Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (77 page)

He had just begun to nibble at a can of salmon when his cancer thrust a skeleton hand up his windpipe and his breastbone groaned with pain; no, that was him groaning. For a long while he bent over the sink, struggling to vomit. (If it were only true what the statues of angelic harpists promised:
ASLEEP
!) Finally the fish came up, streaked with black blood. Eased and exhausted, he lay down on the sofa.

In a rage he snatched up another of her unread letters: Now she was the one who demanded to know the future!
I always need to know everything for me to be comfortable.
She was just like him! Meanwhile he was everything he had disliked in her: suspicious, withholding, prissily critical, even nasty—while the poor girl timidly hoped for his approval, and even worried that she might be bothering him—how could he have not seen it? Again and again she worried that he would leave her; she reread his letters with foolish minuteness comparable to his—she was a darling, really; his
badness
must have driven her away.

He felt all the more ashamed, not only for having been harsh but also for prying into her heartpourings to her young boy—none of his business! He was an old man eavesdropping on children. So he turned to the letters from the year when she was dying, and read:
Are you really such a sweetheart? How could I have not known that about you? You know I don't want to ask you questions because I don't want to pry. Do you care if I do? Someday I'll write you about something—a really vivid memory I have of something we did in high school. You'll really laugh and kick yourself that you didn't know what I thought.
What right did he have to spy on this
doomed married woman and the man with whom she platonically flirted? He was a grime-eaten angel whose stone trumpet was as cracked as his penis.

How have I forgotten so much? I was certain I'd never let go any of it. And it hasn't really been long! Why can't I remember more? It's as if my seventeen-year-old Victoria were but a blurry, roughed-out figurine of jeweler's wax—or a shapeless corpse. I'll go to her—tonight, and tomorrow night, if I'm well enough. No, I'll remember her tonight and study the moon map. Those photographs help me at least as much as does visiting her. And if I stay too long at the cemetery I'll get sicker; I can feel my tumor when I'm there, for some reason. So let me just read her letters once more—not the ones I don't remember but the ones I've come to know again.

Outside the window, his conception of Victoria hovered in the trees like a solitary gall.

So much of the loveliness of that summer had had to do with waiting for her; sometimes he met her once a week, occasionally more often. Until their next meeting he had her latest letter to read over and over with desperate happiness.

Shyly, desperately, happily the boy followed the blonde girl with his eyes. He slept with her letters under his pillow. Since she was more a part of her family than he of his, her letters sometimes described her brother and her sister, or her mother's health. He was never in her home; he never saw her bedroom.

Does old age invariably imagine youth to be a more innocent time? After all, babies keep getting made and grownups keep getting depraved. In any event, he almost never even held her hand. He never passed a night with her; nor was he with her at that moment past dawn when the cicadas begin to stridulate. He did remember meeting her in a park; he had walked and she had ridden her bicycle. The grass was so green around them that the greenness had stained the inside of his skull, although now it was verdigrised, a penny in a skeleton's hand. He remembered the
summer humidity, and her lovely young face; but their time together never exceeded two or three hours, and sometimes she didn't come as she had promised.

Just as Victoria's not yet reread letters lay waiting for him nearly as invitingly as when they had been new—all the more now, perhaps, for the white envelopes had aged ever so delicately to cream, their thirteen-cent stamps were sweetly antique, the writing on them was precious since the hand was dead, never mind the modest yet significant alteration of the English language since then—and the unremembered contents could not affright him more than any page in some old love story (besides, it wouldn't end until that horrible orange envelope)—so this morning, and the summer world flowing from it, promised him an innocuous sweetness. The dawn was not far gone; the breeze was cool. Feeling less unwell than usual, he decided for that day to live his life instead of Victoria's.

Behind Hal Murmuracki's Chapel of Flowers was an abandoned gas station, after which the swamp began. Nobody he knew had gone there. In truth, he was less of an adventurer than Luke or Isaac; he entered the swamp almost as an exercise; had his tumor tortured him as much as usual, he would have been satisfied to be alone in repose, in his bed, his own place; he didn't need to set out anywhere; he was already suited to being dead. But (so Luke might have said) why not try what did not suit him?

As sky and meadows brightened behind the cool reeds, he felt grateful for the newness of life, and nearly believed himself to be healthy. Happy thoughts of previous women illuminated him in much the same way that morning light jitters back and forth on the spiderwebs between jade reeds; rather than perceiving complete strands, one sees continually altering segments of midair brightness.

When last night's darkness slinks back into reed-shade, one feels the opportunity to play an important part: Very soon I too will make something of myself; I long to; I expect to; for who could waste this morning light? Before the sun has drunk away everything, I will drink my share from the cool breath of reeds just as I have drunk and will drink again from Victoria's cool reed-breath . . .— But then, when the light exposes
each reed in earnest, leaving only outlines shadowed, disappointment arrives.— Once he had seen the corpse of a young murdered woman who had been looking forward to a party. Not yet autopsied, she lay in her pink dress, with pink ribbons in her hair, her face bloody and yellow; and the stink of excrement from her abdominal wound was the smell of disappointment. Had her dress been alive, it would have wished to fly away from her; it could still be happy and dance. Here lay a woman who had very likely herself been happy sometimes, who had hurried in excitement to her death, and now there was nothing but disillusionment and failure.

In his memory that pink dress resembled a shady place not yet overrun by solar heat; still the night fragrance could hide here for another quarter-hour, defying the encircling day. But in full light, with the chance to make something of himself now once more safely past, the green reeds were going a lovely silver, their tips whitewashed so newly, the birds now awake (by now the cemetery grass would be a dreary orange-brown); and still he thought to improve his day just as morning gilds grassheads and wet grass. Morning presented him with the colors of berries and the songs of meadowlarks, the dark water beneath bright reeds, algae'd water like jellied jade, two rabbits chasing each other in a circle—and now in the widening of the morning, the smell of reeds and water began to be superseded by the delicious odors of trees.

The whipping of the trees made him queasy. It was the trees, nothing else. If only they would stop! Closing his eyes did not help, because he knew that the trees were still writhing. Making another effort, he stared them down. They swayed until he could no longer remember every place that they had been, which was when he vomited. So he got into his car and drove home. Needless to say, no time of day is as profitless to ghost-lovers as high noon, particularly in summer. Life sweats away our thanatotic idealizations, and then where are we? Toying with two of Victoria's unremembered letters, he smiled, but decided to treasure them as they were for a while longer. It was not right to decant her sayings when he felt less than his best.

It was a very hot day. He lay in misery, waiting for his prescription narcotics to rescue him. He would not reenter the hospital; those people
would weigh down his misery with powerlessness, and he would still die. Cheered by his determination to be free (and forgetting that he had already made it), he opened a letter and read:

Dear Vickie:

You're tipsy. No, I'm sober. Then why are you writing this? Because I don't want to go too long without having him receive a letter even if it's not what he wants. Give him what he wants, Vickie. No, Victoria, I don't know what he wants from me. You do, mostly. What do you expect, a list of rules? Do this, don't do that? Pour your heart out to me, screw around all you want but leave me your soul. Write me intense romantic letters every Sunday over tea and biscuits. Scent your letters. Discuss your erotica. I'm tired. Who isn't?

In twenty years I bet I'll have breast cancer. I wonder what it feels like to lose a breast. If I'm going to be unhealthy I'm not going to live. Yes, you'll show them, won't you? Lung and breast cancer, kidney disease and maybe a goiter, and you'll just go and die. You're unstable, aren't you, Vickie? I admit it. Not everyone does. After I'm done with prettiness, I know what I am—silly as it is. Vickie, no one thinks I'm a rock of security, but do they know you're compulsive, self-destructive, paranoid? Probably.

Will this amuse him?

Are you amused?

I'll tell you, Vickie, when he answers.

Will he answer?

Sure, he's probably cross at me but he'll answer me.

Love,

Toria.

P.S. My mother has a tumor in her breast. I hope it isn't malignant. Selfishly, I'm worried not only for her but for me and the children I'll have.

P.P.S. I'm still getting the great American suntan in my wholesome sexy swimsuit and Riviera sunglasses. You in your hijacker sunglasses and me in mine, what a pair! I'm reading
The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir,
The Hite Report,
and
The Total Woman.
I've decided to become a man—grow hair on my chest and cultivate a tight ass.

P.P.P.S. Purge the earth. Kill every third person. No, every fourth. No, just all those that protest.

Luke's friend Raymond had sometimes spoken quite calmly and freely of his first wife, the one who had left him and whom he still loved the most. And Luke used to take pleasure in speaking of Eve, whom, as he freely confessed, he loved because he never knew her; some years it had seemed as if he loved her more than Stephanie, out of self-spite or something more glorious. By the time he had thinned out, staggering dizzily and clutching at his greying head, he rarely mentioned Eve. As for Victoria, hopefully her husband had both known her and prized her over other women; whereas this formerly seventeen-year-old lover of hers was only now getting acquainted with her. What he had begun to learn from rereading her old letters shamed him: even then she had offered him this knowledge of her, openly and honestly—perhaps because she did not love him, for if she did, would she have been so brave? Or did this conclusion simply indicate how debased his idea of love must be? But then who could be as cruel as Victoria, who when she went away to college liked to calmly, brightly write him about all the boys to whom she opened her legs? As to whether these revelations had hurt him at the time, he had no recollection. After her he had had, among others, a number of prostitute girlfriends, and even when his middleclass sweethearts cheated on him and lied about it, he never felt especially jealous—oh, a little, perhaps. Had Victoria broken him of that habit? He longed to rush off to the cemetery right then; he had many things to ask her. But some of love's most delicious business takes place behind the beloved's back—for instance, remembering her. There were times that long ago summer when he got to see Victoria for an hour—and then, while he was with her, he loved her so much that he wished they were already apart, so he could begin to remember her sayings and smiles; if he stayed with her too long, he might forget one or two of them. (Which ones
hadn't
he forgotten by now?) Smelling the insides of the envelopes, and sometimes peering inside them just in case there might be something still undiscovered which his dead girl had sent him, he chewed pain pills. He would have liked to ask Luke's advice: Next time he went to the cemetery, should he, so to speak, go deeper? At seventeen he had a male friend to whom he related everything, while Victoria must have had some other seventeen-year-old girl,
or perhaps her younger sister, to whom she confided this or that about
him
—or had she truly been so strong, or isolated, that she kept him to herself? He wished to describe to Luke what it was like to see Victoria welling up out of her grave like a swarm of fireflies; sometimes her skull grinned at him like a stone lantern before the flesh seethed mistily and milkily over it. Knowing that the dead could come back was one of the great experiences of his life; he yearned to tell Luke all about it. But presumably Luke, being dead, already knew. Anyhow, shouldn't he have used the green potion to bring Luke back, instead of putting Victoria first? No; Luke would not have wanted to return; that would have been unkind. Then why wasn't it unkind to resurrect Victoria? Well, she was confined to her grave; it wasn't as if he had kidnapped her out of oblivion and imprisoned her like a pretty goldfish! Then where was Luke? What if he too were trapped? At least his ashes were scattered in the mountains. And Luke had assured him, he had insisted and promised (although how could he know?) that there was no postmortem consciousness; did that mean that Luke was safe from being one with the old man whose marble head gazed sternly out of the niche in his family skeletons' landmark?

Victoria, or at least her circumstances, might have intrigued Luke. If nothing else, Luke would have listened to him kindly and patiently. His grief for Luke was as deep as a bullfrog's voice in a sweltering swamp whose summer evening smell of sunburned live oaks now begins to ooze away at the edges, for fingers of coolness are oozing out of the muck; now the light softens from gold to white, and dusk dances on the triggerhairs of grasses.