Aegypt

by John Crowley

  ‘That’s from a story. Seems this lord had a black dog, a good-for-nothing hound, ate him out of house and home, didn’t do anything but lay in the doorway to trip over, useless. Wouldn’t hunt, couldn’t track. People kept telling the lord to get rid of the dog, and he says, “Uh-uh. The black dog’s day is not yet.”’

  ‘Where did you get this story?’ Rosie said laughing. Spofford – it was a thing she liked about him – was always showing himself to be full of surprising nooks and crannies where odd items like that were stored.

  ‘Well,’ Spofford said, ‘that story, I would guess, comes from Dickens or from Scott, one. My folks had two humongous sets of these books. Works. Dickens, and Scott. It’s about all the books they did have. And I don’t say I read them all, but I read a lot of both. I got them sort of spelling each other, you know, so I can’t always remember whose stories are which. I would say that story is Wally Scott. And if it wasn’t Wally Scott it was Chuck Dickens. Who would know, probably, is my friend Pierce.’

  ‘And that’s the whole story?’

  ‘Heck no. The black dog has his day. Saves the guy’s life. That’s the end.’

  ‘Every dog has his day.’

  Spofford said nothing further, only grinned so that the dead tooth showed in his mouth, so insolently self-satisfied that she had to look away not to grin back.

  ‘So by the way,’ she said, gathering up purse, book, and change from the table purposefully, ready to go and changing the subject, ‘how did your friend – Pierce? – how did your friend Pierce enjoy his visit?’

  ‘He liked it,’ Spofford said, not rising with her. ‘He’ll be back.’

  He had liked it. He would think of it often, in different ways and in different contexts; he had already begun to think of it in the frigid airless bus passing away. And – on city streets, still violent with summer, foul with loathsome summer; in his tower apartment, grown too large now as the suit of a wasted starveling; or when steeling himself for the task he now knew lay ahead – he would sometimes feel those scenes he had visited lying just behind him, a pool of golden light, so close that he was uncertain just how he had traveled from there to here: to here where he supposed he must now be for good, or as nearly for good as made no difference.

  TWO

  ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ said Allan Butterman, tearing into the office where Rosie had been put. ‘You were waiting for hours, right? I am really terribly sorry.’

  He detached from his arm a black band that was pinned there, and dabbed at his face with a large and handsome handkerchief. In a vested black suit and tie, he looked chic, his somehow French features (sharp nose, black eyes and glossy hair, white smooth skin) emphasized, his plump cheeks supported by the starched tall collar. ‘Oh god,’ he said; he sighed greatly, and stuffed the handkerchief into his pocket.

  ‘Was it somebody you knew real well?’ Rosie said carefully.

  ‘Oh no,’ Allan said. ‘Oh no. No. Just an old old client. Old as Methusaleh. Very very old client of the firm. Oh god it’s really just too bad.’ He bit the knuckle of his forefinger, staring out at the river and the day; he sighed again, and composed himself.

  ‘Now,’ he said. ‘First of all, how are you, would you like a cup of coffee? I’m Allan Butterman, Allan Butterman Junior, I’m not really sure your uncle has entirely understood that it’s me who’s been answering his letters and so on lately, my father passed away about two years ago. So.’ He smiled wanly at Rosie.

  ‘Did Boney tell you?’

  ‘He sort of hinted. A divorce. Or at least a separation.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Allan huffed out his breath, shook his head, stared down at his desktop. He seemed to be keeping one step ahead of awful grief, and Rosie was almost afraid of embarking on details for fear of delivering him up to it. ‘I’m already separated. I mean I left anyway.’

  He nodded slowly, regarding her, the lines of his brow contorted. ‘Kids?’ he asked.

  ‘One. A three-year-old girl.’

  ‘Oh god.’

  ‘It’s sort of been in the works for a long time,’ Rosie said, to comfort him.

  ‘Yes?’ Allan said. ‘When did you guys decide?’

  ‘Well,’ Rosie said. ‘He didn’t, really. I sort of did.’

  ‘He’s not in on this?’

  ‘Not exactly. Not yet.’

  ‘When did you tell him you intended to seek this?’

  ‘Well, day before yesterday.’

  Allan spun in his swivel chair. He put the tips of his fingers together, and regarded the day again, but as though it could give him no joy. He laughed, shortly, bitterly. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what. I don’t actually really handle divorces much. Mr. Rasmussen said you had a problem, and I said of course, come in, let’s see what we can do. But actually there might be other guys who would do a better job for you than me.

  ‘Okay. Having said that. Even if I were to handle this eventually for you, I would ask you right now just to think very seriously about it, and see whether you’ve thought it all through. Marriage is real easy and cheap to get into, and real complicated and expensive to get out of. I don’t suppose you and, and . . .’

  ‘Mike.’

  ‘Mike, you and Mike had any kind of marriage contract or prenuptial agreement about this?’

  ‘No.’ She’d read about people doing that; it had seemed the kind of grotesque idea only other people thought of, like getting married in an airplane, or buying a common burial plot. Now she wondered. An escape clause: fingers secretly crossed, I take it all back. ‘No.’

  ‘Okay,’ Allan said. ‘Let me explain this. It used to be, not long ago, even when I first went into practice, that for two people to get a divorce one of them had to have done some pretty serious wrong to the other. Adultery. Habitual drunkenness. Drug addiction. Mental cruelty, which was no joke then, and had to be really established. Okay? That meant that if two people just didn’t want to stay together anymore, no particular reason, then they had to arrange for one of them to lie in court about the reason – and for the other not to contest the lie. And if the court suspected that that kind of collusion was going on, the divorce didn’t get granted. It was a very nasty business all around, husbands wives attorneys all lying through their teeth.

  ‘Okay. Nowadays, just since recently actually, we have what’s called the “no-fault” divorce. The laws have finally caught up with the fact that most divorces aren’t really due to anybody’s fault, and shouldn’t be adversary proceedings. So now, in this state, you can get a divorce on the grounds of “irretrievable breakdown of the marriage and irreconcilable differences between the parties,” or i and i as it’s called. Irretrievable, irreconcilable.’

  The huge words made Rosie swallow. ‘Well, it’s not really anybody’s fault,’ she said. ‘Really.’

  Allan had picked up a long yellow pencil and now held it balanced between his fingers like a drumstick, bouncing its eraser on his desktop. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘You know what it seems to me, Rosie? It seems to me that maybe you haven’t really tried everything to work this out with, with . . .’

  ‘Mike.’

  ‘You seem to be sort of jumping into it, if you don’t mind my saying so. I mean maybe therapy . . .’

  ‘Mike’s a therapist.’

  ‘Oh ho. Shoemaker’s children, huh.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What I’m saying,’ Allan said, ‘is that I think you should wait. I think you should try other solutions, other than divorce I mean. Take a vacation. Rest. Get away from each other for a few weeks. See how it looks to you then.’ His drum-taps altered. ‘To tell you the straight truth, Rosie, I would not be willing myself to initiate proceedings for you at this point.’

  Whatever way it was that Rosie looked at him then, whatever her face said, caused him to gesture at her defensively with his pencil, as though sketching, and to say, ‘Now wait a minute, wait a minute, all I’m saying is this: I’m going on vacation myself for a coupl
e-three weeks, starting tomorrow, I’d have gone today if it wasn’t for, oh well, anyway: let us, you and I, make an appointment to get together exactly three weeks from today. And see. And just see what’s become of everything in that time.

  ‘You never know,’ he said.

  A strange sickening letdown had begun within Rosie; it could not be that she had urged herself to this to have it all come to nothing, to one more exhortation to patience: could not be. She crossed her arms, feeling truculent.

  Allan tossed down his pencil. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said. ‘I’m not saying your problems are trivial or anything, or that in three weeks you might not still want to pursue this. But the thing is, in the no-fault divorce we’ve been talking about – even if you decide divorce is the only way for you – this no-fault divorce requires that both parties be in agreement about it. You can’t get it by yourself.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. In a no-fault divorce, you’re going to the court and saying We agree that our marriage has failed. If one of you doesn’t agree, well then.’

  ‘Then what.’

  ‘Then you would have to go back to the old method. You’d have to sue for divorce, and you’d have to have grounds.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Rosie said.

  ‘A reason,’ Allan said. ‘You’d have to have a reason to get a divorce; a good reason.’ Subject to his dark and mournful gaze, Rosie lowered her eyes. ‘Do you feel you have grounds?’

  Rosie nodded.

  ‘What grounds?’ Allan asked.

  ‘Adultery,’ she said.

  Earl Sacrobosco was tickled, really tickled (his words) at Pierce’s recapitulation, which was total and just in time for the semester’s beginning. He had never really doubted it, he said, and had never ceased including Pierce in his plans for the year; he rubbed his hands and grinned as though he had personally brought Pierce back alive to the hard chair before his desk.

  The deal offered Pierce in the spring had been somewhat sweetened by an exiguous raise, but it was saccharine to Pierce, the extra would be going chiefly back into the Barnabas coffers, remaking his loans had burdened him with a higher rate of interest. There was a penalty too to be paid for his quick arrogance in the spring: a speech had to be made, Earl would not have minded a prolonged one, about Pierce’s reason for a change of heart. Well, he had come to see (he said) that he had dismissed too quickly a position and a college he had invested many good years in; he had had time to think (humble jailbird before his parole board) and a maturer eye could perceive that, though the road ahead might be a long one and the journey couldn’t be hurried, Barnabas deserved Pierce’s commitment. All this said as briefly as was consistent with true repentance, while ashes fell in Pierce’s heart. He didn’t need to say what his real reasons for returning were; Earl was aware, and communicated his awareness, that Pierce had simply nowhere else to go.

  It was further agreed (Earl clearing his throat and getting down to business) that in place of the ambitious course of Pierce’s own devising which had been rejected by the Curriculum Committee, Pierce could take on two additional units of Elements of Communication, which was reading and writing for analphabetic freshmen.

  ‘Getting back to basics,’ Earl said. He had discarded the rug he had long worn, and looked better for it, though it was evident why he had worn it: his bald pate was the sort that grows a dirty fuzz all over, with a dark smudge at the front like an Ash Wednesday penitent’s. ‘Personally, I was very interested in the course,’ he said, clicking the mechanism of a ballpoint and releasing it. ‘It did seem pretty graduate-level, though. And I’m afraid that I agree with the committee that there just wouldn’t be the call for it.’

  ‘It was an experiment,’ Pierce said. His long arms hung between his knees, he wrung his hands, he wanted to get out.

  ‘We’ve already got a reputation to fight of being a fad school that gives a useless degree. Enrollment’s down, transfers are up. We’ve got to have solid food here.’

  ‘Readin’, writin’, and ’rithmetic,’ Pierce said.

  ‘All that stuff is coming back,’ Earl said. ‘It’s a new age.’

  That same afternoon (his heart somewhat in his mouth, he had spoken to her only coldly, briefly, infrequently since the time she had so heartlessly ditched him, long ago, lifetimes ago) Pierce called the number of the Astra Literary Agency and asked for Julie Rosengarten.

  Strange, he thought, how an old name can take up such room in your throat, he had not been certain for a moment if all of it would come out.

  ‘I’m afraid she’s on vacation,’ said a voice like Julie’s. ‘For almost three weeks.’

  Doing well, then, or very badly. ‘Well my name is Pierce Moffett, and Julie and I . . .’

  ‘Oh god, Pierce.’

  ‘Julie?’

  ‘Honestly, I’m on vacation. Oh god. I was honestly literally just walking out the door to catch the train.’

  ‘Huh, well . . .’

  ‘My finger was on the button of the machine. Honestly.’

  She was awed by a fateful moment: he knew how she looked just now, it was a face he had seen often.

  ‘I don’t want to hold you up,’ he said. ‘But I have something I want to talk to you about.’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘A book idea.’

  ‘Yes? God, Pierce, if I hadn’t just crazily picked up the phone.’

  ‘Well, when you get back.’

  ‘Yes. Yes yes yes. Pierce. I knew we’d talk again, talk for real. I knew it. There’s so much, so much to say.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’

  ‘Three weeks. Three weeks to the day. Lunch.’ She named a restaurant he knew, one they had used to frequent but whose name he had himself not thought of in a long time, still open apparently; did Julie still go there? ‘I can’t wait to hear this idea. You know I always thought you could do a book.’

  Had she? ‘It’s a good one. You know some of it already, in fact.’

  ‘Really? I can’t wait. Pierce, I’ll miss my train.’

  ‘Have a nice time.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sorry . . .’

  ‘Go.’

  He cradled the receiver, and sat down on the broad bed; he put his hands on his knees and watched within the strange currents set up there by the sound of her voice, the old inflections.

  Three weeks. He should have something firm, on paper, he supposed; a pitch, a proposal, for her to take away with her, and sell. He supposed there was no reason not to start on that right now.

  There was, then, he thought cockily (his heart though still strangely full and his hands still on his knees), there was some use you can put these old lovers to. For sure she owed him one.

  He ought to get up now, and roll out the elaborate electric typewriter, powder blue, which the Sphinx had once taken in trade from an anxious customer and given to Pierce for Christmas (see how useful, how helpful?), and place beside it a pile of blank bond paper. He ought to get out his old proposal for the course Barnabas College had not wanted to offer, and study it.

  Mystery 101. How history hungers for the shape of myth; how the plots and characters of fable and romance come to inhabit real courts and counting-houses and cathedrals; how old sciences die, and bequeath their myths and magic to their successors; how the heroes of legend pass away, fall asleep, are resurrected, and enter ordinary daylit history, persisting as a dream persists into waking life, altering and transforming it even when the dream itself has been forgotten or repressed.

  More, though. To be a book, a real book, it would have to contain not only the mystery but the detective, not only the dream but he who dreams it. To be a book, it would have to have a plot; it would have to be very different from what’s usually called history, it couldn’t be a simple addition of facts, or any kind of arithmetic at all, no it would almost have to be a sort of calculus, a differential calculus of self and history, inside and outside; it would require one to play history in the same way that chess masters play chess, not laboriously
working out the consequences of possible moves, but perceiving as by a sixth sense the powers of the pieces to be or to do: a thing that can’t be done by logic or training or application, no, it’s an ability you have to be born with. It’s a knack. A gift.

  She did know the idea, she did, though not in the intelligible form it had at length achieved in his mind. She had been there when the first inklings of it had broken in on him, and in the time after she left him he had become almost as obsessed with it as with her: sometimes indeed they had not seemed like different things. And the sound of her voice just now had opened like a key the box of those days.

  And those days then too would have to be a part of his book, wouldn’t they? The days when he had become a popular teacher at Barnabas, the days when he stood at his slum window en route to the most revelatory metaphor – he would have to recover those days as well as the enterprise that had filled them.

  He got up, at length, and did bring out the huge typewriter. He rolled a sheet of paper within it, and sat for a time before it. He rolled and lit a cigarette, and put it out. He got up; he changed his shirt; he turned up the laboring air-conditioner, and stood looking long out the window at the burnt and brownish evening.

  Set out, set out. He wished it were already fall, season of wisdom and work. He wished he had not so carelessly hurt his head and heart when younger with abuse of substances, Thomistic notion. He sat again, and took out and discarded the piece of paper he had put into the machine, it seemed somehow already stale; he inserted another, and sat before it hands on his knees, the typewriter seeming to have somehow grown in the meantime even a little larger than it had been before.

  ‘I don’t understand about history,’ Rosie said to Boney. She was washing and he was drying their dinner dishes; it was Mrs. Pisky’s day off, when she went to visit her sister in Cascadia.

  ‘Yes?’ Boney said.

  ‘How much of it do they really know?’

  ‘How much of what?’

  ‘History.’ She held up to the light a cleaned plate, so old and fine the light shone dimly through it. ‘I mean this book by Fellowes Kraft. He knows tiny details of things, and he just tosses them out, like of course. I know it’s a novel, but still.’ She realized she didn’t know quite what she was talking about. ‘Still.’