Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  She had asked Sophy that question one time when the two of them were alone. Desperately, she had asked it. “Shouldn’t there be joy, Sophy?”

  “We should each have a place,” Sophy had told her—her hands on Agnes’s shoulders, her eyes fixed on Agnes’s eyes. “A lofty and rejoiceful place, Aggie, on which our hearts can dance. Perhaps the abbey isn’t it.”

  “But I longed to be a nun,” Agnes had cried. “I believe in the Church and her teachings. How can you say that?”

  Sophy had seemed as mystified as Aggie. “I don’t know, Aggie. Except that it seems true.”

  Came a whisper of sound, bringing Agnes back to the present, a soft shush, like the opening of a door. She raised her head and saw movement, someone walking from pillar to pillar in the side aisle. A graceful, flowing motion with the feeling of beauty behind it. The idea of loveliness. Someone young, dressed in the wide-coifed habit the order had not worn for decades.

  She turned her head resolutely away. She would pay no attention. It had been a shadow shifting. Too many times lately had she imagined shapes, always moving away, away from the altar, or away from the chapel, or away from the chapter house. Whichever way Agnes was going, the shadow went the other way.

  It was hallucination. She was working too hard, not sleeping well, and seeing things was the result. The flowing shapes made her acknowledge her failure at forgetting Sophy, as she had promised herself and her confessor she would do. Her eyes drifted upward to the Last Judgment once more, she imagining herself among that mob of females, stripped naked, mouth open in a howl of despair, being driven off the edge of the earth into the void while the angels regarded the plunging forms with satisfaction. Most of the damned were female. The painting was full of women falling, screaming, trying to cover their nakedness. Many paintings of the Last Judgment seemed to populate hell with naked females. Was it the artists or the Church that took such prurient pleasure in sending women to hell? Like old Father Conley, back at St. Monica’s, doing one of his little chastity lectures, talking about modesty, all euphemisms and avid looks. Beautiful women would burn in hell, he said. Beautiful women were occasions of sin. Saying it, his tongue came out, like a frog’s tongue, licking his lips, savoring the notion of women in hell, finding the idea delicious.

  True sacraments could flow through bad priests. That was doctrine. Father Conley had the mystical quality of maleness, which Christ had shared. That quality made him acceptable as a conduit for grace. Though he had been uncharitable and maybe even sexually obsessed, the grace that flowed through him was still pure, and pure grace, flowing from God, was enough. Amazing grace—which would be enough for Agnes, too, if instead of wallowing in might-have-beens about Sophy she concentrated on becoming more obedient. Obedience, as Father Girard had pointed out, would not be as spiritually rewarding if it were easy.

  One became obedient by refusing to remember, her confessor said. By rejecting all memory of Sophy. By denying any pleasure in those memories. By refusing to hearken to anything that brought her to mind, including these recent visions, these sounds. Well, by God, Aggie would do it. She would shut down her memories, relentlessly. She would succeed eventually. Resolution was her middle name. She would tell Father Girard everything, she would receive absolution, and she’d forget Sophy. And since she couldn’t do that if she went on meeting with the DFC, she would give up the DFC.

  The chapel door opened. Again she saw movement from the corner of her eye. This time it was real. Sister Honore Philip, coming to kneel just behind her. Aggie raised her head.

  “Reverend Mother. Are you all right?”

  There weren’t many in the convent who would risk breaking silence to be sure the abbess was all right. Not many who knew when the rules had to be bent a little.

  “I’m all right,” she said, rising, holding out her hand. “I didn’t mean to cause you concern.”

  They dipped together before the altar, went together up the silent aisle. The abbess was still thinking about love, and repentance, and becoming pure. Sister Honore Philip, who was responsible for the hospitality offered by the abbey, was considering the ironed bed linens that would be needed for the archbishop, who, though extremely unwelcome, was soon to come visiting again.

  “There’s this woman I know,” said Charley Carpenter, brother of Bettiann’s husband, William, from the deep chair near the fire.

  “There’s this woman right here you know,” said the nymph from the bed. She wore black stockings, a lacy corset-cum-garter belt, and nothing else at all.

  “Yeah, well, this woman, she’s married to my brother Bill. She’s a little younger than him, maybe six, seven years, and she still looks sharp, you know. Groomed. She thinks I’m too old for you, babe.”

  “Maybe she thinks I’m too young for you,” the nymph pouted. “Women that age, they get jealous. You know. No matter what they do, they don’t look young anymore. What I think is, they oughta all be retired.”

  He chuckled, a deep, liquid sound. “Pensioned off. By God, that’s an idea. We oughta pension them off! Starting with ole Bettiann.”

  The nymph rolled into a more provocative position, watching the effect in the mirror as she raised her leg slightly. The image turned her on. She moistened her lower lip. “Charley …”

  “She belongs to this club.”

  “Charley. Facrisake. Come awwwn.” She drew out the word, a teasing sound, like the meow of a Siamese cat.

  “You all hot to trot, babe? You all juicy and ready?”

  “Charrrleeee.”

  “Want me to do you? That it? Want me to do you good?” He bent toward the table, opening the drawer.

  “I want you, Charley. Not that thing.”

  He held up the dildo, tipping it this way and that. “Not a bad substitute, babe. Not bad at all. Let’s give it a try.”

  She sat up angrily. “Damn it, Charley. I don’t need to get all dressed up for that thing. What the hell? Last six weeks all you want to do is stick that thing in me, watch me come. Last I heard, sex was a team sport. I’m not doing exhibition games. Shit!”

  He fell back into the chair, shutting the drawer with a thrust that rocked the table. “Do it yourself, kiddo. That’s the way you want it.”

  “Are you sick?” she demanded. “This is spooky, Charley. This isn’t right. You afraid I’ve got some disease? You know damn well I don’t. What’s goin’ on here?”

  “I’m fifty-two, babe. You need some young stud—”

  “I’m not interested in studs. Studs aren’t safe. They swear they’ll be careful, they’ll be faithful, and it’s all a lot of shit. If that’s all I wanted, that’s easy, screw around a little, be dead before you’re thirty. My best girlfriend in school, she’s dyin’. My cousin, she’s got the HIV. That’s easy. I don’t want that, but I didn’t figure on some old guy with good sense givin’ out after just a couple months.”

  She swayed into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. Charley stared into the fire. He should be very upset by this. Angry, maybe. Annoyed, at least. The best he could summon was a very, very slight discomfort, as though the room were a little stuffy. He needed to take a walk. Take a hike, she’d say. Well, maybe that was true. He liked being with her, liked the glances they got, the stares. He liked her looks, no question about that. He didn’t dislike doing her, either, if that’s what she wanted, but it didn’t turn him on. Not right now.

  He’d had a spell like this once or twice before. Sort of as if his power had been turned off at the main. Once with his first wife, once with his second. Both times he’d found himself a new woman, and that had fixed things. This time, though … he didn’t really feel like looking.

  Funny thing was, he’d told Bill, and Bill had said he felt pretty much the same way.

  “It’s the TV,” he said. “I’ve got the same problem. The urologist says he’s seen a lot of it lately. Too much porn, you know. After a while you get so used to it, nothing works anymore. All that heaving and heavy breathing, all those nake
d girls. You get immunized.”

  Charley thought what he probably needed was a vacation from women. Do without for a while; then it was all the nicer.

  “Hell of a thing,” Charley said aloud. “One hell of a thing.”

  “What is?” she demanded from the door behind him.

  “Life,” he replied with a grin. “Hey, babe. Where’d you like to go for dinner?”

  CAROLYN HAD A DREAM.

  She had gone to the prison, to the big room where the pods were. Someone was taking her through the room—not Josh, but someone else—and that person was walking behind her.

  She was terrified by the footsteps of the person behind her. She tried to turn, or to look through the faceplates on either side, but her hands were manacled behind her, and the person behind her prevented her looking by twitching the end of the chain.

  In her dream Carolyn went on walking, turning, down this aisle and another. Halfway down the last aisle, the one next to the wall, one of the pods stood open.

  “That one,” said the voice from behind her. “That one is yours.”

  Carolyn called Jessamine.

  “You sound awful,” said Jessamine.

  “Nightmares last night,” Carolyn confessed with a shaky laugh. “You know, usually you can’t remember dreams? I can’t forget this one.” She described it briefly, shakily.

  “Carolyn! That’s awful! You called me for an exorcism or something?”

  “No, Jessy. I called you because I’ve got this case.” She went on to explain all about Lolly Ashaler. “It’s spelled A-s-h-a-l-e-r, but pronounced ‘Ashler.’ No idea where it comes from. Not a local name. I haven’t any idea how to defend her. I’ve racked my brain. Hal and I have discussed it.…”

  “How is Hal?”

  “His leg’s almost healed. He’ll be walking without the crutches or canes before long.”

  “That’s better news than your new acquaintance, Lolly. She does not sound charming.”

  “She sounds like what she is,” sighed Carolyn. “One of your apes would make a better appearance, Jessy.”

  “Well, I’ve seen apes act like that.”

  “Act like what?”

  “Give birth and just walk away. I’ve got some tapes, as a matter of fact.”

  “Why do they do it?”

  “Mostly the ones who do it were reared in isolation from other chimps. You know some of these animal nuts, some people with more money than sense—they see a baby chimp so they buy the baby chimp, and they raise it as they would a human baby. That’s fine until the chimp weighs around eighty or a hundred pounds and is stronger than any human, plus being full of sexual urges. Then suddenly it isn’t fun anymore.”

  “I’ve seen studies about that,” Carolyn mused. “Jessy, any ideas are welcome.”

  “If I have any, I’ll let you know.”

  Carolyn called Ophy.

  “Your client’s incompetent,” opined the doctor.

  “To stand trial?”

  “I wasn’t speaking in a legal sense. I meant she’s reproductively incompetent. I see it quite a bit here in New York, kids thirteen or fourteen getting themselves pregnant, and no more idea what to do with a baby than what to do with themselves. No school, no training, nada, zero, zip.”

  Long silence at the other end of the phone.

  “Carolyn?”

  “I’m here, Ophy. I just got the glimmer of an idea.”

  She called Faye, who was not sympathetic.

  “Hey, girlfriend, don’t tell me your troubles. I think heterosexuality sucks in all its aspects, so I can’t help you with the outcomes.”

  “I’m not asking for help. I’m casting around for ideas.”

  “If I come up with any, I’ll let you know. Right now I’m too busy to think.”

  “What are you working on, Faye?”

  “This damned fountain commission. Or this damned commission for this fountain. Something or other is damned about it. Parts of it are sheer genius, and parts of it are driving me crazy. Right now I’m cutting up babies.”

  “I won’t ask,” said Carolyn, faintly amused.

  “So don’t. Love you,” said Faye, hanging up the phone and returning to her task. She was cutting up babies and children, clay models of them, at any rate. She had more than a dozen little bodies on the table before her, chubby hands and feet, plump little legs, baby mouths and baby faces, African, Asian, European. The leather-dry figures slid neatly through the fine blade of her scroll saw, and as neatly out again, halved, quartered, three-quartered, divided into the parts that would emerge above and within the great wave that poured from the loins of Fecundity.

  Faye laid the baby segments on the worktable, flat sides down, looked up at a shift in the light, and stopped frozen as the bronze figure in the corner moved! She was immobile for only a moment before she caught her breath and laughed weakly at herself. This time it was only the light sifting through the branches of the pine that shaded the studio. The wind blew, the shadows moved. The figure itself was as it had been when she’d moved the screen this morning, motionless beneath a crown of fake laurel and a dusty velvet drapery, props left over from a work Faye had done last year. Someone, perhaps the cleaning woman or Petra, had carefully curved the leaves to fit the shape of Sophy’s face; someone had artfully folded the fabric that flowed from shoulder to floor.

  The figure hadn’t been, wasn’t intended to be, covered. Moved by sudden impulse, Faye wiped her hands down her thighs and jerked the drapery loose in a great billowing cloud of clay dust that descended over the bronze figure in slow motion, as detritus sinks slowly into the sea, bit by bit, making a smooth, uniform layer. The sculpture took no notice but merely stood, as Sophy had often stood, watchful, waiting for things to be explained. As though she could not herself judge any issue until she knew what the rest of them thought about it, making them think exhaustively about things they didn’t want to think about at all.

  Faye fetched a wet cloth from the sink. She mopped the smooth limbs, sloshing water on herself, on the floor, as the clay melted into a thin slip, a matte finish that had to be polished away with another cloth. When she stood back, the remembered Sophy had returned, just as Faye had first resurrected her in one fevered, sleepless span of days, a life-size form, brought into being with no maquette, no studies, not even any sketches. When she’d finished with the figure, she’d fallen onto the studio couch and slept for forty-eight hours. God knows what she’d thought she’d been doing.

  Even the sleep of exhaustion had brought no sense of release, only a feeling of futility at the fragility of the clay—what had Ophy used to call it? Dried mud in extremis? Mere clay hadn’t been enough. She’d hired two men to help her get it into the van. She’d carted it down to Santa Fe and stayed at the farm with Carolyn while the Shidoni Foundry had cast it in bronze. Then she’d brought it home to do the patina herself, hours and hours spent caressing that well-remembered body with fire and acid, highlight and shadow. After she’d done everything she was able to do, she had cried on the bronze shoulder, for it still hadn’t been enough. This was Pygmalion in reverse. She could not bring love to life. She could only memorialize a love already gone.

  The figure had stood in the middle of the studio for months, being cried over, talked to, then worked around. When Faye had needed the floor space, Sophy had been shifted to the corner, behind the model’s screen. Now she stood in the open once more, right hand held out as though sagging under some great weight. Mortality, perhaps. Something Faye was very aware of just now, though she hadn’t purposely modeled the arm in that way, hadn’t even noticed how it sagged until after the figure had been cast.

  Stroking the clay into shape was a kind of necrophilia, Faye supposed, as close as she had ever come to physical contact with Sophy. Sophy, who had never wanted to be touched.

  “But you model for me nude,” Faye had challenged her. “Don’t you worry about my thoughts?”

  “When your hands are in the clay, Faye, you don’t th
ink,” Sophy had announced.

  Which was true. Which had always been true, though Faye hadn’t known it until then.

  “What do I do with you now?” Faye whispered, bracing herself for the usual emotional cocktail: grief, anger, terror—so emulsified as to be gulped down together, all or none.

  It came. And it departed, leaving no answer behind. There had never been an answer, and Faye couldn’t take time to search for one now. The consortium had to be placated, cosseted, sold!

  They wanted, so they had told her over a sumptuous dinner in Paris, an extravagant sculpture to center their new trade plaza; something with European references, with historic ties; something that expressed growth and bounteousness after a time of harshness. Faye had listened to all this with understanding nods, holding her wine consumption to a few cautious sips and keeping her brash irreverence under wraps. God knows, the last half century had been harsh enough. The aftermath of war, the Cold War, the collapse of Communism, and the return of tribal barbarity here and there and everywhere. How did one symbolize or personify European rebirth in such a context?

  There were some on the committee who doubted it could be done and who were forthright enough to have said so during their initial dinner. There was one who was certain it could not be done, certainly not by Faye, though he had waited until after the dinner to come to her privately and tell her so. Herr Straub had advised Faye she was a compromise candidate, not the consortium’s first choice. Herr Straub had also said there had never been a great woman sculptor; Faye’s things were pretty, certainly, but not great. Besides, Herr Straub had said, the artistic tradition of her own people was quite foreign to the European tradition.

  Thus having insulted her womanhood, her artistry, her culture, and her race, he had departed in the self-congratulatory mood of one who had done his duty, however painful, leaving Faye in a mood of grim, though rather frightened, defiance. In that same mood she’d gone hunting for inspiration, gypsying her way across Europe, footsore in Barcelona, weary in Berlin, grudging the fruitless hours spent staring at public monuments, looking for something a woman of color—or any woman—might say to a man like Herr Straub. Uncharacteristically, she had come to doubt herself, to think perhaps Herr Straub was right. Perhaps no woman of any race could capably design a monument to mercantile avarice.