The Blue Guitar

by Alex Austin

  Jean came back to the bed. He lay down beside her. He said nothing. She kissed his face gently, his eyes, his mouth, stroking his hair. But he did not stir. She looked down at his young face that was so strong in its beauty, his mouth she had come to know so well in so short a time, these eyes of his that belonged only to her.

  “Dear Jean,” she said, and she kissed the side of his face. “I have been happy here.” And even as she said these words, she wondered what the place would be like where she would say them again. “I have been happy here.” Would the mouth in that place be as gentle, the arms as strong? Would there be the sea to listen to at night? Or would the dark be filled there with the heavy stillness of gray cold mountains that shelter no man?

  She watched him a long time in silence and finally she said, “We will forgive each other. You’ll see, my darling.”

  But Jean lay there in her arms and did not answer.

  For a long time, gazing upon the cruel miracle of his youth, Miss Smith wondered, as she had so often in the past, just what it would be like to feel love for someone . . . for anyone at all.

  And Jean was thinking that what he felt for Sygen on this day, for his own sister, was something far deeper than love had ever been because he knew now that he had always loved her.

  four

  Mrs. Orlovski was pleased to hear Doctor Baimer say how well he thought Sygen was coming along. “You’d hardly believe she’d been in that bad a fix,” he said. She had absolute faith in medical science and when Doctor Baimer said everything was going to be all right, it was almost as if the Lord Himself had spoken. And he added, “Things always do seem to turn out.” And then: “She’s a good girl, that Sygen.” Mrs. Orlovski accepted his favorable prognosis, imposing upon it, as she always did in a most natural manner, the simple truth that, being a man, Doctor Baimer could never, of course, truly comprehend what happened to a woman; he can examine the flesh of a woman, but never the woman herself; he can do no more than pick a star or two here and there out of the vast constellations of feeling that go whirling endlessly through all women.

  He told her Sygen would be fine, perfectly fine, in a few weeks. Then he advised her, as he lit his pipe with the care that is as much joy to real pipe men as the actual smoking, to see that she, Sygen, did not do any strenuous work around the house. Mrs. Orlovski, for an instant (as he looked about for an ashtray in which to put the match), took this to mean that she overworked her daughter, but as he turned to her, puffing contentedly on his small black pipe, she saw he did not mean this at all and she relaxed momentarily into what she often thought when she was with Doctor Baimer, which was that men who take this great and continual pleasure out of pipes cannot find nearly that much pleasure in love, the pipe being a sign they wear, left over perhaps from ancient days when these same men were forced by more knowledgeable gods than we have today to wear small bells around their necks so women waiting for proper lovers could hear these calm men coming and so flee in time.

  “She’s had a great shock,” he went on to explain in his slow, easy voice, a voice that would tell time in years, not in hours and minutes. “And there’s never really any way we can be sure just how it’s affected her, how it will affect her. Sometimes . . .” He removed the pipe from his mouth. “. . . sometimes things like this won’t show for years and years.” Now he was putting on his coat downstairs when he said this and his back was turned momentarily to Mrs. Orlovski as he searched for his hat and so he did not see the shocked expression on her round face.

  “For years and years?” she asked him.

  Doctor Baimer turned and said, “What? Oh. Yes. What I mean to say is, these things are so very complicated, don’t you know. Why there are things that happen to us when we’re infants that may make us do something silly or even quite terrible when we’re fifty-five years old.” Doctor Baimer smiled calmly at this remark and nodded. Light from one of the front windows fell like a scar across his face.

  Mrs. Orlovski, for her part, thought the doctor was now completely out of his water; she saw the shadow beneath the light as the true color of his face; he was no longer talking medical science: it sounded more like some sort of black magic, like some trick you pay a quarter to see performed at a circus or a country fair. And so she dismissed his remark with, “You mean psychoanalysis, of course.” She had such complete faith in medical science, she did not believe even the fools who practiced it could be fool enough to use it wrongly.

  Doctor Baimer paused. Smoke breathed up out of the black bowl of the pipe, breathed like an X ray of what would go on inside a man’s lungs when he breathed, this dim cloud, fading, coming again, being torn apart quickly to disappear. Then he said, “Well, yes, in a way, I suppose.” He was always amused by the simple interpretations his patients gave to his words. They all lived in houses made of cards, cards designed and understood only by them, a human life no more really than this: a doctor sees clearly the functioning of liver, gall bladder, heart, glands, blood, lungs; a patient must abstract all these into some grand philosophy to make life bearable. Just as she, this woman standing before him now. She, even more than any of the others. He laughed quietly and added, “Sometimes I think it’s really a miracle we do as well as we do, all things considered.” Even to know she could not ever bear a child had not been sufficient truth to keep her from becoming a mother, from designing for herself the bright card of motherhood to stand as foundation of her house. It was all so many years ago, it could have been easy to forget, but Doctor Baimer was a man who kept himself too busy to allow time for forgetting in much the same way other people try to keep busy so they will not have time to remember. She came to him, told him of the pains, the sickness each morning, the blood having stopped for two months. He told her this happened, but it would not continue because not only was she not going to bear, she was unable to bear. “God does this.” He blamed much on God to ease what news he often had to give his patients (thus acquiring for himself the reputation of a truly pious man), even though he himself believed in God no more than he believed last Sunday could ever come again: they were both gone completely. This he accepted and smoked his pipe and continued gazing into their bodies as an astronomer stares off into the heavens to find new stars where others, more blind than he can ever afford to be, must find God.

  He told her that day (he even remembered its being October by the way leaves fell down golden to turn gray the instant they settled into the dust outside his window). He told her, but she—like so many others—would not believe him. She had the two children, the boy and the girl. She did not believe him about not being able to bear, but she did tell him on that day how the good Captain Orlovski had brought them to her. It was during the war. The captain’s ship sailed dangerous waters in those days. “But he was such a fearless man.” The children he found in separate ports, towns that had been purged to ruin by the war so pictures still hung lopsided on walls that stood above the bombed rubble and in the streets half-naked children wandered, playing a terrifying game of war, hopscotch over the stones of their broken houses, learning to run without limbs, to see without eyes, to ask for food with mouths half torn off their faces. In each of these towns, the good captain found a child, the boy in one, the girl in another, and he had brought them back to her.

  He had said only, “I did not know this.”

  She had not even bothered to dress herself as she told him the story. Even back that far her body had gone soft. Seated on the white long table, legs hanging down, she had the sad look of an artist’s model who has remained naked in the studio after the artist himself has left, after even the painting he has done of her has been sold.

  “The captain brought them back to me,” she said.

  “But you’ve never told them,” said the doctor.

  “Told who?”

  “The children,” he said.

  She said, “No. Of course I haven’t told them. I never will.”

  “And they have no memory of it?”

  “No. They
were too young.”

  “So you can always be their mother.”

  “Yes.”

  “And they will never be your children.”

  “Perhaps one day,” she said.

  That was always the belief they lived with: that life would be long enough to turn all hope to truth, to turn all dreams of stone to stone itself. And when they discovered, as far back as the very beginning, that life was and would not ever be long enough for this, they had themselves an Eighth Day to the Creation and invented their heaven where there would be time enough and they discarded the real God who had made them not for dreams, but for no more than sleep and waking, who had made not love, but hearts, not eternity, but the ticking of a watch that one day will lie rusted and silent in the great heap of all their ashes. Scared of the thunder as they were, they could have no business with any god who had made man the tiger’s brother. And in his place they had put an old good father of the tribe, wrathful only to their enemies, loving to them, a god who would give them the endless time they had to have if life was to be made bearable.

  The doctor was not a kind man, but he could remain silent.

  “My golden-haired children,” she always said.

  She sat naked, with her soft breasts and the folds loose on her belly, for a long time that day. She told him again stories of the good captain, stories he had heard before, all except the one about his having found and brought back these two golden children who, before he had examined the insides of her, he had always thought were hers.

  “How I loved the captain,” she said to him, sitting there. “It seems as if there hasn’t been a day in my entire life when I haven’t been in love. And yet I know it was all only this love I felt for him. It was like hearing the echoes even before the actual sound itself.” She went on with this. The doctor sat off to one side on the white stool, his legs crossed. He lit his pipe on that day too as she spoke. Love made him recall that while reading the handful of novels he had scattered, with no more need or appetite than feeling he should be aware of this too, over his reading life, he had always wished novelists would stop, once and for all, writing this silly mystical nonsense about love and get down to the plain facts of blood pressure, hearts, glands, metabolism, the beautiful nervous system, the brain itself. Then, if one still had to be romantic about the vast tangle of psychic needs which was built upon this physical base and which in the final analysis produced that psychic chimera we call love, one would at least have truth for a beginning, if not for an end. What a pleasure it would be to read of a boy and girl who fell in love simply because they both had low blood pressure and enjoyed that grand communion of souls which one person who lives slowly finds when meeting another person who lives slowly. Surely blood-pressure mates would have a far better chance to survive than a boy and girl, each stepping out of adjoining toothpaste ads, thinking their bright even molars to be souls and the mere matching of their smiles to be love.

  She was sitting there naked and not even sad really and saying, “I’ll teach them love.” He thought: And that will be enough to make a mother out of her. That’s what she thinks. Of course. The reason they made God in the image of man in the first place is because they knew beforehand how to cheat a man and they would never have invented a god they could not cheat.

  “I’ll teach them love,” she said. “I’ll love them too, of course. I do now. I already have. But teaching them love is something else, something more. I’ll do that.”

  Man is the wildest beast in all the universe and so he had to make a mask called Love to hide himself from the snake and from the tiger. This was what he thought when she sat there with her legs hanging down over the edge of the white table, telling him about love.

  Now she was standing, nearly round as she was then (he could always see their naked bodies beneath the clothes they wore; he knew where scars and warts and all other manner of magic signs were on their bodies), and she was saying, “But she’s all right now, isn’t she?”

  He smiled, pressed her arm in a way that was meant to reassure her, and this gesture of his always did reassure her (and his other female patients), and so she returned his bland smile even before he said, “I think she’ll be just fine.”

  “She’s always been such a strong girl, you know,” Mrs. Orlovski said.

  Doctor Baimer did not answer her. He knew she had more to say; his words would only lead her in new directions and then she would have to retrace her steps to say what she would say now. So he stood there. His gaunt face looked as if all the illnesses he had cured had, in revenge, drained their share of life out of it, leaving this mask colored gray like the dying he had not been able to cure. He barely smiled, the black pipe at one side of his mouth, his hat and satchel in hand, looking a little as if he had quite forgotten them.

  “It is such a terrible thing to happen, though,” Mrs. Orlovski said, heaving a sigh and shaking her head. “Such a terrible thing!”

  “Yes . . . well . . .” the doctor said, but he went no further than this.

  Mrs. Orlovski said, “So many of the guests have known Sygen since she was no bigger than . . .” She paused, glanced briefly around for something against which to measure her daughter, and then she said, “This,” holding her hand around three feet from the floor. “They’ve watched her grow. You know how some of them have been coming back every summer.”

  And he knew this. A doctor would have to know. Old magic men of the tribe. But with that patience that was no part of kindness in him, he pointed out with a certain professional pride that he had even treated some of them. This was more conversation, like blaming God for death and hiccups. But it served to remind Mrs. Orlovski of the time that sweet young Mrs. Jeffers, barely out of her teens, had given birth to twins one summer, a boy and a girl, two months before they had been due. There had been a fierce, ragged commotion that night. Every guest had taken part as if invited finally to the kind of exceptional gathering from which their ordinary lives had always kept them. They raced up and down, back and forth, in and out of each other’s rooms. They carried flashlights, candles, as if in the great excitement they expected the house lights to go out. They speculated, cried, joked, got drunk, reminisced. One woman even had the honesty to get violently ill in the kitchen and spend the rest of the night clutching her own belly as if she were the one upstairs giving birth.

  The girl herself had been terrified. Mrs. Orlovski reminded Doctor Baimer of this all through her telling of the story, like a refrain, and he kept nodding mechanically at whatever she said.

  The girl had screamed and cried, had thrown pillows at those standing around, had ripped sheets with her nails, had nearly heaved her own body off the bed several times so he had to place women on both sides to catch her if she did, and all through it he had harbored the fear (one he always found in himself at births) that a man would feel while having to treat a wild animal.

  The story had been that the husband was a salesman, had gone back to the city, was traveling, and so there was no way to get in touch with him.

  Her screams had kept all the guests up that night, but none of them had complained, not even the one sick all night in the kitchen. Doctor Baimer remarked how it had been a very difficult birth. But he did not add how he believed there to have been no husband at all. At births, witness to the lone world a woman inhabits in this almost single moment of her life, he was never able to truly believe that there even could be husbands. They have always used us like cups and saucers in their lives and yet they are so artful in this, they can fill us up with love like filling a cup with coffee and, even as they are drinking, we believe that we too are full part of it and human and even that we are the ones who are drinking. The doctor often thought this and it always amused him, sometimes made him laugh out loud. He had bought a girl named Marcia a rabbit coat once many years ago, but he had never married.

  “But they were such darling little babies,” Mrs. Orlovski said with a happy smile.

  The doctor nodded, recalling with the du
ll pride of a man who knows what he can expect of himself, his part in the incident, and how, when it had finally come to an end, along about dawn, everyone in the house (in bathrobes and dressing gowns) had congratulated him on the fine job he had done and the sick middleaged woman in the kitchen said with pathetic coquettishness, still smelling of having been sick, “I do hope I’m not pregnant too.”

  “Why it was one of the most exciting nights we’ve ever had here,” Mrs. Orlovski said.

  But then the smile dried up on her face as April rain on a window dries quickly with the beginning of the summer sun. Her eyes avoided the doctor for a moment. He started toward the door since he had heard most of Mrs. Orlovski’s stories many times and he was not particularly in the mood for any more of them now.

  Mrs. Orlovski, however, did not attempt to start one of her stories; or that was what he thought first as she began to tell it, since he had never before heard the beginnings, the first time, only the words made perfect by repetition like stones worn smooth by a million comings of the sea.

  She looked up at the doctor just as he had his hand on the doorknob. He turned a quarter way round, smiled in an embarrassed manner as if he had been caught doing something mildly sinful. He saw the years fade out of her eyes, the face as it had been naked on the white table. Even the voice had no sound of her age, the story (as the others had too, he realized for the first time) giving her life back its very source like a charm to be worn forever against the dying of her years.

  “I can just tell the guests . . .” she began. He knew what she would say, but he did not know how he could foretell such a strange, mad lie. “. . . that Sygen’s husband was a sailor. Ships did come here once. Surely you’ve seen the wreck.”

  He said, “Yes, I’ve seen it.”