Stolen Pleasures (25 page)

Opal rapped at the door a few minutes after Lionel had left for work. A woman in Ross was asking Myra to come to work
that day, Opal said, leading the way back to her room, her blue satin mules knocking against the porchboards, her behind moving like a nest of snakes in the tight, shiny nightgown. “Why'n she call you last night 'stead of this mornin?” Opal complained, spitefully speaking forward instead of over her shoulder.

Myra sat sleepily at the foot of the bed, the phone in her lap. The caller was a woman she liked, an elderly, strong-voiced woman, an ex-nurse who lived in a two-story house within a garden. She always felt friendly toward this woman, and she responded now without resentment to the masculine voice explaining that guests were coming that evening to stay for several days, that she had just learned late last night. Please, couldn't Myra come today?—a little ironing, a little cleaning up? “Yes,” she said, yes, she'd come, she'd be there by nine o'clock, and heard the woman's laugh, a harsh and broken laugh, the kind a person puts on to make you think she was at your mercy and you granted her her life. But when she hung up she remembered the weariness that came after her last job for another woman, a couple of weeks ago; she had stood all afternoon on the concrete floor of a basement, ironing fine sheets, frilly blouses, little girls' pinafores, linen napkins, while a tall gray poodle wandered in and out, out into the flowers and sun and up the high porch steps, his nails clicking on the floor above her head, a dog possessing the run of the house and the air.
What do you care if I die, you bastard?
she said to Lionel.
What do you care if I come back and die?

Opal was in under the covers again. “What you say yes for?”

“I like that woman.”

“You like her better'n your own baby?”

She went back along the porch on her bare feet, feeling apart from everyone, feeling jagged in her mind, hating the woman she had agreed to work for, that woman telephoning at half past seven in the morning, sure about claiming a servant woman's day.

On the way back from the job, almost the moment she climbed down from the bus at the depot shack, the pangs began. She ran across the yards, the sooner to lie down, ducking under empty clotheslines, grappling and slapping her way through hanging laundry. By the time she got to her door, she was already tearing at the buttons of her blouse. She lay down in her slip and drew the covers up over her mouth.

Lionel fixed the ice bag for her the minute he got home. After he had showered, he cooked supper and brought her a plate of rice and leftover stew, and she leaned on her elbow to eat it, her head in her hand. The unshaded light above the table where he sat, facing her, deprived his narrow, bony face of its contours, flattening it into a newspaper face. “You strain yourself?” he asked her. “What you do to yourself?”

“I did my chores,” she told him, sarcastic.

No words from him, just the tink of his fork on the plate and the stuffed-nose way he breathed when he ate. Her arm began to quake with weariness, and at that moment she wondered if even her half-up position was risky. She leaned over the side of the bed to put the plate on the floor and lay back, and her disgust with the few forkfuls she had eaten and with his happy drudgery way of eating and with the nothingness between them in this hour when the child was losing its poor, watery-handed hold on life rose up in a long wrench of a cry.

“Jesus,” he whispered. “What you want of me?”

She stared up at the stains of rain on the ceiling, the pictures of bears and monkeys they had picked out long ago as they lay there. How could a man change like that? His entire body aware of her, even the soles of his feet against her feet, and then be that person no more? And why was it she could not tell anybody of what it did to her, though it sat day and night in her mind? Even if her mother came alive again, came back on a nightmare visit and knocked at the door, she could not tell
her,
though she came wearing her black faille dress and gloves and hat, came to be
told.

“You want me to get Opal?” he asked.

“Don't bother yourself,” she said and, turning her face to the wall, experienced a great longing love for the abused child within her, the child that was only becoming and that was treated so cruelly by its mother even so early, so soon. She dozed, wrapped in the quilts and in the heat that was forced into the room and into all the rooms down the box and all the boxes in the valley, until heat and quilts and pain became one, an unbearable, strangling quilt that brought her awake, and she called to him. She heard a chair pushed back and saw him stand, and knew by the slouch in his body, by the quietness in the yards, that early evening had passed and it was night. “Go get somebody,” she told him, and felt no love anymore for the child or for anybody.

Opal came, and the old woman with the pale yellow scarf tight over her skull and a grin of sorrowing exertion whose center was a tooth's gold cap, perforated with a four-leaf clover, a cap gleaming like the hope of prosperity. They took it from her and hid it away, a silent thing not a child, that must have been her anger against him,
the pain of her anger against him. They washed her bent legs and her feet, and the rest of her, and she felt that the lashing-out had quit her tongue forever. By the time a stranger doctor came, a long time after Lionel had phoned him, she was falling asleep under the women's hands.

“
E
LEANOR, LISTEN TO this:
In the evening after sunset, when according to my habit I was contemplating the stars in a clear sky, I noticed that a new and unusual star, surpassing all others in brilliancy, was shining almost directly above my head, and since I had, from boyhood, known all the stars in the heavens perfectly, it was quite evident to me that there had never before been any star in that place in the sky. A miracle indeed!
Eleanor, you know what it was? A colossal stellar explosion, a supernova. But back then they thought the heavens were changeless, and so there's young Tycho Brahe gazing up at the new star one calm evening and he figures it's a miracle. No telescopes yet and he didn't need one. Even when the sun came up he could see it.”

Noel read quietly, a lodger respectful of the hour of midnight in this foreign city and of the little family who had rented out a room on this night of the tourist season when all hotels were filled, and who were asleep somewhere in the dark apartment. Like a tour guide whose memory wasn't equal to the task, he was sitting up in
bed, reading over salient points from his colorful book on European astronomers. A tour guide, but hers alone.

The beds were single, and he had pushed them together so he could take her in his arms and comfort her in the night, though she never asked for comforting. She lay with her hands under her cheek, palms together, watching his profile as he read, and loving him almost reverently, yet at a distance from him, as though she loved him only in memory; and at a distance from their son beyond the actual miles, wherever he was on his own journey; and at the farthest distance from their daughter, Nana, a distance never to be comprehended, even as the child's sixteen years of life had become a mystification of the mother.

“Listen, sounds like he went 'round the bend:
The star was at first like Venus, giving pleasing effects, but as it then became like Mars there will come a period of wars, captivity and death of princes, together with fiery meteors in the air, pestilence and venomous snakes. Lastly, the star became like Saturn, and there will finally come a time of want, death, imprisonment, and all sorts of sad things.
Sounds like he freaked out. Imagine Einstein writing all that in his journal?”

She saw him as he must have been when he was a boy, six, seven, adjusting the telescope an uncle had given him, bringing a star down close to his backyard for the first time, convinced then, he had told her, that the sound of crickets all around in the summer night was really the music the stars were making. On so many nights of their years together, when he sat late over his work and she heard him go out into the garden to gaze at the stars, she wondered if he were seeing all things again as indivisible, or trying to or
not trying anymore. The measuring of vast distances, incredible velocities—it was this that enthralled him. At parties, when the guests wandered out into a patio, a garden, lifting their faces to a placid moon, he would gently remind them of something they may have neglected to remember, that those far lights and all the galaxies were racing away from the earth and from one another.
The farther the distance from us, the faster they're leaving us behind. Imagine four hundred million miles an hour?
And they would smile complyingly as over a joke on them all.

His face was softened by the lamplight, and she saw again how Nana had resembled him, and felt again the same mute alarm that, back home, drew her up from the bed in the middle of the night, alone as if she had no husband nor ever had children nor even parents to begin. This journey was his offering of love, a healing quest. By visiting together the places where the early astronomers had lived, the narrow Golden Street in Prague, a castle in Italy from where one had viewed the heavens, he hoped to humanize them for her. They, too, had suffered afflictions of the soul, yet despite their earthly trials they had never turned their eyes away from that marvelous beckoning up there.

The lamp was switched off. Darkness now in this room in a stranger's house, this night and one more night when they returned from their day's trip to the island. Noel bent over her and kissed her face, imperceptibly, as you kiss a sleeping person lost in the self. She said, “I'm awake,” and he took her in his arms. Branches stirred close to the small, high window, and distant sounds from the Tivoli Gardens—fireworks and music—trembled against the glass. She lay very still, keeping down her alarm. Any movement,
no matter how small, might wake the little family, like a cry from out of her sleep.

By boat from Copenhagen to the town of Landskrona, on the Swedish coast. Old brick buildings, factories blowing out sulphurous smoke. And now by a tough little boat, its yellow smokestack the only touch of color on the heavily gray Baltic Sea, or a slender finger of that sea, but so wide both shores were lost to view. A sea she had never thought about or ever wished to cross. They had climbed up from the hold to stand on deck. She had felt confined down there, under false protection from the wind-driven swells the boat was striking against. The other passengers, Swedes, Danes, seemed content down there on hard benches, in company of their bicycles and crates of beer and fruit. Like a willing patient wanting to believe in a cure, she kept her gaze straight ahead to see the island the moment it came in sight.

She must have blinked, she must have glanced away. The island had risen suddenly. The stark look of it from afar gave her an imagined view of tremendous rocks under the water, close below the boat. An island precariously small, leveled down eons ago by fierce winds and sweeping torrents and monstrous waves, until water and wind calmed down and lay back. The inhabitants now, how did they feel about it?
Stay calm,
they must tell themselves to stay calm, and if the waters began to rise again and the winds to stir again, some exquisite instrument, designed by a mind like Noels, would detect the slightest threat in the depths of the sea and in the atmosphere, and everyone would be warned to jump on their bicycles and pedal away to the nearest church, which, since it was already four, five hundred years old, was to last forever.

A harbor town for the trusting. Their houses, gardens, fences, trees, all on the very edge of deep gray waters, their little sailboats pleasantly rocking as if upon a transparent azure sea. The boat was moored, the passengers walked their bicycles up the rise and rode off past an approaching wagon drawn by two tawny horses and followed by two men walking leisurely. The horses stopped, the passengers climbed down. Except a little boy and his mother, the boy asleep on the blue wooden bench, his head in his mother's lap, tiny purple flowers clinging to the edge of his jacket pocket. The visor of his cap was tipped back, baring his face to the sky. He opened his eyes and, surprised by the sky, closed them again, and Eleanor, watching, pictured his face growing older each day to come, each night to come, less and less surprised by the sky. Carefully, mother and child climbed down.

“Tycho Brahe's museum?” Noel's voice always sharply friendly in a foreign land.

The driver, up on his high seat, appeared to nod.

The wagon joggled along the road that must be in the very center of the island, like a spine, and Noel sat very erect. The pale sun was turning his light hair to silver, a swift aging he didn't know about. Some of the gray of the sea was taken up and spread in a high, flat film over the sky, and the shadow of it crept over the land, over the fields the same tawny color of the horses, and over green meadows and their few black cattle, and over the thatched roofs of cottages and barns. Roofs like that in a picture she had painted, years ago. Nana, in her small chair by her mother's chair, had watched the picture come to life, sooner for her than for all the other children who were to see it later in an opened book: under an
indigo sky dotted with white stars, a small cottage, and a cricket in the nightgreen stalks of grass. Unlike that painting years ago, these roofs could be overrun with rivers of fire.