Love and Sleep (57 page)

He didn't take it from her. That age was passing. Val's arm was over the hieroglyph of the Monas stamped on the book's cover, and Pierce didn't see it, and this time it didn't call to him.

She came to collect him (she was driving, of course), and they went up to a place on the mountain and had dinner on a broad deck overlooking the confluence of the rivers (the Shadow, the Blackbury) as day turned to night with long reluctance. She talked of her youth, how she had been restless but good, and only later got a little wild.

"Wild,” he said. “Now it's an odd thing, because..."

"Not so wild,” she said. “Really. Comparatively."

"Because once, you know, in Shakespeare's time say, when a man called a woman wild—a poet anyway—it meant she was chaste."

"Oh yes?"

"Yes,” he said. “Wild was chaste, like Diana's handmaids. Uncatchable. Untamed.” He poured her wine. “The lover set out to tame the wild. It was the tame one who was, who came when she was called."

"Huh.” She was listening carefully.

"Who came to eat from his hand. The poet's. Willing to come. To take the bit,” said Pierce, and drank. “Funny, huh?"

"Funny,” she said.

They talked about The Woods, a place unimaginable to Pierce. She had taken work there somewhat as an underling, earning a college credit in social work and work experience useful in counseling or teaching, where she seemed to be heading, without a lot of enthusiasm Pierce thought. And it had begun to seem that she might lose the job anyway. The Woods was not in healthy shape financially.

"Because a lot of the need for a sort of retreat like that has gone away. Not entirely. But maybe there are too many to share the business. So they've been trying to develop other resources up there."

"Like..."

"They offer these week-long sensitivity-training sessions for men. And self-esteem and reorientation workshops for women who are say going back into the job market."

"For men must weep and women must work,” Pierce quipped.

"It's real important,” she said, as though she meant “unimportant.” Important, unimportant. “And then there's the special project in healing."

"The what?"

"A little core group has gotten interested in this,” she said, her eyes losing focus in a certain way he was beginning to log, without being able fully to interpret; one thing he thought it sometimes reflected was other men, passing peripherally through her thoughts, associated with the topic she spoke about. “Non-traditional approaches. Or
more
traditional you might say compared to therapy."

"There are a lot of those.” Pierce envisioned astrological medicine, Ficinian mood-alteration by means of solarian plants, music, colors. Surely not.

"Well that was the idea at first. But it's gotten narrowed down. Everybody's gotten real interested in this one guy. A Christian. He's come back twice."

"And he's a healer? What, Christian Science? Or faith healing?"

"Well I'm not sure,” she said. “I haven't been invited to be part of it. It's just being a Christian, I think. Healing, you know, like Jesus. I mean I know he says you have to be a Christian."

"To heal or to be healed?"

"Dunno.” She looked at him levelly. “Could you do that?"

"No,” he said. “Not even to get healed.” He rolled a cigarette. “I was raised Catholic,” he said. “I think that functions as some kind of inoculation. After that it's almost impossible to become any other kind of Christian. It may immunize against other belief-systems too. I don't know."

"Magic,” she said. “Don't you believe in magic?"

He inhaled tobacco smoke, and breathed it out in mystic calm. “No,” he said.

"But you think it works."

He said nothing.

Rose ran her finger around the edge of her wineglass, and a faint ghostly cry arose. “If you knew a lot about it,” she said, “as much as you know—I'd think you'd be tempted to try it. If I knew a lot about it I'd give it a try."

"You would?"

"Maybe I could be an apprentice. You teach me what you know."

"You could,” he said. “You could sit at my feet."

She regarded him for a time, her head nodding ever so slightly first for a moment to one side, then to the other, a small smile on her lips, as though (Pierce thought) she listened first to the good angel on her right, then the bad angel on her left, unwilling to choose between them.

"The training is long,” he said. “And terribly arduous."

"But you do know,” she said.

He considered. He could say he didn't know. In a sense he didn't. She waited. With a sensation of stepping into dark water, he said:

"The magician does what he wants by knowing the inner workings of things. He knows the big general things that influence everybody—the stars, first of all, I mean the planets, the big forces that control us and make us what we are. He would be able to just look at me and say I was Saturnian. For instance. Under Saturn."

"How?"

"Signs. Emanations. Smells. I don't entirely..."

"Well you don't know me, Moffett."

He looked at her without irony, fully and frankly, and for a moment she grew still. What he knew of her had not been picked up by occult means, but only by his sensitive melancholic's antenna pulling in the faint hint that Rosie Rasmussen dropped, and acting on it. All magic is illusion.

"What his perception gives him,” Pierce went on, “is that he knows what images he should project in order to compel the soul he wants to capture."

"Images?"

"Magic pictures he constructs. Power pictures that give him inner strength. Talismans."

"Huh."

"You use them to rule the souls of others.” He put out the smoke. “It's called ‘binding.’ The bonds you forge are called ‘chains,’
vincula
."

"But how do you project them?” she said. She lifted her hands and shot energy through her fingers like a movie sorcerer.

"Well I don't really know how
they
did it. But I don't think it was so different from what we do all the time. We can't think without images, and images have no power to work in us unless we are moved by them. What moves us most is love. Erotic power, erotic energy, desire. One magician said:
Love is magic, magic is love.
Giordano Bruno. He believed you gave life and power to the images you cast with love."

"But by that he didn't mean."

"Oh yes. He meant
love,
love: the same erotic power that binds anybody to anyone, to anything they desire."

"Love,” she said.

"Makes the world go round,” he said.

"But if we all do it all the time."

"The difference is that the magician does it consciously. Consciously cultivates in himself the erotic energy to animate the powerful images that will bind others."

"Cold."

"Cold love. But hot inside. And dangerous too. The master has to avoid at all costs getting enchained by these hot potent images he has created."

She was listening intently, but maybe not, he thought, to him.

"All these magicians did it, or tried to do it,” he said. “They made images of the stars, or of the divine intelligences—angels, dAEmons—that power the stars; sometimes they cast medallions of the planets, made of the right metal and so on, and contemplated them, to draw astral powers into themselves, make themselves bigger. Or they made them inwardly, by thought. They said: in their hearts."

She laid her hand on her own breasts lightly, as though she tried to imagine this, or feel a workshop there, where things could be made. Pierce too tried to glimpse inside, through the windows of her eyes, inward-turned and open. “So what could I learn to do?” she said. “If I studied. What things?"

"Well how about,” Pierce said, “invisibility.” He told her how old wonder-workers had been able, knowing the subtle and astral springs or roots of things, to churn out from their potent hearts images that could actually make them invisible. If you knew what plants, animals, stones, colors, times of day were imbued with the powers of which stars and planets, and if, say, you worked in Leo and the Sun at midday, observers would see no robed mage at all but only a golden tabby cat asleep among the dandelions.

"Huh,” she said. “See? Invisible.” She laughed, moved and happy, making a sense out of what he had said that he could only guess at, and held out her glass for wine.

Afterwards they saw a movie, for an entrepreneur had lately taken over the big bleak grange hall in Stonykill and showed foreign films and esoterica on weekend nights. The movie was a weird and fatuous historical import, a vamp on the life of the mystic nun Hildegarde of Bingen. Pierce tried not to laugh aloud, though in fact most of the audience was restless and talkative. Hildegarde gave herself to God: she knelt before the stern yet ember-eyed priest to have her starlet's golden tresses cut.

"Oh let's go,” he said.

"Wait,” she said, and he could feel her private urgency. Hildegarde, shorn and humble, held the mass of hair in her hands. In the projector's light Pierce could see the sheen of Rose's own hair, loosely braided.

In the Asp, careening down through the mountain road's dark turns toward Blackbury Jambs, Pierce expatiated on the silliness of what they had seen, about as medieval as, as; and she was silent. Only long after, when in order to save himself he was condemned to repeat in the solitude of his heart all the moments he had spent with her, would he find that film again, that night back before he understood the extent of her wondrous wiring, or what heats she endured; how she could be aroused unrefusably by, but not only by, the cutting of her hair, by sudden loud noises, by certain whispered words, by long kid gloves, by the nearness of fire.

When they sat again at his kitchen table with a glass (soda water only for her, she couldn't, she said, trust herself further with booze), he let her lead the talk for a while, looping her stories and her hopes and hurts while he listened. Then he stood, and took a flimsy white box from the counter, the sort of box old-fashioned department stores used for their wares.

"Now,” he said, “I have a present for you."

He put the box in the middle of the table and waited while she stood up to open it. She unfolded the flanges of the top; the tissue parted, and she drew out the scarves, one, then another, and another. When she had seen them all, she smiled a little, and began to say Well!, but he spoke at the same time, and she stopped still.

He spoke carefully and softly, trying hard not to move, his big hands resting one atop the other on the table. “What I want you to do,” he said, “is to take those in the bedroom. Take off your clothes and wait. I'll come in a while."

She didn't simper, or vamp; she said nothing, only across her features came the abstraction he had seen first in the Donut Hole, when he had told her not to button herself. He didn't need to say more. She stood motionless for a moment, as though pausing for some internal assent to come, not her own assent but an assent she awaited; then she gathered up the handful of innocent stuff and left the kitchen with her smooth swift tread.

Pierce remained.

He really hadn't known if that would work: he sat at the kitchen table, his throat thick and his skin burning, trying to gauge what an imperious coldhearted length of time might be, his heartbeats no good for counting. He hadn't ever done anything like this before; he knew not a practical thing about how to bend a woman's will, subject it to his own,
use
her for himself, the project was ludicrous. What he knew about, what he was actually good at, was service: listening for what a woman wanted, and guessing how to supply it, or some part of it, for some length of time.

Well right there it was, too, wasn't it.

He emptied his glass and rose. At the door of the bedroom he stopped, a sinister silhouette (he perceived) against the lighted kitchen behind him, for she had not dared switch on the lamp beside the bed. She had done as he had told her, and lay darkly alit on the russet bedclothes, still in her girlish knee-socks, her head lifted slightly to watch him enter; alert, expectant, a patient awaiting a novel treatment.

He went in to her, unbuckling his belt, not knowing any more than she did herself what they had embarked on.
Embarked
: the word had always had for Pierce a shadow of danger and unknowing in it, a picture in his heart of himself in his fragile boat (a
bark
) setting out in a stiff wind onto a sea of blue-black whitecaps.

She called out his name repeatedly as he worked, her cheek pressed down into the pillow by his hand, her arms and legs bound in imitation silk and unclosable. Pierce, she cried, Pierce, Pierce: and it might have been an imperative as much as a supplication. Certainly it was not a cry directed at him; it could not be, for she didn't know him. By his lies and by his histrionics, by taking the part he took with her and playing it, and not here in bed alone either, he would make certain that she couldn't know him; therefore she couldn't love him, and so could not cease loving him; and so he would be safe, having risked nothing of himself.

That was his sin, that he would try to hide himself behind his sudden and unexpected expertise at this mode, as behind a Mephisto mask or vampire makeup. He would give as good as he got, but he was determined not to be reached. It was a sin he had never tried to commit before: and he would fail at it too, in the end, as he could have guessed even on that night that he would fail.

For of course the dark bond you had to pretend to in order to play the game was going to become a real bond over time without his noticing it or assenting to it. Of course it was. There was no other way for this story to unfold but that way, at least if it was enacted by men and women of Pierce Moffett's time and not by, say, bears or angels. What I tell you three times is true. There was no excuse for not knowing it, and he did know it, he did: that there would come a time when he would try to remove the mask, wipe off the whiteface, and she would not believe the face beneath, or hear his confession, that he had never done any of those things with anyone else ever.

The blackhaired nymph Nimue apprenticed herself to Merlin, and when she had learned his secrets she turned them on him, maybe by mistake, not really knowing what she did; and shut him fast in an oak tree, from which he could not escape. Or—in one telling of the tale—in a cage of glass, where he could not even tell that he was caught. And he remains there to this day.