Little, Big (58 page)

And the phone book, when (just hypothetically, there was no immediate need) he consulted it, listed surprising columns, whole armies in fact, of Rodriguezes and Garcias and Fuenteses, with great pompous Christian names, Monserrate, Alejandro, such as he had never heard her use. And talk about pompous names, look at this last guy, Archimedes Zzzyandottie, what on earth.

He went to bed absurdly early, trying to hurry through the hours till her inevitable return; he lay listening to the thump and hum and squeak and wail of night, trying to sort from it the first intimations of her footfalls on the stair, in the hail; his heart quickened, banishing sleep, as he heard inhis mind's ear the scratch of her red nails on the door. In the morning he woke with a start, unable to remember why she wasn't next to him; and then remembered that he didn't know.

Surely around the Farm someone would have heard something, but he would have to be circumspect; he restricted himself to inquiries that, if they ever got back to her, would reveal no possessive distress or fussy prying on his part. But the answers which he got from the farmers raking muck and setting out tomatoes were even less revealing than his questions.

"Seen Sylvie?"

"Sylvie?"

Like an echo. A kind of propriety kept him from approaching George Mouse, for it could be that it was to him she had fled, and he didn't want to hear that from George, not that he had ever felt competition from his cousin, or jealousy, but, well, he didn't like any of the possible conversations he could imagine himself and George having on the subject. A weird fear was growing in him. He saw George once or twice, trundling a wheelbarrow in and out of goat sheds, and studied him secretly. His state seemed unchanged.

At evening he fell into a rage, and imagined that, not content with leaving him flat, she had engineered a conspiracy of silence to cover her tracks. "Conspiracy of silence" and "cover her tracks," he said aloud, more than once that long night, to the furnishings of the Folding Bedroom which were none of them hers. (Hers were at that moment being exclaimed over, one by one, elsewhere, as they were taken from the drawstring bags of the three brown-capped flat-faced thieves who had abstracted them; exclaimed over in cooing small voices one by one before being put away in a humpbacked trunk bound in black iron, to wait for their owner to come and claim them.)

The bartender at the Seventh Saint, "their" bartender, didn't appear for work that night or the next or the next, though Auberon came every night to question him. The new guy wasn't sure just what had happened to him. Gone to the Coast, maybe. Gone, anyway. Auberon, having no better post from which to keep vigil when he could no longer bear the Folding Bedroom or Old Law Farm, ordered another. One of those periodic upheavals in bar life had taken place among the clientele lately. As evening drew on, he recognized few regulars; they seemed to have been swept away by a new crowd, a crowd that did superficially resemble the crowd Sylvie and he had known, were in fact the same people in every respect except that they were not. The only familiar face was Leon's. After an inward struggle and several gins, he managed a casual question.

"Seen Sylvie?"

"Sylvie?"

It might well be, of course, that Leon was hiding her in some apartment uptown. It might be that she had gone to the Coast with Victor the bartender. Sitting his stool before the broad brown window night after night, watching the crowds outside pass, he concocted these and several other explanations of what had happened to Sylvie, some pleasing to him, some distressing. He fitted each out with motives planted in the past, and a resolution; what she would do and say, and what he. These would grow stale, and like a failing baker he would remove them, still pretty but unsold, from his case, and replace them with others. He was at this on the Friday after her disappearance, the place packed with laughing folks more bent on pleasure, more exquisite than the diurnal crowd (though he couldn't be sure they weren't the same). He sat his stool as on a solitary rock amid their foamy rushing back and forth. The sweet scent of liquor mingled with their mingled perfumes, and all together they made the soughing sea-noise which, when he became a television writer, he would learn to call "walla". Walla walla walla. Far away, waiters tended to the banquettes, drawing corks and laying cutlery. An older man, white-templed less it seemed from age than by choice but with an air of subtle ruin about his nattiness, poured wine for a dark, laughing woman in a broad-brimmed hat.

The woman was Sylvie.

One explanation that had occurred to him for her disappearance was her disgust with her poverty; often she had said, as she pawed furiously through her thrift-shop clothes and dime-store valuables, makeshifting an outfit, that what she needed was a rich old man, that she'd turn tricks if she only had the nerve—I mean
look
at this
clothes
, man! He looked now at her clothes, nothing he had ever seen before, the hat shading her face was velvet, the dress nicely constructed—lamplight fell, as though guided there, into its decolletage and lit the amber roundness of her breast; he could see it from where he sat. A small roundness.

Should he leave? How could he? Turmoil nearly blinded him. They had ceased laughing together, and raised their glasses now, topped up with lurid wine, and their eyes met like voluptuaries greeting. Good God, what nerve to bring him here. The man took an oblong case from within his jacket, and opened it to her. It would contain icy jewels blue and white. No, it was a cigarette case. She took one and he lit it for her. Befcre he could be harrowed by the characteristic way she had of smoking her occasional cigarette, as individual as her laugh or her footstep, thronging crowds intervened. When they parted, he saw her take up her purse (also new) and rise. The john. He hid his head. She would have to pass by him where he sat. Flee? No: there was a way, he thought, to greet her, there must be, but only seconds in which to find it. Hi. Hello. Hello? Heh-lo, fancy meeting . . . His heart was mad. Having calculated the moment at which she must pass by, he turned, supposing his face to be composed and his heart-thuds invisible.

Where was she? He thought a woman just then passing near him in a black hat was she, but it wasn't. She had disappeared. Passed by him quickly? Hidden from him? She would have to pass him again on her return. He'd keep watch now. Maybe she'd leave, covered with shame, sneak away sticking Mr. Rich with the bill but no favors. The woman he had for a moment thought to be her—in fact years and inches different, with a practised lurch and a gravelvoiced excuse-me—worked her way past him, and through the massed exquisites, and took her seat with Mr. Rich.

How could he even for a moment have thought . . . His heart turned to an ember, to a cold clinker. The cheerful walla of the bar faded away into a sound of silence, and Auberon had a sudden horrible percipience, like a dropped ball of mental string madly unwinding, of what this vision meant, and what would now, must now, become of him; and he raised a trembling hand for the bartender, pushing bills urgently across the bar with the other.

He arose from his bench in the park. Traffic had grown loud as day grew bright, the City flinging itself against this enclave of morning. Without reservations now, but with a strange hope in his heart, he moved sunwise around the small pavilion and sat again, before Summer.

Bacchus and his pards; the flaccid wineskin and the checkered shade. The faun that follows, the nymph that flies. Yes: so it was, so it had been, so it would be. And below all this pictured lassitude was a sort of fountain, the sort where water gushes from a lion's or a dolphin's mouth: only this wasn't a lion or a dolphin but a man's face, a medallion of grief, a tragic mask with snaky hair; and the water was not issuing from his sad-clown mouth but from his eyes, falling in two slow and constant trickles down his cheeks and chin into a scummy pool below. It made a pleasant sound.

Hawksquill meanwhile had gone to her car in its underground den, and slipped into its waiting seat which was clad in leather as smooth as the backless gloves she then drew on. The wooden wheel carved for her grip and polished by her hands backed the long wolflike shape neatly around and faced it outward; with a clanking the garage door opened and the car's growl opened fanwise into the May air.

Violet Bramble. John Drinkwater. The names made a room: a room where pampas grass stood in heavy floor vases purple and brown, and there were Ricketts drawings on the lily-patterned walls, and the drapes were drawn for a seance. In the fruitwood bookcases were Gurdjieff and other frauds. How could anything like a world-age be born there, or one die? Moving uptown in knight's-moves as the clotted traffic forced her, her impatient tires casting up filth, she thought: yet it may well be; may well be that they have kept a secret for all these years, and a very great secret too; and it may be that she, Hawksquill, had come close to a very great mistake. It would not be the first time . . . . The traffic around her loosened as she set out on the wide north road; her car threaded through it like a needle through old cloth, picking up speed. The boy's directions had been eccentric and wandering, but she wouldn't forget them, having impressed each one in place on an old folding Monopoly board she kept in her memory for just such a use.

The Thirst that from the Soul doth rise

Doth ask a drink divine;

But might I of Jove's nectar sip

I would not change for thine.

—Ben Jonson

Earth rolled its rotundity around, tilting the little park where Auberon sat one, two, three days more faceupwards to the changeless sun. The warm days were growing more frequent, and though never matching quite the earth's regular progress, the warmth was already more constant, less skittish, soon not ever to be withdrawn. Auberon, hard at work there, hardly noticed; he kept on his overcoat; he had ceased to believe in spring, and a little warmth couldn't convince him.

Press on, press on.

The struggle was, as it had always been, to think rightly about what had happened, to come to conclusions that took in all aspects, that were mature; to be
objective
. There were multitudes of reasons why she might have left him, he knew that well, his faults were as numerous as the paving-stones of those walks, as rooted and thorny as that blooming hawthorn. There was after all no mystery in the end of love, no mystery but the mystery of love itself, which was large certainly but as real as grass, as natural and unaccountable as bloom and branch and their growth.

No, her leaving him was sad, and a puzzle; it was her disappearance that was insane and maddening. How could she leave not a wrack behind? He had thought of her abducted, murdered; he had thought of her planning her own vanishing, just to drive him mad with bafflement, but why would she want such a madness? Certainly he had raged, frantic, at George Mouse, unable to bear it, tell me you son of a
bitch
where she is, what you've done with her, and saw his madness reflected in George Mouse's honest fear as he said "Now now, now now," and groped amid his souvenirs for a baseball bat. No, he had not gone about his searching in the most lucid frame of mind, but what the hell was to be expected?

What the hell was to be expected, when after four gins at the Seventh Saint he would see her passing by in the crowds outside the window, and after five find her sitting on the adjacent stool?

One trip only to Spanish Harlem, where he had seen her replicated on a dozen street corners, in halter tops, with baby carriages, chewing gum on crowded stoops, dusky roses all of them and none of them her, and he had abandoned that search. He had forgotten utterly, if he ever really knew, just which of these buildings on highly individual hut at the same time identical streets had been the ones she had taken him to; she might be in any of those aqua living rooms, watching through the plastic lace of curtains as he passed, any of those rooms lit by aeqeous television and the red points of votive candles. Even worse was the checking of jails, hospitals, madhouses, in all of which the inmates had obviously taken over, his calls were shunted from thug to loony to paralytic and finally cut off, by accident or on purpose, he had not made himself clear. If she had fallen into one of those public oubliettes . . . No. If it was madness to choose to believe she had not, he would rather be mad.

And in the street his name would be called. Softly, shamefacedly; happily, with relief; peremptorily. And he would stand looking up and down the avenue, searching, stock still amid the traffic, unable to see her but unwilling to move lest she lose sight of him. Sometimes it was called again, even more insistently, and still he would see nothing; and after a long time move on, with many halts and backward glances, having at last to say out loud to himself that it wasn't her, wasn't even his name that had been called, just
forget
it; and curious passersby would covertly watch him reason with himself.

Mad he must have seemed, but whose God damn fault was that? He had only tried to be
sensible
, not to become fixated and obsessed with the imaginary, he had struggled against it, he had, though he had succumbed in the end; Christ it must be hereditary, some taint passed down to him through the generations like colorblindness. . . .

Well, it was over now. Whether or not it was possible for the park and the Art of Memory to yield up to him the secret of her whereabouts didn't interest him; that was not what he was at work on there. What he hoped and believed, what seemed to him promised by the ease with which the statuary and greenery and footpaths accepted his story, was that once he had committed the whole of his year-long agony to them—no hope or degradation, no loss, no illusion unaccounted for—then he would someday remember, not his search, but these intersecting pathways that, leading always inward, led always away.

Not Spanish Harlem but that wire basket just outside the fence, with a
cerveza Schaefer
and a mango pit and a copy of
El Diario
crushed in it, MATAN as always in the headline.