Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille (25 page)

I sighed with content. The empty years after college already were fading. Books, a comfortable chair, and people to talk to about them.

Lynn excused herself when we entered the other hallway. Her fingers grazed my cheek. “It’s really good to see you again, Allan.” She entered the first room before closing a door behind her.

Rick grimaced, his emotions hard to discern in the hallway’s dim ceiling light. “She’s not totally . . . healthy. She tires, I’m afraid. We both do.”

I touched my cheek. The year after college I’d taken up with a goth girl who looked somewhat like Lynn, except with black lipstick and multiple piercings. The same slenderness. A passing resemblance in her eyes and hair, but the relationship was a failure. She didn’t read beyond Anne Rice. She felt lovemaking was too earthy, too mundane, below her ideas about death, decay and her fascination with vampires. I tried, but I couldn’t picture Lynn when I was with her. The few times she consented, it was an act of quid pro quo, a straight exchange of services. She liked me to drive to a cemetery where I could go down on her in the car’s backseat, the windows open so the cut grass and freshly turned dirt smells would fill her nose. She longed to couple on a fresh grave or in a tomb, but I was too squeamish. Her voice was wrong. She was not Lynn.

Rick opened a second door. Beyond him, the light didn’t show more of the hallway than a few feet.

“You said in your letter that you weren’t doing well. Something about ‘afflictions?’”

“Yes.” A switch clicked on. “This is the guest bedroom. I hope it’s comfortable enough for you.” A bedside light on a small stand showed a bed, a bureau and a chair. Like the front room, tapestries hung from the ceiling to cover the walls. “Afflicted, did I say that? I suppose I am.”

“You said maladies, too.” I shivered. Away from the fireplace, the air bit with cave cold. I wondered if I had packed a sweater. A thick, folded quilt covered the foot end of the bed.

Two other doors opened into bedrooms. The next revealed a bathroom, where both the toilet and the sink had been shaped directly from rock. A black curtain covered the shower. I didn’t realize the bathroom had a mirror until I stepped in front of the sink, where my own face startled me.

“How many square feet?” I still couldn’t see the hallway’s end.

“Two thousand, originally.” He sounded ironic. “Now, I’ve lost track.”

The heart of Rick’s house came at the last door. Another peaked cathedral arch like the front entrance waited, but this was unadorned, and our footsteps echoed when we entered. Rick turned on a single lamp on a reading table flanked by two soft-looking chairs. Its weak rays barely reached the walls, twenty feet away, and what they illuminated were books on shelves all the way around the room. A ladder attached to a rail fifteen feet above and mounted on wheels below provided access to the higher volumes. My breath caught in my throat. Books filled every space, all leather-bound, and rarities, no doubt. Their smell filled the air, parchment and ink and binding glues.

“My library.” Rick waved his hand. “It and this house have been my life’s work.”

The books’ spines felt cool across my palm. They were solidly packed from end to end. I saw no place to add a new acquisition.

Rick stood beside me. “Here’s an oddity.” He took a book from a shelf above his head. “Look at this one.”

Its brown cover had no title. I moved to the light, but when I tried to open it, the pages stuck at the bottom as if glued. “It’s damaged.” I held it out to him.

“No, not really. Look at the edge.”

I turned the book on end. The bottom pages didn’t look like paper at all. The surface was slick, and it clicked against my fingernail.

“Fossilization takes centuries, they say. Water carries dissolved minerals, and the minerals displace the organic material, cell by cell, so thousands of years later we can find complete trunks from ancient trees. Perfectly duplicated leaves in stone.” He took the book back. “We find the dinosaurs, even, revealed in rock’s slow triumph. Stone echoes.”

“But it is, as you say, a gradual process. You can’t be implying that your book is turning into a fossil.”

“It has been on that shelf for fourteen months. Some of the titles have become . . . permanent, a part of the wall and shelf. The shelves themselves.” He shrugged. “I’m not sad about it. There’s a poetry here. If the trend continues, my library will always exist. I only read the same one or two of them anymore anyway.” His tone became wistful. “Mostly I like to come in here and sit with the books around me.”

I shivered again, but not from the cold.

“You must see this, though, at the back of the library.”

He led me to a narrow exit surrounded by shelves, but it didn’t look like the other doors in the house, although its top led to a point too. The edges were rolled and smooth, more like flesh than stone, and a damp seep glistened on the surface. Rick handed me a flashlight. “The electrical lines don’t go this far.”

I had to rotate my shoulders to squeeze through the door, and the wet stone moistened my shirt. The flashlight cut a clear shaft in the darkness to reveal the library floor’s perfect plane broken into gentle corrugations, and instead of walls, long, natural stone columns connecting the floor to the ceiling. Tan stone replaced the black. “You broke into a cave?”

“I don’t think so. I only discovered this a few weeks ago. It wasn’t as large then.”

“What do you mean?” The light played across the ceiling, catching water drops in brilliant flashes dangling from stalactite teeth.

“I mean, this room is new. It didn’t exist when I finished the house.”

When I turned, the flashlight changed his face into a landscape of bright whites and shadows. “I don’t understand.”

He walked into the strange room, dragging his hands across the stone on either side, past me so that he stood near the middle. “This is the affliction I wrote you about. My malady. My evolving rock house.”

“Jesus, Rick.” A water drop released from the ceiling, caught the flashlight’s beam for a glittering instant, then plinked loudly like a glass bell into a shallow pool. “What can I do? Why did you ask me to come?”

He looked at me intently. “We ended on some awkwardness, I remember. I’ve always been sorry for that. It was my jealous soul.”

I couldn’t think of an adequate reply. A straightforward apology left me uncomfortable. “Are there bats, too?”

Rick shook his head.

He pointed his flashlight at his feet. The pool picked up the glare. It was if he stood on a radiant platform. “You have the imagination for it. I would have thought of you, eventually, but it was Lynn’s idea. She asked me to write.”

After much conversation, I grew too tired to talk. Most of the time he sat on his library chair, a book unopened in his lap. He’d lit a candle and turned out the lamp. I sat with him next to that flickering flame, reminiscing about the books we’d read in college. It made me happy to talk with him again, like those times when all that mattered were our thoughts and interpretations, when we considered ourselves a part of the literary elite, polishing off volume after volume, washing them down with wine and talk and long passing nights listening to Lynn read. I thought again of her leg draped over mine and the small contractions in her calf as her speech bathed us, of the intensity in her gaze moving from word to word. She kissed me goodnight the last time we read together, at the door of Rick’s room. It was the only time. The next day was when Rick grew so angry about the antique book.

Lynn had asked for me!

When I couldn’t hold my eyes open any longer, I excused myself to my room. It wasn’t until I was in bed that I looked at my watch. It was only 6:30 p.m. I turned the light out.

The darkness descended. Nothing else describes it. Lying in bed, the quilt pulled to my chin, the utter blackness of a cave enveloped me. My eyes strained to see anything, vainly, waited to adjust to the darkness, but there was nothing to adjust to, and for the first time since I had entered Rick’s rock house, the weight of the mountain above me made its presence known. The quiet, too, was utter. No click of a clock. No whisper of air conditioning. No refrigerator buzz. Nothing except the rush of my own pulse in my ears, and soon I couldn’t hear that. I held my breath in the silence. Finally, I felt on the table beside the bed for my watch. The tiny green light exploded behind the time: 6:43. It winked out. I pressed it again just to see the hopeful green planet swimming in the unlit space. But when I pressed a third time, the light shone dimmer, and on the last press, the light barely came on before fading to nothing. My battery had died. Sadly, I put the watch back on the table. It felt cowardly to turn the table light on, and Rick had said they budgeted the electricity.

Once, when I was a child, I’d gone on a cave tour with my father. The guide stopped us in a curved hallway, and then he turned out the lights. He said, “This is what a blind man sees every day of his life.” Delighted at first, I wiggled my fingers in front of my face, but the guide kept the lights off for too long. I pressed against the wall, trying to grow small, too afraid to reach for my father. My heart stuttered. Then, something touched the back of my neck.

Later, they told me I had had a seizure.

I don’t know. I don’t remember that part, but it seemed to me, in the instant before all memory fled, something whispered in my ear, its talon on my neck, sharp nail against my skin, teeth clicking together, an airy whisper saying things I didn’t want to understand.

Now, in the room’s darkness, I lay still for a minute, an hour, a night. Who could guess how long? It seemed, bizarrely, as if the bed were slowly spinning. I tried counting breaths, and wondered if I would be able to tell the difference between being awake in the lightless room or asleep in a lightless dream.

Then, I did hear a noise, a slippery creep that could have been nothing, the sound of a single hair in my ear brushing against another, or the near undetectable rush of a lone drop of water running down the wall, but it repeated. Something was in my room. I became a child again as the steps approached my bed, singular, each, and loud now that came toward me, until they must be at my bed’s side. Then, a touch against the quilt. A silky swish of something brushing toward my face.

My heart, my chest, the muscles of my neck, tensed so I thought I would burst. My back arched slightly as my body clenched. I couldn’t scream or voluntarily move. Maybe I whimpered. I’m not proud of it, but the darkness like that, and the sound in the black. Then, a warm caress on my face, a warm breath of air against my lips. Lips on my lips. It took me a second to react, to realize the tongue seeking mine was real and human. I reached out from under the quilt to find an arm, and my fingers moved up to wrap in long hair. The lips pulled away. Cloth rustled. Soft clothes dropped to the floor. The quilt lifted to let in a cool draft, and the bed rocked. Knees bumped knees. The kiss again. I caressed her, slid down to the hip’s fine curve and pulled her toward me.

In that total dark, only the baby seal feel of her skin on mine existed. Only her exhalations, warm and explosive against my neck. Only the taste of her mouth, the sweat on her face. Only her fertile smell. We could have been floating above a desert or marooned at sea or on an arena’s wide-open floor.

Some time later, her leg still draped over my stomach, her head on my shoulder and my hand on the small of her back, my breath at last slowed to normal. I broke the peace. “After all these years, why now?”

She kissed the underside of my chin, then moved her hand between her thigh and my stomach, down until she held me again, and soon, much sooner than I would have believed possible, I stirred. She levered herself back into position, supple as an eel, but this time my senses expanded beyond the languid cavort beneath the quilt, beyond my hands gliding from sweat-slick shoulder blades to curving back, beyond our consuming mouths, to the room’s stone walls, as if our gasping breath served as a bat’s sonar, sending signals back to me. I sensed the room and the halls and the moisture trapped in the rocks, and a liquid, mineral sentience around us, listening and urging, greedily absorbing, until, behind that, I felt a brooding overwhelming possessiveness. The walls of Rick’s rock house became quiveringly alive, dampness flushed, as if the mountain was reaching into the room, guiding us, huge limestone fingers holding us together, connecting us so firmly and deeply and singly that I thought we had become just one orgasmic being. For an instant I tried to slide out from under Lynn, from under the mountain, but the feeling was too strong, too good, too frightening, and the second time with her it was if my skull emptied out along with everything else.

When it ended, Lynn stroked my chest. Her damp hair stuck to the side of my face. She spoke. “You ask why now?” I listened to the empty room, just as sightless, but the mountain had retreated, and I felt we were alone. She said, “Nostalgia, maybe.” Her palm lay still on my heart. “I needed a change.” As quietly as she had entered, she left, navigating from the black room by feel or memory.

She’d said, “nostalgia,” but we’d never been lovers before. Nostalgia for what? I wondered. But I didn’t think about it long; I could still feel her skin against my hand, the touch of her lips under my chin. The sheets were clingy with our sweat.

I don’t know how long I was awake after that sleep before I realized it. What I noticed was a swelling of passing candlelight under my door, spreading long yellow fingers that crept across the floor before vanishing, and I felt as if I had slept for some time. I didn’t stir at first. The stately wash of light crossing the stone produced a strong déjà vu, like this wasn’t the first passing of the light, as if this was a routine for me.

Turning the light on, I got out of bed. Goosebumps prickled my legs as I pulled on my socks, but even with them, a cool draft I hadn’t noticed the night before crossed my ankles. Fully dressed, wearing both my sweatshirts, I followed the draft to one of the tapestries. The heavy fabric pulled aside reluctantly, the bottom edge of the cloth no longer cloth at all, but solid rock. At the base of the wall, a ragged hole a foot across blew a steady breeze. The room light didn’t reveal anything past the first foot, but the small tunnel sloped down from the floor. Roomy for a rat; too small for a person.