The Retreat (13 page)

She walked down the path and waited. A mosquito landed on her neck and she slapped at it. A long while later, the door opened and Harris stumbled and almost fell forward into the darkness. “Jesus Christ,” he said.

Back in the chair, he sighed and said, “Kill me already.” It was like the cry of a small bird.

At his cabin, Lizzy parked the wheelchair under the awning and helped Harris up the stairs.

“Come in,” he said. “Please.”

She continued inside, holding his arm. He lit a lamp and sat on a chair, breathing heavily. He motioned at the desk in the corner. “There’s a bottle of Scotch in the drawer, and two glasses. Have a drink with me. I’ve been drinking all evening but it would be nice to have company.”

“I don’t think so,” Lizzy said. “I gotta get back to my brothers.”

Harris waved a hand. “They’ll be fine. Everett’s a big boy.” Then he said, “He’s a different one, Everett.”

“What are you talking about?” She went to get the bottle.

“He might not know it yet, but I can see it. There is a marked circle in which we all exist, and Everett is at the edge of the circle, on the verge of leaping out.”

“He’s just Ev,” Lizzy said. “Doesn’t talk much, but knows everything that’s going on.”

Harris shrugged but didn’t pursue the topic. He took the Scotch from Lizzy’s hand, squeaked open the cork, and poured two glasses. “Here.” He handed her a glass and then he drank from his own.

Lizzy looked at her glass and then drank. The liquor burned her tongue and passed down her throat and she coughed.

“Good for you,” he said. “Sit.” He motioned at a second chair by the desk, and she sat cross-legged, aware of the room now in the dim flickering light. There were the two beds, both made. There was a bookshelf and a desk and a table with Emma’s butterfly paraphernalia. Against the far wall stood a wardrobe, and beside that was an easel and brushes, and beside that another desk that held a typewriter and nothing else.

“You’re wondering where my wife is,” Harris said.

Lizzy didn’t answer.

“It’s fine. Everything’s fine. We have this arrangement that must be obvious to everyone else. Though she always makes it back here, so that she can help me. Tonight, I fear, she forgot me. Didn’t she?” He looked at his glass, which was empty, and he poured himself more. “Highland Scotch,” he said. “Not as musky as the Lowland.” He drank. “Quite the
saviour.” Then he smiled and said that it was unfortunate that a girl her age should have to witness the idiotic failings of adults. “I love my wife,” he said. “And I need her.” He gestured at his legs. “With these useless legs, what else would I do? Hire a girl like you? You’re rather a good dancer, by the way.”

Lizzy wondered if he was going to cry, and she wondered what she would do then. She thought she should be frightened, but she wasn’t. He leaned forward and watched her circumspectly. His nose was suddenly large. His glasses had slipped slightly. He drank again and then said, “I hear you’re reading the novels I gave you, first to last. Your mother told me, she was proud of the fact, though I’m sure there are better things to be read.” He paused, studied her, and then said that he wasn’t going to ask what she thought, because it wouldn’t make any difference, he wasn’t going to change anything. “These days I’m like a dull moth banging at an unlit lantern.” He drank and then said that he seemed to have lost his muse at about the same time he lost the use of his legs. “I was loved,” he said. “And I loved back, ferociously, and now I appear to be flapping uselessly in the wind. Funny.”

Lizzy didn’t respond. She thought she should leave, but she was curious too. This frail man, with his sticks for legs, and his clumsy hands, was so different from the man who fumed and ranted in
All Leer’s Women
, the novel Harris had handed to her one day. It was the story of a real estate salesman, Richard Leer, who talks his way into the underwear of every woman he meets, young or old. Maybe Harris would try to seduce her, though she could easily outrun him. The possibility
intrigued her. She wanted him to be pathetic. She wanted to say no to him.

He was moving his crooked fingers, as if attempting to pick some slippery idea up off the floor. He said that once upon a time there was a man who took his wife on a long trip to southern Europe, and then across the Mediterranean to Egypt and on to Tanzania. This was not long ago. Three years, maybe two. The man’s wife was unhappy; she suffered melancholy, she was dissatisfied, she wanted to hold something in her hands that she had not yet held. He said that this was not unusual, especially as one grew older and discovered the darkness at the edges of the path. He said that the man thought that he could cure his wife of her unhappiness, and travelling might be that cure. One afternoon, in Egypt, in a place called Aswan, the two of them sat on a small balcony and watched a crowd of men with horses gather in the courtyard below. There was much yelling and shouting, and then a stallion was brought out and it was made to mount one of the mares. When the stallion was finished, one of the men jumped on the mare’s back and another man took off a shoe and hit the mare on the rear end and the mare took off madly down the road and then returned. A celebration ensued and then the process was repeated with another mare. The man and woman watched this for a while and then the crowd of men and the horses disappeared and it seemed as if the scene had never actually happened, that the horses and the men and the shouting had all been imagined, though there was horse dung on the cobblestones below.

Harris stopped as he poured himself more Scotch. Held up the glass and dipped towards it as if he were a bumblebee hovering over a newly opened flower. Lizzy saw the shadow of his mouth through the bottom of the glass; the candle flame mirrored there as well. Harris recalled that the daylight disappeared quickly. It fell away as if a curtain had been suddenly drawn. The woman was cold and so the couple went into their room and lit a candle and drank some wine and ate some pita and shared the boiled eggs that they had purchased in the market. The woman went to bed early and the man stayed sitting in the chair and he watched her sleep beneath the mosquito net and then, finally, because he too was cold, he climbed in beside her and she woke and said that she had dreamed of the horses.

Harris paused. Lizzy wondered if he was about to fall asleep, but he was simply resting. He said, “The next day they flew to Tanzania, and that is where we meet Franz.” The flame from the candle on the desk wavered, and then renewed itself. Harris shifted and looked at his empty glass and then at Lizzy and he said that he would drink a little more. He said that the story he was telling was long and it didn’t have an ending yet. As he poured more Scotch, he said that his wife had been jealous of his success. “It was as if I had been anointed in some way, or perhaps it was simply chance that threw success my way, and suddenly the world was at my feet and Emma did not recognize the man she had married. Or she did not like what I had become. Or she wanted what I had. I do not know.” He said that she had wanted children, and when that
proved to be impossible, she became interested in insects. In bugs. Then he said, “Look at your mother. Four children, like four novels with endings yet to be written. Wonderful. Emma would have liked that.”

And this idea appeared to rejuvenate him and he sat up and said that in Tanzania the man and the woman fought. They fought as soon as they woke and they fought through breakfast and on into the day. The arguments were about African politics or the efficacy of malaria pills, or whether or not the fish had been cooked enough, or about money. Pointless disagreements, he said. But beneath the arguments was a deep sadness, as if they both knew that the man’s increasing inability to walk was a symptom of everything wrong in the marriage. “Suddenly, she had the advantage,” he said. “And she was merciless.”

He said that they flew over to Zanzibar and hired a car to take them up to Chwaka where they stayed at a run-down villa that had, in its prime, been an estate of a German family. It belonged to the government now and it was in disrepair. Rats had made homes in the mattresses, the windows were broken, the few chairs left were wobbly and unsafe. There was little to eat and they made do with fish that was delivered by a local villager.

Harris said that it was impossible to predict how a decision, like his and Emma’s choice to spend a week in Chwaka, could change one’s whole life, but this was what happened, and it was only in hindsight that the evidence could be sifted through and understood. Or sometimes not understood. He said that on a weekend afternoon, while sitting out on the
beach, he and Emma met a German man who was staying in a house up the coast. The man invited them for dinner. Emma accepted with great alacrity and this surprised Harris because usually she was hermetic and antisocial. He couldn’t walk to the house, and so the German man, who was Franz, picked them up by jeep and drove them to his villa, which was beautiful and well kept, with the requisite cook and gardener and liquor cabinet and a fine view of the ocean. In a large room just off a wide hallway, Franz had a solarium in which there were plants and mounted animals. The animals weren’t all large, in fact the majority were lizards and birds and all of them were placed strategically in trees and on rocks, so the effect was surreal. Harris said that it was like walking into a photograph. Franz was very proud of his stuffed animals, and of course, Emma was intrigued. After all, she collected butterflies.

Harris paused, drank, and then said that it was a fascinating thing to observe the disintegration of a marriage. This last gasp. He said that love should not be taken for granted. “It is so often a doomed enterprise, and typically perceived by the outsider to be doomed before the players are even slightly cognizant of the carnage. Franz knew immediately. And, delicately, as if he were a man who might wish later to claim innocence, he seduced my wife.”

Here, Harris stopped talking. He closed his eyes for a long time, and then he opened them and said that he knew that the point of view was awry in this story, but would Lizzy bear with him? Please? In any case, it wasn’t necessary that she follow exactly, and wasn’t it more interesting to have to work at the threads of the narrative? He said that there were
moments when he was overcome with anger and shame and he saw his wife as a whore. But he said that there was also curiosity and a certain macabre objectivity. “As all of this was happening,” he said, “I imagined writing a story about a cripple whose wife takes on a lover and the three of them, the two men and one woman, live together and in fact quite easily fit into the quotidian of eating meals together and travelling, but never really talking about what is actually happening. My own life was producing the fodder for my next novel.” He said that he was a puppeteer. That was what he did for a living. He wondered though if he had been deceiving himself all along, and that in real life, his life, the life of Emma and Franz, and even in Lizzy’s life, they weren’t all puppets being manipulated by some higher puppeteer, some malevolent and disinterested God who smiled benignly at his puppets’ foibles. “Perhaps there is nothing more than this. A kind of luck or fate. Or not even that, because that is being too generous. Luck implies the possibility of blessing, hope, redemption. I have given up on all of those.” He chuckled. Not happily. And then he said that it was unfortunate that she, at her young age, should have to listen to the indiscriminate musings of a disappointed cripple. “I do not wish to steal hope from you.”

And then he was quiet and Lizzy waited, but he did not say anything more, though he had promised more. She had listened to his voice lift and fall and she had wondered if the story he was telling was true or if it had been made up for her benefit, as if he might be trying to tell her something about her parents, or even about herself. Harris had been watching her dance all evening, and he had seen her with Raymond, and
though he had said nothing, and she had asked nothing of him, she did wonder if he was trying to protect her in some way. In the light of the flame, Lizzy saw that his eyes had closed and that his glass was slipping from his hand. She took the glass and put it on the table, and then she stood and looked at Harris, and knowing that she couldn’t leave him in his chair, she shook him awake and said, “Harris, you should go to bed.” She stepped backwards and then turned and left the cabin.

There was a quarter moon just above the treeline. It offered a pale light that allowed Lizzy to find her way to the outhouse. She sat and wondered how it was that older people could complicate what should be simple and clear. What resonated with her was Harris’s use of the word
puppet.
It had been like a slap and she had wanted to protest, but she hadn’t.

Coming out of the outhouse she came down the path and met the Doctor, who was standing and observing the sky. He turned to her and said that a sky like this one — and here he lifted a hand towards the stars above them — made immortality seem possible. He asked Lizzy if she believed in everlasting life.

She shrugged and stepped sideways. The moon was behind the Doctor’s head and it lit up the path and the trees. She said, “I should get back to my cabin.”

The Doctor appeared to not hear her. He said that he had seen her come out of Harris and Emma’s cabin. “You were with Harris,” he said. Then he said that Harris lacked both conviction and faith and that he was suffering from a failure of ego. “This happens to men sometimes. We’re swimming along,
taking our good fortune for granted, and suddenly we begin to sink.” The
s
of the final word whistled from his mouth.

Lizzy was aware of the Doctor’s youthful face and she was suddenly conscious of his vanity and of the night sounds and the late hour. She said, “My mother loves my father. She’s been sick and he knows what she needs.”

The Doctor nodded, as if her statement made perfect sense. “Of course he does.” He paused and then said that he had seen Lizzy with the Indian boy. He said that he was worried about her. It appeared that her parents didn’t worry, or didn’t take any responsibility for her choices, and so he was offering some advice. He said that she should be careful. She was a stunning young girl and she could do better than this Raymond Seymour. Did she know that?