Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (79 page)

It was a hot and utterly silent day. Smiling, he took the envelope in his fingers as gently as he could and kissed it. Just as some Saxons used to place a coin in a corpse's mouth, to keep it content with gnawing on that, so he clutched this letter of hers, and withheld other aspirations; but then the aspirations came anyway. Desire rose up gently within him, and he gave himself over, pulling the letter out of the envelope with much the same smoothness which had once informed his unhooking of women's brassieres (although in Victoria's case, his first, he had made several attempts, too flustered and ignorant to understand how the hooks went, until she finally undid them for him; and he kissed her delicious armpits). Now the letter lay undressed but still folded in his hands. He coaxed the folds apart. She loved him; she loved him; now she would say she loved him.

I can't really assure you that I didn't undergo some “psychic rape.”

As usual, he didn't remember this at all.

I can assure you that I am doing much better. The first four days afterward were confusing. No desire to eat or sleep; everything about me deteriorated. I am now, in fact, a slim size 7, a considerable difference as you probably are aware. I was not affected for life. For me, at this time, I am just happy enough to go on living. No more emotional roulette. This will hurt you, because a part of our relationship was and is caught up in this spinning wheel. This is not saying we don't have a relationship, or that I'm negating what we previously established. Sometimes it seems that what we established isn't valid anymore. Maybe it still is but it will take time to know. I won't tell you what happened.

He had no idea how worried about her and selfishly anxious for himself this communication would have made him at seventeen. Now he felt sorry for her, of course. And as to whether or not they had engaged in a “relationship,” how could that even be a question? This seventeen-year-old girl might assert herself all she chose, rejecting and raging, alluring and denying, but this old man, almost too old now to be her father, would not stop loving her; nor could she desist from loving him, for she was dead.

Of course she did right to leave me; all I cared about was keeping her; I couldn't have understood her, or been a patient, trustworthy pivot for her flitterings.

But I wonder how unhappy she was? I have been, I believe, very happy, although that may not have been apparent to others. (No, perhaps I have not been happy.)

At least she had her children. Very possibly she felt happy in those middle years when we didn't know each other.

And what happened to her, to make her write that letter? Should I ask next time I go to the cemetery? She might tell me now, but it must be a bad memory for her—best to leave it buried in the ground.

She did not love me.
She did not love me.

But one thing I've definitely learned in life is recognizing when I'm not wanted. Victoria still wanted me then, even if only to gratify herself by keeping me dangling.— No, that's unfair; neither one of us knew ourselves, much less each other. And she wants me now—doesn't she?

Thus he overcame his disgust, grief and dread at his red book of poems, over and over again.

Whenever night came and he dressed to go to the cemetery, shaving himself carefully for Victoria, he felt anxious, excited, half-tempted to stay home, with an undercurrent of cocky desire just as when he used to set out to find prostitutes—but he was
old
now; all these feelings were weakened down a significant portion of the way to extinction; he didn't actually care so much; if he undressed again and lay down in bed it wouldn't be the end of the world—and something scary might happen at the cemetery; somebody or something might hurt him—but the prospect of sweetness awaited him, and he was so lonely; he yearned for an adventure; and even if something bad happened, how much could he
lose? And if he stayed home, what did
that
make him? Once upon a time he used to go downtown to seek out women in the streets; and before that he used to get dressed for this date or that date; usually the girl ruled him strange long before the end of the movie; within ten minutes he knew she wished to escape him; it was to avoid that misery that he had hired or inveigled promiscuous women, who like him would settle for the satisfaction of the moment; so perhaps the same impulse now drove him to haunt a ghost-woman in the cemetery, who again would probably not be so choosy as to reject him. Something dark blue like an oil slick over black water slowly flashed between gravestones, hunching its dark shoulders; perhaps it was a lunar vampire, or one of Victoria's new friends (if she had any), or some animal. He decided not to mention it to her. He likewise declined to bring up the red notebook.

Victoria was waiting, sunning herself beneath the moon. He rolled out the blue-and-yellow blanket she had wished for, and she smiled. Her fingers were as white as her teeth.

He asked what it had been like for her on the first occasion when he called her out of her grave, and she hesitated, then said: I didn't know what to say; I was so excited about talking to you . . .

His heart began stupidly pounding; he grew nauseous. He said: Victoria, how do you feel about me now?

She quietly replied: I need to love someone, and so I've fixed on you.

Testily he cried out: Why didn't you love me when we were seventeen? You were my first; you know that. I still don't even know if I was yours; well, actually, of course that means I wasn't. I was so faithful and loyal to you; I worshipped everything you did—

Pityingly, the ghost stroked his hair. It felt like the slightest breeze; he could have been imagining it. She said: Well, I did love you sometimes.

I'm sorry; please forgive me; I . . . And it's just as you wrote me at the end: We would have left each other anyway.

But I do admit, he continued, laughing a little even as he rubbed his eyes, that even though I know that, I don't completely believe it. If you hadn't left me—

And if I hadn't died.

Yes.

And if you weren't going to die . . .

They both burst out laughing.

A moment later, he saw tears in her eyes. At once he took it upon himself to comfort her, soothing her, kissing the moonlight where her mouth should have been and promising to do whatever she might wish.

Later that night he was sitting beside Victoria on her grave when panting rapid footfalls came up the gravel walkway by the lake. Any instant, whoever it was would come into sight. Victoria vanished silently into the earth. Rising, he withdrew behind Mr. Arthur J. Bishop's tomb, leaning on the arms of the cross. The sounds got louder. He felt dread. Presently a chalky-featured man appeared, glaring straight ahead, running and gasping with his arms straight out. The man did not appear to see him. He kept still. The man ran out of sight. For a time he could hear him. Then, just as he had returned to Victoria's grave and was on the verge of trying to coax her out of the ground, he heard those evil, frantic footfalls coming back. This time, thanks to the configuration of the cemetery, he could see the man sooner and more clearly. His face was, in fact, horrible. As he approached, he seemed to scent something in the direction of Victoria's grave, for he glared up toward the two of them, showing his teeth. As yet he was some distance away, and not until he reached the stairs in the hill would he become a definite threat; all the same, it seemed best to retreat over the crest and down, which he did. Now he was temporarily out of both sight and hearing of that ghoul, who might, however, come loping around the hill in some unexpected direction, and so, hating to show his back to the darkness but not daring not to, he ran (in his own estimation) nearly as well as a young man, his heart tolling in his breastbone, and finally reached the hole in the fence and the single wan streetlight. He unlocked his car, entered it, started it, turned on the headlights and saw through that hole in the fence the hateful greenish-white face staring at him. Surely it would not come out here. There was a sharp cramp in his chest. He locked all four doors. Then he backed the car a good long block, until the hole could not be seen. He longed to live; he knew that now. So he had better organize himself. His way lay past the hole. He shifted the car into drive, then pressed the gas pedal halfway down, speeding back alongside the cemetery fence—and in the middle of
the street stood that emissary from
MANSIONS ABOVE
, waiting for him with its mouth open and its arms stretched wide. He knew that if he slowed down in order to return to reverse, he would be in the thing's power. So he floored the gas, aimed right at the monster and ran it down. It panted and scrabbled even then; its long greenish hands broke off both windshield wipers, trying to pull itself up onto the hood. He kept driving, not knowing what else to do, whipping the steering wheel left and right until he had dislodged the thing. It was still squirming on the tarmac when he sped away, rounding three corners before he began to feel safe, slowing then to legal speed just before he passed the eternally shining sign, flickering with mosquitoes and midges, of Hal Murmuracki's Chapel of Flowers.

He got home, locked the door, and lay down gasping like his enemy, feeling nauseous in his belly and pained in his chest, with death's vomit choked through him like gravel, from deep in his guts right up to his tonsils.

He dreamed that the moon was a round bright pool in the sky which now rapidly increased in size until he fell into it, and he was swimming. Now he perceived that only part of it was bright. There he swam in mellow gold. But the instant he reached the shaded zone, the water or whatever it was became almost stingingly cold, and he seemed to see something like a low stone statue grinning at him.

Awakening into another stifling, nauseous dawn, he opened his eyes and saw the pale blue sky, which was in itself sufficient reason to have lived. He might have slept four hours. His mind was clear. It pleased him to be nearly alone in this new day. Perhaps death might be as fine as this, if he could only guard himself against the thing with the greenish-white face. He had not been afraid until now. Rising, he went out into the day.

Something was moving; something was watching him from behind his back yard hedge. It could have been a woman, or a man. Then he saw it no more. Why should it have been Victoria—and not something worse? Then he seemed to hear something creeping through the branches—well, actually, this is merely a metaphor for what he felt whenever he forced himself to withdraw another of her envelopes from the pile on his
father's desk. Where was that greenish-white entity which seemed so desperately to desire him? What if it came inside the house?

After that, he began to dread reading her letters almost as much as he did returning to the cemetery at night knowing that that dead thing called Victoria awaited him; he had imagined that it was he who summoned her with the green liquid, but now he knew all too well that she whispered and murmured to him from under the ground and inside his desk until he grew helpless to employ the green liquid on anybody but her, or
it,
or whatever Victoria should rightfully be called. In truth there was probably no Victoria at all, but a nameless entity of unwholesome intentions.

Discovering the thirteen-cent checkerspot butterfly stamp and the thirteen-cent flower-and-mountain Colorado stamp, he felt fondness again and kissed the envelope. But he hesitated to learn whatever the thing in the cemetery might be whispering to him. No, she wasn't that, not then! Although this was a lengthy letter, she had denied herself the typewriter, in order to think before she said anything; this was sweet, not to mention reassuring.
Your longer, rational letter and the shorter, emotional one are in my mind. Your emotional one was what I thought I needed until my mother brought me down hard.
How could he imagine anything monstrous about his Victoria?
I'm tired of struggling between my guilt (and desire to be realistic) and my urgent inclinations toward fantasy and the unusual. I'm tired of thinking about our relationship. It is clear to me that it will have to be limited to paper for quite awhile; I don't even know about Christmas. If we survive all that I imagine we'll have our garden and breakfast in bed. That leaves us absolutely nowhere. Except that I'm rather emotionally involved and in love.

That made him love her. In the dark, hoping that she was there and also that she was not, in which case he could run away with honor, he forced himself to enter the hole in the fence, then tiptoed through the forest of tombstones, sick with fear. All was silent.

Bending over her headstone,
Victoria, Victoria!
he called in a whisper.

Nobody answered.

Suddenly something pale rushed toward him from the black thicket of crosses farther up the hill. He leaped to his feet, deathly sick with terror. It was the ghoul; he would die now.

Boo!
giggled Victoria. The pale blur had been her hair.

You scared me, he muttered.

Victoria laughed and danced. Her insides resembled black water silvered with thistledown.

What was that thing that chased me the other night?

It didn't chase you. You ran. That was how it noticed you.

Then it tried to attack me. I'm afraid I didn't kill it.

Of course you didn't. It's dead, just like me.

Whose side are you on?

Listen, she said suddenly in a low voice. I think it knows you're here. You'd better go now. I'll get in big trouble for telling you this.

I'll come back tomorrow.

Go now. I love you.
Run.

He rushed away as quickly and quietly as he could, not knowing whether he was escaping the thing or approaching it, and fearing above all that it would be waiting for him at the hole in the fence—which of course it was. He saw it before it saw him. He burst out in a sweat. But he was relieved not to have it behind him. Very quietly he backed away, knowing enough not to return to Victoria's grave; sooner or later it would hunt for him there. First what he longed for was an open mausoleum to hide in. Then even a culvert would have done. Ducking down toward the lake, he soon spied the thing on the low hill he had vacated. Just as during an adagio movement a conductor's upside-down shadow clings to the podium's edge, its arms endlessly parting from and rejoining its sides with the same steady determination as a long-distance swimmer's, so this new graveyard thing stroked the belly of the night, glowing like a jellyfish. Fortunately it did not seem capable of scent-tracking like a hound. His heart pounding, he sidled behind a monument, then quickly ascended a narrow lane between tall dark tombs, realizing that he was nearly or already lost and therefore seeking the landmark of a tall narrow cross-crowned mausoleum which at a certain moment of each cloudless summer evening became as blonde as Victoria's hair; perhaps its cross would catch the moonlight a bit. But it didn't, and soon he was definitively lost among the graves. His belly ached. Around him the earth sweated out loathsomeness. He pressed himself in a shallow doorway
and stood until the moon declined. It was the hour when frogs screech like birds.