I don’t love you at all. But I’m undeniably attracted to you.
Because I’m alive, I guess.
That’s much of it.
Would you ever choose to live with me? I mean, if you couldn’t go home—
You do love to make up stories, don’t you?
So do you, darling! This morning I was rereading one of your old letters—
I told you to destroy them!
Well, I didn’t, because I was in love with you—
But I told you!
I never promised.
Yes you did.
Anyhow, you wrote it exactly a week before my seventeenth birthday (you were always conscientious about dating them, Victoria). You had dreamed you had sleepwalked to the shower, and later you wondered if you had really dreamed it or—
Did you ever show my letters to anybody?
No.
Swear it.
I swear. But what does it matter to you?
Well, it does. It may seem stupid to you—
What’s the longest you’ve cried?
Here? Sometimes I’ve cried for a year or two straight. But I’m enjoying your visits now, even if I occasionally get irritated.
Thank you.
By the way, do you have a best friend?
He’s dead.
Then I might have met him.
No, he’s not at the cemetery.
What’s his name?
Luke.
Of course I don’t know him. Why is he your best friend?
For years he was almost like my older brother. He taught me how to organize weight in my backpack. Whenever anything went wrong in my house, he could usually fix it or tell me how to. There were certain things he didn’t deal with, like leaky roofs or doors out of true. He did a lot for me. When my father was alive, he and my father used to do things for me . . .
It’s good to be sad, said Victoria. That makes you more like me.
Gazing up at the constellated sky, he felt as if he were about to sink into black water which was snowed with cattail-down. It was getting dark earlier nowadays. Carefully he inquired: Can I love you except by being sad about you?
I’ll consider that.
Luke was very wise. He said so many things that I always remember. For instance: Don’t keep making the same mistake. Make a different mistake. And I could talk to him about my love life. When I was younger I used to ask him for advice, and then when he was suffering with Stephanie I wanted to give him advice, just because I loved him and that was something I could give, and sometimes it helped him, or her, but he was more his own man than I was. Now I think I’m becoming more my own man; I don’t know why—
Because you’re dying.
Into his mind came Luke’s assertion that dying could become freedom. Even while he felt relatively well, Luke had begun giving up ever more experiences and aspirations as well as things, in order to die better. But he and Stephanie never had children. That must have made it easier. Victoria had fought death, for her children’s sake.
Luke, to whom trust came hard, had gentled toward him over the years, but until the end, so it seemed, could not help but suspect even this close friend of selfish motives. If he made a date with Luke for lunch, Luke would pick him up at the station—then let fall some grim remark which implied that Luke knew very well that his friend was using him to get a ride. Or he might give Luke a book he had read and liked, in which case Luke might say that it must not have been a good book, or the moon-dreamer would have kept it. As for him to whom Luke had given so many rides over the years, he himself had surely been negligent or ungrateful on occasion; he and Luke had hurt each other every now and then, mostly by saying no. Of the two of them, Luke was more generous with his capabilities, having more; while the moon-dreamer more easily gave away money and possessions to others. What Luke did for his wife—the repaired washing machine and balanced checkbook—often went unnoticed by her; what he blamed her for were her temper and her flightiness. It must have been his cancer which inspired or compelled him into trusting Stephanie. About the cancer Luke once said: What I hate more than anything is throwing up. That must be the reason I got this disease, so that I have to throw up over and over again.— And so it might be argued that the illness refined or at least steeled him, or at least that he could have made a virtue out of his suffering. Not Victoria!
Why are you quiet? Do you need to go?
Victoria, tell me how long I have to live.
I already said I wouldn’t.
But you know?
Of course I do.
If I had a month, I’d live differently than if I had three, or—
And then you’d want to know whether I love you, and what I will and won’t do, and which sort of future we’d have, when I’ve already told you how I feel about futures. That was another reason I left you. You demanded certainty from me. What seventeen-year-old girl can give that?
But you married at twenty-one. Are you glad that you did?
I’m so grateful that I had children.
When we were seventeen, you told me that you might marry for money. You were laughing when you said it—
If I’d lived to be forty I might have had an affair. Maybe with you. But I never would have married you.
Why not?
Because nobody changes very much, so what I disliked in you would have remained. Besides, you wouldn’t have loved me as much as you did before. It’s refreshing to be adored. You’d stop doing that if you knew me—
I don’t adore you now.
Well, that’s not very nice! I’m going now.
Turning away from him, Victoria sank under the grass. The last he saw of her was her beautiful blonde hair.
30
He had forgotten that she had sent him more than one photograph. As he sat in his study that afternoon, too unwell to consider going to the cemetery, he withdrew a letter from his father’s desk; on the back of the envelope she had written amusing enclosures and Inside are pictures!!!!! Lions + tigers, monkeys, cats and zebras and she had drawn a heart dripping two drops and then she had written: If I wrote you in French could you understand it?
For a time he held the letter in his hand, smiling. How many pictures had she sent him, after all? (The more he read, the more she was winning him over.)
She was at the zoo, and her lovely hair was blowing. Perhaps her sister, who might still be alive, and if so perhaps a grandmother, had clicked the shutter. She had lowered her head and closed her eyes when she smiled. In a high-necked white blouse and a paisley skirt, she stood before a giraffe, which cocked its head at her, its neck at a rigid near-horizontal, while she held a small blue balloon at her left breast, clasping her pretty long fingers together across her waist, the string wound around them. This photograph had not decayed so far into the red as the other; the sky was purple, the phony rocks reddish, the animal perhaps a bit more red than brown, but Victoria had barely begun to flush; her hands remained as fair as ever, and her blonde hair scarcely intimated red. He turned it over. On the back she had written that she loved him.
My mother is fine—no complications, no cancer. Help me. I know you are. Love me.
Victoria, he cried out, help me; love me!
No one answered.
31
There remained to him this sweet world of unread letters; perhaps it was better to guard them as if they were the future, rereading only a few; they were his treasures, or possibly the verdict against him. The true horror, much worse than that of the death which already drooled at his shoulder, was the fact of who he had been at seventeen. The reason he had clung like death to Victoria was that hardly anyone else would come near him! In high school he finally began to have friends, for the hormonal allurements at puberty can be so irresistible that we learn to disguise our faults in hopes of losing later rather than soon
er; the shy girl parts her hair over what her mother helpfully assures her is the uglier side of her face; the farmboy takes more showers, and the boy who loved Victoria learned to hide his kinship to ghouls, skeletons and rotting corpses; in his summer nightmares the graves flipped round like lazy susans to fling death in his face! He always woke up smelling it. Years later, when he witnessed death without dreaming, he found that it smelled quite different—more vomity when fresh, more like garbage later on—but the death in his dreams intermittently continued to exude a sulphurous vileness, perhaps because he had once believed in hell, not to mention his own badness; certainly something about him was wrong, and when he was young his schoolmates would tear at him in a frenzy, children scratching at their common scab; he never should have existed at all! Later he disguised this fact; hence women loved him. Was it because he focused the lens of his own so-called love upon pleasuring them, so that, lost to his expert ministrations, they mistook procedure for soul? Give the devil credit; he’d had a knack; even Victoria, his first patient, appeared to enjoy the operation as far as it went. Better yet, he performed it sincerely. But certain natures are born in the shadow. In his first grade art class he was already drawing pictures of lightning-storms, carefully coloring the sky black and purple. Why are some people like that? I repeat: He should never have seen the sunlight. Nor did he mean to see it. When Luke and Raymond departed on that final hike, the reason that the moon-gazer stayed behind was that he’d spoil everything otherwise; he’d never been able to live among others; he slimed over everything he touched! No wonder Victoria fled him! What he should have done upon receipt of his fatal diagnosis was to remember all this, in order to begin to answer the question: Why am I this way? Some creatures are shadow-born, yes, but why? And who are they? Were death oblivion and could he rush into it, like a child darting under the bedclothes at night before the monsters come, then there might be scant interest in hunting this subject, but Victoria’s postmortem consciousness unfortunately proved that avoiding or denying one’s identity is not so easy. Once upon a time there had been that witch who loved him, the one who mixed green potions; why hadn’t he loved her? She knew who he was (he supposed), and even liked it. But Victoria, who rather than being noble was possessed by a selfishness as ordinary, healthy and therefore as good as the movements of her bowels, intuited who he was and knew that she had to get away. He said to himself: To begin to see myself I must diagram the movements of the living ones whom I repel. Death had struck Victoria, shattering her skull and cramming fistfuls of worms inside her brainpan. She had sought to run from death, which had begun with a kiss, sucking those round pale breasts with which he had played in his seventeenth summer, then insinuated itself within the glands, clawing into her armpits, nibbling here and there until her strong young bones were breached—and she screamed, wept, vomited, perhaps prayed or pretended to for the sake of those children to whom she clung as he once had to her; she would have done anything to be selfish and move her bowels a little longer. Now her bowels pulsed with moonlight; to him she was more beautiful than ever. But she had gone over there, to this other man whom she had married. And when he was a child, the other boys, punching him a few times, had then kicked him into his place, which was westward of here, where the moon rose. Had he stayed hidden on the lunar surface (or at least concealed between broken marble urns), no one would have troubled about him—but perhaps the moon was another of those localities which were too good for him. Waiting for the school bus, in one of those winters before Victoria wrote her first note to him, he stood by himself, and then a girl in a ski parka grappled him, having fun, bullying him but also being sexual with him, and of course that excited him; he didn’t know how boldly to grapple her back; it lasted but a moment, and then a strong, healthy boy, who hated cancer, came and punched him in the face. He had never told Victoria, who felt his unwholesomeness anyhow, sure enough. The fact that he later learned to love himself because women loved him is evidence that evil things need not find trouble in continuing to exist.— But why was he evil? It kept coming back to that. Had he asked the other children, and had they been able to articulate their loathing, they might have said: Because you’re different.— And why was he different? Why does the rat seek out putrescent flesh? Rats aren’t evil, are they?
He had just begun to nibble at a can of salmon when his cancer thrust a skeleton hand up his windpipe and his breastbone groaned with pain; no, that was him groaning. For a long while he bent over the sink, struggling to vomit. (If it were only true what the statues of angelic harpists promised: ASLEEP!) Finally the fish came up, streaked with black blood. Eased and exhausted, he lay down on the sofa.
32
In a rage he snatched up another of her unread letters: Now she was the one who demanded to know the future! I always need to know everything for me to be comfortable. She was just like him! Meanwhile he was everything he had disliked in her: suspicious, withholding, prissily critical, even nasty—while the poor girl timidly hoped for his approval, and even worried that she might be bothering him—how could he have not seen it? Again and again she worried that he would leave her; she reread his letters with foolish minuteness comparable to his—she was a darling, really; his badness must have driven her away.
He felt all the more ashamed, not only for having been harsh but also for prying into her heartpourings to her young boy—none of his business! He was an old man eavesdropping on children. So he turned to the letters from the year when she was dying, and read: Are you really such a sweetheart? How could I have not known that about you? You know I don’t want to ask you questions because I don’t want to pry. Do you care if I do? Someday I’ll write you about something—a really vivid memory I have of something we did in high school. You’ll really laugh and kick yourself that you didn’t know what I thought. What right did he have to spy on this doomed married woman and the man with whom she platonically flirted? He was a grime-eaten angel whose stone trumpet was as cracked as his penis.
33
How have I forgotten so much? I was certain I’d never let go any of it. And it hasn’t really been long! Why can’t I remember more? It’s as if my seventeen-year-old Victoria were but a blurry, roughed-out figurine of jeweler’s wax—or a shapeless corpse. I’ll go to her—tonight, and tomorrow night, if I’m well enough. No, I’ll remember her tonight and study the moon map. Those photographs help me at least as much as does visiting her. And if I stay too long at the cemetery I’ll get sicker; I can feel my tumor when I’m there, for some reason. So let me just read her letters once more—not the ones I don’t remember but the ones I’ve come to know again.
Outside the window, his conception of Victoria hovered in the trees like a solitary gall.
34
So much of the loveliness of that summer had had to do with waiting for her; sometimes he met her once a week, occasionally more often. Until their next meeting he had her latest letter to read over and over with desperate happiness.
Shyly, desperately, happily the boy followed the blonde girl with his eyes. He slept with her letters under his pillow. Since she was more a part of her family than he of his, her letters sometimes described her brother and her sister, or her mother’s health. He was never in her home; he never saw her bedroom.
Does old age invariably imagine youth to be a more innocent time? After all, babies keep getting made and grownups keep getting depraved. In any event, he almost never even held her hand. He never passed a night with her; nor was he with her at that moment past dawn when the cicadas begin to stridulate. He did remember meeting her in a park; he had walked and she had ridden her bicycle. The grass was so green around them that the greenness had stained the inside of his skull, although now it was verdigrised, a penny in a skeleton’s hand. He remembered the summer humidity, and her lovely young face; but their time together never exceeded two or three hours, and sometimes she didn’t come as she had promised.
35
Just as Victoria’s no
t yet reread letters lay waiting for him nearly as invitingly as when they had been new—all the more now, perhaps, for the white envelopes had aged ever so delicately to cream, their thirteen-cent stamps were sweetly antique, the writing on them was precious since the hand was dead, never mind the modest yet significant alteration of the English language since then—and the unremembered contents could not affright him more than any page in some old love story (besides, it wouldn’t end until that horrible orange envelope)—so this morning, and the summer world flowing from it, promised him an innocuous sweetness. The dawn was not far gone; the breeze was cool. Feeling less unwell than usual, he decided for that day to live his life instead of Victoria’s.
Behind Hal Murmuracki’s Chapel of Flowers was an abandoned gas station, after which the swamp began. Nobody he knew had gone there. In truth, he was less of an adventurer than Luke or Isaac; he entered the swamp almost as an exercise; had his tumor tortured him as much as usual, he would have been satisfied to be alone in repose, in his bed, his own place; he didn’t need to set out anywhere; he was already suited to being dead. But (so Luke might have said) why not try what did not suit him?
As sky and meadows brightened behind the cool reeds, he felt grateful for the newness of life, and nearly believed himself to be healthy. Happy thoughts of previous women illuminated him in much the same way that morning light jitters back and forth on the spiderwebs between jade reeds; rather than perceiving complete strands, one sees continually altering segments of midair brightness.
When last night’s darkness slinks back into reed-shade, one feels the opportunity to play an important part: Very soon I too will make something of myself; I long to; I expect to; for who could waste this morning light? Before the sun has drunk away everything, I will drink my share from the cool breath of reeds just as I have drunk and will drink again from Victoria’s cool reed-breath . . .— But then, when the light exposes each reed in earnest, leaving only outlines shadowed, disappointment arrives.— Once he had seen the corpse of a young murdered woman who had been looking forward to a party. Not yet autopsied, she lay in her pink dress, with pink ribbons in her hair, her face bloody and yellow; and the stink of excrement from her abdominal wound was the smell of disappointment. Had her dress been alive, it would have wished to fly away from her; it could still be happy and dance. Here lay a woman who had very likely herself been happy sometimes, who had hurried in excitement to her death, and now there was nothing but disillusionment and failure.
Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) Page 69