Galilee (23 page)

“I haven't finished talking.”

“Well I've finished listening,” he said, crossing to the bedroom door.

She moved to intercept him, feeling bizarrely empowered by her own nakedness. She saw him cowed by her lack of shame and it aroused an exhibitionist streak in her. If he was going to treat her like a coarse woman, then damn it she'd behave like one, and take some pleasure in his discomfort.

“Is that all the baby-making we're going to be doing tonight?” she said to him.

“I'm not sleeping in this room with you tonight, if that's what you're asking.”

“The more often we do it,” Rachel pointed out, “the more chance I'll produce a little Geary. You do know that?”

“Right now, I don't care,” he said, and walked out on her.

It wasn't until she'd showered, and was toweling herself dry, that the tears started to come. They were surprisingly inconsequential, given what had just taken place. She made swift work of them, then washed her face clean, and went to bed.

She'd slept alone for many years, and been none the worse for it, she told herself. If she had to do so again for the rest of her life, then so be it. She wasn't going to beg anyone for their company between the sheets; not even Mitchell Geary.

P
aradoxically, they'd made a baby the very night she'd ended up sleeping alone. Seven weeks later Rachel was sitting in the office of Dr. Lloyd Waxman, the Geary family physician, with Waxman telling her the glad news.

“You're in very good health, Mrs. Geary,” he said. “I'm sure everything's going to proceed along just fine. Did your mother have easy pregnancies, by the way?”

“As far as I know.”

“Well that's another good sign.” He jotted the information in his notes. “Maybe you'd like to come in and see me again in, say, a month's time?”

“No instructions in the meantime?”

“Nothing to excess,” Waxman replied, with a simple little shrug. “That's what I always tell people. You're a healthy woman, there's really no reason why this shouldn't be a breeze for you. Just don't go out on the town with Margie. Or if you go out, let her do all the drinking. She's very capable of that. Lord knows, it'll probably kill her one of these days.”

Rachel had made a tentative peace with Mitchell about a week and a half after the argument in the bedroom, but things had not been fully repaired between them. She wasn't so much hurt by the exchange as she was insulted, and she wasn't about to kid herself that just because he was making an effort to be conciliatory the opinions he espoused weren't still lurking behind his smile. As he'd said at the time, they were part of the way he'd been brought up. Such deeply held feelings weren't going to disappear overnight.

But the news from Dr. Waxman was so rapturously greeted on all sides she forgot about the argument, for at least a few weeks. Everybody was so pleased, it was as though something miraculous had happened.

“It's only a baby,” she remarked to Deborah one day.

“Rachel,” Deborah said, with a faintly forbidding tone. “You know better than that.”

“All right, it's a Geary baby,” Rachel said. “But Lord, all this hoopla! And there's still seven months to go.”

“When I was pregnant with Garrison,” Deborah said, “Cadmus sent me flowers every day for the last two months of my pregnancy, with a little card attached, and the number of days left.”

“Like a countdown?”

“Exactly.”

“The more I know about this family, the stranger it seems.”

Deborah smiled, her gaze sliding away.

“What does that mean?” Rachel said.

“What?”

“The smile.”

Deborah shrugged.
“Oh,
just that the older I get the stranger
everything
seems.” She was sitting on the sofa beside the window, and the sun was bright; it made her features hard to discern. “You know how you assume things'll come clear as you get older? But of course nothing does. Sometimes I find myself looking at the faces of people I've known for years and years and they're complete mysteries to me. Like something from another planet.” She paused, sipped her peppermint tea, stared out of the window. “What were we talking about?”

“How strange all the Gearys are.”

“Hm. I suppose you think I'm the oddest of the lot.”

“No,” Rachel protested. “I didn't mean to say—”

“Say whatever you feel like saying,” Deborah said, her tone still distracted. “Take no notice of Mitchell.” She looked in Rachel's direction, her gaze uncommitted. “He told me you were angry at him. I don't blame you, frankly. He can be very controlling. He doesn't get that from George, he gets it from Garrison. And Garrison gets it from Cadmus.” Rachel didn't remark on any of this. “He said you had quite an argument.”

“It's over with now,” Rachel said.

“I had to pry it out of him. But he knows better than to try and conceal anything from his mother.”

Several thoughts had come into Rachel's head at the same time and were competing for attention. One, that if Deborah didn't find it odd that her son was sharing bedroom conversation with her, then she was indeed just as strange as the rest of the family. Two, that Mitchell wasn't to be trusted to keep their intimate business to himself. And three, that she would hereafter take her mother-in-law at her word, and say whatever the hell came into her head, however unpalatable it sounded. They were stuck with her now. She was going to give the Geary clan a child. That conferred power upon her.

Margie put it best, in fact, when she remarked that “the kid's going to give you something to bargain with.” This was a grim vision of things, to be sure, but by now all of Rachel's romantic delusions were in retreat. If the child she was carrying was a necessary part of getting her way, then so be it.

In late January, on one of those crystalline days that make even the most arctic of New York winters bearable, Mitchell came to the apartment at noon and told Rachel he wanted to show her something; would she come with him? Right now? she asked him. Yes, he said, right now.

The traffic was abnormally snarled, even for New York. The leaden sky had begun to shed snow; a blizzard was promised within hours. It reminded her of that first afternoon, in Boston. Snow on the sidewalk, and a prince at the door. It seemed so very long ago.

Their destination was Fifth Avenue, at 81st: a tower of condominiums which she knew by reputation only.

“I bought you something,” Mitchell said, as they stepped into the elevator. “I think you should have a place you can call your own. Somewhere you can shut out all the Gearys.” He smiled. “Except me, of course.”

His gift awaited them at the top of the tower: the penthouse duplex. It had been exquisitely appointed, the walls hung with modern masters, the furniture chic, but comfortable.

“There are four bedrooms, six bathrooms, and of course . . . he led her to the window “ . . . the best view in America.”

“Oh my Lord,” was all Rachel could say.

“Do you like it?”

How could she not? It was beautiful; perfection. She couldn't imagine what it had cost to create luxury on such a scale.

“It's all yours, honey,” Mitchell said. “I mean, literally yours. The apartment, everything it contains, it's all in your name.” He came over, and stood behind her, looking out over the snow-brightened rectangle of Central Park. “I know it's hard for you sometimes, living in the middle of this fucking dynasty. It's hard for me, so God knows what it's like for you.” He put his arms around her from behind, his palms laid against her swelling belly. “I want you to have your own little queendom up here. If you don't like the pictures on the walls, sell 'em. I tried to choose things I thought you'd like, but if you don't, sell them and get something you do like. I put a couple of million dollars in a separate bank account for you, to change whatever you want to change. Put in a pool table. Or a screening room. Whatever you want. You call the shots here.” He put his mouth close to her ear. “Of course, I hope you'll
let me have a key, so I can come in and play sometimes.” There was a gravelly tone to his voice, and his hips were moving gently but insistently against her backside. “Hey, honey?”

“Yes?”

“Can I come in and play?”

“You need to ask?' she said, turning in his arms so that she faced him. “Of course you can play.”

“Even in your delicate condition?”

“I'm not delicate,” she said, pressing against him. “I'm feeling fine. Better than fine.” She kissed him. “This is an amazing place.”

“You're amazing,” he said, returning her kiss. “The more I know you, the more I fall in love with you. I'm not very good at telling you that. You throw me off my stride. I'm supposed to be Mr. Cool, but when I'm with you, I get stupid, like a kid.” He put his mouth against her face. “A very, very, very
horny
kid.”

She didn't need to be told; he was so hard against her. And his pale face was flushed, and his neck blotchy. “Can I put it in you?” he said.

That was always his overture;
can I put it in you?
When she'd been angry with him, and thought of this phrase, it had struck her as perfectly ridiculous. But right now she was persuaded by its idiot simplicity. She
wanted
it inside her; that it which he couldn't bear to name.

“Which bedroom?” she said.

They made love without fully undressing, on a bed so big she could have thrown an orgy amid its countless pillows. He was more passionate than she could ever remember his being, his hands and mouth returning over and over to her silky belly. It was as if he was aroused by the evidence of his own fecundity; muttering words of adoration against her body. The session didn't last more than fifteen minutes; he couldn't hold back. And when he had finished, he was up and showering, and then away downstairs to make some calls. He was late for his meetings, he said; Garrison would be cursing him.

“I'll catch a cab and leave the limo downstairs for you,” he told her, leaning over to kiss her forehead. His hair was still wet from the shower.

“Don't get a chill. There's a blizzard out there.”

He glanced out. The snow was coming down so heavily it had almost obscured the park.

“I'll stay warm,” he said softly. “I'll think of you two lying here, and I'll be toasty.”

When he was gone her body remembered the motion of his erection inside her, as though there were a phantom phallus still sliding in and out of her. And she remembered too the way he spoke when he was aroused. Often, in the heat of the moment, he'd called her baby, and this afternoon had been no different.
Baby o baby o baby,
he'd said as he put it in. But now, when she conjured his voice, it was as if he were speaking to the child in her, calling to it in her womb.
Baby o baby o baby.

She didn't know whether to be moved or disturbed, so she told herself to be neither. She pulled the sheets and quilt up around her, and slept, while the snow lay its own fat white quilt on the park below.

Since I wrote the foregoing passage—which was yesterday afternoon—I've had no less than three visits from Luman, which have so distracted me that I haven't been able to get back into the mood for continuing my story. So I've decided to tell you the matter of my distractions, and maybe that will put them out of my mind.

The more time I spend with Luman, the more troubling he seems to be. He'd decided from our last conversation—after all these years of estrangement—that I was now his best buddy: a smoking companion (he's been through half a dozen of my havanas), a confidante, and of course a fellow writer. As I told Zabrina, he's got the notion lodged in his head that I'm going to collaborate with him on the definitive tome about madhouses. I've agreed to no such thing, but I haven't got the heart to spoil his dream; it's plainly very important to him. He comes to my room with odd little scribblings he's made (actually, he doesn't barge in the way Marietta would; he waits on the veranda until I chance to look up, see him there, and invite him in) and gives me what he's written, telling me where he thinks it's going to fit in the grand scheme of his book. He's obviously thought the whole project through in great detail, because he'll say:
this
belongs in Chapter Seven;
or:
this goes with the stories about Bedlam,
as though I shared his vision. I don't. I can't. For one thing, he hasn't communicated what this book of his is going to be (though he clearly assumes he has) and for another I've got a book of my own to think about. There isn't room in my head for two. In fact there's barely room for this.

I suppose it would have been better for all concerned if I'd just told him that I had no intention of collaborating with him. Then he'd have gone away and left me to get on with telling you what happened to Rachel. But he was so impassioned about it, I was afraid he'd be a wreck if I did that.

That's not the only reason that I didn't tell him the truth, I'll admit. Though it's a disruption having him come in and pick my brains the way he's been doing, he's also been strangely stimulating company. The more comfortable he becomes in my presence, the less effort he makes to keep his conversation on any coherent track. In the midst of telling me some lunatic detail of his book he'll veer off onto a completely different subject, then veer again, and again, almost as though there was more than one Luman in his head, and they were all vying for the use of his tongue. There's Luman the gossip, who has a chatty, faintly effeminate manner. There's Luman the metaphysician, who gazes at the ceiling while he pontificates. There's Luman the encyclopedia, who'll out of the blue talk about Roman law, or the finer points of topiary. (Some of the information he's provided in this latter mode has been fascinating. I didn't realize until he told
me that in some species of hyena the female is indistinguishable from the male, her clitoris the size of a penis, her labia swollen and drooping like a scrotum. No wonder Marietta took to them. Nor did I know that the temples where Cesaria was worshipped were often also tombs; and that sacred marriages, the
heiros gamos,
were celebrated there, among the dead.)