On Keeping Women (39 page)

She’s thinking that their story was deformed from the beginning; there was no way of telling it classically. Or is there. Two people so unaware, yet they have come to the riverbank in the end.

Or is it the awareness, when it comes—mine—that deforms, since it speaks. The old legends, maybe they were better. Two bowed down and wending their way, as in a paradise lost—but still paradise?

She sat back on her heels, an open palm attentive on each thigh. It’s her condition. Perhaps their story would be only as deformed as human stories are.

“It’s the same, isn’t it,” he said suddenly, loudly. “In any walk of life.”

What can he mean? Is he awarding her one? His face has assembled itself. Where’s the trembler of a minute ago, the father? Sloughed.

Ah, she’d know him anywhere—this other one. This tribe.

“The same,” she breathed, softly mocking. And now indeed, they are separate.

He too sits on his heels, thumbs linked behind him.

How we’ve traveled.

Did she say that aloud? Or not?

Dreaming there, he doesn’t answer. There was something she had to tell the children about him at once. She can’t remember it.

It seems to him that they have had their heart-to-heart. Life has prepared them. Out of their differences awarding them the silence other people found in love.

Is it so strange then that he’s reaching for her with the same engrafting movements those other people find?

As he smoothes that wild hair and scraped breast and mounts what melts toward him, it seems that he and she are rehearsing what would have been their middle age together, even their old age. Who hasn’t seen such couples?—he’s had more scope than most. Two musing at the edge of a bed or across a table, nodding absently at each other’s totems—at the totem the other now is. Each conceding at last the vital process of the other—now that there’s not much of it left.

It’s not that her zones are up, submerging her; physically she’s long since a professional. Or that she doesn’t know—even on the open ground she once craved—that he can never be her nakedness. It’s that what first raped her in him has grown strong on him again.

He climbs on her. The foreigner.

The bus, lumbering out of the cove a mile north to backfire the shot that set off the early-morning race here, hove itself out onto the shore road.

In the same plunged second that he reminded himself where he was, where they were—and held on as he could anyway, she rolled him off.

They sat up, slow-motion, in the bruised, unfinished way one did. In the confusion of not being animal enough.

He picked up his watch, strapping it on, winding it intently. Ashamed—that he can never brutalize.

“Sorry, Lex.”

“Don’t be. Nothing would have changed.”

He saw it square. To him their children have always been the real interruption of the sexual fugue. To her—would it still be the telephone—that unremitting hole which drained his services from her?

She sat on her haunches, airing the rawness between.

How maiden he looks—they look—when this happens. When that long muscle of theirs falls short. Once, at one of these times, she’d rushed to a mirror, to catch the moment of coition still on her face, and was shock-pleased to see that white vacuity. To see her rational self—a self which so often pained her because it so often had to go begging—beaten into dazement.

“Nothing,” he said. “And afterwards anyway—all animals are sad.”

“They are?” How could one know? “Are you?” She waited, for his slow nod. “I’m not. Or not really. It’s not exact enough. For what I feel.”

“An old saw,” he said. He was still winding his watch. “What do you feel. Afterwards.”

How ignorant she is. Many must have recorded that non-personal afterglow—has any of her sex ever tried?

She’ll have to get it right, or else no use to it. Holy ardor toward the act itself—is that what she feels? And toward the natural world that allows it.

“I feel loyal,” she said. “To the situation.”

In her language. Exactly.

But other people stare.

Let them.

She’s folded her arms in the cradle position. A palm under each elbow, like a plinth. As if he’s in there. All his shrunken baby-parts exposed.

“And to the man, if you want the bloody truth.” Her mouth wrinkled, folded into her teeth, opened wide for a taut, oval cry that never came, and fell back smooth as a bud, young. “Loyal to every one of them.”

He saw that he’d broken the watch. But it had been accurate. Bus is on time. Old engine still had the same miss in it, projected far ahead by the wet river air. Quiet now and again. Then it grunted on, in a lurch of gas. Hard-breathing at each corner, it’s picking up a life at every stop. Set lives, as his own had been. But I wasn’t a patient yet. I was only practicing.

The gassy smell was energizing him. What he needs now isn’t blood but the smell of motion. Oh I needed blood though. In sickness we carnify. One haunted message maybe—to a life. To be worn in secret on a sacred thong. All the rest an iridescent fever of the cells—then the dark green mold of the bones going back to the energy scum?

She’s still squatting there. Hearing what?

“Bus is on time,” he said.

“I hear it.” Yammering brassy for each customer. Stuttering on.

This is the brink moment, Lexie, just before the image you nurture is broached to the world. All private images of any intensity are lunatic, until externalized. After that it’s up to you. And the world. Whichever one you choose. Or are chosen by. When enough people chose a same world, then there might be a religion, or the art of piano-playing—neither of which is her icon. Or the fine art of loitering in the Hotel de Ville and letting music in as many registers as known pass through you—which is.

Here it comes down the road, all her village. Gossip binding those in the bus mouth-to-mouth with those there was no room for. Will you stand up in salute, Lexie? Or lie down as you began. With your ear to the ground.

She begins to count off by streetcorners and housenumbers. Every straggle of path and wall is engraved on her, it seems, each house by shape and catalogue—wood of white or brown, or black-shuttered, stucco stained with damp the way old linen does, and the earliest houses here—of clapboard above and undershot jaws of rose-geranium brick. She can stroll the whole prospect, to rearrange a leaf. In allegiance. It’s not leaving her as it should be. This eccentric inlet whose gloss already twangs bittersweet in her ear: Landing Way, Ricer Street, Bitker Terrace, Route Nine—a faraway eddy of a river road I once lived on. What are the streetnames in Tierra del Fuego; what would she find there? Waves of rearing anthracite foaming rabid at all newcomers—but when once lived near, revisiting the beach like native mind?

And I forgot the Village Hall—were any children still sleeping there? Cottage by cottage, by new-plastered bargain and august house with five porches, all rotten, the parents are returned, fast or loose in their beds. But here and there now, one by one a man pops out a door, not stopping for history; everybody knows what commuters do. Why do they keep following her, the fathers, each on his time-wheel, each in his slot?

Except at the Kellihys.

Was that the bus halting; who could it be picking up there? Red spurts of music, white honeysuckle of a breeze in the throat, always the caterers thumping their dogsbody rhythms—when did it stop? Don’t stop the music, Bets. Or the babies either. Take in the paper, Bob. Good neighbors helped pay for it.

What’s the bus waiting so long for at Kellihys’? A caterer’s boy?

Yards away, it can’t have seen her yet. In her bower visible only direct in from the crown of the road. Or from her house. Where, rubbing his black furry arch against one of the stone pillars which mark the path to his doorway, is her cat.

She could go back in there for good. Back alone, to resume her valuable reflections. Or could she persuade him, Ray, that enough has happened in the red-dark of themselves; it need never be externalized? Yes—bright, crude but competently, drawn as a lithograph, she can see the two of them sauntering out of the bushes, hands joined in the approving sight of all. What’s she doing here, except holding herself up to view more literally than most?

Ah no, an education has begun here; she won’t fault it. She’s one of the lucky ones, who wake in time to see the arrow sticking in the morning cereal: Rehearse for Age. A circumscribed life can be useful. Boiling down the evening alcohols, the herbal rages, until you have enough brown stock for dynamite. Even the landscape here has helped, lifting her high on its silver salver, so that she might see moral hints even in a downpour of rain. And images, in their season.

It’s not that the force with which she sees herself is fading. Only that her wretched body is thrashing itself into as many angles and simperings as a woman trying on a hat, a bridal gown, and a pair of blood-proof rubber-pants, all in the same mirror. She sees her vision of herself as she ought to be now. Not this trembling body which has lost its confidence. A Niké, a winged victory—modest class. A woman damaged enough to be classical. Would she have arms—or should these be stumps? May she have a head?

Release me, body. Not from life. Just enough—to slump easy. To be able to just—lurch on through. Release me—body which acts like mind.

She rose on hands and knees, to any eye a whole woman, looking back at her house. Never to be turned to stone by the sight—though she might pray to be. The house recedes, a gothic moth only hovering. Ready still, at a word from her, to hold them all on its wings yet awhile? No, it knew her better than herself, had always known. That she was the face in the pool, terrified but rising steadily. To set fire to her own house.

A yearning pang struck her, straight from the birth-couch. Then it was gone. Prepare to be ashamed now—of being ashamed.

Poor old bus, he thought, getting to his feet, craning to see. On the blink again? In front of Kellihys’. Where Horrie must be having to climb over half of tonight’s story before they’ll let him phone the garage.

Poor Lexie here, behind him. What frail hopes she always floats her images on. On a bus. On me.

There comes Horrie. Bouncing out of Kellihys’ and into the bus again, for one more try. Or to consult. Good old Horrie, the bus’ll be saying; he stays the route. Meaning that we all do.

For, poor Lexie, how we switch bargains on you. How we use you, to fox yourself in, the end. That bus, your village—you’re not merely waiting for it. It’s following you, always following you. To watch how the nude bargain comes out.

What’s that other familiar revving, up the hillside? Between them and Kellihys’.

In Spain, at eleven
A.M.
every day except Sunday, in the public square under his balcony the same little hunched bug of a car starting up the time-wheel in his head.

Breakfast-time in Grand River, and his son the all-night reader going out for it. Or some of that legion he lends his car to.

No wonder it won’t move, the way they load it.

Smiling to himself though he’ll have to find other transport, he urges on the old rattletrap. Get going, youngsters. Up this early, to wherever you’re off to. There—they’ve got it running. Smooth. There it goes.

Fading. Gone.

“Somebody’s taken out the Volks.”

Did a spasm of maternity plump her cheeks? “Charlie. Going for buns.”

Holy are the meals prepared by children’s hands.

In one of those purses which were her attaché-cases—tucked well down in a bunch of those hieroglyphs of her life which when dumped on a table could be ridiculed both for their insignificance and their inclusiveness—was the flyer the troupe of Chasids once thrust at her on that last solitary city outing; she’d never been able to throw it away. It contained instructions on the mission of women, and girls. Which was—to light the dark world, from the family distance. All its admonitions, crowding Chasidic, were those same ones more commonly directed, without regard for race or religion toward all her kind. But the flyer was more practical. It gave the candle-lighting times for all major American cities. And the procedure by which, in whichever one she found herself, she might cast her holy light to illumine the world—without entering it:

First light the candles…

I do it. A candle as high as a house.

… then cover your eyes with your hands to hide the flame.

I do. Look here.

At this point you may recite the blessing.

I do. I do. I do. In the double language
under
language, which they never hear:

Airt. Moil. Bast. And Belding’s Corticelli—which is not Betelgeuse. To be a compass, a guide. To toil, to drudge. To be flexible, as bark. And to hang like a star—by a thread.

I recite the blessing, for all my tribe. Which until yours hears it, will infiltrate the children, and hallucinate the world.

But how to say it in a language they understand? The common one.

She lays her ear to the ground, where she can hear the voice of the Thruway, a religion of onward swaying her dais and passing through her, the voice of the many calling to the single without sex or need of translation. We are not alone. We are never alone. Here is the apparatus. This is the contract.

Hurry. Answer. Recite the blessing. The bus must be moving again. Ray had his back to her, and was craning up the road.

It’s what a blessing might be when it’s half banner, half prayer. So that any invoker might stand in a kitchen, or thousands might converge on the Stock Exchange or run to the Champs de Mar to sew it on the air:

KEEP US IN VIEW

And now, let’s be silent. Let’s none of us speak. Let him speak, at the end.

Turning, he saw she’d stopped her thrashing. But he knows the force of that meditation. She’s a woman in a bell-glass, breaking out.

Christ. No—don’t lean on Him. Sister Isaac! Attend! What’s breaking out of there? An image of his own, long nurtured? The enormous hip rising, the breasts that spout, the mouth a babble of rivers, the Maja, blinding the landscape in her slow assemblage of herself—a rotted widow-leg not burned on the Ganges and now whole again, a tenth finger from a small all-female unit in the first factory of Du Pont de Nemours, a marble foot, never compromised, from Greece?