A Fine and Private Place

by Peter S. Beagle

  "Hello." On seeing him approach, she had planned to add something like "Still fighting good fights?" But she also saw the way he walked and the desperate tangibility he strove for that made him look even more unreal, a shape superimposed upon the world, and she said nothing. What can life possibly have been to him, she wondered, that he clings to it so? She felt a bit jealous.

  "Hey, Morgan."

  Michael turned quickly to the raven. "Yes?"

  "Knew I had something to tell you," the raven said. "They set your old lady's trial for August eighth."

  Michael's heart might have skipped a beat here, or pounded like a drum, or raced like a mile runner, or done any of the other things so popular among hearts, except that Michael had no heart now, not even the most smudged carbon of one, nor ever would again.

  "My—old lady?" he asked, slowly and quite foolishly.

  "Sandra." It would have taken a stronger man than Mr. Rebeck to keep his mouth shut. "Your wife, Michael."

  "I know who she is!" Michael shouted at him. He hadn't known he was angry until he answered, and he hadn't meant to shout so loudly. But they were all looking at him.

  "I remember," he said. "What about her?"

  "Saw a couple of papers," the raven said. "All over the front pages. She looks a little worried."

  Michael was thinking about Sandra. He had not thought about her for nearly a week. That is, he had thought about her a good deal, but somewhat in the way one thinks about an aching tooth. It's there, of course, and the sound teeth ache with it in four-part harmony, but it can be lived with and taken as much for granted as all the other parts of daily life. The idea is to keep from touching it with your tongue. And, like the heart and the sphincter muscles, the tongue can be disciplined. It just takes will power and a lot of free time.

  "I didn't even know she'd been arrested," he said to the raven.

  "I'd have told you before, only I don't read the papers much, and then it's just the sports section. They indicted her right after they buried you, and it's probably been front-page stuff since."

  Laura was looking from one to the other of them, frowning slightly. "I don't think I understand."

  The raven favored her with a swift, golden-eyed glance. "Don't feel bad. Nobody does."

  "But why is Michael's wife on trial?" Laura persisted. "What did she do?"

  "Poisoned the hell out of me," Michael said briefly. He did not look at her. "I told you about it."

  "No," Laura said. "No, you didn't."

  "Of course I did. How do you think I got here— overeating? I told you, all right. You just forgot."

  To the raven he went on, "Has she been in jail all this time?"

  "Uh-huh. They don't allow bail for first-degree murder."

  "Sandra in prison," Michael said tentatively. "Odd sound. Is she just going to plead guilty and get it over with?"

  "Can't," said the raven. "Not for first-degree murder. She's got to plead not guilty or they won't play. They got rules, you know, like everybody else."

  "Not guilty!" Michael stared at the bird. "Is that what she's going to tell the jury?"

  The raven scratched at the earth restlessly. "I'm not her lawyer. I just read a couple of papers."

  "Ah, she can't get away with that!" Michael was outraged now. "She poisoned me good and proper."

  "Well, the cops think so," the raven said. "Most of the reporters too. I'll bring you a paper tomorrow. You got a real good press."

  Michael did not seem to hear him. "What can she possibly claim? Accidental death? She'd never get away with it; they'd want to know where she got the poison and how it got into my drink."

  "They found the poison in her dresser or someplace like that," the raven told him. "She says she doesn't know anything about it. Didn't buy it, didn't even know it was in the house."

  "Life is full of surprises."

  "You know it," agreed the raven. He worried an itching leg with his beak. "She's not gonna claim it was accident, though. Not by the papers."

  "What then? An act of God?"

  "No." The raven lunged at another grasshopper and batted it, stunned, to the ground. He took an unconscionable time devouring it, and Michael became impatient.

  "What is it, then?"

  The raven finished the grasshopper and said, "Suicide." Then he hunted through the grass for more insects, because grasshoppers are like peanuts. Nobody eats just one at a time.

  Chapter 7

  They were all looking at Michael. Mr. Rebeck, Laura, the raven—they were all looking at him. He felt as if he had told a joke and they had missed the punchline and were leaning to him, waiting for the kicker, the all-illuminating kicker that is found only in jokes; or as if someone had asked, "How you doing?" and the spring-and-strap arrangement in him that always answered that question for him had rusted and broken and he would never again be able to answer perfunctory questions the way other people did. He hoped that Mr. Rebeck would say something, and then he thought he had better speak to the raven before Mr. Rebeck did say something. So he shook his head slowly to show that he was amazed and more than amazed and he said to the raven, "She says I killed myself?"

  "Uh-huh." The raven had found another grasshopper. "She says you had a nightcap together and you went to bed, and when she woke up, there you were."

  Michael tried not to look at Laura. "That's crazy! Why should I have killed myself?"

  "I'm not your mother," the raven said crossly. "Look, all I know is I read the papers. So here she is and they say did you? She says no. They say ho-ho. So she goes on trial August eighth." He turned to Mr. Rebeck. "I got to pull out. Anything you want me to take?"

  Mr. Rebeck produced a half-pint milk container. "Thank you very much for the sandwich."

  "Pleasure was mine," the raven said. "Also the flying around. See you." His wings began to beat.

  "Wait a minute," Michael said. "Could you find out?"

  "Find out what?"

  "Don't act stupid," Michael said shortly. "About Sandra. What's happening in court. Could you keep an eye on the papers? I'd like to know how the trial's going."

  "Guess so." The raven took off lightly, swung in a long ellipse, and came soaring back over their heads. Skidding on a thin breeze, he banked and banked again, trying to keep within earshot.

  "I'll keep an eye out. Maybe bring back a paper, if I can get one."

  "Thanks," Michael called. And then the raven was gone, flying at right angles to the wind. The milk container swung from his claws, and sometimes he did a sideslip for no reason that Mr. Rebeck could see. But his wings beat easily and strongly, carrying him higher than the trees.

  Michael watched the raven for as long as he could see him, and did not turn even when the bird was out of sight. To his right, he knew, Mr. Rebeck sat and looked at him, with his chin on his fist and his eyes puzzled. He would ask no questions, Michael knew; he would be very polite and wait for Michael to open the subject. And if Michael didn't, he would talk about something else and never mention Sandra again. There might be strain and awkwardness between them for a while, but it would all come from Michael. He would be placed in the uncomfortable position of a man whose privacy is genuinely respected, and he hated Mr. Rebeck a little for it.

  But behind him he could hear Laura's laughter rushing and tumbling in her throat long before it spilled into the space between them, and he spun on her as she laughed and said, "Something's funny?"

  "Everything," Laura said happily. She laughed the way the few ghosts who remember how cry: quietly and incessantly, because there are no tears to dry up, no threats to ache, and no faces to be spoiled. There is nothing really to stop that kind of crying, that kind of laughter, and Michael thought that the slow force of it might bend him until he snapped.

  "Stop it," he said angrily. "She has to plead something."

  Laura kept laughing at him. He looked over at Mr. Rebeck. "She can't plead guilty—and she wouldn't if she could. They'd put her in jail for life."

  Laura stopped
laughing quite suddenly, and where her laughter had been there was the glossy silence that hangs in the air after a train has gone by. "And if they find her guilty now?" she asked.

  But Michael was thinking of Sandra in prison, and he said nothing.

  "They'd kill her," Laura said, "the way they do. It's quite a gamble, if she's guilty."

  Michael still said nothing, and Mr. Rebeck stirred and got up. "Maybe she'd rather be dead," he said slowly. "She might not want to go to prison."

  "Nobody does," Laura said impatiently. "But women don't just throw their lives away like that. Women are real gamblers. They only bet on sure things."

  She looked again at Michael, who would not look at her. "Wouldn't it be funny," she said thoughtfully. "Here we've got Michael Morgan, running back and forth in his grave, stamping his feet, telling everybody he loved life so much that they had to amputate him from it. A murdered man, crying for justice. Everybody within the sound of his voice is suitably impressed." She laughed again. "Me, too. I thought he was a fool, but he howled so loudly and made so much fuss that I began to wonder. And now, after all—"

  "Shut up!" Michael said. "Just shut up. You don't know what you're talking about."

  "And after all," Laura went on, "it turns out that maybe he performed the operation himself. Well, fine. Hurray. Good for him. A consummation devoutly, and so on. You done good, boy."

  "Sandra," Michael said huskily, "I mean Laura, shut up and leave me alone. I didn't kill myself. Before God, I didn't kill myself."

  But Laura's voice skimmed on, not laughing now; even shaking a little, but clear and pitiless, and he could no more stop it than the strongest wire fence can stop the most casual breeze. "And now he's terribly embarrassed about the whole thing. He wants out. He figures if he shouts loud enough, maybe he'll wake himself up." She essayed to laugh again, but the quaver in her voice tripped it up. "God damn you, Michael, for a little while, maybe only a few minutes, you really had me going. You were a symbol of the indestructibility of life or something. A real Greek challenge to death. Man Against The Night. Wherever you go, darling, I'll be with you. Curtain. Everybody files out, uplifted, and the orchestra plays the big tango number from the second act." She sighed. "Oh, well, never mind, Michael. You just locked yourself out, that's all."

  She got up and brushed her hands down the sides of her dress, although no grass clung to it. "Good-by, Mr. Rebeck. Thank you for talking to me. Good-by, Michael." She began to walk away, and sometimes her feet touched the ground and sometimes they didn't.

  "Woman!" Michael's shout bounced, burst, and bloomed inside Mr. Rebeck's head and hurt a little. "Damn and blast it, I didn't kill myself! I had no intention of killing myself. I was too bloody arrogant for suicide. It would have been like murdering God or drawing mustaches all over the Sistine Chapel. Why should I have killed myself? That's what she can't get around, that's what they'll get her on. We had a nightcap, we went to bed, and I woke up dead. That may be indigestion. It's not suicide."

  Laura had stopped walking when he first shouted, but she did not turn. Michael made an abbreviated gesture of head-scratching and said suddenly, "Anyway, my grave is in church ground. I was a Catholic, you know. Not a very good one, but I never left the Church. I think I was too lazy. Would they have buried me here, in hallowed ground, if they thought I'd committed suicide?"

  Then Laura did turn. "I don't know," she said slowly. "I hadn't thought of that."

  Michael took a few steps toward her and stopped. "I didn't kill myself. I know that as well as you can know anything in this place, where all your thoughts crumble and go. It's just not the sort of thing I'd do."

  "As the mother said when her son ran amuck and chopped up two old ladies, a bus driver, and the head of the fire department."

  "No, not like that. Listen to me, Laura. When I was eighteen or twenty, I knew everything except what I wanted. I knew all about people, and poetry, and love, and music, and politics, and baseball, and history, and I played pretty good jazz piano. And then I went traveling, because I felt that I might have missed something and it would be a good idea to learn it before I got my master's degree."

  He smiled a little at the silent Laura and turned slightly to get Mr. Rebeck in too. "And the older I grew, and the farther I traveled, the younger I grew and the less I knew. I could feel it happening to me. I could actually walk down a dirty street and feel all my wisdom slipping away from me, all the things I wrote term papers about. Until finally, before I lost everything, I said, 'All right, I'm sorry. I was young and I had a girl and I didn't know any better. It's not easy to stay properly ignorant. I apologize. Leave me a few things to know, just enough to get home on, and I'll be content with these and not bother anybody. I've learned my lesson. Maybe I'll write a book.'

  "And then the little went too, and I found myself alone in the middle of the world, without a doubt the most stupid man that ever scratched his head. All the things I thought I knew about people, about myself, they were all gone. All I had left was a head full of confusion, and I wasn't even sure what I was confused about. Nothing stayed still. So I said, 'What the hell, I'm a fool,' and that seemed reasonable enough. So I went home and became a teacher."

  "Because you couldn't do anything else?" Laura asked. "I've heard that before. I never really believed it."

  "No, because I felt safe. It was nice being back in college. I knew about colleges. I figured that I'd stay for a while and teach and try to learn a few things. And when I was whole again, and wise, why then I'd be off again to wherever it was I was going.

  "Only I got to like it. I liked it very much. And so I stayed. I compromised, I suppose. You can say that, if you choose. But I felt comfortable, and after a while I felt wise enough to find my way home at night. There were always books to read and plays I hadn't seen, and in the summer Sandra and I—" he caught himself, hesitated, and went on—"we'd drive up to Vermont. I used to write articles during the summers, sort of historical essays. I was going to make a book out of them. And sometimes I'd make up poetry in the bathroom."

  He waited for Laura to say something, but she was silent, and he continued, "So I had something to do, something I'd done, someplace to go, and something to look forward to. That's a reasonable way to live. I enjoyed myself living. I had a good time. How much else can you ask for?"

  "A lot more," Laura said softly, "if you're greedy. I was greedy once."

  "So was I, but that was a long time ago. You're greediest when you're born, and after that it's downhill all the way. Live to be two hundred and you wouldn't demand anything.

  "Live to be two hundred and you couldn't use anything."

  They were looking directly at each other now and paying no attention to Mr. Rebeck. But he leaned against a tree and watched them. He dug his fingernails into the bark of the tree, and little shreds of it came away under his nails. An ant ran over his shoulder and disappeared into a crack in the bark.

  "I'm going to say something a little cruel," Michael said. "I don't mean it that way, but that's how it's going to sound. Do you mind?"

  "What difference does it make? Go on."

  "Well, here you are," Michael began. He tried to cough, but he had forgotten how it felt and it came out as more of a whistle. "I mean, you seem happy. Happier than you were. Or, putting it another way—what I'm getting at is, you didn't have the hell of an exciting life, did you?"

  "No," said Laura. Her smile was too tolerant, Mr. Rebeck thought, too wise, too tout comprendre est tout pardonner. "Not very exciting. Dull, if you like. It doesn't hurt."

  "Well," Michael said. He tried again. "Well, but just the same, you didn't kill yourself, did you? You didn't go running to meet that truck as if it were the mailman—or a lover, for that matter. And when you saw it coming, no matter how bored you were, no matter how damn dull everything was, you tried to save yourself, didn't you?"

  The smile was sliding off Laura's face, like mascara in the rain. She started to say something, but Michael went on, without n
oticing. "You threw yourself away from death, not at it. That's the human instinct. You didn't make it, but that's not the point. The thing is, when it came down to die, yes, or die, no—and you had time to choose—you tried not to die. With less reason to live than a lot of other people, you chose life. Right?" He winked triumphantly at Mr. Rebeck and would have jammed his hands in his pockets except that he had long since forgotten what pockets were like.

  Laura stood quite still. She seemed, Mr. Rebeck thought, a little less sharply outlined than she had been, a little fainter to the eye, a little more wind-colored. She turned away, pivoting on one foot the way a bored child will, and now there was nothing in her moving of the skipped stone or the paper airplane.

  "I don't know," she said. Michael could barely hear her. "No. I wouldn't—I don't know."

  "Let it go, Michael," Mr. Rebeck said under his breath, or perhaps he only thought the words and did not say them. Michael did not seem to hear him at all.

  "You wouldn't have killed yourself," he said. "Oh, I'm sure you thought about it. People think about everything in their lives. But you put it off until morning, and in the morning you had to get up and go to work. People do that. Me too." He made a sweeping, generous gesture with his arms. "But I never found myself alone at the right moment. And neither did you."

  "I don't know, I don't know," Laura said. There was a moment in which she and Michael stood still, poised and waiting but immobile, like weathervanes on a bland summer morning, and Mr. Rebeck leaned against the tree and felt the rough bark under his light shirt and willed them and himself just so forever. Then forever passed and the enchantment expired, and Laura began to run.

  There was no sweep to her flight, and nothing feathered or hoofed about it. She ran like a woman, from the knees down, her hands a little in front of her, and her shoulders slightly stooped. And as she ran she seemed to grow fainter, like a soap bubble blown at the sun.

  Michael shouted her name, but she kept running until the foliage of a cherry tree caught her up. Then he was silent. His right hand kept closing and opening, and he stared at the cherry tree.