by Joy Williams
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll sit down.”
Pearl chose the very last pew. She stared at the front of the church. Suddenly she twisted around and said, “Do you know Sam? He’s my child. He’s my little boy.”
“What does he look like? Have you lost him?” The child kept his mouth open after he had stopped speaking.
“Why no . . . I mean . . . no.”
“I think I know him,” the child said.
Pearl turned around again. There was a huge cardboard backdrop on what now could only be considered a stage, supported by twin lecterns. The cardboard was painted and cut out to depict a nighttime scene of moon and stars. There was also a two-dimensional bed drawn on the left.
Beside Pearl, on a gray wall, was an imprint of a cross. Like a scar upon the dust. A legend that no longer satisfied.
Something cavorted past her down the aisle. It looked like a gigantic tooth with a large gray hole in it. This was followed by other forms, wrapped in antique clothes and encased in papier-mâché heads. An apple ran down, followed by a repulsive-looking worm, the worm being an energetic child crawling in a brown sack. On the stage a large boy puppet with a featureless cloth head and spindly cloth limbs was being moved about by means of a stick shoved beneath its shirt. A person dressed all in black with a black-hooded head held the stick and crouched on the floor, flipping and flopping the puppet around, while a voice from somewhere went on and on in a muted, indistinguishable way, speaking of childhood, obedience, bad dreams and robbers.
Pearl sat with a sad tight smile upon her face. It seemed that nothing could be done these days on a strictly human level. Her thoughts began to wander. She missed the children. She wished she had a baby of her own. She liked babies, the way they felt your face with their hands, the way they put their fingers in your mouth as though they were putting them in their own . . .
The voice, which sounded like a scratchy recording, continued its blurred axioms from a loudspeaker above her.
Another creature had arrived on the stage, some sort of flying insect with wire antennae and a large orange sun painted on its back. Its face, which looked like that of a woman, was heavily made-up. And its belly was huge. Really, Pearl thought, why was a woman that pregnant tearing around in such an absurd production? Perhaps it was supposed to be a spider. And what was that that was told about spiders . . . they were the images of women who had hanged themselves . . .
Pearl yawned nervously. The whole production was harmless and exuberant enough but the thought that it was being enacted expressly for her made her feel uncomfortable. She felt a little disgusted. She might as well be drunk, she thought.
She slipped out of the pew and backed into the street. She went directly into the garden of The Silent Woman where she ordered a very dry martini. She drank. Her fingers with their shattered, uneven nails held the glass. The rind floated there like a sliver of moon. She ordered another.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The people around Pearl were eating. Someone was eating squab, another liver, a third soft-shelled crabs. The smell of the food nauseated Pearl.
Overhead something settled in a tree. Shadows passed across the grass. She looked up into the sky and saw large thin clouds moving across the sun. Sunlight flowed across her table again and then leapt onto the grass, traveling to a picket fence where a shirtless young man in wide purple trousers like a gangster’s was painting the weathered wood white.
A woman on Pearl’s left swallowed a spoonful of something red and white. She said, “He goes into Mass. General on Monday. A brain tumor.” She put the spoon down and opened her handbag that was in the shape of a house, painted with windows and doors. She took a magazine out of the little house and folded it back to a page with large print, an illustrated page.
“It’s not done every day, of course, but it’s not uncommon. The operation is described very well in here,” she said. “I can’t explain it very well myself but the Reader’s Digest does a wonderful job. I swear by the Digest. I haven’t missed a month in fifteen years. He’s dismayed about it, of course, but it has to be done. You’d be surprised how many people have to have it done.”
“The young man that time in Texas, the one who shot everybody, didn’t he have one of those tumors?” the other woman said. “That young man on that tower?”
There was forever a little sober person inside Pearl somewhere, overhearing conversations, and one of these days, just before the light perhaps, she knew it was going to rise up and strangle her, the little sober person being no friend.
Across the street, the Magic Paper Beasts had left the church and were assembled on the lawn. Pearl felt a little better about them now. The drinks had brightened her perceptions considerably. They certainly were life-sized. An energetic troupe, elaborately costumed, wearing those plaster heads. One of them, an odd mixture of lion and cheerleader, dashed over to the garden and peered over the fence at the people there. It was made up to be quite ferocious but it had jolly mittened hands and a humorous, inviting manner. However, what it was inviting them to do was not quite clear. It did not seem to want the people to follow it to the church lawn, or, in any way, to become part of the production. It did not even want money. It waved away several proffered bills. The diners tittered as it lingered there, not quite harassing them, a crude and childish construction and not in its first appearance by any means. The paper cheek was slightly squashed and was leaking a powdery substance and the paint was faded as though it had been stored in the sun.
It ignored Pearl, no doubt insulted by her impolite departure. Behind its eyes, which were raggedly carved holes, Pearl detected other eyes, small and not quite lined up with the holes. Were they the eyes of a man or a child? There was the smell of sweat coming from the figure.
It finally loped away. The others went back to their food, but Pearl began watching the activity on the lawn, grasping it quite well now, she thought.
The figures were outlandish personifications of a child’s dreams and fears. They were animals and pieces of cake. They were toys and snakes. They were the dull admonishments and threats of the adult world. The child that dreamed writhed on the grass that had become his bed. He jerked and tossed, manipulated by the boy in black. All those things leaping and creeping around him were only the products of the dreamer’s exhausted imagination, although in visible fact, the dreamer was the only performer who was a fabrication, being moved about by the stick as he was. The black-suited boy who did the manipulations, sometimes flat on his stomach, sometimes on his haunches, even, like a dog, on his back, amused Pearl. The device was so highly visible, so intrusive that she stared at it, entranced. There was the Shadow, brighter than day, guiding and controlling, the star of the show.
The troupe wasn’t attracting much of an audience. A few children gaped at it from the street and then moved off. Actually, it might seem frightening to children, Pearl thought. Not suitable. All that. Yet what was suitable for children? Impressionable little lumps of clay that they were.
The woman on Pearl’s left was now eating something brown. Pearl heard her companion say, “We were playing that dreadful game Diplomacy with the Joneses and the Foleys and the Prinns, and John got up and went out with Penny for one of those diplomacy periods, you know, where they haggle for supply centers. John had Turkey, and Penny, the bitch, had Austria-Hungary, and they were gone for one half hour, which was acceptable enough as far as the rules of the game went but when they came back John had a stain on his pants the size of goddamn England and I just left. Like that I left. I walked out of that goddamn room with her goddamn crudités and her goddamn fake brick and I called my lawyer and I’ve been a happy woman ever since.”
Pearl twisted slightly in her seat away from them. A man was standing in front of her, facing her, looking into the garden, blocking her view. He looked familiar. There are some people who look familiar to you only when you’re drunk, she thought. The man was speaking to her. She realized it was Thomas.
She interrupt
ed him, “Do you see that person in black over there, pretending to be invisible?”
He turned, “No,” he said.
Pearl giggled.
“Why don’t we go somewhere and have some lunch?” he said.
“All right,” she said, still giggling.
“We can eat right in the main house here. They have a good dining room. Quieter. We’ll have bouillabaisse.”
Pearl looked at him. He was wearing a pale suit and a dark blue shirt. His tie was a school tie of some sort, with small signs or heads embossed upon it.
“You changed your clothes,” she said.
He shrugged. “I just bought them. I felt that I needed a new suit.”
She started to giggle again but gulped it back.
“Laughter indicates a healthy view of the world, Pearl. I’m glad to see you so well.”
Pearl came out of the garden and they went up the wide, pleasant steps of the house. They entered a dim hall with painted black floors. To the right were several closed doors and to the left a large room set up with tables. A fireplace was filled with an arrangement of sea grasses.
Pearl’s heel slipped on an uneven board and she staggered into the room.
“Goodness, it’s dark in here,” she said. “Why is it so dark in here?” she said. “Have they been throwing up on the table cloths?”
“I’ll order for us,” Thomas said. He went off, out into the hallway again. Pearl unfolded her napkin and placed it on her lap. She waited. Waited as a child waits for an adult, as an animal waits, without meditation or exception.
Thomas returned with two wine glasses and an uncorked bottle of wine.
“Well,” Pearl said, “this is very nice.” She wasn’t at all hungry. But she felt elated. It seemed a fateful moment and she wished that the children were here to distract her from its implications. But obviously it was improper for her to think that a child could save her. Improper to think that a child could offer her any salvation whatsoever. Little children were too innocent to provide salvation. Indeed, little children were always leading their elders right into the teeth of death.
“Have you had a pleasant day?” Thomas inquired politely. He poured.
“I don’t like town much. I don’t know, I can do without the town. It’s good to know though that life goes on. Over here, I mean, I suppose.” The wine in the glass rocked up, wetting her fingers. “It tried to do some shopping for the children, for their birthday, but there was nothing that seemed right.”
“There’s nothing that they need. They have everything in their heads. They give little things to one another, as you might remember. Things they’ve found or made themselves.”
“Oh yes, “ Pearl said, “they are resourceful.”
On the wall Pearl could now make out a painting of the moon in its last phase. The horned moon . . . She saw Thomas raise his arm and slowly push the arm across toward her. He brushed something off her blouse with his hand. Her breasts tingled.
“When children kiss, they bite,” Pearl said. “I was amazed when it happened the first time. When they kiss, they take out little heart-shaped bites.”
“That’s just metaphor,” Thomas said.
Pearl sipped her wine. It was cold and tasted like flowers.
“Sometimes,” she said softly, “I think I’d like to have another child. Seven years seems so long. It seems that everything happened so long ago. I would be better with him, you know? I mean, he would be a comfort to me. Not that Sam is a bad boy, I’m not saying that. I’m not saying he’s a problem at all.” Her mind was racing. She leaned forward intently. “He’s not special, I’m not saying that. He’s just like the others. Well, that’s not quite right. He’s not as wild as some of the others. He’s more ordinary if anything. And I’m glad. When he was born, after he was born and Walker died, I worried . . . I was so confused . . . well it ruined my life, as you know. But I realize . . .” Pearl had forgotten her point. Her mind was racing across the water to the children waiting for her to return. She looked at Thomas with perplexity and said loudly, “. . . realize that he’s just a sunny little boy, a calm and ordinary little boy, and I wish you would leave him alone.”
“Leave him alone?”
“Yes,” she said, swallowing.
“You talk as though I’m a modern-day Faust. I have no unutterable secrets, no black powers.”
“Faust?” Pearl said. Her voice sounded thick to her ears.
“Faust ended his days beaten up by devils and buried in horse shit,” Thomas said easily. “I deserve better than that, don’t I?”
Pearl chuckled. She was amazed at herself.
Thomas said, “The pact I’ve signed has been with myself alone.”
“Oh a pact, really. That’s pretentious a bit. I mean, really, don’t you think?” Pearl said unhappily.
“I thought it was a term you would appreciate. It’s obvious you’ve made your own arrangements. You realize that children respect madness so you’ve taken the role yourself of their holy fool.”
Pearl wasn’t listening. She watched Thomas as he pushed the tie so that it fell within his jacket.
The fish soup arrived. The waiter served it from a large tureen. Pearl looked down into the soup, at the beads of butter and saffron swirling there. An eyelash floated down. She removed it with her fingertip.
“It must be diet,” she said. “My eyelashes. They fall out all the time. And it takes nine months to make a new one.”
The glasses here were not dirty. Neither was the silverware. Everything was very clean.
“I’m sick,” Pearl said suddenly.
“You quarrel with your sickness,” Thomas said calmly. “Everyone has a sickness. It should be cared for but not cured.”
“What?” Pearl said dully. She wished that he would pour more wine. Thomas’s way of talking made her dizzy.
“I said, each of us has a sickness. It is not something that should be cured. To eradicate the sickness would be to eradicate the self.”
“Honestly,” she said, rousing herself, “what a lot of trash you talk.” She looked at him restlessly. She felt poised on the brink of something terrific.
He filled her glass by half. She curled her fingers around it but did not drink.
“I have never understood,” she said, “how it happened anyway. Everyone acts as though they know, but I don’t know.” More people fucked with the Devil than they did with the Lord. Wasn’t that why nuns covered up their ears? But that wasn’t the answer. “Do you know?” she demanded.
“Yes,” he laughed.
“There were animals,” Pearl said. “And then there were subhumans and animals and then there was that incredible change, that catastrophe, and then there were human beings.”
“A random phenomenon occurring when a vital urge was aroused.”
“But it didn’t evolve,” Pearl said. “It just happened. There wasn’t time for it to evolve. There never would be enough time.”
“A species under great pressure or in great need producing acausal changes in its material form.”
“You don’t know,” Pearl sighed.
“Visitors from another planet caused the change,” Thomas suggested. “Sin did. Through sin we became human and different.”
“What was our sin?” Pearl whispered.
“A repellant sexual fantasy,” Thomas smiled. “The cause of it all. Yes, the most disgusting sexual fantasy of all lent itself better than any other to the formulation of the most spiritual ideas of which the mind is capable.”
He was laughing at her. She bit her lip and watched him eat.
“It was separating ourselves from the animals,” she said. “That was the sin.”
“Oh Pearl,” he said. “Relax and enjoy your meal.”
“I have never known . . .” she began, and stopped. Then she drank her wine at once and went on hurriedly, “I’m glad I had a child but it’s not a question of being able to do something, actually, is it? It’s not like being able to make an omelet
, even. I’d love to be able to make an omelet, even that. Flu y but runny inside and all folded over in a piece. Because it doesn’t matter if it tastes good. If it tastes good and it isn’t presented well, it’s a failure. I mean, anyone can eat eggs right, that’s not my point . . .”
Thomas put his fingers to her lips. They were so warm. It was a terrible sensation. She wanted to close her eyes.
“Sssshh,” he said.
She pulled back. “Oh, I’m drunk, aren’t I?” she said. “It’s such a good idea to have a few drinks in the afternoon before one has to start drinking at night, but now I’m afraid I’m drunk . . . it’s just my fate to be a drunk.”
“Fate, Pearl.” He shook his head.
“The demands of living have consequences,” Pearl said carefully, “and that is called fate.”
“Fate is vulgar.” Thomas dipped some bread into his soup. He ate. Pearl watched him.
“Even in my dreams, I’m drunk,” she said.
“St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams.”
“I’m not responsible for anything as far as I can tell,” Pearl said.
She watched him eat, the soft sea flesh entering his mouth.
“Everything is sex,” Pearl sighed. “To dream of someone or to want to go somewhere. Eating is sex and music is sex . . . What is childhood a preparation for . . . I mean, those poor children . . .”
“Do you know what Jesus did when he was a boy? Do you know what he did to the children who would not play with him?”
Pearl’s elbow bumped the soup.
“He turned them into goats.”
“Oh,” Pearl exclaimed. “Into kids! It’s a joke you’ve told me. Children into kids! That’s not in the Bible.”
“Do you know that parents told their children to shun the child Jesus because he was a sorcerer? He played by the river and he would mould shapes of animals out of the mud, and he was able to make the animals walk away from him and he was able to command them to return. And once he formed twelve sparrows out of clay and let them fly away.”