The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  In some far precinct of the great summer house, Schubert is being played. The notes of the piano fall with grave regularity, a meditation not unlike the rain itself. The drumming of the rain is the drumming of their hearts.

  Jaschieu is no stranger to either the world or its sorrow. He curls onto his side, facing his younger cousin, but the boy, if he senses this movement, does not respond; rather, he continues to lie supine, arms folded, eyes closed, as if waiting for some visitation or perhaps only the onset of midafternoon slumber. In profile, his eyelashes are long and dark. His beauty, fragile as porcelain, is just as easily broken. Jaschieu knows this. It is the knowledge that aches darkly within him.

  Golden-haired Tadzio breathes in once, audibly, the reverse of a sigh, and it is as if the shy deer standing motionless in the thicket has caught, on the breeze, the whisper of a scent. Moving inside some thoughtful dream, Jaschieu’s right hand begins slowly to creep toward its prey. His fingertips graze the silky flesh of a boy’s thigh. He can feel his cousin tense, then relax as the fingertips rest lightly and unerringly on the smooth surface of the skin. With the greatest care in the world he begins blindly, somnolently, to explore a thigh, the ridge of a pelvis, the taut fine drum of a boy’s belly. He meets no resistance, not a whisper. No fingers clutch his wrist. No voice breaks the tremendous drumming of the rain, their heartbeats.

  Here is the indentation of a navel whose hollow his thumb traverses. He travels north to finger the hard nub of a nipple, drifts across a dip of cleavage to its companion, which he rolls between forefinger and thumb, then begins the long trek south. He has raised himself on his elbow to conduct this pilgrimage. His fingers elicit short gasps from Tadzio as he touches here, and here, and then here.

  Here in this room, this rainy afternoon in the mountains: anything is possible, everything is allowed.

  With a spasm of anxiety, Louis closed the notebook. How well he remembered the intoxicated state in which he had first penned those lines—that evening in October, Tracy Parker’s sweet, calming spirit still filling the house. Everything had seemed possible that evening, and he had dared dream what he had not allowed himself to dream for years. Gratefully he welcomed the return of the god to his temple. He had not thought the hymnic impulse harmful; it only lived, after all, between the pages of his notebook. But the shameful, even demoralizing thing was this: as the shadows of suspicion had closed in, as the Louis Tremper who walked daily in the world said to himself, with sorrow and pity, Tracy Parker is a homosexual, the Louis Tremper who opened these pages and confided his dreams in ever greater fervor and detail, goaded on, in fact, by events as they unfolded, had come to seek here a last resort from the self it was increasingly necessary for the other—the public, the steady, the esteemed—Louis Tremper to become. Here in these secret pages another Louis Tremper felt only a quiet wonder, an unaccustomed joy.

  It took such will to keep so much at bay. Even now he was aware of a host of things that did not bear looking into too closely. How deeply he regretted his panicked avoidance of poor Tracy, but panic, sadly, had been the consistent emotional note of his life. Forty years had gone by, but he still remembered with awful clarity a certain classroom at Cornell, an underpopulated seminar in German literature, a fellow student suffused with such poise, such foolish grace, that Louis could not prevent himself from gazing at him with longing. Longing for what? he’d asked himself, mystified but at the same time enthralled. Admiration, he named it, though in other moments he called it by a more desperate name: adoration. He had lived for a year in Germany, this young man; his accent was impeccable. One day in class that twilight gray gaze met Louis’s own, and they held each other’s stare for several perilous minutes before Louis, confused and troubled, looked away. But he could not look away for long, and when his will broke down, he found the boy still staring his way. For several reckless weeks of autumn those stares had continued. They had never spoken. Then, after class one day, the boy was waiting for him in the hallway. He took Louis’s arm, mysterious and conspiratorial, and steered them out of the building. “Come with me,” he said, his voice low, breathless.

  Suddenly in a panic, he wanted nothing to do with the boy; his familiarity, his touch, were repellent.

  “My dorm room,” the boy told him. He seemed to glow with palpable excitement, a shimmer of energy that Louis could see at once, even in his innocence, was darkly sexual in its origin. Roughly he withdrew his arm from the other’s grip. “I think you’re very mistaken,” he said loudly, fiercely, enjoying the look of shock and surprise that crossed the boy’s fine features. He did not wait for a reply, but marched off across the arts quad in a fury at being so vilely misunderstood.

  He had done, of course, the right thing. What irony that panic so often turned out to be identical with better judgment.

  He shuddered, took an especially deep sip of scotch, and was fifteen, the spring of 1945. Newsreels showed Berlin in ruins while the somber strains of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony played. His mother was very ill. She had flare-ups and quiescences, spoke strange, hurtful, incoherent things; had spent several weeks this last winter resting in a hospital north of Poughkeepsie. Out of harm’s way one morning he crouched behind the garage and listened as she flung words at his grandfather as if they were handfuls of black cinders. She beat her fists against his chest as the white-haired man stood dumbfounded in the midst of his beloved flowers, letting the blows fall against him without even attempting to deflect their fierce assault. “Don’t you think I see with my own two eyes?” his mother had shouted. “Do you think I’m blind? Do you think I’m stone stupid? Oh, I know your secret. I see clearly. My husband, my father. My own son as well. I see through all of you. Filth and abomination. And my own son as well. A pansy like the rest. Don’t you think I know that? The three of you are sick, sick, sick!” she shouted, arms flailing, as his grandfather—her father—had finally said, “Whoa, that’s enough, little lady. Now simmer down before somebody gets hurt.”

  Random like all her words, utterly disconnected and mad, they hit dead in the heart that secret target no one should ever have suspected he carried within himself.

  He had fled, his own madness shouting silently within, through backyards and alleys, a mile, two miles, till a stitch in his side and a burn in his lungs called a halt to his physical flight though his other, more terrible flight—past that dangerous boy at Cornell, past the shoals of all the other unquiet yearnings—did not stop until, one rainy evening in 1955, worn out with running, he had stumbled into the saving refuge of Claire Anselm. But even after that, truth be told, he had never really stopped running.

  He picked up his glass and finished off the last of the scotch. Enough, he told himself. Enough scotch for a single night, enough morbid thoughts. Stashing the notebook safely under its stack of innocuous papers at the bottom of his desk drawer, he saw—as clear as anything, a reality all its own—Tracy Parker lead Noah Lathrop tenderly and silently to a secret room in an ancient house that had never existed at all save in Louis’s worst or bravest imaginings. He could hide the notebook as carefully as he wanted; that, on the other hand, would not go away.

  Lonely silver light framed a room at first, as always, unfamiliar. He lay stiff and cold on the sofa, his old bones covered only by a thin wool afghan. He hated waking to the discovery that he’d not made it to his bed the previous night—damning evidence of weakness, though Claire, bless her heart, never seemed to take these minor infidelities amiss, and on such mornings, when he contritely brought her breakfast up, would only say—entirely without irony, he’d decided—“Working hard last night?”

  Barely dawn; he would creep upstairs, he thought, take a longish shower in the hopes that hot water and vigorous soaping with the washcloth would ease his muscles back into pliancy. Once he’d shaved and dressed it would be time to make breakfast. Afterwards, he wasn’t sure what obscure impulse had made him look into the kitchen before ascending the stairs—perhaps some still lingering wisp of spirit, some vest
igial energy that had not yet dissipated. Halfway between his pillow and the refrigerator, Lux lay on his side. Louis knew at once. “Oh, Lux,” he said, kneeling on creaking knees beside the poor creature and laying his hand on its beautiful fur. The motionless flesh was still warm. A little pool of urine had formed by Lux’s back legs; his tail was wet. His dark eyes, so intense when alive, had glazed over.

  There was nothing to do. Curling up stiffly beside the inert form on the floor, Louis laid his head on the dog’s flank, his ear against the flesh whose warmth he could feel, as he lay there, gradually fade into the cold floor of the kitchen, sublimate into the air, be absorbed into his own sorrowing body.

  He did not cry, as he had feared he might whenever he had imagined this eventuality. He hoped it was not cowardice that he felt glad it had ended at home like this, rather than in a veterinarian’s office, Lux’s eyes alive with sudden terror as loving hands held him down on a steel tabletop, as the kindly killer hovered close with his merciful needle. He could not have borne it. Still, he was so sorry Lux had been alone. He remembered how, earlier in the evening, he’d found him standing by the front door, confused, disoriented. He should have known then that something was wrong, but he himself had been distracted. As clearly as he could, Lux had been trying to tell him something that he, selfishly, had been unable or unwilling to hear.

  He stroked the dog’s lolling head and peered into those cloudy unseeing eyes. Lux’s lips were pulled back, teeth bared, muscles strangely taut, so that he appeared, in death, to be smiling at something.

  Without quite knowing why, Louis picked up the heavy form and laid it carefully on the plaid pillow that had been most of Lux’s diminished world for the last year or so. Had they needlessly prolonged his suffering by allowing him to live, arthritic and half blind, his ears painful with polyps, his kidneys failing? He gave the dog’s great head a final fond pat, then took a wad of paper towels from the dispenser and wiped the cold puddle of urine from the floor. From his arm, also, where some had leaked when he lifted Lux’s body.

  For a moment he considered saying nothing to Claire, going about the morning’s business, bringing her breakfast, leaving for his office as if nothing were amiss. She would find Lux soon enough. Of course that was madness. This truth, too, had to be faced.

  He stood in the doorway of the bedroom, feeling as if he should have knocked, as if he were a stranger who did not necessarily deserve to enter. Claire lay on her side of the bed, the comforter on his side undisturbed. Even in sleep there was a certain formality to her. He felt certain she would sleep this way after he was dead, keeping to her side of the mattress, carefully preserving his space, maintaining its inviolability as he had schooled her to do, perhaps too harshly, in the early years of their marriage.

  He felt such tenderness for her, lying there as yet untouched by what had happened. If he had not been the best of husbands, it could never be said that she had not been the best of wives.

  Sitting down gingerly on the side of the bed, he touched her shoulder.

  “Claire,” he said gently. They seldom touched anymore, and she looked at him with a hazy expression of concern.

  “Did I cry out?” she asked him.

  “No,” he told her, perplexed, rubbing her shoulder lightly as if to reassure them both of their substance.

  “We were coming back from a concert. Do you remember that night? Some animal leaped in front of the car. I was dreaming that. Only this time I couldn’t stop. I cried out but I couldn’t stop.”

  “Everything’s fine,” he reassured her. “It was just a bad dream. But I’m afraid I do have some sad news. Lux is no longer with us.”

  He paused. Actually saying it made the fact suddenly inescapable, but he forced himself to continue, to put into words and so render irrevocable an event that till now had seemed only temporary, even remediable. “He died sometime last night.”

  “Oh Louis,” Claire said quietly, as if it were more his loss than her own, though he knew she had loved Lux deeply as well, had worried about his end. “I’m so sorry.”

  “He went peacefully,” Louis told her. “In his sleep,” he added, realizing that that was the real reason he’d carried Lux back to his pillow, so Claire wouldn’t have to know that Lux had died in some kind of distress, that something had spooked him, driven him to leave his pillow for a few last—panicked?—steps as the shadow overtook him. Where had he thought to go, whom had he sought in the middle of the night?

  He had seemed to be smiling.

  A thought seized Louis with great urgency and would not let go. “We’ve got to bury him,” he said. “We can’t let rigor mortis set in.”

  “Louis,” Claire reminded him, “there’s three feet of snow. I’m sure the ground under there’s frozen solid.”

  He only shook his head. “No,” he said, “We have to do this quickly.” In all their proleptic anxiety, they had never properly talked this through, so certain had they been that the painful decision to have him put down would, in the end, be theirs to make. Now Lux had been snatched from them—or had he slipped away, made a clean escape? The thought troubled Louis. An atavistic shudder ran through him. Gripped by this impulse he knew was entirely irrational, he rose from Claire’s side.

  She reached for him, but he was beyond her grasp. “I’ll call the vet,” she offered reasonably. “We’ll have Lux cremated. We’ll bury the ashes in the spring. In the garden, by the lilacs.”

  “I don’t want Lux cremated,” he said as he strode from the room, and then, even though he knew how ridiculous it sounded, he continued, “Lux didn’t want to be cremated.”

  “Louis,” Claire called out behind him. “Please. I know you’re upset. But you’re not going to make things better by giving yourself a heart attack.”

  He marched willfully down the stairs. “My heart’s fine,” he told her, though he referred only to that hardworking material muscle, not the heavy spiritual organ he also carried within. “And frankly,” he added over his shoulder, “right now, I don’t particularly care.”

  He stood on the back porch in the dawn’s wan light. The day would be overcast, perhaps with snow flurries. No path had been shoveled out to the toolshed; he had to make his slow progress through thigh-deep snow. In dreams he moved this way, his flight from unnameable terrors impeded by some invisible hindrance. Snowdrifts blocked the toolshed door—he could only pry it open a few inches. Wading back to the mudroom, he found Claire waiting for him in her dark robe.

  “Really, Louis,” she said.

  “Let me do this,” he told her, though already he was beginning to feel foolish. “You go on inside. You’ll catch a cold standing out here.”

  “What if I told you I didn’t care?” she said dryly.

  They looked at one another. Claire’s expression was sad but also wry. Of course it should all end right there—Louis knew that perfectly well. He was being childish, silly, absurd; he was throwing a tantrum. Nevertheless, despite his recognition of all that, a great black current had seized him and was plunging him headlong toward the abyss he had known, even as a child, could open without warning: inchoate, frustrated rage in whose torrential grip, while the flood lasted, he was utterly helpless. It had been years since such rage had carried him off; he had thought, with relief, he’d finally, in his twilight years, outraced its rampage.

  With a roar of grief, he grabbed the snow shovel and fought his way back to the shed. Furiously he shoveled at the enemy, the immense undefeatable annihilating power that masqueraded, for the moment, as a snowdrift obstructing the door to the toolshed. He knew this was not about Lux. It was not even about Tracy Parker and Noah Lathrop, or Noah’s threatening father, or Reid and Libby’s desperate marriage. With a final heave of snow, he wrenched the shed door open just enough to slip inside. It was as if he’d stumbled into a momentary refuge. Almost instantly his rage receded. The light shone dim; there was the surprise of seeing the bare earth of the floor. The lawnmower was hunkered down under plastic to kee
p field mice from infesting it with their nests. Pruning shears of various shapes and sizes hung from hooks. Empty terra-cotta pots lined the shelves. Against one wall, in Claire’s neat alignment, leaned a hoe, a pitchfork, several rakes, the garden spade. He had always held himself aloof from his wife’s gardening, praising her efforts with a perfunctory “Very nice, very nice.” Why, he wondered, taking the spade down from its hook on the wall, had he always been so ungenerous, so withholding?

  With everything hidden under a blanket of white, it was difficult to tell where Claire’s flowerbeds began and ended. Choosing a spot near the aged stand of lilacs where he was relatively certain nothing of value had been planted—and what if it had?—he began to dig. Successive thaws and freezes had rendered the snow heavy as clay. He lifted and threw aside leaden shovelfuls. Cold air bristled in his lungs, but soon enough he reached bare earth. He worked steadily, without rage. What would happen would happen, he felt with a sense of doom that was very nearly comforting. Clearing a circle sufficiently wide, he plunged in. The impact shuddered up his arm. He tried again, but Claire had been right. The winter earth was as unyielding as iron.

  Or not quite as unyielding. He found, after repeated attempts, that it was possible to make a little progress; he could see, however, that to dig a hole large enough to accommodate Lux would be impossible.