by Tito Perdue
He had learned to work on his roof while simultaneously thinking about the girl. The old man, unable to climb that far, assisted with block and tackle, hoisting up the inch-thick plywood sheets to the homeowner who tacked them into place. He was thinking of her pertinacious nose, her intelligence, her cello, the single sole woman in all the world for him. She carried him back to golden times, the High Middle Ages, Elizabethan London, Héloise. Everyone perceived her beauty, but he alone knew what it stood for. And what, pray, was that? A visible expression of woman’s essence, not to put too fine a point on it. No wonder people stayed away from her. Her beauty had inhuman aspects.
These were his thoughts when of a sudden it occurred to him that he ought to stop what he was doing and try to replicate those turf-roofed peasant cottages seen in old paintings. (He had little interest in projects that were actually feasible.) A roof of grass, thistles, and sunflowers, and the like. He discussed it with the old man, who listened sadly.
“Real heavy, a roof like that. Going to need a lot of four by fours. And seeds. Lots.”
“Flowers, too.”
“Whew.”
They spent a portion of that entire day talking about it, coming up at about 2:15 with a scheme to fabricate some one hundred twenty flower boxes, each of about seven inches in depth. Having covered the roof with tarpaper, or “felt,” as it now was called, those boxes, drilled for water drainage, could be fixed side by side on the rooftop and then filled with soil. The things weighed heavily, and the work to lift them to the roof was the opposite of easy.
When after two weeks, with the child almost completely out of funds, the house at last was ready for his books and things. That was eleven days after the following events had already taken place:
Forty-one
He parked a hundred yards short of her apartment and then went and knocked three times at her deceptively ordinary-looking doorway. He didn’t really expect her to be at home at 1:35 in the early afternoon, and so, lacking the key, went and took a seat on the floor further down the hallway. He smoked. He had brought no reading material, but with the sort of mind and imagination possessed by him, he was always able to summon up scenes from history and literature and films that he had seen. He never got bored, a rich compensation for the sort of person he was.
“I do believe you could live a full life in solitary confinement,” I told him once.
“If she was with me.”
Perhaps he slept. In any case, his next vision was of the girl herself moving toward him cautiously, her figure unmistakable even in the dim.
“Good grief!”
“Hi,” he said. “I don’t have a key.”
“Well, I reckon not!”
“Later, maybe?”
“The performance doesn’t even start till seven!”
“That’s alright, I’ll just sit here. Thinking.”
He was allowed into her apartment, the girl actually guiding him by that part of the upper arm analogous to where he had once upon a time guided her. Refusing to look at her under artificial light, he went direct to the chameleons, who appeared to have had a bad day of it. Scarlet with indignation, they came forward and pressed their noses against the glass.
“They hate me.”
“They don’t know you. Neither do I.”
“Ask me anything; I’ll tell you.”
“Alright. Why are you so early?”
“Oh! You know why.”
“To look at me?”
“Everybody wants to look at you.”
“That doesn’t mean they get to come into my room.”
“And help you get to the concert.”
“Oh, I see. I wouldn’t be able to get there without you.”
“You wouldn’t go at all, if I had my way.”
She looked at him, meditated, took a raisin from its tiny container, and said:
“There’re lots of boys who would like to say the things you do. But they never do.”
He, too, meditated. To die and be dead, or to capture this thing and enslave her to his heart; for him it would have to be one or the other or nothing at all. He drew near, pleased to see at least some little scintilla of fear showing in her eyes. He could strangle her easily, a fear implicit in women from the remotest times. With their noses almost touching, her lofty one and his that was blunt, he spoke slowly, as slowly as she herself was wont to do.
“I’m going to have you. Now or later.”
“Oh, really?”
“I promise.”
She turned away. Her pets didn’t really need feeding at just that time, but she did it anyway.
He was given a cup of strange tea and then left to himself as the girl adjourned to the next room, where he could hear her fuddling about with one thing and another. She had not tossed him from her apartment, not yet. She had much to do, and meanwhile the boy had found a trove of magazines not usually seen in the waiting rooms of doctors, lawyers, dentists, and the like.
By five o’clock, he was at the stove working studiously on a kettle of hot, savory spaghetti. If he could break her diet, mayhap he could break her in other ways as well. She marveled at the smell, seated herself, consumed perhaps two ounces of the stuff, and then put it away for future disposal. She smiled, took a taste of wine, and then returned to her dressing room and closed the door.
She appeared to him in a skirt that came down to just above the knee, a taut thing as green as mint. All his life he had respected tight skirts that require women to take short steps. Apparently she had schooled herself in the art of walking, which is to say moving in three directions at once. Her hips, too, were of his favorite size.
“How did you learn to do that?”
“Be quiet. We’re going to be late.”
Her blouse, of a lighter green, was adorned with a black opal pin. Her shoes were black and glossy and mounted on heels that caused upper body vibrations. Her hair radiated like sunbeams from her oval head.
“Oh, God.”
“You’re just overwrought, that’s all.”
They drove toward Pleuron, a walled city half-hidden behind a rising Moon. He had started the evening with a fine recording of Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead, a piece beloved by both of them. For four hours, he would have the world’s most gorgeous being sitting quietly at his side, her supernal profile shadowed alertly against the night blue sky. He might turn to look at her, but feared she might have already returned to that other universe from which she had come.
Neither spoke. The night was thrumming with insects and lightning flashes, and they could see far-away cities going up in flames. The woods were congested with animals monitoring each other noiselessly from the vantage of their multifarious locations. An airplane crossed overhead. Did they not know, the jaded passengers, what awaited at journey’s end? The night was perilous, the boy and girl trying to outrun it in an antique car.
They passed through a district with a leaning silo and a farmhouse with two hounds slumbering on the porch. In a place like this, with very little human activity . . . Could anything be more propitious for spiritual development? No, and when he turned to change the music, he saw the girl was watching him closely. He stopped what he was doing and then, fearing that he might run off the road, came to a stop some eighth of a mile further on. She was encompassed in the night, her eyes only sometimes visible among the passing cars. She was beauty, beauty itself. He wanted to cry. The next words came from her and changed his life forever.
“I didn’t know it would be you.”
“What?”
“You.”
He pulled himself together, or tried to, and then forced the car off into the weeds. He could have used a drink; instead, he ignited two cigarettes and gave one over to the girl, a behavior he had seen one time in a certain movie scene.
“Get married?”
She laughed out loud at him, her eyes this time revealing those little “flecks of gold” discussed between them at an earlier date in their acquaintanceship. To see the
flecks more closely, he drew near and then kissed her at last on her red, red lips. She did not draw away. On the contrary, she reached around, gathered his hair and then forced their two heads together in a kind of sudden panic that set his soul on fire. An enormous weight of responsibility now fell down on him.
Forty-two
The concert presumably was a good one, but the two people paid scant attention to it. I seem to picture them there, male and female prototypes instead of two actual creatures starving convulsively for each other as they sat a few inches apart in the dark.
They drove away, saying little as they left town and broke into the outlying countryside. It was darker now, the night a more serious matter than of just two hours earlier. The usual people all were sleeping, dreaming dreams of condemnation for those who stayed awake. Everyone should be sleeping all the time, a philosophy the girl rejected, though the boy did not. He had permitted her to select the music, a cello concerto, to no one’s surprise.
They passed a series of advertising signs set up at distances along the right-side roadway, sparkling placards ornamenting the way ahead. Very seldom now did any bats or fireflies flit into the headlights, and seldom did they encounter oncoming traffic, not until a moment later when they managed to dodge a monstrous two-story truck spangled with colored lights. They caught sight of the driver, a neurotic man with eyes that looked like eggs, his lids held open with safety pins.
They went on, right up until the boy turned and looked at her, a golden coin against the velvet night.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Oh, yes. I didn’t know it till I realized just how fanatical you are. It’s what I always wanted.”
“And no one was more fanatical than me?”
“No one. You said you’d die for me, didn’t you?”
“That’s the easy part.”
“What else would you do, for example?”
He stopped, pulled the car onto the shoulder and looked at her severely.
“Actually, I’d like to eat you. Eat, eat, eat. Starting at your toes.”
“Oh, God.”
“Eat you up entirely. Your brain. And everything that comes out of you, too.”
“Oh my God, I’ve never heard anything like that.”
Her eyes were closed. Drawing her to him, he kissed her, sucked on her lips, and jabbed his tongue into her as far as it would reach. This time he really was going insane. Both were crying. His wish was to kill her, eat her, suck on her, drink her; instead he left the car, went down the road for a distance, and then came back and pulled her out of the car.
The world had disappeared. He couldn’t keep his eye off his amazing prize. They were so near, both of them fighting for oxygen.
“Say this,” he demanded hoarsely: “I love you.”
“I love you.”
He dizzied, sank helplessly to his knees, and pulled the woman down with him. In a view from the treetops, they must have seemed like the original two people. And when she looked at him, she saw that he was looking back at she. On the boy’s part, he could see not merely into her eyes but through them, and into the strange secret workings of a mind that had come down from the remotest times.
“I can see what you’re thinking.”
“No, you cannot! Nobody can.”
She closed her eyes and kept them like that. Even so, he could still attest to her breathing, a panicky sort of business that might easily have resulted from a long run through woods and fields.
“And you’re breathing real hard, too. Good.”
“I know you’re just itching to get on top of me.”
“Could I?”
“I need to pee first.”
He was astounded. Never in their whole connection had it dawned on him that this particularly entity engaged in such behaviors.
“I’m only human!”
“You don’t look human.”
“That’s because of you. I knew I’d have to be at my best to get your attention.”
“I’d have loved you no matter what.”
She laughed. “You wouldn’t have looked at me twice.”
“I’d have loved you if only for your music.”
“No. That might be five percent of it. But that’s all.”
She unfastened herself from his entangled arms, stood, and ran off suddenly into the trees to carry out her requirement.
He waited, only then coming aware of music continuing from the car. The orchestra had come down to its best part, a few measures composed by a genius able to imagine a woman like this present one without ever having actually possessed one. The music was superb but could have been better with another cellist. That was when he realized that the girl had run away and was hiding somewhere in the trees.
Of course he went after her. At least three potential pathways were visible, one of them made by ancient Indians, one by deer, and one, he supposed, by she. Even so, it was difficult to track her in moonlight of the same exact color as her hair.
“It’s quite useless, darling,” he called (never in his life had he used that word), “useless to try and hide from me. Especially when I can hear you giggling over there.”
“Where do you think I am?”
“I can see your left shoe.”
She ran for it, moving at good speed in and out of the shadows. She was fast. Pretty fast. Only now did he understand why she had chosen to dress in forest green. He lit a cigarette which, however, gave only the least light and in no real way helped him find the girl. He hastened back to the car, changed the music over to the second cello concerto of Shostakovich, and turned the volume up. It was the girl’s favorite piece, and together with his own presence ought to draw the girl out of the forest, he believed. Two minutes went past.
“The snakes, sweetheart. Be very, very careful. This area is full of ’em, you realize.”
Two minutes more went by. And then in a voice that didn’t come from where he expected:
“Do you still have that gun?”
“Certainly.”
“Okay, leave it on the ground and go away.”
“You don’t know how to use it!”
“Teach me.”
“Alright, come on over here, and I’ll teach you.”
(I know this event did actually take place. It was told to me by both of them independently.)
They arrived back at her apartment at a late hour, or early hour if viewed from the perspective of the actual day. He had not yet tried to mount the girl, and when they reached her door, he sought to shock her by not asking to come inside.
“Well. Goodnight.”
(He had a view of her tidy parlor, but couldn’t really see into the room with the bed and two colored quilts.)
“Goodnight,” she said. “And thank you for taking me.”
“No, no, that was my idea.”
“My idea, too.”
“No, no, just mine.”
“I was the one who suggested it.”
“Suggest? There’s a good deal of difference between suggesting something and actually doing it!”
“You’re right, of course. I have to get used to that. It’s so late you probably don’t even want to come inside.”
“I always want to come inside! But you probably have a big day in front of you.”
“Yes, so much to do. Too much, really. Well, goodnight, then.”
“Right.”
Left alone, she fed her pets and tried without success to restore their color. She had come through the night, still holding on to her integrity for the nonce. She undressed slowly, exercised briefly, showered—it was two o’clock in the morning—and then got into bed and lay on top of the pillow. No longer did she seek to avert those unseemly dreams that rained down on her from the ceiling. But it wasn’t just love she mostly wanted but something else, something that held love as a subset. Whatever it was, she wanted it grievously.
It wasn’t till almost four in the morning that her dream arrived at last. She was standing out in the
midst of a flowering orchard when she espied a man approaching from the distance.
Forty-three
He arrived back in his hometown just as the car began giving off spumes of smoke. He recognized the cause and believed he’d easily be able to make the repair without assistance.
His head was still full of the girl of course, her legs in hose, her sinister eyes offering a conduit to other lands. A person like himself, no longer afraid of insanity, could see all sorts of things in those eyes—children tossed from the broken walls of erstwhile Troy, Mongols broaching on Kiev, the coming of the Business Age.
“You must learn to stand up to it,” she had said. “And don’t you dare look away from me!”
But it wasn’t till past five in the morning that his mind reverted to the girl’s lips and the porcelain white thighs of which he’d seen all too little thus far, a mere glimpse indeed.
The following day he worked with the old man on his garden-roof. Even half-drunk, the fellow could carry decent loads up the ladder, which is to say until they had set up a block and tackle for the project. It was the soil that weighed the most, two hundred twenty-pound loads that had then to be decanted into the innumerable boxes that covered the roof. Some days, the temperature reached ninety-seven degrees, and in early July the boy’s money ran dry. He had to borrow one thousand five hundred dollars from the man in order to continue paying him his salary.
“This here is a damn fool thing we’re doing,” he said. “So I reckon pretty soon everybody else is going to be doing it, too.”
“No, just me.”
But the best came in August, when, with his mind still primarily on the girl, her arms and teeth, the two men invested in seven hundred fifty tulip bulbs which they implanted one by one in the helter-skelter arrangement on the boy’s all-too-heavy rooftop area. Within a week, weeds began to sprout, causing even further trouble for the men.