Flesh and Blood

by Michael Cunningham

  Cassandra didn't bother turning on the lights. She sat in the dark, smoking, listening to music. When Mary rang the bell she buzzed her in, and turned on the lamp that sat on the claw-footed table. Now the darkness had a cast to it, a honey color behind the dark floating spots. Cassandra unlatched the door, waited. She could hear Mary's footsteps and she could smell Mary's perfume. Joy today, three thirty an ounce.

  “Hi,” Mary said.

  “Hi, hon,” Cassandra said. “Come on in, take off your coat. How's Zoe?”

  “A little better, I think. They gave her something to help her sleep.”

  “I want to get her out of that hospital as soon as we can,” Cassandra said. “Hospitals are dangerous.”

  “Well, they seem to be taking pretty good care of her.”

  “They're terrible places, don't be fooled.”

  “Well,” Mary said. “There's not much choice at the moment. Is there?”

  “No. There's not.”

  “Have you eaten?” Mary asked.

  “Mm-hm.”

  “What did you eat?”

  “I had a little soup,” Cassandra said.

  “Just that?”

  “It was all I wanted. Don't push it, dear.”

  “Do you feel like reading?” Mary asked.

  “Just a minute, there's something I want to give you.”

  Cassandra walked to the vanity, groped until she found the string of pearls.

  “Here,” she said, holding them out toward the place where she believed Mary to be standing.

  “Oh, I couldn't take them.”

  “Please do, I hardly ever wear them, and frankly, they were one of my greatest heists. I never cracked Tiffany's or Carrier's, they're just too careful in those places, but believe me, even getting these out of a place like Bergdorf 's was no small trick. Most of my devotions have been to trash, this necklace is one of the few things of mine I can imagine you wearing.”

  “No, really,” Mary said.

  “Humor me. Accept a few pearls from an old drag queen. At least try them on.”

  “Well. All right.”

  Mary took the pearls. Cassandra could hear the sound of the clasp being fastened.

  “How do they look?” she asked.

  “They're beautiful.”

  “You might as well take them now, I'm leaving them to you anyway. And frankly, honey, when the time comes, there may just be a free-for-all around here. I know queens who can strip a room faster than you can strip a bed.”

  “Well,” Mary said. There was a pause.

  “Are you all right?” Cassandra asked.

  “I'm fine.”

  “Good.”

  “You know, I never told you this—” Mary said.

  “Don't get sentimental, please. I'm not in the mood right now.”

  “I'm not being sentimental. I was going to tell you that I used to take things, too.”

  “What was that?”

  “Shoplifting. I used to do it, too.”

  “Well, what do you know,” Cassandra said.

  “I don't know why I did it. I never took anything very big.”

  “There's nothing so mysterious about it. You want things, everybody does. It's a great big world full of stuff and you want some of it.”

  “But I could have afforded these things so easily.”

  “So, you were a thrill seeker. You had a criminal streak. Just think, in another version of our lives, we might have been cell mates.”

  “I did get arrested once,” Mary said.

  “I've been arrested, oh, let me think. Five or six times, I guess. Jail fantasies, none of the really good ones ever come true, though.”

  “I've never told this to anyone. My husband knew, but our kids don't.”

  “And now you've confessed. Do you feel any different?”

  “Not really.”

  “Confession is highly overrated, in my opinion.”

  “I got the book you wanted,” Mary said.

  “Did you boost it, honey?”

  “No. I paid for it. I haven't taken anything in years. I just stopped doing it, I don't really know why I started and I don't know why I stopped.”

  “We're mysterious creatures.”

  “Yes. I suppose we are. For a long time I had these fits of breathlessness too, I took Valium for them, and then gradually they just seemed to go away. Well, mostly they've gone away. I don't have them often enough to need the pills anymore.”

  “I've always maintained you can either cure your neuroses or you can just outwait them.”

  “Maybe so.”

  Cassandra said, “How are you feeling?”

  “Me? I'm fine. How are you feeling?”

  “I'm fine, too, honey.”

  Mary took Cassandra's hand. “It'll be all right,” she said.

  “Please.”

  “I mean, Jamal will be all right. I'll help take care of him.”

  “Good.”

  “He's a sweet boy.”

  “He's a wild boy,” Cassandra said. “And he has a great heart. Please don't try to rein him in too much, you won't win, and you'll just make yourself miserable trying,”

  “I'll do the best I can.”

  “That's all we can do, isn't it?”

  Mary touched the pearls at her neck. “These are lovely,” she said.

  “Hm? Oh, the pearls. Yes.”

  “Why don't you sit down? You must be tired.”

  “I am, a little.”

  Mary guided Cassandra to a spindle-legged love seat upholstered in pale blue velvet. Cassandra said, “I stole this out of the ladies' room at Bonwit Teller.”

  “This love seat? How did you do that?”

  “It wasn't easy, dear, believe me. I'll bet you never managed anything half this big.”

  “No,” Mary said. “I didn't.”

  Cassandra arranged herself with a pillow at her head. Mary sat beside her on a high-backed chair.

  “Do you want anything?” Mary asked. “A glass of water? A cup of tea?”

  “No. Nothing. Begin.”

  Mary opened the book.

  “ 'I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.' “

  1994/ Aunt Zoe had decided to let her body die but to live, anyway. That was what she said, sitting wrapped in a blanket on Ben's grandfather's terrace. Aunt Zoe put out a cold white glow, a brilliant dead non-color. She wore sunglasses in the October light and she shivered slightly under the blanket on a warm, clear day.

  Zoe could hear the trees. They were restless with all they remembered. They lived in real time, they looked like they were standing still. Zoe didn't speak their language but she knew about their witnessing. What had her father told her? These are my yew trees. Like he owned them.

  Aunt Zoe laughed for no reason. Ben's mother sat beside her on one of the canvas chairs, illustrating the difference between health and death. Ben's mother gleamed. She sat thin and straight as a sunflower stalk in her red blouse. Her hair was so stiffly alive it threw tiny sparks, an effervescence, into the soft, gold-washed air.

  Ben's mother said, “Zoe, honey, look at what a beautiful day it is.”

  “Yes,” Aunt Zoe answered. Ben's mother put her hand on the rise of Aunt Zoe's blanketed knee. She was nervous and she loved Aunt Zoe and she was tired of her, too. She wanted a big broom with steel bristles that would clean better than any broom had ever cleaned.

  Susan was the harmed one. She had the most perfection in her, the truest and greediest heart. All the accidents of fortune happened to her, Will and I could sneak away. We had lives in the world; she gave herself to duty. In every story about a man who asks the witch or the beast or the fish for too many wishes, isn't there a daughter whose job it is to die?

  “Susan,” Aunt Zoe said. .”Susan.”

  “Shh,” Ben's mother said. “Just rest now, don't get all worked up.”

  Aunt Zoe looked through her dark glasses at the empty air. She nodded as if agreeing to something she saw written there.
Ben's mother kept stroking her knee, smoothing it as if it were deeply wrinkled. Ben stood at the far edge of the terrace. He was surprised at how long death took, and how ordinary it was. He'd pictured dramatic momentum, a gathering of event that would suck everybody straight into the moment of loss, which would be terrible and large and satisfying. He'd never imagined all these awkward silences, the way hours could bleed into hours with the television on.

  Ben had the twitch in him, the crazy passion. It was his secret and his rescue. It was his doom. Zoe spoke in her other voice. She told Ben to survive, though children never listened to advice.

  She turned her crazy head, slowly, and stared at him. He prayed to her to look somewhere else.

  Ben's grandfather and Uncle Will came out onto the terrace, full of silence. Aunt Zoe's craziness had canceled all the arguments, frozen them, and Grandpa and Uncle Will could come out of the house together like any father and son. Uncle Will dressed like a son, like somebody harmless. He wore jeans and a plaid flannel shirt.

  “Hey, girls,” Ben's grandfather said. Ben could imagine him as a father. He would have been kind and generous, full of fun. He would have come home at night with gifts. He would have stood just inside the front door with his arms full, calling, 'Hey, girls.'

  Aunt Zoe kept looking at the air. She kept nodding.

  It was too full. There was too much old desire, too many purposes. Zoe listened to the trees her father thought he owned. They spoke in a language too old to know. Zoe saw herself wearing pajamas, trying to smile into a moment of blinding white light. She saw her father and Susan dressed in the patience of whiteness. In every story, there's a daughter whose job it is to die.

  “It's not a good idea,” Aunt Zoe said. “Trust me.”

  Uncle Will crouched beside Aunt Zoe. Ben watched from the far corner, by the potted evergreens. Uncle Will whispered to Aunt Zoe, who kept looking at whatever she saw.

  “The sun is nice out here,” Ben's mother said. “I think it's good for her, sitting in the sun like this.”

  “Please don't talk about Zoe in the third person,” Uncle Will said. “She's right here. Aren't you, kid?”

  Aunt Zoe went on nodding. She said, “I'm never anywhere but here.”

  “Sure, baby,” Uncle Will said. “Are you tired?”

  “Yes. And no.”

  “It'd be good to take a rest, wouldn't it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And then again, no. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Uh-huh. As a matter of fact, I think I do. Hard to stay and hard to go, right?”

  “Well, right,” she said. “And then again, wrong.”

  Under his skin, Will was surviving. Something in him had lived, a pellet of clean light that burned inside all the mistakes and foolish habits. Zoe touched his chest, not with her body. He smoothed her hair. He did it with his real hands.

  Ben's grandfather went and stood behind Aunt Zoe's chair. He laid his hands on the back of her chair, looked down at the top of her head. He stood over her as if she were a fire.

  “I'm going to take the boys out in the boat,” he said in Aunt Zoe's direction, over her head. “It's a great day for a sail.”

  “You don't think it's too windy?” Ben's mother asked.

  His grandfather looked up at Ben. His grandfather was tanned and white-haired, the center of everything. Ben thought of what his grandfather saw: the planks of the terrace, Ben himself, the broad slope of dune grass that made an unsteady line across the ocean. Ben tried to be part of that, part of the terrace and the ocean and the sky, all the things that gave his grandfather pleasure.

  “What do you think, Ben?” his grandfather called. “Too windy for you?”

  “No,” Ben answered, and he saw himself on his grandfather's face, what his courage did to it.

  “Let's go, then,” his grandfather said.

  “Yeah. Let's go.”

  “Where's Jamal?” Uncle Will asked.

  “Right,” said Ben's grandfather. “Where's Jamal?”

  “I'll find him,” Ben said.

  He jumped over the terrace railing, happy with his own demonstration of grace. He knew where Jamal would be. At their grand-father's, Jamal always found his way down to the miniature forest at the farthest corner, the little stand of pine trees that had been stunted and deformed by the winds that blew in off the ocean. It was where he and Ben had been going together for the past year, huddling down among the scrub to share their quick secret as pine needles whisked over their heads and their parents drank beer on the terrace. Ben was flattered by the fact that Jamal went there alone, for solitude, when the perfection of their grandfather's house overwhelmed him. As he crossed the dune grass, conscious of being watched from the terrace, he was filled with pride and a rinsing, agreeable sense of penitence. He would tell Jamal that they had to stop. They had to take responsibility; they had to think of other people. It would be difficult and gratifying, telling him that. It would be a clean kind of death. Ben would claim his own righteousness. He thought Jamal would understand. Afterward he and Jamal and their grandfather would go sailing. Maybe he'd teach Jamal what Connie hadn't been able to last summer. They'd work the tiller like brothers. As Ben descended the slope that led to the trees he was taken by happiness, a sense of rejoicing he hadn't felt in a year or longer. The ocean spread before him, dazzling, flecked here and there with foam. Behind him stood the shadowed rectitude of the house and the eyes of his family.

  His exaltation withered when he reached the little forest and found it empty. He'd been so sure of finding Jamal there, sitting alone, dreamily, on the ground, weighing a pinecone in his hands with his back propped against one of the scaly brown trunks. Everything had turned on the idea of standing beside Jamal in that position, speaking tenderly but firmly into his upturned, lonely face. Ben was overcome by a sudden and wrenching solitude, a desolation, as if by entering the place Jamal was supposed to occupy he'd stepped accidentally into feelings that more rightfully belonged to Jamal. He thought of finding Jamal and dragging him back to the trees, throwing him to the ground and saying—what? Demanding an explanation. Some kind of explanation.

  He went to the far edge of the trees, the ocean side. He looked angrily out at the ocean and was thinking of running back to the house, telling everyone that Jamal had disappeared again and that he and his grandfather would have to go out in the boat without him. Then he saw Jamal down on the beach. Jamal stood at the edge of the water, letting the waves splash over his ankles, picking up stones and throwing them in. He picked them up and threw them, over and over, methodically, as if he'd been hired to rid the beach of stones. Ben ran onto the beach. He did not call Jamal's name. He did not put it into the air like that.

  Jamal didn't hear Ben approaching, and Ben had to stop himself from grabbing Jamal's baggy yellow shirt and turning him forcibly around. He stood several paces behind Jamal. He said loudly, “Hey.”

  Jamal turned, and everything changed again. There was his face, frightened in ways only Ben knew. There were his eyes.

  “What?” Jamal said.

  A new rush of sentiment rose so quickly in Ben that it collided with his anger, exploded into it. He was so full of rage and tenderness he thought he wouldn't survive.

  Jamal said, “Look what I found.” He bent and picked up a gull's wing. The wing was searingly white, nearly two feet long from the stiff, serrated feathers at its tip to the circle of yellowed bone that had been neatly sheared, as if with a cleaver. The wing had been bleached, hardened, cleaned of its flesh. It was only bone and feathers.

  “Gross,” Ben said.

  “Sort of gross,” Jamal said. “And sort of great, huh?”

  He stood with the wing in his hands.

  “Do you want to go sailing?” Ben said.

  “I don't know.”

  “What else have you got to do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That's right.”

  “There's nothing to do here.”

  “Sailing's someth
ing to do.”

  Jamal held the severed wing in both hands, frowning over it as if it were a treasure and, more obscurely, a burden.

  “Okay,” he said. “I'll go.”

  They started up the beach together. Ben said, “You're not bringing that, are you?”

  Jamal said, “I think I want to keep it. I want to take it back to the city with me.”

  Ben knew what their grandfather would think: The crazy son of crazy Aunt Zoe, dragging home parts of dead animals.

  “Maybe you should leave it here,” Ben said.

  “No. I want to keep this. I want to put it on the wall in my room.”

  “You're really weird.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “It'll smell”

  “I don't care.”

  Jamal carried the wing with him as they walked up the sloping sand and into the miniature forest. The wing in his hands looked strangely correct, as if he had gone out into the world and brought back something that was required of him, something awful and fabulous. When they were hidden among the trees Ben stopped walking and said, “Wait a minute.”

  “What?”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “Okay.”

  Jamal stood carelessly, waiting. He examined the wing, poked a fingertip between the feathers. He was in love with this piece of garbage, this horror. Stupid, so stupid. This stupid boy, but all Ben's plans had involved finding Jamal sitting here, and now he was faced with Jamal's complexities of being, his drifting, unconcerned beauty. Ben was overcome with desire, a nagging and insistent love. He dropped to his knees, pulled at the hem of Jamal's shirt.