Mysteries of Motion (21 page)

She had an idea he did that even when he was alone. The shirt swinging above her as she knelt had been rewashed; he was more scrupulous than she and was probably now taking a swim. She hadn’t had it in mind to do this when she stayed behind, only not wanting the walk or the swim; her muscles were stretched to an all-over ache from an invigoration whose details still crammed her head, and she enjoyed the musk of its sweat. Feeling in the bag, it struck her that what she was doing was a domestic necessity; she was investigating her possible future household. He’d asked her to marry him, and she’d half agreed.

She drew out a crumpled drawstring pouch made of tough, sueded calf of the same yellow-brown as the shoes foreigners to New York sometimes wore. In it was the comb she’d seen him use, and a bunged-up locket. The pearl had half its skin gone but the case had a rubbed glow. Nothing inside it. She put the locket and comb back in the pouch and put the pouch back in the bag. Underneath, between it and the bag, almost like a false bottom, she felt a book, and drew it out. Only the dusty green cover of a book whose narrow spine never could have held much. No print there or on the cover, which had once been a fine one. Inside, the spine had been stitched with white book string, to which a few bits of thickish paper still adhered, parts of pages once. Closing it, she found she’d been holding the book cover upside down; its title was on the other side, boxed in by a gold line:
The Elephant Sonnets.
Underneath, neatly smaller: Wolf Lievering.

She knew his first name of course. Since neither he nor anybody ever used it, she’d early on looked it up in the university catalogue, where all the faculty vitae also listed publication, if there was any. His had listed merely his British grammar school and university, a sparse number of teaching jobs, not all of these in colleges, and some British Council lectures around the Indies, of a sort of which Bruce had said, “Anybody down to a button can always do those.” Bruce’s own books were often on his tongue and on other people’s; that was the way, down there if anyone published, whether or not it ever got out to the great world. She was sure neither Bruce nor the university had ever heard of this book.

She sat back on her heels. When she did that, her knees stuck in front of her like a grasshopper’s, Vivie teased, and she’d always laughed back. She didn’t care about it any more than she cared she was black. “Hump it, you don’t,” Vivie said. “You just know you’re beautiful.” Maybe so. Let them all think that took care of it. Rather than that she cared so much about something else, it neutered the skin right out.

“You won’t marry a black man now,” Lievering had said yesterday—“I’m sorry.” She knew this hadn’t been said from vanity but from the built-in prophecy of his teacher trade, which saw the young come and go. “Won’t I?” she’d said then, standing tall and honestly wondering. He had groaned, squeezing vertical forehead creases which did nothing to age him, and asked her again to marry him. “People like me, we go on and on—but you’ll want to stop somewhere. Women do.”

“Or start,” she’d said. Even when she’d still been full of him.

When she put the book back in the bag, the seam between the bag’s zipper and old fabric slightly tore.

She stood up, hearing Lievering return. “Dinner’s ready,” he called up the stairs, and she shuddered. It had been the first thing he’d ever said to her that sounded too ordinary. “Put on your shirt for it,” she’d called back. A sense of what she meant to do rose in her, more in her blood than in her head. He’d come up the stairs, his thick hair slicked back in wet runnels, and had done as she said, buttoning himself up with his slender blue-white hands on which the shadows fell so well. There had been the glory about him of a fine instrument on which tragedy played; people must be excused for adding to it. But that insight came late. At that moment, she simply waited for him to finish, then took his arm with a new intimacy. “I smell,” she said joyously—and told him she would marry him.

That night they retreated each to a side of the bed in a kind of truce, in which he drowsed. She couldn’t feel single that way, and found she wanted to. On a mat downstairs, she stretched out and slept soundlessly, creeping back before he awoke. Vivie had once said that except for after pregnancy, when all women’s bodies repaired themselves in sleep, most unions were divided into those where it was the woman who slept later, or it was the man. If it was the woman who got up earlier, then that was the time when all the marital poisons festered in her. “Even me with your daddy. Maybe we have such a time the night before, I want to kiss his feet. Maybe I’m up early to set his birthday cake. But when I see him sleeping up to heaven with his face so smug, I just want to press the pillow on him.” Asked what she supposed the men thought if the woman was the lazybones, she’d cackled, “Nothing, the thick creatures. They just go on out.”

When he woke that morning, she was staring down at him, with his coffee in her hand.

When he’d drunk it, he ruffled through his hair, which had dried in straight-up patches, said “Comb” to himself, and went to the flight bag. It struck her that he said that every morning. It struck her that he was speaking faster than usual these last days—maybe only to her, as stutterers were said to do with children or members of the family. If this didn’t make her feel closer to him, it must be because she’d been watching him for so long. When he opened the flight bag, the zipper tore all the way down its length.

He smiled. He didn’t often. “Got this bag in the attic of the boarding-house. Somebody’d carried stones in it.”

“Or—elephants?”

She’d thought he would change color or even rant at her; kneeling there naked he’d merely retracted backward at the bent nape, the stomach, as if a force at his shoulder had tapped him, saying “Detained.” He dropped the bag. “You looked. Inside.”

“That’s the way I am.” She straightened herself.

He stood up to her, nodding slowly. She meant he ought to know that about her beforehand. He saw that. Oh, there was never any lack of understanding between them. “You needn’t have troubled. To say.”

“Who
tore the pages out?” She’d waited all night to ask. Still hoping it wasn’t him.

“I was in hospital. After the book came out. I did. Under the influence of a drug.” He shrugged nakedly. “They thought it best.”

She fought off an impulse to draw a shawl around those shoulders. They didn’t have a shawl between them, anyway. In a way both of them had wanted to be minimal, to live it. He giving away his tiny salary to people on the boardinghouse street who needed it more than he did. She always wanting to move on. Both of them needing the drama of it.

“Who’d printed it?” she said sadly.

“A fly-by-night printer in Cornwall. Friend of a girl in the hospital. He did it for free. Hipped on type, he was. Not on the material.” He brushed his palms together in that ridding motion. It would have been the last copy he’d had. No need to ask.

“A wonderful idea. The poems must have been.” By now she thought she knew enough of his mind to apprehend in part what they might have been. She could hear the elephant, plodding down the fragile sonnet structure, thudding through that foliage. The behemoth, breaking down the words that held it up.

“I wasn’t as young as you are.” He snarled it. “When I wrote them.”

“Why’d you keep the cover?”

“To remind me. Not to try again.”

Her breath had indrawn itself in a
s-f-f-f-f
of horror. “A word is a
wing.
You taught us that yourself.” In those classes where he’d taught them to handle other men and women’s poetry the way children were taught to respect knives.

But it was as she’d suspected. He didn’t believe that anymore. How could one—unless one believed in it also for oneself?

He was watching her, sadly. “Good teachers get—such strict listeners.” He twisted her face toward him, her head still bent sick, shook her until her jaw clicked. “Listen, Veronica.” No more
Ronchen
then, grunted from the deeps of sexual energy, whispered lightly at its end. She saw where that long held-back energy—eruptive, ritual—must have come from. Brooding, she scarcely heard at first what she would hear forever. “We make nets of language. But the blood always comes through.”

She went all shivering then, so that he had to sit her down on the bed, which sank beneath them, those knees of hers sticking up akimbo, so that she could almost glimpse between them their pink root. Perversely remembering when she had tried to stanch her first menses with spider web. Having heard that it worked on wounds.

“What is it? Are you ill?” He was chafing her temples, her wrists.

Her mouth wouldn’t work, but only because it was so full of him, the entire gist of him, though she hadn’t the scope yet to say. How she had all his reasons now. With such a fall from belief as his, who wouldn’t be beset by infinite discriminations? Given that head of his at birth, dragging it down to such a minimum, who wouldn’t own that pained beauty-medal of a face? He didn’t despise as he thought he did, not enough for action. He merely despaired. He was in despair over the language he had been committed to by temperament—since for him, no language could compete with his early events.

She hadn’t been as wrenched for him then, though, as she was now, meanwhile crossing her fingers in holy spell against such a fall happening to her. He’d had language sufficient to the day, to his days. What he hadn’t dared was to push the language to meet the life, which meant pushing on the life—to meet and pass those early events.

She’d taken his face in her hands then, kissing him for those as she hadn’t before; it wasn’t necessary to know them in detail before believing. How heavily it weighed, to know a person so; would she ever want to again? Even the knowing might infect.

But she had a discrimination of her own, to keep her strong. To be hoarded, never told, except in its own fashion. No, Lievering. We net the language
for
the blood to come through. I will. She began to shiver again.

“I made too much love to you,” he said anxiously. “You’re frailer than you look. No? What then?”

She stared unfocused at the patch of white his shorts had shaped between the navel and thigh. You’re so white, yes. How we ever going to
get
to you? But who would ever believe that wasn’t the real contest between them?

He was persisting. “Tell me what, then? Is it that I mention blood?”

Poor wolf, she said under her breath. Poor wolf of the camp fringes, do these still shine so brilliant through your child-dusk? Let her fix his face in recollection, alive—and asleep. A man to remember, only. With him—because of the camp, or because of what he’d made of it—one could never know for sure which was character in him and which experience. Nor could he.

She shook her head. “It’s the morning sickness,” she said.

When she saw what he made of that, she began to laugh raucously.

“So now you do what
I
wish,” he said. Meaning, marry him.

They’d had no further talk, having to dress hurriedly. The tall, makeshift scarecrow of a boy who was the group’s only missionary had enthusiastically arrived. At night he recruited the love lanes; once she’d joked to Lievering that he could be their minister. “Jimmy Odgers here,” he said to each couple approached. He called that up to them now, the two of them framed there in the crude window hole. “She made up her mind yet? I took me a chance.” Her head and Lievering’s, stuck there like Punch and Judy, had looked down on him. Hers wouldn’t turn to look at Lievering’s. So that’s where he’d walked to. So that’s the way
he
is, she thought. But he doesn’t say.

Downstairs, lethargy took charge of her. No more talk. “They married to avoid talk,” a Bajan neighbor woman had once said to Vivie of a local pair. Mr. Jimmy Odgers chattered on, but that wasn’t talk.

When they were in his truck, the woman who’d seen to their wants came from behind the house and stood by its vine. When the truck started up she yelled something at them, fluent if not melodious. “What’s she saying?” Lievering had said, through the engine racket. “I paid her.” As the car wheeled around, the woman, standing stolidly, yelled it again, shaking the vine. A scab on her lip made her look as if she had two mouths.

“Good-bye—” Lievering called out. “If that’s what she’s saying.”

Receding from them, the woman brushed her palms in riddance. Veronica, stashed in the open truck between the two men, leaned across Lievering and out the side, aping her. “Whore,” she said, leaning back. “That’s what she said. Didn’t she, Jimmy?” She glanced at Wolf Lievering beside her. “Don’t know what she called
him.”

Red-faced, their driver hadn’t answered. Born a Mormon, as he’d already told them, later serving with a Catholic mission in Africa and now a part-time faculty member of a Methodist seminary in Tennessee, his ear tips were always red anyway, as if constantly tweaked by God in three forms. Bumping along the road back to the mess hall, she’d learned where the wedding would be. What she’d thrown up as a tease Lievering had tentatively acted upon, speaking privately to the missionary who had then, he now confessed, “Blowed it up to a nice big ball. People here need somepin like that.”

She saw from Lievering’s profile that he was appalled. Or maybe was pressing back what she was reassuring herself of—that Mr. Jimmy Odgers was still a minister in embryo. To be fair this was a fact that Jimmy himself had repressed. Still there’d been a specious uncertainty in that truck, rising from all three of them. When they had a flat tire Lievering didn’t help.

By the time they reached the mess hall she’d decided to go through with it. If she was pregnant it was merely with a growing sense of herself and of the rhythm she meant to follow. She entered the hall, whose dirt floor and grub odor and general laissez-faire gave it the air of some zeppelin-sized, Eden-destined paper bag which had burst its sides, scattering garden-fresh youth, three-day-old opinions, and all this could lead to. Portals, visionary but apprehended, rose up ahead, mistily waiting for her and the others, sooner or later. She knew only that those categories one was expected to live by must have a thousand names ever freshly reincarnating—and that she would not comply.