Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (71 page)

When he found the key three days later, he had given up looking for it. Most certainly he had tried every key in the ceramic dish. This one, the ugly-headed object, lay beside the dish as if it had always been there. He turned the lock and opened the drawer. So many women! Luke had met several of them.— Bella struck me as brilliant from the beginning, he said. But she never did her homework. I wonder if she's lost her mind?— Then for a moment the two friends would remember Bella together, and because Bella had been so long ago there was no pain, only the moderate pleasure which scientific colleagues might share when they identified another previously uncatalogued virus.— Beatrice was my favorite, Luke would say. I felt like she and I had a lot in common. What a goddamned nightmare she was. Have you heard from her?— And he would feel happy that Luke was remembering him by remembering his girlfriends.

He scooped up letters and let them fall. Now he was getting tired. At the very bottom (for she had been his first) lay the sack of letters from Victoria, in the fat envelope and the thin one.

He smiled; his heart beat fast. It was she whom he now most longed to know.

Had he first met her in later life he might have found her ordinary, although she probably wasn't, this slightly plump blue-eyed blonde who had once been most provisionally his; and if he could have come across her now as she was then, he would simply have turned away from
seventeen-year-old jailbait. But since he had known her then as
he
was then, he was free to claim her.

People smilingly refer to “puppy love,” for most of us do pass through it. Considered as a stage of character formation, it becomes innocuous, necessary. In its throes, of course, sufferers perceive it differently. His passion for Victoria had been absurdly noble. He accepted any negligence from her, even cruelty, without complaint; and while an onlooker might have been functionally correct to posit in this the desperate resignation of a lonely, unloved, self-despising adolescent, all the same, the boy
did
love her with all his best impulses. Yes, he lusted after her, as well he should have; certainly his infatuation remained nearly unencumbered by self-knowledge, let alone any comprehension of the girl herself; but it is touching and commendable as well as laughable that he would have done anything for her. And when she ended it, he imagined in his grief that he would never again be able to give himself to another as utterly as he had to her. In fact, as was proved by all those other letters in his desk drawer, he managed quite well—but had he done any better than manage? In the sensitivities of children—to raised voices, violence against animals, the softness of grass—there lies, if not wisdom, an empathy, which it is one of maturation's express purposes to blunt. So our smiles when puppy love gets mentioned are not entirely mocking; we remember when we were better. For a year or two, until he forgot her more thoroughly, he was pleased to blame Victoria for the ever increasing selfishness which he deployed in his romances. Irregularly bright glades of memories, hedged in as if by marshes or poison oak, comprised most of what he had left of her. In the arms of subsequent lovers he orbited over the Marsh of Mists, then the Marsh of Epidemics, the Marsh of Decay, round and round, and it seemed that the future would always be peach-colored like the June sky at sunset. By the time he was middle-aged, he and his male friends agreed that it was a fine thing to know exactly what one desires in life, and to demand it of each night-companion (ghosts rising up like angry bluejays at dawn). They convinced themselves that the young women who in truth had no more use for them than for their worn out grandfathers would have constituted annoyances, because, being young, the women must not have figured themselves out. Oh, how fine to have oneself figured out! To be an adventurer in a mystery, asking for nothing,
speeding through space toward the silver-goldness of the Lunar Alps, and seeing for the very first time a round dark crater (Victoria's navel) aglow along part of its circumference, and otherwise shadowed—to bear happy hopes of knowing the Rhipaean Mountains, the Rheita Valley, the Sirsalis Rille, when knowing them would actually be above our capacity, or else be death—to experience each moment with Victoria as so perfect that its recollection fills up the darkest separations from her—to feel dizzy at the first sound of her voice—how preposterous! So he locked her letters away and mislaid the key.

Just then it was enough simply to lay out those two large envelopes on his desk. He sat there with his right hand on them until the doorbell rang. His next door neighbor had offered to drive him to the hospital.

At some point we ought to discuss palliative care, said the doctor.

Don't worry about it, he replied. I have guns.

For an instant the doctor appeared offended. Then he drummed his index finger rapidly on his knee and said: Have you ever tried antidepressants?

The neighbor drove him home, and he thanked her. Another neighbor whom he barely knew had sent him flowers. That must mean that he would die. He smiled, thinking of Victoria's letters. The evening sky glowed white, and the scent of jasmines descended upon him. All at once he grew rich in hopes and projects. But when he went upstairs, all he looked at was his moon map. Then he lay down.

That night he dreamed that in his father's desk were two drawers which somehow also existed as doorways. One of them had always given onto sunlight before; now its interior was nearly as dark as the lunar seas, which are really lava. The other, which had been dark, seemed to have taken on depth and luster, like an attic filled with someone else's dust-gilded toys.

From the fat envelope he first drew by chance that letter from thirty-five years ago when with her typical self-fullness she called herself
lonelier than an angel must feel. What am I doing? And I feel rebellious. I want to
disagree with everything you said in your letter and I want to escape the caresses. I want to be left alone.
But he couldn't take that hint, not in those days when he had no one else. Thank goodness he'd since been given love by others! His memories of them resembled lichen on the shoulders of a semilegible gravestone.

Having forgotten her for so long, he had evidently attached to her a spurious sweetness; and as he continued to pick through those envelopes, each with its thirteen-cent stamp, he grew melancholy, although not overmuch, to see how greatly she had resented and sought to escape him, in part because he had not been a wholesome giving sort, but also because she had been, as she kept saying, restless, almost as if she sensed she would die young. If anything, it was to her credit that under the circumstances she sent him so many letters—although she might have done so simply because she had not known herself—or been instilled with a habit of polite kindness . . . How could he even remember her, especially when he had never known her? Calling her up now was equivalent to imagining how it would have been on the moon when the so-called planetesimals were striking, exploding and cratering.

Scratching his grey cheeks, he found himself even less convinced that he liked this dead young woman. Of course, he barely liked himself now (never mind that he'd indulged himself unfailingly); so what would he have felt for that skinny, acne'd teenager who offered Victoria so little beyond his need—and, of course, that most undervalued of treasures, unsullied adoration? Isn't that what we want others to feel for us, even while experience renders us incapable of giving it to them?

Well, even nowadays he considered himself less selfish than some. For instance, he had never loved any woman the less for being plain; that remained to his credit. All the same, how lovely Victoria had been!

In the drawer there were photographs and faintly scented hairclasps, withered flowers pressed within small folded squares of watercolor paper, photographs of women's faces and bodies, single earrings, half-rings and other such love tokens, postcards from unforgotten Asian prostitutes (he still imagined that he never forgot anybody), a tiny wax-sealed bottle which contained green liquid, happy letters, beseeching ones and
ones which promised or sweetly commanded (he had already destroyed most of the angry ones), roots and nests of memory all in a mucky tangle, living in the decaying matrix of too many years—and, yes, back at the very bottom again, hence appropriate to Victoria, the fat envelope and the thin one. The fat one held the letters from when they were seventeen, each one in its original envelope, the righthand side of which had been carefully, reverently slit open by the idolatrous boy. Yes, thirteen-cent butterfly stamps! Had life truly been so inexpensive in 1977?

The thin envelope contained their early middle age, when she had decided to reestablish contact with him. He had opened these communications almost carelessly, discarding the envelopes. By then it had not been such a thrill to receive letters from a woman—particularly from one who had jilted him. As might be expected, the papers were in no kind of order. They now seemed as bright as sun-caught dust-grains on a spiderweb over dark ivy. He took up a pink sheet of paper and read:
I know I said I wouldn't write.
Evidently, like Isaac, she had broken off with him again; he couldn't remember. Well, she was married. He had been mildly surprised and pleased to hear from her at all. In those days they each sought to respect the lives they had made.
I lied,
said the letter
. I've just been told that I have invasive breast cancer and will have a mastectomy and removal of the lymph nodes within the week. I am scared to death. I have three small children, one almost five, a three-year-old and the baby is ten months. I cannot believe this is happening. I am not vain; I do not care about my chest, but I want to live. Do you believe in God? I'll have radiation and chemotherapy. So, tell me. This fear, I can smell it, is it like being in war? What do you read when you are afraid? You don't have to write; you don't even know me, nor I you, and as I said before, my husband would hate this. But I still need to write it. If I figure out why, I'll explain someday.

In another yellowing envelope with a thirteen-cent Liberty Bell stamp and a 1977 postmark lay a cheap machine print whose color had shifted redwards. His smiling blonde Victoria, clasping her hands across the waistline of her leopard print skirt, holding a blue balloon (on the reverse she'd written
always the child
) was now almost a redhead. The shadows of the park had gone plum and winelike. Victoria stood flushing as if she were drunk, embarrassed or filled with desire for him to whom she had
given this portrait. She was still a virgin then, at least so far as he knew. The blue sky had darkened; the balloon's shadows were purple. When he saw this photograph now, it meant more to him than before. She had sent it to him, so he had supposed, as a halfhearted appeasement; doubtless he had been hounding her for a picture, and on the back she had also penned
Well, I'll do better but please accept this anyway.
Doing better would have in his seventeen-year-old definition entailed writing:
I love you.
Well, why should she? Being young, she possessed the pleasure of declining to define herself. And she hadn't loved him, or if she had, it meant nothing in the end. Cocking her head, tossing her breast-length hair, Victoria smiled widely at him from the wine-rich past.

It was in fact a treasure that she had given him. No one else would ever get another from her. Unaware of her own death and his elderly ugliness, the girl offered him her bare knees, and the wind pulled her balloon eternally away. It looked to have been spring; the trees were barely in leaf. At whom was she smiling, and why? He had never thought to ask. With his now characteristic resentful suspicion he unfolded the accompanying letter, whose cheap white paper had shifted nearly orange, and read:
I think I'm going to miss you. Our relationship is different now, but I feel happier about it—
because I was gone, he thought.
My sister and I are expanding our minds by watching
Rebel Without a Cause
on television. I hope it ends soon. I hope you hold at least fond memories of this place and me and semi-dormant expectations. Needing you again does not totally please me—I think you realized that. Is there anything you don't realize about me? If there is, I fear distance can only make it easier to see. Please keep your promise. When you decide to break it, please give me a little time and notice. Will I suffer withdrawal symptoms? Love, Victoria.

So she
had
loved him, at least on that day. What more could he have asked for?

And once upon a time a certain witch had loved him, too. As one might expect, she was passionate; there was no end to the things she could do in bed. In his memories she resembled the silvergold disk of the evening sun in a wall of wild grapes. Although he had enjoyed her body, she otherwise bored and occasionally frightened him, whereas he had been the
love of her life. She had risen up as if out of the ground to seize hold of him, jealous of every instant that he failed to inhale her breath. He never comprehended why she loved him; nor could she understand why she remained unloved by him.— It's not simple chemistry, said the witch. If that's all it were, I could fix that with two potions. What's your astrological sign?

He told her.

Oh, said the witch. Well, no wonder.

Indeed, she could have made him love her, through much the same procedure as the one through which an impure tomb-spirit may be tricked into inhabiting another dead carcass. To her credit, she did not want that.

One morning she went away. Her parting gift was a tiny bottle of green liquid. She said to him: This can be used only once. If you pour it out on something belonging to a woman, the woman will appear before you.

He thanked her.

She gave him a locket whose window disclosed a many-fingered glob of mercury. For years she had worn it between her breasts. She said: Pour out the bottle on this, and I'll instantly return to you.