AEgypt (39 page)

Beau with a touch undid her locked arms, and took her in his own, pressing his breast tightly to hers. Tears sprang, absurdly, to Rosie's eyes, brought forth like a reflex action by Beau's hug. After a considered moment, Beau let her go.

"Okay?"

"Okay,” she said, abashed and grateful. “Bye."

Sam's curly head, a little tracking station, turned to follow her mother's head as it left Beau, bent to kiss her, rose again to go. “Back soon, Sam. Be good.” The tears in Sam's own eyes, which had been rising and sinking for some time, spilled over then, but Rosie was gone down the stairs.

She picked up Mike outside the Donut Hole, honking her horn to get his attention. He had, between the last time Rosie had seen him (in court) and now, shaved off his mustache. She chose to take no notice of this. He climbed into the wagon and pulled the huge door shut; he greeted Rosie, at once shamefaced and pleased with himself.

"The cat that ate the canary,” she said.

"I have never,” he said, still smirking, “understood what that idiom is supposed to communicate."

"I have to say first,” Rosie said, “that I am really annoyed at you for this.” She moved the machine around to face the other way, the highway and Cascadia. “I just can't help thinking you do it on purpose."

"I have a purpose,” Mike said, turning now more grave. “I do have a purpose. I don't suppose that's what you mean. But you might credit me with some better motive than just trying to annoy you."

Ever since the separation agreement had been arrived at (a pretty simple document whose existence nevertheless embarrassed Rosie profoundly) Mike had set about tinkering with it, altering it and adding to it. He would brood over this or that clause or condition, and (often enough late at night) would call Rosie, and want to talk about it; long rambling not unfriendly calls, about marriage and justice and his feelings. When Rosie refused to talk with him anymore, he got his lawyer to call hers—his lawyer was a little light-boned grey-eyed fierce-faced woman Rosie shrank from, who was apparently willing to go to infinite pains for him; and eventually the niggling had accumulated to such an extent that now the agreement had to be seen again by the judge.

"It was important to me,” Mike said, “and I am a person too in this situation, Rosie, which..."

"I won't talk about it, Michael. Allan told me not to talk about stuff with you and I'm not going to talk about stuff."

The car turned out from the Jambs onto the highway south, joining the lanes of traffic going to Cascadia, where the county courthouse is.

And yet it was probably true, Rosie thought, that he didn't really do it to annoy her. He was just more into it than she was; his own needs, what he felt was fair to him, took up more of his attention. Allan Butterman told her that hers should take up just as much of her attention, but they didn't. For Rosie merely having to negotiate over the stuff, the money, the rights, made them not worth having; the sharper the negotiation, the less worth having. Surrendering stuff took less negotiating than struggling to keep it, and so if Allan hadn't been there she supposed she would have just surrendered it all, and lived with that.

"Well, how are you then, in a general way?” Mike asked. “If that's okay to bring up."

"All right,” she said warily.

"You doing anything?” He was looking not at her but out the window, as though searching for something, the way TV actors in cars do to fill the time while they say their lines.

"You know I'm working for Boney. The Foundation. Full time."

"That's not what I meant,” Mike said. “When you were with me you always had a lot of projects. You painted."

"I did not."

"That kind of thing. Maybe you're too busy now."

The motels and restaurants of the Cascadia strip had commenced, the amoebic geometries of their signs and roofs. The Eaterie. The Morpheus Arms. The Volcano.

"Actually,” Rosie said, “I've been planning a painting."

"Yes?"

"A big one. A lot of work."

"Yes?"

"It's a picture,” she said, improvising, “of Valkyries—is that what you call them, the women warriors who carry away the dead soldiers?"

"Um, yes. Valkyries."

"Well of them. But not in battle. Afterwards. Valkyries disarming. Sitting at the end of day. Taking off their gear."

Mike had begun to grin, eyeing her sidewise, interested.

"Big women,” Rosie said. “But not posing. Not dramatic. Just ordinary; hurting a little maybe; bending over, undoing their whatchamacallits, on their shins. Piles of armor around, like football gear."

"Girls’ locker room."

"Sort of. But not a joke. Just—realistic.” She had not ever before thought of this subject in fact, had just been handed it, but now could see it with great vividness: the dull glowing Rembrandt colors, a dark nowhere; big glossy bodies of ordinary women, talking, idly checking for bruises, their faces like those in candid snapshots, filled with private thoughts. Who were they?

"I like it,” Mike said. “A look into the girls’ locker room. Something that's always appealed to me."

"Not like that,” Rosie said. “Not what you're thinking."

"No? So what would they be up to?"

"They're just
there
,” Rosie said. “They're tired."

Mike went on grinning, at a painting of his own. Rosie felt a small familiar irritation, an impatience at being misread, especially misread by Mike's omnivorous horniness. “So how are you?” she said, turn the tables. “How's Vampira?"

"Rosie."

"So are you guys going to get married, after this is over?"

"It's not really a topic of discussion.” He returned to looking out the window, stroking the place where his mustache had been. Poor guy, Rosie thought glancing over at him; caught in the toils of love.

Mike had once told her that when he first took courses in psychology they were still talking about a “latency period” in boys, and Mike had been puzzled because he'd never had a latency period. There had never been a time, he said, when he hadn't wanted to get into the pants of girls, or get girls into his; he'd spent his childhood trying.

Funny in a psychologist, Rosie thought, that unreflective projection of his desires onto the world which Mike was capable of. His desires were sometimes—often—frustrated, and caused him pain (and dealing with the pain was what Mike called Growth, and Maturity); sometimes he would even say he felt at the mercy of his desires, and better off without them; but still he took them as simple givens, and the value they imparted to what he desired as well. He never considered that desire might make him misunderstand its object. He might
say
he considered it, but he didn't.

That was one reason for the silly threesome that Mike had inveigled her into, her and a counselor from The Woods whom Mike had become entranced with: the simple unquestioned value Mike put on it, his big night, as hard to refuse as an eager kid who wants to shovel your walk or rake your leaves.

"It might not work out real well for you,” she said, suddenly meaning it. “I mean I know she's your type, that dark tawny weird type..."

"Actually she's very sharp,” Mike said. He lifted his chin, a quick gesture, to free his neck from his shirt collar, a signal that he was talking seriously of himself and his enterprises. “She's been doing research for me, using the Method. Climacterics. Applying the parameters to sort of random lives. She's turned up some interesting stuff. She's very willing."

That had been the other reason, of course: Rose, her willingness, her abstracted mild acquiescence. Mike just took it for heat, since he wanted it to be heat. But it was spooky.

Her eyes somehow not there, not looking at what was there.

That night had meant nothing to Rosie at the time, or seemed to mean nothing, she had only been surprised at how well it went, and how little aftertaste it left. But in the course of it she had shed something, she saw that now. She had stepped away. She had turned, and begun to walk away. And though maybe she had at first meant only to walk away from Mike and his needs, from her marriage, from Stonykill, she had somehow gone on walking ever since, farther maybe than she ever realized, always away, never toward.

A huge shudder arose unrefusably within her, and shook her shoulders.

"What,” Mike said.

"Nothing,” she said. “Somebody stepped on my grave."

The Bison achieved the crest of the last low rise of the Faraways, and the strip leading into Cascadia unrolled across the valley, the gas stations and miniature restaurants and car-lots full of cars like a jumble of brightly colored toys; the road that divided them plowed ahead and was lost in the old gray city, from here almost like a
cinquecento
view, the crowded neighborhoods and blackened steeples, the dome of the county courthouse.

If she ever wanted to negotiate hard, Rosie thought, if she needed to, she could hold all that over his head. Call Rose to the stand, and get Allan to force her to tell what Mike and she did together. For Rosie had herself been a Model Single Parent, had been good, had not been much tempted actually. She had done without since that night last summer, the party by the river, the Full Moon Party: when Spofford had slipped her into the shuttered hot-dog stand and laid her on his old brown Navajo blanket, while the party murmured on outside.

Rosie had learned, in her appearances beside Allan Butterman in court and in arbitrations, why Allan seemed always burdened with intense emotions held just in check. In such circumstances Rosie felt herself awash in swiftly changing feelings, unable to avoid or mitigate them: rage when Mike lied, triumph when Allan answered cogently, guilt, embarrassment, loathing, none of which she liked feeling. These hearings did not seem to Rosie like negotiation at all but like some awful dark ritual in a Piranesi prison, a punishment only after which she would be free: you can go if you can stand this, can walk on these hot coals, wash in hot bull's blood. Allan, who surely didn't feel any of this himself, probably just soaked it up from his clients and those he dealt with, excess vapors.

"I don't know how judges can tell,” she said to him during a pause (Mike huddling with his lawyer in a corner opposite). “How do they know if what they decide is right?"

"They don't,” Allan said, stretching out his legs and crossing his small feet shod in black. “A judge I know confessed to me once that it really bothered him, the fact that he didn't know. Not that I was really surprised to hear it. He was very conscious, he said, that all he knew was what was put before him. The husband and the wife are both on their best behavior; the kid in his Sunday suit. If he was their next-door neighbor he'd be in a better position to know. But he has to make his decision based on what he
does
know, even if what he knows is nowhere near the whole story, or not even the right story, and even though his decision is going to affect all the parties for life."

Rosie felt a sudden awful perception, like a blast of cold wind. She might have been wrong in the decision she had made, so instantaneously, to take Sam. When it might really be Mike who after all and in spite of everything loved her more. A gulf seemed to open for a moment within her, beyond which Allan was hard to hear.

"The only thing that gave this guy comfort,” Allan said, “is that he was pretty sure, if he did make a wrong decision, everybody would be back before him again eventually. And again. Until the whole true story finally came out.” He glanced over at Rosie. “I wonder,” he said.

She tried to insist that Mike get a ride home with his little lawyer, but he argued (did he never get tired?) that he might have to wait for some hours for her to resolve her various courthouse business, and it seemed unreasonable for them not to share the same journey in what had been, until recently, his own station wagon.

Maybe he was tired after all. He climbed into the back of the wagon, pushing aside the torn coloring-books, the galoshes and maps and ice-cream cups, the empty oil cans, and stretched out. His was the sort of body put to sleep by gentle forward motion and an engine's noise. He didn't even wake when Rosie turned off onto a Scenic Overlook and stopped, idling.

My castle
, she thought.

It was shapeless and comical this close up, like a bunch of random chimneys, and shabby pale from winter, like the rest of the world. Butterman's. Not hers really, of course, not actually, no matter how long it had stood in her soul like a castle in an allegory, standing for all that was hers.

All that was hers.

If she slipped out now, opening the door without waking Mike, she might leap the low barricade there, and make her way down to the river's edge. She might find a boat there, a rowboat left accidentally, overturned on the shore, its oars beside it; and set out in it across the wrinkled river like gray silk, and reach the rocks of Butterman's. And then.

Silly, she thought: as if that pile were far enough away to run and hide in. She would only be found, after a search; and brought back, and made to go on with the life she led or pretended to lead.

She had in fact done no painting for a long time, though it certainly wasn't true she had been too busy. It was that she had somehow grown unconvinced of herself as a painter: not doubting her talent or her skill necessarily but only her reasons for doing it, unsure why she or anybody at all did it, painted. My art, my painting.

It was like the station wagon and the savings bonds and the loan payments Mike wanted to negotiate over: you had to know why you did it in order to bring it off, or get it for your own.

Mike knew. Mike knew what was his, and what he wanted, and what he loved; and if Rosie was sure that what Mike loved was mostly Mike—that he just went on making a simple mistake, like a kitten batting at its own image in a mirror—well, that might be what love really is, an illusion, but an illusion without which life couldn't be carried on, like color vision or three dimensions, and Mike had it, and she had lost it.

No that couldn't be.

It couldn't be: yet she had grown alarmed, hands on the wheel of the wagon, Mike breathing rhythmically behind her.