Extreme Magic (22 page)

“Oh.” He drew out a cigarette. “Your—people.”

She nodded. “Parker and Buzzie.”

“Cigarette?”

She lit the filter end. He gave her another. She addressed the trembling end of it, deeply. “It’s just, you know, I smoke these plain fags.”

He stood up again. “Just about to get myself another beer. Would you—?”

“Oh, no
thanks,
I mean, I
do,
but no thanks.”

He brought back a Coke and a plate of store cookies, the filled kind.

She ate one. “Peanut butter! God. Haven’t tasted it since I was six.”

“Your—people,” he said. “They’re—your parents?”

“Oh dear.” She sat back to survey herself, unclasping her knees. Sparks flew from her, and the cigarette. She retrieved it. “I catch everything, don’t I know it. There was this boy at the Proot, he used to say it.”

“The—Proot?”

“Prewitt Country Day.”

“Oh.” He remembered the term, from Hartford. “A school.”

She stared. “It’s just down the road from here.” She waved a hand, inland. “I used to go there.”

He often had a sense of how much in this landscape was just down the road from him, from childless people living in inns and barns. This was one of the times. “Which is which?” he said.

“Hmm?”

“Your people.”

“Mummy is Parker.” Suddenly she took another cookie. She gulped it. “Oh, you mustn’t think—Buzzie is very dignified. He can’t perform an instrument or anything, but he has this very serious interest. He even wanted to go to the Newport Festival, the jazz one. But Parker dragged him off to the Casals. Spain, or somewhere. She recruits for Gran, you see.” She hefted a sigh. “That’s why I’m here.”

“To see me?”

“Oh, no. Well, partly. But I meant here in this godforsaken end of nowhere.
Home.”

It was almost dark now. “You must have a huge view from there.”

“Oh no, our part’s all overgrown, been that way since I was a child, not that I mind. And Gran won’t give us the money to—” She broke off. “Anyway, the only place you can see out is up-river. From Gran’s tower.”

“Oh yes, I think I’ve seen it,” he said. “An old American Gothic. Way, way on south there, there’s one open spot. Through those trees. But I should think my trees would block—the tenant’s, that is.”

In the dark, her eyes shone. “No. You’re our view.”

“Oh.” It had never struck him that anyone could look in on his solitude. “Dull for you.”

She was silent for a time. “Summer!” she said then. “Summer around here is sure a real dark nervous green.”

“Nervous?”

“Oh God,” she said. “Me again. I’m an absolute
ensemble.
We had a guest last week—Hollywood. That’s what they say out there. For anything awful.”

He repeated it. “It does have a hit.”

“Mmm.” Her voice was shrewd. “So did he.”

He turned on the porch light. “You mind telling me something? Exactly how many years ago was it you tasted peanut butter. Since you were six?”

She lowered her chin, then raised it. It was a more than nice face, not quite lovely, but sympathetically planed, already shaped both to give and to receive. She tilted it higher. “Ten. Ten and a
half.”

He was less relieved than he should have been. “I judged you older, somehow,” he murmured.

Her look said that his judgment was profound.

“All I ask is to be old enough to be natural,” she said gruffly. “I just pray for it.”

“Other way round, I thought. When you’re young is when you are, I thought.”

“Not when you’re me. I’m just only bits and pieces of whosever’s around.
Simply
hilarious.” She gave a doleful shrug. “It can last on and on too, Buzzie says, the way it has with himsel—” She coughed. “Unless you have a serious interest.” She flung her head back, and her hands—flung the world off. “I don’t mind Gran, though. Funny thing, when a person is themselves, no matter what, they’re not so catching. To me, that is.”

“She’s old enough, I gather? To be nat—”

“Boy!” She giggled. “I’m supposed to be looking after
her
—and the cats, of course. And she’s supposed to be taking care of me. But that’s Parker for you.” She rested her chin on her knees, eyes up. “Anyway…summer around here is sure a…grim. I don’t see how you stand it. I should think it’d drive you absolutely nuts.” Then, with a horrified glance at him, she sat up very straight, open-mouthed, arms at her sides. He had a feeling that only manners, or perhaps the delicacy which already showed so plain on her, kept her from clapping a hand to that mouth.

He was used to this of course. One couldn’t expect them to be as used to his history as he was. “Tell me,” he said. “The favor you wanted to ask me.”

From what he could see of her cheeks they were red, but she answered in his own tone. “I was wondering. If by any chance you were going to be around next weekend. Labor Day weekend.”

“Why, yes.” The past afternoon rose up in him, dark pool so alien from this light refreshment its own dusk offered him. “As a matter of fact—I was planning to.”

“And you don’t seem to mind cats. At least, you’ve been feeding them.”

“We-ell, that’s about it, I don’t mind them. I prefer dogs, of course.”

“Of course,” she said. “But then—you don’t have a dog.”

He stared at her, at their image of this clearing, minuscule in their distance, across which a toy man, toy solitary, never walked a toy dog.

“Apparently Gran isn’t too old for twenty-twenty vision,” he said.

Her face was still pink. She kept it lowered. “Oh—she never goes up there. It’s hot as blazes, and full of dead flies. Lucky for me. You see—they’re supposed to be off the place altogether. The cats. And I’ve been keeping them up there, or trying to.” She looked up at him. “Cats need a
place!”
Her lip trembled.

“And yours is closed up?”

“Rented. So
they
could go, you know. And we couldn’t ask the renter to keep
four.
And for four, there just wasn’t enough—well, a kennel was just—out. So it was up to—” She cast him a faint smile. “Gran never thinks about money. Far as she knows, that’s where they are.”

“So it was up to you,” he said.

“Oh, I’m quite dependable.”

“Yes.” He watched that movie. “I can see that you are.”

“And it would all work out,” she said. “Only dammit, just for this weekend I’m being sent away.”

“Ah yes,” he said. “From your tower.” When his powerful garage light was on, as it often was if he worked evenings, then his clearing must hang in the trees like a fair. Still, it was cruel of him. “Like Rapunzel,” he said. “Or, no. Rapunzel was
kept.”

“Oh, I’m not
de trop,
or anything,” she said. “Gran wouldn’t give a hang. It was Buzzie who insisted. She’s having a very sophisticated bunch up for the weekend, some of her screamers—you wouldn’t know about that—and…and I’m not supposed to be that sophisticated. So Parker had to arrange for me. Buzzie was really very strong about it.” She looked proud.

“Good for Buzzie.” A sudden thought struck him. “Cats give some people asthma,” he said absently.

Her face fell.

“Oh, not me,” he said hastily. “I thought perhaps that was why—”

“Gran? No, far as I know she just ha-ates them. Really she’s just one of those people who’s mortally afraid of them. There’s a name for it.”

“Mmm.”

“If one comes in a room where she is, she jumps up on a table. They do rather go for her extra. They
know.”
She chewed a finger. “Could be her color too, of course. She’s got some vein disease that doesn’t bother
her
otherwise. But she
is
blue. I expect you’ve heard.”

“N-no, I—” He leaned back, arms folded. “Your gran. Mrs. Aldrich. She jumps on tables. And she is
bl
—?”

“Really, rather turquoise.”

“N-no,” he said. “I h-hadn’t.” Hiccups engulfed him. “Heard.”

She waited until he’d finished, to stand up. “I didn’t think you’d laugh. At other people’s misfortunes. I didn’t really think you would.”

“I didn’t think so either.” But he felt as if he had been for a swim in laughter.

“Or you don’t believe me.”

“I believe you,” he said.

“I guess it was me then, you were—People do.”

“No, it was a coincidence,” he said. “I was laughing at the smallness of the world. Or the enormity. Anyway, please believe
me.
I can’t possibly explain.”

“Oh, I believe you,” she said. “I certainly do. And I appreciate your language.”

He stood up. “Cats need a place,” he said looking down at her. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to do the rounding up. Or else rename them.”

“Oh!” she said. “Oh-h. I could come tomorrow morning and start feeding them here. I could come here every day, so that by Friday—I don’t have to go, you know, for four whole days.”

She was going to be a bore, the kind that could be painful. He hadn’t come near one of her for years. He already wanted to get rid of her. She was the young. “Where are they sending you?”

She made a face. “Friends of Parker’s. They have a girl my age, and they keep wanting us to be. We haven’t a thing in common really. Bianca O’Brian. She’s French.”

“She doesn’t sound very French.”

“Oh, she had an ancestor—some marshal. To have an Irish surname in France is the utter. And her live grandmother is a princess in Rome.”

“Oh? And what color is
she?”

She giggled. Then she stood on one leg.

He sighed. “And is Bianca at the—Country Day?”

“Oh no,” she gasped, “she’s already been at Le Rosey. And at Brillaumont. They couldn’t do a thing with her.” The other leg twined. He watched, in fascinated recall of how it had once felt, to be literally beside oneself.

She began to speak very rapidly. “She has this little face that pooches out, and she wears her hair scissored all around it, the way they do. Y’know? As if some sex-maniac had been chewing it. And all she has to do is scatter this talk of hers, like birdseed, and the boys come hop, hop. And wherever we others are wearing our belts, she isn’t.”

“I hope it isn’t catching,” he said. “It’s certainly utter.”

“Oh, it’s very poisemaking, to have a line,” she said. “If you haven’t yet got—the other.” And finally, the leg came down. Standing there, all of her implored him to see that she would give anything to rid them both of her company.

He would have liked to pat her, in sympathy. Instead, he looked at his watch.

“Oh, I must go!” she said at once. “Gran will be wi-ild.” Her hands crossed on her bathing suit. “I hope I haven’t given you a—a false impression of us. We’re really a very devoted family.” It gave him a glimpse of how she might be, once she had achieved what she aspired to—and a wish to give her something toward it. He hadn’t been able to give anyone else anything, all the long day.

“I knew a girl once,” he said. “Only a very little older than you are.” It came as a shock that Ellen had been only three years older than this girl when he married her. “She wasn’t any prettier than you. And probably not as—smart.” His voice ground. To think blasphemy was different from speaking it. “But she had a way with her, if it’s any use to you—I suppose one could call it a line. Whenever anyone paid her a compliment, or she was at a loss, she used to look at him sideways—you’ll know how—and say,
Oh, you’re just saying that!”
Once, at Niagara Falls, Ellen and he had donned the oilskins they gave one, and had walked through a passageway under and back of the Falls. Strange images, octahedrons of glass were at the other side of them. Ellen stood with these now. “It was very fetching,” he said. “It made the boys come hop, hop.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Thank-
you.
I’ll study it up in a mirror sometime.” Then she bounded away from him. He gathered that he had somehow offended her, but at least it had made her free as a gazelle. Across the glen, he watched her bound backward over a hedge.

His own youth had been awkward. “Pleased to meetcha!” he called from it. “Pleased to meetcha, Alden.”

She paused, then she came running fleetly. Halfway across the clearing, her hands clasped at her breast exactly as before. She rediscovered the barn, the screen door, him standing there. A moon had risen since, and was coldly shining. Walking as if her bathing suit were a skirt, she included the moon. It was like watching a tic of the imagination—hers—acted out on his obviously dream-forested land. “You’re just the way I thought you would be,” she said softly. “Good night—Gwee.”

She was there the next morning, and more of each day thereafter, sharing his lunches and once, in the company of a dealer-friend up from Pennsylvania, his supper, even offering him a muted assistance in the shop—and all with a manner so altered that he could find her unimportant presence lightly welcome. The dizzy reel of her confidences had altogether stopped, like a carnival ride shared by strangers. She made no more references to her family, and in his own mind they no longer struck the monster, papier-mâché attitudes she had so carefully pointed out to him along the ride. It was probable that they were quite ordinary, in their own way. Her subdued manner now almost called upon him to notice that so was she. Even the soapbubble chain of her giggling had vanished overnight, as if somewhere quieted at the fount. Overnight—it amused him to think—she might have consulted one of those Carmencitas who squatted over such matters behind windows crayoned with the zodiac, to which the words
Readings, Advisor
also adhered. Somewhere, in the depths of herself, she was being advised. In his own, he knew he was being worshiped, and felt himself too humble to question it. It was pleasant to find himself amiably concise with her in a way he was seldom able with his sharper-tongued New York friends—in the way perhaps, if things had been otherwise, that fatherhood sharpened the tongue. As a proprietor, he was used to lingerers, hangers-on, even apprentices such as, in the late, Urbino light of those August afternoons, pottering after him in her shirt and shorts, or shorn tan head seen bent across an intervening field of objects and tasks, she increasingly appeared to be.

In that light, age was their duenna—and her hair wasn’t gold; she was merely in the absolute russet of health. He recalled better now how the flesh at that age was aureoled in its own fuzz. But, as she lounged, sun-struck in the doorway, he had no visual terror of her; she wasn’t Ellen, but what might have been Ellen’s child. A dealer had just left them. The shop’s business was always by appointment; few itinerants came here.