"I guess a stew. Does the smell bother you?"
"It's okay. Is it like what you used to make?"
He didn't know what she meant, but then the sight of her face staring at him suddenly jogged his memory.
"Not really."
When he was in the army he did a stint at the base mess before his general soldiering, and at the orphanage he would make dinner for the children whenever he was able to get foodstuffs from the PX, this once every couple of weeks. The aunties usually prepared rice and a soup made from wild greens and potatoes and whatever meat they could manage, sometimes dumplings filled with bean threads and chives, but after a particularly successful trading session with the PX sergeant he'd make a "camper's stew" of everything he hauled back--canned corn, green beans, Campbell's tomato soup, frozen beef patties or hot dogs or Spam, egg noodles, and Tabasco; the kids went crazy for it, they'd yell Campus-too! not knowing what they were saying, and crowd too closely around the stockpots on the blazing outdoor cooker. The stew was much heavier and richer than what they were accustomed to and a handful of the kids would eat too much too quickly and vomit, but then come back for another bowl anyway. June would stay on the periphery and wait until the clamor died down, and he remembered now how she'd insist he fill her bowl to its brim, keep pushing her hands up to him and say in her disarmingly good English, I am very hungry today. I want more. She was the best English-speaker among the kids, but employed it sparingly, and for her own ends, rarely willing to be a translator or advocate for anyone else. Unlike most of the other children, she was short-tempered and difficult and in certain lights insufferable but you never knew what horrors any of them had survived or witnessed or had to commit, and there was no use in judging. He'd comply and give her what she wanted, and she'd go off on her own and despite what she'd said eat her food with cold method, careful spoon by spoon, as though she were counting them for the next time.
"Maybe I'll try some," she said. "It almost smells good. To me. You know what I mean."
"It'll be ready soon."
"May I have some of that water?"
There were no cups in the cottage, so he just gave her the glass bottle, but it was a full liter and a half and a bit too heavy for her and he had to help hold it up; she had some trouble drinking straight from the bottle and some went down her airway and she had a brief coughing fi t before she could lie back down. When he was finished cooking he asked if she still wanted some and she nodded. He bore the hot pot over and placed it on a stool between them, pulling up the other for himself. There were no plates or bowls and only the one wooden spoon, and he offered it to her.
"You eat," she said. She was sitting up now, her narrow shoulders pinched forward, making her seem slighter still, folded in, like she was an image in the crease of a book. "I just want a taste anyway."
"You ought to go first, then."
He handed her a scant spoonful of it, its consistency more like a soup than a stew. She took it, chewing tentatively, and then had another, two large full spoons. She rapped the spoon on the edge of the pot and offered it to him.
"You keep going," he said.
"We can share."
"You better eat while you want to," he said. Then he added, "While you can."
She nodded, and had two more spoonfuls, though the fi nal one seemed to stick in her throat. He had opened a bottle of the homemade wine, leaving the equivalent of fifty dollars in lire for it and the rest of the things he had opened, from the money she had had him change in Livorno. In fact she'd given him her bankroll to hold, twelve thousand dollars or so in traveler's checks and cash, vastly more money than he'd ever seen at once. But he'd never cared about money and he would have likely traded a good deal of it for a corkscrew, if the cottage hadn't had one. (Though he'd smashed open the tops of bottles before.) He found one, though, and his hands were calmed by the familiar heft of the bottle, and in one smooth continuous action he pulled the cork and brought it to his lips. The wine wasn't wine at all but a very strong, clear brandy, harsh and chemical, like dry-cleaning fluid might taste, but it was right enough; he drank nearly a third of it in one slug. He sensed her watching him with hooded eyes, undoubtedly wondering whether he was that much better off than she.
"You didn't drink so much back then," she said.
"You wouldn't have seen me."
"I did," she said. "I sometimes followed you. You didn't know, but I spied on you."
He took another long slug and tried not to think of what she might have witnessed, though not because it wouldn't have been right for a young girl; he was simply shielding himself, for as much as the memory of Sylvie Tanner charged hotly through him, the picture of her milkhued throat only made him more wary, and then thirstier. He hadn't drunk in more than a day, and if anything the craving in his body was the opposite of June's: he wasn't moving quite fast enough, he couldn't feel any of that phantom speed, the easy gearing that the drink let him slip into, allowing him to gain a merciful distance from himself, which was the pathetic excuse of a creature he had come to be: loser-foreternity, world-class self-pitier, tireless batterer of men and embodied doom of women, this now wholly bereft last man standing. June said, "I remember, just before the end, when Reverend Tanner was letting her have it. Telling her what a disgrace she had become."
"Where was I?"
"You were gone for the day," she said. "Maybe you had gone to the base, for supplies. It was morning and she was sitting in the patch of grass behind their cottage. She had missed breakfast again, and I had come to sweep and clean. Her eyes were bloodshot and her hair was messy and he was standing over her, so tall and high. He didn't shout. But for some reason I was sure he was going to strike her. I had his glass paperweight in my hand and I was ready to hit him, if I had to. Of course he didn't."
"He wasn't like that," Hector said.
"No, he wasn't," June answered. "But he kept telling her how ashamed he was. How she was an embarrassment to herself, and to him. She just sat there, taking it. I was so angry."
How easily Hector could see June, more than thirty years removed, wielding some sharp crystal. And then Sylvie, in a cloak of miserable penitence that she was all too ready to don. Tanner had returned from another overnight trip to nothing different except that she was obviously sluggish, exhausted, moving about as if she were the one who had been on the road for a week. She was sleeping late some days, something that she would never have done before. Tanner had asked Hector twice if anything odd had happened, whether she had seemed ill, but he simply shook his head, not wishing to have to lie outright. After that first week of their arrival, the man had been nothing but fair to him. He wouldn't apologize, but he didn't need to have Tanner know, either, that she had spent the previous four nights in Hector's bed, neither of them sleeping at all, he drinking and she drugging herself in alternation with their lovemaking, which for Hector was a revelation, this woman whose sexual hunger was both a plea and a hazard, like someone fl oundering in waves far from shore.
"When you were spying on us. Were you in the storeroom?"
"Yes."
His room was on the end of a long, low wood-framed building that was roofed with sheets of corrugated tin. It was a room much like this one, though half its size, with a single cot and a rusted metal shelf for his things but no window onto the dirt courtyard. It was never meant for habitation. Next to it was a general storeroom for the orphanage--study books and pencils, some canned foodstuffs, tools and rakes, Bibles, donated blankets and children's clothes and shoes, square cans of kerosene. June described how she had crouched low against the shared wall, a wall that he himself had erected with materials on hand, salvaged studs and panels of pegboard that he covered with canvas.
"There was a gap in the fabric on your side, down near the fl oor, and if I pressed my eye up I could see through the holes."
"We never knew."
"I was careful to be quiet."
"How many times were you there?"
"I don't know."
He took a long drink, and then another. "Why are you telling me this?"
"I don't know, exactly," she said. But her eyes were enlivened, gleaming brightly against her sallow face, the last pools in a forsaken plain. "After she told me I couldn't work in the house anymore, I wanted to hate her. But then she started seeing you and I could see a way, again."
"A way to what?"
"To being with her always. Isn't that what you wanted, too?"
He didn't answer, because of course it was true. Yet at the time he didn't quite know it--he was too brutal and stupid, just a rig of fl esh that selfishly craved and rebelled. He didn't understand then how deeply he needed her, that he loved not just her sharp wants and carnality but how tightly bound up those were with her decency and beauty and goodness; she was exalted and flawed, someone who required as much grace and succor as she herself readily offered, someone both he and June desperately needed, a mother and a lover and a kind of child, too. That first time they made love, when she opened the back door of the cottage for him, she had fallen upon him as if she'd thrown herself from a parapet, with the grave force of both will and surrender. She kissed him, bit him, wanted his fingers inside every part of her. She was more than thirty years gone now, though it could be a mere day, and he felt his heart suddenly unstitch, the wire twine instantly rusting, falling away, to reveal again the cold box, the great dark underworld of his guilt.
"I'm so tired," June said. She had a hand on her belly, not quite holding it, the way a pregnant woman might unconsciously take her own measure. She lay back down and slowly closed her eyes. With a long swig Hector finished the first bottle, its liquor still burning his throat. He had just opened the other bottle when she said, "I'll sleep a little now."
"Okay."
"Aren't you going to eat?"
"No," he said. He was already drinking deeply again, a broad, dry delta. "Maybe later."
"Will you stay here with me?"
"Where else would I go?"
"Just stay."
He nodded to her and waited until her breathing grew steady and more audible. He had become her sitter now. Like a child, she was acting as if his remaining within the scope of her reach and sight would somehow diminish his power or will to leave. And yet now her insistence seemed strangely valid, for he thought he needed to step outside the cottage to determine what he would do. In fact, in Livorno he had, at least temporarily, deserted her; for two hours he sat in the main station, waiting for the next train to Rome, until he finally returned to their room at the hotel and found her unable to get out of the tub. She'd been showering and had reached up to adjust the sprayer and lost her balance, slipping and falling hard on her side and back. Though she was in pain, nothing, miraculously, was broken--a folded towel on the tub edge had softened the impact--and the distress of the situation allowed them to avoid the question of where he had been. Her nakedness was unsettling, but only to Hector; she didn't try at all to cover herself, either immediately or after he lifted her up, merely sitting on the bidet in a miserable daze. Her breasts were shrunken and lined and her scarred belly was partly distended to a shine, and the patch of hair between her legs, a thick, dark broom, was the sole indication that she was not even fifty years old. He had offered her the towel but she only held it in her hands, weakly wringing it, dabbing it against her face as if it were a precious furl of cloth.
The sun was now low in the sky but still bright and he shut the door of the cottage behind him to keep the light from disturbing her. He was sitting on the creaky bench and drinking from the second bottle, feeling the day's heat radiating from the stone walls behind him. This bottle seemed even stronger than the first, and he was reminded of how Dora began her evenings by downing three small glasses of her own brand in quick succession, as if to prime her needy motor before the drinking proper. So he took three swift shots in somber deference to her, and then three more, not caring that it was harsh on the tongue and throat and smelling of petrol; but the rite fell short, for he conjured up not Dora's thirst sated, that first sip's glee, nor the soft grainy apple-flesh of her bottom, nor the furious grip she'd exert on him during their passions, grappling his shoulders, pulling his hair, but rather the horrid bed of the blood-glazed street, and her pretty leg all in a mess, and her eyes beseeching him, not to save her so much as to explain the backward mercy of the world, why it was taking her just at the moment she had finally stopped wanting it to.
Had the eyes of the Chinese boy soldier made the same petition?
And the others he had witnessed die during the war? Why was he to be the angel of ironical death? It was those last few seconds that were most horrifying for Hector; at least the mien of the long-dead he had collected doing graves registration was generally one of distinct unconcern, or perhaps the mildest bemusement, if they had faces left at all. He could take their expressions blackened with rot or dried blood >or else blown away, cheekless or jawless or lacking a brow, all countless mutilations, the frightful carnage, but watching a living face fade and pale was to him the most grotesque of turns, the one thing he could no longer bear. The promise of being with June at her end made him want to crawl away, to run, and he knew he would indeed have to leave her, that it was inevitable, that he must desert her before the fi nal hour.
He wandered down the steep, arid hillside with the bottle in his hand, drinking it down as he went. The homemade liquor was coursing through him more hotly than usual, almost painfully; he could feel it drawing out into his extremities, these lines of ants on the march. He was going to drink some more, maybe drink the rest. If it was poison, let it be. He found a deer path through the scraggly brush but instead of stepping mindfully he let the pitch take him and he dropped himself headlong in its leafy track, pumping his legs in a velocity of desperate escape; to view him from above was to see, paradoxically, a man running as fast as he could in order to keep from falling. But even Hector could not sustain the necessary speed, create enough balancing momentum, and he flew down the hill, tumbling head over knee so violently that it appeared he was there to thrash clear the greenery, the rocks, the dusty earth itself. He came to rest in a dark glade of cork trees, their sinuous trunks stripped of bark to the height of eight feet. They were old trees but now naked and smooth, and he felt as exposed as they. He was cut and bruised about the face and knuckles; he was crying, but not from any physical distress. The bottle, emptied, was still in his hand. He'd just missed an exposed sharp spine of rock and he cursed his luck and smashed the bottle against it. He was going to fight himself, pugilist as onanist, because there was nobody else to fi ght, nobody left to take on. Here he is, your undying low-life champion. With the jagged neck of the bottle he slashed across each wrist and also his neck, and jabbed at his side and thighs. Then he got on his feet and bull-rushed the largest tree. He rammed it with his chest, and then his shoulder, and as he grew weary he pushed against it with his now bloody carmine hands, his carmine-stained forehead, grunting and pumping his legs as if he were a football lineman toiling against a practice sled.
After a stretch of time long enough to be embarrassing, even to a man alone, he relented, his punctures already congealed and crusting over in the unnatural manner they always did. This was the only pain he actually felt, which actually registered, the sear of the too-swift healing. His exhaustion was fed less by exertion than frustration, the closed loop of his thwarted rage, and he fell against the roots and lay staring up at the stilled canopy, the sky dimming to indigo behind the web of gnarled black limbs. The sight was vaguely Eastern in aspect, like a beautiful silk-screened panel, but then lovely for nothing, and he thought that this was the diseased tableau of his life: forever there to witness splendor, while death coolly drifted upon everything else. Up the hill only the chimney of the cottage loomed. If she cried out, if she called for him, would he stay silent? And if she didn't see the morning, would he simply leave her in the bed for the huntsman to fi nd, or else bury her, as he had buried so many others, dig the necessary hole, his bes
t dark talent among all his dark talents?
T H I R T E E N
J U N E S L E P T M O S T O F T H E N I G H T and on waking realized that Hector was gone from the cottage. She panicked and stumbled onto the floor and nearly hurt herself, but when she stepped outside she spotted him up the hillside from the hunter's cottage, sitting in the driver's seat of the car. She practically ran up the rutted drive and would have leaped for the bumper had he accelerated but as she drew near she saw that he was asleep.
It was the first time she had seen him so, since they'd fl own from the States, and she could study him for a moment. His seat was slightly reclined and his face was turned toward the window, his reddish-brown locks untouched by a single strand of gray. His complexion was a wonder to look at, even after all these years and despite his roughness and obvious disinterest in caring for himself. He glowed like a saint in some Renaissance painting but the rendering here was of a man clearly fallen, marked by the most subtle of colorations, an incipient, brooding shade. He was a shockingly beautiful man. She had always thought him so, from the moment they crossed paths that first day on the refugee road, even if his radiance had meant nothing to her. And yet there was something definitely restorative in simply regarding him now, a momentary suspension of the sentence on her body, her demise. She had always considered beauty more perilous than useful, and yet, when it persevered, it became its own element and property, indivisible, original. Something to have faith in. She should have left him undisturbed for a little longer but she was made irrationally anxious by the fact that he was literally in the driver's seat and could easily motor away, and when she roused him with a tap on the glass he shivered ever so slightly, as might a child, the sight of which only honed her guilt.
She asked him to put the cabin back in order as best he could, and she added money to what he had left on the table for the owner, writing Mi dispiace across the top banknote with a grease pencil she'd found in a drawer, the sentiment of regret seeming more fi tting than one of thanks. If anything, she was grateful to Hector for having made her stop and rest; she was definitely stronger today, or at least after waking him she was, the ground not shifting or rolling beneath her feet as it had been most of the last two days, her eyes able to look at an object without fixing on it so forcefully that everything else whirled about its axis in a furious, breakneck orbit. Among the many dozen complications and eventualities that Dr. Koenig had listed in his imperious fountof-the-Maker tone was vertigo, a case of which she'd suffered once long before the cancer and was likely now not a simple disturbance of the inner ear but a sign that there might be tumors in her brain. Of course she knew that the longer she survived, the more any extension would mean something like this, that the cancer would duly migrate and settle and prosper, and if during the past rounds of treatment she had yielded completely she would certainly give herself over now for as long as possible, endure the role of host to the last. In her painfully sentimental dreams of late, like the one she had had last night, the tumors were wards of her nursery and she was naming them as she would children, these eager clumps in her bones, in her lymph nodes, speckles on her liver and lungs, all racing to see which of them would bring her its fi nal gift: You're darlings, she said to them, in a warm, matronly voice. She was dressed in white burial garments, just as her great-grandmother had been enrobed as she lay on her funeral bier. She pressed her hands against the length of herself, her still-sturdy body.
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