Several times Adam found himself with tears in his eyes—not of grief, exactly, of course, and yet he seemed to be getting slowly torn to pieces by some clawing thing. So many of these people were, as his uncle had been, people one read about—artists, journalists, scientists—people who were fashioning the world they had received into the world he would be living in. How was it possible that he was here? He had always thought of his uncle as someone he himself had more or less imagined, but perhaps that was backwards; certainly his incorporeal uncle was more vivid than he was—perhaps it was he himself who had been conjured up from a pallid vision of the future, to materialize here . . .
His mother would be sitting with his grandparents in their kitchen, talking about the television news or the vegetable garden or church or the weather or the neighbors, in somber, brief, ritualized exchanges, the seemly code of his childhood that had to serve for all sorrows, all joys, all fears. It was grotesque that his uncle’s body had been shipped back there to the plains, where, in the uniform sunlight, it pleased God to monitor your soul for any fleck.
The prim, pastel-colored era that had completed his mother and ejected his uncle was long over, but in the region where all the family had grown up, it had been replaced by nothing. The exuberant 1960s were snobbishly passing it by when he was born, and now the venal 1980s were squeezing it dry. And the modest rural life there, with its piecrusts, its kind, tired waitresses in checkered uniforms, its Fourth of July parades, its rapidly abrading veneer of cheerfulness, had come to feel like something preserved in a bottle of chloroform, a piteous, amateur, over-rehearsed reenactment of an Eden that, come to think of it, might have been a little bit junky in the first place.
Everyone was filing out. “How are you getting to the house?” Vivian asked.
He looked at her.
“Clifford has a car,” she said. “Come.”
Clifford turned out to be a marvelously ugly, elegant old man who had spoken earlier, caustically and affectionately. It was hard to imagine him doing anything so plebian as driving a car, and indeed, his car turned out to be a glossy, panther-like vehicle, driven by someone else entirely, a man in a uniform.
Adam was stowed in front, saving him from the strain of immediate new surprises. Engulfed in the purring of the motor as the magnificent city parted around the windshield, he could just hear the murmur of Vivian and Clifford conversing. At one moment his name seemed to sound in the air, but when he turned, he saw that the two in back were both looking vacantly out the windows, their hands lightly clasped on the seat between them.
The house had chandeliers that looked like they had come from a mermaid’s palace. The floors were as shining as water. Huge mirrors brought the garden inside, with its cascading flowers. Adam stood at the open French doors watching the light splash through the leaves. The day, so fresh and glistening, seemed to contain every summer that had ever been and to promise more, endless more.
There were little, delicious things to eat, and large, fragile glasses of wine. Two musicians in white robes sat cross-legged on embroidered cushions, drawing out from another world a fragile, seeking cable of sound. Each note quivered for a moment in the air, dissolving, causing the walls to dissolve, dissolving the divisions between one thought and another, one feeling and another—rapture and anguish, resignation and yearning, twining together and dissolving . . .
The house lifted slightly off the ground. Adam clung to Clifford and Vivian. He wanted to say something . . . “You were friends of my uncle’s for a long time,” he eventually managed, and blushed at the inanity it had taken him so long to formulate.
“We’ve both known him—we both knew him—for around what?” Vivian turned to Clifford. “Oh, decades. Heavens—centuries, eternity. It feels like one second.”
“Young people think it’s some sort of accomplishment to know people for a long time,” Clifford announced. “But after the initial effort, you see, the matter takes care of itself.”
“It must be wonderful to have old friends, though,” Adam said, just as he realized how tactless this was, and in so many ways.
Clifford’s smile was the sort that concludes a dull business transaction. “Oh, you’re bound to find that you’ll have acquired some yourself. When you’ve lived long enough. You don’t even have to like them, not at all! There they are, whether you want them or not. Yes, old friends are marvelous. Stick to your old friends. Old friends are best. Because the things your new friends do to you will be every bit as dreadful.”
Clifford and Vivian chortled absently, and then, to Adam’s surprise, Clifford enfolded Vivian in his arms. Her cheek rested against his jaunty pocket handkerchief, and the two of them stood there for a moment, swaying gently until he released her and turned away.
Vivian touched a fingertip to her eye, preventing a tear from spoiling her makeup. “Simon now, yes?” she said after a moment. “Are you up to it?”
Simon had regarded him steadily with the light, wolf’s eyes that seemed to see all the privations of winter forests. “I’ve picked out some of Phillip’s things for you,” he said. “Things I thought he’d especially want you to have. But you must stop by before you leave London and choose whatever you’d fancy.”
Adam emitted a clump of sound, but the weight of his uncle’s absence dropped onto it, crushing out nearly all its meaning. Simon stood courteously, head inclined, until Adam had finished, then patted Adam’s arm and returned to the cordoned-off world where Phillip was waiting for him, fading.
* * *
Now Adam had questions for Vivian, which he understood to be shockingly rudimentary. “Was it sudden?” he asked.
“Not sudden, but fairly rapid. We all knew something was wrong, but we didn’t know what, or how serious it was. Simon’s a doctor, though. I guess he pretty much knew what to expect, but he didn’t talk about it. I don’t know how much Phillip knew, himself.”
They were at Vivian’s. When Adam had told her where he was staying, she’d said, “Oh, no, darling—you can’t. I mean, you can, of course, but why? I have a perfectly good spare room. You can just pretend it’s a hotel and come and go as you please.”
Come and go? he thought, as he put his pack down in the spare room. Why would he go anywhere? He was exactly where it turned out he wanted to be.
Her apartment, or flat, as she called it, was not far from Simon and Phillip’s house, in a part of London called Notting Hill, which looked like a nursery rhyme. The flat was small and a little shabby, but everywhere you looked there were pictures or small clusters of toys or ceramic vases. The indigo night sky streamed in, trailing little moons and stars. Two dogs snoozed on a rug, and he had nearly tripped over a cat.
While Vivian went to get sheets and towels for him, Adam examined a cluster of framed photos. A girl in a tutu, her dark hair up in a bun, floated through the air toward another dancer, who, serene in an impossible balance, stretched out his arms to receive her. How young the girl was! Her tilted eyes were nearly closed in the bliss of anticipation. And there she was again, the girl, in another picture, wearing leg warmers and a baggy sweatshirt, leaning back, an arm around—yes, that was Simon, definitely it was, and both of them were laughing goofily. And there was Simon again, alone, under a tree, looking out over a misty valley . . . There were no photos of anyone who could be his uncle.
He was amazingly tired and yet not quite sleepy. Vivian had made up the bed, and he lay there thinking of home, of the prairie, vast but incommodious, gorgeous and exhausting—the gargantuan farms looming in on his grandfather’s small, old-fashioned one, the daily drama of producing food, the revolve of the seasons, unremitting and grand, disrupted by periodic cataclysms . . .
Out the window was the charming street, and beyond, the houses and gardens and distant neighborhoods. London articulated itself, on and on, and all of England, then France, Germany—a smidgen of Asia . . .
Almost every bit of the world was unknown to him; almost every bit of it—past, present, and future—
lay beyond the dome of his consciousness, invisible to him and unimagined, and yet just as real as anything his imagination could encompass. A phantom horizon shot out all around him, a sparkling mist of sky and water, in which faint continents were rising. The planet turned in the sky, dotted everywhere with people and animals. Oop—there went a mastodon, lifting off Earth’s surface into the clouds! There went Uncle Phillip, now someone else, and more and more and more—the stratosphere was thick with balloon-like angels . . .
A rectangle of faint city light hung in the dark air. He grasped at a wisp of music that had been winding through his dream, but it was gone. The afternoon came back to him, the faces, his uncle . . . He was in London; that was a window, hanging there. He slid into place and felt around for a switch. A lamp awoke.
Not once, he realized, since he’d boarded the plane had he thought of Carol. Did he miss her? It was only a few weeks ago that they had broken up. Only a day before, he had missed her achingly, had missed making plans with her, meeting her at the café, fixing breakfast with her. He had missed her body, her lilting voice, her copious, glossy, slippy hair.
She had loved to go to the supermarket with him, to go running, to go out to dinner. She was always full of plans and projects, agile in her reasoning, a frighteningly good mimic. She could imitate all the lawyers at the firm where she was interning, and trot them out for his entertainment. They had never spoken of marriage, but still, he pictured a white wooden house near a meadow, where the children could play . . .
The last morning they spent together had started out with sunlight and pajamas and toothpaste and coffee, smiles and kisses—and then, quite unexpectedly, while he was carefully buttering his toast, there was a quarrel, swelling out of nothing, out of some infinitesimal mote. He wasn’t sufficiently ambitious, she said; it worried her. “I mean, ‘climatology,’ what is it, exactly? Like, sometimes it rains, sometimes it doesn’t? I mean, do you want to be one of those guys on TV with the hair?”
He had looked at her, uncomprehending for a minute—was she kidding, or had she never heard a word he had said? Her pretty face was closed.
It was as if someone had thrown a rock through the window with a note tied around it: Someone Else. A partner at the firm, possibly? Possibly even one of the stuffy, swaggering men she had mercilessly lampooned for him—one who, of course, was sufficiently ambitious.
Maybe he had never heard a word she said. He rose to his feet, flinging his piece of toast onto the plate like a losing hand of cards. Her defiant expression had told him that his guess was right, and the indistinct little house in his mind, the indistinct little children, were funneled up from their meadow and spat out into oblivion.
Two A.M., according to a clock on the little table next to the bed. He’d been asleep for a few hours, apparently. He shuffled into Vivian’s living room, with an unfocused notion that he might acquire something to drink there. Vivian was lying propped up on the sofa near a coffee table, with a book open in her hands. Her cigarette glowed in the dimness, and the window reflected the changing colors of a traffic light somewhere; it seemed impossible, in this light, that she could have been reading.
He sat down in an armchair on the other side of the table, which held an ashtray, an open bottle of wine, and a wineglass, nearly empty. She glanced at him, roused herself, and came back a few seconds later with another glass.
She poured him some wine and refilled her own glass. “Cigarette?” she said.
The impulse to rebuke her silenced him for a moment.
“Oh, right,” she said, “Well, sorry to break it to you, but all dancers smoke. Drink and smoke. We can’t eat, and we have to do something, don’t we?”
“Oh—” he said. “But I mean—”
“Well, not anymore, of course. But, still, there it is, old habits . . . Anyhow, I teach at least. I’ve been lucky. No serious irreme”—she interrupted herself to yawn—“emediable, pardon me, injuries. And some choreography.”
She had exchanged her glamorous suit for a pair of floppy trousers and a little T-shirt. She still wore her rings.
“It meant really a lot to Simon that you were there today. I don’t know how he got your family’s address out of Phillip. Phillip never spoke about his family, never. But I suppose, in the end, he must have wanted one of you to come over.”
The tip of the cigarette glowed again, like a breathing heart.
“No one told me,” Adam said. “They never would have told me. I went home for the funeral, to my family’s place, and I saw your letter lying with a heap of bills and things in my grandmother’s kitchen. Just completely by chance. I don’t know why it caught my eye.”
“Subliminal clues,” she said. “Great stuff, huh. You know, I tried to imagine it sometimes. What he came from. God! He was so perfect . . .”
“There was no place for Phillip,” Adam said. It was like an astonishing proclamation that had just been handed to him to read aloud, and he used the name as if his uncle were an equal, a friend, a child he had looked out for. “Just no place.”
“Please,” she said. “You’re speaking to his niche!”
“I meant there, at home.” Adam sighed. Was there something about him? Did all women consider him a complete idiot?
“Feeble joke, sorry . . . I asked him once or twice what it was like. I wanted, you know—I wanted to be able to picture it, to see him in his natural . . . as if that would solve something. But for him, it was just . . . it was over.”
She shifted, uncomfortably, and as she lifted her head to awkwardly readjust a cushion behind her he saw her anguish, no longer restrained by the exigencies of the day. “It’s been a long time since you slept, I think,” he said. “You should sleep.”
“Look who’s talking.” She shifted again, and lit a new cigarette from her old one.
“How did you meet Phillip?” he said, as if she really had been his uncle’s girlfriend.
“Oh, it was just—I just met him. In a shop. And we started talking. You know.” She grunted faintly, as though she were in pain. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters,” he said. The girl in the photo floated toward her onstage lover’s arms. He split the wine remaining in the bottle between their glasses, and she made room for him as he sat down next to her on the sofa and put his hand against her forehead. She shifted again in exasperation, and he stroked her choppy hair back from her face. No fever . . .
“Oh, God!” she said. She clamped her eyes shut, and a slick of tears slid from between the lids.
Nothing seemed ever to change in the world Phillip and he had come from, he told her, putting his arms around her to calm her sudden, violent trembling. Everyone had been plunked down there on the sixth day and that was that—the past was a circle, and the future would be, too. There was only the winter death and spring rebirth, the ecstatic, shimmering summers, the harvest. Nothing broke the curve of the earth, the curve of the golden crops against the blue. Except, and it was an astonishing thing to see, through the wavering film of heat, when one of the storms appeared, marking the infinite sky.
First the air turned yellow. Yellow. And a black sort of veil dropped over it. And then the sooty yellow slowly turned a lush, rippling green. There were streaks of rose.
Then—everything went silent, silent and completely still. Except that way off in the sky, the black veil was spinning itself into a tiny, crazed, spinning black funnel, leaving the sky a clear yellow again, or green, as it twisted itself into shape after shape, skimming along toward you in the silence, like a dancer filled with God, growing larger and larger by the instant. All your senses were aroused and your whole body was alert, as though in expectation of some wonderful arrival.
The universe was poised, waiting. Then—a bird chirped nervously on a branch: a signal! Abruptly, a delicious fragrance released, and all the growing things for miles around started to tremble and rustle. The air was chattering and filled with the soft thumping and scampering of little animals as they beg
an to run.
It was the voice, especially, that was Phillip’s. Not only the timbre but also the accent, the cadences—Phillip’s voice, assuming a presence in the room. She had forgotten how it felt, to be so light, to be lying in the sun . . . Concentrating fiercely, she gripped the glossy, wheat-colored hair in her fingers, and it glistened.
He had been in town, once, he was saying, in the silent moment, the moment just before the trees began to groan and sway. And there, on the street where the post office and the shops were, a little fawn had come clop clop clopping, disoriented, out of a stand of trees and then right along the sidewalk. Its hooves rang out against the concrete, striking sparks, and the distant funnel swam in the creature’s great, dark, terrified eyes. An immense roar broke open the enveloping green; grainy darkness poured out, and there he was, the boy, scrambling down into the cellar of Dillard’s Stationery just as the storm ripped the roofs from the houses on the next street and sucked them into the sky!
He was still, thankfully, sleeping heavily when she disentangled herself from him in the morning. She collected her rings from where they lay in a heap on the floor and got up to feed the dogs and cat; she would be able to have coffee alone in her kitchen, to bathe . . .
She had made her way during the rest of the night in flickering gradations of sleep and wakefulness through a thick loam, like fallen leaves, of discarded and forgotten sensations.
. . . The dim afternoon when Laura Empson had been cast as Giselle, and there had been nothing to do but go out and walk in the freezing drizzle. Such desolation! That cold hand that grabs your heart from time to time and squeezes.
Laura was a beautiful dancer, she’d insisted to herself, and better suited to the role. And Laura was much older, Laura was twenty-six; if she didn’t dance the part now, she probably never would. And she deserved the role. Lovely Laura. Spot-on for that silly git, Giselle. And besides, there were roles that Vivian was suited for that Laura wasn’t. There was plenty of time for her, yet. Plenty of time . . .
Your Duck Is My Duck Page 17