The Heat of the Sun (12 page)

In those days, the young David Windsor was an idol in America, the world’s most eligible bachelor. Trouble laughed and I flushed, remembering a drunken Englishman at one of Aunt
Toolie’s parties, who bellowed uproariously the refrain:
I’ve tossed off a chap, who’s tossed off a chap, who’s tossed off the Prince of Wales!
Trouble thought it
frightfully droll.

In the annexe the light was a seeping pallor and the cold so bitter that my teeth chattered. Quietly, as if clutter were reason for reverence, we prodded here and there, moving willow-pattern
plates, a family of marionettes, and waterlogged heaps of sheet music: Stephen Foster, Chas. K. Harris. Something dreamy filled the scene, something strange. Trouble tilted a rocking horse,
pressing down its head, but halted it when the rockers squeaked too loudly. A banjo clanged as I knocked it. Why had Aunt Toolie kept all this junk? She must have brought it from the old Sharpless
house in Savannah.

I wondered why she had never married Colby Something, Jr. Perhaps Trouble could tell me, but I was never at ease with him now. Since my lunch with the senator, I felt I had betrayed him. Yet
what had I done? I had no intention of taking up the offer. For a man determined to be president, a son like Trouble was a liability. Working for the senator, I would be on his side. My job,
nominally, might be speech-writer or researcher; in truth, I would be Trouble’s minder. The idea was monstrous. It also filled me with a certain base excitement.

A cheval glass shuddered in its frame as we passed.

‘Where
are
these skates?’ I said, as if I cared.

‘Aunt Toolie said they’d be in a chest.’ Trouble, moving a rack of gowns, exposed a cabin trunk in a corner. Across the lid were stickers, plastered askew:
SHANGHAI
,
HONOLULU
,
NAGASAKI
. A name was visible on the side, the letters flaking:
B
.
A
.
SHARPLESS
. Beasley Addison. The trunk had been my father’s. It must have been shipped back from France, along with me.

Perturbed, I told Trouble that this was not the place. He paid me no heed. Perhaps I should have asked him to leave the trunk alone, but I saw his fascination with it and could not intervene. He
broke the rusted locks. He lifted the lid. Rushing up at us came the scent of incense. Marvelling, Trouble reeled out a length of fabric, embroidered brightly: flowers, peacocks, dragons. A kimono.
He slipped his arms through the sleeves and tied the sash. In the grey light, the silk glowed with inner fire. Excitedly, he plunged into the trunk again. He drew out a fan and flicked it open,
revealing a painted butterfly.

‘Mirror, mirror!’ He swivelled towards the cheval glass and posed, head back, fluttering his eyelashes, half-concealing his face with the fan. I should have laughed, but in this
strange garb Trouble might have been alien, a creature of a reality quite different from my own.

‘Did I ever tell you,’ he said, as if it followed, ‘about the face I imagine? It’s a woman’s face, and she’s looking at me with eyes as black as night –
Oriental eyes. She stares and stares and I think she’s going to cry. But there’s something too brave in her, something too strong. Sometimes I see her face before I sleep, hanging like
a mask before my eyes.’

‘I’m sorry, Trouble – I’m sorry.’ I was barely aware that I spoke, or why. I moved towards him. I touched him. He moaned and stumbled against me. I cradled his head
against my heart. I told myself this could not happen: this could never happen. Time distended, stopped, and I thought of other lives I had not known, other people I might have been. If, in the
universe, there were infinite worlds, why should I live in this world? Boundaries rose high around all my desires. I wanted to pass through them easily, freely. I ran my hand through
Trouble’s hair. I touched his bent neck: just touched it, held fingertips to the delicate, pale skin.

We might have remained like this for hours, days, but now the voice came: ‘Benjy, where
are
you?’

We sprang apart. Rounding a corner of the clutter, Aunt Toolie laughed. Smoke curled from her cigarette holder and she huddled in a much-burned dressing gown. ‘Oh, it’s vile in here.
Let’s just
rent
skates.’

Trouble removed the kimono and flung it back in to the trunk.

I have always hated the New York subway. I hate the concrete, the metal, the glaring electric light, the tracks beneath their treacherous drop. I hate it when it is crowded
and I fear I shall be crushed in the press of bodies; I hate it when it is quiet and every echoing footstep makes my heart jump. I hate it when it is hot. I hate it when it is cold. I hate the
shriek of the incoming trains.

Trouble loved the subway. On our way uptown I watched him, as if he were a stranger, shuddering in the streaky black mirrors of the windows. Often his smile flashed. His hands gestured
expansively. Wearing a red deerstalker that Aunt Toolie had presented to him, he chattered too loudly about Louise Brooks, King Oliver, cocktail cigarettes, and how much he wanted to go back to
France. Several times he ridiculed the senator, agreeing with a recent Republican smear, even adding an anecdote of his own. Aunt Toolie, in moth-eaten mink, watched me with an expression I could
not make out.

By the time we reached Central Park, the light was failing already. Only the hardiest skaters remained on the ice; I, of course, could never have joined them, but my companions were determined.
Like a fool I kept up a commentary of sorts – ‘Brrr! Isn’t it cold?’ and ‘I don’t know how you can do it,’ and ‘To think, I could be in bed
now’ – as they donned their skates.

Trouble took charge of Aunt Toolie, hustling her out on the ice before she was ready. Their voices drifted back to me. Aunt Toolie fell several times, squealing in delight; Trouble, who skated
with superior grace, laughed at her immoderately, but kept close watch on her. When, far out on the ice, she was about to fall and teetered, flinging out her arms, he swooped towards her, grabbed
her hand, and swept her back on course. For a time she accepted his guidance, looping this way and that with him, cutting a figure of eight; then, growing confident, she broke free. He skated
around her in circles, then Aunt Toolie circled him.

The sun, diffuse and orange, burned low through a wintry mist. I sat on a bench. Gripping my ashplant between my knees, I rested my chin on its knobbly top and stared across the frozen lake.
Score marks gleamed on the grey-white surface like the cat’s-cradle trace of a dance of knives; black trees, gaunt as pylons, rose around the shore. I heard the laughter. I heard the cries.
The skaters grew unreal to me, phantoms circling in the declining day.

Passing my bench came a curious group. All were Orientals. At their head, striding forward, was a slender youth, aged perhaps fourteen or fifteen; behind him, struggling to keep up, were three
little men, none of them more than five feet high. Each had dressed with elaborate neatness, as if from a Wedger’s winter-wear display; but while the boy’s coat, hat, and gloves were of
bright yellow, the three men wore black. Only the boy had rented skates. Perching on a bench some way around the lake, he donned them with quick, capable hands.

A little comedy played itself out. Exuberantly, the boy gestured to the ice, while the attendants, standing about the bench, remained solemn, as if to dissuade him from a course so risky. One
shook his head. One flung up his hands. One might have been about to restrain the boy, but seemed abashed and drew back. The boy, it seemed, was an object of peculiar respect. He had none for his
attendants. Laughing at them, he launched himself on to the ice.

When he fell, almost at once, the attendants gasped; one covered his eyes and I thought of the Three Wise Monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. The boy scrambled up; within moments,
he cut a remarkably graceful figure. The attendants, like palace guards, remained by the bench. Curious, I watched the boy vanish into the distance.

Aunt Toolie hobbled over to join me. I lit her a cigarette.

‘Our friend Benjy’ – she blew out a long stream of smoke – ‘is too
small
. I never feel he’s quite anchored to the earth. Now take Copley Wedger: a girl
could feel safe with a man like that.’

‘I thought you and
Benjy
were getting on rather well.’

‘Darling, you’re not going to resent me, are you?’

‘Who’s resenting?’ But I did. At a party at Wobblewood two nights before, Aunt Toolie had been unusually silly. Dressed, at ‘Benjy’s’ insistence, in
flapper-girl garb, she paraded haughtily amongst the guests, cigarette holder jutting just so, and I felt an impulse to slap her. Worse still was her skittishness with ‘Benjy’. He had
slicked his hair and wore white tie and tails; both of them mocked the guests, and their mockery grew worse as the evening wore on. Interrupting Arnold Blitzstein at the piano, Aunt Toolie demanded
that they put ‘Fidgety Feet’ on the phonograph; she shimmied to it flamboyantly, all by herself. Later, ‘Benjy’ played at being a dog, crouching on hind legs with hands
curled like paws, while Aunt Toolie held crackers above his head and snatched them away as he lunged up for them, yowling. In the end, she pelted the crackers at him in handfuls until he chased her
down the stairs, caught her, and kissed her.

‘I know you’ve been miserable since Agnes,’ I said.

‘Agnes! Ancient history.’ I supposed she was: not once, despite promises, had the new Mrs Copley Wedger descended to her old haunts. But what did Aunt Toolie expect? Secretly, I had
always hated her protégés. What was I to feel though, when her protégé was ‘Benjy’? Eagerly, she began saying what a tonic he was, what a broth of a boy:
Benjy this, Benjy that.

I snapped: ‘Do you have to call him
Benjy
?’

‘It’s his name: Benjamin. No need to be lugubrious.’

‘I’m not lugubrious,’ I said.

‘You are. You’re Mr Lugubrious.’ Aunt Toolie pouted and patted my head. ‘Don’t you know you’re first on my list? My special charge. My sacred trust. My dear,
dear boy.’

‘You packed me off to Blaze as soon as I arrived.’

‘It wasn’t all up to me. Provisions had been made.’

‘Oh, provisions!’

She stiffened. ‘Darling, you must admit you were difficult. Christ, you were impossible! You’d just tried to kill yourself.’

‘I didn’t!’ But what had I done? I thought of the automobile that had shattered my right leg. How many times had I played that scene over? Each time it felt real, as if the
accident were happening again: the green boxy sedan ramming into me, sending me sprawling, while the driver, too late, blared his horn, as if to silence the crunch of bone. The moment, I thought
sometimes, had been the greatest of my life: the time I stopped traffic in the Champs-Elysées.

Wildly, I had run from the honey-coloured house that meant only a coffin in the front parlour, and silent servants, and the concerned lady from the consulate, and the weeping Latin Quarter
mistress, who had to be asked to leave. As I ran, tears blinded my eyes, but I needed no eyes; if I ran fast enough I could fly: fly faster than time. And I flew, only to be snatched back suddenly
to earth. In my shock I felt no pain, not at first, only bewilderment that I didn’t, that I couldn’t, rise up and keep flying, outstripping the leaden chronology that said only, in its
remorseless drumming march, that my father was dead... that he was dead... that he was dead.

Aunt Toolie touched my hand. ‘Take care of Benjy, won’t you? Friends like him are rare. In Savannah, as a girl, I paced beside the railroad tracks and wished the train would take me
away – away, like your father. Have you ever thought why he travelled so far? Couldn’t stand his ruined Southern family, that’s why. Couldn’t live on a desolate plantation
with empty slave shacks rotting out the back. What boy of spirit could? What death-in-life, to know your world is ruined before you’ve had your chance! Oh, if I’d been a boy! But
wherever I was going, I’d find a friend. That was it, you see. Not fame, not wealth, but a friend. There’s nothing more important.’

I agreed there was not, and almost asked her about the man who would have married her, but she tossed aside her cigarette and rose, ready to return to the fray. On the lake’s brink, she
turned to me. ‘I say, look at that Japanese boy, all in yellow. Rather fetching, isn’t he?’

‘How do you know he’s Japanese?’ I said.

But of course he was. Again I looked at the boy’s attendants. I had seen them before: Yamadori’s servants. And what connection, I wondered, had this boy with Yamadori?

Aunt Toolie said, ‘Your father adored the Japs, of course.’

‘Did he? He didn’t stay long in Japan.’

‘Something happened there. Some scandal, I think. Upsetting, whatever it was,’ she cawed back, and slid away from me. Trouble, in a stately arc, cruised towards her; behind him,
threading with insolent aplomb between plaid-jacketed burly youths and red-cheeked laughing girls, I saw the Japanese boy. How graceful they looked, these phantoms of the ice! I loved and envied
them. I imagined slipping outside myself, joining my spirit with the circling figures: I was Trouble; I was Aunt Toolie; I was the Japanese boy; I was all of them and none of them, captured in the
pattern.

My eyes flickered shut.

In my dream I skated, revelling in my prowess. Trees thrust upwards, barren-branched; snow piled in drifts; but between the obstructions ran a web of icy paths where Trouble and Aunt Toolie and
the Japanese boy and I careered in enthralling, unending chases. As I whizzed down entangling roads of ice, I felt I might take to the air, vanish into realms above the clouds.

I skidded into a clearing. Paths branched in all directions. For a moment I thought I had lost the others, but a red deerstalker flashed: Trouble, circling on a frozen lake.

I called his name. I called again.

The lake was growing larger. Round and round went Trouble in his revolution of nothing, but I had no power to reach him. Mist hung low over the lake, and the sun glowed red as the ice began to
crack, radiating from the centre in a star. I called – ‘Trouble, please! Trouble, no!’ – but he plummeted into the depths. A hand waved up, then was gone, as if the lake had
swallowed him, leaving only the deerstalker trembling on the waters.