The Bookman's Tale (11 page)

“Take a drink, Mr. First Mate; you're not having any fun.” And, “Would you like to see my School? I have pictures.” “Oh, yes I would.”—Ray hesitating (no concern of his), then following them, uneasy at the misread signals.

The mate snapping the lock on the door with a firmness that seemed to alarm her. “Don't lock the door,” quietly and with maybe a teetering smile but her voice subtly different, a change of pitch, the same key as the “Oh, yes I would” but a quarter-tone lower as if striking a wall and coming back distorted. A hurried, “I can't stay but a minute,” no longer the life of the party, a looking-behind-her voice, the words clear enough through the dance music filling the corridor outside, as if she were standing near the ventilator slats in the door, the mate speaking some words with a new authority and she raising her voice and calling out something, and the Captain's voice in the narrow passageway drowning out the music with, “Open the door, Wagman!” as he shook the doorknob, then with, “This is your captain!” then with, “Stand clear!” and the corridor full to bursting with the pistol ball into the lock, the door swinging free on Sarah-Wesley hugging her bare chest and the mate motionless in a far corner eyes on the deck.…

And the old man motionless, until moving to lift a hand and seeming to lift the voice sounds, and the drum sounds lifting in a brushing whisper that seemed a cue to the dancers, to two of them, both stepping out of their skirts and striding into the fire-glow on elegant tan moves of pink-soled feet, the glow and lantern-light in streaks and shadows on sweating skin, the old man raising his eyes as the drums came up from whisper to mumble, the girls moving in tune with the drum notes and the voice notes over the drums like birds sailing, the girl beside Ray—what was her name?—moving against him, or he against her, laying a hand on his chest and gripping his when he touched it, the unknown hand of a stranger immediately familiar as if joined to his by what they were seeing.

The dancers in front of the chair now, turning away from each other in separated patterns that faced the old man with the moving buttocks of one and the moving belly of the other as they turned on close-together feet, the arms of both in a continuous weave of forearms and wrists and fingers out of India or the East, though he felt the heritage more than thought it, all thinking subdued as if by the drums and the chanting that seemed to spread feeling in place of thinking, he and the girl (“Janet,” of course) as if dreaming the same dream from opposite parts of the night, he the old man, she the naked dancers—as they turned in sweating scrolls and moved closer to the chair and one of them dropped on a knee and lifted aside the hem of the striped robe, parted his spindly shanks and brushed a hand up the inside of his thigh, twirling away on a rise in the drum beats and a rise of the voices in acclamation, Janet's hand under Ray's freeing itself and repeating-echoing-trasposing what she had just seen, or just imagined.

And he hardly knowing which awareness-level he himself was in, removed by her touch from his cripple-world as in dreams he ran with young forgotten legs, heard long-silent voices in long-silent tones, doubts, uncertainties, apathies discarded like everyday necessities abandoned in a hurried escape—two shrunken old women appearing past the drums, hardly visible under the loads of palm fronds bunched in their arms, laying them out before the hut, smoothing them, patting the edges in a housekeeperly way as if making a bed, one end on the step of the hut and higher than the other, two of the young men guiding the old one, solicitously steering him, settling him at his length on the sloping bed; one of the dancers dropping beside him, breasts flattened against drawn-up knees, fingers on the two pipes of a bamboo flute attached to one mouthpiece that she coaxed into a monotonous four or five notes Ray could hardly hear for the distance and the envelope of drum sounds, trilling them, aiming them, at the center of the old man's legs as if he had been a dervish's basket with a sleeping cobra, the center beginning to stir as the old man stared past her at the other dancers moving to the notes as though translating sound into motion, heads slightly turned, eyes chastely on the stomped earth to one side of their steps but lifting them now and then to the old man as if measuring his watching them from where he lay, the old man seeming to watch the dark V at the fork of their legs as you sometimes watch the speaking lips of someone instead of the eyes, one of the dancers, as she neared him, sinking to her knees and throwing a leg over him as if he had been the saddle of a motorcycle, settling herself, grasping his upper arms for handlebars, the chanting voices rising as if in response and the drum sounds rising.

And Ray in his antique propriety half prepared for the woman beside him to spring to her feet and run away from it up the slope, not prepared for her moving against him reflecting the girl, moving expertly over him, his mind for an instant with the other soft shelf and the fisherman wading past their held breaths, held-back laughs; then forgetting the long-ago, forgetting the old man, the girl with the old man between her legs, discarding them as you discard a pattern you know by heart, or fusing the two old men, the two young women, all four rising in transports like the voices, the chanting, like the drums—like the pigeon tossed into the air by someone in the circle, lifting away and gone; as he himself seemed lifted away over distance and time and blankness to his hotel bed under the lazy fan, the early sun slanting across the Park into his window, all of it unreal except the feeling in himself of opening his eyes on a day of sharper sun and shade, and the pillow by his head under an airy scent of jasmin, and the note by the ashtray on a table that he held in the sunlight and read without glasses:
MS at desk
,
or soon will be. J
.—
Lunch?
Or was it, “
Love”?
No, “
Lunch
”, setting no store by intimacy (in their modern throw-it-away decorum), trading the weight of her narrow body on his chest for a reader, and maybe, who could tell?, a publisher; that she wouldn't know in daylight walking toward her on the street.

The “
MS
” brought up to him while he was shaving by a boy in a white coat with sleeves to his knuckles, “J. Tyner” with a firm pen in a corner of the envelope, “P.O.Box 763, Davistown, S. Juan de Pinos” when he found his glasses. Not very heavy, he was glad to think, through thoughts already putting together the editor note he would enclose, “… you write with warmth and an appealing spontaneity” (extrapolating). “Suggest you complete … novels sometimes hard to evaluate even when completed. Will bear it in mind in case I hear.…”

No. No. He was too out-of-date to be able to dismiss intensities so lightly—except that their very intensities contributed to making them dismissable for him, as his ears with their deficiencies welcomed
legato
over
allegretto
; as his scales weighed felicity over delight, devotion over prurience. Weighed highest what Stevens called love's celestial ease in the heart—the words sending him once more to the phone in the lobby and the voice he had heard before giving much the same answer: “Miss Claudia is expected for lunch at two, is there a message?”

“Thank you, no message.”

“If you will leave your name, sir,…”

“Thank you, I'll call later.”

And he walked out onto the high porch to the semi-British breakfast served to him on the broad flat arm of the chair she had sat in the night before—fresh pineapple, scones with sultanas, grilled something or other that might have been turtle or shark or eel in place of kipper—the chair and the Park and the
22 Taxis Facing West
(two this morning, neither one theirs) all but invisible beyond a screen of bamboo and vines and tree trunks, and the black bodies swaying in the lantern light, and the pliant soft chest against his own that was strange and familiar too, all of it like a tune that gets hung in your head and can only be quieted by another tune to displace it.

Which “Some more coffee, sir?” almost was, bringing with it a reminder of the regal boxes of Havana cigars he had seen in the lobby, and while the waiter cleared the dishes from the chair arm he found and lit a
Larranaga cetro
such as he hadn't luxuriated in for decades, returned to the chair, put his feet on the banister American style and pulled out the manuscript from the envelope—to read the usual first three pages, a middle three, perhaps the last three, depending on the others (never able to approach a new manuscript without hearing the rusty quip of, probably, a white-waistcoated editor of
The Atlantic
that “One needn't eat the whole egg to know that it's bad”).

“
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A BABE IN ARMS
”—Well? Hhm. Maybe yes, maybe no (Carbon copy. Holding back the original? Or having already sent it to New York? Multiple submission, even in one so young? A fast learner.)

Call me Penelope, Penny, if you like. A weaver. I also answer to Augusta named for the month I began.…

And after a scoop of fading pages (carbon paper wearing thin, new sheet—a firmer voice):

… stopping the car and leading her to the bank of a rushing mountain river at a place he seemed to know about (from other times, perhaps?) and giving her a hand down a sloping bank to a leafy shelf, talking all the while as if to cover his designs, or hoping to. Shoes off, socks into shoes with a fussy neatness, cotton pants rolled up over legs with the hair worn off on the backs like the haunches of a moldy deer in a small-town zoo, cringing from the cold water as he waded in, this man she hardly knew, turning round, begging, “Come on, come on.”

“I'm not coming in.”

“Come on, you'll like it.”

Goosebumps on her calves, the backs of her knees, her thighs as she bunched up her skirt and waded in, the water off a snow peak or seeming so, a glacier, wading in a step or two, searching for a good excuse to leave, escape, without seeming priggish to this persistent all-but-stranger. Refusing his held-out hand, pushing it away, when she slipped on the slime of an underwater rock, both of them turning to look downstream at a sound or something moving and seeing a stout fisherman emerging at a bend in glistening boots, casting, reeling in, looping his line and casting again, absorbed, as if the world depended on where it fell, and both of them splashing to the bank and up to the shelf behind the limbs and lying there still as puzzled squirrels.…

Hair trying to stand on end, shoes thumping down off the banister, two-inch cultivated ash lost off the cigar, his “Just a minute now!” meant for himself but tumbling out strong enough to bring a “Yes sir?” from the boy who had delivered the pages, or his double. Ray waving him off with the pages themselves, mumbling to himself that stranger things had happened (and trying to think of one), arguing it was not so strange after all for her to imagine two people wading in a stream on a hot day, even hiding on the bank from an intrusive fisherman; there were such mountain streams, such days, such fishermen on the Island at her doorstep.—Glad he was able to revive the cigar, the aroma itself reassuring.

Another scoop of pages, fading out then black (new carbon), and:

… she told him not to wait, please not to wait, there under the four-sided moon-clock creeping up on midnight and train time, this man who had followed her to New York—inventing all sorts of odd reasons, not telling her he was coming then phoning he was there “on business”; this man whose invitations she had refused all week suddenly walking up beside her as she handed her ticket to the fatherly man in blue at the table by the gate. “I can manage, John. Please don't wait.”

“You've been avoiding me.”

“Avoiding you, what do you mean?” smiling a thank-you to the blue-coated man returning what was left of her ticket—smiling to show she could smile if she cared to—putting the ticket-stub away in her handbag and closing the catch with a firm snap that she meant as dismissal to this insistent reappearing John Somebody.

“I mean avoiding me.”

“Good-by, John. Please don't wait, I can manage—what are you doing!” as he laid a green ticket on the table.

“I happen to be on this train too.”

“You what!” surprise going into anger, into something close to fury.

“Doctor's appointment in Baltimore tomorrow.”

Wordless, and holding herself rigid to draw a deep breath into her chest then expel it with, “You don't look sick,” and as he handed a porter the check for his luggage and some money and pointed at the checkroom, “You don't act sick either,” voice as stinging as she could make it.

“Oh I'm not. Just routine.”

She studying him a minute in the dozing hum of the midnight station that floated down like snow, then turning away and hurrying through the gate and down the steps to the black train.…

Throwing the cigar over the banister at the
22 Taxis Facing West
, crossing the porch at a stumble until he remembered to take off his glasses, scribbling, “Emergency call from home office. Thanks for showing this to me. Will write” on a hotel pad at the desk and sliding it in with the manuscript. “My bill, please. And please hand this to Mrs. Tyner when she calls.”

“Leaving, sir? Anything wrong, sir?”

Assuring the clerk of the hotel's excellence and asking about planes for the United States, the clerk running his finger down a schedule by the letter boxes and reporting a non-stop flight to Miami at “thirteen thirty-seven,” both of them glancing at the clock over the boxes showing five minutes to eleven.

“Would you send somebody for my bags? And please get me a taxi,” (not No. 17, please God),—a long wait at the terminal, but rather that than being at the hotel when she came for the manuscript, pushing the envelope across the counter with the tips of his fingers as if it might explode, hadn't exploded.

“Very good, sir. Have nice fly.”

“Thank you,” turning away, then facing back. “Tell me, you know Mrs. Tyner, do you happen to know Mrs. Tyner's name before she married?”