People smilingly refer to “puppy love,” for most of us do pass through it. Considered as a stage of character formation, it becomes innocuous, necessary. In its throes, of course, sufferers perceive it differently. His passion for Victoria had been absurdly noble. He accepted any negligence from her, even cruelty, without complaint; and while an onlooker might have been functionally correct to posit in this the desperate resignation of a lonely, unloved, self-despising adolescent, all the same, the boy did love her with all his best impulses. Yes, he lusted after her, as well he should have; certainly his infatuation remained nearly unencumbered by self-knowledge, let alone any comprehension of the girl herself; but it is touching and commendable as well as laughable that he would have done anything for her. And when she ended it, he imagined in his grief that he would never again be able to give himself to another as utterly as he had to her. In fact, as was proved by all those other letters in his desk drawer, he managed quite well—but had he done any better than manage? In the sensitivities of children—to raised voices, violence against animals, the softness of grass—there lies, if not wisdom, an empathy, which it is one of maturation’s express purposes to blunt. So our smiles when puppy love gets mentioned are not entirely mocking; we remember when we were better. For a year or two, until he forgot her more thoroughly, he was pleased to blame Victoria for the ever increasing selfishness which he deployed in his romances. Irregularly bright glades of memories, hedged in as if by marshes or poison oak, comprised most of what he had left of her. In the arms of subsequent lovers he orbited over the Marsh of Mists, then the Marsh of Epidemics, the Marsh of Decay, round and round, and it seemed that the future would always be peach-colored like the June sky at sunset. By the time he was middle-aged, he and his male friends agreed that it was a fine thing to know exactly what one desires in life, and to demand it of each night-companion (ghosts rising up like angry bluejays at dawn). They convinced themselves that the young women who in truth had no more use for them than for their worn out grandfathers would have constituted annoyances, because, being young, the women must not have figured themselves out. Oh, how fine to have oneself figured out! To be an adventurer in a mystery, asking for nothing, speeding through space toward the silver-goldness of the Lunar Alps, and seeing for the very first time a round dark crater (Victoria’s navel) aglow along part of its circumference, and otherwise shadowed—to bear happy hopes of knowing the Rhipaean Mountains, the Rheita Valley, the Sirsalis Rille, when knowing them would actually be above our capacity, or else be death—to experience each moment with Victoria as so perfect that its recollection fills up the darkest separations from her—to feel dizzy at the first sound of her voice—how preposterous! So he locked her letters away and mislaid the key.
6
Just then it was enough simply to lay out those two large envelopes on his desk. He sat there with his right hand on them until the doorbell rang. His next door neighbor had offered to drive him to the hospital.
At some point we ought to discuss palliative care, said the doctor.
Don’t worry about it, he replied. I have guns.
For an instant the doctor appeared offended. Then he drummed his index finger rapidly on his knee and said: Have you ever tried antidepressants?
The neighbor drove him home, and he thanked her. Another neighbor whom he barely knew had sent him flowers. That must mean that he would die. He smiled, thinking of Victoria’s letters. The evening sky glowed white, and the scent of jasmines descended upon him. All at once he grew rich in hopes and projects. But when he went upstairs, all he looked at was his moon map. Then he lay down.
That night he dreamed that in his father’s desk were two drawers which somehow also existed as doorways. One of them had always given onto sunlight before; now its interior was nearly as dark as the lunar seas, which are really lava. The other, which had been dark, seemed to have taken on depth and luster, like an attic filled with someone else’s dust-gilded toys.
7
From the fat envelope he first drew by chance that letter from thirty-five years ago when with her typical self-fullness she called herself lonelier than an angel must feel. What am I doing? And I feel rebellious. I want to disagree with everything you said in your letter and I want to escape the caresses. I want to be left alone. But he couldn’t take that hint, not in those days when he had no one else. Thank goodness he’d since been given love by others! His memories of them resembled lichen on the shoulders of a semilegible gravestone.
Having forgotten her for so long, he had evidently attached to her a spurious sweetness; and as he continued to pick through those envelopes, each with its thirteen-cent stamp, he grew melancholy, although not overmuch, to see how greatly she had resented and sought to escape him, in part because he had not been a wholesome giving sort, but also because she had been, as she kept saying, restless, almost as if she sensed she would die young. If anything, it was to her credit that under the circumstances she sent him so many letters—although she might have done so simply because she had not known herself—or been instilled with a habit of polite kindness . . . How could he even remember her, especially when he had never known her? Calling her up now was equivalent to imagining how it would have been on the moon when the so-called planetesimals were striking, exploding and cratering.
Scratching his grey cheeks, he found himself even less convinced that he liked this dead young woman. Of course, he barely liked himself now (never mind that he’d indulged himself unfailingly); so what would he have felt for that skinny, acne’d teenager who offered Victoria so little beyond his need—and, of course, that most undervalued of treasures, unsullied adoration? Isn’t that what we want others to feel for us, even while experience renders us incapable of giving it to them?
Well, even nowadays he considered himself less selfish than some. For instance, he had never loved any woman the less for being plain; that remained to his credit. All the same, how lovely Victoria had been!
8
In the drawer there were photographs and faintly scented hairclasps, withered flowers pressed within small folded squares of watercolor paper, photographs of women’s faces and bodies, single earrings, half-rings and other such love tokens, postcards from unforgotten Asian prostitutes (he still imagined that he never forgot anybody), a tiny wax-sealed bottle which contained green liquid, happy letters, beseeching ones and ones which promised or sweetly commanded (he had already destroyed most of the angry ones), roots and nests of memory all in a mucky tangle, living in the decaying matrix of too many years—and, yes, back at the very bottom again, hence appropriate to Victoria, the fat envelope and the thin one. The fat one held the letters from when they were seventeen, each one in its original envelope, the righthand side of which had been carefully, reverently slit open by the idolatrous boy. Yes, thirteen-cent butterfly stamps! Had life truly been so inexpensive in 1977?
The thin envelope contained their early middle age, when she had decided to reestablish contact with him. He had opened these communications almost carelessly, discarding the envelopes. By then it had not been such a thrill to receive letters from a woman—particularly from one who had jilted him. As might be expected, the papers were in no kind of order. They now seemed as bright as sun-caught dust-grains on a spiderweb over dark ivy. He took up a pink sheet of paper and read: I know I said I wouldn’t write. Evidently, like Isaac, she had broken off with him again; he couldn’t remember. Well, she was married. He had been mildly surprised and pleased to hear from her at all. In those days they each sought to respect the lives they had made. I lied, said the letter. I’ve just been told that I have invasive breast cancer and will have a mastectomy and removal of the lymph nodes within the week. I am scared to death. I have three small children, one almost five, a three-year-old and the baby is ten months. I cannot believe this is happening. I am not vain; I do not care about my chest, but I want to live. Do you believe in God? I’ll have radiation and chemotherapy. So, tell me. Th
is fear, I can smell it, is it like being in war? What do you read when you are afraid? You don’t have to write; you don’t even know me, nor I you, and as I said before, my husband would hate this. But I still need to write it. If I figure out why, I’ll explain someday.
In another yellowing envelope with a thirteen-cent Liberty Bell stamp and a 1977 postmark lay a cheap machine print whose color had shifted redwards. His smiling blonde Victoria, clasping her hands across the waistline of her leopard print skirt, holding a blue balloon (on the reverse she’d written always the child) was now almost a redhead. The shadows of the park had gone plum and winelike. Victoria stood flushing as if she were drunk, embarrassed or filled with desire for him to whom she had given this portrait. She was still a virgin then, at least so far as he knew. The blue sky had darkened; the balloon’s shadows were purple. When he saw this photograph now, it meant more to him than before. She had sent it to him, so he had supposed, as a halfhearted appeasement; doubtless he had been hounding her for a picture, and on the back she had also penned Well, I’ll do better but please accept this anyway. Doing better would have in his seventeen-year-old definition entailed writing: I love you. Well, why should she? Being young, she possessed the pleasure of declining to define herself. And she hadn’t loved him, or if she had, it meant nothing in the end. Cocking her head, tossing her breast-length hair, Victoria smiled widely at him from the wine-rich past.
It was in fact a treasure that she had given him. No one else would ever get another from her. Unaware of her own death and his elderly ugliness, the girl offered him her bare knees, and the wind pulled her balloon eternally away. It looked to have been spring; the trees were barely in leaf. At whom was she smiling, and why? He had never thought to ask. With his now characteristic resentful suspicion he unfolded the accompanying letter, whose cheap white paper had shifted nearly orange, and read: I think I’m going to miss you. Our relationship is different now, but I feel happier about it—because I was gone, he thought. My sister and I are expanding our minds by watching Rebel Without a Cause on television. I hope it ends soon. I hope you hold at least fond memories of this place and me and semi-dormant expectations. Needing you again does not totally please me—I think you realized that. Is there anything you don’t realize about me? If there is, I fear distance can only make it easier to see. Please keep your promise. When you decide to break it, please give me a little time and notice. Will I suffer withdrawal symptoms? Love, Victoria.
So she had loved him, at least on that day. What more could he have asked for?
9
And once upon a time a certain witch had loved him, too. As one might expect, she was passionate; there was no end to the things she could do in bed. In his memories she resembled the silvergold disk of the evening sun in a wall of wild grapes. Although he had enjoyed her body, she otherwise bored and occasionally frightened him, whereas he had been the love of her life. She had risen up as if out of the ground to seize hold of him, jealous of every instant that he failed to inhale her breath. He never comprehended why she loved him; nor could she understand why she remained unloved by him.— It’s not simple chemistry, said the witch. If that’s all it were, I could fix that with two potions. What’s your astrological sign?
He told her.
Oh, said the witch. Well, no wonder.
Indeed, she could have made him love her, through much the same procedure as the one through which an impure tomb-spirit may be tricked into inhabiting another dead carcass. To her credit, she did not want that.
One morning she went away. Her parting gift was a tiny bottle of green liquid. She said to him: This can be used only once. If you pour it out on something belonging to a woman, the woman will appear before you.
He thanked her.
She gave him a locket whose window disclosed a many-fingered glob of mercury. For years she had worn it between her breasts. She said: Pour out the bottle on this, and I’ll instantly return to you.
I understand, he said.
Don’t call me back unless you want me. Otherwise it will hurt me too much. Do you promise?
I promise.
You’ll use it for some other girl, I know. You don’t care about me.
Of course I care about you. I love you—
Then marry me.
No.
Please, why can’t you love me?
I don’t know.
Is it because I’m old?
You’re not old.
What is it about me? wept the witch. Nobody loves me.
I love you.
Goodbye, said the witch, and walked away without looking back.
10
He lay awake in the darkness thinking about Victoria until it began to seem as if she were thinking about him. His stomach hurt. He rose and visited the bathroom. In the mirror by the medicine cabinet, he saw the specter of himself, unshaven, pale, grimacing and bewildered, with dark hollows under his eyes. How could this be him? He tried to smooth down his sweaty grey hair, swallowed two antacids and three pain pills, and returned to the darkness. Now he could nearly see Victoria standing over him in midair. She too was thinner than formerly, but no less beautiful. Her long hair, which he had remembered as sunny yellow, now appeared silver-white like lunar beams—not grey like his, but as young as ever. He was neither ecstatic nor afraid. A slow joy settled upon him, as if she were bending over him, tossing her hair upon his chest.
11
He knew that a wall of agony awaited him; he was already in its shadow. Above swam the pitted moon; below hung a pale gall alone in an oak. Of course this had little to do with Victoria, who might indeed distract him from his impending appointment with the wall, which for some reason he began to imagine as pertaining to an old-fashioned New England churchyard. He had never visited her grave, and in fact had scarcely wondered where she was buried. A quarter-hour on the computer sufficed for that: West Laurel Hill, near the edge of town. A map appeared on his screen. He zoomed in and in, until the site had minutely located itself.
The grand trees behind the entrance arch recalled a trifle of the verdancy which framed our great nineteenth-century mausoleums, supposedly forever. The hill which once looked down on forest, church, field and brook, warning off colored people and Jews, was now an uninspired slope of homogeneous late-twentieth-century slabs. The great stele of every rich man was ringed round—at a distance, to be sure—by granite footnotes to the poor, many of which flew miniature American flags. It was late afternoon. His stomach ached. A bird-shadow sped over the breathless grass, whose scent resembled cured tobacco. Each tombstone’s zone of shade had contracted, hiding all but snout or whiskers under the cracked plinth. Now he passed through another wealthy old section. Bemused by those dishonest arched doorways which looked from hillsides, as if the dead could see out and the living were invited within, he remembered his dream of his father’s desk. Bypassing two marble cornucopias which had been gnawed at by automobile exhaust, he arrived at the new section containing Victoria’s hill—more precisely, a modest mound whose crest alone had been sold by the time the twentieth century began. He sorted through the lesser bric-a-brac of modern tombs. In a thicket of stair-plinthed granite crosses, square slabs, gravestones which epitomized the negative spaces cut out of archways, he presently found a monument to Mrs. Emilia Woodruff, who lay SAFE IN HER SAVIOUR’S ARMS, and beside her rotted Victoria.
She had sent him another photograph; the baby, who sat in her lap, wearing a plaid skirt, must have been about ten months. What if he and Victoria had had children? He remembered her eidetically from the time when she had been his sweetheart. In this family photograph (already time-stained on the back—a blotchy scarlet like some rare lichen), she failed to resemble the girl he had loved. Her blonde hair had thinned a trifle and taken on a reddish tint—the color of the three children’s hair. Although she had lost her baby fat, her face remained unwrinkled. Had she owned so many freckles at s
eventeen? She was smiling, and he liked her cheekbones very much. He assumed the person at whom she was smiling to be her husband. She and the children were sitting on the steps of a suburban house, evidently gazing into the sun, because she was squinting, as was the middle child, who was grimacing, clutching his toy spaceship. The baby was clenching her fat white little fists, staring sideways at the eldest boy, whose eyes were also narrowed against the light but was seeking in sweet submission to look into the photographer’s eyes. Victoria’s expression could have been read as happiness or compliance. She wore green. With the infant on her lap and the two others on either side of her, drawn in by her pleasantly pale hands, she concealed most of her body from him in this image, which no doubt she had chosen for just that reason; she had stepped out on her husband, but innocuously, careful to assert her familial self. Had the husband discovered who had received this photograph, he could at least have told himself that Victoria was not alone in it; moreover, her collar came up nearly to her chin. She wore white crescent earrings. No, she did look happy! She was the center of a young, healthy and prosperous family. Now she was a skeleton, or ashes. You will not be aware of this, said another letter, but it is the anniversary of my mastectomy and I am supposed to be happy that I survived and all of that.
Now with the mourners and other regular people gone, the front gate locked, the crows returned to the cemetery grass, watching him sidelong through their metallic ring-eyes. In case there might be a watchman, he hid inside the bell-cupola of the Bartlett mausoleum. The moon emerged suddenly, much as illnesses, realizations and heartbreaks so often do; so that it was now time to call up Victoria. How welcoming would she be? Sometimes in that last year he used to telephone Luke to see how well he was enduring, imagining that he was performing some virtuous duty, only to discover that Luke was bored with talking, or with him. Why shouldn’t this be worse?
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