Gravity Box and Other Spaces (10 page)

He considered for a moment telling her. What could she do with the knowledge that the Named and the Namers came in all kinds, with ambitions and appetites that often conflicted? Nothing, probably. Still—

“I like the world as it is,” he said.

“But it don't work right.”

“You noticed that, did you?” He leaned close to her and drew back the blanket from her daughter's face. He gazed at the infant for a long time, then sat back.

“Does she have a name?” Elle asked.

Devon nodded.

“You gonna tell me what it is?”

“Oh,” Devon said, and drained the can of bitter coffee in a long draught, “I think you can do just as well as I. Like I said, you have to be careful about handing out names.”

She swallowed hard. “I thought you were somebody else.”

“Yeah, a lot of people get me confused with somebody else. I don't know what to do about that, if anything.”

He lifted the lantern then and blew out the light. In the darkness, chaos maintained.

“Conny, he's asking for you.”

She blinked in the bright wash of morning light and looked up at Geoffrey. His face was pale, making the scar across his cheek look like a slight fold of skin.

Conny sat forward in the overstuffed chair. It had seemed the most comfortable chair in the house the night before, but now her back ached. She rubbed sleepers from her eyes. “What time is it?”

“A little past seven.” He stepped back, hands in pockets. “He's been awake less than half an hour. The nurse is with him.”

“How is he?”

“Not good.”

Conny stood and her head swam. She remembered dreaming and a half-real tingle in her abdomen. The sensation startled her, and she almost asked if William had been writing, but the images had fled like ghosts as soon as she tried to capture them.

She went to the window, stretching, and gazed out at the slope of land that ended at the river a hundred yards below. No dream. They had returned to
the
house, her house now. She had smelled the traces of her uncle's cherry tobacco when they arrived last night, surprisingly clear after all this time.

“I called Dr. Ludi,” Geoffrey said. “I still think we should have taken him to the hospital.”

“That's not what he wanted. Is there coffee?”

“In his room.”

Conny used the bathroom. Feeling more awake, the dull pain in her back almost gone, she walked down the hall.

William looked like a miniature—not so much shrunken as reduced, his features etched and pale, like a cameo in ivory—in the mass of pillows and blankets on the huge canopied bed. Small and bleached. The last few months of illness had leached out his features, robbed him of expression, as if sifting him away. His hair lay matted against his skull and his beard needed trimming and combing. The room smelled of sweat and soup. The weak breeze from the open window did little more than stir the air and mix the odors. A tray with pages of marked-up manuscript lay next to him.

Conny gestured toward the door and the nurse left.

“I'm sorry,” William said. “Were you sleeping?”

“No. I can't sleep in the sunshine for long.”

“Of course not.” He made a weak attempt at a cough and lifted a blood-stained rag to his mouth. “My letters. You still have them?”

Conny sat on the edge of the bed and took his free hand. “You mean ‘our' letters, don't you? Of course I have them.”

“Of course. They're yours. Yours and Geoffrey's. No one else.”

“You were working?” She nodded toward the tray.

“Last words. Notes to you. Something—a closure.”

“Dr. Ludi's been called. Geoffrey wants you to go to the hospital.”

“Shh. Doesn't matter. The letters. Do you have them?”

“Yes, I said—”

“Get them. The first one, anyway. I want to remember.”

Conny peered out the door. Geoffrey stood in the hallway, leaning on a windowsill. “The trunk,” she said. “Would you bring it?” He nodded and hurried off. Conny glanced at William. He seemed to be sleeping now.
Only sleeping, I'd know the difference.

Then Geoffrey was back, carrying the heavy oak box edged in tarnished brass. He placed it in her arms and went back to the window. He spent as little time as possible with William now; he could not bear the smell and taste and waiting of death. Conny tried not to be angry with him—everyone had weaknesses and flaws—but it would not have hurt him just now to have brought the trunk all the way into the room. She wrestled it to the bed and set it at the foot of the mattress.

When she looked up, William's eyes stared at her, bright and feverish. She unlocked the box and pushed up the lid. Within lay neat bundles of papers, each stack tied with a ribbon. Seventeen of them, one for each year until this last. Some loose sheets lay on top. A rich, musky odor escaped, displacing the sickroom stench for a few moments. Conny licked her lips and dug to the bottom of the box. She took out the oldest bundle, bound in a brittle blue band. The pages showed faint yellowing.

“D'you remember the first one?” William asked. “The first time, really. Here. In this house.”

She undid the bow and sorted through the handwritten sheets. “Here. Yes.” She read the date. “I'd forgotten it was in March.”

“Read it to me.”

They laughed about it later, the way she kept saying “no” and giggling even as she unbuttoned his vest, his shirt, his pants. Not here, she meant, not in her uncle's study, in sight of his enormous desk and his books; “no,” while she helped him undo her girdle and roll down her stockings; “no” in a kind of disbelief, while his hands trembled as they brushed her breasts; “no” again until he kissed her and their mouths became busy with other sounds in a different language. She liked the feel of his beard on her skin, the exhilaration of his belly against hers. Not here, she wanted to say. They could sneak up to her room and lock the door, down the hall from where her uncle slept upstairs, morphically coddled by one glass of claret too many. But there was no question of “yes,” not for weeks now.

She had come from New York to stay with her British relatives, to see Oxford, London, perhaps tour the continent. He had been helping her uncle with a translation of some Latin texts she had been forbidden to see. The tension between them had not been immediate. Conny could barely remember that first week when he had been little more than part of the furniture.

The leather divan had not been intended for sex: The lumpy, squeaking surface seemed to grab at them, refused to let them slide or find comfort fully stretched out, and her head jammed against the arm, bending her neck awkwardly. Before she could find a different position, he was inside her. She closed her eyes and concentrated on each sensation, drawing her legs up and around him,
determined to take as much compensation as she could for the guilt she knew she would feel later.

Too many sensations. The smooth texture of his skin, the pressure of his hands, one on her shoulder, the other on her right breast; the rush of his breathing in her ear; the tension building up deep within, as if someone were holding her inside, a safe, warm embrace. Far too many sensations. She realized that she would have to do this again just to count them all.

His breathing became ragged, and he moved faster. Sweat slicked their flesh. Suddenly all the stress in his body released, along with five or six sharp breaths. He shuddered then lay still, panting and damp. Finished. He raised himself up on his arms and smiled.

“We must do that again.”

Conny laughed, and it sounded timid to her ears. “Of course.” She felt an ill-formed disappointment and wanted to ignore it.

He gestured across the study. “We've made a bit of a mess.”

Their clothes were everywhere. Conny blushed when she spotted her chemise draped over the green-shelled lamp on the desk. She caught his eye, and they burst out laughing, Conny tapping a finger to her lips and making shushing sounds. “Someone will hear,” she said.

“Would you mind so much?”

“No.” Surprised at her own boldness, she reached for him.

“Wait,” he said, catching her hand and kissing her fingers. He climbed off her and went to the desk.

Crossing the study, Conny saw all at once how thin he was. Frail. His shoulder blades protruded, and she could count each vertebra. His skin gleamed like molten wax.

“I want to give you something,” he said, sitting down in her uncle's high-backed chair. He searched the drawers till he found paper, then took Professor Carlisle's ivory pen. He ran his fingers through his hair, closed his eyes for a moment, then began writing. “Something more than my exhaustion, anyway.”

Conny pushed herself up a bit and watched him. William Heath had written a novel, which he had sent off to a publisher, and he had shown her some of his poetry, published in
The English Review
. He was self-conscious about it, though, as if writing was the wrong thing for him or that he was inadequate to the challenge.

It amazed her, after a time, how natural became the sight of him naked behind the huge oaken desk, intently scribbling away—absurd and comic, yes, scandalous, and a little frightening, absolutely. But while he wrote, Conny imagined herself like this every night watching him as an after-play of their lovemaking.

“I love you, William.”

He hesitated just before he looked up. “Really?”

“Yes, really.”

He seemed to think about it. “Good,” he nodded, “Good” and continued writing.

Conny slid a hand between her thighs, toyed with her hair, then pressed her fingers into the moistness. The pressure began rising again. It was like a child's fear of doing something forbidden and expecting to be caught: a nagging fascination, a warning impossible to heed. She moved on the divan, leather tugging at her, the air cool across her skin. The sound of the pen scritching across the paper, his breathing, the sensation of her own lungs filling and emptying, all seemed enveloped in the stillness outside the room, as if they had separated from existence and were
drifting in a non-place, without time.
If I open the door, there will be nothing—

The experience came like panic. Conny closed her eyes and held her breath against an almost excruciating urge to escape. Her muscles tightened in preparation, ready to send her running. She did not move, held in place by an intense curiosity to know what came next. And next. And next. Pressure built intolerable to endure or ignore. Her legs stretched out. Her back arched of its own will. Then her folded in on itself, spent and wet. When she opened her eyes, he was squatting before her, a few sheets of paper in his hand.
Everything is changed
. She touched his knee. He offered the pages.

“I love you,” he said.

He jerked his finger away and Conny laughed, grabbing for it. “Come on, ninny! It won't hurt!”

“It's macabre,” he objected, waving at the bottle of ink and candle on the floor of her room and the needle in her hand. “Your uncle is already furious about this.”

“What does that have to do with anything? Uncle Francis would be furious with anyone taking his favorite niece from him.”

“And you want to compound it with this superstitious nonsense?”

“I don't intend to tell him, William.” She snatched at his hand again and caught his wrist. He tugged, but she held it firmly. “What am I going to say? ‘Oh, Uncle, I know you're displeased that I'm marrying a writer, but it's all right. We're signing the certificate with our blood, so everything will work out.'”

“I think it's silly.”

“As silly as the wedding itself?”

“Well—”

“Come on, open your fist. This will only take a second. Didn't you ever do this with your friends when you were a boy? Blood brothers and all?”

“No, I didn't. I didn't have any friends.”

She squeezed his wrist. “Open.”

His hand unfolded, and she shifted her grip to hold his index finger stiffly. She waved the needle through the candle flame again, then jabbed into his fingertip in the center of the faint whorls. He almost pulled free, but Conny held on. Blood beaded, and she brought the finger over the open inkwell. She pressed both sides of the wound to bring more blood and let it drip into the ink.

“Not so much!” he complained.

Conny dabbed his finger with a ball of cotton soaked in gin and released him. “Ninny,” she said playfully, a smile in her voice, then stabbed her own finger and added her blood to the bottle. She sucked at the tiny puncture while she took a piece of straw she had plucked from a broom and stirred the mixture.

“I don't see what this is supposed to accomplish,” William said.

Conny capped the bottle. “What do you mean you didn't have any friends?”

He looked at her with the sour expression he gave to unpleasant topics: a reproachful look that embarrassed her that she had even asked the question.

“I was never strong,” he said. “And people mistook my asthma for tuberculosis. I seldom got to play with others.”

Conny thought,
I could have figured that out for myself
. She said, “So who is this Geoffrey you've asked to be your best man?”

His expression relaxed. “College. We roomed together for one term.” His voice sounded instantly lighter.

“What's he like?”

“Different than me. You'll see. I think you'll like him.”

Conny entered the small chapel on her uncle's arm. A few of her friends smiled at her over the backs of the dark pews. They, and a couple of Uncle Francis' colleagues, comprised the entire guest list. William had no family, and, evidently, no friends. Conny's cousin Janet waited, diminutive bouquet in hand, opposite William and the man beside him, Geoffrey.