Three Short Novels (27 page)

I guess Martin is back by now, so kiss him for me and ask him how it feels to be a celebrity.

Your blessed child,

Antonia

On the landing she finished reading the letter by the light from the evening sky and then it seemed that the same light, the same hour lay over the entire world, just as it had seemed on those summer evenings when she had taken the deepening blue as a promise that someday she would find herself far away from the stucco bungalow. For a moment now the earth was hers to know, even as it was known to everyone to whom the earth with all its wonders appeared to belong. A child out in the world can do that for you, can bring you to belong in the world yourself. With the key in the lock, with her hand on the key, she bowed her head against the door that she must open.

20

L
ike Martin's place by the ocean, this cottage on the sand trembled with resonance from the deep waters at its doorstep. She felt it at once. If the ocean were to rise up suddenly, a level rising with no warning, or if it were to come thundering over, the way Claud had described it that night of the party, not much of a house would be lost. Years after her year in that little house it was washed out to sea, the first house to go because it was the farthest out, and no trace was left, no fragments were swept up against the other houses built on sand. High tides, high winds, the winds piling up the water, a full moon at its closest point to earth, a point called perigee, and the earth at its closest approach to the sun—all forces joined together to sweep it away.

Claud carried in her possessions from his car. Offering the cottage to her for the year his former wife was to be away, he had described Ilona's move as a step into the world, but anyone who had ever roamed the world or crossed an ocean would laugh at the distance she'd come, only twenty miles north from the city, around the same mountain whose one side at night was ornamented with lights and whose side facing the sea was densely dark.

Wandering the small rooms through the horizontal light from the setting sun, she knew she had chosen to come to this place so that the constant presence of the lovers in her being, as implacable as figures in a dream and who would demolish her if she stayed any longer in that dream, might be overcome by the reality of the ocean. And she knew that her fear of the night ocean was to wake her even on calm nights and that she would switch on a lamp by her bed and lie in light for a little while. Lamplight in the middle of the night always seemed to emanate from the other side of the earth, come from elsewhere to keep her safe.

Claud came into the bedroom where she was sitting on the floor, glancing through the record albums she had found in the closet. The music was opera, the faces of the celebrated singers on the covers like masks laden with cosmetics and fate.

“She thinks she's an opera singer,” he said. “I mean she is an opera singer but she's usually in the chorus. Once in a while she gets to sing a few words by herself. She likes it out here, she strolls along the sand singing above the din and everybody thinks she's crazy. Her voice isn't beautiful enough to compensate for everything that's wrong in her life. I wish it were.”

The bedroom was almost bare, the bed not quite a full bed, too narrow for a husband also but just right for a lover, a night or two. On the chest of drawers was a framed snapshot of Claud at the age of twenty or so—barefoot on a lawn, thumbs hooked in the front pockets of his jeans.

“Some of my stuff is here,” he said. “There's a little bit of me under the bed. When I left I thought if my valuables were under there it would be like I was there, and if she had a lover in her bed, I could hear them. She'd like that.”

From under the bed he pulled out the same sort of grocery box she'd found in her brother's room, the universal grocery box, and the grating sound of sand came along with it. He sat down on the floor beside her and brought up a pair of bronze-plated baby shoes.

“They don't do this anymore,” he said, weighing the shoes in one hand. “It's like I died at the age of one.”

A wristwatch, the crystal badly scratched, his initials and the year of his graduation from high school engraved on the back. A battered book next.

“The name of the kid in here is Diamond. He sleeps in a stable loft and he has spells of delirium, and every time he's delirious he goes off in the arms of the north wind, who's a great big woman. That's the way I remember it, but it might not be that way.” Over the inside of the cover, a drawing of a marvelously large woman, her hair flowing and rippling across the sky, and in her arms a very small, very thin boy. “She carries him off on excursions and the last time she doesn't bring him back. See, here's my name in the properly rounded letters, and my age. Claud McCormack, nine years old. This stuff, this watch, this book, these adorable shoes, I found in my mother's garage. The rest of the stuff, I'm to blame.”

Up from the box a blue shirt, mottled with sweat and fuel oil. A pair of unwashed gray socks, holes in the toes and heels. A black wallet, split along the seams, and another wallet, yellow leather embossed with the Aztec calendar. A jockstrap. A half-smoked cigarette in an empty box of matches.

“My last cigarette.”

A dozen and more ballpoint pens in a bundle, bound around with a rubber band. A mailbox, the kind that hangs on a wall, its coat of green paint flaked away. A red toothbrush, bristles flattened.

“All this junk, I've been saving it with a purpose in mind. It's for that librarian who used to beg me for mementos of my life. Unless he's forgotten how he used to desire me. Some university library—Sore Neck, Nebraska, or Hang Dog, Georgia, I can't remember which. Anybody who's ever got one paltry word in print hears from him. He wants to embalm the writer's spirit. That's his word, embalm, not mine. You've sent him something?”

“I need it myself.”

“Ilona, send him something. It might be the only way you'll be remembered. He stashes it away—manuscripts, underwear, prostheses, bounced checks, pisspots, empty bottles of sleeping pills, empty bottles of booze, condoms, he stashes it all away in a sort of a tomb. No earwigs, no moths, no maggots, no mice, no rats, nothing ravenous. And think of it, Ilona—every hundred years your stuff gets set out on a revolving shelf in a glass case and round and round you go. I can't see how he can promise us that hundred years slot. Writers proliferate like rabbits. We'll be lucky to get on that merry-go-round every seven thousand years. What do you think, do you think seven thousand years from now when this junk goes around, along with my one novel and my picture on it, some beautiful girl will fall in love with me? Maybe by that time girls will have three eyes, but it won't matter how she looks as long as she falls in love with me. Like Anna for Dostoevski, only seven thousand years too late. Not just in love with my soul, but me, me, driving her wild in bed.”

A pair of shoes, a grayed, rundown pair of canvas shoes, the shoestrings knotted together.

“They're not mine. I'll let him think they're mine. They belonged to a friend of mine, a fairly decent poet. The son of a bitch stepped out of these shoes and over the edge of a cliff, up in Mendocino. A couple of guys fishing on the rocks found his body. I was living on my boat at Fort Bragg and I went over to the cliff and found his shoes.”

Swiftly he bent his head away, then he got up and drew her up. “Ilona, come to bed with me. Come in under with me.”

That longing for another lover, that longing she confessed to herself reluctantly because the desire was like a betrayal of Martin, because it was an accusation that she was the deserter, that longing for a lover who would bring her to the bliss she imagined for those other lovers, who would take her down into that deep communion with all lovers, now that longing confessed itself to this man.

It was night when they lay apart. The ocean was louder. The sound of a breaking wave began at one end of the beach and traveled its length, and before the sound reached the other end another wave began to break. There was no silence between the waves.

“At night,” he said, “I'll tell you how it is out there at night. Out there the clouds pile up on the horizon like that wave I told you about and I figure that's just what it is and everybody else has got the message over their crackly radios and they're already climbing the nearest mountain with their loved ones. But me, I'm sticking it out, smoking my dope, singing at the top of my voice. I can't keep a tune like my wife but I sing anyway. I sing what my father used to sing when he was shaving in the morning. ‘Throw out the lifeline, someone is drifting away.' Or I sing, ‘Kansas City, here I come, they got some crazy little women there and I'm gonna get me one.' The cabin's a mess, my bunk stinks like I pulled up a drowned man and hoped to revive him by warming him up, but I'm singing away. Some nights I'm so high I tend to neglect the rules of the road. The other night a freighter passed so close I saw the guy up in the pilot house, I saw him so close I'd recognize him in a crowd if I was ever to be in a crowd again. They don't see you way down there, your running lights are the farthest stars in the universe. Ilona,” kissing her brow, “I'll tell you a dream. Not mine but my friend's, the one who stepped off the cliff. He used to go out on the boat with me, he used to help me out. One morning he comes up on deck—I'd been on watch while he slept—and he says, ‘Oh, you still here?' And he told me he dreamed he woke up and came up on deck and I'm not there. Morning clear and brilliant, without me.”

Lying close beside him, she knew he was telling her about his friend's dream to waken her even more to his presence, to the preciousness of his life.

Then, in the deceptive calm of strangers surprising themselves as lovers, “Ilona, tell me what you mean by blessed. Who is?”

So Martin had told him about that day she'd raved on and on, berserk. What Martin knew about her worst moments—shouldn't he have kept it secret out of respect for her, someone who appears to be balanced most of the time?

“My mind's way back in the Dark Ages.”

He was stroking her hair, waiting just as Martin had waited, out in the sun and the wind. “The reason I asked, I thought if I was going to go around on that shelf every seven thousand years, maybe I'd be certified as blessed. I'd be remembered forever, more or less, and my picture was going to keep me the same age I was then, thirty and a goodlooker. But what the hell. One day out of seven thousand years guarantees me nothing. I'm going to take that stuff down to the boat and throw it over. Something's bound to wash ashore. Somebody, say in Patagonia, is going to pick up a shoe and wonder who it belonged to. Did you know the ocean currents can take a shoe around the world? See, this guy's standing on this desolate shore, way down there, he's standing there with my shoe in his hand, thinking ‘Who the hell did this belong to?' I like that idea. I could be anybody.”

His hand stroking her face came to rest over her mouth, where no answer was waiting, nor any further speculation as to who was blessed and who was not.

“Ilona, you suffer from delusions of the other fellow's grandeur. Whoever they may be—saints of all sorts, Nobel Prize winners, Jesus, Tolstoy, maybe Garbo, anybody in the hands of what you think is a great destiny. Ilona, I struggle with that delusion myself, all my life, and that's why I stay out there at night, because out there we're all in the same boat. I've got them all jammed into my smelly little boat that's going to spring a leak any minute. Ilona”—kissing her brow. “Come out with me some night.”

As he fell asleep his hand slipped down from her mouth, his arm stretched out, and his hand opened palm up.

21

C
laud slept, and she lay listening to the waves breaking. She had never fallen asleep before the man beside her slept, and it had been that way with her child. She hadn't slept until the child slept. Long ago she had been charged to observe the drifting away of the spirit and just by her waking presence protect the sleeper in that transition. She slept, then. Startled awake, she lay waiting to learn just what it was that had waked her but it would not let itself be known. All she knew was that there was more space out in the heavens for it to swoop down and farther depths in the ocean for it to rise up and surge toward the ledge on which they lay.

She dressed in the room that faced the ocean and lit the lamp. The light would tell her where the house was when she made her way out from the waves. It would tell her where Claud was. His sleeping presence would guide her out just as Martin, without his knowing, had drawn his wife out from the ocean at his doorstep. The lights of earth are all the beings who draw you out from the dark, and are they everyone in your life?

One step down, and her bare feet sank into cold sand. The wind off the ocean snapped strands of hair across her eyes. She went down
toward the water at a diagonal, struggling against the wind, wanting to give herself over—only for a moment—to that engulfing embrace, wanting to immerse herself in the element that was to wake her in the night, all the nights of that year. Above the sound of deep water spunglass notes sprang up, almost like voices. Out before her now lay the vast surface glazed over by the stars' light. The ocean was a great eye, turbulent over its blindness.

Even in the cold sweep of the shallows there was such a merciless draw. The sand under her feet yielded to it and yielded her over. She stepped down the slope until the water rose to her breasts, and in that rocking expanse, in that rising mound before the first big wave broke, she turned and looked back to shore. The unlit houses along the sand were unseeable and the few lights were dimmed by the turmoil of distance and mist. The waters surging around her shifted her sight and jumbled the lights about and the light in the little house where Claud slept jumped sideways. The tremendous wave broke over her, knocking her under, dragging her down, and when she fought her way up and was almost standing again, the wave that followed struck her down again, and within that raging blindness she beat her way toward shore or toward where the shore was last seen.