Three Short Novels (22 page)

“Ilo, you won't have to work. I'll find a job and take care of you.”

It was like an offer to lame her for life, an offer to imprison her within his own benighted being forever.

“Wherever I go,” she said, “let me get settled first.” And this denial to him of the future he was begging from her was a cruelty that was to strike back at her when she was to write at all the many tables of her life, roaming her imagination with the hope of finding her own future there. No latent beauty was to be revealed in her work, only the cruelty of forsaking him that confessed itself in the emptiness of each story.

“I'll go to Aunt Sarah's, I'll go to Seattle and live with her.” He was striding around the room in a frenzy of helplessness. “If she can't take me in I'll get a room near her and I'll help her, I'll do her shopping for her and I'll go with her on the streetcar if she's afraid of going out alone and I'll mop the floors for her.”

The old woman who was their father's sister had come down to console them when their father died and to pay for the funeral, and she had tucked her purse under her pillow at night, afraid the two demented children might steal from her while she slept.

“Then I'll know where to reach you,” she said, “when the time comes for you to be with me.”

He thanked her profusely for that. “If you don't do well where you go,” he said, “you can come and live with me.”

“If I don't do well,” she promised.

Eagerly, on the run, he helped the mailman's two sons carry the furniture out to the open truck. He hoisted up his father's ancient black suitcase of heavy, pebbled leather, with straps and buckles. Up it went and over. Their father was gone most of the time, on the road, searching for work on newspapers in other cities, soliciting ads. He was on the edge of oldness when she was born, and the Sundays he
took her to hear the soapbox orators in Pershing Square, people would ask him if she were his grandchild. So his suitcase was old-fashioned even then. On the run, her brother carried out grocery boxes filled with salvage-store clothes, with paraphernalia of inestimable value, each box tied with twine, and, last, the wooden box with handle, containing his shoemaker's tools.

They were alone in the empty house. The mailman's sons waited, one in the driver's seat, the other on a chair in the truckbed. The seat beside the driver was to be his, like a seat of honor. He wore a black suit that some larger man, years ago, must have worn to his own significant events. He was to spend the night, or even a few nights, at the mailman's house, and she was to board a bus to San Francisco, where she had never been. It was time to part. When he bent his head to kiss her on the cheek, his loneliness struck him across the face and left him pale and shaken. He was already lost in the world he was to enter as soon as this embrace was over. He would never again be even halfway sure she loved him, though she kissed his trembling cheek and his brow filmed with sweat.

Then he climbed up into the truck and, wearing a departed man's dapper Panama hat and hunched over in fear of this exciting time, he waved to her, an exaggerated wild waving, as they drove off.

Ilona, alone at her table, raised her head and saw that it was a dark four o'clock. If it was six o'clock in Chicago, was he already on his way to his job through cold half-dark streets or was he on his way home from a hospital's steamy basement kitchen after scrubbing pots and pans all night, a tall figure, head sunk forward, hat pulled down over his ears, overcoat flapping in the wind? Or was he still asleep in that city closer than this one to the hour of waking, and if he was still asleep, his sleep was not deeper than hers had been all her waking life.

12

U
ncertain about which door was the right one, someone was bungling along the landing, knocking at all of them. The dog inside the apartment next to Ilona's clawed at the door, banging against it, and its bellowing bark caused the walls of her room to vibrate. Then the caller knocked at her door.

“Ah, it's you,” Claud said, surprised he had found her. “I want you to join me in an act of supreme cruelty. You remember Jerome, our host? If not his name at least his suffering face? We're going out to the ocean and we're going to make a bonfire and we're going to burn his manuscript. His only one, that one about his wife and Neely in the coils of a boa constrictor passion.”

One second of perverse pleasure—it sprang so fast to her eyes she had no way of concealing it from him. If all those pages, all those years of labor were to go up in smoke, then the woman herself might end up unremembered, her life unknown.

“That's an awful thing to do,” she said, “burning up all that labor,” her dismay as true as that shameful pleasure a moment ago.

“It's cold out there at the ocean,” he warned. “Dress warm.”

“I don't want to see him.”

She wanted to back away, close the door. They were two of a kind, herself and that husband. There was a shame about them both for their fear of loss and for the loss that had come about.

“Oh, but he looks great. He's skinny and he's got a haircut and he's wearing suits again, and he's got himself a big desk in the trust department at the Bank of America or Bank of the Cosmos. One little thing left to do, burn up his obsession, and he'll soar like a big pink flamingo.”

He found her raincoat and held it up for her and she slipped it on. At the foot of the stairs he took out a black knit cap from his jacket pocket, a watch-cap like the one he was wearing, and drew it over her head, down to the eyebrows.

“You and me,” he said “I'm the executioner and you're the priest. Say a prayer over the ashes.”

The time was midafternoon, but their host was lying asleep on Claud's bed. He sat up, hampered by the blankets over him, struggling up from the exhaustion that precedes an act of finality. Ilona would not have recognized him in a crowd. He was somebody else or more truly himself than on the night of his party. His face, that night, must have been padded with hope that everything would stay the same, the tolerable same, despite the man up in the air.

Claud pushed a chair firmly against the backs of her knees. “Sit down, sit down.” And to the host, “Sit up, sit up. I'll brew something bitter.”

Jerome sat on the edge of the bed, head down. “How've you been?” he asked his shoes.

“I've been fine,” she said.

“Me too.”

She had wanted never to see this man again. The night of the party, his prophetic fear of losing his wife to Martin had diminished her, Ilona. His confession had been direct as a statement that she, Ilona, was not one to keep a lover when that lover was to come into
the presence of his beautiful wife. He diminished her further, now, by the loss of his flesh, by the grief and rage that had brought him here and entangled him in his friendly enemy's blankets. She was not loved beyond reason, as his wife was loved. She was not loved anymore within reason.

“You want to tell Ilona what you did? What he did,” Claud went on, “was hide out by her house and wait for them to come out. He bought himself a Triumph because it's easily hidden under a bush, the sort of car a rodent can drive. He told himself he wasn't going to hurt anybody, he just wanted to see them together. Maybe he hoped the sight of them would bring on a heart attack and he'd collapse and die, like those primitives who fall down dead at the sight of a sacred person even if it's their own cousin. But when they showed up he began to shake, like this. He was shaking so hard he thought he was going to shake himself right out of his car and across the street on his hands and knees. They didn't see him and he got away. He got back across the bridge all right because those Triumphs drive themselves. Then he came over here. I thought he came to kill me because it was me who brought Martin Vandersen into his life. I was afraid he had a weapon on his person, like a lady's ivory-handled revolver that belonged to his grandmother, maybe with a blood-red ruby in the handle. The rich kill you with the very best, it's a matter of noblesse oblige. So I pleaded with him for my life, I said ‘Martin Vandersen's relieved you of a life-threatening wife.' I said, ‘Unless that's what you want, an early death with her kneeling by you, floor, street, wherever, so the last thing you see is her beloved face.' That was too much to think about so he toppled over. But before he fell asleep he told me his manuscript was in his car and he was going out to the beach to burn it. I said, ‘Why don't you do it in your fireplace?' and he said, ‘The smell of human flesh. The neighbors will call the cops.' If he talks that way in his novel it's good he's burning it.”

The bitter brew fumed up over the percolator lid.

“You ever see that painting Paradiso?” he asked them, bringing black coffee in chipped mugs. “Where everybody's dressed up in their Renaissance best, finding each other again, falling into each other's arms? Well, the people in that Paradise are forever in the shape in which they were last seen on earth. There're people of all ages, kids and middle-aged ones and old, old ones. I've always puzzled over that painting, it wakes me up in the middle of the night. I think, Well, it's all right for the young, it's real nice to spend the rest of eternity looking the same. But what about the older ones? I bet when they get a little time to be alone up there and to think, maybe the old ones say to themselves ‘It was me at six years old and it was me at twenty and it was me at forty, so why does it have to be me forever when I was ninety-one? Why ninety-one forever even if my arthritis is all gone?' Myself, if I could have a word with God, I think I'd tell him ‘Look at me, God. I'd hate to go through eternity like I am now at forty or like I'm going to be, even worse. I resemble a bullfrog now, my chin is adhering to my chest because you took my neck away, and look at my sad froggy eyes. I used to be good-looking, God. I was good-looking for a long enough time to give you time, God, to think about keeping me that way forever.'” And to the host, who had scalded his mouth with the hot coffee and was bent over in pain, head down to his knees. “I'm telling you this as an argument for an early death. You ought to make it up there before you look any worse. Maybe all you need to do to get there fast is persuade your wife to come back to you.”

No one spoke, not even Claud, on the drive to the ocean. They went in Claud's rattling car and, by a trick of his, the manuscript lay in Ilona's lap. Its weight was impressive. She guessed there must be close to a thousand pages in the brown wrapping paper tied with string. No matter if he had revealed nothing more than how trapped he was in his own life and how oblivious to the rest of the world—his pages ought not to be burned. Why, then, was she riding along with the manuscript in her lap?

Claud slowed down along the Great Highway, selecting the site with care. On the landward side of the highway the old houses and the new stucco motels faced the sea, and on the seaward side the high sand dunes, some ten feet high with purple iceplant clinging to their slopes, belonged somewhere else on the earth, an ancient port on a desert coast.

Claud parked before a green stucco motel aglitter with specks of gold. She was about to say No, not here and said nothing. Martin's house had stood there, and she knew that when the pages had all gone up in smoke and they were climbing back over the dune, Claud would pause at the top and say You know, I think Martin's basement was along about here. In fact, right there. You see that green motel? And the specks of gold would be flashing and sparkling in the rays of the setting sun.

“Somewhere else,” she said, “might not be so windy.”

“No wind anywhere,” Claud said, and got out first.

They climbed the dunes and were met by a fitful wind, the ragtag end of a storm yesterday. The wind, though not strong enough to break up the glaring overcast sky, was lifting foam high off the breakers. A fisherman in hip-high rubber boots was casting his line into the breakers, a very small figure in the glare of sky and water. Far down the beach a few lone persons and a dog were either approaching or retreating in the mist along the water's edge.

Claud led the way down the slope, past three seated figures facing the sea. It was obvious in their calmness, the disciplined erectness of their backs, that they were meditating. Ilona, trudging down last, saw that they did not move a muscle. It was as if no one passed by. Up ahead, Claud stopped at the foot of the slope, turned, and waved his arms. The spot he had chosen was only a few yards from the three figures who were seated in an arc, above.

“Why here?” Jerome asked. “Look, there's nobody for miles.”

“These dudes don't see a thing,” Claud assured him. “They won't
laugh at you, they won't cry. They're above it all, they're floating above all human suffering. You used to be into it yourself.”

The figure in the middle was a girl, her long hair drawn back, her face blanched by the cold, her heavy clothes shapeless. The young man to the south of her was bearded, his dark hair hanging thickly to his shoulders, and the young man to the north was beardless, his wisps of thin blond hair lifted and laid down by the wind, his eyes closed. The other two held a steady gaze on the horizon.

“We're disturbing them,” she said.

“We can't. Nothing can.” Claud took the package from her and dropped it straight down at his feet. The package scooped a shallow place for itself, scattering sand over his boots.