Love and Sleep (39 page)

"Balloons,” said Sam.

"Bubbles,” Pierce said. “Which are heavy till you blow them, though."

"You,” said Sam, with a weirdly grown-up gesture of coquettish dismissal. “You are so
silly
."

"What you
should
do,” Rosie said, “is get a car. Isn't there at least a bus from the store to town?"

"Well I noticed there was,” Pierce said. “It picks people up at a bench there. But everyone waiting for it seemed to have a good reason for taking it. Extreme old age. Feeble-mindedness. Bad eyesight. Real poverty. You know. I felt I might be unwelcome. A guy who obviously has no reason not to be driving."

"
Now
,” Rosie said to Sam, “he is being silly."

Pierce really had intended, without exactly foreseeing the process, eventually to learn to drive and then acquire a car. He had arrived at his present age unlicensed in part because he had not very often or very badly needed to drive—he had gone to a private prep school from which egress was largely forbidden during the school terms, and at Noate, his university, only upperclassmen were allowed cars. By then a distaste for cars and driving had become a feature of the eccentric character he was assembling for himself like a suit of homemade armor, and in the city no one drove anyway, no one Pierce knew.

But there was an abiding and aboriginal fear too, that had kept him from ever being tempted; where cars had been to Joe Boyd and the boys of the Cumberlands heart-filling personifications (even named, often) of freedom and power and heat, to Pierce they had been like the dogs chained to stakes outside Cumberland cabins, or encountered roaming free in the hollers: big beasts, minding their own business but to be dealt with gingerly or not at all. He still sometimes dreamed of such dogs, but filled with mindless malevolence, their chains giving way like twine; and he had dreams too of finding himself inexplicably at the wheel, under way and the pedals useless, the car speeding willfully toward ruin.

Anyway so many bodies had been broken, so many cars demolished in those years by the boys of Kentucky, so many boys themselves slain too (crushed like nutmeats within their huge old Hornets or new Hawks or Impalas, boot still on the accelerator, cigarette tucked behind the ear), that the insurance premium on such drivers was fearsome; Sam decided that Pierce and Joe Boyd would have to raise the extra themselves in order to get their learner's permits, which Joe Boyd somehow did quickly and easily and Pierce never tried very hard to do. His female cousins had no such impediment, and got their licenses early on (Hildy even learned under Sam's instruction, a mortification she felt earned her millennia of credit hereafter). So Pierce wangled rides with them.

"It's not that I have something against cars,” he said to Rosie. “I have fond feelings for some. I lost my virginity in a car."

"Oh yes?"

"A Lark,” Pierce said. “A now-forgotten kind. I would be one of very few, I would think."

"Are you going to get a license?"

"I have every intention. I have a learner's permit. My lifetime third. The others went stale before I learned."

"Oh right. Val drove you in. To get the permit."

"It was remarkable,” Pierce said. “A dozen teenagers, one widow suddenly on her own, and me."

"Did you pass?"

"That was the most remarkable part. You were set ten questions to answer, but you only needed to get eight right.
Only eight.
Which seems to mean that you could be under the impression, for instance, that the red octagon sign is the sign for Caution and not Stop, and still be allowed to take the wheel."

"Oh everybody knows.” Rosie pushed the Bison around a broad traffic circle, heading for the exit into Blackbury Jambs. A sign directed her to Merge. Now how exactly (Pierce wondered) do you Merge? Are there rules? Not explained in his learner's manual. Just sort of ease in apparently. Everybody knows.

"I saw Boney today,” Rosie told him.

"How is he?"

"Well. He's coming home."

"He's not sick anymore,” Sam said.

"Good,” said Pierce.

"Well,” Rosie warned. Pierce asked no more.

They entered onto the bridge across the somnolent summer river, and the ridges of its surface thrummed beneath the Bison.

"When you see him again,” Pierce said, “tell him I've found some interesting things. Not,” he cautioned, “like
astonishing.
But. Kraft did own some nice books."

"I bet."

He told her about the
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.

"The what,” Rosie said, in exasperated wonderment. “Good lord."

"Say it again,” Sam said laughing.

Pierce split the words: “Hypn. Eroto. Machia. Poliphili. That's: Sleep. Love. Struggle. Of Poliphilus. You might say: The Love-struggle of Poliphilus in a Dream.
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili."
He looked back at Sam and laughed aloud with her. “Absolutely one of the great strange unreadable books of all time."

"But you've read it."

"Well.
In
it. There is a fabulously valuable first edition with illustrations by Botticelli. This isn't that one."

"No, well."

"But it is a real nice sixteenth-century edition with wood engravings. Weird ones too. From the great days of weird book illustration."

They had come to a stop on River Street, by the variety store down from the library, at the corner of Hill Street, up which Pierce's street was.

"Valuable?” Rosie asked.

"Yes."

"But not really..."

"Not. No."

A little red Asp sports car was wiggling into a small parking space across the street from the library. It had several small dents and primed spots on it, as though it were accustomed to tangling with other cars. It just fit, finally, with its shapely rear end somewhat protruding.

"Say it
again
,” said Sam.

"Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,” said Pierce.

A long-legged woman climbed from the car, her dark loosely braided hair aswing; Pierce thought he saw her notice their station wagon, and then take no notice.

"You know,” Pierce said to Rosie, “I once thought she was you."

"I know."

"I mean I once thought she was Sam's mother, and. Because of."

"Yes."

He had thought for a time that this dark woman—Rose Ryder, pulling a big bag from the Asp's rear space and hooking it over her bare tanned shoulder—was the Rosie who was Sam's mother, Mike Mucho's soon-to-be-ex wife, and his old friend Spofford's passion: she, and not carrot-topped Rosie here with him. Rose Ryder crossed the street to the library with a smooth pardlike stride that Pierce enjoyed watching.

"Hey. It's Rose,” Sam said pointing. “Where's Daddy?"

"I don't know, hon. At work, I guess."

"Are they still,” Pierce asked. Sam's father Mike was also Rose Ryder's lover, which had added to Pierce's confusion.

"I don't hear,” Rosie said, a little curtly. “I think it's mostly over."

"Huh,” Pierce said contemplatively.

"Are you getting out here,” Rosie said, “or do you want delivery to your door?"

Pierce unlatched and swung open the heavy door of the wagon, which scraped horridly against the sidewalk. “She was very, when I talked to her last,” he said, climbing out with his bags. “She seemed, and I was wondering what she would do if I."

"I think,” Rosie said, “that she'd do anything the right man asked her to do."

"Anything?” Pierce said in mock scandalized astonishment.
"Anything?"

Rosie put the car purposefully in gear, and motioned Pierce to shut the door. It groaned and creaked on its hinges before shutting with the patented thump that was intended to signify solidity and worth.

"Rose didn't say hi,” Sam said, miffed.

"She didn't see us, I guess.” Jeez what tact, Rosie thought: to ask her about some other woman's availability, and that one of all women. Still she felt instantly ashamed of herself for saying what she had said to Pierce about Rose, for revealing what she had revealed, if indeed she had really revealed anything: felt disloyal, somehow, having told something that no woman should tell a man about another woman, something which Rosie ought not to have known anyway, though she did know it.

Disloyal! Rosie lurched out into River Street more summarily than she had intended to, and Sam beside her laughed with glee to be rolled around.

Pierce had, in any case, no business to be making such inquiries. And as he put away his groceries in the kitchen cupboards of his second-floor apartment on Maple Street, he felt a curious lassitude in the contemplation, even, of pursuit; the lassitude maybe felt by the mountaineer who by squeezing from himself every drop of willingness and cheer has achieved a dozen subsidiary peaks, and finds himself now still snowbound, with only another and its joys ahead of him. The bear went over the mountain.

For a long time he had used to credit a malign fate with the disasters of his heart; he after all had always been willing, single-minded in his devotion, bound by his word and his need: it was
they
who always took off, wounding him atrociously, unforgivably, but he forgave them, all of them. At length he had come to understand that he had, after all, selected these women and not others out of the available population; they had not been brought him by a genie; he had selected them by his receptivity to their charms, whatever those exactly were, volatility, restless hotness, availability; huntresses, unaware themselves. He had chosen them (had acceded, at any rate, in their choosing of him) for exactly what had made it unlikely they would stay. And that was a sort of insight, he thought, not nothing anyway: his histrionic vow had probably only reflected a reality his soul had come silently to face, that he was not the marrying kind, that he was bent out of true and unsuited to a wife ‘n’ kids.

He had forgotten to buy capers, with which he had intended to dress his steak tartare, bachelor's indulgence, why not a dish of oysters too you dope. And a half-bottle of dregs.

It was not as though the old dynamos row on row within him had been disengaged, he could not think how to disengage them even if he wanted to; if he was not constantly on the boil as he had been in the city, that was probably only because there was no daylong nightlong parade passing before him here as there had been there, the illusion of endless supply. Here in Smallville there was the other danger, fixation on the one or two who roughly match the inner template, scarcity confused with Fate's special election.

That panther's walk. He had actually embraced her once, kissed her deeply too, in a deserted summer-house on a branch of the Blackbury River. She hadn't resisted him. Her unresistance had been complete, so complete as to be unnerving, at least to Pierce; as unnerving as insistent seduction.

That was last summer, when he had first visited this country (by mistake, he had been headed elsewhere) and bumped into Spofford, and thought of coming here to live. In the confusions of a night he had come to suppose this Rose was Rosie Mucho and therefore his friend Spofford's beloved. For that reason he had gone no farther; for that reason, and because of a sudden alarm he had felt, a species of holy dread such as might come over a poor traveler who has unexpectedly entered a lost temple, and finds himself before the idol, above whose awful altar a lamp is still burning.

He finished the wine.

It might be, he thought, that his flaw lay in the stars of his birth. Pierce had recently applied to Val for his horoscope, as nearly everyone he knew in the Faraways had done, and then had listened to her analysis with attention in spite of a small unwipeable smirk on his face. We will always pay attention to vatic statements about our own natures, no matter how baseless. His own case was even less decidable than most, because of an uncertainty about his birth hour; he knew the year and the day, lucky Sunday ha ha, and when he asked Winnie for the hour she said she remembered five o'clock distinctly, but not whether it was morning or evening, and of course the whole heavens had swung around between the one hour and the other. Twilight Sleep, she said; she couldn't remember much.

So Val made a stab at two different charts (perhaps not as thorough as she usually tried to be, she wasn't getting paid double for this) and she found many little things different, and some big things the same no matter what the hour. In both, a basically cheerful and sagacious Sagittarian nature was overborne by the leaden weight of Saturn, weepy Neptune too, a planet unknown to the science when it
was
a science. In the evening option, Saturn and the Moon, coupling joylessly in the House of Death, opposed poor Venus dejected in the wrong house: Did Pierce maybe have trouble with relationships? The big difference between the morning and the evening views, said Val, was their likely outcomes, the better or the worse.

Death or life?

Maybe not that drastic. Easy oppositions or hard ones. Val suggested (maybe it was too simple an out, but not unwise) that Pierce just go with the morning chart, and by acting on it make it his.

That put Saturn in the first house, imparting to the forming body and nature his own cold sad dry qualities, predisposing the child to melancholy, to which Pierce was certainly subject. Any doctor of the sixteenth century could have pegged him as Saturnian at a glance; he would only have had to note the signs. Pierce stood before his books (where else, at evening's end) and leafed through one. Here: a Doctor Johannes of Hasfurt, standard medieval authority, lists them: “A broad ugly face,” check. “Small eyes downcast, one larger than the other and having a spot or deformity,” check if you looked closely. “Connecting eyebrows, bristly black hair shaggy and slightly wavy,” check and check. “His beard, if he has one, is sparse, but his body—especially his chest—is hairy.” Check, this was getting a little much. Legs long, hands and feet deformed with a cleft heel, well no. Body “not too big” (Pierce's was, he thought) and “honey-colored” (that would be nicer than his own untannable pallor) and “smelling like a goat,” hey now.

Clap that book shut, pull out another. There was always another to consult. He had offered some of these to Val, who said she'd rather listen, it sank in better. Here was Burton: bad luck to say “melancholy” without saying “Burton” right after. He carried the
Anatomy
to the bed, and lay down with it.