Set This House on Fire (46 page)

“And then, some time later, came that abominable old dream that I’ve had over and over again all my life—waterspouts and storms and volcanoes boiling.

“This time I didn’t panic. There was no crying out, no shaking, no sweat, no fear. It was late. It must have been past midnight, and still Poppy and the children hadn’t come. Well, I knew they would come, sooner or later, and I’d be waiting for them. Outside it was as quiet as a graveyard, and the glow had disappeared from over the station. After a while I heard footsteps on the street below and someone whistling
“La Vie en rose”
then a rustle of laughter, and a girl’s voice, then the footsteps got softer and softer and disappeared up the street, and all was quiet as before. And I got myself ready. I didn’t have any more muscles than a jellyfish, and my ulcer was acting up, but I didn’t care, and I was as sober as a Knoxville parson. And it’s funny, as I went about my business I kept thinking of the headlines I’d read, things like:
Farmer hacks, slays family, kills self,
and how I’d always visualized the man—some mad, sweaty, hairy ox with foam on his mouth and eyes balled-out like pigeon eggs, laying about him with a hatchet and shouting, Whores of Sodom! Satan’s offspring! and cutting down his own flesh and seed like so many saplings and then with one last shriek at Jesus and all the saints to bear witness to his affliction taking a twelve-gauge loaded with buckshot and blowing off the roof of his head. And I kept thinking that maybe that was the true picture but more likely my own was closer to the truth. That a man bent on annihilating his own and dearest and best might be a lunatic but he might too be someone else and contain within him the cool clean logic of eternity: a man just like me, maybe, who had dreamed wild Manichean dreams, dreams that told him that God was not even a lie, but worse, that He was weaker even than the evil He created and allowed to reside in the soul of man, that God Himself was doomed, and the landscape of heaven was not gold and singing but a space of terror which stretched in darkness from horizon to horizon. Such a man knew the truth and, knowing it, would take the best way out. Which was to remove from this earth all mark and sign and stain of himself, his love and his vain hope and his pathetic creations and his guilt, and be duped by life no longer. And he’d be cool about it, and collected, because it wouldn’t pay to bungle.

“So what I did was, I went over and checked the gas range—the oven and the four burners—and turned them on full blast for a moment, then turned them off again. There was plenty there. They would do, I knew, they would suffice. Then I went back to the bed and sat on the edge of it, waiting. I was as calm as I could be and I had it all fixed in my mind: playing possum when they came in, I’d allow them all to go to sleep, then sometime toward morning I’d get up and do the job. And finish myself off after. Then I thought: Suppose it don’t work, suppose they wake up in the strangling gas? Christ love us, what mortal fear! They had to go easily and swiftly, just like sleep. So I got up again and rummaged around in the dark in the pantry and found a claw hammer and brought it back with me to bed. Then I just lay there on my back with my eyes wide-open, waiting for them to come, thinking of nothing but sort of rocked by great soft silent waves of emptiness and loneliness, as if I were the last man left in all creation. Then, before I knew it, something strange seemed to come to me: it seemed as if I were reliving that nightmare again, only it was not the part that was so soul-ruining—the waterspouts and the storm and volcanoes and the perishing shore —but the other part, the good part, the heart-breaking and lovely part that had been hidden to me before, and it all seemed to be beckoning me toward it. And I saw some southern land with olive trees and orange blossoms, and girls with merry black eyes, and parasols, and the blue shining water. There were majestic cliffs, too, and gulls floating about, and there seemed to be a carnival or a fair: I heard the strumming music of a carrousel, which wound through it all like a single thread of rapture, and I heard a liquid babble of tongues and I saw white teeth flashing in laughter and, Lord love me, I could even smell it—this smell of perfume and pines and orange blossoms and girls, all mixed up in one sweet blissful fragrance of peace and repose and joy. And over all of it, somehow, vague and indistinct but possessing the whole scene: a girl’s sweet voice calling, some southern Lorelei calling me and beckoning me on. And as I lay there, sometimes it was as if I saw the whole thing entire, and a voice in my mind told me this was Andalusia, and another voice the slopes of the Apennines and another Greece. Then I’d see it in small joyful fragments, like magic lantern slides in color, and my eyes would pick out the cliffs, or the gulls, or the clear and shining sea, or the girls with flowers in their hair. Then there’d be a spell of darkness and I wouldn’t see anything at all, but suddenly it would return in a great blossoming flood of color—magentas and blues and cherry reds and limpid greens—and I’d hear the voice of the girl again, calling, and after a time I was groaning in my sleep with delight, and I knew I had to go there. And then finally somewhere in the midst of it all I heard this chattering sound. I woke up again. I opened my eyes and outside it was broad daylight. The blinds were drawn up and there were great green blotches of sunshine all over the walls from the elephant vines. I could smell bread baking and down below someone had set a parrot out into the courtyard and he was chattering his head off.

“Well, I didn’t have any more strength than a newborn mouse. And hungry! I could have eaten a slab of asphalt. I sort of rolled slowly out of bed, and stood up and blinked and walked softly into the other room where Poppy was sleeping with Timothy and Felicia and the baby. They were sound asleep. I went into the bathroom and there was Peggy, sitting on the can in her nightgown and reading a funny-book. She looked up and grinned at me and said, ‘Hi, Daddy,’ and I tried to say something, but my tongue got caught between my teeth, and I couldn’t say anything. So I turned around and went back into the bedroom. I knelt down beside the bed and very gently drew Poppy next to me. Her little face was moist and soft and warm and—well, fabulous. She woke up slowly and opened her eyes and blinked at me, then closed them, then opened them and blinked again, and yawned, and finally she said: ‘Cass Kinsolving, if you don’t get a haircut I’m going to buy you a dog license!’ I didn’t say anything, just knelt there beside her with my head against the pillow and my eyes closed. Then she said, drowsily and gently and without bitterness: I hope you feel better today, darling. You certainly were cranky yesterday. I do hope you feel better.’ I still didn’t say anything, just biting my lip and softly stroking her and feeling her ribs small and frail beneath the sheet. Then I felt her stir as she sat part-way up in bed and said: I do hope you weren’t worried last night because we were so late. What time is it? I’ve got to take Peggy to mass.’ Then, ‘Oh, Cass!’ she said. ‘Guess where we went? We went to the bird market and guess what we did? We bought a parrot! A wonderful little parrot with green and blue wings and all he can talk in is Flemish! He’s just a
daisy
of a parrot, Cass! Can you talk any Flemish?’ I couldn’t say anything for a moment, then finally I made my mouth work and said: ‘Poppy, sweetheart, I think we’re going to leave this town. I think we might just move on down south.’ But she hadn’t heard me, and in her wonderland world of birds and parrots jabbered on in the morning, and I lay my head against her shoulder and I thought of the day before, and the long night, and even Vernelle Satterfield and what she said about the divine spirit, which had indeed flowed right on out of me, and which to save my very life I knew I had to recapture.”

VI

The next day Poppy made Cass go to a doctor. The office was in an expensive-looking house far over on the Right Bank, and the doctor himself, an Austrian, was a stolid, wrinkle-browed, officious man who listened to Cass’ heartbeat and took his blood pressure and peered into his ears and then, after x-raying his stomach and examining him up and down and hearing a somewhat abridged version of all his recent debauchery, came bluntly to the point. In an amazing French heavily accented with gargled r’s and g’s, he told Cass that, except possibly for his ulcer, he was as healthy as a plowhorse, but the fact remained that even a horse might kill himself if instead of eating oats he drank nothing but bad cognac for a long enough period of time. No wonder he had spells of anxiety (Cass had only been able to hint at how bad the “anxiety” was); the mind, after all, was not an entity distinct and separate from the body. Waste away your substance while you’re young and you’ll live only to regret it. Stop trinking! he said in English. And he prescribed two months of therapeutic vitamins, and a week on a mild barbiturate, for sleep, and a new drug, Pro-Banthine, for the restless ulcer, which didn’t seem to be in too bad shape. Then, as Cass was on his way out, the doctor sort of loosened up and dropped his stodgy guard, putting his hand on Cass’ arm and saying gently, Don’t be a fool, you’re young yet. And he charged him five thousand francs, which was more than he would have paid on Park Avenue; it made him feel unconscionably old.

All the rest of the month of May and on into the months of summer, Cass embarked upon a regime which he was later to call his period of “dull reasonableness.” It wasn’t easy; it took a lot more will power than he thought he possessed, but he managed it—or at least the better part of it—and he began to feel more relaxed and composed than he had in a long time. He obeyed the doctor’s instructions almost, but not quite, to the letter. He took exactly four vitamin pills, and then forgot the rest, which finally melted and ran together like gumdrops on the bathroom shelf. He was conscientious, however, about the ulcer balm, which after a while seemed to put an end to the gnawing pain in his belly; then, most importantly of all, he swore off the murderous brandy. He drank wine instead. To be sure, this was not just what the doctor ordered, but it was far easier to handle than cognac, and he was still able to see Paris in a pink romantic glow. He began to eat food again. He began to work—not precisely with gusto perhaps, because whatever blocked him still blocked him, but at least when he picked up a brush or a pencil his fingers no longer trembled with the old enmity and dread. Like something not only intolerable to the mind, but now utterly implausible, he put out of his thoughts that night of Gehenna; he could not countenance it, and didn’t, save for the mild reflection, which would sometimes steal over him, that maybe in order to think straight a man just needed to be dragged, every now and then, to the edge of the abyss.

His entire posture and stance in the midst of life seemed infinitely more graceful. He no longer staggered, but walked—with his brow up to catch the sun. His sense of taste improved—a notable reaction of the restored lush—as did his eyesight: his children, who had for so long been dim blond blurs, emerged upon his vision as bright and beautiful as a sudden handful of daffodils. And he found himself inordinately and embarrassingly nuzzling their sticky faces. Even his hair had taken on a surprising luster. And though his mood fell somewhat short of ecstasy (“I’ve always been wary of these bastards who are all the time
embracing
the world,” he said once, “and that includes me.") he felt composed and restful: sitting in the cafe in the morning light with a crouton and a carafe of wine (gentle eye-opener), gazing cleareyed and alert at the sparrows in the sycamores or the old men passing or the skirts (the skirts, always the rounded frisky skirts, retreating!), he would sometimes feel so liberated, so alive, that he might only be aware in the dimmest way that part of a cloud had effaced the edge of the sun, and the air had become faintly chill, and that his eye, catching the suddenly shadowed wall of the cemetery of Montparnasse, had communicated to some inner part of him a vague fidgety restlessness and a breath—just the merest breath—of the old fear. And he would begin to wonder how long all this peace could last.

Then one morning early in August, as he sat reading in a cafe on the Boulevard St. Germain (and the logic of the whole sequence of impressions, as he later recollected it, seemed beautiful, reading as he had been that great chorus from
Oedipus at Colonus,
which begins: Stranger, in this land of goodly steeds thou hast come to earth’s fairest home, where the nightingale, a constant guest, trills her clear note in the covert of green glades, dwelling amid the wine-dark ivy and the gods’ inviolate bowers, rich in berries and fruit, etc.) he heard a woman’s voice, shrill against his right ear, which, both meaningless and meaningful, had the effect of a cheese grater scraping against all his senses and caused him to look up wild-eyed, letting fall to the floor as he did Volume One of Oates’ and O’Neill’s
Complete Greek Drama.
“I will not pay!” said the voice, in the purest accents of America’s prairie hinterland. “If you ’spect us to pay seven hunnerd francs for
tha-yut,
you’re just outa your head!” And as Cass looked around, it suddenly struck him that, save for the browbeaten waiter who stood shrugging automatically at the woman’s elbow, there was not a Frenchman in sight. As if, while deep in Sophocles he had not seen the bad fairy enter and cast some malign hocus-pocus over all, the place had been whisked two thousand miles across the sea. And although the phenomenon, he knew, should not have left him so wonder-struck, he could not repress a feeling of awe as his eyes roved around and searched in vain for one Gallic eye to return his glance. Mother of God, he thought, I’m in a Howard Johnson’s. He was hemmed round by a sea of camera lenses and sport shirts; the noise of his compatriots assailed his ears like the fractious harangue of starlings on a fence. “Willard!” the voice persisted. “Tell him off! In French, I mean!” No, he thought, you couldn’t even caricature it. Shakily, he retrieved the book, opening it: And, fed of heavenly dew, the narcissus blooms morn by morn with fair clusters, crown of the Great Goddesses from of yore. … As he recalled it later, it must have been, as they say, a simple concatenation of circumstances, the only question remaining being why, after all, it had not come sooner: like a great wild dolphin exploding from the depths of a murky sea, the memory of the dream he’d had—the blue southern waters, the carrousel, the laughing girls—vaulted into his consciousness, no longer just a promise and a hope, but a command, rather, and an exhortation. It was as simple as that: Why, he wondered, feeling an inner joy, had it taken so long to move him? Paying for his wine, he arose and sauntered over to the benighted couple from Baraboo, or wherever. “Pardon me, madam,” he said without rancor, almost courtly in his softest Carolina voice, as he clamped his beret down over one eye, “when we are the guests of somebody we don’t shout. We positively
do not holler.”
Her eyes grew wide as saucers; a broomstraw would have toppled her to the floor.