Duplex (5 page)

It is true, the full moon had risen so high in the sky it didn’t look any bigger than the baseball one of the boys had left lying on the grass verge below the stoop. The boys had gone home long ago; the street was perfectly quiet except for the sound of piano music coming from down the block. Whatever it was it was being played at the correct tempo, so it couldn’t be Mary.

If I could only begin to be a queen, Janice said, talking to herself, I could go wherever I pleased. She sighed and patted her hair, adjusting her hairdo the way the mothers did.

They were taken up in the scow, she said. One after another. The operator got there first and was treating his girl to a cocktail in a crystal goblet. From above, the mansion looked like a snack cake, with shadows sticking out at angles that didn’t make any sense unless you took into account the blue light cast by the scow.

Inside the scow everyone was busy drinking cocktails and trading cards. The robots thought of this as foreplay, having no understanding of physical intimacy. According to the prophecy a child was going to come along that would be part human and part robot and this child was going to change everything. Of course it was way too soon—both sides were totally unprepared, not to mention the fact that they had their parts mixed up. The girls were only interested in romance, and the robots in completing a transaction. Oddly enough, both sides were hoping for the same pair of cards, Blue Boy and Pinkie. The cards originally came from a deck belonging to the girl’s parents. Her parents had no need for jokers, since they played bridge, not poker. The cards were beautiful, with gold rims.

I’ve heard of them, someone said. Those cards were even more beautiful than the horses.

There used to be lots of beautiful cards, said someone else. Then the fairies got loose.

Listen to me, Janice said. Leave the fairies out of this. Do you hear?

Pinkie had belonged to Mary, she said. Everyone knew the story of how the sight of her blood on the sidewalk had moved Eddie to tears. The stain was still there—you just had to know where to look for it. Mary used to think of Eddie as Blue Boy, with his dark hair and soft lips and studiously downcast expression. She thought of Pinkie as herself, even though she would never have dreamed of wearing a hat that had to be tied with pink ribbons. To see her now you’d never know she’d been one of the ugly girls.

There’s no such thing as an ugly girl, someone said. My mom told me.

No one bothered to disagree, the idea was so stupid.

At first they didn’t notice, they were too busy trading, Janice said. Ever since the wind blew their dresses away the girls were just in their underwear; most of them had on bras, even if they didn’t need them. The robots moved closer.

The girl had gotten a little drunk from the cocktail. She was sitting on the floor of the scow when her dance partner reached across the cards piled between her spread legs and slid his finger up under the crotch of her panties. It was cool, his finger, being made of titanium, and he used it to stroke her, first on the outside, running it over her pubic hair until she began to moan, and then sliding it inside her. She’d done this to herself but she’d never had it done to her.

Everyone knows what I’m talking about, right? said Janice. Once you start you can’t stop, isn’t that so? Just try stopping and see where it gets you.

Now all the girls were lying on the floor with their knees pointing to the ceiling and their legs spread. Everything was going fine as long as the robots kept using their fingers. Give me the card, said the girl’s dance partner. The robots had based their plan on information they’d read in a book somewhere: “Rooted fast she’ll turn to flame and change her form but keep her love the same.”

Give me the card, the girl’s dance partner said again, sliding his finger in deeper. The card, or I’ll stop. There was one big pile with all sorts of cards in it. There was a fruit basket, a parrot in a cage, a red rose, a white rose, a bridge over a river, a black Lab, a golden Lab, the Mona Lisa, a kitten, a tree, another bridge, a robin, a pear, the Potato Eaters. All of this was being offered for Pinkie. To make the pair with Blue Boy, who was being kept hidden away in the drinks cabinet.

Take it, the girl said. The robot took this to mean the transaction was complete. It lowered itself into her.

What happened next was too horrible to describe. Naturally the girl hadn’t changed form the way the robot thought she would—none of the girls had changed form. The information the robots based their plan on was poetry, which they are incapable of understanding.

Janice poked me hard between the ribs.

You think that hurts? she said when I began to cry. That’s nothing compared to what it felt like. Nothing. You can’t even begin to imagine. Supposedly the sound the girls made was so loud no one could sleep. It wasn’t like being torn to pieces, because pieces are big. It was like having the smallest parts of your body like the corpuscles and peptides and nuclei and follicles rip loose from one another, every single one of them. The parts were so small they were practically invisible and all different colors, the main ones being red and yellow and blue. They were gorgeous if you didn’t know what they were. There was nothing left of the girls. Nothing for the doctors to replace with new parts, nothing.

The robots washed everything down the drain in the floor of the scow and for days afterward it rained beads. People tried leaving out bowls and buckets and trash cans to catch the parts—there was a rumor that if you caught all the parts of a girl she could be put back together again and you could keep her for your own. The mothers and the fathers tried hardest, of course.

Like Humpty Dumpty, said the littlest girl.

What about the fairies? someone else asked.

Shh, someone said, checking to see if Janice was going to get angry.

But she was off on another planet as she often was after telling a story. It had grown so dark you couldn’t see the expression on her face. The lightning bugs were out and they were the only bright thing on the block, except for the light at the other end of the street in Mrs. Trimble’s attic, where her grown-up son lay smoking cigarettes and reading books by French intellectuals.

The fairies? Janice said. Look! There’s one! She reached out and caught a lightning bug and squashed it in her hand.

You’re blaming the robots, right? That’s what everyone did. The robots didn’t mean to start trouble. They weren’t happy about what happened. It was a mistake, and they don’t like it when they make mistakes. It was no different from when a nuclear reactor blows up and for years afterward radioactivity rains down from the sky making people sick. It was better than that, even, because the robots wanted to make things better. It wasn’t their fault they didn’t understand the poem.

That’s not a fairy, someone said.

How do you know? Janice sniffed as if maybe she’d been crying, too. No one understands poetry. Another lightning bug flew past and she reached out and caught it. Some things are real and some things are
like
real. The girls died. They died for love. She opened her hand and let the bug go. Everyone watched it drift away across the street until it was too small to see.

The mothers and fathers, though, Janice said. They never got over it. They had to harden their hearts so they wouldn’t keep breaking.

You can sit out here forever, Janice said. They’re not going to call you in.

H
IS NAME WAS WALTER WOODARD, THE ELDEST OF the three Woodard boys—Sorcerer was only the most well known of Walter’s nicknames. No one could believe it when Mary agreed to marry him. Of course everyone thought she was going to marry Eddie. To imagine one of them without the other was like seeing the sky without the sun in it, an affront to nature, a rift in the fabric of the common good, an invitation to obscenity. Along with the family business—a variety of dark ventures comingling in a sack called “real estate”—the Woodard boys were known to have inherited their father’s questionable character, his ability to perform such sleights-of-hand as could turn abomination to gold.

Marriage proved to be a surprise to Mary, who had thought being a wife would mean being constantly busy. Her new neighborhood was quiet, the house all by itself at the end of a long driveway bordered on both sides by rose bushes and backed by a woodlot. They had bought the property to escape the noise of the city, especially the din of people and objects being moved from place to place. It was a lovely house, quite expensive, the walls white as snow inside as well as out. Through every window Mary had a view of growing things driving their shadows deep into the wide suburban lawn.

Her husband claimed the noise of the city had been the source of Mary’s problem. Her unhappiness troubled him, as if she were being unhappy on purpose to make a point. When she woke at night from bad dreams he told her she needed to take it easy during the day—nightmares were caused by stress. When she said the dreams weren’t her dreams he gave her the look that eventually won her heart. It was exactly like the look Eddie used to give her, one that had been designed to show his fondness for how adorable Mary was, which these days, as far as she could tell, was not very. In a contact dream the dreamer’s mind got swallowed by the mind of another dreamer, usually someone who lived in close proximity though not in the same house; this phenomenon occurred most often in the very young or the mentally ill, whose brains lacked such walls as the mature brain erected over time, brick after brick of old passwords, the secret location of a soul, schoolmates’ birthdays, how to sew a dress, recognize a prime number. People living in duplexes were especially susceptible, which was why the sorcerer had bought such an isolated house in the first place.

He would lie in bed facing Mary, his face inches from hers, cupping her ears in his hands. How was she expected to hear? If she wanted to get pregnant again, it seemed like he was saying, this certainly wasn’t the way. Her life was supposed to be perfect now that all the unpleasantness with the boy was behind her. They never talked about Eddie, the way he brought her home from the prom and that was the last she saw of him. The sorcerer knew the subject was one better left alone.

“I’m not ready for this,” Eddie had said to her that night, though Mary later realized that she’d never been exactly clear on what he meant by “this.” They were standing under the porch lamp like people in a show, with the Darlings and Miss Vicks in rapt attendance. Eddie didn’t want a baby, that much was obvious. He’d have to be some kind of an idiot to have a baby now, he told her, just when his career was getting off the ground. It wasn’t fair to her, either, he added, though with much less conviction. There was a place she could go—he’d heard about it from one of the fellows he’d be playing with in the fall. Saint Something-or-other, run by nuns; he could get the name from his new teammate. The place was supposed to be nice, not far from the shore everyone on the street used to go to on vacation, and afterward the baby would be adopted by some nice people who couldn’t have babies of their own. Better yet, she could just get rid of it. Roy’s father was a doctor and he said he’d help out. He would lose his license if she ever told a soul. “You don‘t have to worry about money, though,” Eddie told her. Now that he’d signed with the Rockets, money was the least of their problems.

It wasn’t as if Mary wanted a baby. It wasn’t even as if she wanted to get married. Everyone kept telling her she had her whole life ahead of her—whatever that meant. No, it was more like a part of her life got sliced into and lifted out like a serving of sheet cake. As it transpired, the nuns were silent and surprisingly lacking in judgment. Sea breezes blew through all the windows of the convent day and night, moving Mary’s thoughts around to make unreadable patterns like the grains of sand on the floor of her room.

Meanwhile Eddie disappeared completely after signing with the Rockets. The only way Mary knew he was alive was through Downie, who’d gotten a job at the ballpark as the team mascot. He didn’t even need to wear a costume. The sweet summer days turned to star-patched evenings, the ballpark filling with noise and the smell of beer and popcorn. When Downie came to visit he would bring her news of Eddie, but only if Mary asked, and even then it was like pulling teeth.

When she finally returned to the street no one recognized her. She took to bleaching her hair and putting it up in a beehive, wearing large round sunglasses and stiletto heels. Often she could be seen standing with her hips thrust forward, paging through fashion magazines at Resnick’s Drugstore. The store still smelled like the horror comics she used to buy back when she first learned to read. She would hand Mr. Resnick her allowance money and carry the comic to the booth farthest from the door so no one would disturb her while she studied the monsters, their misshapen limbs and faces with pieces missing, their fangs and claws and fur and bandages coming undone. The monsters used to make her feel lonely and tenderhearted, unlike the fashion models, who made her feel like a monster. She remembered folding construction paper in Miss Vicks’s classroom prior to recess. No one knew where Eddie was then, either. Outdoors hadn’t been any better. The drinking fountain water in the bubbler tasted awful. You couldn’t see the sun itself, only a flat pan of sunlight on the rough playground floor.

“I wouldn’t worry,” Miss Vicks told Mary’s mother, who in fact didn’t. It was Miss Vicks who worried; Mary’s mother was too busy thinking about her next drink to worry about her daughter. “Once she gets to art school she’ll be herself again,” Miss Vicks reassured her.

“Mary’s a big girl, Marjorie,” said Mary’s mother. “She can take care of herself.”

Neither woman knew what went on in art school—if she had, she wouldn’t have been so sanguine about Mary’s prospects. During the day the students were a hive of industry, drawing plaster casts, painting from the model, learning the rules of perspective, stretching canvas. But night was a different story. At night the square they had crossed in the morning to enter the building was transformed, the central fountain no longer a cheerful sunlit place where young mothers came to sit with their baby carriages, gossiping and eating lunch and blocking everyone’s view of Aphrodite. At night the fountain became a shrine, the goddess standing there fully revealed in the middle of the water, her body white and naked, her back arched and her breasts lifted to the moon. Elm trees lined the square, their leaves falling ceaselessly through the dark like coins. This is how Zeus got women pregnant.

Mary had to struggle to keep the large canvas she gripped in both hands from catching the wind like a sail and carrying her off.

“Where are you going?” called the blond boy from Cast Drawing. They’d been assigned to the same small room that morning together with an immense Roman head, both of them reduced to helpless laughter by the bust’s egglike eyeballs.

“Home,” Mary told him, “to work,” and he told her she was crazy.

“The Latvians are having a party,” he said. “No one does homework in art school.”

The question of genius came up during the day but at night it didn’t matter. Often at night Mary would find herself in the bed of someone whose paintings she couldn’t bring herself to look at by day. Everyone got drunk or high at the parties; the apartments were small and poorly heated and you could hear living creatures walking around in the walls. One boy was a pointillist, meaning when she agreed to pose for him in the nude it took forever. The blond boy only did paintings of rabbits, the big gray hares that were everywhere now, pale-eyed and serious, appearing in the middle of the city streets reared up on their hindquarters as if automobiles posed no threat, though you could see their dead bodies everywhere. “They have gray eyes like you,” the boy told Mary, as if she should feel complimented to have her eyes compared to a rabbit’s. Eddie used to say her eyes were silver.

After they moved into the new house, Walter insisted on hanging one of Mary’s paintings on the living room wall above the sectional sofa, even though she asked him not to. He thought she was being falsely modest, but the painting reminded Mary of a time in her life she’d rather forget. The painting was divided horizontally in three layers and represented the tripartite universe. It was inspired by the work of a Spanish monk who’d lived during the waning years of the first millennium when everyone thought the world was going to end.

The bottom layer was the color of copper, streaked with verdigris and violet, giving it a watery, immaterial look. It was the prettiest layer, even though it stood for the underworld, the bodies of the Aquanauts drifting through it like goldfish. Mary used the same gold leaf on them that she used for stars in the eggplant-colored top layer, neither fish nor stars having any moving parts. The gold leaf shone but enclosed anything it touched in a hard shell—the Spanish monk had used it for halos. If you looked closely you could see fine gold threads linking the stars and the Aquanauts, so thin they were almost invisible, passing through the red middle layer that represented life on earth. The threads tangled around the limbs of regular people trying to get their job done.

“What are these supposed to be?” her teacher asked Mary during a critique. “Air hoses,” Mary said, and he sighed and patted her on the head. He was old and often cruel; one time he threw a boy’s painting of a poinsettia plant out the window. He was always nice to the girls though, despite the fact that he never nominated them for any of the prizes, the good ones where you got to travel to a foreign country.

The subject of the painting was the Descent of the Aquanauts, a fact Mary had kept to herself until the day not long after they’d moved into the new house when Walter was putting something away in the cellar and found her paintings where she’d hidden them behind the hot water heater. She used to think there would be a greater sense of forward movement in her life, but now it seemed like where a person ended up was going to turn out to have everything to do with where she started.

“That’s what I went as to the masked ball,” she reminded Walter, as if he would ever forget. “An Aquanaut.”

Each October the art school put on a masked ball that was the talk of the town, attended by bohemians and socialites alike. Even the less talented students were good at making costumes, but the costumes the talented students made could take your breath away. One boy was an anamorphic blur that only became himself when you looked at him from the right angle. One girl opened like a Cornell box and a ghost flew out. There were two Brides Stripped Bare, two Saint Francises receiving stigmata, any number of Madame Xs, Winged Victories, sunflowers. The pointillist boy was a trick of light, a mirage. No one would go anywhere near him.

“You should be more careful,” her future husband had told Mary, leading her off the dance floor to the upstairs gallery where the drinks were being served. She couldn’t dance and the flippers didn’t help—to make matters worse she was hallucinating on mushrooms. When he introduced himself to her as Walter Woodard, she laughed. “I thought you were dead,” she said, and he told her she was thinking of his father.

Walter was wearing gold hoop earrings and dark glasses, a gold crown and a fuschia tunic with black leggings that showed off his long sleek legs. He fit right into the gallery, with its Moorish jewel-box arches. When Mary asked him what he was supposed to be, he said a sorcerer.

“Can’t you tell?” he said. “I can tell what
you
are.” Then he leaned down and put his lips to her ear. “You should leave the past alone,” he whispered. “Not everybody’s going to get the joke.”

“I’m not joking,” Mary said. She stood there leaning up against him in her black nylon bathing suit with its little black skirt and her white rubber bathing cap, looking up at him through her goggles, her air hose regally draped across the crook of one arm like a train.

“I worry about you,” Walter said, and he meant what he said.

Later he followed her into the bathroom and held her shoulders gently as she threw up into the toilet. Then he wet a paper towel with cold water and pressed it to her forehead. “Weren’t we in some bathroom together before?” Mary asked, and Walter reminded her she was tripping. “No!” Mary said. “I remember!” He helped her to her feet and took her back to his apartment, which was immense and lavish and looked out over the river. All night long the channel buoys tolled their bells as the big ships slid past them in the darkness.

“IT’S TOO BAD THINGS CAN’T STAY LIKE THIS FOREVER,” Walter said to Mary in the morning. They were lying in bed looking up at the ceiling, watching the light cast there by the river as it swam above them, a shifting net of many colors.

“Why can’t they?” Mary asked. Of course she thought she knew the answer—the light on the ceiling looked to her like it was being processed by an enormous mind and then filtered through an eye that despite the precautionary veils couldn’t bear to see her lying there one second longer. “I feel like I’ve always known you,” she said, clutching at straws, but as she said it she knew it was true. Walter felt familiar to her, beloved even. The truth is, he felt like Eddie, and why shouldn’t he?

“Oh, Mary,” he said. He took her in his arms and kissed her on the mouth. “It doesn’t work that way. You can’t always have known me—you know that, don’t you? It isn’t time that folds, it’s space. Didn’t you learn all this in school?” Walter was a good kisser—better than Eddie had ever been. “That teacher of yours, didn’t she teach you anything?”