by Lily Pond
The next evening, as soon as her son fell asleep she went to find the old man and spent most of the night with him. It was nearly morning when she returned. She lay down beside her son’s bed and fell asleep straight away.
When Jakub returned a week later he found her haggard, as if exhausted from a fever. She avoided his kiss and was scarcely aware of what he was saying. Then she announced that she couldn’t live with him any more and tried to explain to him what had happened. He listened to her aghast. When he had grasped the sordid nature of her infidelity, he yelled at her that she disgusted him. He was about to hit her but it seemed too theatrical and undignified, so he just spat on the floor and dashed out of the room. She could hear him shouting from the next room, most likely for her benefit but perhaps he wanted the person downstairs to hear. “With a cripple like that—she goes and does it with a senile cripple!”
Marie put her son to bed. For a moment she hesitated over whether she should go to her husband and try and make him understand that she had no wish to hurt him. Then she realized that the old bookbinder was sure to be waiting for her and she crept out onto the landing.
When news of her behaviour spread, people were scandalized. Such a misalliance left all other adultery in the shade. A social worker voiced doubts about whether she was a suitable person to bring up her son and submitted a lengthy report to her superiors showing that the mother had left her child alone in the flat night after night. The director of the creche asked her to find a job somewhere people didn’t know her.
On the day of the divorce hearing, the old bookbinder accompanied her to court. He carefully stood his crutches against the wall and took a seat in the back row.
The judge was a stout, kindly looking man. In his time he had dissolved hundreds of marriages but he would always try to reconcile the couples, usually without success. He tried to reconcile Marie Anna with her husband too. Lots of unexpected things could happen in the course of a marriage, he told them. People found themselves in situations they would have never have dreamed of and so found it impossible to deal with them: at such moments they could make rash decisions that they would regret. It was up to their partners, if they loved them, to show forbearance and offer them a helping hand.
He turned to Marie and urged her to consider her actions and think not only about her partner who had so far behaved like a model husband, but also to take her son’s interests into account. Nothing would ever make up for the comfort of a happy home. A child should be brought up by the joint efforts of both parents. Didn’t she realize that she could lose her son not only by a court decision, but also by a judgement of the heart, were her son not to accept her actions when he was old enough to fully understand? And last but not least she should think about herself. After all, she too wanted to live with someone who was her equal, spend not just a few short months with him but live to see the fruits of their joint efforts, live with her partner to a ripe old age, when one needed the support of one’s companion more than in one’s youth. The judge looked towards the seats where her lover sat, whose early demise he seemed to prophesy, and then turned to her husband and asked him if he was still willing to take Marie back as his wife. Jakub seemed overcome with emotion and was about to say something when he simply nodded. The judge adjourned the hearing to give them time to think things over.
The three of them left the court room. Jakub hesitated for a moment, then, without a word, started to stride away, healthy and self-confident, while she walked along silently at the side of the lame old man.
The bookbinder talked continuously as if suddenly taken aback by his responsibility: the hearing was bound to have upset her and she must have been scared by the threat of her son being taken away from her by the authorities. It was an unlikely eventuality, but should there really be such a risk, she was not to take him, an old man, into account. He would leave and remove the burden that he was becoming to her.
She shook her head. In fact she hadn’t found the hearing particularly upsetting. She felt that it had nothing to do with her and she had not yet absorbed the fact that she might lose her son.
The old man at her side picked up the judge’s words about death and those who are left alone. He said he had no right to ask her to bind herself to him, to take her away from her family and then abandon her, leaving her alone in the world.
She listened to him horrified. How could he talk so cold-bloodedly if he loved her? How could he call into question the very thing that had raised them above what would otherwise be a meaningless existence?
She shook her head once more. Then they parted company and without another glance in his direction she hurried off to fetch her son. Only now did the judge’s words begin to sink in. When Matous ran up to meet her at the kindergarten, she took him in her arms, hugged him and burst into tears.
Back home she played with the little boy, then fed him and put him to bed. Her husband had gone off somewhere, but for the first time in ages she did not go down to the flat below.
In the bathroom she glanced in the mirror. She had grown thin over the past three weeks, her face struck her as emaciated, with her small eyes looking even more deeply set, surrounded by a dark shadow.
Jakub returned before midnight. His face showed momentary surprise but he walked past her in silence. He stank of beer.
She lay down in the bedroom which until recently she had shared with Jakub but which neither of them used these days. The judge had warned her about loneliness should she remain with the old man and he died before she did. As if death was governed solely by age, and death alone determined people’s loneliness. As if a few months of love didn’t mean more than a whole life without it.
She got up, put on her dressing gown, and quietly opened the door behind which her husband was lying. He wasn’t asleep, he was smoking.
“Don’t take him from me,” she said, meaning her son.
He didn’t even turn his head towards her.
“I don’t know why it happened,” she went on, “but we were happy.”
Jakub made a gagging noise.
“Forgive me. I don’t know why it happened.” She realized that he could never understand her choice and so he could hardly grant her this wish. Receiving no reply, she turned and left the room.
She stopped outside the door on the floor below but didn’t ring the bell; she just stood and waited. She listened to the silence from inside. Nothing disturbed it. She realized she had no wish to disturb it either. A man may be a cripple, but he must remain a man who did not shy away from responsibility.
She walked down the remaining six floors.
Fate offered everyone a moment when they could shine, the chance of some deed to transcend their own emptiness. But when that moment passed, what then? What should follow?
She leaned wearily against the wall of the building. She looked upwards, but the light of the stars was obscured by the glow of the street lamps.
The Sheep Child
James Dickey
Farm boys wild to couple
With anything with soft-wooded trees
With mounds of earth mounds
Of pinestraw will keep themselves off
Animals by legends of their own:
In the hay-tunnel dark
And dung of barns, they will
Say I have heard tell
That in a museum in Atlanta
Way back in a corner somewhere
There’s this thing that’s only half
Sheep like a woolly baby
Pickled in alcohol because
Those things can’t live his eyes
Are open but you can’t stand to look
I heard from somebody who …
But this is now almost all
Gone. The boys have taken
Their own true wives in the city,
The sheep are safe in the west hill
Pasture but we who were born there
Still are not sure. Are we,
Because we remember, remembered
In the terrible dust of museums?
Merely with his eyes, the sheep-child may
Be saying saying:
I am here, in my father’s house.
I who am half of your world, came deeply
To my mother in the long grass
Of the west pasture, where she stood like moonlight
Listening for foxes. It was something like love
From another world that seized her
From behind, and she gave, not lifting her head
Out of dew, without ever looking, her best
Self to that great need. Turned loose, she dipped her face
Farther into the chill of the earth, and in a sound
Of sobbing of something stumbling
Away, began, as she must do,
To carry me. I woke, dying,
In the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes
Far more than human. I saw for a blazing moment
The great grassy world from both sides,
Man and beast in the round of their need,
And the hill wind stirred in my wool,
My hoof and my hand clasped each other,
I ate my one meal
Of milk, and died
Staring. From dark grass I came straight
To my father’s house, whose dust
Whirls up in the halls for no reason
When no one comes piling deep in a hellish mild corner,
And, through my immortal waters
I meet the sun’s grains eye
To eye, and they fail at my closet of glass.
Dead, I am most surely living
In the minds of farm boys: I am he who drives
Them like wolves from the hound bitch and calf
And from the chaste ewe in the wind.
They go into woods into bean fields they go
Deep into their known right hands. Dreaming of me,
They groan they wait they suffer
Themselves, they marry, they raise their kind.
Sex and Its Substitutes
Paul Theroux
WHEN PEOPLE SAID, ‘Miss Duboys has a friend,’ they meant something sinister, or at least pretty nasty—that she had a dark secret at home. Because we were both unmarried and grade FS0-4 at the London Embassy, we were often paired up at dinner parties as the token singles. It became a joke between us, these frequent meetings at Embassy Residences. “You again,” she would say, and give me a velvet feline growl. She was not pretty in any conventional way, which was probably why I found her so attractive. Her eyes were green in her thin white face; her lips were overlarge and lispy-looking; her short hair jet-black; and you could see the rise of her nipples through her raincoat.
It took me a little while to get to know her. There were so many people eager to see us married, we resisted being pushed into further intimacy. I saw a lot of her at work—and at all those dinner parties! We very quickly became good friends and indeed were so tolerant of each other and so familiar that it was hard for me to know her any better. I desired her when I was with her. Our friendship did not progress. Then I began to think that people were right: she probably did have a secret at home.
The facts about her were unusual She had not been to the United States in four years—she had not taken home leave, she had not visited Europe, she had not left London. She had probably not left her apartment much, except to go to work. It made people talk. But she worked very hard. Our British counterparts treated hard workers with suspicion. They would have regarded Margaret Duboys as a possible spy, for staying late all those nights. What was she really doing? people asked. Some called her conscientious; others, obsessed.
There was another characteristic Miss Duboys had that made the London Embassy people suspicious. She bought a great amount of food at the PX in Ruislip. She made a weekly trip for enormous quantities of tax-free groceries, but always of a certain kind. All our food bills were recorded on the embassy computer, and Miss Duboy’s bills were studied closely. Steaks! Chickens! Hamburg! She bought rabbits! One week her bill was a hundred and fourteen dollars and forty-seven cents. Single woman, tax-free food! She was carnivore and no mistake, but she bought pounds of fish, too. We looked at the computer print-out and marveled. What an appetite!
“People eat to compensate for things,” said Everett Horton, our number two, who perhaps knew what he was talking about: he was very fat.
I said, “Margaret doesn’t strike me as a compulsive eater.”
“No,” he said, “she’s got a very sweet figure. That’s a better explanation.”
“She’s thin—it doesn’t explain anything!”
“She’s pretty,” Horton said. “She’s living with a very hungry man.”
“Let’s hope not,” I said, and when Horton leered at me, I added, “For security reasons.”
She had completely reorganized the Trade Section; she dealt with priority trade matters. It was unthinkable that someone in such a trusted position was compromising this trust with a foreigner who was perhaps only a sexual adventurer. It is the unthinkable that most preoccupies me with thought. Or was she giving all the food away? Or, worse, was she selling it to grateful English people? They paid twice what we did for half as much and, in the past, there had been cases of Embassy personnel selling merchandise they had bought at bargain prices at the American PX: they had been sent home and demoted or else fired—“terminated” was our word. We wondered about Miss Duboys. Her grocery bill was large and mystifying.
The day came when these PX print-outs were to be examined by some visiting budget inspectors from Washington.
Horton, who knew I was fond of Miss Duboys, took me aside that morning.
“Massage these figures, will you?” he said. “I’m sure they’re not as lumpy as they look.”
I averaged them and I made them look innocent. Yet still they startled me. All that food! For any other officer it would not have looked odd, but the fact was that Miss Duboys lived alone. She never gave dinner parties. She never gave parties. No one had ever been inside her house.
There was more speculation, all of it idle and some of it rather cruel. It was worse than “Miss Duboys has a friend.” I thought it was baseless and malicious and, in the way that gossip can do real harm by destroying a person’s reputation, very dangerous. And what were people saying about me? People regarded her as “shady” and “sly.” “You can’t figure her out,” they said, meaning they could if you were bold and insensitive enough to listen. And there was her “accident”—doubting people always spoke about her in quotation marks, which they indicated with raised eyebrows. It was her hospital “scare.” Miss Duboys, who was a “riddle,” had been “rushed” to the hospital “covered with bruises.” The commonest explanation was that she “fell,” but the general belief was that she had been beaten up by her mysterious roommate—so people thought. If she had been beaten black and blue no one had seen her. Al Sanger claimed he saw her with a bandaged hand, Erroll Jeeps said it was scratches. “Probably a feminine complaint,” Scaduto’s wife said, and when I squinted she said, “Plumbing.”
“Could be another woman,” Horton said. “Women scratch each other, don’t they? I mean, a man wouldn’t do that.”
“Probably a can of tuna fish,” Jeeps said.
Al Sanger said, “She never buys cans of tuna fish!”
He, too, had puzzled over her grocery bills.
Miss Duboys did not help matters by refusing to explain any of it: the grocery bills, the visit to the hospital, no home leave, no cocktail parties, no dinners. But she was left alone. She was an excellent officer and the only woman in the Trade Section. It would have been hard to interrogate her and practically impossible to transfer her without being accused of bias. But there were still people who regarded her behaviour as highly suspicious.
“What is it?” Horton asked me. “Do you think it’s what they say?”
I had never heard him, or any other American Embassy official, use the word “sp
y.” It was a vulgar, painful, and unlucky word, like “cancer.”
“No, not that,” I said.
“I can’t imagine what it could be.”
“It’s sex,” I said. “Or one of its substitutes.”
“One of the many,” he said.
“One of the few,” I replied.
He smiled at me and said, “It’s nice to be young.”
The harsh rumors, and the way Miss Duboys treated them with contempt, made me like her the more. I began to look forward to seeing her at the dinner parties, where we were invariably the odd guests—the unmarried ones. Perhaps it was more calculated than I realized; perhaps people, seeing me as steady, solid, with a good record in overseas posts, thought that I would succeed in finding out the truth about Miss Duboys. If so, they chose the right man. I did find out the truth. It was so simple, so obvious in its way, it took either genius or luck to discover it. I had no genius, but I was very lucky.
We were at Erroll Jeeps’s apartment in Hampstead. Jeeps’s wife was named Lornette, which, with a kind of misplaced hauteur, she pronounced like the French eyeglasses, “lorgnette.” The Jeepses were black, from Chicago. A black American jazz trumpeter was also there—he was introduced as Owlie Cooper; and the Sangers—Al and Tina; and Margaret Duboys; and myself.
The Sangers’ dog had just come out of quarantine. When he heard that it had cost three hundred dollars to fly the dog from Washington to London, and close to a thousand for the dog’s three months at the quarantine kennel in Surrey (“We usually visited Brucie on weekends”), Owlie Cooper kicked his feet out and screamed his laughter at the Sangers. Tina asked what was so funny. Cooper said it was all funny: he was laughing at the money, the amount of time, and even the dog’s name. “Brucie!”