”
“I’m afraid,” he said again. “I can’t offer you anything. Mrs. Pisky.”
“Well,” she said. “Well listen.”
Listen. But she said nothing more. He lifted himself again on his elbow, as though he had already forgotten that he couldn’t do it, and settled again, a fragile thing too heavy to be lifted and so put back carefully.
“Bad day,” he said.
“Yes.”
She sat down on the hard chair near him. He turned his head toward her, weird object, brown-spotted and damp and absurdly small, like a doll’s left out lost for years. She herself felt horribly enormous, weighty, filled up with all that she was not going to say.
Not going to say: for she had understood almost as soon as she entered here that she was not going to charge him wit
h all that he had done, or make him acknowledge her, or ask any of the questions she had asked him in so many imaginary interviews in so many imaginary movie versions of this room. It was just too late. He had not done what he should have done and she had not been able to make him do it and now it was too late. He was only a sick old man who could think of nothing but himself and his death: as she would think of nothing else when her turn came.
“I’m sorry?” he said again.
“It’s okay,” she said. Even if she had demanded he listen to her, the story would still be hers to carry, no lighter. “It’s nothing. Rest.”
She sat by him a long time. Once she got up and with the corner of the sheet she wiped away the tear that trickled down the crevasses of his cheek, not shed for her or for any of his other sins, only another gland malfunctioning, he hardly noticed. Mrs. Pisky gasped to find her there bent over him, intruder, thief, Angel of Death in a sundress.
“So,” Val said to Rosie. “I’ve been here helping. Cheering him up.” A sort of antic cheer had entered Val herself by then, the resolution of no resolution, she was to be left with the self she had brought here, but by Christ she would not imagine this room and this moment and this man again.
“Oh, Val,” said Rosie. “O god how strange.”
Had he heard Val tell Rosie her story? He gave no sign. Rosie looked on him in awe. In her eyes he had shape-shifted into something not entirely human.
She stood. Mrs. Pisky now returned from the phone, cried out with relief to see that Rosie had come home. Boney on his sheeted couch looked up at the three women standing over him.
“I’m afraid,” he said. “I have to go.”
“Well sure,” Mrs. Pisky said. “When we have to go, we have to go.” Her own cheer was all worn away, transparent, seen to be the artificial kind, no longer any mistake about it. Not at heart a cheerful woman, stubby, strong, and loud, she had always scared Rosie, who thought Boney was afraid of her too.
They got him to his feet, at which he looked, as though uncertain where they were placed.