Pearl (34 page)

“Here, give me that,” Mick says. “There’s no elevator. I’ll take it outside and we’ll get you a cab.”

“I can manage, thank you,” she says.

“Look, it’s easier for me. Don’t make a battle of it. Save your strength for the real enemy.”

He takes the box out of her arms and is already out the door. She can’t possibly run after him and struggle for the possession of the box. Finbar watches her follow Mick down the stairs; he closes the door before they’re at the bottom.

Mick has gone out without a coat, but he doesn’t seem to notice the raw cold. He carries the box two streets down to a taxi rank and helps the driver put it in the trunk.

“Thank you,” she says, refusing to meet his eye.

“Hey, if you need anything, you know where we are. Day or night. Absolutely,” he says, and cocks his thumb and forefinger at her as if they were a gun.

When she gets back to the hotel, the bellboy carries the box into the elevator and then into her room. She unpacks it as if it would provide clues. The clothes in the box are remarkable only in their neutrality: grays, blacks, whites. No nightgowns or pajamas. Pearl and this boy slept naked. A warm red velvet robe, familiar to her: a present from Joseph and Devorah five Christmases ago, worn—overworn—on weekends when Pearl’s not getting dressed till three in the afternoon drove Maria to distraction. Toilet articles; several products—Nivea lotion, under-eye cream—for dry skin. She hadn’t known Pearl suffered from dry skin. Maybe it was only in Ireland. But wasn’t the climate of Ireland wet? A package of condoms. Our generation did not use condoms, she thinks. The new etiquette—my condom or yours—was foreign to us. It was supposed to give women more control, although she couldn’t see how. Her daughter’s condoms. Her daughter’s life with men. Men? Finbar is a boy. What was her daughter doing there? She shudders, thinking of Mick—what was his name, Cabot, Lodge—one of those names. Winthrop. She wishes she’d been with Pearl to help her interpret him. She could have said, at least, It is impossible to act well in a room with a man like that. Impossible to be natural. “Don’t gender it,” he had said—ridiculous use of language; surely Pearl would have seen through that. But seeing through that kind of man didn’t seem to help. You saw through him as if he were transparent, but the transparency didn’t matter; his weight was what mattered. They were heavy, these men; you felt the weight of their bodies on you, pressing you down, making it hard for you to breathe. As if they were fucking you; in a room with them you always felt fucked, fucked by a man who was too heavy on top of you, whom you had to wriggle around to be free of, knowing that if they wanted to they could, with their strong arms, pin you down. You acted trapped, like a wild animal. You did wild things, trapped things. You said, “I can carry that box,” when you really couldn’t, when it was clearly the case that he had more physical strength, could carry it more easily than you, and you ended up following him down the stairs, a fool, a failure, a weakling, a girl. And then your rage flared up, and you wanted to do something wild to show him—to show him what? That kind of man was transparent but impermeable. A wall of glass bricks that could crush you but would never fracture, never even have its surface scratched.

What should she have done in that room with Mick Winthrop? What did Pearl make of him? How did he treat her daughter? Who did he think her daughter was? And how did she act with him? If only she had been there. But Pearl had never mentioned Mick or Finbar, or living with a boy whom she bought condoms for, kept in her toilet kit along with her under-eye cream, moisturizer, nail clippers, deodorant, cake of eyeliner, and thin black-handled brush.

She’s almost afraid to look at the books, as if they might give too much information. Most have to do with language. Irish grammars, books by De Saussure and Chomsky. A collection of Irish fairy tales. And one she recognizes as her own:
Butler’s Lives of the Saints.
Not her own, her father’s; his signature is on the bookplate. Her father’s study comes to her. Days when she would sit reading on the rug, the delicious smell of paper making her wonder if the books she was reading might themselves be edible.

Pearl must have taken the book from her shelf without asking. Or, no, it wasn’t on her shelf. She must have gotten it from Joseph; Joseph had kept her father’s books.

She won’t think about her father now. Only to wonder what Pearl knows of him. Has Pearl asked Joseph questions about her grandfather? If so, it’s been kept from her. But Maria has never asked to be the custodian of her daughter’s thoughts.

She puts everything back into the box. None of it has made anything clearer. If Pearl were in front of her right now, the first thing she would say to her is, I don’t understand.

40

Pearl opens her eyes, closes them, opens them again. The doctor is gone, but she is not alone. Tom is always with her, or a nurse. There is very little she can do. This interests her, as if it were a situation she was observing in the life of someone else. There are bars at the side of her bed that she can’t lift. She hasn’t the strength, and besides she is attached to poles with tubes; there is a tube in her nose and throat; in her vagina. She has only a vague memory of how they got there, a distant sensation, like a wind rushing, violent, tearing, dark, but without a single image clear enough to explain anything.

The doctor is gone. The doctor has kept her alive. The doctor said her death would be a waste. Didn’t she understand how insulting that was? Like saying someone’s lover was a fool.

Did the idea of death make the doctor angry? Was it anger that gave the doctor the strength to hold her down when she’d put the tube, hard as a pencil, in her throat, the tube she’d pulled out? Had the doctor been impressed by that? Or did it make her angrier; was it anger that made her stitch the tube beside Pearl’s nostril? For the first time in her life, force has been used against her. Odd, she thinks, that force should be used against me, a person of no force. “You have a lot to live for,” the doctor said. The doctor who spoke kindly was the same one who pressed her shoulders down, shoved a tube into her throat, then sewed another to her nose. Pearl feels she must thrash against her. She sees the doctor as a bush with branches that keep growing in front of her, scratching her eyes out, choking her, like in a fairy tale. The bush keeping her from something she has worked to get to, that the doctor thinks she must be kept from, because it is a waste.

She is losing her weakness, a thing she cannot will herself not to lose. It is very odd, she thinks: as she loses weakness, she becomes more afraid; as she is fed, she becomes hungrier. In losing her weakness she has lost something of great value to her. She is giving up her place outside the ring of force. When she was not afraid of death, she was saying that there were things more important than her own life. That seemed an entirely good thing. Now, in fearing death, in no longer desiring it, she is helping to keep the iron ring closed. She no longer breaks the circle. She had cast her lot against all safety measures and all prudence. Her hand became so thin it was translucent if she held it to the light. She raised her thin translucent hand and in this gesture was her exaltation. And in her exaltation she was exultant.

Starved, she was exalted and exultant. But with nourishment, she has grown hungry and she has begun to fear. Starved, she needed nothing. Now she knows her own aloneness. Before, she saw or sensed her companion, waiting for her at the end of the road. Now she can see no companion, only a long darkness, and feels the sense of being unaccompanied.

Fear has entered, now, and taken root. It has taken its time; its time is now. When she tries to tell herself death is desirable, she must work to conjure the face at the end of the white road, and often she is distracted: by a tearing hunger, and by the doctor’s words.

She is frightened; she is hungry; she is confused; she is interested; she must work to see the face at the end of the road.

Her mother is in Dublin now. If she calls for her mother, her mother will come. The doctor has said she will bring her mother to her, if she wants, or keep her away, if that is what she wants. Only a little while ago—but how long? Time has been lost to her—she knew she didn’t want her mother. Now the image of her mother, coming in from the winter with cold on her hair, stirs up in her a hunger, a hunger that is similar to her desire for her mother’s food. Her mother’s mashed potatoes. Her mother’s rice pudding. Her mother’s body, the cold clinging to her hair.

She turns her head to where Tom sits, reading under the bad light. “Tom,” she says, “I’d like to see the doctor.”

“She’s just outside. I’ll get her right away.”

41

Joseph has walked for a second night through streets that seemed desolate rather than dangerous, walked down prosperous streets of houses set far back from the road, houses behind walls or hedges or gates. He has taken buses, got off anywhere, read signs that said Howth, Dun Laoghaire, Chapelizod. He feels the pavement through the thin soles of his shoes; this is an appropriate sensation, he thinks, ungiving, punishing, without variation or surprise. Once he stopped for a glass of wine. This he regretted, because it blurred the edges of his fatigue, making him feel he should succumb to it.

And why not? He has a room that has been paid for. He could bathe so that he won’t dread the glimpse of himself in a shop window: grizzled, derelict.

He is waiting for something, an understanding or the lifting of a burden. But his mind won’t focus; all it will do is press again and again on the dull wound of his mistake.

The sun comes up, a joke effect, a whitening, not an illumination: colorless. He tries to remember: if you stare into the sun do you go blind? Not this sun, he thinks, it hasn’t enough power. He rests his gaze on the circle of a more silvery white, concentrates on the whiteness pressed into the whiteness, loses himself in the question: What is the difference between white and white?

White, absence of color, pure color. He thinks of white stone, arches of white stone, a white stone fountain. He thinks of the hateful pinkness in the restaurant two nights before: the pink lamp shades, the pink tablecloth, salt poured to absorb the spilled wine on a pink hill on the flat pink plane of the cloth. He thinks of Maria eating meat and butter. Animal fat. Pure animal. Even an animal has its purity, because no animal is capable of excess. That’s it, he thinks, excess rather than mixture is the opposite of the pure. Maria has always been excessive. His mother was right. What she said was dreadful but it was the truth; Maria is greedy. Greedy for everything: for weather, talk, expression. Most of all sensation. The word
sufficient
has never crossed her mind.

A pure gesture, he thinks, has no excess. Purity. Impurity. He has suffered because of the ideal of purity; he remembers the shame of being sent away to Portsmouth Priory; the guilty anguish at the strange, perhaps criminal desires of a thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen-year-old boy; his torment in the days when he desired Devorah’s body and knew that any touch would be a violation. He has suffered from the ideal of purity, but he would not have it given up. Without the ideal of purity, too much would never have come to be: Matisse’s empty oval, the face of St. Dominic, holding only air; the arias in the St. Matthew Passion; the credo in the Magnificat that changed Devorah’s life. She was right to change her life for it, wrong only later when she said it wasn’t worth it. What was the
it
that it wasn’t worth? he wanted to ask her.

He has always thought of Pearl as pure. A white flower hidden in a cool green sheath of leaves. Did she think she was emptying herself of all excess? Did this emptying mean she would become one of the dead? She has approached the territory of the dead, intending to give herself to it. He looks at the white sky with the whiter sun pressed into its surface and thinks of the desire to be part of it. That whiteness. That quietness. Withdrawn, set apart from the world. Of course Maria can’t understand that. She is sated, clotted. Pearl is a white flower without fragrance, or the fragrance only of leaves, nearly toneless, a pale green sheath. Maria wants to force the sheath. To force the flower with her sharp nails, her thick fingers. People did that with flowers. Devorah did it—in the name of what? Paperwhite narcissus, the bulbs were called; she had forced them, as if that were a good thing. And the flowers overfilled the air of the winter room with their insistent smell—was it supplication? protest? He didn’t know what it smelled of, only that it had made him sick. Forced. They forced things because they wanted them for themselves, in their own time. They wanted what they wanted
now
. That was all they saw, all that was real to them. Paperwhite narcissus. Butter.

He remembers a story Professor Stivic told him: Professor Stivic, whom he had had to disappoint; Professor Stivic, in his crowded, chaotic office, with his caterpillar eyebrows that became completely vertical when he was excited or alarmed. Or distressed. This day he was distressed, because Joseph was apologizing for the mediocrity of his work. They both knew what he had written was mediocre. “You are forcing it,” the teacher said. “You mustn’t force things. Forcing is always a mistake. I must tell you about forcing. A story about forcing, the story of the worst thing I ever did. I was very young, but not so young as to justify it.”

Joseph was frightened. Was he going to hear a story of a murder covered up, of a rape, of pointing the Nazis to a hideout of hidden Jews?

“I was with my best friend, we were walking in the woods, and we saw a butterfly about to hatch from a cocoon. For a while we watched it, but I got impatient and took it in my hands, the cocoon, and I breathed on it, to provide warmth to hasten the course of things. It worked, the butterfly hatched, but because the time was wrong, because it had been forced, its wings withered and it died in the palm of my hand. It died because of my impatience, because I forced something that should not have been forced. Go home to your beautiful new wife, let her sing to you, walk with her in the sunlight. What will come will come in its own time. Never force.”

Professor Stivic. Each year a Christmas card; from Champaign-Urbana, lately Krakow. Joseph did go home; he and Devorah walked by the river; they made love. He did no more work that day. But eventually he did write a thesis, his thesis on medieval reliquaries, that he knew was very good.

Pearl must not be forced. How can he protect her—from her mother, from this doctor, from other doctors who most certainly are to come? What is the difference between force and protection? The doctor has said she needs protection in order to be kept alive.

Pearl could die. Her body could consume itself, because she would rather be a skeleton than be part of this life, a life she feels is unbearable. Because of what she did to that boy. The will to harm, she calls it; he calls it the unreasonable appetite. The hot breath, gasping
Mine, now
. Whatever they call it, he and Pearl mean the same thing. Both of them have felt themselves torn at, eaten up, by the hand that grabbed and grabbed, the mouth that chewed and chewed. What they have both understood is the real nature of the world. But he hadn’t understood before that he was feeding the maw with the substance of his own life.

Only now does he understand that he has given too much. He has given too much because others had felt free to take too much. He has given too much to the wrong ones, the ones who wanted the wrong things: Maria and Devorah and his mother and Dr. Meyers; they wanted sensation and position, safety and placement, attention, the demands and the desires of the flesh. What about his desires? He desired beauty and fineness; he gave over his substance to others, who wanted what would perish, what the moth would eat, what rust would turn to nothing, what would go in their mouths and end up in the drain. Wasn’t that what Jesus was saying, that this sort of desire was wrong? Where your treasure lies, there will your heart lie; hadn’t Jesus said that too? He and Pearl were alike. They did not desire what the moth could eat or what rust could consume. What they desired was not consumable. He remembers her telling him, and begging him not to tell Maria (and he did not), that she decided not to apply to Harvard because she didn’t want it enough and her friend Luisa wanted it so much, and she knew the difference between really wanting something like that and not, knew she could never want something like Harvard the way Luisa did, and she was afraid that because her mother was an alumna and because Pearl had two 800s on her college boards, she would get in before Luisa when it wasn’t something she wanted nearly as much. Luisa is hungry for it, she had said. I’m not.

The hunger of the world. He has fed the hungry. That’s how he’s lived his life, feeding Maria, feeding Devorah, feeding his mother, feeding the hunger of the world for ugly objects thought of as a type of god. Idolaters. Appetite and ugliness and force. He and Pearl are talking about the same thing. They are talking about the real nature of the world. It might have killed her. And then what in life would be pure, would be lovely, would be worth his life?

Feeding others, he has allowed Pearl to starve. The prospect of losing her is unbearable. He sees now what the shape of his life must be: to protect her. The doctor has said people like her need protection. He has not protected her; he has not kept her safe. Now he must live his life to keep her someplace where she will be safe from the assault of the world’s force. A life where she need not suffer, where she won’t be afraid to live. So she won’t die.

But now he can’t do anything for her, because he has no legal standing. Her mother is the only one with legal standing. Only her mother can invoke the law. In Pearl’s name, for her protection, he must be able to invoke the law. So that she will live. He must be able to do it, not her mother. Her mother doesn’t understand her. Her mother and the doctors can save her body; only he understands what will save her soul. If her soul isn’t saved, she’ll find another way of destroying her body.

Joseph is thinking in ways that he has never thought before; in his mind he is using words that have not, until now, been his. Never before has he said
must
in relation to something he wanted to do. Never before has he thought
only he
could do something. But no, that isn’t true. He had thought only he could give Devorah the life she wanted; only he could help her honor her gift. Only he could protect her. In losing that conviction, he lost the habit of thinking himself singular in any way.

He had not been able to protect Devorah, but he must protect Pearl. He knows this is most important; he must not fail, as he did with Devorah. Pearl must be protected. Something must be invoked that will protect her. He tries to think of a suitable law. But what law can help him guard her? Guard, he thinks, and then the word comes to him:
guardian
. To become her legal guardian, he would have to have her mother declared unfit, and no one would think that of Maria. But if he were her guardian, he could protect her. Her mother and the doctors don’t understand what she needs. Life, they keep saying, more and more life. But what of the flowers that wither in the sharp wind, the burning sun? What of the butterfly, forced outside? Some need enclosure. A garden enclosed is my sister, my love. The Song of Songs: what greater love poem has there ever been than this? He sees lilies of the valley, unprotected, turning brown exposed to air. She is in danger. How can he keep her from danger? Her doctor said it: she needs protection. How can he provide protection?

It comes to him: he will protect her. By marriage. He will invoke the law that is invoked by marriage. A man and a woman, kept by marriage from the encroachments of the world. He sees it now, he sees it: they must marry. She must take his name; they must have it as the visible sign of his protection of her. What is marriage but a story of the law? It goes without saying that he will never touch her, but if they tell the story of a marriage, she will be protected. He is the one who will be called; he is the one who will have to give consent; the doctors will have to abide by his decisions should she ever need a doctor.

When he was married to Devorah, she was connected to him by law. When she died, the decision of what to do with her body was his. Her parents had had to call him for her body; it was up to him.

He looks up at the white sun in the white sky. The whiteness is illumined now; it spreads itself, a sheet of silver whiteness. He can look at this sun without danger; nothing in it seeks his harm. Pearl must not be forced. She must be protected. This, he knows, is the right thing. He will find a place for them, a quiet place, a sanctuary. Old stones to take the sun’s heat, the splashing of a small fountain. Days drenched in peace, shaped by silence. Their meals as plain as she likes. Everything will be simplified. She can study her languages. He imagines a plain white table piled high with dictionaries and grammars. No poetry or novels, no history or science, no politics or philosophy. It will mean he will give up some things important to him, a kind of reading by which he has understood himself and his place in the world, but of course, he tells himself, he can make this sacrifice in the interests of simplicity. He will cook for her. He doesn’t know how to cook, but he will learn. He is sure she will eat properly if he presents her with this plan to keep her from the force of her mother, the force of the doctor, the force of the world.

He will devote his life to her. To her protection. Her claustration. From the Latin
claudere, clausus:
enclosed. The enclosure of the sacred: tabernacle, temple, shrine, sanctuary. The sanctuary of marriage, the safe place, the inviolable place, the locked door that keeps out danger.

.  .  .

I want to tell Joseph that he’s made a mistake, it’s not the sanctuary of marriage, it’s the sanctity. But you might want to cry out: Why of all the wrong things that he’s done would I choose to remark on a mistake of language? Perhaps it is because I am aware of how little I can do, how little I can change. Don’t you imagine that if I could have stopped Joseph from thinking in this way I would have?

What Joseph understands is this: Pearl will be kept safe by their marriage, which will be a good story, a strong story, a story that explains the shape of things, even if the explanation isn’t true. Finally, a story that doesn’t sicken him, that does its proper work.

He will go to her with this plan, this plan to keep her from force and ugliness and fear and sorrow. To live a life of quiet, of the contemplation of beauty, under the sign of the law. She has looked too long and too hard at the unfiltered sun. That’s what the doctor said. He will keep her from all that. He will provide sanctuary for the contemplation of the beautiful. He will see to it that these things, these things alone, will make up her life. He will live his life for that. She will no longer be subject to her mother, to her doctor. He and she will be alone together.