Little, Big (51 page)

So she dreamed; so it came to have been; so the saplings grew, dirty-faced urchins, tough, neglected and sharp. They grew, fattening in the trunk, buckling the sidewalk that ran beneath them. They wore broken kites and candy-wrappers, burst balloons and sparrows' nests in their hair, unmindful; they shouldered each other for a glimpse of sun, they shook their sooty snow winter after winter on passersby. They grew, penknife-scarred, snaggle-branched, dog-manured, unkillable. On a mild night in a certain March, Sylvie, returning to Old Law Farm at dawn, looked up at their branches outlined against a raw pale sky and saw that every twig-tip bore a heavy bud.

She said goodnight to the one who had seen her home, though he was importunate, and sought the four keys she needed to get herself into Old Law Farm and the Folding Bedroom. He'll never believe this crazy story, she thought laughing, never believe the crazy but essentially innocent, nearly innocent, chain of events that had had her up till dawn. Not that he would grill her; he'd only be glad she was safe, she wished he wouldn't worry. She got whirled away, sometimes, is all; everybody put a claim in on her, and most of them seemed to her good. It was a big city, and its revels ran till late when the moon was full in March, and hey, one thing just led to another. . . . She unlocked the door into the Farm, and made her way up through the sleeping warren of it; at the hall that led to the Folding Bedroom she slipped off the high-heeled shoes from her dancing feet and tiptoed to the door. She unlocked the locks quietly as a burglar, and peeked in. Auberon lay in a heap on the bed, obscure in the dawn light and (for some reason she was sure) only feigning untroubled sleep.

The Folding Bedroom and its little kitchen were so small that Auberon, in order to have some quiet and isolation in which to work, had to create out of it an imaginary study.

"A what?" Sylvie asked.

"An imaginary study," he said. "Okay. Look. This chair." He had found somewhere in the ruined habitations of Old Law Farm an old schoolhouse chair with one broad paddle arm for a student to use as a desk. Underneath the seat was a compartment for the student's books and papers. "Now," he said. He positioned the chair carefully. "Let's pretend I have a study in this bedroom. This chair is in it. Now really all we have is this chair, but . . ."

"What are you talking about?"

"Well will you please just listen a minute?" Auberon said, blazing up. "It's very simple. There were lots of imaginary rooms at Edgewood where I grew up."

"I bet." She stood arms akimbo, a wooden spoon in one hand, head bound in a bright hussy kerchief beneath which her earrings trembled amid escaping curls of raven hair.

"The idea is," Auberon said, "that when I say 'I'm going into my study, babe,' and then sit down in this chair, then it's as though I've gone into a separate room. I shut the door. Then I'm alone in there. You can't see me or hear me, because the door is closed. And I can't see or hear you. Get it?"

"Well, okay. But how come?"

"Because the imaginary
door
is
closed
, and . . ."

"No, I mean how come you need this imaginary study? Why don't you just sit there?"

"I'd rather be in private. You see, we have to make a deal, that whatever I do in my imaginary study is invisible to you; you can't comment on it or dwell on it or. . ."

"Gee. What are you going to do?" A smile, and she made a rude gesture with the spoon. "Hey." But what he intended to do, though no less private and self-indulgent, was mostly to daydream, though he wouldn't have put it that way; to court, on long woolgathering rambles, Psyche his soul; put two and two together, and perhaps write down the sum, for he would have sharpened pencils in the pencil-well of the desk and a clean pad before him. But mostly, he knew, he would only sit, twist a lock of hair between his fingers, suck his teeth, scratch himself, try to catch the flying speckles that swam in his vision, mutter the same half-line of someone else's verse over and over and generally behave like the quieter sort of nut. He might also read the papers.

"Thinkin' and readin' and writin', huh," Sylvie said with great affection.

"Yes. You see, I have to be alone sometimes . . ."

She was stroking his cheek. "For thinkin' and readin' and writin'. Yes, baby. Okay." She backed away, watching him with interest.

"I'm going into my study now," Auberon said, feeling foolish.

"Okay. 'Bye."

"I'm shutting the door."

She waved the spoon. She began to say something further, but he cast his eyes upward, and she returned to the kitchen.

In his study, Auberon rested his cheek in the cup of his hand and stared at the old grainy surface of his desk. Someone had scratched an obscenity there, and someone else had priggishly altered it into BOOK in block letters. Probably all done with the point of a compass. Compass and protractor. When he started in at his father's little school his grandfather gave him his old pencil-case, leather with a snap closure and weird Mexican designs cut in it—a naked woman was one, you could run your finger over her stylized breast and feel the leather button of her nipple. There were pencils with dowdy pink hats for erasers, which pulled off to reveal the naked pencil end; there was another rhomboid dialectical gray eraser, half for pencil and a grittier half for ink, which macerated the paper it was used on. Pens black and cork-tipped like Aunt Cloud's cigarettes, and a steel box of points. And a compass and protractor. Bisect an angle. But never trisect it. With his fingers he moved an imaginary compass above the desk-top. When the little yellow pencil wore down, the compass leaned at a useless angle. He could write a story about those long afternoons in school, in May, say the last day, hollyhocks growing outside and vines clambering in at the open windows; the smell of the outhouse. The pencil box. Mother Westwind and the Little Breezes. Those protracted afternoons . . . He could call the story
Protractor
. "Protractor," he said aloud, and then shot a glance at Sylvie to see if she had overheard him. He caught her just having shot
him
a glance, and now looking back at her task unconcernedly.

Protractor, protractor . . . He drummed his fingers on the oak. What was she up to in there anyway? Making coffee? She had heated a big kettle of water, and now dumped heedlessly into it several big shakes of coffee, right from the bag, and threw in this morning's used grounds as well. A rich, boiling-coffee smell filled the air.

"You know what you ought to do?" she said, stirring the pot. "You ought to try to get a job writing on 'A World Elsewhere.' It's really degenerating."

"I . . ." he began to say, but then studiously turned away.

"Oops, oops," she said, stifling a laugh.

George had said that all that TV was written on the other coast. But how would he know anyway? The real difficulty was that he had come to see, through Sylvie's elaborate retellings of the events of "A World Elsewhere," that he could never have thought up the myriad and (to him) incongruous passions that seemed to fill it. Yet for all he knew the terrible griefs, great sufferings, accidents and windfalls it told of were all true to life—what did he know about life, about people? Maybe most people were as wilful, as overmastered by ambition, blood, lust, money, passion as the TV showed them. People and life weren't his strengths as a writer anyway. His strengths as a writer were . . .

"Knock-knock," Sylvie said, standing before him.

"Yes?"

"Can I come in?"

"Yes."

"Do you know where my white outfit is?"

"In the closet?"

She opened the door of the toilet. They had screwed into the door of this little chamber a collapsing clothes-rack, which held most of their clothes. "Look inside my overcoat," he said.

There it was, a two-piece white cotton outfit, jacket and skirt, an old nurse's uniform in fact with an identifying patch on the shoulder. Sylvie had ingeniously altered it into something at once stylish and improvised: her taste was sure, her skills didn't match it quite, he wished not for the first time that he could give her thousands to lavish on herself, it would be a joy to watch.

She looked over the outfit critically.

"Your coffee's going to boil away," he said.

"Huh?" With a pair of tiny scissors in the shape of a long-beaked bird she was removing the identifying shoulder patch. "Oh, yike!" She hurried to turn it down. Then she returned to her outfit. Auberon returned to his study.

His strengths as a writer were . . .

"I wish I could write," Sylvie said.

"Maybe you can," Auberon said. "I bet you'd be good at it. No, really"—she had snorted in contempt at this notion—"I bet you would." He knew with love's certainty that there was little she couldn't do, and that little wasn't worth doing. "What would you write?"

"I bet I could think up better stuff than they think up on 'A World Elsewhere.'" She carried the steaming kettle of coffee to the tub (as in all old-law tenements this sat squat and unembarrassed in the middle of the kitchen) and began straining the liquid through a cloth into an even bigger cauldron set in the tub. "It's not
touching
, y'know? It doesn't touch your heart." She started to undress.

"Do you mind," Auberon said, abandoning as hopeless the imaginary walls and door that separated him from Sylvie, "if I ask you what the hell you're doing?"

"I'm dying," she said calmly. Shirtless now, the globes of her breasts swinging gently with their pendular momentum as she moved, she picked up the two parts of the white outfit, looked them over a final time, and thrust them into the cauldron of coffee. Auberon got it, and laughed delightedly.

"Sort of a beige," Sylvie said, pronouncing the "g" as though it were in "badge". She plucked from the dish-drainer by the sink the little sock-like cotton strainer—
el colador
, a boy—which she used to make strong Spanish coffee, and showed it to him. It had turned a rich tan color he had himself often admired. She began stirring the cauldron slowly with a long-handled spoon. "Two shades lighter than me," she said, "is what I want. Café-con-leche."

"Pretty," he said. Coffee spattered her brown skin. She wiped it off and licked her fingers. With the spoon in both hands she lifted the garment up, her breasts tautening, and looked at it; it was already deep brown, browner than she, but rinsings (he could see her think it) would lighten it. She dropped it back in, with a quick finger tucked a lock of hair that had got away back under her snood, and stirred again. Auberon wouldn't ever decide whether he loved her more when her attention was on him, or when as now it was fixed on some task or thing in the real world. He couldn't write a story about her: it would consist only of catalogues of her actions, down to the most minute. But he had no real desire to write of anything else. He was standing now in the door of the little kitchen.

"Here's an idea," he said. "Those soap-operas always need writers." He said this as though it were a fact he was sure of. "We could collaborate."

"Huh?"

"You think up some stuff that might happen on the show—coming out of what's happening now—only better than what they'll do—and I can write it."

"Really?" she said, doubtful but intrigued.

"I mean I'll write the
words
, and you write the
story
." What was odd (he came closer) was that he meant by this offer to seduce her. He wondered how long lovers are lovers before they stop having to plot each other's seduction. Never? Perhaps never. Perhaps the lures get smaller, more perfunctory. Or maybe just the reverse. What did he know?

"Okay," she said with quick decision. "
But
," she said with a secret smile, "I might not have a lot of time, because
I'm
going to get a
job
."

"Hey, terrific."

"Yeah. That's what this outfit's for, if it comes out."

"Gee, that's great. What kind of job?"

"Well, I didn't want to tell you since it's not for
sure
. I have to get interviewed. It's in the movies." She laughed at the absurdity of it.

"A star?"

"Not right away. Not the first day. Later for that." She moved the sodden brown mess to a corner of the tub. She poured out the cold coffee. "A producer, sort of, I met. Sort of a producer or director. He needs an assistant. But not like a secretary exactly."

"Oh yeah?" Where was she meeting producers and directors and not telling him about it?

"Like sort of a script girl and assistant."

"Hm." Surely Sylvie, even more alert than he was to such things, would have sensed whether this sort-of producer's offer was real or mere predation; it sounded doubtful to him, but he made encouraging noises.

"
So
," she said—turning cold water full force over the now-tan outfit, "I got to look
good
or at least as good as I can look, to go see him. . . ."

"You always look good."

"No, really."

"You look good to me now."

She flashed him the briefest and brightest of her smiles. "So we'll get famous together."

"Sure," he said, coming closer. "And rich. And you'll know all about movies, and we'll make a team." He circled her. "Let's make a team."

"Oh. I got to finish this."

Okay.

"It'll be a while."

"I can wait. I'll just watch."

"Oh,
papo
. I get embarrassed."

"Mm. That's nice." He kissed her throat, smelling the biscuity odor of her exertion, and she allowed him to, her wet hands held out over the tub. "I'm going to let down the bed," he said in a low voice, something between a threat and the promise of a treat.

"Mm." She watched him do so, her hands in the water but her mind not now on her task. The bed, lowered, intruded suddenly into the room, very bedlike but also like the prow of a laden ship that had just come in: had just sailed through the far wall and hove to there, waiting to be boarded.

In the end, though—whether because she came to doubt that her producer really was one, or because the false spring of that week vanished and March went out like a lion freezing her tender marrow, or because the dyed outfit didn't ever please her quite (there lingered about it after no matter how many washings a faint smell of stale coffee)—Sylvie never did go to be interviewed for the movies. Auberon encouraged her, bought her a book to read on the subject, but this only seemed to plunge her into further gloom. The klieglit visions faded. She sank into a torpor that alarmed Auberon. She lay till late in a huge tangle of bedclothes, his winter coat atop them all, and when she did rise, mooned around the little apartment with a sweatshirt over her nightgown and thick socks on her feet. She'd open the refrigerator and stare irritatedly within at a container of moldy yogurt, nameless leftovers in tinfoil, a flat soda.