by Alex Austin
It was as if the man had left himself behind inside her and now her body grew to fit his image and it was not long before she too could hold life, the world, in her two hands, and Tico Reeves could remember nights when he had heard his mother talking to his father; though the man was gone, she talked to him and laughed as if they were laughing together and the people in the dirt town soon called her mad and thought it only the way of such madness that she should take wandering strange men to her bed and call them by another name.
Tico Reeves carried them both inside his heart, took joy in what both their lives had been, laughed at their comedy, but loved it too. He built his own strength upon what he knew they both were in hearts no dirt town could ever know, and he let his weakness feed upon the hunger that had been the feast of both their lives.
His love for this girl was made of all he had learned of love from those who, themselves, he did not think had ever loved; his father in that wild derby with the whiskey-laughter rich as April, the mother who had grown so slowly out of dying as to make life a great and loud cry when she finally came to it with the laughter and the lust of legions in her waking flesh; then the sisters who were spread-leg fools and the brothers who said more to their mules than to their women; these and then the old man Joe Tom and the stranger inside himself who kept asking for a name.
Tico Reeves walked along the beach on this morning, through skies and skies of rain, until he came to where he could see the crazy gray frame house leaning against the gray sky, both this gray ghost color of a world that was so heavy with life, the color of all that memory believes it can make real again by merely remembering. He walked slowly, as kings do in their own land, and was sure he would see the girl before this day was done.
three
Sygen could not believe that in her heart she wanted someone to be dead.
For days she had tried to hide this feeling, this desire, from herself. The gifts of love, once so light to carry, had become a burden in her heart. And on this day, with the entire world turned the soiled color of death, she found her life focusing on this single wish like a child who can see only one toy in a window that contains thousands.
She tried to consider it as no more than a bad dream, but if it was only this, then there would be no line to separate sleep from wakefulness, since it was a dream that infected every hour like a wasting disease. The mere fact that her entire life had undergone so drastic a change in so short a time was difficult enough to believe. First she was alone as she had never been before. Then they were no longer children and games were no longer games. Then she had imagined, sitting alone by her window, death as a mad ruin through which faceless creatures wander aimlessly, walking a thousand steps before they have even begun to move, then turning back as if they were not allowed to go any further. And she had never seen death before, not even in dreams, and so she told herself that her wish was not so much for anyone to be dead, but for whomever had brought this dread vision from the outside world, to take it back with them, to leave her as she had once been, as she knew, even out of the rain’s sound on her window, she would never be again.
She went to her room directly after lunch, undressed, and got into bed. She tried to sleep. She rarely slept during the day. As children, when they had been forced to take naps after lunch, Sygen and Jean would crawl into one bed and then pretend they were asleep. The first to discover in some secret way that the other was not really asleep won this game and was entitled to a prize of his choosing.
Now that they were grown, no longer children, now that the prizes have changed, the game too had changed and they would share winter afternoons in this same way, finding joy in any depth like fishermen with magic nets who never draw one in that is not filled with fantastic creatures of the sea that can be sold only to cooks who cook for kings.
Only the previous afternoon Sygen had tried to invent what she thought would be a new game for Jean. She had gone to her room, had found the lipstick, one she had discovered in an empty drawer when all the guests had gone one summer, a gold case ringed round the middle with white pieces of glass cut to look like diamonds. She had never used it, had kept it secret beneath underthings in the second drawer and only once had wondered whose mouth this red paint had marked for what passion, since the lipstick seemed to her as a device used by some pagan priestess to entice the appetites of savage gods.
She went to the mirror over the washstand in the corner of the room and there gently, first afraid, she painted her lips, timid as a sparrow come to perch on the palm of your hand. She drew the dark red line across her upper lip, saw it smear a vague shape beyond her mouth, and so rubbed it off and tried again. This time seemed better to her. She painted the upper one; then, as she had seen others do, she pressed both lips together, rolling them in upon each other, stepping back as she did from the mirror. But when she saw her mouth, her entire face became ridiculous, a face she would have laughed at had it not been her own.
She turned quickly from the glass, horribly ashamed. She shut her eyes, made a pretense of saying she was not used to seeing her mouth painted and that was the only trouble. But when she turned again to the glass, the mouth glared at her like torn flesh made comical the way the sorrow of clowns is painted to induce laughter.
Sygen could not understand why she looked so strange. All women wore lipstick, one shade or another, and none seemed to be marked by it in any way as she did. She moved closer to the glass once more and stared at her painted mouth to see what she had done wrong. The lipstick was not smeared and the shade, she thought, was proper to her coloring. But still she looked absurd with it on. If she had painted a red mouth on a gull, a cat, a mackerel, it would have looked this way.
“Why, dear, whatever has happened to your mouth?” She could hear her mother saying this. Jean would laugh at the words. Perhaps Miss Smith would not say anything, perhaps she would even take her to one side, show her how to paint her mouth properly and, in so doing, confirm in such easy, ancient conspiracy what Sygen was becoming aware of now, watching her wounded mouth in the glass: that there was danger somehow always involved in merely being female, a danger whose secret gave the woman a strength no man would ever have and whose answer placed her in an eternal jeopardy that was like the abyss made by the heart to house God.
Sygen moved back a little, turned her head one way, then the next, thinking perhaps it was no more than the light. But she could find no image of herself in the glass that was not absurd, and finally she rubbed the paint from her lips with the back of her hand, rubbed so hard her mouth ached her when she was done and the back of her hand was stained the color of blood.
Sygen had cried then because it seemed as if the paint had been a sign to tell her she was no woman, that the absurdity had been no more than her childhood, little girls wearing the long skirts of their mothers, the huge shoes, the feathered hats that all but cover the small faces and have to be pushed back constantly if any image is to be seen in the tall looking glass.
Sygen now tried to shut this out of her mind, reeled from it as from a shower of hailstones or the blow of a fist. She fought to shut, beyond this, whole worlds from her mind as she lay there, eyes closed, sheet and quilt pulled up chastely over her naked flesh.
She felt crippled by childhood. She could hear the shallow breathing of waves beyond her window. But even the sea hung like a relic in her abandoned heart.
She tried to escape this sudden ebbing away of herself by recalling his body, how they were together, mouths and thighs and all soft places touching. But something was missing like wounds and wonder in the air, old sleepless phantoms who search the night for some dream to hide them.
The heart is our only defense against life and love steals the heart away; she lay there, helpless as a corpse.
It had happened so easily, something not even unexpected, as a day follows another and the mirror sees no change in so short a time.
Sygen lay there and the slow aching in her flesh led her deeper and deeper into the ver
y fear she fought to escape.
She had taken him up inside her without really having lost herself to him or to the very act of love itself. She had been able to give herself completely, but she could sense something beyond herself now that was inviolate to every passion but that final one which is the need of love to be destroyed, to seek its own destruction, then to destroy. The very air about her seemed to be echoing with intimations of that which she had discovered in fear and could name only out of love.
Sygen fell back, her eyes letting silent tears fall, her body heavy with new spaces to be filled.
All summer long she would look forward to winters she would share only with Jean, their world returned to them. They even joked in summer about pouring cups full of pepper into the soup to burn the mouths of all the guests raw so they would return to their dead towns and decrepit cities sooner than planned. Once Jean said they could put fish in all the beds and Sygen said they could run about ringing cowbells in the middle of the night. They had more plans of attack than any general who has ever set out to conquer the world. But no war was ever fought because both knew, with all the certainty of innocence, that winter was sure to come.
Now, however, winter was here. The sun itself no longer burned brighter than all fires, but lay frozen, embalmed against the pale sky like a piece of sculpture in a museum corridor. The moon, crowded with tides, warmed the waters, burning deep into their darkness each night, and stars fell to earth as pieces of ice, no more than this. The land was wrapped up in the decaying slumber of this cold, but winter had not truly come because they were not alone. A stranger had arrived to tell them winters would come no more.
Sygen rolled over onto her stomach and cried softly against her pillow and was so terribly ashamed of the tears she felt wet on her face. She never cried. No pain she had felt in her life, even as a child, had ever made her cry, and now she was crying only for a season she could not find.
She lay there that way a long time. He did not come to her as she wished he might. He would take her violently on this day. She told herself this. Grief reduced life to no more than a story she could tell herself in this manner, nothing to feel any more. His desire would be not only to possess but to destroy and in so doing to create some new being who would be much more in the remembrance of that pain than she could now be in the desire of this love.
She lay there and felt her flesh alive with days she could not recall clearly, days that were chastened like white birds flying into a gray mist. She reached up, touched her own breasts beneath the sheet and quilt, felt nipples spring gently alive to her fingers like waking small beasts. She paused there, would not deny the thrill opening down through her flesh. She let her hands move then further down, slowly over her body to discover each softness, each hidden place as if for the first time, and knew by the empty vessel of desire which grew greater and greater that this flesh of hers belonged as much to Jean as to her and when they were separated as they were now, it was as if half of her were being murdered, as if whatever game she chose to play could be played only with a corpse.
So when she stepped down, shuddering a moment, out of bed and began to dress, it was not with any thought but to save herself as one might fight back against a murderer who has stolen into one’s room at night.
Sygen washed her face, let the cold water wake her. She combed her hair quickly, merely glanced at her face in the mirror, only to be sure no sign of her tears could be seen.
She left her room, closing the door quietly. She walked down the hall to Miss Smith’s room and it was not until after she had knocked softly on the door that she realized she had no idea what she was going to say.
When Miss Smith asked who it was, Sygen said her own name, almost in a whisper, hoping she would not be heard, the name itself sounding like a word spoken in a foreign tongue. But then Miss Smith said, “Come in.”
Sygen opened the door slowly. Miss Smith was standing by the windows, rain streaming in wild rivers down the glass that framed her against the naked sky.
Miss Smith wore a brown woolen dress and a sweater to match, and Sygen noticed immediately that the lipstick she wore hardly colored her thin lips.
“I was watching the rain,” Miss Smith said awkwardly, when Sygen did not speak.
There was another silence. The sound of rain and wind against the windows filled the room for several moments. Sygen turned to close the door behind her, saw that it was already closed, and then, looking back at Miss Smith, she said, “I’m sorry.”
Miss Smith smiled a bewildered, polite, even helpless kind of smile. “Sorry?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“But . . . for what?”
“For coming here.”
“I’m afraid I——”
“Because now that I’m here I think I’ll say what I came to say,” Sygen said. “I have no right to say it, I know. But I will.”
Miss Smith was completely bewildered. She drew the sweater in closer around her and waited for the girl to go on, with the vague expression in her eyes of one who has just heard a stranger laugh a little offkey.
Finally Sygen said, “It’s about Jean.”
“About Jean?”
“Yes. . . .” Sygen nodded. She had been standing with both hands clasped tightly behind her back, but now she brought them forward, stood with her legs set squarely apart as if preparing to withstand a physical blow.
“I’ve been thinking about this for some weeks now,” Sygen said with the deep seriousness of a child that almost made Miss Smith smile.
But she remained silent. She was filled with terror at what the girl, child or no, might say next, but she could think of no way to stop her.
Sygen seemed about to speak, then caught herself, as if the wrong words had come to her lips and she had managed to stop them just in the nick of time, and then she said, “It’s about Jean being blind.”
Miss Smith had not expected this. She was visibly surprised and shaken. Her face went pale. She backed up a little until she reached the window sill; she leaned against it, gripped the ledge with her cold fingers; she had long ago recognized the importance of props in life, the necessity of certain gestures that had no other purpose or meaning than to free the body from the trap of having to stand perfectly still.
Sygen said, “Don’t you understand? He can’t see you.”
“I know that,” Miss Smith said. “But I don’t——”
“He can’t see you and he thinks you’re young and beautiful,” Sygen said quickly as if she were afraid she would not have the courage to finish the sentence once she had started it.
Once it was said, however, both women relaxed past fear of being wounded once the wound is received; the worst blow had finally been struck, and they were both surprised and relieved to realize they had survived it.
They were silent for several moments, but the hostility that had existed between them at the beginning now was cleared out of the air. Truth had taken its place, naked, strange, terrible truth, and each of them knew there was no way to go back into any lie, for all shores of illusion seemed to be many lives from where they now stood together.
It was Sygen who broke the silence. She said, “You know he loves you.”
Miss Smith smiled with a forgetful joy, lifted one hand briefly as if to reach out and touch the girl, letting it fall slowly as she said, “He tells me that.”
Sygen said, “It’s true. He does love you.”
“And you think that is so wrong?” Miss Smith asked.
“Not love,” Sygen said. “Not love. . . .”
“This is love.”
“When he thinks you’re young and beautiful?” Sygen asked. “Is it love then?”
Miss Smith shuddered and started to turn from the girl, but she did not turn. The conversation had suddenly taken on the quality of an exposed nerve trying without success to become articulate.
Miss Smith placed one hand absently to her lips, touching them lightly. “Young and beautiful,” she said, feeling
the words with her fingers as she spoke them. “Yes . . .”
“He sees you as some marvelous creature,” Sygen said.
“And I’m not young and beautiful?” Miss Smith asked Sygen.
Sygen looked horrified for an instant. The question made it seem as if the woman standing before her were also blind—either blind or mad.
“You know what you are,” Sygen said.
Miss Smith laughed softly at this, shaking her head. She said, “Yes . . . of course. . . . I know what I am. . . .”
“And you know you’re not what he sees,” Sygen said. “You’re old. Your face is dried up. . . .” She stopped suddenly, knowing she had gone too far.
Miss Smith did not speak.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” Sygen said softly.
Miss Smith turned. Like a sleepwalker, she went to the closet, pulled out one of the suitcases. She laid it flat upon the floor, knelt in front of it, then switched open the single latch that was fastened. She rummaged among papers and magazines until she found what she was looking for. She took out the packet of photographs that were tied together with a piece of soiled white string.
Then she stood up, paused another moment, turned the packet over once in her hands, as if judging its weight. She walked to the round table that was set between the three windows overlooking the sea. She dropped the photographs onto the table as if they had suddenly become too heavy for her to hold. Turning to Sygen, she said, “Please. . . look at these.”
Sygen did not understand what Miss Smith was up to. She told herself to be on her guard and at the same time there was something so pitiful about the way Miss Smith looked now she could not help feeling as if it were up to her to help the poor woman in some way she could not even imagine.