Hunger's Brides (154 page)

One night. Everything changes. As everything must as each thing settles down to dust. Now four years on she wants him to want it again one last time want it with her so she can go for good, burn her bridges / her fleet on the beach—head inland in-country up the creek. She gets up from her bench, walks across the street.

To what owes the honour? says Gavin surprised at the door. The honour's in the offer—of a quick visitation a slick assignation. Not going to ask me in? Please say you're happy to see me, Gavin dear—Christmas, this our last season of cheer. How are they, he wonders. Don't ask, the answer. And don't let me interrupt your pathetic TBdinner—but tomorrow night I'll cook for you a real meal, a real consumptive consummation if you'll let me stay. Of course you can you're my sister. Ah filial duty courtly manners, such a prince of man, the little sun of our benighted clan. And how he's grown straight as waving grain! So tall olive skinned, and brawny—effortless, unbidden, in the royal genes. His upper lip a saddle of softest eider / o how the girlfriends must love a ride on that.

Surprised to find you alone you must have to beat them off with sticks. Studying? What—on Christmas break, birthday of the baby Jesus? Fuck that, let's have some Christmas cheer—a manic, mantic moment distilled in forty ounces of Morgan's demon rum.

Call it a duty-free dance with the faeries.

Duty-free from Calgary? Not that kind of duty, silly. Suspicious now his narrowed eyes. Some enchanted evening—two hours of drinkies
hastily gulped. Tell me why you've come, Beulah.
Mexico?
Mexico City,
alone?
But he really means why tonight, why here, why him?

Why?—to chat chew the fat break bread,
hermanito
. With you. After all silly it's our anniversary—four long years give or take a week or two. Roseate blush in those olive cheeks, eyes bright, a startled hart in headlights. Never to mention that night our unspoken compact, never to mention the savage little tryst, all our brotherlove hangs on this siblingness. Your dream that I'd never mention it / my dream that we'd never have to pretend. You're eighteen, I'm twenty-one. We're not kids anymore, I waited. Rip yourself off some, it'll be unforgettable I promise you. Let's lose our heads together—come be your own man, break with the well-bred, we'll stage our own fuck convention.

Tickle tickle tickle his fly, can't hide that siege engine—here let me give that thing some air.

Please Beulah.

Here, I've brought you a token, a gift a green / silk / scarf, real gold thread in the hem and seam. Wear it like a sash like a pirate you'll look so dashing in that—

At least give your half-sister a little half-kiss of welcome, am I such a hag undine undead dragon queen? That's better. One more—bust loose. Now three—now let me kiss it bigger for you.
Let me
. Such a scholar high-neck collared, but I see your puppy straining dew-nosed at the leash. You loved this once let me set him free. Come Gavin my prince, cough up the little emerald of your virtue. Together let us open our veins on its gem-green girdle, renew our blood pact against the common enemy. Won't you give it up for me? Don't put your nobility ahead of my great need.

No?
NO?

Then let me make you bleed
like you once bled me
—my turn, fair turnabout sweet prince, let me make you suffer for it just a bit.

If it's not raping you want, is it romance? Then stoop with me, my love, amidst these blooms of foxglove and loosestrife, and strive with me this longest of nights, in this green bower, by the glow of the street. There, close the blinds, but not completely. Now let us bewitch us both this hour with potions of digitalis. While on the wall above us the rain pours down the light's frail trellises. I've brought mistletoe—see? kiss me I don't care if it's holly—come sharp-eyed little botanist let me stem that sweet bloom of confusion, let me lay this cool green silk against thy skin, and for breakfast I will serve thee black currants in a stew of brawn and
holly berries. Come taste this with me, come taste what I have prepared for thee. See that it is good. Come little battle-hawk make the sea hag a girl again. Come taste all this—the budding splitfig at the crotch of this tree, the furry little foxgrapes at these swollen tips, come taste. Lay down here with me on this bed of foxfur—for, you see, our pelted plot, the leafy periphery of this narrow couch holds toxin enough / to speed the world's wild heart this one long night. So let us make us a solstice, and let our hearts run and rut till the tocsined dawn lifts foxfire from the rotting in our burned-out bed.

Burn. Doubt. Bed.

Fuck yes
I'm unhappy you know what I want, you have what I need—and it is not the upright standard of your nobility. Why then and not now, why once and not twice—you
what?
fucked my ass not to hurt my feelings? No Gavin don't worry yourself for me, those aren't tears, really onions are my aromatherapy. Yes well exactly precisely schoolboy, let's dissect me let's see what's wrong with
me
. What about you?—you did me rougher than he ever did.

Come little healer, let us feed our disease.

You don't want me Beulah! you want another chapter for your diary, you want proof,
testimony
—you're already planning to write this up
aren't
you, admit it we're all grist for your crazemill. Do you hate him that much—isn't it because I am
his
son? but I'm not just his—you're my big sister.

I've become just like HIM …?

Have
I?

Take it out on little brother, make him pay for the sins of the father? Is it true—is that what this is?—could I do that? What kind of monster feeds the son's heart to the unknowing father? God say it isn't so, make it untrue. I
am
your big sister, Gavin—I will always be. Who has made this thing this monstrous thing? Of me.

They say ruin runs in the family.

What kind of freak was made here—made more and more like him no matter what I do. How have I become so vile
so low?

Sinking.

    Sinking.

        Sinking still. Slow the mind REELS—look at him! My little
brother
. No Gavin I can't stay. RIGHT NOW tonight. It's not your fault no don't be sorry, no you're
right
you spoke true, you always
do. O Gavin you deserve so much better, every happiness every promise better than this, you still have a chance, a disease less advanced.

I'm sorry for the things I have done. For things I will do. It's just beginning. And it will keep going. On and on until it is stopped.

Yes I'll call you soon, see you in the spring from Mexico—call you soon. Yes, promise.

Gavin …?
I'm so sorry
.

Snow falls heavily all night in the streets. Obliterating steps.

H
ARLEQUIN
: T
ABLE
        

T
HE SECOND CALL
came three days later. February 17th, 1995.

Friday night about eight, Catherine asleep. We'd put a brave face on things since the call on Valentine's Day. We didn't need to talk things over. Madeleine and I were solid, we'd been through all this, been through tough times and come out the other side. Things were almost as before. No reason to cancel our little dinner party. Things were almost as before.

Roast kid in curry. One of the dishes I loved to prepare. Gas oven banked low for the last stage, fresh papadams spattering in oil on the range. Madeleine playing cheerful sous-chef, bright smile, red lipstick, full kiss on the lips, black dress. She stacked the dishes we would need on the antique sideboard, started setting the table for four.

“No tablecloth?” I asked, mildly surprised.

“No. Not tonight.”

The furniture we'd bought just after our wedding no longer suited us. The dining room table was by a designer in Milan, a post-industrial statement in steel with which we had once seemed to agree. A blued and riveted whip-steel with an oiled finish the brochure had described as ‘salmon,' salmon blues, salmon pinks. Lightly oiled to the eye but dry to the touch. Like the skin of snake, Beulah had said, the one time I brought her here. She called this our Euclidean showhome.

I must have been insane.

Chris and Mariko were due any minute, the couple we somehow ended up seeing the most often. Certainly I hadn't hit it off particularly with any of Madeleine's colleagues. Chris and I had been the last of a hiring binge in the mid-eighties, the end of a golden age of social investment. The youngest turks now on staff, the only ones of our generation to cross the bar, we were well into our forties, married in the same year, destined it would seem to be friends or enemies. He'd cut off his ponytail a couple of years ago, leaving me the last retrograde. He was adored by his students, though in a different way now. We'd done some whoring around together in the early, formative days at the College of Infidelity. A double date or two. I was looking forward to talking to him about a pleasure in teaching I'd felt reawakening in me.

I glanced out the kitchen window toward the hot tub, saw the plastic cover crumpled off to one side. Odd. Madeleine almost never used it during the day. I walked out onto the deck in my shirtsleeves, the warm chinook blowing around me. I looked up at a sky swept clean, extraordinarily clear. Stars glittered overhead, hung glorious in vast suspension. The stars pause for us, it appears, when we pause to see. The glitter, perhaps, their stilling from the velocities they travel at when we look away. A bright arctic shawl—shaken out, arrested in its fall, it hung over the house, the yard, with a weight. The hard weight of starlight.

I replaced the cover. Maybe the wind blew it off.

I heard the doorbell as I came back in. The porch light was on. They waved through the glass outer door; a couple with their height differential had to be fun. He, the tall, stooped Slav; she, the Japanese imp, mad potter with a wicked tongue and a merciless eye. He seemed to bend more to her each year—elm over a stone fence. Madeleine came up beside me and waved them in.

“She left another message today on the machine,” she said.

My eyes asked the question.

“No she didn't leave a name. It seemed to be long distance. Where would she be calling from do you think?” she asked, smiling towards our guests, who'd stooped to take off their boots.

“Madeleine …”

“She called to offer her condolences.”

February 17, 1995. Three hundred years to the day—to the hour, who knows?—from the death of Father Antonio Núñez de Miranda. Another of the things I didn't know then.

What on earth had I been thinking, bringing Beulah here? This was to be my way of letting her down easy. Was this really what I told myself—while I fucked her on my wife's bed, on the dining room table, in the hot tub, on the deck? For nine months I had been in the grip of a sexual obsession unlike anything I'd ever known—and played with it like a mindless idiot with a wolf. I would have stopped at nothing, let her look everywhere, touch anything, would have broken every trust and did—anything to buy my release.

And what should have loomed in my mind like an icon of superstitious dread, I'd converted into the rueful souvenir of a reckless boyhood stunt. Whew, lucky to get away, narrow escape … a difficult
student. For the past three days I felt it all stirring up again. Was she still in that ground-floor apartment down by the river? Across from the park? How was she? Not well, apparently.

Remembering her. What we'd done. I couldn't get enough of her. That body, so slender by then, small calves, full buttocks, high round breasts. Long slopes of famished skin…. But we were going nowhere, she and I. So I let myself see that beauty, invisible to her. The end nearing, I looked into those eyes.

Bright paradox of the human eye: flexing, clenching with life, yet strangely inorganic—jewel box of a lost fascination … like fire, like the sea. Glass eye of a china doll, a radial pattern of facets and flaws—bullet through glass—spokes to a crystalline wheel. If the soul somewhere exists, it would not be as butterfly or lotus, it would be mineral. A precious stone, like obsidian. Jade. She taught me this.