Little, Big (12 page)

She wanted not to hurry, though her heart against her will hurried anyway. Brambles implored her lacy dress to stay, and she thought of taking it off too, but did not. The wood, looked through lengthwise the way she went, was a tunnel of soft darkness, a perspective of fireflies; but when she looked out its less dense sides she could see a lapidary blue-gone-green horizon flawed by a pale brush of cloud. She could also see, unexpectedly (it was always unexpected) the top or tops of the house, far off and moving farther off—so it seemed as the air between grew hazier. She went on more slowly into the tunnel into evening, feeling a kind of laughter constrict her throat.

When she came close to the island, she began to feel Somehow accompanied, which was not wholly unexpected, but still it made her flush with sensitivity, as though she had fur and it had been brushed to crackling.

The island wasn't really an island, or not quite one; it was teardrop-shaped, and the long tail of it reached up into the stream which fed the lake. Coming to it here, where the stream at its narrowest swept around the teardrop's tail to swell and ripple the lake, she easily found a way to step from rock to rock that the water rushed over making silken water-pillows where it seemed she could lay her heated cheek.

She came onto the island, beneath the gazebo which stood abstracted, looking the other way.

Yes, they were around her in numbers now, their purpose, she couldn't help but think, like hers: just to know or see or be sure. But their reasons surely must be different. She had no reasons that she could name, and perhaps their reasons had no names that could be spoken either, though she seemed to hear—doubtless only the stream and the blood sounding in her ears—a lot of voices speaking nothing. She went with care and great silence around the gazebo, hearing a voice, a human voice, Alice's, but not what it said; and a laugh, and she thought she knew what
it
must be saying. Why had she come? Already she began to feel a horrid blind dark pressure at her heart, a wall of great weight building, but she went on and came to a higher place shielded by glossy bushes and a cold stone bench; there she knelt without a sound.

The last green light of evening went out. The gazebo, as though it had been waiting and watching for it, saw the gibbous moon pull itself above the trees and spill its light over the wrinkled water and through the pillars and onto the couple there.

Daily Alice had hung her white gown on the hands of a bush, and now and again its sleeve or hem would move in the breeze which began when the sun set; seeing it with a corner of his vision Smoky would think there was someone else near the gazebo where they lay. There were these lights then: darkening sky, fireflies, phosphorescent blossoms that seemed to shine not by reflection but by some mild inward light of their own. By them he could sense more than see her long geography beside him on the cushions.

"I'm really very innocent," he said. "In lots of ways."

"Innocent!" she said with false surprise (false because of course it was for that innocence that he was here now, and she with him). "You don't
act
innocent." She laughed, and so did he; it was the laugh Sophie heard. "Shameless."

"Yes, that too. The same thing, I think. Nobody ever told me what to be ashamed of. Afraid of—they don't have to teach that. But I got over that." With you, he might have said. "I've had a sheltered life."

"Me too,"

Smoky thought that his life had been not sheltered at all, not when Daily Alice could say the same thing about hers. If hers were sheltered, his was naked—and that's how it felt to him. "I never had a childhood . . . not like you had. In a way I never was a child. I mean I was a kid, but not a child. . . ."

"Well," she said, "you can have mine then. If you want it."

"Thank you," he said; and he did want it, all of it, no second left ungarnered. "Thank you."

The moon rose, and by its sudden light he saw her rise too, stretch herself as though after labor, and go to lean against a pillar, stroking herself absently and looking across to the massed darkness of the trees across the lake. Her long thews were silvered and insubstantial (though they were not insubstantial; no; he was still trembling slightly from their pressure). Her arm up along the pillar drew up her breast and the blade of her shoulder. She rested her weight on one long leg, locked back tensely; the other bent. The twin fullnesses of her nates were thus set and balanced like a theorem. All this Smoky noted with an intense precision, not as though his senses took it in, but as though they rushed toward it endlessly.

"My earliest memory," she said, as though in down payment on the gift she had offered him, or maybe thinking of something else entirely (though he took it anyway), "my earliest memory is of a face in my bedroom window. It was night, in summer. The window was open. A yellow face, round and glowing. It had a wide smile and sort of
penetrating
eyes. It was looking at me with
great interest
. I laughed, I remember, because it was sinister but it was smiling, and made me want to laugh. Then there were hands on the sill, and it seemed the face, I mean the owner of it, was coming in the window. I still wasn't scared, I heard laughter and I laughed too. Just then my father came in the room, and I turned away, and when I looked again the face wasn't there. Later on when I reminded Daddy about it, he said that the face was the moon in the window; and the hands on the sill were the curtains moving in the breeze; and that when I looked back a cloud had covered the moon."

"Probably."

"It's what
he
saw."

"I mean probably . . ."

"Whose childhood," she said turning to him, her hair afire with moonlight and her face matte and blue and for a moment frighteningly not hers, "is it that you want to have?"

"I want to have yours. Now."

"Now?"

"Come here."

She laughed, and came to kneel with him on the cushions, her flesh cooled now by moonlight but no less wholly her flesh for that.

Sophie saw them coupling. She felt with intense certainty what moods Smoky made come and go in her sister, though they were not the moods she had known Daily Alice to feel before. She saw clearly what it was to make her sister's brown eyes grow dense and inward, or leap to light: saw it all. It was as though Daily Alice were made of some dark glass which had always been partly opaque, but now, held up before the bright lamp of Smoky's love, became wholly transparent, so that no detail of Alice could be hidden from her as she watched them. She heard them speak—a few words only, directions, triumphs—and each word rang like a crystal bell. She breathed her sister's breath, and at each quickening of it Alice was fired further with distinctness. Strange way to possess her, and Sophie couldn't tell if the breath-robbing heat she felt at it were pain, or daring, or shame, or what. She knew that no force could make her look away; and that if she did she would still see, and just as clearly.

And yet all this time Sophie was asleep.

It was the sort of sleep (she knew every kind, but had no name for any one) in which it seems your eyelids have grown transparent, and you look through them at the scene you saw befcre they closed. The same scene, but not the same. She had, before her eyes closed, known or felt anyway that there were others around come also to spy on this marriage. Now in her dream they were quite concrete; they looked over her shoulders and her head, they crept with cunning to be near the gazebo, they lifted atomies of children above the myrtle leaves to see the wonder of it. They hung in the air on panting wings, wings panting in the same exaltation as that which they witnessed. Their murmuring didn't disturb Sophie, for their interest, as intense as hers, was in nothing else like it; while she felt herself braving deeps, not certain she would not drown in contrary tides of wonder, passion, shame, suffocating love, she knew that those around her were urging those two—no, cheering them on— to one thing only, and that thing was Generation.

A clumsy beetle rattled past her ear, and Sophie woke.

The living things around her were dim analogs of those in her dream: murmuring gnats and glinting glowworms, a distant nightjar, hunting bats on rubber wings.

Far off, the gazebo was white and secret in the moonlight. She thought she could see, at moments, what might be the movements of their limbs. But no sound; no actions that could be named, or even guessed at. A stillness utterly private.

Why did it cut her more deeply than what she dreamed she had witnessed?

Exclusion. But she felt immolated between them as surely now when she could not see them as when she dreamed she could; was as uncertain she would survive it.

Jealousy: a waking jealousy. No, not that either. She had never been conscious of owning so much as a pin, and you can be jealous only when what is yours is taken. Nor betrayal either: she had known all from the start (and knew more now than they would ever know she knew); and you can only be betrayed by the false, by liars.

Envy. But of Alice, or Smoky, or both?

She couldn't tell. She only felt that she glowed with pain and love at once, as though she had eaten live coals for sustenance.

As quietly as she had come she went, and numbers of others presumably after her even more quietly.

The stream that fed the lake fell down a long stony distance like a flight of stairs from a broad pool carved by a tall waterfall high up within the woods.

Spears of moonlight struck the silken surface of that pool, and were bent and shattered in the depths. Stars lay on it, rising and falling with the continual arc of ripples which proceeded from the foamy falls. So it would appear to anyone at the pool's edge. To a fish, a great white trout almost asleep within, it seemed very different.

Asleep? Yes, fish sleep, though they don't cry; their fiercest emotion is panic, the saddest a kind of bitter regret. They sleep wide-eyed, their cold dreams projected on the black and green interior of the water. To Grandfather Trout it seemed that the living water and its familiar geography were being shuttered and revealed to him as sleep came and went; when the pool was shuttered, he saw inward interiors. Fish-dreams are usually about the same water they see when they're awake, but Grandfather Trout's were not. So utterly other than trout-stream were his dreams, yet so constant were the reminders of his watery home before his lidless eyes, that his whole existence became a matter of supposition. Sleepy suppositions supplanted one another with every pant of his gills.

Suppose one were a fish. No finer place to live than this. Falls continually drowning air within the pool so that it was a pleasure simply to breathe. Like (supposing one were not a waterbreather) the high, fresh, wind-renewed air of an alpine meadow. Wonderful, and thoughtful of them so to provide for him, supposing that they thought of his or anyone's happiness or comfort. And here were no predators, and few competitors, because (though a fish couldn't be supposed to know it) the stream above was shallow and stony and so was the stream below, so that nothing approaching him in size came into the pool to contest with him for the constant fall of bugs from the dense and various woods which overhung. Really, they had thought of everything, supposing they thought of anything.

Yet (supposing that it was not his choice at all to be a swimmer here) how condign and terrible a punishment, bitter an exile. Mounted in liquid glass, unable to breathe, was he to make back-and-forth forever, biting at mosquitoes? He supposed that to a fish that taste was the toothsome matter of his happiest dreams. But if one were not a fish, what a memory, the endless multiplication of those tiny drops of bitter blood.

Suppose on the other hand (supposing one had hands) that it was all a Tale. That however truly a satisfied fish he might appear to be, or however reluctantly accustomed to it he had become, that once-on-a-time a fair form would appear looking down into the rainbow depths, and speak words she had wrested from malign secret-keepers at great cost to herself, and with a strangulating rush of waters he would leap—legs flailing and royal robes drenched—to stand before her panting, restored, the curse lifted, the wicked fairy weeping with frustration. At the thought a sudden picture, a colored engraving, was projected before him on the water: a bewigged fish in a high-collared coat, a huge letter under his arm, his mouth gaping open. In air. At this nightmare image (from where?) his gills gasped and he awoke momentarily; the shutters shot back. All a dream. For a while he gratefully supposed nothing but sane and moonshot water.

Of course (the shutters began to drift closed again) it was possible to imagine he was one of them, himself a secret-keeper, curse-maker, malign manipulator; an eternal wizard intelligence housed for its own subtle purposes in a common fish. Eternal: suppose it to be so: cetainly he has lived forever or nearly, has survived into this present time (supposing (drifting deeper) this to be the present time); he has not expired at a fish's age, or even at a prince's. It seems to him that he extends backwards (or is it forwards?) without beginning (or is it end?) and he can't just now remember whether the great tales and plots which he supposes he knows and forever broods on lie in the to-come or lie dead in the has-been. But then suppose that's how secrets are kept, and age-long tales remembered, and unbreakable curses made too. . . .

No. They know. They don't suppose. He thinks of their certainty, the calm, inexpressive beauty of their truth-telling faces and task-assigning hands, as unrefuseable as a hook deep in the throat. He is as ignorant as a fingerling; knows nothing; he wouldn't care to know—wouldn't care to ask them, even supposing (another inward window slides open silently) they would answer, whether on a certain night in August a certain young man. Standing on these rocks which lift their dry brows into the perishing air. A young man struck by metamorphosis as this pool was once struck by lightning. For presumably some affront, you have your reasons, don't get me wrong, it's nothing to do with me. Only suppose this man imagines remembering, imagines his only and final memory to be (the rest, all the rest, is supposition) the awful strangulated gasping in deadly waterlessness, the sudden fusing of arms and legs, the twisting in air (air!) and then the horrible relief of the plunge into cold, sweet water where he ought to be—must now be forever.