“Maybe Tom’ll run a picture, Rhoda.” Vague, menacing and costing the earth to arrange properly. “Of the curbstone of a bank.”
“Oh, you’re all, all—”
Alike? No, not really. Except that none of us can help seeing these days that what’s “significant” to people is no longer the key to them. What means nothing to people, to us—is what must be looked for. Flags of nothingness, which may one day ring the world.
“Rhoda—”
“Oh, all right, all right. Say it. What you want to say.”
What an order. But it came to her.
“All Popes die.”
Rhoda herself hung up. Better that way. Among the staffers, whose real united front—youth—Rhoda never mentioned, there was an implicit agreement to keep propping her up. In case Tom should after all decide to have his non-way.
She turned back to her desk.
It had been a silvery island afternoon when she’d left for Cuba. Vivie, so prophetically right, had tried to equip her like a bride, but she would take only a change of dungarees and underpants, a shirt and a bikini for sun work, a poncho in case of mountain cold and one of the wide-necked cottony blouses, approvably peasant-revolution, which the American girls wore for everything. At the last minute Vivie had tucked in a gift-wrapped package she hadn’t opened but had let stay. Looking down at her straw case the night before, its contents seemed to her like a vocabulary, suitably stripped down for voyaging. Expanding easily into the airy silences in which she would swim nude, sleep raw. All of it underwritten by the sandals she stood up in.
Only last year she’d still been jealous of the clothes she saw on the island’s international residents—thin voiles and lineny wools which hung from their lamb-pink or artificially tanned limbs like paper sculpture, gilt sandals which scrolled the toes and ran up the ankles as if hardened from the money they walked on. Vivie couldn’t make those clothes no matter what skills or New York supplies she had; they were heritage. The hacked leather and metal-blazoned denims the American boys and girls were wearing were merely emblems, half army regulation and half spectator, and like the banners carried into football stadiums, never sported by the team itself. The Americans hadn’t really divested themselves of anything. In among them under the lush green breeze of the airport, which like all airports seemed to have no past and one narrow future, Lievering, in the dim European suit which was never precisely cool enough or warm enough but would probably do him at either pole if necessary, should have looked ill fitted out for this group and its purpose—too baroque.
He hadn’t. His face had been open to the world. He’d been born his own emblem. She looked down now at her own hands spread angularly on the desk. So had she. That was why she had wanted him. For a time.
When they arrived, there had been a crop. “Arranged for—” the camp cynic, a boy from Brandeis, said, “like everything. Those canes look old.” Maybe so; they never found out, or even whether sugar crops went in seasons; the rest of the group either ignored such things or took it as a sign that miracles came naturally to the elect. Who were to meet the island’s dictator at a still undated event listed on their schedule as “Agenda, with Music.”
They were to have seventeen days there, most in the mess hall gloated, before their intricately chartered flights flew them to ports from which they could reenter home. Some were plodding on to colder socialist countries, chillier in temperament as well, which would allow a witnessing visit but had refused any offers of work. Castro’s generous acceptance of their work gesture had won their hearts, and the velvet climate he provided went to the head. After peppery-sweet suppers from which pig or whatever it was had been removed on gentle notice from the vegetarians, the lanes were full of hand-holding couples murmuring decorously to each other, “This is a Latin country,” until the gloaming was over and they could dive behind a hedge.
On the fourth day she and Lievering, gazing helplessly at each other across the sea of talk at mealtime, joined the strollers, walking like the other couples but not touching. “It’s like the evening promenade in little Italian towns, the passeggiata,” he said—but here talk, which at the university had been their niche away from others, belonged ceaselessly to the crowd. They were thought to be a couple; wise glances came their way from other pairs, but when night fell they separated, each to one of the cots which to the property-shock of some had been discovered to be catch-as-catch-can, yours only for the night.
Conversely one’s assigned place in a sector of a work gang was for the duration unchangeable except by committee, yet the following day Lievering had crossed a cut field—she could see him coming, bare to the waist and in a regulation khaki sun visor too small for him—and joined her line, inserting himself sometimes ahead of her, sometimes behind. Either way, she wielded her knife silently, taking her dippers of water, her scratches and her reliefs as they came. It’s courtship in dumb show, she told herself. Or like that push game men play hand against hand, the bodies not quite lunging. Something must give.
On the sixth day, working so close upon her that she feared she would cut herself, he said suddenly, “Fall out of line.” The singing in the fields was constant; he’d had to repeat. When she’d done so, he led them to the main hall. A few dropouts were asleep there, hang-jawed, saved for beauty by an upflung arm, a curved cheek. There was a smell of fruit and chocolate—a five-pound box of French candies, filled with citron, which somebody had opened that morning, as well as whiffs of chewing gum and toothpaste and feet, and vegetable fart.
“It’s a children's crusade,” Lievering said. “Not a pimple here. Or wrinkle.” Was he telling her that she too was a child? He was smoking a cigarette, which did scare her. He hadn’t smoked since he was seven, he’d told her, when they did it for hunger with rolled cornhusks, which was all she knew of his childhood. She stared at her dust-burned feet; they were farther from her than normally. His hands were shaking. This place was called “the camp”—did it remind him? “Get your bag,” he said.
He walked her down a dirt road—she knew the distance because he told her so: “Two miles.” There were cars to be borrowed but he hadn’t thought of it. She carried her own light suitcase. Now and then they passed a small, loaf-sized cottage. Things were neater here than the group had expected, though the gardens could be tangled, bearing grossly whether tended or not. It was past lunch and into siesta. As they walked, the strange all-day hubba-hubba from the fields—military anthem, reggae, a tape of Piaf singing À l’autre côte de la rue, and one insistent, lemony harmonica—gradually died. The sky was a flat blue. She felt they were walking on it.
Yes, he said one more thing. “Put on your hat.” She was carrying it on her wrist, a wide, black-straw brim of Vivie’s from which she’d once cut out the crown. In the fields she sometimes put one of the provided khaki caps on top of it to further protect her exposed head, but not now. As they walked, the big black disk balanced her. Since childhood she’d been one for costume, and was always secretly conscious of her own silhouette. At going on for eighteen, she thought of this as insincere. Under the hat brim, sweat formed a diadem from which pearls slowly fell. Her wickedly long stride kept her slightly ahead of him.
They stopped at a cottage which had been whitewashed and had a flowering vine. A short-legged middle-aged Cuban woman came out to them, nodded, and slunk back in. Lievering put down his faded Aer Lingus flight bag. She held on to her satchel. They stood chest-to-chest, hers slightly above. “There’s such a lot of utopia here,” he said. It could have been the fields left behind he was saying it to. Or else the whitewash and the vine, and the coffee smell from inside. A cooling second wind came to her, from her own sweat. There were two orange flowers on the vine just under their noses. He saw them but didn’t pick them, for which she was glad.
Inside, all was brown and white except for the fruit the woman served them, along with bread and pancakes. Wood and white wall, bare table, the dishes baked brown as the woman’s hands. And a stair. The coffee
came from a tin of the same American brand the camp was using. Outside back, near a privy and a washplace, two sun-dried towels hung neatly on a string. It had all been prearranged.
“So it’s as you wish,” he said, laying her on the bed, and she heard the faint, Germanic flavor. His eyes beside her, even as remembered these years later, were of an innocence to be relied upon. Or stamped on. Though he and she had at last gripped each other in the hedges, they hadn’t yet kissed. Now her lips drew back in a snarl of need, and they did not. His bronzing torso, slightly small for his head, was familiar to her; the white hips and thighs, protected by his shorts, were a surprise. After one glance at the luxurious implant of his sex, she hid her eyes from it. His face was strained; she couldn’t tell what he thought of her, stretched out on the coarse bed with her bony feet slopping over, but the foreplay of his hand was reverent. He was slow, but not as delaying, she thought strangely in that same moment, as “when in life.” They seemed to her to be swinging in a jungle cradle of their own flesh. She forgot her own silhouette.
They spent three nights and two days in that place, deep in sex and bitter, fortifying quarrel. No wonder she’d come to think of day and night as one. As if sunk down a well, they were, with only the other’s ladder to climb up on, or fall back from. The woman served them nameless greens and sweet farinas whose cooking smells were still with her, and once a birdling they ate with bare hands. On the wooden sideboard there were knives and spoons only, cups of baked clay, nothing of glass. Four thonged chairs, the one set of sheets, and the two towels, which didn’t grow grimier. Plus that coverlet, how could she have forgotten it?—an heirloom or dowry piece surely, wild with the only color in the house. They were always afraid they’d stain it with sex; that fear had been their only expressed emotion. Unless they were all the time expressing one she still had no name for, as for the vegetables. The sex wasn’t various; she was too young to invent, and what he was she still didn’t know, but he came to her by ritual and she had no sense of want. In her young one-track way, which could envision no experience except its own, she was storing it all up, in case it never came again.
On the second noon, while they were eating, they saw the woman hanging out the sheets and, abashed, didn’t go back up the stairs, though the woman’s smile remained the same. Because the woman was another woman, she who at home roamed the nearby barrios and poked her head into every language, never addressed her, and had half convinced herself the woman was mute.
“Let’s go for a civilized walk,” Lievering said when he saw that audience of sheets, and though the road was dead in sun they had walked far from the house, found a ditch pool and bathed, watching each other in their first easeful silence. Nature lapped them in velvet-struck calm; their eyes stretched now to horizons; again they were abashed. In quiet, they walked back. The woman was gone, into the village or to wherever she lived, from which she came and went every afternoon leaving them one of her peculiar suppers; she was not the owner of the house. They mounted the stairs, so that they could quarrel again.
She had been right, to store it all up.
She couldn’t smile even yet at that upstairs classroom, the bed lit like a boxing ring by two bodies’ natural light. There had been no single contention between them. The match itself was that, conducted in the bright, floating anger generated by two opposing poles of life. Which had to meet. On the bed, her younger self crouched on all fours, its lean rib cage pushed forward—he said once, “like those figurines on old automobiles. On the radiator caps. I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen one.” She hadn’t. She’d looked over her shoulder at her own buttocks raised high, humbled yet enraged that she should be compared. He sat at the head of the bed, hunched sculpturally to himself, clasping his knees, a man in one of Blake’s circular drawings, with the same rayed, effulgent eyes. Held fast by student resentment, she hadn’t told him so; he had brought her to Blake. “There are no men in Blake,” he’d have said. “Only angels and unearthly denizens”—and he would have been right. She always knew what he would have said, even now. In the end who could stand it? He always rang true.
For good or ill, he’d taught her the sound of it.
“Are all—couples—as angry as we are?” she’d asked.
“We’re angry because I’m weary. Both of us. And because you are yet not.”
Weary of life, he’d meant, though she hadn’t asked. Weary was still not the word she would use for him; she knew no right one. For the way he hung impaled on the brute past, with that awkwardness which made people avoid him.
“You don’t have the—aplomb to die,” she’d said.
He’d broken out of his hunched circle then, to cover her mouth with his hands. So that she couldn’t answer him. “Where, my God, do you get the words?”
From the air, from the English. From Vivie speaking in her own father’s voice, or now and then from a nursery memory of him, keen as a slap. From subway posters, travel brochures, a hoard of books picked up at the whites’ thrift shop in Bridgetown, New York Public Library exhibits of medieval and other manuscripts—and from Bruce, sitting on the porch. Though she sometimes got them wrong, she was going to be better at the words than Lievering was. She let them all in.
“I made you break the circle,” she’d said. “Didn’t I.” And didn’t explain, didn’t have to. “That’s what words are for.” Down flat on her belly then, with her face in her paws. In wonder. And that’s what I’m here for. She was half off the bed, her arches scraping the floor in that long length of leg she always carried below her. Like a second body, he once said.
“Maybe they have you on the planes now,” he’d said. “Those ornaments.” There was always a moment when they slid into sex. One or the other would weaken. She held still for it. “Maybe on the bombs, even,” he said. A spark from his fingernail pricked her hip. “I can feel the lines of speed on your side.”
The next day, the last in that place, Lievering went for a walk by himself; she’d refused. When he was safely gone, she went to his flight bag. He’d left the suit, oxford shoes and raincoat in which he’d traveled back at the main hall, not worried, as he said with a wry face, that anyone would take them, though there had been thefts. In the bag she found the ancient black one-piece bathing suit he sometimes wore in the fields. He was at the moment wearing the white shorts he sometimes put over it. One extra pair of underpants. No pajamas, no socks. Those he’d worn on the plane must be with his shoes. The shirt he’d worn hung on the door of the bedroom’s one cabinet; he’d put it on for dinner the night before. The cabinet’s door swung emptily open; emulating him she’d hung nothing there either, keeping what she had in her satchel, removing and replacing her few needs when the other was out of sight.
She had an idea he did that even when he was alone. The shirt swinging above her as she knelt had been rewashed; he was more scrupulous than she and was probably now taking a swim. She hadn’t had it in mind to do this when she stayed behind, only not wanting the walk or the swim; her muscles were stretched to an all-over ache from an invigoration whose details still crammed her head, and she enjoyed the musk of its sweat. Feeling in the bag, it struck her that what she was doing was a domestic necessity; she was investigating her possible future household. He’d asked her to marry him, and she’d half agreed.
She drew out a crumpled drawstring pouch made of tough, sueded calf of the same yellow-brown as the shoes foreigners to New York sometimes wore. In it was the comb she’d seen him use, and a bunged-up locket. The pearl had half its skin gone but the case had a rubbed glow. Nothing inside it. She put the locket and comb back in the pouch and put the pouch back in the bag. Underneath, between it and the bag, almost like a false bottom, she felt a book, and drew it out. Only the dusty green cover of a book whose narrow spine never could have held much. No print there or on the cover, which had once been a fine one. Inside, the spine had been stitched with white book string, to which a few bits of thickish paper still adhered, parts of pages once. Closing it, she
found she’d been holding the book cover upside down; its title was on the other side, boxed in by a gold line: The Elephant Sonnets. Underneath, neatly smaller: Wolf Lievering.
She knew his first name of course. Since neither he nor anybody ever used it, she’d early on looked it up in the university catalogue, where all the faculty vitae also listed publication, if there was any. His had listed merely his British grammar school and university, a sparse number of teaching jobs, not all of these in colleges, and some British Council lectures around the Indies, of a sort of which Bruce had said, “Anybody down to a button can always do those.” Bruce’s own books were often on his tongue and on other people’s; that was the way, down there if anyone published, whether or not it ever got out to the great world. She was sure neither Bruce nor the university had ever heard of this book.
She sat back on her heels. When she did that, her knees stuck in front of her like a grasshopper’s, Vivie teased, and she’d always laughed back. She didn’t care about it any more than she cared she was black. “Hump it, you don’t,” Vivie said. “You just know you’re beautiful.” Maybe so. Let them all think that took care of it. Rather than that she cared so much about something else, it neutered the skin right out.
“You won’t marry a black man now,” Lievering had said yesterday—“I’m sorry.” She knew this hadn’t been said from vanity but from the built-in prophecy of his teacher trade, which saw the young come and go. “Won’t I?” she’d said then, standing tall and honestly wondering. He had groaned, squeezing vertical forehead creases which did nothing to age him, and asked her again to marry him. “People like me, we go on and on—but you’ll want to stop somewhere. Women do.”
“Or start,” she’d said. Even when she’d still been full of him.
When she put the book back in the bag, the seam between the bag’s zipper and old fabric slightly tore.
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