William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (55 page)

“Yes I’ll admit she’s a nice-looking tomato,” Lennie said later, “but she’s confused. What kind of a job is she trying to give us? First all this talk about motion in Cezanne—all right, that made sense, she was sober. Then Marx, I’ve never heard anything so naïve. You’d think she had a card in the Comintern already. Then fill her with sherry and she’s ready to lynch every——”

“It’s not that, Lennie, don’t be stupid. When something half-convinces you against your will you can’t stand it. She’s just … well, as you say, confused … but it’s not the South. There’s nothing intellectual troubling her. She’s young yet. It’s something else the matter.”

“She’s weird——”

“Oh, dry up.”

“Are you getting yourself in love—?”

“Maybe.”

“You
are,
aren’t you, sonny?”

“Maybe I am.”

Harry didn’t know why he wanted so much for his friend to like Peyton, except that—unsure himself of the reason for his sudden, violent attraction and still bewildered by her—he felt an obscure need for Lennie’s moral support. Lennie was a shrewd one and although it was his own love that was blossoming, and not Lennie’s, he wanted Lennie to back him in his own shaky conviction: she’s really not weird, Lennie, there’s nothing screwy about her, she’s just—well, as you say … confused.

But Lennie came to like her, too, even to love her after a fashion, and finally, when the marriage was breaking up, to agonize over her almost as much as Harry. It had been Lennie, rather than himself, who had noticed the change in her after the first few weeks of their “co’tin’,” as Peyton put it. It had been Lennie who had said, “She’s changed, son; she’s really right nice,” using Peyton’s accent; “I do believe you’re doing good things for her. Watch out, though; she’s the dependent kind.” It had been Lennie who had noticed how little Peyton needed to drink now (though Peyton had made the shy admission, too: “You don’t drink like that when you’re happy,” she said, kissing Harry on the nose). It had been Lennie who had seen the sudden bad turn for the worse when they came back from the wedding, who told Harry two years later, “Those first six months before you got married were the best you two ever had.” Lennie had been the one who drove Peyton over to Newark, to a special psychiatrist he knew; when that didn’t last a month, when, right afterward, she went off for a week to Darien with a mystery writer, it had been Lennie who had comforted Harry in his suffering, saying, “I know you love her, son. Quit talking about nymphomaniacs. That’s why you got to go back anyway and stick with her and show her that you’re not her father, but just
you
that love her, son, just
you
.” It had been Lennie who—when Peyton, after Harry left her again in desperation, came to Cornelia Street after him, drunk, hysterical and crying about drowning—slapped her across the face to calm her, then surrounded her with his good arm, kissing her like a brother, saying, “Now you just calm down, baby, and take a look at that guy. Can’t you see he’s crazy about you? He won’t let you drown. You just take it easy.” Now finally it was Lennie to whom he had gone in grief, to help fetch her back from the island.

The undertaker was fat and dark, an Italian named Mazzetti, whom Harry, not knowing any other, had found on Bleecker Street. When he spoke he was inclined toward obsequiousness, and he had fat, lewd lips, but for the most part he kept mercifully silent. It was a hot August morning, the drive up along the river and into the Bronx seemed interminable. The three of them rode in the wide front seat. Lennie knew just what to say, and when.

“You’re not going down to Virginia?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I didn’t think you would.”

“You know why.”

“Yes. I wouldn’t think you’d want to have anything more to do with them.”

On the ferry over to the island there was another hearse, driven by a portly Negro in cutaways, who grinned suavely at Mazzetti and doffed his Homburg in a sort of professional salute. He was accompanied by a young girl, a mulatto; she ogled them coyly from the front seat. Mazzetti made no sign of recognition. “They’re always after insurance,” he explained sardonically. “Which wunna you gen’lemen,” he added, “will kindly identify the remains?”

“I will,” said Lennie quickly.

Thank you, Lennie, Harry thought, for he couldn’t bear to see that beauty dead.

In the field it was sweltering, swarming with gnats. A cloud of dust rose up through the heat. Three prisoners went to work on one of the graves. Harry saw the corner of a coffin and, without knowing why, could tell that it was Peyton’s. He turned away. Lennie put his hand on Harry’s shoulder.

“Buck up, son,” he said.

“If I’d just known what was going on inside her. Why? Why?”

“Sh-h-h, take it easy.”

“I could have stopped her.”

“Cut out that talk.”

Harry walked alone over to one of the other graves. More than anything at all he wanted to keep from thinking of Peyton and so, dazed suddenly by the heat and the horror of the place, he stood sweating and watched two prisoners, supervised by the Negro in the Homburg, disinter a coffin. A prison guard stood by, a pinched little Irishman with a bandanna around his neck, and a sawed-off shotgun.

“It’s a terrible place,” Harry said.

“I been out here for twenty years.”

“God. You like it?”

“It’s my job.”

“It must be sad.”

“Yes. Sometimes it is. It’s the little boxes, the babies, that get me.”

“I could have stopped her.”

There was a sudden cry from the opposite side of the pit. Another coffin was open and the colored girl peered down into it, her eyes goggling. “God in heaven,” she squealed, in a clear Brooklyn accent, “doesn’t he look terrible!”

Harry turned away, his stomach heaving. He bent over and looked down toward his shadow, regarding the earth, weeds, a cloud of gnats.
No,
he thought,
I just don’t know whose fault it is
.

Lennie squeezed him gently on the arm. “It’s her, son,” he said.

Oh that my words were now written oh that they were printed in a book. That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock forever. For I know that my redeemer liveth and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth and though worms destroy this body yet in my flesh shall I

Shall I

Oh my flesh!

(Strong is your hold O mortal flesh, strong is your hold O love.)

“I don’t have enough time.”

I looked up from where I was lying, staring right into his eyes; he had eyes like coughdrops, the amber kind, and little blue freckles in the white part. “I don’t have enough time, Tony,” I said. “That’s O.K., Peyton, I got lots of time,” he said. “Besides I can’t,” I kept saying, “we can’t do it today.” Besides, I was thinking I’d still been dreaming. The clock said 2:25; the dots on it were as green as cats’ eyes, even in the sunlight which slanted down through the blinds. He was standing there waiting, saying nothing, but I went on thinking, trying to think, because of the dreams: how many hours have I slept? I tried to subtract 2:20 from 3:00 but it wouldn’t go, twelve hours and a half or eleven, well, it didn’t matter. The dots were green and luminescent, shining like my conscience, though Harry said once I was sadly lacking in conscience, he said, “You have no moral censor,” and I kept looking at them, not looking at Tony, listening to the whir inside. Once I’d had a dream: I was inside a clock. Perfect, complete, perpetual, I revolved about on the mainspring forever drowsing, watching the jewels and the rubies, the mechanism clicking ceaselessly, all the screws and parts as big as my head, indestructible, shining, my own invention. Thus would I sleep forever, yet not really sleep, but remain only half-aware of time and enclosed by it as in a womb of brass, revolving on that spring like a dead horse on a merry-go-round. I could hear Tony taking off his shirt. “I been sweating,” he said, “I took a bath while you was sleeping,” something about how a milk route is rough work, always that. “I’m tired,” he said, but … “if a man don’t get his lovin’ he’ll get sick.” I was trying to recover my dream. I was stuck to the sheets from sweating; I stirred a little, my pajama pants made a little sucking noise where the sweat came through, the sheets all wet and wrinkled beneath. Outside against the afternoon two pigeons came floating by, braking the air, landed on the ledge outside to send up a cloud of feathers and dust from their old droppings. There was noise below on the avenue, a bus, trucks, a subway train somewhere far below, rattling the walls. I tried to recover my dream and soon the smell came up, faint and blue from the bus, of gasoline. Then it was like this, I remembered: Harry was the man with the mask, rattling a garbage bucket. This was on the rocks in the park where we used to go walking, and I was below, looking upward. I said, “Harry, you come on down from there this instant!” but he took off his mask and turned his back so I couldn’t see him, threw something—old newspapers, soup cans, a dead sparrow—into the bucket, shouting, “No, darling, no, darling, I can’t!” A cop came up then, I know it was a cop, but the rest I disremember, as Ella used to say; he chased us off from the rocks, smiling, a happy Irishman, and then I couldn’t find Harry. There were woods somewhere and the smell of ferns; I was lying with someone near a river, I don’t know who, some woman dressed in a mother hubbard and sunbonnet like the grandmother I never saw, Bunny’s grandmother; she was knitting a quilt, singing songs from Stephen Foster, saying, “Don’t you fret, Peyton honey,” and then the cop came up again and chased us away. We ran like birds and Grandmother ran like a penguin, waddling; she was crippled, Bunny told me once. She was a Byrd and very wealthy, but Grandfather spent all the money because he had no mind for figures. I watched the light come in through the slats; a drop of sweat rolled off my brow, then I could taste it. I didn’t move, watching the pigeons stir and rustle on the ledge outside, sending up dust and feathers; they rumbled inside like fools, clucking away, and I could concentrate on what they were saying, I could make them say anything: mostly “How do you do, how do you do, how do you do,” and then I’d make my mind click, like you do when you know the sun’s in the west but imagine that outside on the street it’s morning; I’d make my mind click like that and the pigeons would say, “Look at the fool, look at the fool,” or “Wanna big screw, wanna big screw,” like Tony sometimes. His belt buckle clinked behind me, the same one I knew he always had on—A.C.—Anthony Cecchino, my Tony. A woman came out across the avenue, waving a mop on the fire escape; I watched the dust fly up; an air current caught it, scraps of paper and gobbets of lint, bore it higher and higher against the skyline, against a cloud dozing peacefully in the sky like a huge white rabbit. Bunny always used to whistle through his teeth when we were playing croquet, and sort of waggle his head seriously but there was a light in his eyes; with three beers he could play better, he always said, and would pat me on the tail when I went through two wickets. The dust disappeared, leaving blue sky, and the rabbit became a duck with feathers drifting off its back. There was a duck in the dream, too, either big or small, floating somewhere on that river, some kind of bird. I could feel myself smiling. Bunny always said that his grandmother took snuff; it was all right for ladies to do that then, she stuck it under her lip and during Lent she ate like a pig, but she gave up snuff. She was a dear woman, he always said, and I always knew it and held up the mezzotint to the light and kissed it once it was so beautiful; she was dressed in lace and I could imagine the snuff beneath her lip and there was a dear loving look in her eye as if, when you climbed into her lap, she would hold you and tell you stories about little girls in the War between the States and rock you to sleep. Tony was humming something. I turned my head, watching him naked in the middle of the floor. He turned, too, sideways, hands on his hips. He said, “Look, baby,” but I didn’t look, turned away, and watched the white fluffy duck fade against the sky, become something else—by the mass, said Polonius, like a camel, backed like a weasel, but very like a whale. Tony said, “All for you, baby.” I said, “Yes, but I can’t” and he said, “Why?” and then I rose up on my elbows, feeling the sweat suddenly cool against my back. “I just can’t,” I said, “I can’t, Tony,” and then I felt it: the cramp exploding in my womb as if everything inside of me, heart, liver and lights, had been squeezed aside and I was all agonizing womb, crying aloud, gasping like a fish. “What’s the matter?” he said. He came near me. I wondered if I was bleeding yet. “No,” I said. He said, “You done it last time. What’s the matter?” I sank back again, watching the clock: 2:30, it said, and I could hear the almost silent whir, see the words BENRUS Swiss movement, U.S.A., in a crescent around its rim. I said, “No” again, with a thought for the clock: inside, it would be filled with clean chrome, springs and cogs all working quietly; in there I could creep and sprawl along the mainspring, borne round and round through the darkness, hear the click and whir, my only light a pinpoint where the alarm button comes through, shining down on the jewels and rubies like a shaft in a cathedral. A cockroach ran along the windowsill, wiggling its antennae. It stopped and I moved a little, then it went down a crack. Tony saw it, too; he ran his hand through the bluish hair on his chest. “Cockroaches,” he said, “I hate cockroaches. Why don’t you put powder down? I hate cockroaches.” I could feel another cramp coming on; it was not there yet, resting superimposed on the nausea I had like a big hand with claws ready to strike. Then it struck
; I was all womb again, gasping silently. I lay quiet, watching Tony run his hand through his chest hair, scratching himself; then the claw retreated, went away. “Get me my pills,” I said. “What pills?” “Pills for this pain,” I said, “they’re in the top drawer.” I lay trying to get my breath; there were dots on my eyes like drifting sparks projected on a screen: on the other side of the screen Tony fumbled through the drawer, hair on his tail, small red pimples, hair on his shoulders too. He came back with the pills and a glass of water. I took them and lay back again. He unbuttoned my pajama top and put his hand in on my breast. The sparks still floated on the screen. There were tiny, opaque spots, too, of water; these shifted always outside of my vision, along with the sparks: I couldn’t concentrate on them long; instead I watched the rooftop across the avenue where a man shook a stick at pigeons. They seemed to rove around the blue like a flurry of slate-colored leaves, noiselessly with flecks of light against their wings: I became afraid of something, I wanted to go to the bathroom and get sick because of the fear, but Tony put his hand between my legs and played with me: it hurt and I felt the cramp coming but it didn’t come, and I thought of all the Byrds I’d seen: there was a one-eyed condor they had stuffed in Lynchburg that had lice in its feathers and Dickie Boy said, Look at the final irony, he that preyed nobly in the Andes is preyed upon by Virginia vermin, which was real insight for Dickie Boy, and then there was an ostrich we saw in the zoo in Washington that stuck its head in the sand and then its tail feathers went straight out like an Indian warbonnet. He said, “Come on baby, take ’em off,” and I said, “No, I can’t, Tony, I just can’t,” and he said, “Why?” again. “Because it hurts me!” I said loudly and he bent down with a smile and kissed me; I closed my eyes, I wouldn’t open my teeth and his tongue went shooting off into the side of my cheek. “No,” I said, “no,” but when I said it his tongue went in: he smelled of milk. He couldn’t get it off, he always said, even with all his baths: now so close he smelled like a dairy or a nursery or a soda fountain where they haven’t been clean, milk enveloping me like the heat. I was sweating now. The kiss would be long, I knew, with the tongue like that and the constant smell of milk; I thought of Byrds. Grandmother was from Lynchburg, too; she had the face of an angel, Bunny used to say; he said she used to make hermits and call him Bunny so when I heard him tell it I started to call him Bunny, too: how lovely and exciting, I thought, to be your father’s grandmother and have him climb up on your knee, pink-faced like he is now, I guess: I wondered if that lock of hair was there then, silver as cigarette ash, dangling: but Tony ran his hand up my side, milky hands. The tickle they made ached and didn’t tickle; I had a fever, maybe my skin was yellow, I thought, like the time I had jaundice, for the fever was the same and Tony’s hand ached and didn’t tickle. I felt his tongue now, the slick underpart and the strip of flesh beneath, loose like the comb of a rooster; so I let him: I told Tony once he was like Pride, like Ovid’s flea: he could creep into every corner of a wench, sit on her brow like a periwig, kiss her lips like, what was it? Feathers, birds. Fie, what a scent is here! I remembered that part, but he didn’t understand it, or that I meant milk. He stopped kissing me, looking down at me, his eyes amber as coughdrops, freckled blue. Once I cried when Harry took me to the river and said that I was fairer than the evening air, clad in the beauty of a thousand stars. “Come on now, goddammit,” Tony said. He took off my pants, lifting me underneath. I thought of feathers, birds, and when he went in it hurt, but no more than the other pain quiescent in me now like the claw of some bird waiting: I put my arms around him, feeling the hair. I could hear the clock whir so near me it brushed against my ear:
tick-tick-tick,
that minute hand making its perfect orbit in space, bearing us like freight through the sky, Harry and I sprawled along the springs and drowsing there to yawn and stretch and turn and watch the revolving diamonds, rubies red as blood from the cut throat of a pigeon, set perfect and complete among the precisely ordered, divinely ticking wheels. Sheltered from the sky like drowning, only better: the sun within submarine, aqueous, touching the polished steel with glints and flickers of eternal noonday light; so we’d have our sun among the springs and our love forever. When it was over, I was weeping. “What’s the matter, baby?” he said. “Nothing,” I said. “Well, quit it,” he said, “you’d think we didn’t know each other. You gonna say, ‘But I don’t know you very well’? Is that what you’re gonna say?” “I don’t know you very well,” I said. He said, “Oh, for Christ sakes, you gimme the creeps. You’re about as much fun as a stick.” I turned over on my side and watched the clock, not crying anymore. I heard Tony running water, washing himself, humming again, and I tried to remember how long I had known him, a month maybe, a week, it was hard to say: only the first time there had been something about the incinerator in the hall, and then we drank beer, talking about birds, and when I woke up I was feeling the nest on his shoulder, where hair. Birds, I mean; there was something confusing going on, I knew that. I pulled the alarm button up and looked down into the hole, but all I could see was one small white band of metal: that would be the dome where light seeped in: outside, the hands, the luminous dots—all these would be my conscience, and Harry and I would be hidden from that, thank God. Lenin said there was no God, and Stalin said collectivization + electrification = Soviet power, all working like a clock, tick-tock, and when Albert Berger said that, his eyes watered as if he’d been gassed and there was no God, he’d say, save Him in the spirit of the creatively evolved, in the electrons of a radar screen or in the molecules of DDT. Yes, Harry said, but DDT is death, God is life-force, love, whatever you will, but not death. And how do you know, said Albert Berger, and I said—remembering something I do not know, I was drunk I guess, with what Harry always called an alcoholic, facetious desire to shock—I said For now is Christ risen from the dead, the first fruits of them that sleep. Too loudly, the wise, quizzical, psychoanalyzed faces turning toward me from the floor, the martinis in mid-air pale as mountain water, all quiet, puzzled, expectant, and I said it again: The first fruits of them that sleep! and slipped off the couch to bruise my behind. I don’t know why I did it. I thought of Carey Carr. Outside the pigeons chuckled and rustled, throats swelling like bladders, iridescent, throbbing; if you cut them with a knife the blood would rush out; Dickie Boy couldn’t ever get big after the first time, he was afraid and sometimes he’d sob he was so frustrated, his bird was so small and futile, but he had warm hands and when we lay down in the darkness I felt his ribs. Tony walked across the floor, I couldn’t see him but he had his shorts on; he always did, with a bottle of beer. “What are you lookin’ at the clock for?” he said. “You give me the creeps.” I heard myself answering him. Strange. To answer like that, I thought: the voice disembodied, directionless, coming from nowhere, spoken to the pigeons or the whole wide blue air: “I am having communion with dead spirits.” I could hear the clock whirring against my ear, perfect and ordered and eternal. “Ah, you funny kid. Come on, honey, give us a loving kiss.” He pressed the beer bottle against my spine, I should have known: it went through me like a blade, only the blade was made of ice and it routed out that horrible claw: the cramp came groaning up through my womb and I cried out loud. “Oh Christ!” “Aw, baby, I didn’t mean to.” I lay back holding my belly, kneading the skin, wishing more than anything on earth for a hot-water bottle enormous and limber, as big as the room and so hot it would scald the flesh, and I was about to ask Tony—but I remembered, the bottle I had was busted. “Just get me a hot towel,” I said, “please, Tony, get it for me.” “I’m sorry, baby,” he said, leaning over; in the hair on his chest there was lint and one of my hairs, long and brown: I saw these as he bent over me, and the Christopher medal, dangling, trembling at the end of tiny golden links: the baby half-strangling the Christ-Carrier with His small brazen arms, the sea and the wind and the darkness—