“So had there been?”
“What?”
“Anyone before me.”
“Just me.”
Upstairs, William began coughing again. Conny listened, willing it to stop. When it worsened, she stood.
“Stay,” she said. He nodded, and she went up to William.
A few days later, during another afternoon downpour, his fever broke. Conny cleaned him up and changed his sheets, then cleaned the rest of the sickroom. At one point she noticed him watching her, eyes half-lidded. His face moved as if to smile. Perspiration slicked his cheeks.
Toward evening the rain stopped, and she opened his window to rid the room of its oppressive air. She mopped the floor hoping that too would help. When she finished his room, she went into his study.
Boxes of books were stacked against one wall. A plain table served as a desk. Conny picked items up and put them down, not really straightening anything. He had yet to do any work here. His desk stood ready—paper waited on one end, the ivory pen and ink bottle by the lamp, and the bulky typewriter he almost never used on the other. She picked up the bottle: the same one, all this time. The traces of their blood must have long since disappeared. Perhaps some few molecules had worked into the glass wall. He always refilled it when the ink ran out, the bottle and the pen constant, lifelong companions.
She ran the mop lightly over this floor and took the bucket down to the kitchen. She was hungry but too tired to bother cooking anything. She tore off a piece of bread and poured a glass of wine and went up to her own room, just across the hall from William’s. She lay down, closing her eyes without expecting to sleep, wondering what it would be like to stay in one place forever.
She opened her eyes to a wash of brilliant moonlight silvering the walls of her room. The silence around her seemed like the night was holding its breath. She was absolutely awake. Her pulse beat quickly, as if something had frightened her from sleep. It was only then she realized that she had actually slept.
No light shone in the empty hall except a dim glow that peeked out from the stairwell from below. Curious, she went to the staircase, but could hear nothing but silence. She descended the stairs taking care to be as quiet as possible.
The main room held a bluish light like water-reflected moonlight that muted color and detail, yet gave the impression of perfect illumination. She paused on the last step, letting the feel of the old wood against her feet register as solid, as real. A faint breeze shifted her hair, tickling her face. Movement caught her eye. She stared across the room, against the wall, by the long divan. Another movement—an arm shifted, swimming through the unreliable light. Conny stepped to the floor and threaded her way between chairs and tables, and stopped before the couch.
The arm moved again and a face came up out of shadow.
“He’s writing again,” Geoffrey said.
Conny made her way over to him and perched on the sofa edge, her hip against his side. She walked her fingers across his stomach. He snatched her hand and held it, running his thumb up and down her palm.
“How long has it been?” he asked.
She tried to find a way to misunderstand him, but she knew what he meant. “Since Cambridge. A little before, maybe.”
“For both of us, then.” He lowered his arm and looked at her. “I ran away after Reading. I blamed you. I thought we shouldn’t be doing this, and it was you kept finding me and insisting, but that wasn’t it. I wanted to see if I could live on my own.”
“And?”
He shrugged. “Sure. If you can call it living. Tasteless food, stale air, meaningless routine. No reason to get up in the morning except that it’s too bright to sleep. You?”
“I’ve been too busy taking care of him to notice.”
He gave her a skeptical look. Then, abruptly, he frowned and sat up.
William stood at the bottom of the stairs, a long nightshirt covering him to his shins, staring at them. He held a thin sheaf of paper in his hand.
January, 1933
Conny’s lungs emptied in quick succession as her thighs relaxed. The coils in her stomach released across her ribs, along her back, through her arms, and ebbed away. She folded against Geoffrey. Where their skin touched sweat oiled the contact—it let them slide minutely with each inhalation and exhalation; at the exact line along which their skin parted, evaporation cooled them. Moisture ran from her shoulders, into the runnel of her spine. In the stillness she heard the faint scratch of pen nib on paper.
“My God,” Geoffrey breathed, “the man’s prodigious.”
Conny nodded. She opened her eyes. Across the room, by the window, William hunched over the small table, working.
“What do we do if he dies?” Geoffrey asked quietly.
Conny raised herself on one arm. “That’s not funny.”
“Wasn’t meant to be. It’s a serious question. We ought to think about it.”
She kissed his neck, licked the salt from the hollow of his throat. “Not now.” She lay back against him, and he ran his fingertips lightly along her sides and over her hips and buttocks. His gentle touch still surprised her.
Conny closed her eyes but could not sleep. Geoffrey’s question nagged at her. In the nearly two years since Norwich, William had never really recovered. His coughing peppered the nights, and he obstinately refused to see a doctor. Geoffrey regularly threatened to pick him up and carry him to one, but it never happened. Still, William seemed no worse. Conny imagined him like a stone balanced on an edge, waiting for a sufficient tremor to send it tumbling. He needed to be in a sanatorium, but neither she nor Geoffrey could bear to do it. At times their inertia almost let her believe Geoffrey’s occasional delusions that they had no reality of their own away from William—that they existed only in the benevolence of his incessant scribbling.
“We go on,” she said.
“Hmm?”
“If he dies. We go on.”
“Can we?”
“Shh.” She listened to William working. It was in these moments she imagined herself as a pyre, a fire eating everything down to charred debris, but then William moved his pen again stirring the ashes, and phoenix-like, found something more to burn.
June, 1935
Conny trudged up the steep path. The late afternoon light angled through the trees in shafts. Devon was peaceful—she liked this place more than any other. She tried to imagine living the rest of her life here. This time it was possible, she decided. The three of them had achieved a kind of equilibrium. The last year had been the best.
It was nearly dark by the time she got back to the cottage. Geoffrey sat at the foot of the steps. He looked up at her, his face taut and grim. From the house she could hear William shouting. Something shattered.
“What happened?” she asked.
Geoffrey shrugged. “He threw me out.”
She dropped her bag beside him and ran up the stairs.
Furniture had been moved around, a table turned over. Ceramic shards littered the floor. William squatted before the fireplace. As Conny came up behind him she saw him shove a handful of pages into the flames. They curled up and blackened almost at once. Even before they were gone, he threw more in.
“William!”
She grabbed the next stack from him and he fell. He stared at her for a few seconds as if he did not know her, and then he jumped to his feet and took the pages back, pushing her away. He flung them into the hearth.
“Damn them! Damn you!”
Conny tried to get the rest of the manuscript from him. He whirled around and caught her with an elbow. She staggered onto the couch, breathless, and watched as he tossed the rest of the pages to the fire.
“Damn! Damn! Damn it all!”
His face seemed to compress, caught for an instant between rage and hurt; then the tears came and he howled. Conny held him. His thin body convulsed. He screamed and shook, made motions to push her away, but without any force.
“I’m tired,” he said.
Conny led him
to his bedroom and helped him undress. She could almost pick him up now. She drew the sheets and eased him onto the mattress.
He reached up and touched her face. “Don’t go.”
Startled, Conny stared at him for a few moments. She took off her clothes. He watched her with an expression of gratitude. Naked, she climbed into bed with him. He laid his head on her breast and idly ran his fingers over her stomach, her hip, her other breast. After a time his hand became still and his breathing deepened.
Conny watched the last light fade and the room pass into night, not wanting to move. She heard Geoffrey come back into the house. She listened to the heavy tread of his boots to the kitchen, then back into the living room. Finally, he came into the bedroom.
“Conny—?”
“He’s sleeping,” she whispered.
“No,” William said. He lifted his head. “Join us, Geoffrey. Please.”
“You told me to get out.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Please.”
Geoffrey drew himself up.
“Conny?”
“Please,” she said.
Geoffrey undressed in the doorway. As he did, William’s fingers began moving again. At first Conny was more surprised than excited. His fingers slipped between her thighs. She moved her legs apart to give him access. This time she did not simply lie open for him. She reached beneath the thin leg he had thrown across her thigh. He sucked his breath between his teeth.
Then Geoffrey stood by the bed. She could not see his face, and she doubted he could see her well by the dim light through the open door. She brought her free leg up and kicked the sheets down.
“Please,” she said.
William scooted to the far side of the bed. Conny rolled toward him and kissed him. The bed shifted as Geoffrey lay down. She felt his hand on her hip. She raised her leg and Geoffrey’s fingers slid inside her. She pushed back toward him. He pressed against her, kissed her shoulders, her neck. Conny caressed William. He bent toward her and traced the shape of her breast with his mouth. William reached across her and grabbed Geoffrey’s arm. They all stopped for the moment making a tableau, a kind of completion. Conny bit her lip to keep from crying.
“I love you both,” William said. “I’m sorry it hasn’t come out better.”
Above her in the dark the two men hugged each other, briefly. She eased onto her back, opened her arms wide, and embraced them both.
May, 1936
She looked up at the sudden stillness. For a long time she did not want to look at him. She held the handwritten page before her, pretending to herself that she was simply appreciating it, that it still meant so much to her that she could find nothing to say, but the silence stretched, and she set the page aside and looked at him.
There was no way to divide the time into infinite sections, no way to prevent herself from coming to the point of knowing that he was gone. At least his eyes were closed. He had always been afraid of dying with his eyes open. He could never explain it clearly to her. It was the only thing he had ever failed to put into words, but it had to do with dreams and darkness and fear of being caught in the wrong reality.
Conny closed the chest and went to tell Geoffrey that William was dead.
Geoffrey sat staring out the window. The mourners had all gone, few as they were. Conny knelt beside him and touched his hand. Dry and papery.
“What now?” he asked.
“We go on.”
“With what? I haven’t felt much this last year. A few times.” He looked at her with a puzzled frown. “Will it be like this from now on?”
“I don’t know.” She patted his hand, stood, and moved closer to the fireplace.
Conny broke twigs and piled them onto the ashes of the last fire, then set four good-sized logs on top of them. The dried sticks caught easily and soon the logs burned, too. She sat on a footstool and watched the flames lick the air.
“Did you ever wonder what it would’ve been like if it’d been me you met first and married?”
“No.”
Geoffrey had come near, away from the window, hands in his pockets. He stared into the fire. “I think I’ll go for a walk.”
“All right.”
He hesitated. “Conny—do you think when I get back—maybe—”
“We’ll see.”
He nodded and turned away. A few moments later Conny heard the door close.
She sighed and turned to the chest, close at hand. It seemed to have grown larger over the years. The pages were an inch away from filling it completely.
She understood Geoffrey’s frustration. It was a frustration they shared. Neither of them had felt any desire for nearly a year, not since that last night when William had surprised them both. They talked about that night sometimes, as if it marked history for them. Conny supposed that it did.
In the morning William had been feverish and blood flowed from his mouth. They finally got him to see a doctor, a triumph of sorts after all the years of refusal. Tuberculosis. It surprised no one, perhaps not even William, but somehow, as if hearing it made it finally real, William grew weaker and sicker. Geoffrey and Conny had done their best to take care of him, but there was not much they could do. William still refused to go to a sanatorium. He wrote little. Friends sent cards. A few sent money.
Geoffrey was afraid. He did not want to leave her, but without William—without William’s scratching and scribbling, without his continual act of creation—he thought she might leave, or that he might. He wondered if William’s words were all that bound them one to the other.
She lifted a sheet from the trunk. The words blurred. “This is all we had,” she said. “All that’s left.”
She fed it into the fire.
Innumerable pleasures ignited her senses—the smooth texture of skin, the pressure of hands, the rush of breathing in her ear, taste of sweat—the tension now building in her stomach, as if someone were holding her inside, a safe, warm, protective embrace. Too many sensations. She counted them all now, after so many times, and counted them again. She slid a hand between her thighs, pressed her fingers into the moistness, and the pressure began to build again, like the fear of finding something long lost and wanting never to lose it again. The stillness surrounded her, as if she were enveloped in silence, drifting in a non-place, without time. It came like panic and an exquisite urge to escape—
She stared into the fire, at the few dark shreds of blackened paper. She was still staring at it when Geoffrey opened the door and came into the room.
“Conny?”
She looked up at him. His scar, she noticed, was not so prominent anymore. Over the years it had grown fainter and fainter, so that now it was only obvious when he became flushed and excited.
“Geoffrey.” She took out another page. “I have something for us. Something William left us.”
So was for many days and months maintained
By us, in secrecy, the amorous game;
Still grew by love, and such new vigor gained,
I in my inmost bosom felt the flame…
Ludovico Ariosto
Orlando Furioso
Canto V
Preservation
“I will not have my line sullied!”
Mindan, the royal gamekeeper, waited. The king’s tirade washed around him and Karl, the first minister, and Alistar, the king’s geomancer. King Prester of Catanac enjoyed a good thunder, whether the audience was small or large. His voice, gravelly with age, swam around the pillars and arches of his council chamber.
Karl offered a sympathetic nod to the gamekeeper. Mindan knew the first minister had endured many more of these outbursts. Alistar kept back, halfway to the door leading to the private passages the council and other advisers used when coming or leaving. As usual, Mindan could read nothing in the sorcerer’s face.
“If Staban thinks he can pass off his slut of a daughter on my son and improve his circumstances by a foul marriage, he is mistaken!”
It seemed to Mindan that Karl ma
naged not to roll his eyes only by an extraordinary exercise of will.
“Majesty,” Karl said, “benefit would transfer in both directions. Catanac would acquire a safe route through to—”
“I’m aware of all that! Makes no difference. I will not have my son wed well-used cunny, king’s daughter or not.”
Alistar gave the king a sidelong look at that, but continued to say nothing. Alarm entered Karl’s eyes, though, and Mindan wondered what else was going on concerning these negotiations. Not that he wanted to know—he was uncomfortable listening to this, not used to being privy to the closed-chamber politics of the realm—but he could not leave, having been summoned to this audience. Like most people, Mindan had thought the marriage joining two royal lines was long settled.
“With all due respect, Majesty,” Karl continued with a hesitant catch in his voice, “you can hardly substantiate such a characterization. The princess is, after all, a princess. She would be unlikely to have the liberty to live the kind of life you suggest, much less the inclination.”
“No? You’ve been to Masady, Karl. You know what license they exercise there. My father said it was one great brothel, and I found little to dispute the claim. I don’t care if the girl’s had one or one thousand; no maidenhead, no wedding.”
Alistar cleared his throat. “Your pardon, Majesty, but you yourself decreed that the lack of a hymen is no indication of virginity. We can scarcely violate our own standards.”
“True enough,” Prester said. “For that reason I insist on a more accurate test.”
“More accurate?” Karl said. “What do you intend to do, have spies question everyone in Masady who might have bedded her?”
Gravity Box and Other Spaces Page 10