Bryce's eyes fell on this well-remembered piece of furniture first, and then on the glass-doored bookcase beside it lined with books about jungles and deserts, European castles and rock formations: mute testimonies to the eccentric wanderings of an eclectic mentality that had enjoyed examining information about the far-flung world. As a child Bryce had pored over these volumes and played with the two carved bookends of Mexican boys in sombrero and sarape taking a siesta. Now, their backs against the books, eyes hidden in their arms, the statuettes evaded the dim light that washed over the sparse fur of dust on the glass. Across the room, on a hospital bed close to a window lay his uncle. The blind was down, the sick man resting on his side, the drawn skin over his temples taking on a translucency under the low wattage of the night-table lamp.
Though the sheet was pulled up over Bill's shoulders, there was no denying how the body beneath it had shrunk. A gleam filmed the eye of Bryce's aunt as she got up to greet him. She had been sitting in a chintz-covered armchair wedged in the shadowy corner next to the bookcase. A tall woman, she clasped Bryce by the shoulders, then dropped her red-knuckled hands and wiped them on her apron, her clumsy uncertainty betraying an unsuccessful attempt to conceal her agitation.
When she told him she was glad to see him, Bryce knew her words were meant. Genuinely grateful, he kissed her cheek and let her lead him, her fingers laid on his wrist, thus easing his approach to Bill.
At first, the high, metal-railed bed effectively barred him from Bill who, according to his aunt, was not asleep but just resting after a rough night. "He was so excited to see you," she said in a quavering voice. Wisps of gray hair escaped from her pinned-back bun. Ten years ago, Bryce had seen his uncle stealthily creep up behind his oblivious, chattering wife, remove her hairpins one by one, until he held the heft of her hair in his hands, black-brown and silken enough for the inner threads of a swallow's nest. It had either coarsened when it greyed or perhaps just wasn't brushed. While Bryce inwardly smoothed his voice for speech, he recalled that affectionate act of this seemingly slumbering man.
Later, through reacquaintance, Bryce was to realize that Bill was more attentive than he appeared at this first meeting. He hadn't known for certain what he would find in his uncle's bed—an auburn leaf caught in a cluster of pine needles? Even in August images of autumn already were uppermost in his mind, and he could foresee the ending.
A southern sky had not been sweltering; late summer was "just easing out of itself," was the way Bryce's father described the unseasonable and refreshing coolness, the sun's serene slant in the mornings, the rustling winds already dropping mockernut hickories to the ground. Bryce enjoyed being inland now that he didn't feel trapped, enjoyed Meridian's smallness after massive Manhattan, and, most of all, he enjoyed the matinal chirping of birds against quiet, even if it took only a day or so for the ennui of suburbia to set in.
Bryce had always been good about taking pains, and his appearance in Meridian was carefully contrived. He rose early in the morning and arrived at breakfast in a silk scarf and a custom-made shirt. He found he still fitted in to Southern society, though at an angle, and no one yet blamed him for its being oblique. And if visiting the sick was an act of sacrifice, he got more from Bill's joy in seeing him than he believed he gave. You reap what you sow, his mother had said, but Bryce wasn't sure if he were planting or gathering a harvest.
* * *
After a few days, Bryce visited a public Japanese garden, cited by local citizens as evidence that Meridian was growing cosmopolitan. Meditating on a wooden bridge with carved railings, he stood over a murky green pond. He glimpsed flashes of an immense red-gold carp swimming among the lily pads. Miniature maples flanked a stone pagoda. He crossed the bridge and walked under a cherry tree with weeping branches and a silver-birch-like bark. Was the effect Japanese? Bryce could hear the automobiles on the nearby highway and, on a bench beside his path, a courting couple conversing. Without a doubt he was in Mississippi, and yet he felt no disgust nor disdain nor even a mild dislike. Instead he absorbed the tranquility of a place where people had chosen to live out of the limelight.
Now his perceptions were softened by a sentiment that hinted that he'd end by having an affection for at least some aspects of all that he had once opposed. After all, there was hardly a need of his former contempt if he had escaped. Bryce surprised himself with his regret, mild and bearable, for the person he could never have been, even had he remained in the South.
Though he missed Paul, he didn't call him at first, telling himself that he didn't know what he wanted to say to him. He wasn't sure how to explain the delicate, ambivalent feelings he was experiencing about his past. It had been easier to express his anger and resentment about Mississippi to Paul. Returning to Meridian, he felt his old attitudes undergoing a transition. He was so absorbed in figuring out who he currently was in the context of his family that he didn't know how to put the experience together with the life he'd left behind in Manhattan. Sometimes New York seemed almost like a dream to him, so swept up was he in this Mississippi existence.
He'd realized, before he left, that he'd made Paul angry by not confiding in him. In part, he put off calling Paul because he didn't want to have to justify himself, but after more than a week, he found himself thinking of his lover late one night, and phoned him on an impulse. At first it didn't unnerve Bryce to find no one at home, but after unsuccessful attempts on different days to get in touch, he began to worry.
A bitter taste rose in his thought, a sneaking suspicion he couldn't swallow. In the South he was loved by reason of birth, but no one asked for the benefit of his thought. Bryce missed his and Paul's intimate nonsense, their teasing, their games. Unable to reach Paul, he felt insecure. Still, he gave in to the wish of his dying uncle and extended his stay.
His note posted north was picked up by the porter in his building and placed with the other mail on the table in his foyer. The sealed message read as follows: "Dear Paul, I've tried to call you without success. Mississippi is overwhelming, Manhattan seems far away, I miss you. Will you phone me when you get this? The number's in the address book on my desk. B."
Chapter 6
Paul sat in the back seat behind Jeanne and Althea as they drove to the ferry in Jeanne's Nissan packed full with Althea's belongings. They were leaving Block Island behind. Jeanne was telling them a story about someone she knew, but Paul wasn't listening. He leaned back and closed his eyes. She glimpsed him through the rear-view mirror. Only their arrival at the dock and the appearance of the attendant who was to take her automobile aboard prevented her from letting him see how his inattention had hurt her.
Leavetakers and wellwishers lined the decks and the dock, the smoke-stack belched up grey-black exhaust, and they were off. The ocean surface was wrinkled like battle-green fatigue cloth laid over an extensive scaffold. Althea sat on a bench between Paul and Jeanne on the ferry's upper deck. For as long as she could, she watched the last house visible on the island, fixing her gaze on its windows, like dark unwinking pools, and on its three-gabled roof rising gravely under a sky that was dull with a sun effaced.
A watery division blurred the time between island and mainland. The first buoys appeared in the Connecticut bay. Lobster traps rocked on the wake-whipped water. On narrow knives of land extending into the water or half-hidden behind windbreaks of fir and oak sat immense historical houses, too grandly conceived to be presently kept up to the scale for which their splendor was intended.
No passenger pulling in could help but see a resort given over to darker endeavors, for between the great houses and the grimier town, the olive-green shells of submarines nosed each other. What might suggest from a distance a row of reptiles half submerged in cold water, sunning their spines, wouldn't be taken for fauna close up. A sign advertised New London's foremost product like a message meant to perform a public service; and yet unpleasant premonitions were clearly present on the passengers' riveted faces. Althea found herself watching the people as sear
chingly as she studied the undersea ships. She was a prism separating the vast gloomy light into refrangent rays and waves and points.
At the breakwater the ferry cut its engines, drifted downharbor, pulled gingerly in. Its lines were tossed ashore and made fast. Althea overheard a blond-haired boy's query to his parents as they lined up before they were let off.
"If Adam was first, then what am I?" the child asked, his head, like his inflection, inclined upward.
His tall, blue-jeaned mother didn't respond at once. He tugged her jacket, repeated his question, and she paused before she answered that she didn't know. She looked at her husband, who stretched a smile into a shake of the head and placed his hands affectionately on his boy's shoulders. Aware he was being humored, the son pulled away and ran around the seats and the smokestack. His father had to chase after him while his mother held their place in the line.
Bags at her feet and hands on her hips, Althea shook her hair behind her shoulders in a thick fall. Jeanne was still sitting; Paul leaned against the metal railing. His knuckles discovered the steel's hollowness, a dull vibration that drew forth a muffled echo. There were other stirrings, people gathering up their belongings, admonishing their children, before they were allowed to disembark. Jeanne and Paul and Althea drew together, three friends among a ferry of families.
Again, Paul and Althea were passengers, while Jeanne drove. Car lights and overhanging lamps lit the darkening freeway. The opposite traffic east sent pinwheels of light through the freeway's concrete dividers, like a revolving artillery fire through which they, immune, flung headlong. Althea felt a dissociation grow in her. She seemed to be sliding over the spinning earth. Her hands smoothed the folded roadmap over her knees, its red and blue lines twisted together like arteries and veins, as she watched Jeanne's profile, as Jeanne watched the road for them all.
They had grown quiet as the rhythm of the ride settled into their bones. Paul dozed the drive away in a dream where he saw Bryce's dark eyes and the lustreless pallor of his cheek.
Undaunted by the heavy weekend traffic, Jeanne maneuvered her car. As she accelerated, she experienced brief sensations of free fall that fortunately weren't reflected in an outward loss of control. She conducted them smoothly through the interstate interchanges all the way to Manhattan. It was late when she pulled up to the West Siders' curb. She helped unload Althea's belongings and Paul's bag, and then left, explaining that she was tired, with a big day ahead.
While Paul remained at the curb, watching over their possessions, Althea carefully carried inside her two double-divided portfolios packed with her four paintings in-progress. She didn't want anyone else to handle them. She had speed-dried them in Jeanne's hot, closed car hours before their departure. After she had taken in the portfolios to her apartment, Paul proved enough of a gentleman to help her make two more trips inside, up the one flight of stairs, through a narrow vestibule, and down a short hall. At her door, he handed over the bags, the boxes, and the folded easel. Then he hesitated at her threshold, and when she asked him in, he politely declined.
At first Althea was sad to be left alone to her unpacking. Surprised as always at the compactness her life would have to assume in a single room, she concentrated on putting her things away, and she wasn't sorry when at last she could lie down in bed with Vasari's Lives of the Artists.
* * *
Paul watched Althea's door close over a forlorn face. She hadn't had to speak for him to understand that she didn't want to see him leave. He passed the row of shiny mailboxes, went out the door and down the steps, his hand gliding over the railing, to the street-lit penumbra of a city night. A slender Puerto Rican girl passed him, led by the leashes of two Golden Retrievers. Three boys bounced a tennis ball coated with bright yellow fuzz.
Paul wondered if Bryce was waiting for him, eleven stories closer to the sky, bearing the hurt of his neglect. Pausing to put off a return that frankly scared him, he found himself facing straight down the long aisle of his block. At the end of the block, across the intersection, people and cars crossed in parallel paths as if this were a pasteboard stage with paper dolls pulled across cut-out lines.
Narrowing his eyes, Paul pondered how it was possible for movement to be both smooth and jerky. In the hazy distance the traffic light was a circle of red smoke. He swooned with tiredness, so much did he desire rest in familiar surroundings. His address was a substantial brick building with a heavy wrought-iron door. In the lobby the guard who should have been on duty wasn't present, but the elevator was, and he took it up all the way to the top landing. He unlocked the private door that led to the roof. He could see the outline of the penthouse. Its interior looked dark.
He switched on an outdoor light, crossed the roof, unlocked the door to the penthouse and entered, closing it behind him. He called Bryce's name. No sound came back. He stepped cautiously to the hall. The rooms off it were closeted in darkness. Bryce was gone.
Though he was grateful at not having to face Bryce’s anger, he couldn’t help feeling let down at being left all alone. As he reached for the light, he noticed the stack of mail that the porter had brought in. Letters, brochures, and magazines were all piled indiscriminately together on top of a low bookcase in the hall.
Such a lot of mail, thought Paul. I bet there’s almost nothing that I want.
Setting his bag on the floor, he half-heartedly began to sift through the publications and envelopes. But he wasn’t in the mood to go through the mail or sort it, and soon he abandoned his efforts until another day. Hastily, he rearranged the pile, not noticing, in his carelessness, when a small, thin envelope fell behind the bookcase and soundlessly landed between its four squat legs, on the floor. Bryce’s letter to Paul lay undisturbed under the bookcase, presumably lost.
Next, Paul unlatched the door to the garden and switched on the floodlight. Crimped orange and red dahlias were opened like miniature, intricate paper party decorations, but the roses' petals were fallen and bruised. There were other signs of neglect: in the kitchen garden the herbs and cultivated weeds were ragged and overgrown. Overripe tomatoes, split and fallen, rolled together on the soil.
Paul stood on the rooftop, gazing at his wild garden. He found himself thinking back on the past, recalling a grandfather who had influenced him. He was an idiosyncratic man, an opera singer, who had also performed as a yearly cantor for a Minneapolis synagogue at the High Holy Days. Although a Presbyterian, he was inclined, when moved, to break out in a Hebrew medley. Paul wasn't in the habit of speaking to God, but he took after his grandfather in his desire to be onstage. It seemed to him that dance was how he expressed the mutability of his yearnings.
Abruptly shaking off his reflective mood, he came inside the penthouse, checked the locks on the doors and windows. He reached for the pull to let down a shade, and the long rope slithered across the floor. As if it were alive, it went for his feet. He caught the inanimate rope in his hand, but he never discovered what had sent it twisting after him. The room grew dark except for a slight sheen on the wavy antique mirror. Paul tucked himself in a neatly-made bed. A flower folded up, petals gripping the blind center.
* * *
After leaving her passengers late that evening, Jeanne drove down the Upper West Side and then through midtown. On a whim, she turned off Seventh Avenue in the flower district instead of continuing straight downtown. As she crossed the intersection, she automatically checked that her doors were locked. Her car bumped over the exposed cobbles and she slowed down. It was as if she were proceeding down a tunnel whose lower walls emanated light, for the city sky was starless and the skyscrapers distant enough here not to impinge on the bright band of lit-up display windows on either side through which Jeanne drove.
Some of the windows were empty, the aluminum shelves scrubbed down, waiting to embody the next shipment, while other glass revealed masses of greenery, spikes of gladioli about to open, pom-pom flowers dyed all different colors, heavy painted crockery wound with ivy. Before one store a truc
k was pulled up and men were unloading. So flowers come like this, she thought, in long cardboard boxes, in the middle of the night.
She wondered, What are they packed in to keep them fresh? Are they sheathed in an icy gas to preserve them, like a fairy princess under a spell, until they are delivered into their future? What vanishes as completely as flowers, whose season is not only brief but leaves so little trace of itself?
Except that it becomes something else, the thought occurred to her as she arrived at the corner of Broadway. The flower stores ended across the intersection. There were other wholesale establishments: novelty stores and Indian importers whose displays featured items of brass and cheap cotton. This part of the city was busy in the day and was fled from at night. Now Jeanne felt the strangeness of its stillness, as if it and she were submerged in water. Though she was driving at a steady speed, it seemed that it was the city that was moving and not she.
It was not only place that affected her this way, but time as well. For how long had she been away? Three days? This nocturnal drive through New York was familiar to her, so why, she wondered, did she suddenly feel so shaky and unsure of the way she wanted to go, so uncharacteristically inept? Would her life change because of how she'd spent her weekend?
In the springs of her girlhood that were always becoming more distant, she had eagerly awaited the blossoming of the wild bindweed that grew on a certain hillside in her hometown of Greenwich. She had loved the flowers, like white-pink morning glories. It didn't take much wind to bend them down. She had thought in her childhood that they were the color of the dawn that she was so rarely up in time to see, but that she imagined had more pallor in its sky than a sunset. In a heavy city night past the close of August, Jeanne's vision of that hillside was unclouded, but it was also brief.
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