Beautiful Kate (32 page)
Authors: Newton Thornburg
So, yes, I will admit that a case can be made that Cliff was no better than I, only more remorseful. And if you choose to believe it, I can understand. But I can also assure you that you are wrong. After living eighteen years with Cliff, I think I knew him well enough to state categorically that he would never have been
able
to commit incest. For me, this is simply a given, much as if I were to say that I know lambs are not predators. So I have always accepted it that all Cliff did with Kate that night was talk. At the same time, I realize that I must also accept the possibility that she may have
tried
with him, tried to find that intimacy she no longer could with me. And failing in that, as she had to, I imagine she then must have told Cliff about the two of us and how I had not been as strong or as “cold” as he was. Knowing her state of mind that night, and in fact all that summer, I would judge that she told him what had happened between us not as a confession but as an act of intentional and even calculated cruelty—though the style of it matters little, I know. It was the content that Cliff had to deal with and the evidence is that it pushed him over the edge. In destroying his perception of the two persons closest to him, Kate destroyed him as well.
Shaken and bewildered, Cliff must have started for home, driving as we all have driven on occasion: recklessly, unconsciously, so lost in thought we barely remember later having driven at all. And he must have gone into the curve faster than he should have and, losing control, sailed through the guardrail and crashed. Thrown from the car as it glanced off the first tree, he probably came upon Kate in the wreck just as I did later, with that same terrible vulnerability, totally unprepared to find instead of the live and lovely girl of a few seconds before that heinously mutilated
thing
inside. And unhinged by it, decimated by both guilt and shock, he immediately must have started running for home, heedless of his own serious injuries, driving himself with the singlemindedness of a lemming seeking the sea.
And that is all there is to it, as far as I am concerned. Cliff did not touch Kate, nor did he intentionally crash the car. All he did was kill himself.
As for Kate herself—why she did what she did, why she was as she was—I really don’t know. For years after I left here I consciously tried never to think about her or what had happened between us. And then later, as a young fool steeped in Freud and Jung and other vices, I convinced myself that the whole thing had been merely a matter of sickness, that it all had happened only because Kate had been emotionally ill, a victim of drives and passions she could not control or comprehend.
But as the years have passed, and with them my certitude about almost everything, I find myself wondering more and more if it wasn’t I rather than Kate who was the sick one, in that I denied my own nature, chose pale convention over the urgent bidding of my heart. Why is it so reasonable, I ask myself, to see Kate’s problem as a manifestation of emotional illness rather than as a case of simple honesty, the actions of a girl who had the will and spirit to go where her heart took her, no matter how alien or forbidden that place might have been? Often I wonder what would have happened if I too had had that kind of blazing honesty. Would our passion have consumed us, or would it simply have burned out in time, leaving the two of us to go our separate ways? Or just might it have endured, annealed us into hardest steel over the years? And I wonder: would she then be with me now, as old as I am to the hour, lined and heavier, but beautiful still, probably even more beautiful? Could it be that we might have survived it all, trampled the world with our love?
I don’t know. In fact, I don’t even know that she loved me. And that I guess is the problem, that I never know, that instead of answers I have only theories and explanations. But then even those are better than lies.
It was almost September when I left, on a night so hot and humid that I was afraid Jason or Mother might be awake and hear me leave. But if they did, they made no move to stop me. I packed my duffelbag and left a note, saying that I would not be coming home but would stay in touch. Then I walked to the freeway and hitched a ride going south to St. Louis, a route I had to take in order to follow Sixty-six west to California. But I had no plans to stop off at the riverfront and take in the strippers at the Lucky-O or to try to find my way to the bed of Black Mama again. For the time being, getting drunk and having sex were not so all-important. What I needed now was to be on my own, just me, alone. And as long as I could manage it, I didn’t want to know anyone and I especially didn’t want to love anyone. It was a callow thought, I know. But at eighteen, it seemed no less than the most basic condition for survival.
14
It has been three days since Jason died and over a week since the storm hit and the phone and electricity went dead. There was a one-day thaw but now it is cold again and the snow remains drifted at roof levels in most places. Still, this unprecedented breakdown in utility services remains a galling mystery to me. All I can figure is that there must have been an apocalyptic ice storm associated with the snow, possibly in the Ohio Valley, wiping out entire grids of phone and power lines—something like that. But as for the snowplow that never comes, that I can’t understand at all, except perhaps as a logical culmination of the breakdown in municipal services that has been plaguing most of us these past years.
Nevertheless I am not without hope. I keep believing that one of these days—one of these minutes—the phone is going to ring and it will be Sarah or Toni, first one and then the other, each saying that she has been trying to reach me ever since the storm hit. Sarah’s affair most likely will be over and she will be waiting for a bus home, hopefully not too much sadder and wiser than when she left here.
As for Toni, I have assumed for some time now that Junior probably dumped her the second he hit L.A., his hemorrhoids in irresistible itch to begin their inflamed tour of the gayer Hollywood bars. So by now I figure that she most likely is in Venice somewhere, staying with friends until she gets a job or maybe a modeling assignment or even a bit part. And I will admit it is my expectation that when she does call, it will be to beg me to come to her—because if she doesn’t, then I’ll just have to do the begging myself. Either way, I figure I can’t lose.
And if neither of them ever calls? Well, then I guess it will just be a matter of muddling through here: eating all the ketchup and peanut butter and sugar and whatever else there is, and keeping the fire going even if I have to start burning furniture eventually. But in time the snowplows
will
come through and the electricity
will
come back on—certainly that isn’t too rash an assumption, is it? And when those things do happen, then I can begin the long process of getting out of here, probably by borrowing against Jason’s estate so I can afford to bury him and return to the Coast to settle my problems there. Because I have no previous criminal record, I wouldn’t be surprised if all I got was a probationary sentence, which means that I could be out on the beach again in no time at all, strolling in the cool salt air past all those tanned young goddesses and idly trying to think up some get-rich-quick scheme (such as a horror script) so I could go on strolling there forever, with a goddess of my own at home, in the person of Toni.
But all that is still very much in the future. For now, there is only this littered kitchen table and the open-stove firelight spilling across the legal pad, turning it into something molten and shimmering, investing these words with magic of one kind anyway. As I write, the side of me that faces the fire is hot, while the other is cold. I hear the wind picking up again, singing under the eaves like a choir of castrati. If I go to the door and shine my dimming flashlight outside, all I will see is snow, light sprays of it exploding in the wind, adding to the great drifts against the house and the outbuildings. Above the door icicles hang ready to be picked, a Siberian’s fruit. And thinking of ice, I remember that earlier, when it was still light, I went upstairs and checked Jason’s body once more and found it beginning to putrefy in spite of the cold. So I packed it in snow, right on Sarah’s bed. (If and when she returns, I imagine she will want a new mattress.)
I can’t believe I am so close to the end of this record. It makes me wonder what I will do tomorrow night and the nights after that, especially if there is still no electricity and I can’t watch television to learn what has happened to us. The prospect of one day doing only that—sitting back and relaxing with others, talking, watching an electronic box—fills me with a minor terror, for I guess I have come to enjoy this silence, this oddly appealing communion with my own life. I will miss the darkness and the firelight playing in it, raising ghosts in every corner: Mother doing dishes at the sink, turning to say something to me or the kids; and Cliff standing there in embarrassed pride in his scout’s uniform, almost trembling for his father’s approval; and Kate—
everywhere
. In the lambent light, I see her lying in grass chewing on a haystem and I see her nude in front of the bathroom mirror and coming up out of the water and disappearing into my arms. And I ache for her, even now, after all these years.
Sometimes what I see in the light makes me weep and all I can do is settle back and give in to it, letting the tears come and come, as if they might wash the images away. And then there are other times when the images make me smile. I sit here with my pen lifted and my mind gone as suddenly I am a child again, running hand in hand with Kate and Cliff down the hillside through the high summer grass. Strangely, there is no laughter or in fact any sound at all, and the hill does not come to an end. The grass just goes on forever.
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