The peacock's step was both stealthy and unsteady. As it approached, Paul saw that its train was mostly molted, with only a few quills remaining at the center. Their long, disintegrated barbs of metallic green and bronze made a straggly appearance in so small a quantity. The peacock did not repeat its call, but continued around the fountain. The short, silky feathers of its back shone for an instant, light-green as a spring leaf. It retraced its walk up the gravel. Paul casually followed. The peacock waddled through the partly open door from which it had entered the cloister, the wispy remnants of its train dragging carelessly on the ground. Paul pushed the door further open and watched the peacock's progress around the fenced-in yard at the side and back of the church. The sun had left the grass to shade, but the day was still bright, the September sky brilliantly blue under which the peacock walked, its breast yet bluer.
Paul turned back to the cloister and the fountain. Slender willow leaves floated on its surface, a bright contrast. It seemed to him that he was like that peacock, its train molted, its beauty diminished. The idea pleased him. He imagined the peacock's rejuvenation in the spring, as if it might stand as a symbol for him of his own renewal.
He pictured the garden cloister on a mild, windy-to-rainy day in mid-March, its grass only faintly tinged with green, its paths damp, its earth soggy. In his vision, the peacock is standing with its back to him. All the feathers of its train have grown back and are standing up erect in a great semi-circle, supported by its stiff brown tail feathers. From the back, the peacock is dull; it turns, and is brilliant. Behind its bright blue body, the spreading fan of its train is iridescent green and bronze. Upraised, the short feathers over its back create a shining, golden-green border for the head it exhibits in profile, as befits a king.
In Paul's fantasy, the peacock pauses, then suddenly rushes forward. With a shiver of its entire body, it rustles the hundred quills of its train. A music comes forth, beginning like wind in trees and growing more penetrating, like the patter of rain on dry leaves. At the margins of the train the quivering is greatest, a fleeting shimmer of the deep blue ocelli ringed by gold.
It was a beautiful vision: the peacock renewed, triumphant. Paul realized he was trembling. He sensed himself on the edge of some revelation, but what? The peacock's dance was like his own culmination. He imagined it, he felt it—the radiance he strove to create each time he went onstage.
It was tragic, he thought, that his radiance would neither endure nor sustain him. He danced, and the dance disappeared. He believed that dancing freed him even while he knew that it enslaved him. His submission, his willingness to be other, to express, to act as instrument was a desire for a self transcendence which he could not humanly sustain. He thought of how the supreme triumph of the self is its own effacement, and in its ability to be what it is not lies its greatest power. He grieved for that perfection which he might glimpse, but could not attain.
Yet, in fact, he realized, he was glad. He didn't want to lose himself entirely, he didn't wish to cease to be unique. He thought of how his feeling for dance was like his feeling for love, that in both he sought a transcendence which eluded him. Instead of making him free, desire released him to a deeper enslavement. Perhaps all the monks in cloisters were right, he considered. Perhaps there are other existences to which this one is but slavery, a realm of perfection separated from earth by an unbreachable chaos.
He thought of how, for hundreds of years, men have joined religious orders, renouncing the world to seek solace in cloisters. When he tried to summon up such a belief, he failed. It was like a foreign language that he knew he'd never be able to learn. He had no feeling for a religion that denied his body to save his soul. Soul—I'm not sure what that means, he thought. The spark of life? And what after death?
He shrugged, gladly giving up the inquiry. He heard bells naming the hour: four—no, five o'clock. Time had passed, and he had lost track of it. He considered how, since his return to New York, he had been reluctant to call, write, see anyone, reluctant to abandon his solitude even though it was sorrowful. But he wasn't renouncing anything. Not in the least. It was more as if he had gone into hiding. He had passed whole days in apathy. He'd assumed he was protecting himself.
But from what? He had been afraid—now he admitted it. He had dreaded that they would all descend on him—Bryce, Althea, and Jeanne—each demanding, pleading for a part of him. Between them, he had imagined, they would tear him to pieces.
Well, he thought, he ought to feel foolish now. It appeared that he had invented this danger. Since his return three weeks ago, only Bryce, with his plaintive, posted wish, had tried to contact him. And he had ignored it.
What did this mean? He should be relieved, perhaps even disappointed. Probably he had exaggerated his own importance. He was quite aware of how vain he was. But whatever he meant to them—any one of them, but particularly Bryce—he saw that he would not be forced to do anything. He realized that he might not even be approached.
Maybe he had deceived himself all along, and it was his own feelings—not theirs—that had made him afraid. He understood he had been punishing himself, not with remorse, but with unexamined dread.
By denying it, he'd grown numb, and that was almost worse. Now he believed that his vision of the peacock was a good sign. Why else, he thought, did he feel more alive than he had in weeks, and happy, even unreasonably happy? Just as a season had passed and another was coming to take its place, so, too, was his fear passing, like a season.
Chapter 12
On the way back from Block Island, Jeanne had felt more glad about what had happened there than guilty, but as the days passed and Althea still didn't call her, she began to grow apprehensive. The pages in her engagement book were scribbled with reminders of September appointments, but that wasn't why she herself didn't arrange to meet with Althea.
Was a double desire a jinx for Jeanne? One was less licit than the other, but both beckoned her. Take Paul away, put the long friendship to the other side, and what was left? She could not discount an early awe of Althea who, while certainly not an angel, was still a shade unearthly. It wasn't just because she was taller than Jeanne that Althea seemed to her friend to go around with her head in the clouds. And yet, Jeanne's plunge towards the depths of Althea had not been very great.
What she had sought in Althea was emphatically not herself, though it was like her. Her feelings also included the conviction of having committed a sacrilege on her friend. That she had been afraid had made her tremble and, trembling, she wanted to go on. Yet she had gone farther with Paul than with Althea. Her solitude in September was founded on these two separations.
* * *
On an early evening at the onset of October, Jeanne found herself working late and all alone at her office. The season hadn't started. Before she left, she entered the empty theater on a whim and flicked on the lights. The theater was smallish and old, and the stage traditional, with a proscenium, wings, and a shallow pit in front. The chairs were covered in a worn aqua velvet, their shabby gentility repeated in the speckled gilt of the armrests and seat backs. Jeanne wandered dreamily down the aisle.
Suddenly she sensed that she was not alone. It was hard to say how she first felt it, not as close as a breath on the back of her neck; and yet those tiny hairs still tingled, as if charges in the atmosphere were being disturbed.
"Jeanne."
Before she saw him, she recognized his voice. "Where are you?" she called.
"Find me."
She heard him laugh, and trembled. She had forgotten that he was as at home in a theater as she. "Paul." Her tone held reproach, not quite teasing. She scanned the rows of empty seats, her nerves racing. She wasn't pleased at his invasion of what, at that moment, was her private sanctum, but when she saw his bright head lifted from the shadows where he had been hiding, in a center row, she felt, in spite of herself, a kind of wonder. He showed her his back and, silent as an idol, waited for her to come around to face him.
Whe
n she did, she saw that he was lounging comfortably, with a pleased smile spread over his face, as if this theater were his space, rather than hers. She thought she ought to be annoyed, yet felt glad. "How did you get in?"
"I was passing by, found myself in front of the theater, and thought I'd try to see you. The door was open, no one was there, and I just walked in and ended up in here."
"That's odd," said Jeanne. "The door shouldn't be left unlocked. I'll have to check on that. Why didn't you come find me?"
"But, you see, I didn't need to."
She didn't answer him at once. In spite of herself, she wondered if he could be right, and somehow it had been fated that she'd find him. He seemed so sure of it. He reached out his arms to her, and she hesitated. Then, lightly, she touched her hands to his, fingertips to fingertips. She felt the sympathy between them, their very breaths in synchronization.
When he asked her to come closer, she obeyed. He drew her down into his lap, and kissed her, and she forgot to be affronted, or upset. He slid up the armrests between the seats.
"Really, aren't you frightened?" she asked him.
"Why should I be? Aren't we alone?"
"We should be. Come with me. I want to make sure the doors are locked. Otherwise, I'll keep thinking about it." They rose up together. She found her keys in the pocket of her skirt, and jingled them authoritatively in her hand. At the door she said, "You know, we could go over to my place."
"No." His voice was low, his arm tightened around her. "I want to make love to you in the empty theater."
Once again she sensed he was making her an accomplice in his fantasy. It was his gift—or his power—to make her aware of a recklessness in her that she almost hadn't realized she possessed and to inspire her to act on it. She saw that he was serious, and she felt protective of him, unwilling to disappoint him. She turned off all but the "Exit" lights. Taking her by the hand, he guided her behind the stage, and onto it. They sat side by side, close, their legs dangling over the edge into the pit, gazing out to the rows of darkness.
"Is this what it's like for you when you face an audience?" she asked. "Are you imagining that the seats are full?"
She could feel his smile, kinder now. "Not at this very moment, no. Why, is that what you were thinking?"
"I was trying to see it through your eyes."
She turned to him as she spoke. His face appeared smooth, its angles softened. He touched her hair so lightly it almost seemed he was touching an aura around her head, and she grew very still.
They made love with their clothes on, lying on the stage floor. Afterwards she found herself looking up into the recesses of the ceiling, trying to make out in the semi-darkness the tangle of stage lights, the track for the curtain. He lay beside her, watching her. She was grateful for his attention, for the empty theater suddenly seemed a lonesome and melancholy place.
She sat up quickly, rearranging her clothes. She felt grimy. But he lay still, peaceful, in no hurry. She knelt beside him, her hair falling into her face
"You know, I haven't seen Althea since we got back from Block Island, or even talked to her," she heard herself telling him.
"I haven't either," he admitted to her surprise. In the next breath he asked her if she'd see him again, provided, of course, that they both kept it quiet.
Paul was proposing a new orientation—would she give up coincidence for a plan? Leaning over him so that it seemed to her that she was the one in heaven and he below, she realized that she'd go where he wanted her to and she wouldn't tell Althea. She had seen, in some over-forties women recently left by their husbands after an average of twenty years of marriage, a daze, as if they were just waking up, but weren't sure to what. She didn't want to be caught out like that. She had no guarantee of the future, but she vowed she'd try hard not to deceive herself as to Paul's designs or her desire. If he were flighty, then she'd fly with him, but she wouldn't try to feather his nest. She was partial to him, but she could also part easily.
"We could allow ourselves a little more luxury next time," she said, rubbing her side as she stood up. In essence she was agreeing to his conditions. It was his idea to make a getaway on the coming Columbus Day weekend to a country inn he knew of (she didn't ask how) in northwestern Connecticut. She found herself assenting, even though—she told him—she didn't have Monday off and would have to return on Sunday. She offered to drive them in her car, and he accepted.
A soreness in her right hip from making love on a wooden floor troubled Jeanne with twinges for two days. If she had second thoughts about going with Paul, she overrode them in the end. She picked him up on the morning of Saturday the eleventh on a corner of Broadway.
The traffic was moderate out of the city, but they hadn't counted on the inconvenience of engine trouble that suddenly began in lower Connecticut. The motor jerked and jumped when Jeanne tried to speed up, and the problem persisted. She had to buy gas anyway, so after the sign for the next service area, she exited.
She could identify the parts under the hood of her Japanese car, but she didn't know how to proceed after that, and if Paul was mechanically minded, he wasn't showing it. The gas station mechanic told her that the problem was when the sparks were firing. "The timing's off," he said, peering through the windshield at Paul as he lowered the hood. Even as he spoke to her, Jeanne saw in the mechanic's look at her front-seat passenger a frank curiosity, which she distracted with a question. Yes, if she drove slowly, she could let it go, but not for long.
Unwilling to throw a wrench into their plans, Jeanne proposed that they continue to the inn, take it easy with the driving, and on the way back she'd drop the car off at the Greenwich garage her parents used, and take the train into the city.
As she re-entered the highway, the cars came up quickly in her rear-view mirror. When Paul laid a hand on her knee, she shook her head; a fear had a finger on her, too. She imagined automobile accidents, and then, by an effort of will, she put such thoughts out of her mind. On a day so faultlessly blue, she wouldn't let herself give in to morbid musings. The scenery was all she could wish for as the roads became more rural, and the way was white gravel for a quarter-mile up to the River's End Inn.
Their dormer room had printed wallpaper peeling a little on the low-curved walls. "Don't bump your head," Jeanne warned. There was a walk-in closet and a four-poster covered with a quilt. Paul surprised Jeanne by recognizing its wedding-ring pattern. "This must be the honeymoon suite," he said. Best of all, in an alcove flanked by two wooden benches built into the walls, was a fireplace with a neat pile of yellow birch next to the hearth.
A picture of horses in the brochure had caught Paul's eye, and he had included a request with his reservation. The stable was adjacent, the two horses waiting to be groomed by their own hands. The dust from her white mare's hide sprinkled Jeanne's arm. The work was part of the rental and so, apparently, was the guide, a laconic man who looked little at Paul and less at Jeanne as they rode around the ring to prove they were able. He said he'd take them on the trail if they would sign a waiver that said in the event of accident the stable wasn't liable.
The gold and purple glow outside the wide stable door was beguiling. The three went out together and, their horses walking, headed towards the river which, despite the name of their hotel, was just passing through. "No one steps twice in the same river," Paul quoted, riding up beside Jeanne.
"And the one who steps in is also a river," Jeanne added gravely, but nobody tried it, not in October.
From the riverbank they went out to a road and then turned off. Vines threaded the clumps of brush and shrubs on both sides of the trail up the hillside. Jeanne enjoyed the sensation of a horse mediating between herself and the uneven earth. Through steps she wasn't taking, she felt loose stones giving way. They arrived at a high, lush field open to the sky. The shining grass looked wet but wasn't; berries burned in the brush like seeds of fire, and already a violet chill hung half-visible in the golden air, like a gauzy net in advance of the p
itch-black curtain of eventual night.
Jeanne stopped to let her horse munch morsels of the meadow. The man from the stable was still behind her, while Paul cantered ahead, his horse's hooves flattening the grasses. Briefly she closed her eyes. Otherwise she might have noticed the laggard horse and rider too near. The other horse must have nipped hers, for her horse bucked. It happened so quickly that, before she understood what the other horse had done, Jeanne had lost her balance. She felt her fingers slipping down the reins, her hip slide against the horse's front flank. Even she was surprised at how lightly she landed. From the ground she looked up. Still mounted on his horse, the guide was looking down at her. She detected his shame when he asked her if she were okay, and she was more jovial than she felt. She climbed right back into the saddle, catching the stirrups without his help, for she was embarrassed, although the guide was the one who had erred, in coming up from behind.
And Paul, who'd gone ahead? He'd gotten wind of the situation—how, she didn't see, for to herself her drop onto the grass had been virtually silent—and he came wheeling back on his steed like a knight (so he'd like to think, she thought). But he was too late, for she was astride her horse before he was beside her.
Jeanne didn't count it against him that he wasn't there to rescue her. Still, she conceded to herself, she wouldn't have liked it had he found her mishap amusing. But he was concerned, and, in the stable ring when he gently helped her to dismount, he held onto her waist longer than he needed to.
On the way back from the stable, they wandered down to the river. The water level was low at this time of year. As the sky darkened, the river surface looked lighter. Like an uneven mirror, Jeanne thought. Would she and Paul make a habit of days like this? They were hardly into autumn, and then there was the winter. What would they do then, cross-country ski? They weren't intentionally touching as they turned along the river, but his arm brushed hers, and, very naturally, he took her hand. They'd left the subway far behind them, but did Block Island also seem so long ago?
Fall Love Page 17