Cynosura

by Tito Perdue

  But now, having embarked upon love-at-a-distance, the boy and girl began writing each other. The fact is, I have inspected some of that correspondence myself. Naturally, the boy needed someone to talk to, and as a tolerant sort of person, not to mention experienced and wise, he chose me for his confessor. After all, it was only two or three times each year that I passed through that region.

  He was perturbed by her buttermilk thighs, but more than that by her Sun-like face that took advantage of cosmetics without having to rely on them. Sometimes he preferred to see her in the face that Heaven had given her, a sort of church-going experience that put him nose-to-nose with freckles and health and man-destroying smiles. Myself, I compare that face to a certain Syracusan coin seen by me many years ago on a visit to the British Museum.

  “Hurts, hurts, hurts!” he said. “I want to eat her.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Eat, eat, eat.”

  “Just lie with her a few hundred times. That’ll take care of it.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  “And so you’re going to skip that part?”

  “The whole goddamn thing. Toes and guts, all of it!”

  (I had never seen a case like this.)

  “All things end,” said I.

  “No, sir. I’m ruined.”

  “We’re all ruined. Me, I wanted to rule the Western World.”

  “I suppose I could kill myself. But it’s like Schopenhauer said; it wouldn’t do a bit of good.”

  “Myself, I had wanted to create a Confederacy of the Northern Hemisphere. Till I got to know people better.”

  “Had a hysterectomy when she was seventeen.”

  “Did she indeed!”

  “Her parents don’t know, of course.”

  “I like this girl! When may I interview her?”

  “I’ll ask her to come see you.”

  “Tuesday?”

  The boy agreed, albeit somewhat reluctantly, I thought. I wanted to take another look at that personality and satisfy myself that she was good enough for the best student, certainly, that I had ever had.

  Forty-four

  They worked diligently, the old man and boy, right up until the tulips began to bloom. Oftimes he could be seen, the younger one, bending over his plants, trying to coax the things into coughing up their flowers. The rain, when it came—it seldom did—would overflow the boxes and run down the underlying tin roof to quench the zinnias positioned to receive it. By this time, he owed the old man more than two thousand two hundred dollars, and there were moments he was tempted to use some of the checks his parents had been sending; instead, he burned them.

  His books had by this time all been transferred to his new lodgings, giving him time at last to choose and hang the artworks he wanted, a heterogeneous lot including framed prints of medieval book illustrations, The Three Musicians of Rufino Tamayo, and the official portrait of Corneliu Codreanu in full uniform. He had already painted the rooms in various shades of scarlet and purple, a vivid layout that appealed to me but not, probably, to any realtor known to me.

  Another peculiarity—he had organized his books by color and size as opposed to subject matter. He had made a catalog of his books, a nineteen-page document penned scrupulously in a sort of Fraktur. He also maintained a rotating list of titles borrowed from libraries which had constantly to be brought up to date.

  He had a chamber pot by the bed, and instead of an ashtray, a fruit jar full of sand. Day and night, he relocated his revolver from car to home and back again. He lived for efficiency or, as his mentor recognized, for love, art, egotism, and perfection.

  He did have a wood-burning stove, but for the most part he took his nutrients straight from the can. Nothing was more obnoxious to him than the need to participate in taxpayer-supplied resources, and yet he was weak enough to visit archives and public libraries and draw water from the county well. Having paid in full for his dwelling, his monthly charges were rarely above ninety-seven dollars, or not until that day in mid-August when he invested in a six-pack of Puerto Rican rum and hurried back home to make himself drunk.

  To him, the stuff tasted like the worst kind of medicine, nor did he enjoy the effect it had on him. The old man put him to bed, but by seven he was lying on the floor again, still listening to the same music for God knows how many times.

  He was sick, sick in body, brain, mind, soul, head, the package entire. He wanted to multiply the girl ten thousand times and consume them all at the same time. He was crying of course, an increasingly commonplace experience with him. Was not this the perfect time to die? To die and be dead and remain that way? Possibly, but what about the tulips? The unreturned library books? But far more important than any of this was the thought of those who might someday hold the girl in their arms rather than in his. And in short, his wish was to kill every last living one of them while time as yet allowed.

  Salvation came on sweet Thursday when the girl summoned him urgently to help salvage her family’s farm. There was nothing wrong with that farm, save that the owners were getting old. For years they had wished to make certain improvements about the home, a project that gave the girl all the reasons she needed to summon the boy.

  He drove forward at high speed, arriving at the farm before the third act of Götterdämmerung had finished. It was a unique vision that greeted him—the Earth’s most ethereal woman (dressed in trousers and muddy boots) cavorting with the dog in the forty-acre field that provided forage for the half-dozen cows that hadn’t as yet forsaken the place. She was lying on her back when he saw her, laughing, the dog tugging on the golden sunrays that composed her hair. Seeing her there, thrashing about, laughing under the Sun, he was assailed by a hunger as cruel and unremitting as gravity.

  No remedy for a person like him. And then she was running toward him in her sloppy pants, her divine face a mess of smiles. “Oh, God,” she said, colliding into his arms. They kissed in the open field, none to see them but the dog, the everlasting gnats, and a score of sarcastic crows hooting at them from a distance. The Sun, too, should be mentioned, and the girl’s mother, two of the cows, and sundry other life forms who had seen this sort of thing before. He put her on the ground, spread her out, and lay on top of her.

  “I’m going to eat you all up now.”

  “Good.”

  God, what a face. He could barely go on looking at her, scorched as he was by her fulgent eyes. He could not recall anyone in history who had been given such a privilege, namely to lie athwart a goddess and burrow one’s snout in her golden neck.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “Don’t ever let anyone else hold me like this. You promise?”

  “I’ll kill ’em.”

  It seemed to content her. He said:

  “You’re breathing real hard again. Are you excited?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Even down to your fingertips. Imagine what it’s like for me. The most beautiful girl in the whole wide world trembling in my arms. You’re like a motor, or something.”

  “I can’t stand it.”

  Suddenly she wrapped her legs about him in the way he had seen in certain pornographic movie scenes.

  “Oh, God. Fuck me.”

  “Your mother’s coming.”

  They leapt up, and as she tried to brush the straw out of her lap, he tried to comb his hair, using for that purpose the fingers of his hand, one of them.

  “Morning!” the boy said. “Thought I’d come on down and see if I couldn’t, you know, help out a little bit.”

  “She’s not but nineteen.”

  “And your husband, how’s he doing?”

  She didn’t answer. There was a hollow place in the straw where the boy and girl had been lying. They looked at it.

  “Anyway, she’s going on over there to Germany, don’t you see. Play in one of those orchestras they got over there.”

  “Romania,” the girl amended.

  He didn’t believe it. To get away from that possibility, he said: “Maybe
we should start by painting the barn. Needs it.”

  “House needs it worse.”

  In the event, the boy and girl scavenged a half-gallon of linseed oil-based white paint and set to work. The barn must have been a hundred years old and had lots of bald places fore and aft. Even so, it seemed likely to outlast its owners.

  “This was my room,” the girl said, tapping at a window entangled in vines. My student tried to peer into the room, but the glass gave back only a reflection of his own dour face and not much else.

  “This is where you used to do your sleeping?”

  “Yes.”

  “God. Dressed in pajamas. Did you always comb your hair before getting into bed?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Do you still have the comb?”

  She laughed. “What, you want to ‘eat’ that, too?”

  “And went to sleep around, what, about ten or eleven o’clock?”

  “Why don’t we just tuck you away in that bed? It’s still there. And then you could smell the sheets and whatall.”

  “And those little pajamas. You didn’t really need ’em in the summertime, did you?”

  She laughed out loud. In her right hand she held a paintbrush drenched to the hilt in glossy paint. Moving slowly, she returned the brush to the bucket and then turned to face him. They were separated but by inches, and her hair was blazing in the afternoon weather. Her face encompassed just a few square inches that, to his fevered mind, was larger than the sky. Sent here from elsewhere on impermanent loan, she was not a normal human being. They both were breathing uncommonly hard.

  “You can do anything to me that you want to,” she said. “Anyplace, anytime, anywhere. But it still won’t solve our problem, I don’t think.”

  “Our problem?”

  “It’s worse for me. Been waiting since before I was born. I didn’t know it would be you, of course.” Suddenly she clutched her own abdomen in both hands, the seat, I suppose, of those yearnings inflicted on her when biology began.

  “Beat me.”

  “No.”

  “Well, gracious, do something at least!”

  They kissed and then adjourned to the field where he put her on the ground and settled her on top of himself. Face up beneath the Sun, he listened to her wants and wishes, a shocking list delivered slowly in dark voice in her Deep South accent. Her scope for passion was even larger than he had hoped.

  “You really mean that?”

  To shut him up, she kissed him twice and then went on with her confessions, moving deeper and deeper into that female territory that mustn’t be revealed to standard people.

  “Are you trying to kill me?”

  “I will you, if you will me.”

  “Do me first.”

  “No! I want you wide awake.”

  “But what if I don’t want you to die?”

  “That’s what makes it so interesting.”

  “Alright then. How should I do it?”

  “I want you . . .”—and here she began to unbutton her blouse—“. . .want you to cut me open and take all the evil out.”

  “Take it out? I depend upon it!”

  She laughed. God alone could know whatall that gorgeous head contained. And then, too, he had been tumescent for three hours and was beginning to suffer.

  They did their bit of painting, making a poor job of it, and then drove the family truck into the middle of East Field, where some two or three dozen bales of new-cut straw needed to be taken elsewhere. She was strong enough, the girl, to lift the bundles without assistance and shift them into place. She was enjoying this. The Sun had set her hair on fire, and she hadn’t neglected to paint her lips a violent red. This was the time, now, this very moment, to make a photograph of her and paste it away forever in Time’s album, an indictment of all future girls.

  “My God, you’re so beautiful,” he said. “How does that make you feel?”

  “It’s what I was born for. It’s so good, sometimes it makes me want to scream. I’d rather have this for ten minutes than . . . More than anything.”

  “Well, sure. I understand completely. You’re one of the lucky ones.”

  “No, you. You have me.”

  Somehow she had cut herself at the base of her thumb, a trivial wound that nevertheless had let a few drops of ichor run down into her palm. He availed himself of it, coming forward quickly to lap it up with his tongue.

  “You really do love me after all.”

  He squeezed the wound, creating more beverage for himself. “Love? Not really. No, it’s much more than that.”

  She closed her eyes, ecstatic with that sort of language and the Sun.

  Forty-five

  Having achieved not very much during his interlude on the farm, the boy drove back slowly toward his own hometown. He moved past a run-down gasoline station where three old men sat shoulder to shoulder, appraising the passing traffic. The boy ran past the place, continuing on to where three roads came together, an endroit that in his romantic and much-too-literary mind brought up remembrances of where Oedipus had slain his father. And then, too, he had some particularly direful music playing at just that time on his costly machine.

  He turned, came back, took a precaution not to tread on the forked tail of a beagle reminiscing in the Sun, and entered the establishment. He had come for fueling, but instead of that, his all-too-historic mind leapt up in joy when he beheld the quality of the place, a museum it almost were, with jars of candy, tobacco products, and odds and ends of automotive parts displayed beneath a glass countertop whereon three blue-green flies were darting back and forth at unexplained intervals. Perhaps they knew something he did not. Perhaps? Equipped with all those eyes, it were a certainty.

  He waited for one of the men to leave the bench and attend to him. Not that the boy, regaled as he was by the smell of turpentine and other kindred fragrances that transported his all-too-nostalgic outlook back to times when a man and his wife knew how to stand on their own four feet and whose typical children knew how to . . . He wasn’t impatient in the least.

  “Need to get some gasoline,” the boy said when finally the attendant stood and came toward him. They looked at one another. The older man was smaller than the younger one, resulting in a momentary disconnection of their eyebeams in the problematic dark.

  “You come in here. Now just exactly what is it you want?”

  “Need about ten gallons of gasoline.”

  “Do?”

  The man was just too insolent. Neither of them wanted to be there.

  “How much is it?”

  “Ten gallons, I thought you said!”

  “I could pump it myself.”

  “It ain’t hard.”

  Now finally their eyebeams collided, leaping across the barrier of about half a century. He had seen things, the proprietor, yea, and done things, too. The boy coughed politely, making shortly thereafter the following remark:

  “Oil, too.”

  “That don’t surprise me. Two quarts and you get a free package of sunflower seed. You can’t do better than that. Nobody can.”

  The boy grinned weakly, paid, put the seeds in the glove compartment, and pumped the gas himself. He even thought about doling out to himself more fuel than he had paid for, but stopped short when he recollected that he never allowed himself to break the law.

  It was past dark when he arrived home again. No one had intruded into his home, nor had he expected it. It had become his habit once or twice a month to take his revolver out into the yard and fire off a few shots at random targets.

  No one bothered him except for a certain artistic lady—he knew the type—a bohemian woman of perhaps fifty who stopped by on two occasions to signal approval of his roof and exceptional way of living. Her hair was short, very, she wore a medallion about her neck, and her moccasins had beads on them.

  “Wonderful!” she said. “We need people who aren’t afraid to act up once and again. Otherwise life is so . . .” She indicated around at the work
ing-class homes of the sub-humans amongst whom she lived. No, she dwelled on top the hill in a chalet of some sort with a mansard roof devoid of flowers, the reward, he supposed, of her cultural sophistication. He could have her if he wanted. But he didn’t.

  It was warm in Tennessee, enough to cause him to postpone his work till late afternoon. Balancing on the gunnels of the boxes, he weeded his strange garden. His neighbors were accustomed to him by now, but still didn’t like him nevertheless.

  His rooftop garden: like the world in general, it produced more weeds than anything else. Even so, it pleased him that he had successfully reared a number of passion flowers, properly so-called, an ornate growth producing dark purple blooms that spilled over into the adjacent boxes. He couldn’t have been more pleased. But wasn’t he already sufficiently endowed with passion to resist making a salad of that stuff? Apparently not.

  Once more he applied for a loan from the old man, and being denied it, packed his bag and went down into the town to scout about for a job. He described to anyone who would listen his knowledge of Hellenistic philosophy, and on the second day was given the job of walking two small dogs on their daily jaunts. The woman who owned them was old and weak, and he could easily have pushed her over and taken her purse. Instead, he followed her inside and vacuumed her floor.

  His next position was at a building site where his ability in moving sticks of lumber lifted his wage to the legally-required level. He was, of course, detested by the other workers, who now were expected to work harder than before. Truth is, they just didn’t like him very much. He might even have had to take a beating had not his darling little revolver dropped from his apron one day and lain in plain open view for a few seconds on the cold, hard ground.

  Where did he sleep and how did he eat, this puritanical boy with his head full of books? He assayed the women strolling past. And then, finally, during his fourth week in town, he had a dream that he hadn’t allowed himself before, a dream of his golden girl standing before him without any clothes on.