Galilee (45 page)

Catholic atheist that he was, he half-believed in that hell; half believed he would suffer—if not eternally at least for a long, long time—in a barren spot where every comfort wealth and power could bestow was denied him. He'd never really cared about luxury so he wouldn't miss the silk pajamas and the Italian shoes and the thousand-bucks-a-bottle champagne. He'd miss control. He'd miss knowing he could get any politician, to the very highest, on the phone in five minutes, whatever their affiliations. He'd miss knowing every word he uttered was scrutinized for a clue to his desires. He'd miss being idolized. He'd miss being hated. He'd miss having a purpose. That was the real hell waiting for him: the wasteland where his will meant nothing, because he had nothing to work it upon.

Yesterday he'd cried quietly to himself at the prospect. Today, he had no tears left. His head was just a cesspool, filled with dirty little words that he had no use for now that his bitch-wife had gone. Gone to get herself fucked, no doubt; gone to spread her cunt for some stinking donkey-dick—

He was saying the words aloud, he vaguely realized; talking filth to himself while he sat in his own caked shit. And in his head there were pictures to accompany the monologue; too blurred for him to know if they were excremental or erotic.

Somewhere in the midst of all this confusion there were other concerns he knew he should address. Business unfinished, goodbyes unsaid. But he couldn't pin his thoughts down long enough to name them; the dirt kept distracting him.

At one point the nurse came in and asked him how he was doing. It took the greatest effort of will not to let out a flood of filth, but he used the last remnants of his self-control to order her out of the room. She told him she'd be back in ten minutes with his noon medication, and then left.

As he listened to her footsteps receding across the hall he heard a whirring sound in his head. It seemed to be coming from the back of his skull; an irritating little din that rose in volume by degrees. He tried to shake it out—like a dog with a flea in its ear—but it wouldn't go. It simply got louder, and more shrill. He grabbed hold of the arm of the sofa so as to pull himself to his feet. He needed help. A head awash with dirty words was one thing, but this was too vile to be endured. He got to his feet, but his legs weren't strong enough to support him. His hand slipped out from under him and he fell sideways. He cried out as he went down, but he heard no sound. The whine had become so loud it overwhelmed everything else: the crack of his brittle bones as he hit the floor, the din of the table lamp as it came smashing down, caught by his outflung hand.

For a few moments, when he hit the ground, he lost consciousness, and in a kinder world than this he might never have found it again. But fate hadn't finished with him yet. After a period of blissful darkness his eyes flickered open again. He was lying on his side where he'd fallen, the whine now so loud he felt certain it would shake his skull apart.

No; not even that excruciating luxury was granted him. He lay there alive, and deafened, until somebody came and found him.

His thoughts, if such they could be called, were chaotic. There were still fragments of filth in the stew, but they were no longer complete words. They were just syllables, thrown against the wall of his skull by the relentless whine.

When Celeste came back in, she was a model of proficiency. She cleared her patient's throat of some vestiges of vomit, ascertained that he was breathing properly, and then called for an ambulance. That done, she went back out into the hallway, alerted a member of the household staff to the crisis, and told them to find Loretta, and have her go to Mount Sinai where Cadmus would be taken. When she returned to Cadmus she found that he'd opened his eyes, just a fraction, and that his head had turned away from the door.

“Can you hear me, Mr. Geary?” she asked him gently.

He made no reply, but his eyes opened a little wider. He was trying to focus, she saw, the object of his attempted scrutiny the painting that was hung on the far wall of the room. The nurse knew nothing about art whatsoever, but this mammoth picture had slowly exercised a fascination over her, so much so that she'd asked the old man about it. He'd told her it was painted by an artist called Albert Bierstadt and that it represented his conception of a limitless American wilderness. Looking at it, he'd said, was supposed to be like taking a journey: your eye traveled from one part of the panorama to the next, always finding something new. He'd even shown her how to look at it through a rolled-up sheet of paper, as if viewing the scene through a telescope. On the left was a waterfall feeding a pool where buffalo drank; behind them, stretching across the canvas, was a rolling plain, with patches of bright sunlight and shadow, and beyond the grasslands a range of snow-capped mountains, the grandest
of which had its heights wreathed in creamy cloud, except for its topmost crag, which was set against a pocket of deep blue sky. The only human presence in the picture was a solitary pioneer on a dappled horse, who was perched on a ridge to the right of the scene, studying the terrain before him.

“That man's a Geary,” Cadmus had once told the nurse. She hadn't known whether the old man was joking or not, and she hadn't wanted to risk his ire by asking. But now, watching his face as he struggled to focus on the painting, she somehow knew that the pioneer was what Cadmus's eyes were straining to see. Not the buffalo, not the mountains, but the man who was surveying all of this, in readiness for conquest. At last, he gave up: the effort was too much for him. He made a tiny, frustrated sigh, and his top lip curled a little, as if in contempt at his own incapacity. “It's all right . . .” she said to him, smoothing a stray strand of silver-white hair back from his brow. “I can hear them coming.”

This was no lie. She could indeed hear the medics outside in the hallway. A moment later, and they were tending to him, lifting Cadmus up off the floor and onto the stretcher, covering him with blankets, their gentle reassurances echoing her own.

At the last, as they picked the stretcher up to carry him out, his gaze went back in the direction of the canvas. She hoped his exhausted eyes had caught a glimpse this time, though she doubted it. The chances of his ever coming back to study the painted pioneer again were, she knew, remote.

F
or Rachel the house was a different place now that she knew that Galilee had built it. What a labor it must have been for a man on his own; digging and laying the foundations, raising the walls, fashioning windows and doors, roofing it, tiling it, painting it. No doubt his sweat was in its timbers, and his curses, and a kind of genius, to make a house that felt so comforting. It was no wonder Niolopua's mother had wanted to possess it. If she couldn't have its builder, then it was the next best thing.

Following the conversation on the veranda Rachel no longer doubted that Galilee would come back, but as the afternoon went on, and she turned over all she knew about the man her mood grew steadily darker. Perhaps she was deceiving herself, thinking that something rare and tender had passed between them the previous night; perhaps when he returned he'd be doing so out of some bizarre obligation. After all she was just another Geary wife as far as he was concerned; another bored bitch getting her little fix of paradise. He didn't know how much of a captive she felt: how could he? And how could he be blamed if he thought her despicable, taking up residence in his dream house, lying in the cool like some planter's wife while Niolopua trimmed the grass?

And then, as if that weren't enough, the things she'd done last night! She grew sick with embarrassment thinking about it. The way she'd displayed herself to him; what the hell had she been thinking? If she'd seen any other woman behave that way she'd have called them a slut; and she'd have had reason. She should have protested the instant she'd realized where his story was going. She should have said: I can't listen to this, and firmly told him to leave. Then maybe he would have come back because he wanted to; instead of—

“Oh my Lord . . .” she said softly.

There he was, on the beach.

There he was, and her heart was suddenly beating so loudly she could hear it in her head, and her hands were clammy and her stomach was churning. There he was, and it was all she could do not to just go to him; tell him she wasn't a Geary, not in her heart; she wasn't even a wife, not really; it had all been a stupid mistake, and would he please forgive her, would he please pretend he'd never laid eyes on her before, so that they could start again as though they'd just met, walking on the beach?

She did none of this, of course. She simply watched him as he made his way toward the house. He saw her now; waved at her, and smiled. She went to the French window, slid it open and stepped out onto the veranda. He was halfway up the lawn, still smiling. His pants were soaked to the knee, the rest of him wet with spray, his grubby T-shirt clinging to his belly and chest. He extended his hand to her.

“Will you come with me?” he said.

“Where are we going?”

“I want to show you something.”

“Let me get my shoes.”

“You won't need shoes. We're just going along the beach.”

She closed the screen door to keep out the mosquitoes and went down onto the lawn to join him. He took her hand, the gesture so casual it was as though this was a daily ritual for them, and he'd come to the lawn a hundred times, and called to her, and smiled at her, and taken her hand in his.

“I want to show you my boat,” he explained as they took the short path to the sand. “It's moored in the next bay.”

“Wonderful,” she said. “Oh . . . by the way . . . I really think I should apologize for last night. I wasn't . . . behaving . . . the way I normally behave.”

“No?” he said.

She couldn't tell whether he was being sarcastic or not. All she could see was the smile on his face, and it seemed perfectly genuine.

“Well I had a wonderful time last night,” he said, “so if you want to behave that way again, go for it.” She offered an awkward grin. “Do you want to walk in the water?” he said, moving on from her apology as though the whole subject was over and done with. “It's not cold.”

“I don't mind cold water,” she said. “We have hard winters where I come from.”

“Which is where?”

“Dansky, Ohio.”

“Dansky, Ohio,” he said, turning the words over on his tongue as he spoke them, as though savoring the syllables. “I went to Ohio once. This is before I took to the sea. A place called Bellefontaine. I wasn't there long.”

“What do you mean when you say you ‘took to the sea?' ”

“Just that. I gave up the land. And the people on it. Actually it was the people I gave up on, not the land.”

“You don't like people?”

“A few,” he said, throwing her a sideways glance. “But not many.”

“You don't like the Gearys, for instance.”

The smile that had been at play on his face dropped away. “Who told you that?”

“Niolopua.”

“Huh. Well he should keep his mouth shut.”

“Don't blame him. He was upset. And from what he was telling me it sounds like the family gave everybody a raw deal.”

Galilee shook his head. “I'm not complaining,” he said. “This is a hard world to get by in. It makes people cruel sometimes. There's a lot worse than the Gearys. Anyway . . . you're a Geary.” The smile crept back. “And you're not so bad.”

“I'm getting a divorce,” she said.

“Oh? Don't you love him then?”

“No.”

“Did you ever?”

“I don't know. It's hard to be sure of what you feel when you meet somebody like Mitchell. Especially when you're just a Midwestern girl, and you're lost and you're not sure what you want. And there he is, telling you not to worry about that anymore. He'll take care of everything.”

“But he didn't?” Galilee said.

She thought about this for a moment. “He did his best,” she admitted. “But as time went by . . .”

“The things you wanted changed,” Galilee said.

“That's right.”

“And eventually, the things you end up wanting are the things they can't give you.” He wasn't talking about her any longer, she realized. He was talking about himself; of his own relationship with the Gearys, the nature of which she did not yet comprehend.

“You're doing the right thing,” he said. “Leaving before you start to hate yourself.”

Again he was talking autobiographically, she knew, and she took comfort from the fact. He seemed to see some parallel between their lives. The fears that had threatened her that afternoon were toothless. If he understood her situation as he seemed to—if he saw some sense in which his pain and hers overlapped—then they had some common ground upon which to build.

Of course now she wanted to know more, but having made the remark about hating yourself he fell silent, and she couldn't think of a way to raise the subject again without seeming pushy. No matter, she thought. Why waste time talking about the Gearys, when there was so much to enjoy: the sky turning pink as the sun slid away, the sea calmer than she'd seen it, the motion of the water around her legs, the heat of Galilee's palm against hers.

Apparently much the same thoughts were passing through her companion's head.

“Sometimes I talk myself into such foul moods,” he said, “and then I think: what the hell do I have to complain about?” He looked up at the reef of coral clouds that was accruing high, high above them. “So what if I don't understand the world?” he went on. “I'm a free man. At least most of the time. I go where I want when I want. And wherever I go . . .” his gaze went from the clouds to Rachel “ . . . I see beautiful things.” He leaned toward her and kissed her lightly. “Things to be grateful for.” They stopped walking now. “Things that I can't quite believe I'm seeing.” Again he put his lips against hers, but this time there was no chasteness. This time they wrapped their arms around one another and kissed deeply, like the lovers they'd been bound to be from the beginning.