The room seemed suddenly appalling.
Ben flung himself away and staggered outside to the verandah. Downing his drink, he stared out at the sea and the encroaching ruin, and saw for himself the absurdity of Vinnizi’s claim that all along he’d been making films about the end of everything. This was ruin and horror, this the art of final things. Then she touched his shoulder and Ben turned and she pressed her lips to his and dear God, his cock was like a spike he was so hard—
Ben thrust her away and stumbled down the spiral stair to the lawn. When he turned at cliff side to look back, she was still there, standing against the railing, watching him. Her sheer dress blew back in some vagary of the wind, exposing her body so that he could see the weight of her breasts and the dark triangle of her sex. Another jolt of desire convulsed him and once again he turned away. He clambered down the stair to the beach, tore off his clothes and waded into the ocean, but no matter how long he scrubbed himself in the clear water that had not yet succumbed to ruin, he could not wash himself clean.
* * *
He told Stan of it; he told Lois.
His cigarette trembled as he described it. He drank off two glasses of scotch as he spoke and poured another. The bottle chattered against the rim of the glass. He had known the nature of her work, had seen the photos, had read the profile. Yet nothing had prepared him for the way its cold reality shook him. What had Dickinson written? “I like a look of agony because I know it’s true.” And had any poet in his ken written a poem so true as Veronica Glass’s work—so icy that it shivered him, so fiery that it burned? Was this not art, and did not his own work—the work of any poet or novelist, sculptor or composer—pale in comparison?
Ruin closed inexorably upon them. The parties became ever more frenetic. Suicides came in clusters now. One night, flying on heroin and prime, Gabrielle Abbruzzese slit her own throat at the stroke of midnight. The vast house rang with her otherworldly sonic landscapes, and she twirled as she died, her white ball gown blooming around her. Blood sprayed the revelers. Finally she collapsed, one leg folding under her like a broken doll’s. Someone else seized the blade from her still warm hand, and then another, and another until the floor was littered with corpses. Ben and Lois watched from the gallery above. Looking up from the slaughter, Ben locked gazes with Veronica Glass, on the other side of the great circular balcony. She gave him an enigmatic smile and vanished into the crowd. The revel continued until dawn. Dancers twirled among the bloody corpses until ruin withered the privet and shattered the lawn; they made their escape as the land burned black behind them.
So passed the nights. The days passed in a haze of sun and sleep and alcohol. One boozy afternoon, Ben found himself alone with MacKenzie, watching Cecy in the yard. He made MacKenzie a vodka tonic and slumped beside her in her Adirondack chair.
“Have you given up poetry?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, and he thought of his impulse to set down some record of the dying world in lines, knowing how useless it was, how it too would come to ruin, and no one would survive to read it. He admired her body. She wore a bikini, and he could not help imagining the tan lines as Stan stripped it away and carried her off to bed.
“Why bother?” he said. “Who will survive to read it?”
“Perhaps the value of it is in the doing of the thing itself.”
“Is it? Then why did you give up acting?”
“I was never really an actor,” she said. “I’m not delusional.”
She had been the star of a popular sitcom before her single disastrous attempt to break into film: the fading action star, the failed movie.
“I never really made it,” she said. “Or if I did, I never was up to the challenge of real acting. I posed for the camera. The money didn’t matter, not as a measure of artistry anyway. I was a poseur.”
“That’s more than I ever achieved. I was a poseur, too.”
MacKenzie looked at him for the first time, really looked at him, and he saw a bright intelligence in her eyes, a self-knowledge that he had not known was there. It had been there all along, of course, but he’d been too blind to see it.
“I never read your poetry,” she said.
“Who did?”
They laughed, and he felt that desire for her quicken within him.
Cecy cried out on the lawn. Her ball had plunged over the cliff. Ben retrieved it. When he returned, MacKenzie had moved to a towel. She lay on her stomach. She had undone the back of her bikini top, and he could see the swell of her breast.
“Why do you let Cecy attend the parties?” he said.
“I’m not a bad parent,” she told him. “Her father—he was a bad parent.”
“But you didn’t answer the question.”
She propped herself on her elbows, and he could see her entire breast in profile, the areola of one brown nipple. She looked at him, and he wrenched his gaze away. He met her eyes.
“I will not hide the truth from her.”
“And in ruin is truth?”
“You know there is.”
She lay back down, and he looked out to the sea, and even that was not eternal. “Do you want another drink?” he said.
“I’m positively parched,” she said. So he made them drinks, and they drank until his face grew not unpleasantly numb and they watched Cecilia in the splendor of the grass.
Stan joined them as the shadows grew long and fell across the yard. Then Lois. The four of them drank in companionable silence through the afternoon. MacKenzie said again, “I’m not a bad parent. She has to face it the same as we do.”
Lois nodded. “Perhaps you’re right.”
At the party that night—a sculptor’s—Ben spoke with Veronica Glass.
“Are you ready yet?” she asked.
“I will never be ready.”
“We’ll see,” she said, and drifted off into the crowd. Afterwards he sought out Lois, and they watched together as the sculptor put a sawed-off shotgun in his mouth and blew out the back of his head. A spray of blood and brain and bone adorned the wall behind him; if you stared at it long enough, you could discern a meaning that was not there.
They walked home at dawn.
Stan drifted ahead along the rocky white beach with Lois and Cecilia. Ben and MacKenzie fell back.
“Let’s swim,” she said.
“The water’s icy,” Ben said, but she slipped out of her clothes all the same. With a twinge in his breast, he watched the muscular flex of her ass as she ran into the water. She swam far out to the edge of ruin—he feared for her—before she flipped like a seal and returned. When she emerged from the foaming breakers, crystalline bubbles clung to her pubic hair. Her brown nipples were erect. She leaned into him.
“I’m so cold,” she said. She turned her face to his and they kissed for a long time. He broke away at last and they walked home along the beach. By the time they reached the house and MacKenzie had showered and Cecilia had been seen safely to bed, Stan had laid out lines of cocaine on the kitchen table. The drug blasted out the cobwebs in Ben’s brain. He felt a bright light pervade him, energy and clarity and a sense of absolute invulnerability. Somewhere in the conversation that followed, Stan proposed a change of partners.
“Yes, let’s,” Lois said, and that cool longing for MacKenzie possessed Ben. Then he thought of Veronica Glass, and he said, “I don’t think I can do that, Stan.” They went off to bed soon after. Lois had never seemed so desirable or his stamina so prolonged, and when he made love to her in their bright morning bedroom, he made love to her alone.
* * *
One by one, the Christmas lights along the coastline blinked out. The revelers dwindled, the parties became more intimate. Ben spoke with the poet, and they agreed that poetry was a dead art. Yet Ben was flattered when he learned that the younger man had read his work.
“You’re just being kind,” he said.
“No,” the poet—his name was Rosenthal—said, reeling off the titles of Ben’s three books. They had be
en published by university presses—small university presses, at that—but Rosenthal, who had been published by Little, Brown before Little, Brown decayed into rubble and his editor was ruined, quoted back a line or two of Ben’s. Ben forgave him the National Book Award and his perfect hair, as well. It was all ruined now anyway, meaningless. Maybe it always had been.
That’s what Rosenthal said anyway, and whether he meant it or not, it was true: as meaningless as Stan’s Oscars or the dead novelist’s Pulitzer or any other prize or accolade.
“And do you still write?”
“Every day,” Rosenthal said.
Ben thought of Veronica Glass’s dictum: art for art’s sake. He proposed the tautology, knowing as he did so that even she did not believe it—that her’s was the aesthetic of ruination and destruction and final things.
Rosenthal looked at him askance. “I write the truth as I see and understand it.”
“And will you continue to write?”
“To the very end,” Rosenthal said.
But the end was closer than he perhaps thought: the very next night, he and five others slipped into the black waves and under a full moon swam out to the ruin and ruin took them. As they pulled themselves onto the surface of the dead water, where the moldering fish had blackened into nothing, they became burned effigies of themselves, ashen. Over the next day or so the wind would disintegrate them too into nothing.
That was the night Ben saw Lois slip away into a spare bedroom with the front man of the slam band, and whether she did it for revenge or out of despair or for some reason beyond his knowing, he could not say—only that he too had had his infidelities, and his was not to judge.
“And what will you do now that she has betrayed you?” Veronica Glass said at his shoulder. “Are you ready?”
“She has not betrayed me,” he said. He said, “I am not ready, nor will I ever be.”
They leaned against the bar, sipping scotch. She slipped him a handful of prime and they smoked a joint together, and the party degenerated into strobic flashes of wanton frenzy: he stumbled into an unlocked bathroom and saw MacKenzie going down on the architect who’d designed the Sony tower in Tokyo, long since ruined. He shot up with Stan in the kitchen. He found himself alone with Veronica on the verandah, looking out at the ruined ocean.
“Did you ever want a family?” he said.
She said, “Hostages to fortune,” and he tried to explain that Bacon had meant something entirely different than what she was trying to say.
“No, that’s what I mean exactly,” she told him, and then he was lying on his back in the grass with Cecy, pointing out the constellations that ruin had not yet devoured. A great wave of grief swept over him, grief for her and grief for all lost things, and as he watched Rosenthal and his companions swim out to meet their ruin, he grieved for them, as well.
Afterwards, Ben threw up on the beach. Someone lay a cool hand upon his neck. He looked up and it was MacKenzie. No, it was Veronica Glass. No, it was Lois. He scraped sand over his vomit, staggered into the icy waves, and fell to his knees, lifting cupped handfuls of water to rinse his mouth until it felt clean and salty. He did not remember coming home, but Lois was in bed beside him when awareness returned. He whispered her awake. They wandered out into the vast glassed-in rooms, in search of drinks and cigarettes.
* * *
Stan and MacKenzie still slept.
Ben mixed gimlets and they sat out in the Adirondack chairs, their eyes closed, nursing their hangovers. Their lives had by then become an endless round of revelry and recovery, midnight suicides and daylight drinks on the verandah, grilled steaks, liquor and iced beer in the long afternoons, sex, drugs. Cecilia joined them for a while and then wandered off to the other end of the verandah to play some game of her own invention. She had the virtues and the vices of the only child—she was both intensely independent, playing solo games of her own devising, and profoundly dependent. She had been too early inducted into the mysteries of adult life and she had not yet the emotional maturity to understand them. She was prone to tantrums, and for inexplicable reasons, Ben alone had the ability to soothe her.
But today she was calm.
Ben turned his face to the sunlight. He held a sip of gimlet in his mouth and wondered when he’d last been completely sober—or when Lois had last been sober, for that matter. She’d gradually slipped into the world he lived in on the road, whether out of despair or some other more complex reasons of her own, he did not know. And regardless of what he’d said to Veronica, he did feel in some degree betrayed. But his feelings were more complicated than that. He felt too a renewed sense of physical desire for her. If she did not possess the beauty of MacKenzie—or Veronica Glass’s aura of sexual intensity—she possessed the virtue of familiarity: he knew how to please her; she knew how to please him. Yes, and love, love most of all.
He reached out for her.
“Did you ever want children?” he asked.
She squeezed his hand. “It’s sweet of you to ask. I used to, but—”
“But I wasn’t the best candidate for fatherhood.”
“No, you weren’t. But you’re a good man, Ben. I always believed that. I knew it, but it’s a little late now, don’t you think?”
“Stan and I were talking about it, that day we walked inland.”
“And what did you see?”
“Ruin,” he said. “Ruin and devastation.”
“Yes. And any child we’d had, she would be ruined by now.” Lois looked the length of the verandah. Cecy pushed along a miniature truck. She sang softly to herself. “That sweet child will be ruined soon enough. And think of the things she has seen.”
“Sometimes— sometimes I think she’s more equipped to see them than we are. It’s part of her reality, that’s all. She barely knows the world before.”
“Do you think we’re the last ones, Ben?”
“Does it matter? Someone somewhere will be. It’s only a matter of time.”
“And nothing will survive.”
“Nothing.”
“No, I think I’m glad we’ve been childless. We are sufficient unto ourselves. We always have been.”
Ben heaved himself to his feet, went to the bar, and made them fresh drinks.
He stood at the rail and lit a cigarette. He recalled MacKenzie running naked into the moon-washed water and felt once again a surge of desire. The flesh forever betrayed you. He felt headachy and regretful and even now he could recall the shape of her body in almost pornographic detail. Yes, and Lois, too, slipping into the empty bedroom with the tattooed front man of the slam band—Roadkill, that had been its name, and it too was ruined. And her hand upon his neck.
“Last night—”
“I’m sorry, Ben.”
“No. I wanted you to know that I’m not jealous. I want to be. I should be. But the rules seem to have changed somehow.”
He drew on the cigarette, sipped his drink.
“Yes, the rules have changed,” she said. “There’s a kind of terrible freedom to it, isn’t there?”
“Your hand upon my neck. It felt so cool.” He turned to look at her. “How did I make it home?”
“Stan and I practically carried you.”
“And the stairs?”
“The stairs, my love, were an absolute bitch.”
He laughed humorlessly.
“I remember opening a bathroom door to see MacKenzie—”
“You needn’t bother. Last night became something of an orgy, I’m afraid.”
“New rules,” he said.
“Or perhaps no rules at all.”
No rules at all. And what did that mean but ruin?
He thought of Rosenthal, writing every day, imposing a discipline of his own upon the world until even that collapsed into despair. Was not his own resistance of MacKenzie—or of Veronica Glass—a kind of discipline, a kind of personal rule, newly instituted. Maybe that was all you had in the end: the autonomy of the individual will.
�
��No,” he said, “I have my rules still. Maybe for the first time I have them.”
He ground out his cigarette in MacKenzie’s ashtray.
“Is that why you wouldn’t trade spouses with Stan the other night?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t thought it through. It just seemed wrong, that’s all.”
“Surely you want MacKenzie. I saw you kissing her.”
He laughed. “I’ve wanted MacKenzie since the day I met her.”
“Then why not take the opportunity? I wouldn’t have minded.”
“Maybe that’s it. You wouldn’t have minded. There was a time you would have.”
She stood and came to him and cupped his face in both hands. She gazed into his eyes, and for the first time in years, he noticed how deeply green hers were, and kind.
“What a sweet man you’ve become, Ben Devine.”
“I only love you,” he said.
“And I you,” she said. She said, “I’m sorry about last night. I didn’t know.”
Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2014: A Tor.Com Original Page 5