Judith Ivory

by Black Silk

  After a moment, he looked up. “The meter is off.” He could have said worse. The first was a perfectly morbid little sonnet.

  She was watching him, waiting for something, but not criticism.

  “Do you write much poetry?” he asked.

  “A little.” Her head bent down and admitted, “A lot. I have boxes of it.”

  There was a long, awkward silence. He set down the pages. “I should have to read more, and my opinion matters very little, but it seems a little constrained.” Quickly, he amended, “But interesting, nice.”

  She took this as criticism. “I know.” She sighed. “They’re all like that.”

  He offered the rather hollow consolation, “One does not become a poet overnight.”

  She shrugged and pushed her hands deep into the pockets of her dressing gown. “I suspect one does not become a poet. It is something one simply is or is not.”

  “The language is learned.”

  “If it were only language.”

  “I don’t doubt you have the soul for it, if that’s what you mean.”

  Submit gave him a rueful smile for his chivalry. “Henry loathed them.”

  She began to straighten her papers, gathering them up. She put them together, then dumped them into the garbage bin at the end of the table.

  Impulsively, Graham tried to save them. But the bin was wet and faintly septic. The ink was running already with an unpleasant odor by the time he had lifted the first sheet.

  “I wasn’t suggesting—”

  She cut him off abruptly. “It’s no loss. I have tons of it. Much of it unwritten yet, I suspect.”

  He dropped the damp pages back into the bin and looked at her, a strange young woman huddling into a slightly faded dressing gown. She began to pick at the remains of her half of the honey tart.

  “You mustn’t mind me,” he said.

  He felt as if he had squashed something in her. Something nice, yet inchoate. It was nothing he could put his finger on so easily as her being a budding poet, which he felt perhaps she was not. But he sensed a struggle in her, not unlike a birth. A desperate effort at trying to draw breath as a separate being. It was an empathetic note, more intimate than anything they had yet shared. A common experience was at last forming. It lay between them. Vulnerable. Strange. Lonely. It involved Henry. Graham had already gone through this peculiar process, separating himself from a brilliant, enigmatic, highly opinionated man.

  “Get rid of him,” he said out loud. “He was just a vain old man.”

  She shivered and gave him a startled, peculiar look, as if he had touched too close, as if he had indeed read her mind.

  She closed her eyes and bent her head. When she spoke, it was from an unexpected direction. “Did you know there were irregularities in the will?” she asked.

  “No, but I suspected. What with all the difficulty.”

  “At the end, he was obsessed with time. Time and the idea that he was not leaving me enough.

  “It was so absurd,” she continued. “I had no idea he had taken a new will to Arnold. He wrote it himself, without a solicitor’s help. So ridiculous. It was both overgenerous and uncharacteristically careless—even Henry should have known here was not something a layman should do himself. His estate is enormously complex.” She paused. “I have tried so hard not to wonder about that.” Submit pulled out her chair and settled into it, wrapping her arms about herself, looking down at a table leg. “Arnold says it was because he began to feel rushed, that time was running out, that it was not uncharacteristic of the end of a life. But I don’t know.” She shook her head. “Sometimes I think Henry put obscure sentences and double meanings into the will on purpose, then sent me to you with those miserable pictures. I worry he didn’t intend to make things easy for me, but rather set me up to flounder like this, one of his Socratic lessons of discovery.” Submit smiled wanly up at Graham. He was attentive, his face drawn into a look of concern. She made a feeble effort at trying to lighten what she was saying. “A variation of your own suspicions, which you should approve of.”

  She went on quickly before he could say anything. “I wish I could convey to you—At the end—Henry kept telling me he had to pack several more years into whatever time he had left. Even—” She halted, pressed her lips together. She wanted to tell Graham something, something about Henry, herself, without laying either of them open to quick judgment. She tried to pick up a new thread, a more presentable brightness. She made a slight smile. “Henry rose up in bed one day. ‘I’m not finished!’ he shouted. ‘I’m not ready!’ Then he leaned back and said he had made a deathbed discovery. It was not, he said, that he didn’t believe in God, as he had professed for some forty years, but that he had simply become furious with Him. He wanted to snub God, give Him the most frigid cold shoulder, ‘for having created anything as frustrating and unsatisfying as this.’

  “I was his dutiful student, quoting his own lessons at him. ‘God,’ I said, ‘is our own creation, born of fear of the unknown.’ But he would not be pried from his new position of self-doubt.

  “‘It was not I,’ he said, ‘who made the earth spin round the sun fifty-seven times before I ever met you. Nor I who now insists that I have had my ride and must get off.’

  “‘Don’t anthropomorphize,’ I said. More from the gospel according to St. Henry. I wanted him to stop it, be himself again.

  “But he only stared at me, his old scholarly stare, as if I had answered a conundrum thoughtfully but wrong. I was expected to come up with a better answer.

  “When I got up from the bed, he grabbed my arm. His hand was so cold. It shocked me. He could hardly move it from arthritis. But he used this infirmity, like the strength he’d once had. He had a hundred ways to arrest me.

  “‘Don’t,’ he said, ‘believe everything I have ever said to you religiously. You must question everything. Even me, which has never been a problem for you, so long as I have been standing next to you in my full and rebarbative flesh. But be careful, Submit, when I am gone. We have loved each other in a peculiarly close and unorthodox manner. Don’t build a shrine to that.’”

  She couldn’t go on for a moment. Then, “He died that night while I slept in a chair by his bed.”

  Submit glanced at Graham, expecting him to be showing signs of discomfort with all this. Or boredom. He didn’t show either. Instead, he watched her directly, waiting, leaving silence for her to go on, if she wished.

  She stared down at her hands, playing with the front of her dressing gown. “Until the week before, I had slept in the bed with him. I don’t think he ever realized how ignoble my motives were in wanting to sleep there. It was as if I were guarding my life, not his, guarding him from taking everything I valued from me—the way I talked, thought, moved, felt. He had coached and coaxed and badgered me into being the person I wanted to be. Simplistically speaking, I knew that I had always played a kind of terribly grateful Galatea to his Pygmalion.” She paused. “Then the awful shock, that week before, the sudden wetness in the sheets. His bladder let loose. I was so frightened. I had heard that in death everything, every muscle relaxed, and that was what I thought. When I touched him, felt him breathing, the relief was so great, I can’t describe it. I was crying, kissing him, tears of gratitude, as he groaned and tried to push me away. He could barely talk for his defamed pride. The wet had awakened us both. He was mortified. Such carryings-on. I could have taken care of it quietly myself, but he would not cooperate, would not let me get at the practical management of taking his sheets. He wept like a child, beseeching me to leave him alone. I don’t know, I suppose I was afraid he would take his life then and there if I did. We had a terrific row—with me helplessly having the upper hand, no matter how I might have liked to have given that over to him. He did not allow me beside him after that.

  “Then that morning a week later. The incredible absence. It was so unmistakably different, I couldn’t imagine lying next to—in—his warmth and thinking he was gone. The room was co
ld. I awoke, stiff, cramped in my chair. There was not a sound. The stillness was so complete.

  “Oh, there were birds, the bustle of breakfast and beginnings downstairs. But that was what made it so remarkable. Henry used to speak of death as Nothing, a void: Well, it certainly is so for the living. Henry was simply not there. Like waking to find that in the night, quite naturally, without a trace of blood or pain, one’s limbs had become disconnected from one’s torso. I sat there for more than an hour, without the first notion of how I should ever be able to move again. The maid found us both. Henry. And me, not having budged from my chair, but knowing with a certainty I can’t explain….” She let her voice trail off.

  She had nothing more to say.

  Graham left the silence undisturbed.

  Submit went back to her honey tart, eating it slowly. Graham sat across from her, watching her. The billowy hair—the loose braid hardly contained it. The loose-fitting nightclothes. She didn’t seem to mind his staring, but ate, indifferent to anything but the sticky pie. She appeared to relish the sweet now, carefully cleaning a finger with her tongue like a cat. Eventually, he pushed his own half-eaten portion toward her, which, after a moment’s hesitation, she took.

  The kitchen remained quiet. An animal outside, rummaging in the dark, appeared to have discovered the trash heap from the day’s meals. Inside, the honey tart was gone. Submit began to tidy her area on the worktable.

  “Cook will get it,” Graham said. Then, as if it were part of the same thought, he asked, “What do your friends call you?”

  “Submit.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  She laughed shyly. “You don’t like it.”

  “I was hoping for a reprieve.” That sounded horrid. “That is, I was hoping for a fond name.”

  “My father was fond of it.” She was smiling, teasing him. He was left on the hook for a moment; then her eyes became direct. “Like my husband, my name was my father’s choice. Proving, I suppose, that my father was not very astute in his choices, merely lucky.” She smiled. “Still, it has been a protection for me in ways he never dreamed.”

  “I’m sure.” There was an awkward moment while they both knew he was trying to get over the name. “Submit,” he added. Then he made a face, a display of distaste and dissatisfaction with his own rendering of it.

  She laughed again. “It puts the right sort of people off balance.”

  He didn’t like this and said as much by a look.

  She shrugged. “Henry used it from the first moment he knew me. Without a qualm.”

  “You were a child.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered. He was comfortable with the concept: What a situation called for he did without hesitation.”

  “How wise of him.” Except his tone didn’t much respect such wisdom.

  Submit bristled into a little speech. “He was more than wise. Henry had the humanity that you—and your silences and innuendos—always accuse him of not having. He made dreadful mistakes. But those who live by committing themselves often do. Henry loved.”

  “I have always known that.”

  Submit didn’t believe his sincerity for a moment, then the earnestness in his eyes became so frank, she had to turn away. “I don’t mean to sound so presumptuous—”

  “You don’t. You only sound convinced. As you are entitled to”—only the slightest pause—“Submit.” It was coming out more easily now. He released a laugh. “It is a nice name, a nice sound.” He almost meant it. He repeated the name, listening to the particular sough and tap of the letters. “Submit.” It was formed almost entirely at the front of the mouth—teeth and lips; one hardly needed voice. The sound of a wave breaking on the shore. He was caught repeating the name several times more.

  Her eyes fixed on him, a kind of doubt invading her expression, an embarrassment that he would squander such attention on her name. She looked away.

  “Some of the best things one has of oneself,” she said, “are only flaws one has made to advantage. Don’t examine me too closely.”

  There was a break. She snugged the wrap of her dressing gown about her and went toward the door.

  “Submit?”

  She stopped. He came up next to her. It was the first he was sure that things had changed between them. She lifted her face toward him, her eyes mildly challenging. He pressed closer, took her chin in his hand. As his mouth came near hers, she pulled away.

  “No.” Like the day at the inn.

  He couldn’t keep himself from the same response. “Why?”

  “For pity’s sake,” she said. “Let’s not do this again.” After a pause, “Good night.” She was going to leave.

  For an instant, he was nonplussed. He dropped an arm down to the door frame. His arm caught her against her ribs. He felt her halt, arch her body just enough to take the weight of her breasts from the top of his arm. She looked at him. And it was he who was caught, pinned to a page from the serial romance: The cad barred her way with the object in mind of forcing himself upon her. Graham couldn’t quite see how to make this different—perhaps it wasn’t different. In any event, it was the wrong move; he could see it in her face by the look she gave him.

  She leaned back on the door frame, her hands tucked behind her. He made a wry face and dropped his arm. Her confined hands were categorically not a coyness, not a clearance for him to continue, but an explicit message: There would be no physical contact. They stood looking at each other a moment. Then that stupid, insulting, flattered, feminine smile came faintly into the corners of her mouth. She bent her head, trying to hide it once more.

  Graham was quietly infuriated by her attitude, the old, revisited, hypocritical pose. “I’ll get the lamp,” he said.

  He burned himself picking the lamp up by the base. There was a clatter of glass and metal as he caught it from falling over, tapping and touching its hot edges back into place with both hands. His hands stung. He muttered obscenities and put his fingers in his mouth. With a failing sense of control, he realized he was on the verge of an old assault. Henry. Her relationship to him. The pictures. The large sum of money this young woman was due to inherit from the old man’s estate. William’s words, and worse, all these he was about to utter out his own mouth. But when he turned, she was right as he’d left her, standing presumably on her mute concern for his burnt fingers.

  “So why are you still here when I’ve just played it as written: Netham the rake?”

  “You’re being much harder on yourself than I’m being.”

  “And why is that?”

  “I don’t know why you’re so hard on yourself.”

  “No. Why are you being easy on me? I don’t usually inspire moral generosity. And I have the impression, in any case, you don’t usually give it. ‘A hard woman,’ I’ve been told.”

  “By whom?”

  “Not until you’ve been more specific as to why.”

  “Why what?”

  “Why, if it’s not just a maneuver to you”—he was irritated with himself for this schoolboy pressing of the matter—“can’t I kiss you?”

  Submit frowned quickly. “But it was maneuvering.”

  “And that’s the reason.”

  “No.”

  He took an exasperated breath.

  “Risk, I suppose. I’m not that brave.”

  “For a kiss?”

  “Don’t pretend.”

  “All right. I want you. All of it. The kissing, the panting, the sweating, the nakedness.” He would floor her figuratively, if he couldn’t otherwise. “I have wanted to climb on top of you, I think, from the first moment I saw you. How does that strike you for a direct lack of pretense?”

  “Not very politely spoken.”

  Also not precisely as he had wished. She cast her eyes down, and there was unmistakably the traces of the smile again, that peculiarly feminine inconsistency. It grew and became—as large as a walnut—impossible to hide inside her mouth. As she tried to contain it, it came out in little puckers of sel
f-consciousness. She put her hand up to her lips, as if she might catch it. Her head bent again, into her hand. A woman laughing. He found it insulting; he found it infinitely attractive.

  “It’s not funny,” he complained.

  “No. I’m sorry.” She looked up, an attempt at contrition. But then her hand came to her mouth again. “I can’t help it. It so amazes me that you should—should want me in that way.” She forced her hand down, her head up. The smile was openly feminine. “I wish it didn’t please me so. Because I just can’t. It wouldn’t be any good.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “You know how I mean it. For pity’s sake, leave us both a way out.”

  “You’ve no right to a way out, not gracefully, dressed in your widowhood from your throat to your knuckles, to the limits of public behavior—when, in the dead of night, you laugh up your sleeve—”

  “Don’t be mean.”

  “Bluntly candid. Following your example.”

  “All right. Then we’re even. I’m sorry.” She was not put down, only vaguely put out, the righteous heroine to this villainous affront. She took the lamp by the handle. “It’s my upbringing, I suppose. A tendency to butcher genteel scenes. With the giggles or bluntness.” But her apology, her refound role were anything but blunt. He felt cut clean, neatly left at bay.

  She had turned and quickly became only a glow in the dining room, a rhythm of light that paralleled the long, vacant table, an echo of diminishing steps. When he rounded the archway into the entrance hall himself, he saw her sidelit profile, her superior bearing ascending the stairs to the upper apartments.

  “Submit,” he called.

  She turned, halfway up. It seemed conceivable now that she minded his possession of the name, his compulsive use of it. She made a brisk, inquiring pause. “Would you like this? If you are staying down, I can see the rest of the way.”

  She held out the light, offering to keep him at a literal arm’s length. For a moment she reigned over the lamp, over the pose, like a worker of spells. Until Graham began up the stairs.