Novelties Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction
Page 27
It wasn’t true, what he had told the boy: that he had been given no gift, made no promise. For it was only after Greece that he came to possess the quality for which, besides his knack for verse, he was chiefly famous: his gift (not always an easy one to live with) for attracting love from many different kinds and conditions of people. He had accepted the love that he attracted, and sought more, and had that too. Satyr he had been called, often enough. He thought, when he gave it any thought, that it had come to him through the grip of the horned one: a part of that being’s own power of unrefusable ravishment.
Well, if that were so, then he had the gift no more: had used it up, spent it, worn it out. He was thirty-six, and looked and felt far older: sick and lame, his puffy features gray and haggard, his mustache white—foolish to think he could have been the object of Loukas’s affection.
But without love, without its wild possibility, he could no longer defend himself against the void: against his black certainty that life mattered not a whit, was a brief compendium of folly and suffering, not worth the stakes. He would not take life on those terms; no, he would trade it for something more valuable…for Greece. Freedom. He would like to have given his life heroically, but even the ignoble death he seemed likely now to suffer here, in this mephitic swamp, even that was worth something: was owed, anyway, to the clime that made him a poet: to the blessing he had had.
“I have heard of no reports of such a creature in those mountains since that time,” he said. “You know, I think the little gods are the oldest gods, older than the Olympians, older far than Jehovah. Pan forbid he should be dead, if he be the last of his kind…”
The firing of Suliote guns outside the villa woke him. He lifted his head painfully from the sweat-damp pillow. He put out his hand and thought for a moment his Newfoundland dog Lion lay at his feet. It was the boy Loukas: asleep.
He raised himself to his elbows. What had he dreamed? What story had he told?
EXOGAMY
IN DESPERATION AND BLACK HOPE he had selected himself for the mission, and now he was to die for his impetuosity, drowned in an amber vinegar sea too thin to swim in. This didn’t matter in any large sense; his comrades had seen him off, and would not see him return—the very essence of a hero. In a moment his death wouldn’t matter even to himself. Meanwhile he kept flailing helplessly, ashamed of his willingness to struggle.
His head broke the surface into the white air. It had done so now three times; it would not do so again. But a small cloud just then covered him, and something was in the air above his head. Before he sank away out of reach for good, something took hold of him, a flying something, a machine or something with sharp pincers or takers-hold, what would he call them, claws.
He was lifted out of the water or fluid or sea. Not his fault the coordinates were off, placing him in liquid and not on dry land instead, these purplish sands; only off by a matter of meters. Far enough to drown or nearly drown him though: he lay for a long time prostrate on the sand where he had been dropped, uncertain which.
He pondered then—when he could ponder again—just what had seized him, borne him up (just barely out of the heaving sea, and laboring mightily at that), and got him to shore. He hadn’t yet raised his head to see if whatever it was had stayed with him, or had gone away; and now he thought maybe it would be best to just lie still and be presumed dead. But he looked up.
She squatted a ways up the beach, not watching him, seeming herself to be absorbed in recovering from effort; her wide bony breast heaved. The great wings now folded, like black plush. Talons (that was the word, he felt them again and began to shudder) the talons spread to support her in the soft sand. When she stepped, waddled, toward him, seeing he was alive, he crawled away across the sand, trying to get to his feet and unable, until he fell flat again and knew nothing.
Night came.
She (she, it was the breasts prominent on the breastplate muscle, the big delicate face, and vast tangled never-dressed hair that made him suppose it) was upon him when he awoke. He had curled himself into a fetal ball, and she had been sheltering him from the night wind, pressing her long belly against him as she might (probably did) against an egg of her own. It was dangerously cold. She smelled like a mildewed sofa.
For three days they stayed together there on the horrid shingle. In the day she sheltered him from the sun with her pinions and at night drew him close to her odorous person, her rough flesh. Sometimes she flew away heavily (her wings seeming unable to bear her up for more than a few meters, and then the clumsy business of taking off again) and returned with some gobbet of scavenge to feed him. Once a human leg he rejected. She seemed unoffended, seemed not to mind if he ate or not; seemed when she stared at him hourlong with her onyx unhuman eyes to be waiting for his own demise. But then why coddle him so, if coddling was what this was?
He tried (dizzy with catastrophe maybe, or sunstroke) to explain himself to her, unable to suppose she couldn’t hear. He had (he said) failed in his quest. He had set out from his sad homeland to find love, a bride, a prize, and bring it back. They had all seen him off, every one of them wishing in his heart that he too had the daring to follow the dream. Love. A woman: a bride of love: a mother of men. Where, in this emptiness?
She listened, cooing now and then (a strange liquid sound, he came to listen for it, it seemed like understanding; he hoped he would hear it last thing before he died, poisoned by her food and this sea of piss). On the third day, he seemed more likely to live. A kind of willingness broke inside him with the dawn. Maybe he could go on. And as though sensing this she ascended with flopping wingbeats into the sun, and sailed to a rocky promontory a kilometer off. There she waited for him.
Nothing but aridity, as far as his own sight reached. But he believed—it made him laugh aloud to find he believed it—that she knew what he hoped, and intended to help him.
But oh God what a dreadful crossing, what sufferings to endure. There was the loneliness of the desert, nearly killing him, and the worse loneliness of having such a companion as this to help him. It was she who sought out the path. It was he who found the waterhole. She sickened, and for the length of a moon he nursed her, he could not have lived now without her, none of these other vermin—mice, snakes—were worth talking to; he fed them to her, and ate what she left. She flew again. They were getting someplace. One bright night of giddy certainty he trod her, like a cock.
Then past the summit of the worst sierra, down the last rubbled pass, there was green land. He could see a haze of evaporating water softening the air, maybe towers in the valley.
Down there (she said, somehow, by signs and gestures and his own words in her coos, she made it anyway clear) there is a realm over which a queen rules. No one has yet won her, though she has looked far for one who could.
He rubbed his hands together. His heart was full. Only the brave (he said) deserve the fair.
He left her there, at the frontier (he guessed) of her native wild. He strode down the pass, looking back now and then, ashamed a little of abandoning her but hoping she understood. Once when he looked back she was gone. Flown.
It was a nice country. Pleasant populace easily won over by good manners and an honest heart. That’s the castle, there, that white building under the feet of whose towers you see a strip of sunset sky. That one. Good luck.
Token resistance at the gates, but he gave better than he got. She would be found, of course, in the topmost chamber, surmounting these endless stairs, past these iron-bound henchmen (why always, always so hard? He thought of the boys back home, who had passed on all this). He reached and broached the last door; he stepped out onto the topmost parapet, littered with bones, fetid with pale guano. A vast shabby nest of sticks and nameless stuff.
She alighted just then, in her gracile-clumsy way, and folded up.
Did you guess? she asked.
No, he had not; his heart was black with horror and understanding; he should have guessed, of course, but hadn’t. He felt the talons o
f her attention close upon him, inescapable; he turned away with a cry and stared down the great height of the tower. Should he jump?
If you do, I will fall after you (she said) and catch you up, and bring you back.
He turned to her to say his heart could never be hers.
You could go on, she said softly.
He looked away again, not down but out, toward the far lands beyond the fields and farms. He could go on.
What’s over there? he asked. Beyond those yellow mountains? What makes that plume of smoke?
I’ve never gone there. Never that far. We could, she said.
Well hell, he said. For sure I can’t go back. Not with—not now.
Come on, she said, and pulled herself to the battlements with grasping talons; she squatted there, lowering herself for him to mount.
It could be worse, he thought, and tiptoed through the midden to her; but before he took his seat upon her, he thought with sudden awful grief: She’ll die without me.
He meant the one he had for so long loved, since boyhood, she for whose sake he had first set out, whoever she was; the bride at the end of his quest, still waiting. And he about to head off in another direction entirely.
You want to drive? she said.
The farms and fields, the malls and highways, mountains and cities, no end in sight that way.
You drive, he said.
LOST AND ABANDONED
I. LOST
THE LOGIC WAS PERFECT AND COMPLETE; there was a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was love, then came marriage, then two children even before I got out of graduate school and got a real job. There was even a baby carriage, a real one, the blue-black kind with great rubber wheels, chrome bright-work, and a brougham top with a silver scroll on the side to raise and lower it. I wonder where it is now.
The next story element, therefore, was divorce. She with the kids, I with the job (it wasn’t logical but as a story element it has verisimilitude, meaning that it was always done that way then). I taught. I taught American poetry to children, to college students, and over time began to forget why. I thought about it a lot; I did little else but reason out why I did what I did, and whether it was useless or not, why they should be interested, why I should try to capture their attention.
None of this intellection helped my chances for tenure. The word was that I wasn’t a team player; I wasn’t. I was an Atom. I had no reason beyond physics for anything that I did.
Then she showed up again. With the kids, she and he. She had a lot of plans. She was moving, she told me, to Hawaii. She’d already shipped over her cycle, and the rest of the guys were waiting for her over there. The kids were going to love it, she said. Water and fishing and cycles.
And when would I see them?
Whenever you can come out.
Money?
Somebody had told her somebody was opening a speed shop in Maui and she might work there.
It’s odd how quickly two people who have seemed to be practically one person since before they were wholly out of childhood can diverge as soon as they part. I was awake most of that night, lying beside her (old times’ sake), and by dawn I’d made a decision. I wanted the kids. She couldn’t take them. She said she sure as hell was taking them. I said that I would take her to court and get custody before any judge: I worked, I was a college teacher, I had a suit and tie, she was a biker, or could be made to seem one. It might not have been true, that it would have been so easy; but I made her believe it. She wept; she talked it out; she hugged them a lot; she left them with me.
And when I went back to classes in September I had, instantly, a reason to teach American poetry to adolescents, and do it well, too. Love costs money; so love makes money, or is willing to try. What I could not find a reason for doing in itself became quite easy to do when I did it for them. I went and talked all day about Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to put bowls of oatmeal before them, bicycles in the garage for them. And oddest of all (maybe not so odd, how would I know, I’ve only done all this once) I think I was a better teacher, too.
Unfortunately I had stumbled into all this—ordinary life, I guess, the thing that had kept all of my colleagues at their work and playing for the team—just that little bit too late. Despite my new need and my new willingness, I got turned down for tenure. And that in academe being equivalent to dismissal, I now looked into a kind of abyss, one I had heard about, read about, been touched by in stories, and had not thought was possible for me to encounter, though a moment’s thought would have told me that countless men and women live facing it all the time.
Did I think of shipping them to Hawaii? No, never. Some doors cannot be gone back through.
So the next scene is the dark of the woods.
I used all my contacts to get a job that almost no one, it would seem, would want to have, thereby entering into another level of this thing, where the hewer of wood, the drawer of water, grows desperate not for release but for more water to draw, wood to hew, so his kids and he won’t have to beg.
An inner-city enrichment program for no-longer-quite-youthful offenders, which had tenuous state funding and a three-story house downtown that had been seized for taxes. They were given courses in basic English and other work toward a high-school equivalency diploma, and seminars in ethics and self-expression. They got time off their probation for attending faithfully. Do you have better ideas?
The group I taught English to was about the same age as my old students, a group who had appeared ordinary enough then but now in hindsight and from here appeared as young godlings awash in ease and possibility. Days we worked on acquiring the sort of English language in which newspapers and books and government documents are written, a language different from the one most of them spoke, though using many similar words. We diagrammed sentences, a thing I am the last teacher of English on the continent to remember how to do; they liked that. In the evenings we met again. We were going to write stories.
They have stories, certainly. They tend to spill them rather than tell them. It seemed grotesque to try to chasten them, and make them shapely, make them resemble good stories; but that’s what I was hired to do, and simply to listen is too hard. “A beginning, a middle, and an end,” I say. “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief ’ is a plot. Who, what, when, where, how.” And they listen, looking at me from out of their own stories, inside which they live, as street people live within their ragged shelters. Not one grew up with a father: not one. I know what crimes some of them committed, what they have done.
Late at night then I bus over to the adjacent neighborhood, one small step up in the social ladder, and climb the stairs to my apartment; let myself in, awake the sitter, asleep before the glowing television, and send her home.
They grow so fast. In the city even faster. Most of my salary goes to their private school, called fatuously the Little Big Schoolhouse, but really a good place; they love it, or did. They’re getting restive, weirdly angry sometimes in ways they never were before, which leaves me hurt and baffled and desperately afraid. They don’t want sitters anymore. I am going to come home and find them gone; or find one of them gone and the other silent, looking at me in reproach, can’t have her, couldn’t keep her.
“Let’s retell a story,” I told my students. “Just to get our chops. We’ll all write the same story. Not long. Three pages max. A story you all know. All you have to do is tell it, from beginning to end, not leaving anything important out.”
But it was not a story they all knew, and so I had to tell it to them. They listened with both eyes and ears, as my children had once. My own son, at the point in the story when the two lost children understood that the new protector they had found intended them not good but mortal harm, had cried out It’s their mother! Which seemed to me to be an act of literary criticism of the highest order; and for the first time I noticed that indeed the mother, like the other, is dead at the story’s end.
I said yes I would. I would do it in three pages. I hadn’t thought of doing it but yes I would.
I know this story. I know it now, though I didn’t before. I will write mine for me, as they will write theirs for themselves; we will trade them and try to read them with eyes and ears.
Three pieces of mail in the box on this night when I got home. A postcard from Hawaii. An official letter telling me that the enrichment program is being zeroed out, and my services will not be required. An answer to my personal ad in the Free Press, written in a clear strong hand. A picture, too.
My children still there, asleep but not undressed, unwashed and sprawled over the couch and the floor: they would not permit a baby-sitter, said they could take care of themselves. They are at least still here.
I will write my story with a beginning, a middle, and no end. No bread crumbs, no candy, no woods, no oven, no treasure. No who, what, where, when. And it will all be there.
Where will they go, those kids?
II. ABANDONED
POVERTY IS NOT A CRIME. Infatuation is not a crime either; and when a man who has loved his wife dearly, and had two children with her, boy and girl, children he loves deeply and in whose eyes he sees her every single day—when that man falls helplessly in love again, those children might find it in their hearts, if not then perhaps later on, after a period of transition, to forgive him. And to love this new woman, too, as he loves her, without ever forgetting—as he himself cannot—the other and earlier woman.
Children, though, spring from but one mother; and they, even if they cannot remember her, can’t forget her either. The fact that he can see in their eyes the reflection of the woman who bore them can come to seem a reproach. Perhaps it is a reproach. That’s certainly the way the woman who comes to replace her in their home might see it: a constant reproach, a claim never able to be made good and yet never withdrawn. And it’s possible that—she being as infatuated as he, filled up with that domineering love that allows no rival (no crime; it happens); might scheme somehow to remove them, shut their eyes, shut their mouths for good. Especially if there weren’t enough for all of them.