20
The night grew as dark as a mausoleum’s doorway. Victoria had told him how to find the spot where the Spirit of Progress had updated the cemetery wall into a chainlink fence cut with a hole. Through this he now came and went as he pleased, counting off stone Sphinxes, eagles and doves to avoid getting lost. Sometimes he heard the muffled rhythmic clapping of unseen wings.
My first child was the politest, she said. He never comes here. Of course, if he did, he couldn’t see me. There’s no helpful witch in love with him. How she must hate you!
You haven’t met her, evidently.
Why should I take the trouble? I’m not interested.
But you mentioned her.
Well, I admit to feeling flattered that you used her potion or whatever it was in order to see me! And since you chose me over her, I certainly don’t need to be jealous, do I?
No.
But I think you should go home and live your life. You don’t have much of it left.
Do you know when I’ll die?
Yes, but cross my heart, I’ll never, ever tell you! No one truly wants to know.
How much do you miss your life?
I miss my children. I certainly don’t miss you. I miss my house. I miss—oh, we had an aquarium with a catfish in it that kept swimming madly around, trying to die; I used to go down there in the middle of the night to watch it . . .
And what did you feel?
Now I know I was watching myself, but at the time I just felt amused, the way I used to when I hurt you and you tried to hide it from me; I think I’ve always been a sadist, although I’ve never done anything terrible. Or have I? How terrible was I to you?
I don’t remember.
You see? That’s how it is!
21
He asked about the neighbors, and she said: I don’t particularly like the family next door, because they don’t engage in intellectual discussions; they’d rather give impressions and unanalyzed opinions. Of course, I’m not exactly brilliant myself, so that’s ungracious of me . . .
And who’s on the other side?
That woman is thoroughly unpleasant. All she likes to do is chew the dirt in her grave. Oh, dear, I shouldn’t have told you that, because—
So that’s what happens.
Not to all of us.
What happens to the rest?
Victoria smiled.— Someday I might tell you.
Annoyed and weary, he considered walking away. But then he remembered that his illness caused him to be irritable, just as Luke had been whenever the pain tired him without making him desperate or confused.
As if to further spite him, she added: Actually I like them all. I don’t have anybody else who goes back so far. Certainly not you.
But we’ve known each other forty years.
I think we haven’t. You’d forgotten my name until I wrote you.
No, I hadn’t.
But what kind of memory do you actually have? You think that you remember things, but you’re actually at the point where it all goes away.
Will it come back when I’m dead? Don’t ghosts remember everything?
You’re always fishing for answers. I think we should just agree that I don’t have to tell you anything.
Spoken like a seventeen-year-old girl!
Well, I’m immature. I married at twenty-one so I would never have to have another affair to get what I wanted.
What exactly did you want?
I won’t tell you.
Naturally. Well, did you get what you wanted?
She was silent. Then she said: I hope you’ve found your satisfaction somewhere. If my husband had ever cheated I’d have killed him.
If you mean sexual satisfaction, I don’t aspire to that anymore. I’m dying.
I think you do still have desires.
Well, what a fruitless conversation this is.
Then go home.
So long.
Don’t go. I’m bored here. I’ll apologize if you ask me to. Will you ask me to?
He shook his head, smiling.
At least stay until the moon comes up.
All right.
He lay down in the cool grass, slowly curling in upon his side, weary almost to death, seasick at the dancings of the dandelions. Grass-shadows sawed across his face; he closed his eyes. Was that Victoria stroking his hair, or was it the wind? The spasm departed; he stood up. On the knoll where the nineteenth-century rich were buried, something tall turned away from him. The evening sky remained brightly pale. From the swamplands not far off came the humidity of grape-leaves and oaks.
Are you better? she inquired.
Sure.
Do you want to talk about you or me?
Let’s talk about you.
But we always do. I think we should talk about you.
We’d both rather talk about you.
I can feel the moon coming now.
There it is.
You can only see it, but I can feel it.
Did I ever tell you about that moon map I have?
Which edition is it?
I don’t remember.
I used to have the third edition; for awhile it was over my bed at college. I taped it up the day I left you. Do you mind my telling you that?
Not at all.
How old am I right now?
You know.
In a way I am still seventeen, said Victoria. If I weren’t, you wouldn’t be here. And at seventeen, please understand, I wanted someone to love my mind before my body. I held any boy who showed interest in my body in great disdain. Not that my body’s in very good shape now, as you saw. But my spirit, that’s not so bad, is it?
Your spirit, or ghost, or whatever it is, is very pretty. You look seventeen to me.
If my husband had called me up, I’d look twenty-one.
So he never did cheat? At least I never read his obituary!
I was all he could handle.
Does he have someone or not?
Don’t ask about now.
Why won’t you tell me what you know? The end will be easier for me if I could expect—
It won’t, believe me.
Are you able to haunt your children? Because if you can’t, I’ll go and report what they look like—
No, said the woman in the ground.
Are you afraid?
I’m trying to protect you from understanding, and you just won’t let me—
By the way, I’m not afraid of what anybody looks like. Be a skeleton again if you like; I don’t care.
You’d probably like it. You see, I do remember your poems—
What do you want to be?
Right now? Well, beautiful, of course. And—
You are, Victoria, I promise.
Actually, until you started coming around, it never occurred to me that I could escape some of this horror by pretending. I do like to pretend, because it passes the time.
Then do you want to pretend that you’re still my sweetheart?
Oh, grow up! laughed Victoria.
22
He never felt lonely anymore. Even when she was not thinking of him, she awaited him. Perhaps this should have frightened him, but, after all, he had initiated their reunion of his own desire, and nothing happened except when he wished it to; she could not come to him. He avoided visiting on holidays, lest he meet her family, although he inferred that they no longer paid their respects. When he and Victoria were seventeen, they had needed to get around their parents to arrange their retrospectively innocuous meetings, and this felt nearly the same.
I’ve thought of you all the time and kept quiet, she said. What would you like to hear about tonight? The couple next door, the woman who chews dirt, the sounds that the rats make? Sometimes I think if I can only str
ain my eyes hard enough I’ll be able to see through the darkness; and then I start to see a star or maybe the moon, and then I remember that I don’t have eyes and if I could see anything at all it would only be a maggot crawling across me. I can’t see you and you can’t see me—
Yes I can.
I remember my children over and over, of course. They must be quite different now.
Then you don’t know anyone’s lives. Now I finally know—
I like to tell myself the plots of books I’ve read—
Victoria, how much has dying damaged you? And is there anything good?
It was nauseating. It went on and on until I was semiconscious, and then the pain would wake me up, or I would start hemorrhaging or vomiting, and sometimes my children were standing there crying, not that they understood. I had wanted it to be over, but then when I saw them I panicked again; I was afraid of leaving them without a mother. By then I usually couldn’t speak to them, or if I did it hardly made sense. And the morphine made the nausea worse, or maybe it caused it; I don’t remember. And . . . Did you ever live in Baltimore? I managed a whole year there, across the street from a funeral parlor, before I got married. The man next door beat his wife every Friday night.
No, I never—
I want you to go there and see if that’s still going on, said the ghost. I’ll give you the address. Because it’s getting to be an effort to hold onto everything. Does that answer your question?
I’m not sure.
Then I’ll tell you a little more, since I’m the only one you’ve kept up with who’s gone through it. At first you can’t do anything but fight it; you keep trying to protect yourself against further injury and agony and degradation. The first day they gave me chemo, they put the needle in, and I started vomiting right there at the hospital. I vomited for four days straight; my husband almost went mad. I lived for almost two years after that, although for awhile I did get better, but that was just the beginning. You feel that it’s unbearable, but you have to bear it. Then it gets worse, and then much worse. You go into shock, but somehow you still know that this truly is unbearable, and you’re getting so hurt now that nothing can fix you. Then you start breaking into pieces. It’s like that point in childbirth when you realize you have no control and you’re irrelevant. Some people never come back together; they go straightaway into the same condition as that lady next to me who can’t do anything except chew on dirt. But for me . . . well, after a long time my pieces flowed back together like mercury. I think that all of me is back, but I don’t know. What do you think? Tell me! I can’t ask anyone else. Do you think any part of me is missing?
No.
You’re not just saying that? Promise—
I promise. To me you seem the same.
You know, dying hurt so much that for a long time I kept expecting to keep hurting. And at first I was changing so quickly, but now . . . How long have I been dead?
Thirteen years, I think. Well, let me read your—
You mean you don’t know?
How would I? You didn’t exactly tell me! And I didn’t ask your husband. But I always read your headstone when I visit you. What does it say now? It’s so dark. Anyway, when it comes to arithmetic—
That’s right. I always got better grades than you.
That must have been one of the reasons you looked down on me.
Of course! But I don’t now. You’re so nice to come here, especially at night. I’m getting used to not having anything.
I can imagine.
But when I was getting chemotherapy, I learned to like having no hair.
Such beautiful hair . . .
Not having to toss it out of my face . . . My eyes seemed larger and more intense. That was nice. But it was humbling, of course, and being in the ground is so much worse. Did you know that lovers often come here at night?
I’m not surprised. After all, he remarked bitterly, here I am, with you.
Disregarding this, she said: When I see a very female female, with cleavage and long hair, flirting with somebody at the side of my grave, it makes me sad. Last summer, or maybe the summer before, a couple made love on top of me, and I was a little titillated, but mostly I was angry. At them. For being alive and showing me no consideration. But why should they?
You can flirt with me.
I did just now, a little. But I don’t feel anything.
You never did, with me.
That’s true. How stupid that you’re the only one of us two who cares! Or do you? Aren’t you just going through the motions?
Aren’t we both?
Look, I’m not with anyone! Certainly not with you. The way you act toward me reminds me of how it was when the baby was crying or my husband wanted me back the way I used to be. Believe it or not, I have no desire to feel sexy. I’d rather feel alive. I’d like to heave this marble slab off my chest and breathe! I—
Victoria?
What is it? Oh, is it time for you to leave? Well, goodbye.
Victoria, do you want me to get you out of here?
You asked me that.
But if I—
And put me where?
Maybe in a fancy flowerpot. We can grow whatever you like on top of you, some black roses or—
Let me think about that. I like making you come to me. Maybe that’s the best I can expect now.
I’m not feeling well. I’m going home.
Run along then, said Victoria, and he almost hated her. At least this was not the same misery she had caused him when he was seventeen.
23
Of course their doings had not brought him misery alone; that was why he remembered her so fondly, or gratefully, or something. They had kissed and caressed several times, and once it went farther. He remembered her in his bedroom on that summer afternoon—where had his parents been?—and they had drawn the curtains. She stood nude before him, the blonde locks licking down around her nipples as she smiled unreadably, doubtless prepared to withdraw herself at any juncture, as was her right; and he fell to his knees, burying his face in her bright blonde crotch. Then somehow she was in his bed with her legs open. It was his first time, although from what she later intimated, perhaps simply to push him away, it might not have been hers; he’d neglected or declined to ask, as was his policy on so many subjects. So he adored her, and it was all perfect. He would have given anything to keep it from ending. It did, and Victoria, triumphant, alarmed or simply cool, dressed and rapidly departed; he was not to call her without further instructions. That was the day of his great joy. Not until he was twenty-one did he penetrate a woman; but what Victoria had allowed him was no less intimate than that. That was his glory; she was forever his, at least in a certain seventeen-year-old kind of way. And in the painfully lovely brightness of his last summer, Victoria was whispering to him almost like the wind, or perhaps like a rotten tree rocking in the wind. She had opened her legs, and then . . . His belly ached. In the west, two silver dragon-continents faced off upon the moon’s yellow disk, the sky’s red gashes bleeding orange and a pair of raptors taking wing—dew on every railing and plaque, and outside the wall and across the street, doorknobs and porches wet in the country of the living.— Victoria said: When I was seventeen and I got a sunburn, I liked it because it made the hidden me look so white . . .— And his old penis nearly stirred, to remember her white parts. She had been like the moon, or like a concert singer’s voice alone in the darkness, living and altering. He seemed to recall her sitting at the next table at the high school library, turned slightly away from him as she studied for her chemistry test, her handsome legs bare above the knee, the creases behind her knees calling upon him to lick them, her plump, pale buttocks, which he was to see and touch only that once, announcing themselves to him within the paisley dress, her arms alive with pinkness, her hair a brilliant straw-blonde: all these attributes were hers; this was her, but, bein
g seventeen, he never thought to inquire what else might be her. And her breast, or some other woman’s, green and hard in his mind as a half-made acorn, it dazzled him, as when one has sat in the sun too long and wishes to pass into the shade. Then came that maddening tenderness in his sides, nausea in his throat, and he forgot to breathe when he saw her.
24
In high school they took mostly different classes; she nearly might as well have been IN MANSIONS ABOVE. They used to pass in the hall, and exchanged notes. Who would have supposed that this beautiful girl named Victoria would actually write to him? He knew he would keep her letters forever.
25
What might he keep of her now? Had his life-horizon continued to roll indefinitely forward, like a planet’s so called “terminator” where night gives way to dawn, then he might have wished, “forsaking all others” as the wedding vow put it, to lead her past the ruined angel whose marble hands would never come unclasped, then through the gate, for he most certainly lacked any wish to dwell here with her, eating dirt—but the rules have little to do with our wishes. Nor, it seemed, did Victoria yearn to abide with him. Wouldn’t she rather flitter around her abandoned children? And why shouldn’t she? Wouldn’t that be the best, most loving thing, to reincorporate her with them? But if that wasn’t practical, and if Victoria grew fonder of him, and therefore he of her, and could he but live aboveground awhile longer—or for that matter dwell in death with her—where should they abide? In the years when Luke and his wife used to quarrel, they had maintained separate residences, she not being above locking him out of the bedroom in the middle of the night, for which cause he discouraged her from selling her place and moving into the house whose mortgage he had finally almost paid off—what if she evicted him from his own bedroom? When his last illness softened their wills, they removed to a new home, where indeed they must have lived happily ever after, for the widow still remained there. At this stage what could one hope for but the mitigation of loneliness? He had to confess, it hurt his heart to think upon Victoria lying alone down there in the dirt, forever, no matter what she said about the neighbors. For all he knew, they might be one of her sad caprices, and whenever he quitted her she lay isolated and helpless, spinning out her skein of inventions just to kill more years and hours. The way she spoke mainly of herself, and then so inexactly (one shouldn’t say evasively), conveyed nothing. He pitied her for being dead. Goodhearted, thinking merely to save her, in much the same way that Isaac ought to have rescued him from his needs and griefs, he sometimes, as you know, imagined carrying her far away from both their pasts—for example, to the moon, which might be the place to which her neighbor’s tomb was referring when it asserted: IN MANSIONS ABOVE. In one of her letters from when they were seventeen, she had written: I am what I pretend to be. Do pretend, Victoria. Come to the moon with me; pretend away.
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