Towards dawn he drifted off, and he dozed through the morning. In the afternoon he shut himself away in the studio that Bryce had had built for him. For dance to emerge, the body must be patient, he thought. As he bent to the barre and began his warm-up exercises, he felt his thoughts draining away.
There he was in the looking glass; he was all the life there was in the room, and he more than made up for it. He couldn't take his eyes off himself. The mirror was at once Paul's muse and his malediction. He wondered if he was cursed to dance his best for his reflection. In the dusty room Paul saw himself move in the mirror and it seemed his body was speaking to him. He felt a tenderness for himself that was so terrible it was like an affliction. It seemed it would undo him, yet he danced and danced until he felt in this concert of movement, with the recorded music swelling in him like breath, an infusion of new energy.
It was as miraculous as an angelic aura, and it seemed as if it were what he was made for. When he was dancing like this with the flow of energy effortless through him, he felt as if he could go on forever and go farther, as if he were as elemental as weather. In the midst of a movement, he felt the power in his own presence with a fine intensity even as he found in his own reflection something to yearn for.
Transfixed in his transformations, Paul in his euphoria felt the mantle of immortality. This blessing, however brief, was his most magnificent encouragement. He danced not so much with a single mind as with a dissolved one. The rapture swelled in him, and he felt powerless before his own strength. Afterwards his body ached.
Ballet was in his background, but it was not his forte. The classical line and the grand companies' hierarchies were restraints too binding for his personality. He carried himself through off-balanced positions as happily as through the traditional ones. The repertoires of the two companies he was currently appearing with were in the classical-modern tradition, but their styles were quite distinct. Adapting to each was an enjoyable challenge. It was his nature not to resist an influence, but he wondered which of these days might bring such a singular, arresting event that it changed his life for good.
That possibility chilled him as it attracted him. It was as if he were gradually readying himself, but he didn't know what for. It happened first in ways he couldn't fathom although he bore witness to the effects. His equilibrium was being disturbed; he felt the pull without knowing what was behind it.
* * *
On a beautiful blue Sunday a week later, Paul stood on his roof. The trees below in the park were barely tinged with autumn color. Holding binoculars over eyes shadowed by sleeplessness, he watched migrating geese follow the Hudson south to the sea. He wondered if they kept to the coastline afterwards. The distant dark V's of their flight impressed him as a pattern conveying loss.
It was as if something were streaming out of him and gone with the birds across the sky. The realization of the loss made him feel paradoxically full; he was brimming with sorrow. A dormant fear was touched awake in him by the fleeing, beating wings, a fear that had always been there, despite the colored spotlights and the sensuous music, of emptiness, of darkness, of inevitable loneliness. He had assumed he could remain indifferent to virtues he hadn't possessed because of those he had, but this practice, over so long a period, had flawed his self-knowledge and made a stain where a light should be.
While he had danced in the public gaze, secret shadows had met in him and formed dark crossings. Uncertainty was plaguing him. Under the high light of day, he felt threatened by something he couldn't even put his finger on, but only knew it was internal. Had it been otherwise, had he known what haunted him, Paul would not have spent his September on the edges of dreams, or in lonely physical disciplines and the vagrancies of his mind.
From childhood on he had been aware that others disapproved of his nonconformities, but he felt fortunate in that no one had ever really tried to hold him back. Someone, perhaps, might have been able to once, but not any longer. Now what hurt Paul and made him feel unable came from within himself.
The geese had gone. Paul laid Bryce's binoculars down on the glass-topped table. He felt remote from himself. He wondered if he no longer had qualms about the use he was making of Bryce's possessions or his money. Perhaps his advantages had become a habit too hard to break, even while he didn't want to have to answer for them.
First he was to feel, then he knew, that a cost was extracted from him all the same.
The pump was working in the fountain, and spurts of water were jetting up, curving over. The splashing made a pleasant sound, and Paul moved closer. The sun glistened on the pool's altering surface; the small fish swimming underneath glittered like gold flags. Although in the sky a migration had passed like a warning shadow, the sun was still high and warm, and the air as soft as the distant, rounded, feathery clouds. From high up on the roof, Paul felt the billowing air while the fountain's gentle fall soothed his ears. He should have been content with his accustomed comfort and the perfect weather, but he was not.
He switched off the fountain pump, took the binoculars into the house, locked the front and back doors and the door to his private landing, rode down in the elevator, and stepped through the dim lobby onto the sunny sidewalk. Just as he paused by the curb, he saw a pigeon several stories aloft swoop and veer straight into the darkness of an open window on the third floor of a rowhouse across the street, and the ease of its passage shocked him as he pictured it startled in the strange interior.
Paul did not wait to see if the bird flew out. He walked south on Broadway, looking in store windows. Some doors were closed and others were open. He thought of the transience of shops, how they changed overnight when the lease ran out, and one forgot what they had sold before. The sun went behind a cloud and came out from it, and he saw, in the renewed light, the glitter of the gold chain at his throat in his passing reflection in plate glass superimposed on the dark lustre of the furs displayed behind it.
The thick, silken opulence and the precious glint against it wrenched him, though he kept on walking. Now he felt, in the midst of an ordinary walk, a wholly new movement, reflection turning inward. It was as if all his recognitions of himself were preliminary to his perception of the fact that he now wished, for his own revelation, to cast the reflection within himself.
He followed Broadway as one might follow a river at its banks, meandering. He was unencumbered, strolling at his ease in a gray cotton jumpsuit that had more buttons than zippers and an assortment of pockets which divided keys, cash, credit cards, sunglasses, and a comb. He put on the sunglasses; he looked under awnings and peered into stores. He saw a hand reach for a perfume in a display and a woman lift her wrist to be sprayed. Movie marquees were dull by day; none of the titles interested him. Obstructing the way in front of a building under construction was a red crane, its arm frozen in mid-air over the weekend till Monday. Several blocks down, an abandoned building stood waiting for the verdict of renovation or demolition. As he passed, he saw, within the darkness through a gap where a door should have been, a flash like the blade of a knife in a man's fist and a dark figure moving behind it.
Paul smelled the cool breath coming from the concrete and from the earth itself, when what was buried is exposed. Though he kept walking, he still felt vaguely oppressed. He looked above the noisy traffic on the streets and the tall buildings at the placid azure of the upper atmosphere. In spite of its serenity, he felt an uneasy presentiment, as if a change had already occurred to which he might never be reconciled.
Passing a store with an awning the color of his jumpsuit, he paused to admire a fluted vase in the window, and in that suspension he sensed, with a growing intensity, the salesman's glance from behind the counter inside fix on him. He pressed the bell, and the salesman, out of his sight for a moment, buzzed the door, freeing the lock.
Paul kept his sunglasses on when he entered. On one knee, he knelt before a cabinet, examining the porcelain figures behind its glass doors. As if by a breeze, he felt the crown of his head
ever so lightly brushed from above. He did not immediately stand up, but he felt the tinge to his whole self from that touch. Yet he did not tremble, did not stir, still appeared impervious.
From his low stance, Paul saw the salesman's thighs behind the glass move away from him. He stood up; he was not incurious, but reticent. He fingered scarves knotted by their ends to a plastic tree, paisleys, solids, stripes, all silk. He was not the only customer at the counter. He walked to the back of the store. On a shelf, a voluted seashell, pink, with light and dark bands, rested on a silver stand. He picked it up and put it to his ear, closing his eyes. The sound enlarged in his consciousness, more persistent if fainter than an echo, and he felt as alone with it as if it were the sound of eternity itself.
He put back the shell and turned around. He saw the salesman at the counter folding for a customer one of the scarves that Paul had touched. It was red and blue with silk fringes. The salesman put it in a white cardboard box, inside tissue paper. Then he closed the box with gold seals and gave it to the waiting customer, but his hands were moving mechanically, for his eyes had returned to Paul.
Aware of Paul's attention even behind his sunglasses, the man jerked his chin forward as if he were indicating a direction they might go together. His eyes blazed suddenly with the challenge.
Paul shook his head. He experienced a disinclination, even resistance, and yet at the same time felt a longing so strongly inside him it hollowed him out.
The customer had left. Standing alone, the salesman took Paul's refusal with the same quick ease with which he'd picked him out on the street. Paul had to approach him on the way to the door. "Is there nothing here you want?" he asked Paul.
"Not today," said Paul.
The man cocked his head a second time. "Well, come back."
When Paul didn't answer, the man shrugged. He was not in the least upset; it was not attraction he disclaimed, but need. "Have it your way," he said without rancor.
Paul was accustomed to believe he always had had his own way, but once on the street again, the salesman's words repeated in his mind, teasing him. At the corner, outside a florist shop, a boy watered bunches of pompoms, stattice, irises, and chrysanthemums. The sprinkles from the can were steel needles in the sunlight. Paul waited to cross the street; an ancient, lumbering truck rumbled through the intersection, trailing a heavy black plume of acrid smoke.
He was hungry, he realized. There was a café he knew that was close by, with watercolors on the walls and pale, formica topped tables. The door swung easily at the touch of his hand, and he went in.
Removing his sunglasses, he ordered tea and scones. The tea came in a pot, brewed with loose leaves. The café was full of people on Sunday afternoon, and conversations merged around him. He glanced up to see the man from the store framed in the sunlight-flooded doorway. Across the crowded tables, Paul observed him ordering a selection of pastries to be laid in a box and tied up with the thinnest red and white string. He hadn't noticed Paul.
Paul put his head in his hands as if to shield himself, and, just then, he saw an image of Bryce in his mind. Bryce was lying in bed, his face pale, his expression beseeching, but just as Paul mentally reached out to touch him, the image dissolved, before he could complete the touch. He tried to will the image back, but he couldn't. To wish for a touch is all but to feel it, and the wish that began with a sense of lack at once so vague and searing left an ache in him.
Raising his head in the light, lively room, he thought that he could not have borne anyone's scrutiny now. As he departed, he felt the pinpricks of tears start in his eyes. He realized he was suffering. In part it was from a fear of himself if left too long to his own devices, and in part from a fear, too, that the images which he projected of himself might come to mean too much, if not to himself, then to those who received them. It occurred to Paul that his light might be borrowed, like the moon's, and might one day go, or have to be given back.
The tears burned in his eyes, and then subsided. He turned on a side street, crossed, went down another, and spied, from the center of the block, a handsome-looking cluster of people near the end of it.
Approaching, he observed a wedding party arranged and posed for their portrait on the steps of a church. The men wore tuxedos, the bridesmaids pastel pink. Paul could hear their Caribbean accents when they spoke. Broad-shouldered and narrow hipped, of medium height, the groom held hands with his bride. Their forearms touched at wrist and elbow. Paul admired the bride in her white, lacy dress. Her veil was lifted back over her dark hair, like foam on a wave, filmy and light. It was as if she were assimilated by her dress, before she took it off forever. Mindful of the photographer's flash, she posed sweetly, easily pleasing, her bridesmaids at her side. At her feet, in a white dress with a thin pink sash, stood the little flower girl holding her basket.
The photographer pressed the shutter release and stepped back. He waved his arm, "That's all. T'ank you very much." His speech swayed like a song, as theirs all did. Released from obligation, the bride and groom kissed, their lips briefly, chastely, in contact, as the attendants smiled. The flower girl wandered apart from them, murmuring to herself.
The adults were talking, and Paul couldn't hear what the child was saying, but he watched her dreamily lifting the flowers inside the basket that was looped on her wrist. She released a swirl of pink and white; the blossoms landed so lightly on the pavement that Paul thought only she and he had noticed them.
She watched them settle, and then she stooped to gather them up, as the drivers were coming around with the cars. A woman called to her, "Clarisse!" Paul bent good-naturedly to help the child, and, for a moment, their faces were close—the tall man and the tiny girl—but she was going. She laid a finger over her lips as if swearing him to a secret. Just as she ran off, she pointed to the open side door of the church.
Three limousines, black and shiny, waited to convey the party. Paul watched the people making a to-do, getting into the big, fine cars, and driving away, one car behind another, in procession. Then he collected from the sidewalk a few blossoms the little girl had left, and entered the church.
From outside the open doorway appeared black. Inside, he stood under a dome, in dim light. In the air, shafts of light were suspended, slanting, cast from a high panel of stained-glass windows, tilted open at a hinge across their centers. Below them, glowing and obscure, were longer, closed windows depicting gospel scenes. He gazed about him, at the altar and the folding chairs before it arranged in rows for the wedding guests, and noticed a door opposite the one he had come through.
It led him to a cloister surrounding a garden divided by gravel paths into four plots. At the center of the garden was a fountain. In the opposite wall was another low door, partially ajar. The garden was overgrown, with grass coming up between the pansies and mignonette and with Queen Anne's lace twisted in the asters. The place was not only unworldly, but unearthly, impregnated by a green light as if it existed out of time.
The light reminded him of Block Island, and he felt suddenly transported there, to his memories and his feelings for Althea and for Jeanne, and to the effects of that time that were still developing in him three weeks later.
He had not felt overwhelmed then; did he now? If it was not love that moved him, he wondered, then what caused his confusion, the aching sadness that circulated in him right to his fingertips?
He had been satiated, and yet his satisfaction was incomplete. It was the eternal mystery—union and separation- that he sought to explore if never to resolve. In assuaging longing, he only increased it. He thought, The lesson of so many fairytales lies simply in this: the unbearableness of a wish made reality.
He stood in a garden cloister, imbued with its green light that was bringing the island back to him so vividly. The memory of his fervent caresses and of the closeness of the two women made him feel afraid in the core of his heart. He wondered if pain was a nimbus around a kernel of pleasure, or if the inroads of pleasure led eventually to pain. B
ut then, when he had made love to them, the sweetness had been so great that, even had he known that this fear would follow, he would not have cared.
He thought, To experience desire anew, one must first forget it. What his mind revived he felt again in all the nerves of his body, but with a great difference, for an experience that began in the mind ended there, and nothing was obliterated. Its intensity made him realize that absence had not ended his involvement. Perhaps it was unavoidable that the consequence of what had happened already was injury, but if Paul was dangerous, he was not wicked, and he wanted to avoid further damage, particularly to himself. By the cultivation of a finer nature, he meant one not more moral but more finely attuned. He endeavored to sense before he acted, not through sensation, though he expressed himself through his body, but through instinct.
Now he was able to comprehend what he hadn't before: how, for curious example, he had imagined he felt the seal of Bryce's lips on him as he lay between Althea and Jeanne. Those lips were affixed to his, and his sharpest, sweetest pang had been for the man his caresses were betraying. It was to this configuration that Paul came back and knew his own place at the heart of it. The sadness he felt was more profound than guilt; it was a grief without reparation.
No breeze stirred the flowers at his feet. The slender branches of a willow tree hung straight as fishing lines sunk in the air. The stillness was like the intake of a breath; Paul felt an anticipation rise in him like sap, and so he didn't even jump when he heard the shrill squawk behind him.
There were two shrieks, short and long, uttered in succession. Curious, he turned to gaze into the dark beady eye of a large bird. Of course he could not mistake a peacock. It had walked, not flown, through the door opposite the one leading to the sanctuary, and then had screamed as if this cloistered garden were the forest it meant to warn.
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