Nobody in the room could crack the text she’d quoted, though the donkey far down the table quoted a few wavering lines of what he said was the Twenty-fourth Psalm.
“Get a Bible.” Leskel glanced at his watch.
All down the room, the guests murmured like people leaving a theatre. They were leaving us with our troubles. It was only polite.
I UNDERSTAND BUDDY DID go for a Bible … You can’t do that, Batface, great as you are. Unless somebody in the office has already fed you all of it—which I doubt. Hear then, Corinthians, chapter ten, verse twenty-one: “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils; you cannot partake of the Lord’s table and the table of devils.”
Meant for us human binaries, Batface. Not for you, who can partake of anything.
I hadn’t stayed to hear. I had come to my senses at last and run after Maeve. Why wasn’t she keeping us on anymore? Buddy? Me? The answer came to me in great spills of magnetic tape spiraling up through the house as I ran between its curling fountains, sidling at me anaconda from every corner. The machine of the past had vomited it.
I found her where I knew I would—at the terrarium door. She was standing with her back to me, pressed forward, her spread arms cradling the curved wall on either side, like a tiny Atlas holding the bubble of the world. Or an experimenter, about to step into space holding onto a glass-and-wrought-iron balloon.
The sneakers I’d changed to made their sneaker sound. A tremor in her shoulders told me she heard it. But in whatever yoga-plan she was breathing by, I had no place. I must have lost my place there long ago. For months on end, I had forgotten her myself. To me this was natural. Was it to her?
As I came nearer, she let go of the globe and wheeled to face me, arms at her side. Just before I got to her, moving slower because I was scared—she had her feet on solid floor, but I felt her teetering, as if she were going to jump somewhere—she reached behind her, slid open the terrarium door to an arc just wide enough to backstep into it, still facing me. Smiling humbly, deferent, she barred my way.
I let out my breath. In relief. I think the flesh of apartment dwellers never really forgets at what height it lives. Or not the child who is bred to it, warned when near windows, or grabbed away from them before language, his sight grilled with curlicued iron, or soft stone balustrade or glass, or nothing but nothing—between him and the people moving urgently down below. Down there is the empire. The eye is always making the magic, forbidden leap. In old dreams, I floated down plumb, my descent safe in the marble column of itself, to a slow melody. Heard at windowsills, when leaning awake. A tension, like silent decibels. One grew accustomed to it. A slight fear of heights. Like a slight fear of death.
I had never had it for her or Buddy, of course. They had had it for me. Now the balance had changed. But she was in the safest place here. Heavy glass, aluminum banded at good close intervals. No access to the parapets—the only outside room that hadn’t it. A small core of safety. Aluminum is such a joyously weightless metal, a cheap sunbeam in rain. I fell in love with modernity all over again, just looking at it.
“What a great idea, Maeve.” And she is safe. No way to go except back to me where I am, feet planted on the same parquet pattern that has followed us through all the apartment houses.
She’s standing just back of the glass wall that curves toward her from either side. The floor inside there must be some three inches higher, bringing her that much nearer my eye-level; when I first passed her height, years ago, I used to waggle a forefinger at her, senior to child.
Above her head, a dark fester of vines and leaf-faces pressed toward me through the glass.
“Even the door’s curved, isn’t it? That Claes is clever. Boy, what it must have cost.” Brushing against her wrist as I put my palm against the doorframe, I find her arm rigid. She really means to keep me out. Of her lair? I can understand that.
“Oh, it cost.”
No grin. In department-store days, there would have been.
“Maeve. What’s between you and Buddy? … That I don’t know, I mean.”
“Nothing new.”
“Something I should have known? And don’t?” I try to grin at her. “Or shouldn’t have. The bathroom wall. Remember?”
She does look up, then. “Remember? The end of an era.”
“The day I—” What had I done, really.
“You scared us. Me.”
“How?”
“After that, I really did things Buddy’s way. Before that, it was sometimes for myself.”
“Your parties, you mean. Changing apartments. Your not going downtown.”
“That the way you saw us? Only those three things?”
I shook my head like a swimmer. Second string. “Maybe it was me. The way I saw me. Between the two of you.”
She shrugged. “People act on one another. A family. One day or another doesn’t make the difference. Don’t you mind.”
“What am I minding? … You haven’t yet said.”
When she doesn’t answer, I say “Maeve. Let me in, huh.” I try to laugh it off. “Let me see your lair.”
She looks up quick. Says nothing.
“After all, I am going to be an architect.”
She put a palm up to my cheek. “Build well … No, stay where you are. I’ll talk.”
“Aw, come on.” I become her child again. “We could sit on that bench in there.”
On the far side of the terrarium, one of those iron cemetery benches had been poised, near what must be the new plants. Thin airy ones, spreading their lace; they couldn’t weigh that much. At each point in the wall where there was a metal stave, Claes had bracketed it with a speared oval teardrop frame in filigree, in the center of each of which there was a piece of milky glass—amber or lavender or green, and in one or two, an old streaked mirror; he had copied what the eighteenth century called a repose. It did make me feel a child again. In front of a secret garden. Out of those fairybooks I’d hated, but wanted to believe in.
“No. No.”
She’s not lucid here. At this point, it stops. Here at this door. And here is where I’m no longer a child.
“Okay. Give.”
“You make me feel so good. So normal. Just to hear your slang.”
“A convenience. That’s what I am. You’re brownnosing me.” But I couldn’t make her smile. I touched her hair. “Since when Kwan Yin.”
“Since.”
Depression became her; she looked younger for it. But it sat on her cheeks like rouge on a corpse’s. On the one corpse I’d seen.
“You look like him. Like Granpa MacNeil. I never saw it before.”
“You only saw him dead.” She reached up to touch the spot between my eyebrows, where the Hindus put a red dot. Or the ash goes, on Ash Wednesday.
“I used to be afraid your chin would turn out like hers. Like a cat’s.”
“Maybe it will yet. My mother’ll never make a Park Avenue wheelchair lady, though, no matter what Buddy does. People should lead their lives to their natural outcome. She’s doing it. I don’t mind her anymore. Not like Buddy hoped.”
“But you left, just now, when she—”
“No, I did it for myself. I’m doing that now. Learning it.”
“For yourself, Maeve?”
“I can only do it here.”
The globe was like a rival. Into which she would recede.
“You’re a quick learner.”
Joke. But she shrank. I don’t have to imitate Buddy. I already sound like him. She made a movement. I saw she wanted in. I needed to delay her. That’s all the vibes said.
“How’d you come to build this thing?”
“I came here for the city, you know. When I was young.”
“Well?”
“I wanted to look at the city again.”
“Again?”
“Like from the Amenia porch.”
She had never said anything like that to me. In my whole life. Like that sounded. “And can you?” I
wanted to know too. It would be something I could hold onto.
She looked down, hunted. It was the simplicity that scared me. “Oh, Bunt. I see so much.”
Husky-voiced. A woman I’d never seen before. A woman. Making me see how in all the girl-wrestling I’d maybe never seen any of them—right. How they chain themselves to each other—after we chain them. Be careful, Jasmin was saying to me. Your mother’s voice has death in it. But it’s not too late.
“Strange, how I can talk to you,” Maeve said. “Why is that?”
I couldn’t tell her yet; it would choke me. Kangaroo.
“You shouldn’t have come back,” my mother said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to talk.”
“Maybe I do.” I took her by the wrists. Doing any of this wasn’t going to make me feel any bigger. But this was the audience I had. “Tell me, Maeve—has Buddy always given the parties around here?”
She went limp. Only a little. I’d only slapped her gently, with her life. I let her go.
“You shouldn’t have come back.”
“You’re telling me I’m not worth anything. That’s not nice.” I could smile at that whimsy from a world where the rainbows weren’t barbed wire yet. She looked ravaged enough to be my mother. I was old enough. “I’m away from you, from you both. Without having to be away.”
“How do you mean, Bunty?”
“I learned a lot over there, sure. But not what Buddy thought. Not in the galleries only. Walking the streets, watching Europe. And in the bars, with my friends.”
When we talked, no matter about millions of things, no matter what, underneath it was always about them back here—and us. Versus us. They were in possession of our childhoods. From a hundred thousand miles away—three times round the globe and over, they held us fast.
“It was in Paris I learned it most. In the restaurants. Watching the kids and the parents—once I ate a whole dinner watching a couple with a two-year-old. Her grandparents owned the place, but she sat up and ate like a little granny anyway—she knew she was watched. Oh there was love going around; when the grandpa served me the melted butter I thought he’d drown me in it, looking at her sideways. And the grandma came out of the kitchen like under a spell. But they were all so cool about it, the baby most of all.” I couldn’t believe it, whatever it was. “And when dinner was over, a little white dog jumped out from beneath the cloth. From the baby’s lap. And in their own family restaurant.” It knew, too, whatever was being taught there in front of my eyes. It was the coolest of all.
“In Asia, too,” I said. “Though there it was too much. When they were poor. The parents were teaching them how to be. How to be the underdog. I won’t buy that.”
I’d interested her. Fishing for her, skeining. Somebody had to. And could do it only with the truth. She’d spread her arms against the curve of her lair—but she was listening. “What do you mean—I was telling you you’re not worth anything?”
“They’ve got other things wrong over there. But I could feel it in the streets. In the parks especially. Maybe it’s wrong. Maybe it only leads to armies in another way. But I wanted it.”
“What?” Maeve said. “What did you want?”
They’d never really asked that, she and Buddy. Only thought they had.
“A girl said it to me. She was going back to Boston to teach in a nursery, because of it, she said. She was going to try to teach them it. Monica, her name was.” She was still coming down, when she said it to me. I’d held onto her while she screamed and huddled. Sex helped. I was sick on my own, though I hadn’t had a thing. Tired of my world-dwarfing, I huddled too.
“She said it was too late for you to teach us obligation,” I said. “She said you only taught us love.”
“Smart,” my mother said. “You’re smart.”
“Let’s make it a rule,” I said. “Not to say that to each other. Ever again. A family rule.”
Maeve looked up at me. “Too late for that. Your girl was right … Bunty dear. Go away and leave me for a bit, then.”
“Leave you?”
She stretched out her hands. “Be.”
How seductive her voice was—and not for me. I knew how hard I had to fish for her. What I couldn’t figure was how. There was some secret to the terrarium. A bloody secret garden—somewhere.
Holding onto her hands, not wanting to let them go—or was she holding me?—treading water for a time, I cast my eyes here, there. “School starts you becoming a person, Maeve, that’s all.” Her apologetic, blue-eyed boy, swinging arms with her. “I became one to myself. You two didn’t, to me. You stayed where you were. In my mind.” I leaned closer, close. “Tell me, then. About Buddy. It can’t be so terrible.”
“Only to me. And it’s no secret.”
“Only to me, Maeve.”
“What good is it, if I tell you how Buddy lies to himself? I can’t tell you mine.” She gave me her strange, transparent smile, as if I must be seeing through her lips to them.
“He digs being rich, you mean.”
“For me,” she said, with the smile. “Only for me.” And she looked away from me, at the terrarium.
What’s there, what’s there? The jewels had been. That she doesn’t wear. The Kwan Yin that he began looking at art with. And when he knew better, discarded, leaving it with Maeve. The suit of armor, if we still had it. Disposed of after some jokey guest stuck a pair of sunglasses on it. It’s all here, what she came to the city for. Why weigh it on him?
“Generosity can be a disease.” Maeve turned up my palms, staring at them. “That doctor tells Buddy it’s a way of possessing people. Buddy told me.”
Jannie should know. I saw him in the launderette. With Jasmin’s check in hand. Holding his face out to her, like a check.
“And what did Buddy say?”
“He laughed, and said ‘Jannie’s not a Jew.’ Your father’s just as sick as they say I am. Only he’s a success at it.”
She raised her chin high. I saw her mother in it. I saw her natural outcome. Or thought I did. And could love her for it. In a way she never taught me to. “Oh, Maeve.” I held my arms out, to her shabbiness. I hugged her to me, a bag of bones that had no more demands in them. What did it matter whether those demands were hers or Buddy’s—she had no more of them. I felt it in her—the emptiness of those who demand nothing from others anymore. Or not from themselves.
Or who tell you the stories that help them dwarf the world.
I let her go. Watching carefully. Standing near. Somewhere—there was a brink.
“I’ve a confession to make. I gave one of your coats to a girl.”
If she asked which coat, it meant that she could still be dragged back.
“Did you. I hope she needed it.”
“She reminded me of you a little.” I suppose Jannie would say that’s why I get the girls I get.
But it wasn’t merely the way the two of them felt to my arms—smallboned, downbeat. It was when Dina spoke of Felipe. Oh, I believed in her tale of the sphincter muscle. But I could tell the reason she and he hung together must be different. Why wouldn’t he come here? What if she ripped off houses like this because she wanted to? Why would he rather mug? What did they hang onto each other for? What was their joint sadness?
“Did she. She live near?”
She said it absently, the way she had asked about schoolmates when I interrupted her, peering down meanwhile at a task. A glass globe, decorated and almost finished now? Why did I think that? What did it lack?
“In the park.” I said. Absently.
“The park.” Maeve stared through her glass lair and out the other side. “I’d like to live there.”
“Maeve. Maeve.” I’d been with as many way-out people as anybody. I couldn’t take it in her. “Maeve—let’s go get some gormay.”
“Gour-may, it is,” my mother said. Half-laugh, half-sob. “I found out.” And all her charm came back to me. Her wild, whirl-on-a-heel intentness when she wan
ted something. She would get it too, like always. Unless I got there ahead of her.
I followed her stare. “Your plants—your new plants. They don’t seem to be doing very well. Even though Claes watered them.”
“Oh, they’ll do,” she said. Staring at them as if they were shelves. With her death on them.
They’ll say now that she was telling me. Asking me for help. Directing me toward it. But I don’t believe it. She had it all worked out. She hadn’t asked me to come back. And had taken all precautions. The key was at her waist.
She was only gambling on when.
You guess things because of what you are. In Maine once, I knew a local boy who couldn’t tell his left from his right—and walked more unerring in the woods because of it. My habit is maybe a city one. I’m always miming space with my elbows—or a cock of the head, a stretching of ears—anything handy. I follow architecture with my body. Skyscrapers don’t do anything for me; I just stand tall. The Taj Mahal made me spread my fingers—Siva Siva. And certain parts of Italy put me in knots. Or tempted me to fly. Jasmin was onto it. “Think of me as Borromini Tower,” she said once. And leaned back.
“Buddy bought the farm,” my mother said. “Our farm. Watch out. He thinks he did it for you.”
Funny how just as I began to catch onto what the lair was—to mime its space to myself, plotting it mentally with my feet, getting the feel of it in my arms, receiving its message like a cable I couldn’t read yet—my mother began to tell me what she thought was the story of her life. Just as I was only half-listening; maybe she felt that. We talk best, Bats, to those who’re no longer listening.
I was observing the plants. Dark-snouted, the nearer ones, healthy velvet, clambering toward us, opening their broad throats. Screaming. If I could only tune in.
“Don’t take a house from him,” Maeve said. “You’ll never get it right for him. Or if you do, you’ll only be its secretary: Secretary to the house. And he’ll move on. He’ll be doing it down at the office. While everybody’s watching the house. He’s too smart for us. That’s one time he tells the truth.
The plants in the rear—high, graceful aureoles new from the greenhouse—were already only a faded lace, scarcely breathing, their broad skirts drooping, as if a squeezing hand was at their roots. At the Folies Bergère, I’d seen a mock ballet of Circe—twining green sirens, oldish women most of them, kicking and cavorting in and out of painted cloth waves, from behind each of which an iridescent serpent-arm rose and pulled them down. All done in black light. The plants back there looked as if they too were in stage-light, on another plane. The cemetery bench was pushed near them. And close to it—the Kwan Yin was back. Inside.
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