"You're not sorry at all," she told him, as always. "Please don't say that."
"Then what am I? Why do you keep coming here? You could be going out with any boy in your school."
"I'm not interested in any of them," she said, which was true. The boys were nice enough and certainly interested in her but she found them all too keen and bristling, like frantically spawning fish. But she >didn't answer Jim, either, for although she would have liked to say that she was here because he was thoroughly kind (which he was, without any effort, to her and to everyone he met), it was in fact because he was also frail, if not somehow wrecked, that she was drawn to him. He was overtly slung with the weight of time, but to her he wasn't a pitiable sight, rather as if he had been stitched with one of the marred but still beautiful bolts, this forlorn cape, and could no longer take it off.
What he sipped along with his root beer was a tincture of opium, which he had been given many years earlier for dysentery while hospitalized in France at the end of the Great War. He always had some now and although she kept asking him if she could try it he refused, saying it was dangerous medicine, but one night when he left her for five minutes to make his rounds she dug in his coat pocket and took a small swallow, and then another. The thick, sweetly fragrant syrup instantly coated her entire insides, the sensation the exact opposite, it would turn out, of the precipitous detachment she would later suffer, hotly fusing her to herself in a manner that made her feel whole again, even if she were no more substantial than ether and light. Years later, married to Ames Tanner, she would seek out that feeling again, though it would come in the form of a vial and needle, procured in the service alley behind the city hospital by a person met, again, through a mission, though this one a client.
When Jim returned he could tell something was different and immediately smelled the tincture on her breath but before he could get cross she kissed him again. He balked at first but then melted into her as he had not allowed himself previously, the sudden force of his arms momentarily alarming her but then just as swiftly firing her desire to make love to him. She was not saving herself for any reason or person--for what propriety, what realm, would she be doing so?--and as such there was nothing stopping her from being with him now, in this oddly, lovingly enrobed little room. She tugged at his belt to unbuckle it but he twisted away and when she clutched at it again he held on to her hands.
"Please turn off the light," he said.
She rose and flicked it off and the room went completely black. She didn't know if it was the perfect dark or his medicine but she floated back to him on a silken wing and when they began kissing again she felt a wonderful new ache flooding her limbs, filling her torso. She slipped off her underpants. Then he was busy kissing her and caressing her hair and she found his belt again and undid his trousers. Her long skirt had ridden up and he lay atop her but there was nothing but his bare thighs against hers and she kept waiting for the pushing that didn't come. She reached down to touch him and when she found him he was hardly there, not tiny but empty, more skin than blood, and beneath it there was almost nothing there at all, just a node seamed by a hardened, smooth line of a scar in the flesh.
"I'm no good," he whispered to her in the dark. He was crying.
"I've been useless since the war."
"You're not useless," she said to him. She guided his wet face to her chest, the way she'd once seen her mother do to her father as she peered at them through a hole in the rice paper screen. She guided him lower still, feeling the cooling trail of his tears on her belly, her hip, the crook of her thigh, but he stopped before he went any lower.
"It's all right," she said. "You can keep going, if you want."
"I don't know what to do."
"Yes you do. Just kiss me."
"How?"
"However you want to."
"Just kiss you?"
"Yes."
And when he did she was surprised by them both, their shared ignorance in the act an object lesson in how experience only mattered if one let it, his mapping of her with the gentlest, humblest fervor innocently building her up before smashing her in the darkness, exquisitely obliterating her again. The pattern of the evening was reprised each time she visited him, once a week throughout that winter, Sylvie staying with him until fi ve, when the first buses began running; she'd ride back up through the fogged-in hills to her aunt's house with her mind similarly sodden and obscured but her body still bounding and alive with his hands and his lips and then soon enough the taste of the tincture, craving it not in her own mouth but in her bones. Each time she'd take a little more, Jim warning her to be careful and that it was not meant for a healthy young woman, but she knew she wasn't a tenth as sturdy as she appeared to Jim or to her aunt or to everyone else who saw her as a beautiful, somewhat aloof, scholarly girl who had so quickly righted herself after such a lamentable family tragedy, whose good long years spanned out freely before her. But the recent past was a well-rutted road, still the only way she knew to get back and forth to the present, and as she went to her classes at the college, attended church with Aunt Lizzie, a part of her couldn't help but wish to run to Jim and the pitchblack room at the factory, drink in the potion and transmogrify, be anything but her mortal self.
It was soon after she was introduced to Ames Tanner, by a deacon of the church whose family was a longtime acquaintance of her parents, that she decided to stop seeing Jim. Ames hadn't even asked her out yet that but she knew, he would imminently and that if he was truly as he appeared, she would be with him always. She loved seeing Jim and loved his gentleness and modesty but it was really a love of cloistering and smallness and her own physical pleasure, all of which she already understood were signs of her ugly narcissism, her insoluble weakness.
Ames Tanner, by contrast, would compel her into the wider world: he was freshly ordained, and a pediatrician as well, and he had great plans for his new church, not only for its congregation but for the charitable works he would urge it to pursue in the wider community. He had the same incandescence in his eyes that her parents had, that cool flame that seemed an uncanny reincarnation of them both, and he had asked her right away, as they sat for tea and cookies in the warm basement of the church, if she would come to his congregation and recount her parents' dedication to improving the circumstances of the poor and powerless. Like everyone else, he knew generally what had happened to them, but he was one of the few who didn't shy away from mentioning them.
So it was with foreknowledge that it would be the last time that she went to Jim. But once there, she couldn't bear to say anything; he had brought her a bouquet of dried flowers that night, in addition to the root beer and of course the half-pint bottle, its glass the color of dark caramels. He'd tacked different fabrics on the walls. For the fi rst time in many weeks she declined to take her sips (he'd had to buy extra bottles from his friend at the hospital), and as he slowly twisted the cap back on, his expression was that of a prisoner being led down into an isolation hole, regarding her as the man might check the sky. She thanked him for the flowers and hugged and kissed him and he hugged her back stiffly.
"Should I turn off the light?" she asked him.
"Okay."
But in the customary dark she had some trouble finding him. "Over here," he said, from the far corner. When they touched it was a minor collision, the crown of her head against his chin. He was sitting up rather than lying on the curtain he had spread out, and before she could apologize he took her shoulders and pinned her hard enough that she could feel the points of her shoulder blades grating against the fl oor.
He took off her clothes. He wasn't kissing her this time but using his hands, searching her out as if he had only a few scant moments to get to know her and pinching her nape, her nipples, rooting his thumbnail into her belly button until she thought it might have begun to bleed. And yet she willed herself not to tense under his hands; she laid herself open. She wanted to show him that it was all fine, that it was all welcome, that no matte
r what his compulsion or need she would try to take pleasure now, genuinely and not in spite, for she knew he could only feel any sexual pleasure through her. It was a surprise, then, when he tugged down his trousers and got between her legs, began driving into her, though there was nothing but a rubbing and the spurs of his own narrow hips knocking into her own; he kept on and she urged him, gripping his buttocks to pull him to the right rhythm, and when he matched it with his own fingers in her mouth and in her rear, simultaneously reaching as if he were going to clasp her in the middle, she lost herself as she never had before.
She waited to leave until he thought she was asleep and had gone on his rounds. It was cowardly of her, but he hadn't said a word to her after their lovemaking and she thought it would be a mercy for them both if she simply disappeared. But it was still an hour before the buses began running, and she walked all the way home in the steady, chilly March rain, wholly accepting the misery of being soaked to her bones. It took her an hour to climb the long road up the hill. The next two days she was fever-wracked and shaky, her aunt feeding her soda crackers and beef tea in bed, wondering aloud how her skirt and sweater could have gotten so wet, then telling her in the next breath that Ames Tanner had dropped by while she was asleep, leaving a note card that he'd inscribed in the cleanest, upright hand: "Will you give me the honor of learning more about your experiences? I am eager for your wisdom! Faithfully yours, A.T."
Ames took her to lunch the following week, and to the movie theater and dinner the week after, not making any small talk but rather asking about her family's travels in Africa and China, about the conditions they encountered and how her parents set up the ministries and schooling at each of the missions, about the other kinds of projects they instituted, in mercantilism and agriculture and disease control. He wanted to know how they had gone about learning the local languages, or if it was difficult to work with other missionaries, particularly the Catholic ones. He didn't ask about the circumstances of her parents' deaths, nor in fact speak of them as if they were even gone. She was glad to talk about them this way, for he made her feel as if they were not just alive but still out in the world somewhere, still setting up missions, still aiding and organizing and teaching, and she found herself recounting their activities of those last years in more detail than she had offered anyone else, including her aunt. He'd have her celebrate them, shout their praises if she would, make them gleam again by their brightest light.
He did ask, however, as he drove her back to her aunt's house in his Packard sedan (his family was wealthy, being prominent in the timber business), whether she'd had serious boyfriends in her life, or any present suitors, and she immediately said no, though flashing on Jim. Ames nodded, still quite serious but obviously pleased. She hadn't volunteered again at that particular soup kitchen, but she couldn't help but think about Jim sitting in the dim factory office, the various curtains still tacked on the walls, nursing his bottle of the tincture. At certain moments late at night she craved the taste of it terribly, and longed for him as well, and she found she could master both impulses by kneading herself raw with the back of her thumb until the sensation was only, solely, painful; she would make her body quell its own urges with an even sharper reality. For she knew she must not hide out any longer. She must climb out from every cave of her making. Ames's presence in her life and his interest in her parents was in fact a blessing; he would >bring her forth, even if her memories of those last hours might be fully rekindled.
And soon enough, one evening, the past engulfed her all at once. She was preparing for just her fifth dinner out with Ames when she cut herself shaving, the blood running freely from her calf. She was in the tub and instead of stepping out and blotting the wound with a tissue she propped her foot against the tiled wall and let it bleed, accelerating the flow with another quick gash, letting the blood stream past her knee to her thigh, the streaked pale limb fallen asleep and coldly tingling but still existing outside her sensation. It looked as if a wave of blood had washed over her leg but it was merely a surface current, and she was never in the remotest danger; the sight froze her, however, and although she heard the doorbell (her aunt was out of town) she didn't stir, seeing only the bodies of Reverend Lum and his wife lying uncovered in the courtyard of the mission, a splotch of dark red that had spread over Mrs. Lum's face the lone mark on the ground, light snow descending upon them. It was odd, for it was never an image of her parents, but rather of the Lums, which would always spark her mind.
She could hear Ames shouting up at the opened window of the bathroom, and when she didn't answer right away he shouted again. He called her name and when she weakly responded with his he must have heard something wrong in her voice, for he pushed through the unlocked front door and bounded up the narrow stairs of the modest row house. He anxiously called and banged on the bathroom door, and when she didn't answer he came right in, his eyes instantly drawn wide in horror at the dyed hue of the water, the smears of blood on the tiles, on the rim of the tub; her leg had slipped down below the surface. He instinctively grabbed her wrists and pulled them out of the water, but when he saw they were untouched he shook them in panic and cried: "Where is it? What have you done to yourself?"
She was listless from the still-hot water and feeling she could open her throat and disappear within it when Ames reached in and lifted her out in one swift movement. She glanced toward her feet and he quickly found the two tiny slits above her heel; he dressed them with bandages from the medicine cabinet. She was dripping and now cold, but when he knelt and covered her with a towel she bared herself and blotted his drenched suit jacket and trousers. He tried averting his eyes and kept asking what was wrong, but she felt him aroused underneath and hardly knowing what she was doing undid his belt and put him in her mouth. He said no but his face was bound up and he shuddered. In just a few minutes he was ready again and they lay down right there and it was then that blood came from her once more, the ruined towel beneath them like a shock of color in new snow.
The next day Ames proposed to her, something that he was planning anyway but which was certainly accelerated by what occurred, as well as by their assumption that she might be pregnant, which she was. They were married within the month. Yet she didn't stay pregnant, nor could she remain so the next time, or the next. It was not his problem; she would become pregnant at least five times that they knew of, her body simply unable to nurture to term. The last time would be several years before they went to Korea, a three-month-old fetus with nothing obviously wrong with him, a devastating fact, though ultimately not as disturbing to him as was Sylvie's demeanor afterward. She wasn't inconsolable as she was the other times, even as those pregnancies were much shorter-lived, lasting barely a month, or two. This time after recovering from the extraction of the lifeless child Sylvie had simply showered and dressed and with hardly any despondency folded her hospital gown and placed it on the bed and silently waited for the nurse to come with the chair to wheel her out of the hospital. At their small home in Laurelhurst she left the nursery they had set up intact, which heartened Ames for a while, until he realized that she was slowly removing items from it, a book or picture, a stuffed toy or rattle, one piece at a time, until eventually the room was bare, save for the furniture and the crib. He blamed her, blamed her for the dire force her frailty and sexual abandon could have on him, and he more than she grew to be haunted by the idea that they had tainted themselves with the debased, confused desire of that first coupling. Out of anger or spite or desperation he began asking her about what had fi nally happened to her parents in Manchuria, as if he were sure that it was where the source of all her troubles might be found.
She refused to answer him. But was he right? Were they so easily derived? She didn't think so, and yet who could dismiss the insistent push of those memories?
For it was too easy to recall how she and her parents had watched through the classroom window as the soldiers dragged the Lums' bodies outside, her parents not shielding her from the sig
ht. They were still in shock from the easy brutality of their deaths, Sylvie's father perhaps most of all. After the Lums were left there, he had sat back down on the blanket with his head in his hands, her mother hotly whispering something to him in the roughhewn Provencal dialect they used when they wished to obscure their talk.
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