by Joy Williams
“Well that sounds right, I guess. I suppose if he were a child he would be going around doing things like that.”
“Several times he caused children who quarreled with him to die. Joseph said to Mary, ‘We should not allow him to go out of the house for everyone who displeases him is killed.’ He killed a teacher once who whipped him.”
“Oh,” Pearl said earnestly, “that must have been another child who did those things, don’t you think?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Jesus was supposed to be charitable, wasn’t he? And good? ‘The joyous boy of the fields.’ I mean, he sounds like a little bastard.” She laughed. The laugh sounded like a chain dropped upon the floor.
“You’re not eating,” Thomas said.
“Is there something sweet I can have? I’m afraid this doesn’t appeal to me much.”
Thomas called the waiter. There was cake. He brought Pearl cake in a puddle of cream. She sampled the cream with her finger.
“I don’t believe Jesus was ever a child anyway,” Pearl said, “I mean in that sense.”
“It’s true,” Thomas nodded. “The figures that changed our histories had lives based on special knowledge, on a physicality of spirit that had nothing to do with their shapes as men.”
“I don’t . . . I wouldn’t know about that. I don’t . . .”
He smiled at her indulgently. He seemed to have white spokes radiating from his eyes. Pale etchings in his sun-tanned face.
“I don’t see why you want to talk with me,” Pearl said.
“It’s true that the feminine character doesn’t interest me much. Most women use a combination of enthusiasm and ignorance to get through their days.”
Pearl poured a glass of wine for herself. “The children told me about your room,” she said. “They told me that you have a jock strap hanging on the wall with a rat in it.”
“That object appeared in a highly successful show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,” Thomas said, nonplused.
Pearl swabbed up more cream with her finger.
Thomas said, “The feminine character interests me quite a bit actually.”
“Too late to be interested in my character,” she said. “Poor Pearl’s character is just about gone.” She was having a terrific rush. She was hearing everything but not listening much. Her mind was smooth and sunny. The children were calm. The animal was still.
“I used to dislike you,” she said cheerfully. “Now it doesn’t matter much.”
“You lead a charmed life,” he said.
“I once fell down the steps coming to dinner,” Pearl said. “It’s true. How many steps, thirty-seven or . . . and I didn’t break a thing.”
“If you were lost in a blizzard, you would probably be taken in by wolves.”
It didn’t last long, the blossoming, the rush, the flying. She smiled.
“It’s a great gift to be a survivor,” Thomas said. “I try to impress upon the children how important a gift it is. I’d like to think that if anything happened to me the children would be successful in their own society, that they would not need the false securities of . . .”
“It’s a funny phrase, isn’t it, ‘if anything happened’? People use it all the time, don’t they? All kinds of people, as though it meant a lot of things when actually it only means one.”
Pearl picked up a utensil beside her plate and pushed it into the cake. She raised a piece of cake to her lips and secured it safely in her mouth. She was startled at the feel. She slid the runcible spoon distastefully past her lips. Who had ever invented that neither-nor arrangement? She went back to picking at the cake with her fingers.
“You’re not a bad man,” Pearl said, as though to herself, “you’ve loved all those children for all these years.”
“Oh, to be quite frank, I’m not sure it’s love. It’s an interest, certainly. Children have always fascinated me. The energy that shapes and moves them is not the same as ours.”
The children stirred in Pearl’s mind. They raised their heads.
“But then they grow,” Thomas was saying. “They become imprisoned in their bodies. They acquire their faces. It’s unfortunate, really.”
“Well,” Pearl said, “children grow. That’s what they do. It’s practically their sole occupation.”
“Yes, yes,” he said eagerly. His face seemed to be widening before her. Wine splashed upon her wrist.
“It’s only in childhood that life gives you time to confront your soul, your protector, and you see it alive, exactly as it is,” Thomas said. “But children grow, as you say. They change. The metamorphosis comes unbidden. They exchange the knowledge of the child for the conventions of the adult, and everything is lost in the transition. Everything. Life itself.”
Pearl watched his large, rapacious hands move as he spoke. Everything was an artifice. What the mind thought and the tongue spoke and the heart felt. She watched him in a heavy, sleepy way.
“Man’s reason has made him nature’s freak,” Thomas said.
It was terrible the way he spoke, in that strange, punishing way. She wondered how the children could be so patient and submissive and untouched by him.
“The dichotomy between the anti-world and the world he is forced to experience consume him. The result is death. Such a dichotomy isn’t necessary.”
“Death isn’t necessary?” Pearl said.
“‘Death’ is a poor word. Merely a means of communicating a memory, a shared experience. Yes, a very poor word, like ‘love.’” He rolled the word in his mouth as though it were an oyster, a clot of phlegm.
“You’re not experimenting or anything with those children, are you?” Pearl demanded loudly.
Thomas looked at her. He rolled up his napkin and pulled it slowly through his fist. It was a provocative gesture, Pearl thought. She had the shakes. She felt as though she were twitching all over.
“Pearl, you must stop thinking of me as some sort of wizard.”
“Well, what are you saying then . . . I mean . . . it’s just words you’re saying then isn’t it? Please, I don’t want to talk anymore. Order another bottle of wine, please. Why do you use so many words? Those poor children . . .”
“But you asked me about the children. They have had every freedom. Their fantasies have been encouraged and respected. Some of them are brilliant. Some of them enjoy encyclopedic knowledge. But this is unimportant. It appeals to me far less than it once did. Childhood is the conscious world as well as being the transcendent one. The increase in consciousness is the key to everything. It is the major force of change, a force powerful enough to alter the primitive structures of human instincts and needs. Observing those children over the past few years, I have become an enthusiastic synergist . . .”
“I don’t know what that means,” Pearl wailed. “Please,” she said.
She looked at his tie, at the figures on the tie. They were birds, flying at her from a great distance, not even birds, more the shadows of birds.
“They’re just children,” she said. “You must not talk to me this way. I don’t want to talk about them. I don’t want to talk about Sam. I’m not . . . why do you want me to be sick, to be crazy? There’s something I know. I knew it a long time ago in my mother’s house, in my mother and father’s house a long time ago when we were all alive. There was a picture on the wall. It was a woman, a woman, about my age now, and it said underneath her in great scrolly letters ‘The Bruised Reed He Will Not Break’ and she was obviously in great distress, this poor woman in a long gown and she was embracing a tree. She was spread out on the ground in distress embracing a tree which was not a living tree but sort of a trunk stripped of bark. A terrible-looking thing, all flayed and solid-enough-looking but not giving any comfort to that poor woman as far as I could see and I remember thinking, even as a child, I bet He breaks bruised reeds all the time . . .”
She watched the birds flying toward her, straight toward her eyes.
“I am a bruised reed,” she
said.
“I’m sorry, Pearl, I’ve tired you.” He reached across the table and stroked her hand. She didn’t move her hand away. She dropped her eyes to the roll basket where a fly moved daintily among the crumbs.
“I want to ask you something,” she said. “I just want you to answer it in a simple fashion, please. It’s just a simple question.”
“Of course.”
“Is there an old woman who lives in the house? A very old woman?”
“No,” Thomas said.
“You’re sure?” Pearl said. “You haven’t forgotten or anything? Your grandmother or something? This happens occasionally. I’ve read accounts. People in a big house, they just forget sometimes, and there is this elderly relative living upstairs, living along very frugally, darting in and out of the past, strangling pigeons for her supper or something.”
“No,” Thomas said.
“She’s very old,” Pearl said. “Sometimes she hardly looks like an old woman at all. She looks like some bird. A dreadful, fierce bird, like a hawk or . . . when I look at her sometimes it’s hard for me to doubt that she’s a bird, I see her so clearly. But, after all, I see her and see that it isn’t a bird, because as I see her I have the impression that it’s an old woman and someone I’ve been seeing for quite a while now . . .”
“Come, Pearl.” Thomas was smiling. “It’s all right. You know what that is. It’s just the drinking. It’s when you’ve had too much.”
“It isn’t,” Pearl said. She slid her hand away from his.
“Michelet says that birds are ‘beneficent cressets of living fire through which the world passes.’”
“I . . . why do you do that? What is that anyway? You answer everything with words, somebody else’s words . . . you don’t have any of your own . . .”
“Michelet refers to the bird as the agent of purification, ‘the wholesome accelerator of the interchange of substances.’”
“I don’t know this . . . is he French? He’s talking about vultures. Scavengers. I am talking about . . . I don’t know . . .”
She rose abruptly. “We all get scared as we get older, I guess that’s all it is.”
“Dread is a fearful enchantment,” Thomas said.
“Those are someone’s words too, aren’t they?” Pearl cried.
The words were like insects on the walls of the room. Insects, changing colors, fading and shifting and loosing themselves in the room.
“Let’s go back to the boat, Pearl. I shouldn’t have gone on as I did with you, forgive me.” He spoke in a humorless, unknowing way.
They left the inn and walked out into the street. The sky was queerly bright. The day was stifling.
“Perhaps we’ll get some of that storm. Have to get home now, Pearl, batten down the hatches.”
He spoke to her as one would a pet on a leash. She followed him miserably. The drinks had let her down. She thought of the children waiting for them, back there, on the other side. She walked very slowly. People hurried past them. She had tried, hadn’t she? She was sick of trying to reason things out, of talking. The people hurried past with their huge faces. The world that lured people on was just a prank, didn’t they see? Everything could be reversed in an instant. Life could taste like flowers, like the expensive wine that Thomas had bought, but in the end you’d be sick with it.
Lincoln and Miriam and Shelly were waiting at the dock. There were several cartons of bright, cheap toys. Pearl looked at them with effort. Whatever would the children do with those? She lowered herself into the boat.
Thomas cast off the lines. The launch pulled out into the harbor. The sun was shining messily through skinny threads of clouds.
Lincoln was eating a chocolate bar and tying knots into a piece of line. Impossible knots. Who could escape them? He shook his wrist and the line snapped straight.
Off to the west, where the sun rolled, there was a cluster of boats, circling, small boats with the stars of police upon their white sides, making flowers, shifting, backing off, making the stems of flowers. They were bringing something up with hooks.
Miriam took the mail from Pearl’s bag and was looking through it.
“What’s that?” Shelly asked. She fiddled with the chain around her neck.
“This woman claims that vegetables were the world’s first saviors,” Miriam said, pressing a letter written in brown spidery ink upon her knees. “She is from North Dakota and she writes, ‘against this irrespirable air which first enveloped the earth, vegetables were its saviors,’ and she has enclosed a weaving of vegetable fiber that includes the stalks of twenty-three vegetables.”
She held up a small faded square, dry and shrunken. She tucked it back into its envelope and unfolded another letter.
“Now here’s a woman who has sent me a piece of her son’s diaper. She claims that when the diaper was placed across her dead sister’s face, the woman began to speak.”
“You mean she came back to life?” Pearl asked.
“No, she just began to speak.”
“What did she say?” Thomas asked.
There were several moments of silence while Miriam read the letter further. “She writes that her sister said, ‘It was not Denny who pushed me, it was a coronary that made me fall.’ ”
“Why did they put a diaper over her face?” Pearl asked.
“I don’t know.” Miriam’s face was sad and defeated.
“They must have suspected something,” Pearl said.
“You are too literal about things,” Miriam said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The children were nowhere to be seen when they got back to the house. The doors were open. There was silence.
“They could be anywhere,” Thomas said.
“I’m going down to the pool and just sit in it,” Shelly said, pushing her hair away from her neck, “I’ve never been so sticky.”
The house seemed cooler. Miriam went immediately to the kitchen, Thomas to his room. Lincoln took a beer from the refrigerator and went down to the sauna.
Pearl went slowly up the stairs. She looked in each one of the children’s rooms, but there was no one. No figures bouncing on the bed as there might have been, holding out their arms remorselessly. No one. She hesitated outside the door of her own room. There on the hall floor was a huge construction made of wooden blocks. The children were always building places for themselves. Pearl looked down into it. It had no roof and was a rage of static activity with everything out of scale. A plastic pineapple dwarfed a cloth doll in a crib. A cricket box perched on a fireplace made of small stones. Everything was fashioned in such a way as to represent something it was not. Rugs were made of colored paper. Books were made of stamps. Outside was the mirror sea.
Pearl went into her room and sat on the faded chaise before the window. Her head felt penetrated by slender, silver needles. She made herself a drink. She wanted to make her bones blossom, a different sort of life. The bones blossoming like the flowering wands. An image like the Hanged Man on the tarot cards. As a girl she had preferred the flowering wands, but they signified hope and there was no hope.
She could see the shape of Shelly far away swimming back and forth in the pool.
Without the children, she would be all alone. It would be dreadful. She looked around the room, at the bed with its thin coverlet. Everything happened so long ago. It had always been the past she had tried to remember, but she’d found that the past changes like everything else. It doesn’t stay the same. The hunter on the screen shot the bird from the tree but there was another hunter, soaring high up above the world, seeing the patterns and the bones and the lights of things. A hunter with a hunter’s eye, flying in the narrow but endless channel between one’s death and another.
Outside, the sky swept by in clouds, a great sea of dissolution, harmonious with her thoughts. Yellow and swift and gray, a sick and angry sea. And her mind joined with it without a struggle. Once she had had a baby. He had made nice sounds, night sounds, water sounds. Once she’d had
a baby that hadn’t been hers.
Pearl went downstairs and poured herself another drink. In the kitchen Miriam had supper on the stove. She sat at the table drinking tea. Pearl looked at her hands on the teacup. Her skin had begun growing over her wedding ring, as the bark of a tree grows over something alien that had been driven into it.
“Why don’t you go get the children, Pearl? They must be in their playhouse. It’s as though they want to miss their own birthday. I’ve rung the bell but not a single one’s come up.”
Pearl looked dreamily out the window where the sky now seemed the color of plums. The last light was collecting in the windows, which seemed inches thick.
Miriam looked at Pearl sternly, but there was no way she could enter Pearl’s locked universe. “You’re always drinking, you’ve always got a glass in your hand . . .” she said.
Pearl raised her rather thick eyebrows. “I’ll get the children.”
“On second thought . . .” Miriam began. She stared at Pearl. “It’s not right,” she said.
Pearl looked at the wedding band sunken into Miriam’s flesh. Like her mother’s hand. They had to cut the ring off her mother’s hand. She never got a new one. Pearl felt the familiar swelling rising in her throat which meant she could cry if she wanted to. Everyone was lonely, so lonely, and everyone longed for that which they had lost and for which there was no hope of ever possessing again.
She felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. She imagined a bat hovering over her head, fanning her with its peculiar little wings. The air around her was comforting, rhythmical and cold. She was so tired, so weary of witnessing, responding. There is no room in life for decorum! At times it is necessary to expose the skeleton within us, to make manifest the death within us!
“Don’t be annoyed with me,” Pearl said suddenly. “I know about memory too. It’s what keeps the others alive, familiar. It’s forgetting them that is the second death, the real death.” She saw horror fatten Miriam’s face. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Pearl cried. She ran outside. The earth gnawed at her feet and the wind at her hair. She felt as heavy as the earth and as eternal and indifferent. She should have said . . . the dead don’t come back because it’s less lonely there than here . . . it’s the only comfort they can give us . . . She should have said . . . this is it, this is the evening of the day. Our souls are being gathered for the judgment.