Agnes Mallory

by Andrew Klavan

  ‘Gee,’ I said faintly, ‘was it good for you too?’

  She laughed and moaned and sobbed all at once, moving her hands up to cover her face. I started to speak again, anything just to bring her down to earth, but she pulled away from me, unfolded her legs and, climbing off the bed as I called to her, hurried, naked, weeping, out of the room.

  Unsure what to do, I stayed on the bed at first. I tried to listen, over the racket of the downpour, to hear where she was, what she was up to. I figured she’d get herself a beer or something, maybe cry it out alone on the sofa. Maybe go back into the studio and work her feelings off on the wood – that’s what I thought she’d done when I heard the door shutting. But then I heard another noise through the wall – a noise from the bathroom: she was opening the medicine chest in there.

  I threw myself off the bed and got out of the bedroom fast. I grabbed the bathroom doorknob, yanked the door open just as she was screwing the cap off the bottle.

  ‘Don’t do that, Agnes. You don’t need that,’ I said.

  Crying, trembling, she shook about seven tablets into her palm. I stepped forward and grabbed her wrist.

  ‘Let go!’ she said – she practically shrieked it. She tried to pull away, dropping some of the tablets to the floor.

  ‘It’s too many,’ I said. ‘You’ll kill yourself.’

  ‘Let me go.’ But with another sob, she went limp in my grip. She hung her head and cried miserably as the rest of the tablets dropped noiselessly from her hand.

  ‘I mean, that’s crazy,’ I said, feeling awful for her. I tugged the bottle gently from her fingers and set it on the sink. She tilted against me, and I held her, held her up, feeling her tears running into the hair on my chest. ‘What did you expect?’ I said, just to say something. ‘We’re just people here. I mean, what did you expect?’

  After a while, she let me lead her back to bed. She was much calmer, and even lay with her head on my chest, watching her own hand toying with my shoulder. I kissed her hair and petted her and murmured to her, my stomach only slowly untying its knots. I felt good that I’d kept her from taking the pills: I hated the thought of her trashed on that shit, with all her energy gone. And as I lay there, thinking about it now, realizing that our future as a couple was what you might call limited, I began to think that maybe my best bet here – maybe my Purpose, if you will – ‘was to try to talk her into meeting with Roland, and she’d have to be off the pills for that. Maybe if she made some peace with him, I thought, logged some time with her daughter, you know; maybe it would get her out of this depressing eyrie of hers and back into some semblance of a normal, healthy life.

  But thick-skulled as I may have been, other suspicions were beginning to condense as well. It was pretty obvious I’d touched on something more – worse – than till now I’d understood. Working my way so close to her – by virtue of my claims on her past and imagination, by virtue of my love and my lust and my panic and despair – I’d clearly set one toe into the Sea of Bad she held inside. And there was more Bad than I could account for by what I knew of her. More at least than I’d figured on anyway, knowing what I knew.

  I really did want to help her – and I was curious to get the whole story. So, lying there, holding her, warmed by her body against the cold sound of the rain, I conceived my nocturnal project while Agnes sunk away, finally, exhausted, into sleep.

  I didn’t wait there long – less than half an hour. I was afraid the constant rain rhythm would lull me and make me doze. Besides, I’d read somewhere that the earliest part of sleep is the deepest – and I was also afraid she would wake up hungry, because I didn’t think she had eaten all day. So, soon as she started to snore fairly steadily, I slipped out from under her. Tensely, I watched her roll over. I watched her resettle on her other side till she began to snore again. Then, kicking through the clothing that lay strewn around the floor, I moved to the spot where I had thrown her jeans, picked them up, and began going through the pockets.

  The studio keys were there in the right front. I gripped them in my fist as I removed them so they wouldn’t jangle. I went from the room on tiptoe – flinching, bracing, looking back every time the boards creaked underneath me, though I doubt the creaks could have been audible to her over the noise of the rain. At any rate, she still lay quiet when I reached the door. So, steeling myself as best I could, I moved into the other room.

  I’m not, I suspect, particularly courageous – I knew she would find this a terrible betrayal, and the suspense as I reached the studio door was murderous; I nearly gave it up. But I managed to work the key in the lock, and made a great, elaborate, slow business of turning back the bolt. I pushed the door open, slipped in – my plan, at this point, being to take a quick look and then run like anything back to bed.

  I found the light switch on the wall. I flipped it up. I was thinking, God, God, what if she comes in now, what could I say? But the next moment, my thoughts were obliterated by a jolt of surprise – because the room, at first glance, seemed to be empty.

  It was a big rustic room of rough log walls and unfinished floorboards. Sheets lay crumpled here and there along the edges, and there were pencil sketches on newsprint tacked up at eye level all around. There was a jumble of various-sized logs and branches just to the right of me too, with a wicked-looking chain-saw tossed in among them. But nothing else, I thought – until I looked left, and discovered all the rest. Under a rain-splashed skylight in the corner, stood her small worktable. Her chisel pack was unfolded on it and the chisels lay skewed, some in, some out of their pockets. Her mallet had been dropped beside the table’s leg – so much smaller, the mallet, than I’d pictured it. And there was her high stool for sitting at; and a plywood stand with a covering sheet fallen into the woodchips at its base. And atop the stand, alone atop the stand – there stood the one statue; that’s all; just the one.

  Well, that was strange – wasn’t it? – I thought that was strange right away – that there was just the one work in progress. No models, no maquettes, no other works at other stages. Just this one – and it looked so small too, no more than three feet high – less – and so little completed. She was in here chiseling away so much, so many hours. Was she throwing everything into the valley? As I crept closer to it, the screeking boards crying up to the pattering ceiling, I saw that only the face had been finished really. The rest had just the vague shape of a human figure chopped into the surface by a few rude strokes. And then, and finally, these thoughts also were blown away as I came right up to it, as I got my first good look.

  Agnes was right about at least one thing, I’ve noticed: artists, critics – they are always describing their creations in very melodramatic terms: shattering, breathtaking, shocking, revolutionary. Personally, I think it’s just because they lead such boring, solitary lives and need to put some fireworks into them. I mean, everyone dreams of heroics and having a hand in world events and so on, and they spend their lives in their rooms making useless little things. Once I even heard a writer say he wished he lived under a more repressive regime so he could endure the torture and censorship which make art important. I thought he ought to just stick his penis in an electrical outlet to get the feel of it – because none of that really is ever to the point in the end.

  See, I saw that child, her statue, Agnes’s Child of Glory, and it wasn’t a dramatic or shattering thing at all. It was apparent, even at that stage, even to me, that she was getting it right, getting exactly what she wanted, and the effect was one of – I don’t know – a depth of recognition more than anything. It was an impression that met the impression within, like the meadow full of wildflowers or the swimming hole: almost a cliche but revivified by its insistent presence and individuality. Man, I wish I could see it again now, stand before it again – now, I mean, that I know a little, have studied a little, albeit studied in my half-crazed, alchemic efforts to bring the dead woman back to life. But even in my ignorance then, it did finally dawn on me that this exasperating gal o’ mi
ne had been up to something incredible here on her mountain top, was accomplishing something historic even, if out of so repetitive a thing one can make a history of sensation. All fearful of discovery, all keyed for interruption and the incriminating cry as I was, I still looked at her Child, at the barely sculpted face of it, and felt that still, sad hallelujah of release that comes when the substance of great things feared and hoped for is revealed to have been obvious all along.

  It was Lena, I guess – her half-sister Lena – I’m almost sure of it – I mean, wasn’t that what she’d been trying for even as a kid? Lena at the edge of the ravine, at the very end of her life. So young, little more than a toddler, still trailing clouds of glory as it were, but also, somehow, staring with knowledge if without comprehension into her own meaningless destruction. Now too – now that I’ve seen the model for it – I guess it was the other Lena as well, Agnes’s daughter. I didn’t know that at the time, I didn’t even think about it but, sure, I guess that was also part of the point of what she had been doing here.

  Anyway, my reaction to this discovery was almost comically stupid. Well, it was pure resistance at this stage. I had all the facts, I knew everything; it was pure denial that kept me from putting it together. Instead, I went positively radiant with hope and determination. Ho, ho, thought I, a small, rapt smile creasing my idiot features; ho, ho, if I could bring this down! If I could help bring her down with this from the mountaintop, guide her through our love to a happier life creating such things as this, well then, young Harry, my son, my pal, well then, even your scandal, even your selfishness, your unkindness, your very corruption would become mere footnotes in the Book of Art, mere quibbles beside your magnificent contribution – nay lad, next to your salvation, after all!

  This called for a sandwich. Back I tread to the formerly hated door with a last fond glance at the Child – and a quick check to make sure I hadn’t left footprints in any stray sawdust – and touching the lightswitch, I gently shut up the studio, and gently locked it.

  I went to the kitchen and slapped some goat cheese on wheat, and stood at the window chomping away and chuckling in what must have been an hysteria of impossible aspirations. I watched the rainwater streaking the pane, and listened to it spanking the slates of the roof and, hey, it was letting up a little, I fancied. Yes, it was. Oh, how symbolical, I thought, and how right it would be – how perfect, I thought, popping the last of my sandwich in the old gob – how perfect if tomorrow should dawn bright and clear.

  The day dawned bright and clear, all right, the storm finally abating in the last dark hours, the big clouds just blowing over and away as the clang of the woodstove door in the next room woke me. I lay there gathering my thoughts a moment, memories surfacing. I had awakened at one point in the dead of night, I recalled, and found Agnes lying also awake beside me. She’d been staring quietly up at the ceiling, a small, unpleasant smile on her lips; a sneer almost. And I had shuffled close to her and nuzzled against her neck and murmured I loved her as I fell back to sleep. Some hours after, as dawn was coming, I woke again – or became aware, at least, that the rain was stopping. The raucous thwacking at the roof had become a scattered drip-dripping from the eaves and from the trees … What else did I remember? Oh yes: nightmares – I had had nightmares – those came back to me last. Ominous, importunate dreams, full of eager faces staring through inky murk. I suppose my subconscious had been working things out, assembling what I knew. The valley, the routine, the disconnected phone, I have to work, the one statue. They had come back to me in my dreams as whispers, messages, urgent, distant, muffled as if through fog. I closed my eyes, straining to hear them again. If I could make a child … The little clay figures in the stream back home, the baby she had almost drowned, a child of glory … I guess, in my sleep, defences down, I had finally let the whole picture come together because now, as I lay there, casting for my dreams, the facts began to arrange themselves. Agnes’s evening depressions – it occurred to me, as if out of nowhere, that these were glimmers of her better self – her happier, saner self, I mean. Signs that the weight of the love she still could feel, the beauty she still could make had been resurrected, were threatening to overwhelm her grand ambitions and intentions. I ran my two hands up into my hair. Yes. That was right. I understood. And in the morning, she was cheerful – cheerful because she had triumphed again, her intentions, her artistic mission had triumphed again, was marching on. I mean: nuts. What if she was nuts, in other words! Caught in one of those ritual treadmills of insanity like some guy on a street corner arranging buttons in a gutter. Christ! It could have been going on for months. Long before I came: days, weeks, months literally, before I showed up to disturb her. Doing the same thing day after day after day, again and again going into her locked room, chiseling out the same face, the same child, over and over and over until her heart sickened with love, at what she saw as this trial of mere love against her revelation, and then every morning, every fucking morning …

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ I said aloud.

  The clang of the woodstove door.

  I got tangled in the covers as I hurled myself from the bed. Cursing, I ripped them off me, and hurtled, naked, over the bedroom threshold. The peaceful susurration of the stove was deep and chesty. The orange glow around the door sent out blinding spokes of glare. I grabbed the door handle, searing my fingers. Threw the door open and stuck my hand into the blaze.

  ‘Damn it!’ I shouted. ‘God damn it!’

  For a single instant, I had hold of it, even drew it to the edge of the fire. Saw, as through a dancing red glass, the face already shrinking into flaking char. And then I fell back, hissing in pain, gripping my hand to my chest and gritting my teeth as the red flesh blistered. And the thick log shifted back into its bed of ashes and was hidden completely by the unbroken shroud of fire.

  ‘Oh … bah!’ I said. Furious, I stalked back into the bedroom. I yanked my pants off the bed’s footboard, yanked them on, up over my nakedness, barely remembering to push my penis down clear as I yanked the zipper up with another curse.

  I stomped back through the central room with a convulsive sneer at the jolly stove. I kicked the screen door open and stepped out, barefoot, into a muddy puddle up to my cuffs.

  I sloshed to the edge of the Swimhole trail. There was no sign of her.

  ‘Agnes!’ I shouted, clenching both my fists. ‘Agnes!’

  And then, with another harsh expulsion of breath, I threw my hands to my sides in disgust. I shook my head. And then – standing quiet like that – I heard the river.

  Well, I was a city boy. It hadn’t occurred to me – what happens to a river, I mean, after two nights and a day of torrential rains. I suppose I knew in the back of my mind; I suppose I could have answered if someone had asked. But I was a city boy. I just hadn’t thought about it. Not until I stood there, not until I heard that sound.

  I started running. Down the trail – all mud now, mud and puddles and swift rivulets of brown water. I had, I guess, some crazy hope that it was just some sort of aural glitch – that steady bellow rising through the forest to my left – that it was magnified between the banks or something, that it sounded worse than it was. But there was no mistaking the fact of it as I splashed, mudspattered, nearer to its source. The thing was roaring – roaring – like a giant trapped in a pit, that sort of echoing, hollow, interminable roar. I rushed past the turn off to the meadow – I was wheezing for breath – and saw the other turn off up ahead, and the steep forested hill to the river’s edge, now sliding with mud. I saw the river then too, through the trees. Unrecognizable as the river I knew. Half again as wide and twice as high, whipped by tornadoes of frothing white, and the driving current scored atop its surface in long, moving sinews of implacable force.

  I left the trail – before the turn off, I just cut off it and raced into the trees. Immediately, my feet were swept down and out from under me. I dropped hard onto my ass, sliding in the mud, rolling in the mud to find my feet again. Grabbing
hold of tree trunks, I got a few more steps – let go and charged and fell again, forward this time, thudding to the wet earth on my shoulder as the filth sprayed up over my mouth and eyes. Again, I rolled. I grabbed at a tree, and dragged myself up. I worked myself, sliding, to the next tree and the next …

  And already, I was at the edge of the water. It had risen that high, that far into the woods. The sandspit, of course, was gone, was buried under the rushing current. Even the diving rock was wholly covered, and where its extension had been was now a lashing serpent’s tail of green-white spume.

  Agnes stood naked there, on the far side of the rock, with the foam thrown up around her. She stood at the very brink of the forest, at the brink of the water, between two trees. Her green robe was lying in the mud behind her. She was poised to dive and I, braced against a tree twenty yards away, had no chance of reaching her. I suppose I could have shouted – assuming she could have heard me over the river’s roar – but I knew there was no point to it. This was part of the ritual too – this she did after the burning in remembrance and communion – and for all I know the secret motive of the whole business had always lain in the fact that the river would one day rise. If I’d ever had a chance to break the spell, it was probably when she’d taken me along with her to swim here, when she’d allowed me to come that close to the mystery. Maybe I should have ravished her on the beach that day and just hoped like hell she’d love me. I sort of doubt it would have worked like that. Then, after all, she’d been in her pride – and even last night, when the terror struck her, me and my precious dick and my cut-rate humanity had just been things to mourn over and sneer at in the dark; I had nothing near the power of her compulsion.

  So, leaning on the tree, I closed my eyes and said, ‘Aw, Agnes.’ And when I looked again, she dove.

  Maybe she had a moment of comprehension then – because she buckled as she fell, as if to stop herself mid-air, and she plunged into the water sloppily. The current slammed her into the diving rock and the serpentine waves grabbed hold of her and tossed her over. Her body was pulled down beneath the water, her limbs splayed, as if she had no power at all, as if she were a doll or a puppet. But she was still conscious, I think, because she surfaced once in the next second or so, and I saw her chin tilt up and her mouth open as she fought for air. She was facing upriver. The next whirlpool was just behind her. That dragged her under finally, and she was drowned.