Cynosura

by Tito Perdue

  He slept for possibly five hours, awakening in the dark to the sound of primitive music issuing from a passing car. He had determined that it was time to get into his shoes and was dismayed to learn that he had them on already. He yearned for rain, rain to quell the ambient noises, yea, and thunder, too. What was she doing just now, the girl? Going through her toiletries? Nibbling on cashews and artichoke hearts? And why, when he turned around, was she not lying on the bed with arms outstretched? He was angry about almost everything, and never throughout his whole life had he been able to understand why the world was organized the way it was.

  He forced down a pint of potato soup followed by a few other nutrients not worth itemizing. His illness had by no means passed away, and when he returned to bed he had trouble putting himself into position. Came then the rain.

  The rain! The rain! They loved it equally, the hollyhocks and he. He dreamt he was captain of an eighteenth-century sailing vessel daunted by waves and high winds, and then next that he was keeping dark vigil from the walls of medieval Pskov. But these were only-too-familiar to him, these old dreams, and he choose to shut them down.

  He did not wish to dream about the girl, not at this time. He had been crying and yearning and moaning for the past three days, a time-consuming effort that had left no time for his rooftop garden. Further, he had received a petition, a two-page document asking him to reconsider the project. Worse, he had read almost nothing during this time, and his funds were running low.

  “Ah, me,” he said, “no one suffers the way I do. The price of integrity, I suppose.”

  That was when he recognized that someone or something was in bed with him. He screamed.

  “Hush!” she said.

  Fifty

  And when someday the Moon falls into the sea, he will still have had this.

  “Hush. I was worried.”

  “Oh, God.”

  She was laughing in the dark. He reached for her, horrified to find that she was undressed, or above the waist at any rate.

  “Hey! You don’t seem to have any clothes on!”

  “I got tired of waiting. And besides, I was worried.”

  “Worried!”

  “All this rain. And you never write anymore.”

  “But . . . But . . .”

  “Harold [trombone player] brought me. He knew I was worried.”

  “But . . .”

  “I don’t have anything below my waist, either.”

  Her flesh, he later admitted, was as a superfine gold in which the largest unresolved grains were no larger than some of the smallest grains ever known, the interior of a honeydew melon, strangest of all things. He was weeping of course, but this time he had the girl to console him. Anyone seeing this process from afar would have reported the boy insane. With two hands only, he could evaluate the entire surface of that entity within just moments.

  “Oh, God.”

  “No, baby; it’s going to be alright.”

  “I can’t breathe!”

  It was true she had nothing below the waist. This was unfamiliar territory to him, though he had done some reading on the subject.

  “I have to go back tomorrow.”

  “Nude?”

  She laughed out loud, laughing in the dark. Her hands also were occupied, causing her on one occasion to emit an expression of real surprise.

  “Oh!”

  “Well, I guess I’d better get on back,” the trombonist said, moving quickly to the door.

  It was still raining out there, and would remain dark for hours more.

  He came awake before she did. Allied to the Sun, her unnatural hair looked like gamma rays scattered equally across the pillow and himself. He had been an adult since seventeen, and after last night, must henceforward be seen as a fully-fledged grown-up person in the opinion of everyone.

  “Oh, baby,” he opined.

  “Darling.”

  (Alright, let time come to a stop. History could get no better, and from now on “progress,” men call it, would be the worst thing possible.)

  “Oh, baby; I want to stay here forever.”

  “You’d get bored.”

  “What!”

  He lifted a tangle of gamma rays and managed to get about a foot of it into his mouth and throat. A little help and he could have drawn the whole person into his personal self. Better she had never existed than they be hived off from each other by time and space. Or that they might die and their souls never find each other in a universe that wasn’t already awful enough but must forever go on getting larger.

  “We don’t have much time.”

  “I know. But we have this.”

  “Yes.”

  “And no one can take it away from us.”

  “Yes. It’s been inscribed.”

  “We’re so lucky. Think of all those people . . .”

  “It’s not luck! We deserve it.”

  “You deserve it. Not me.”

  “Oh, good Lord. Look at you! Routine-type people just don’t look like that!”

  “It was an accident.”

  “It was not an accident! It’s a . . . teleology. A force that started out long, long, long ago.”

  She came nearer, saying:

  “Maybe.”

  “It happened with Helen and it happened with . . .” (He mentioned another ancient Greek personality unknown to me.) “That was the last time.”

  “I didn’t know it would be you.”

  “No, I had to force it.”

  “The more you want me, the more I want you to want me more.”

  “How much do I have to want you?”

  “Till you can’t stand it.”

  “It’s already that way!”

  “No, you haven’t even started. You’ll learn, you’ll learn.”

  “Look, I’m the one who started this whole thing in the first place!”

  “What if you hadn’t?”

  “Well! You would have had to settle for one of those people.”

  “No, no, no, just no. I would have gone back home and looked after my brother and cows.”

  “I don’t think so! After thirty or forty of those people had asked you to marry them, you would have.”

  “That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard! Anyway, I don’t plan on living that long.”

  “So who will take care of the cows?”

  She had to laugh. More beautiful that moment than ever, he photographed her with his mind.

  They played for the rest of that morning and then reluctantly rose up out of bed and went to look at the rooftop garden. The Sun, enthralled with the girl, smote her hair, elbows, eyes, and the tip of her perspicacious nose. She spent a long while staring up sadly at the weeds in his garden. A car passed by, the driver hypnotized by the vision of the girl dressed in a blanket, a pair of earrings and high-heel shoes. They returned to the house.

  All his life, he had wanted to sit at his desk with regular cups of coffee fetched to him by the world’s most beautiful woman; instead, she took his left ear between her thumb and index finger and led him back to bed. Neither of these two people was absolutely normal, especially not her and especially not him. He seemed to have stirred up a hornet’s nest inside her.

  “It was like sitting in an electric chair!” the boy described it.

  “I know, l know,” she said, soothing him. “But it’s even worse for me.”

  Whether this were lovemaking or a form of jousting or murder by mutual demand, I can’t say. Wasn’t there.

  And yet by two o’clock she was washing dishes, humming, sweeping the floor, and things of that kind. Dressed as she was in her towel-like robe, she looked more than ever like a figment out of literature, an educated Calypso to enslave certain types of men. And in short, she wasn’t entirely human. That was when she stopped to watch him philosophizing pessimistically at his pitted desk. He was aware of a certain stasis in the ambience, and outside, the noiseless Sun dispensing life and motion to those below. He heard a truck laboring up a hi
ll, a barking dog, collisions in the dust, a portentous voice from far away. Time had come to a stop, riveting them to the beginning and endpoint of a glance. How strange. Nothing happened, and yet, looking back upon it from a great distance, the boy (no longer a “boy”) was to list this moment the very sweetest of his long and wistful career.

  She left that afternoon, traveling by bus in clothes and cosmetics chosen to neutralize her beauty. Her baggage was small, holding not much more than a pound of makeup, book, mirror, and underwear, together with about thirty dollars’ worth of cash. She traveled like a Bedouin, a free-range woman with one great destiny. She had no need of abortifacients, of course, owing to her elective surgery of some years earlier.

  “I mustn’t have children. The only love I want is a love between equals,” she told me once.

  “And where will you find such a thing?” I asked, aroused.

  “Well, I did.”

  “Oh, my gosh, that’s just about the nicest thing anyone ever said to me!”

  We both broke out laughing. Her eyes gleamed with a glycerin of some kind, and her teeth were white. It hurt me, no lie, each and every time I saw her.

  “I tell you the truth, lady, I may be three times your age, but I’d so much like to . . .”

  “No, no, no, no. Hush, or I won’t be able to come here anymore.”

  Fifty-one

  He needed time to heal. Weakened by the woman’s embrace, he drifted both spiritually and physically throughout the house and field. So it must have been with those whom Aphrodite had chosen to regale.

  Having now to prepare his own coffee, he sat at table, struggling to decide what music he ought to attend during the brief interval between this half-hour and those others soon to follow hard upon. He would have preferred to stay in bed. In truth, he would have preferred to be dead, dead and buried with his beloved next to him in a fitted box. Such was the disposition of the best and gloomiest student that was ever my pleasure.

  The coffee was bad, but he forced it down anyway. These days he was living mostly on toast and jelly together with an occasional visit to a nearby eatery—“The Pied Cow” it was called—habituated by some of the most suspicious people the town had produced. As to what they were suspicious of, they never said.

  Entering by the back door, he trudged to a corner table, making himself as insouciant-looking as he could. He had a cigarette dangling from the proper place, and in his left hand a volume on the Hindu gods with colored portraits. Fifteen clientele filled the narrow space, pure trash, most of them, though he had more lief stand in the front lines with one of these than amongst the insured businessmen three doors down.

  Stationed in his place, he sometimes caught sight of faces worth looking at. He saw one now! A pudgy fellow with a bent nose, extinct eyes, each fist as big as two. They nodded each to each. What sort of awful activities had this person not carried out during his forty to fifty-five years on Earth? It didn’t bear thinking of. It was just then that my student recognized that he had been carrying a paper of some kind in the breast pocket of his used jacket, a newspaper perhaps, or forgotten magazine that wasn’t very thick, a brochure (probably political), or lecture notes left over from college days. Christmas cards or wrapping paper, he wasn’t sure.

  It was, in fact, a letter. He paid attention to the handwriting, an unusual script that might have been expected. A collection of twenty dollar bills fell out on the table, payment for “services rendered,” she said. He scooped them up quickly and hid them away in the breast pocket of his previously-used jacket. He had no shame in accepting it. What was hers was his, and his would have been hers if only he had anything. The letter itself was lyrical in part and in other part quite pornographic, actually. I wasn’t offered to read it, of course. Not that I would have refused. Research is research.

  He now had the resources to buy another cup of coffee and did so. All his life he had planned to live a cultured existence without recourse to employment, a long-standing desire now seemingly within reach. He had gone far, had picked up all sorts of knowledge that would have slipped from memory without him. And as a corollary of that, a mere detail, he had added the world’s most sumptuous woman to his résumé.

  By contrast, his rooftop garden had gone to seed. Finally, in early November, he submitted to the advice of his alcoholic neighbor, a good man who had loaned money to him. Together they mounted to the roof, and in place of the ruined vegetables and sunflowers, planted two gross of bright green and yellow tulips made of a plastic of some kind. Requiring neither rain nor attention, they offered a startling view to passers-by who once or twice came to the door to talk about it. Two weeks later, he was offered a price for the place, one that would have discharged his debts while giving him almost seven thousand dollars in capital gains.

  Thursday, he hired himself to a well-heeled couple in the valley who desired to clear a two-acre plot that adjoined their home. A sorry pair, they had gained a great deal by swapping their lives for money. They would stand authoritatively at the edge of their yard to be certain they were getting value for money. How odd all things are! He could have thrashed both of them to death with one hand only and had more information in his fingernails than was dreamt of in their hollow heads.

  Came the weekend, he traveled to the town of Chalis, or rather tried so to do because the car broke down before he was halfway there. He did, however, have a good collection of tools in the car, and after about an hour was able to have the thing moving again. Tonight’s performance was to be of French music only, and he arrived in good time to witness his favorite cellist, an iridescent woman in a blue gown that couldn’t have weighed more than five ounces. Six at most. Her solo was good, of course, very good, but he had moved beyond mere music by now. It was her face and the way it combined with the rest of her, a unity that put the audience, or half of it anyway, into a state of paralysis. The more they wanted her and the more they couldn’t have her, the happier he was.

  They looked at each other across the space, the movement of her bow intended obviously for him. She never closed her eyes at such moments—he didn’t allow it. They were having trouble breathing. Thirty feet apart, they could nevertheless engage with each other in the lewdest fashion I’d ever seen.

  He helped her with the case and instrument, rushed her to the car, and in order to safeguard her gorgeous blue gown, he removed that item and put it away safely in the glove compartment where it fit well enough when forced to do so. He was desperate. There was no doubt but that some of the passersby could suspect what they were doing. Both were crying, an arduous event punctuated by a muffled subtext of cries and screams.

  They drove about the town. The Moon, though large, was sullied by a vapor that obscured it from normal viewing. Even so, the boy deemed it the best real estate anywhere.

  “Okay,” he said, “you can have the Sun. Me, I’ll take the Moon. Especially when it’s all covered up in vapor like that.”

  “Just a cloud, actually.”

  “Always the realist!”

  He seized her, drove his tongue into her, and working counter-clockwise, tried to unscrew her right breast.

  “Does that hurt?” he respectfully inquired.

  “Isn’t that what you want?”

  “Me, I hurt all the time.”

  “I know, I know. Poor baby.”

  “Make it go away.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Kill yourself.”

  “No, I’m too beautiful. Later, maybe.”

  He drove home slowly, covering nearly fifteen miles before returning to find the girl in one of his favorite callisthenic positions. She was wearing only a few items, and after a brief struggle, they were able to set her free. Cruel girl was she, and very soon she managed to put herself on top of he.

  On his next attempt, he drove all the way home before arriving there. He had been listening to some really fine music that caused the girl’s face to materialize in front of him, obscuring his view of the oncoming traffic. He wa
s crying, of course, but had done such a great deal of that in recent months as no longer even to bring handkerchiefs with him, far less any of those little tear-away paper towels of about one square foot each.

  He arrived home at half past three and immediately took to bed till the hour ended. He had to return to the car to shut off the music and retrieve his revolver. Someone had trespassed into the driver’s seat, but hadn’t been able to start the car. Back in his apartment, the boy tried to force down a dram or two of cough medicine and buttermilk, and then again went outdoors to check on the fragile Moon, characteristic behavior of his in the aftermath of the girl.

  Came Tuesday, he was on the roof when two suited persons, one of them tall and the other not, called up to him from the sundial down below. He descended reluctantly but wasn’t encouraged to shake with either of them.

  “The Boy?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “We have a matter to discuss with you. We could go inside if you prefer.”

  “Certainly. I still haven’t done the dishes, however.”

  “Oh, that’s alright. Okay with you, Charley?”

  They all went inside. A new edition of Pelléas et Mélisande was on the machine, a fine performance that seemed to annoy the visitors.

  “Could I offer you a cup of coffee?”

  “Naw, I don’t want any. You, Charley?”

  “Naw. Beer, maybe.”

  He was a short fellow, Charley, and had some sort of civic decoration affixed to his lapel. Apart from this he had nothing more to say during the remainder of the session.

  “We have some good news for you, Mr. ---------,” the tall one said. “Real good. We’re taking over this place of yours. The house and whatnot.” He waved around at the property. “The whole kit and caboodle!”

  “All of it?”

  “And the flowers, too. What we have here, Mr. K--------- is a new age coming into focus, and we all have to adjust to it, you understand. You, me, everyone.”