Trust (88 page)

"What for?"

"To claim him."

"That's law school advice," I said. "My mother has her own lawyers. My mother has William. She claimed what William tells her to claim, right? It's in
his
discretion—you told me that once yourself."

"My father doesn't as a rule send persons to potter's field. He doesn't have that sort of clientele."

"No, William doesn't have paupers," I agreed.

"He doesn't have potters. I'm telling you, you better get your mother over," William's son said.

I said again, "What for?"

He scowled with exasperation. "To give some decency. The whole thing is sordid enough—good God, to bury the man."

"She wouldn't do it. William wouldn't let her do it."

"My father doesn't get in the way of what your mother wants."

"Right," I said. "She wants the Ambassadorship."

He turned to view Stefanie—she was sobbing noisily into the microphone.

"It would ruin Enoch," I said. "That's the whole point of everything—not to ruin Enoch. It's why I came."

She was explaining how her skirt was rent to pieces in the water. She had lost it finally. The county men and the man in charge of the microphone looked away, reminded by the drying rosebuds on her underpants. Her naked thighs were slick with oil.

William's son said: "She's worse."

"Who?"

"Your mother."

"Worse than Stefanie?"—I thought he would wince.

"Worse than my father." But he was bold merely. He said, "My father killed a boy to please her. But he went to the burial.
She
won't even bury a man."

"She won't bury a Muse. Nobody does that."

He said disgustedly, "The Muse is a woman."

"A male Muse he was. Nick."

"That beats it. Cant What it comes down to is she wont bury the man."

"Then she's
not
worse than Stefanie," I said.

"You go to hell. That poor kid cries and cries. She's cried five hours straight without letting up. She nearly drowned herself trying to keep him up and out of it. And all that muck. I say she's a heroine. How about this quiz they're putting her through? You ought to get down on your knees to her—it's
your
father. I don't give a damn whose Muse, but he's your muck, and she nearly saved him—practically saved him, so don't go around saying she buried him."

"Not him. Somebody else. You."

Now he did wince. I saw it—a current of shock in the nostrils. "That poor kid's a victim," he defended himself. And hesitated. Then: "What she's been through today. A martyrdom. Use your eyes. A martyr to muck she is. She's been through hell today."

"St. Stefanie," I reminded him. "Patroness of housecats,
floruit circa
1957
A.D
. Pussyhead, you make William look like a lion."

"A man died."

"And you were the one who was going to make it hell for her!"

"She's had her hell," he said, subdued.

"The water-power of a tear exceeds the sea. My stepfather says that. What will you do?" I asked him. "
All,
her lovers won't die," and watched him return to her side. My envy had nothing to take then but the back of his neck. She would have other lovers. None of them would die. None of them would live. It is no light thing to have intercourse with the Muse. Afterward there is not taste for this or that. The planet's sweetmeats fail after a nibble at vatic bread. The grove without its genius is bleak and chill. The spirit of a happening, like the spirit of a place, has no wants. It is we who want
it.
Think of the man who slept with a mermaid and learned her unearthly singing: when she at last, no longer amused by hot human love, and suffocated by hot human flesh, flopped from the beach where they had lain to the cold base-depths where he could not swim or follow, he was smitten not with grief of her abandonment but with unexpungeable longing for that singular absent music: he goes home, pursues composition, labors all the rest of his life to duplicate her clef and scale and system, never so much as catches the spoor of any of these, and is acclaimed a master of the newly weird, of art, of beauty, of the illimitable into which few can penetrate; but he breathes failure, loss stuns him. How changed he is from his days of gold!—
then
he wore a gold beard, and saw its image in the mirror of her burnished scales at that shining delta place where the human female's in-between would be,
then
he listened to the inhuman scales of her song, neither archaic nor Oriental nor twelve-tone nor diatonic nor chromatic nor like the lightly grave hendecachord of Ion of Chios, but unlike all, cold, multisegmented, isolate, phantasmal, neither color nor graph nor emotion, yet ghastly, ghostly, more lovely and less bearable than that hendecachord of Ion of Chios (which no living ear has ever heard), and the beat of it homologously suggestive of the rational wash of one's own blood in the arteries, when the ears are stopped by the sea in the instant before drowning—phylogeny connects that music and this, as it connects gill and ear.

So now Stefanie. She would change. I listened to the tissue of her weeping: she spun it out and spun it out. It made a grey net over her voice. The florets ceased to fall in her voice. She went on weeping and weeping as though joy were done forever. The county politicians sighed with boredom. All who have not had intercourse with the Muse, female, or male, sigh with boredom. The Coast Guard officer sighed with boredom. Ditto the doctor. Ditto the man holding the wire. Ditto the men with the notebooks—still they dutifully wrote. (The motors did not sigh.) Her flowerless voice told the future—how she would go from place to place, looking for Duneacres, as my mother had flown from place to place, looking for the bird of the world and secretly thinking it Brighton: and now thought Brighton might somehow lodge itself in an Embassy. William's son sighed with boredom. He had achieved his father in blunted tooth and shaven claw, and it could not be said it was against his will. All who had not had intercourse with the Muse, female or male, achieve no more than their begetters. The begetter of William's son acquiesced in the law of prey. So at last did William's son. They acquiesced in themselves as prey. But the Muse does not prey: no Muse commits the act of love upon a domestic animal, and she will never touch William or his son. Not that the Muse is extraordinary—extraordinariness in passion is a modern fallacy. Besides, the Muse is in charge of artifice (as no nature-acquiescing creature of prey can be), and artifice is never extraordinary. Our phrase for the marvelous is
natural
wonder. The sun is extraordinary, but the white blaze of my father's head was not. A dye. Ah, tawdry, tawdry, yet why not a tawdry Muse? (It must be a tawdry Muse to call forth Allegra's
Marianna
or Stefanie's tale of death and puking.) Tawdry, to hope to bring to life one of those boys on an amphora, bright-haired, goat-legged, with a little tibia-pipe poised and halted for laughter, among those love-exalted girls? A dye! Aha, my mother's fantastic lover, potter, Muse, charlatan, insincere blackmailer—somewhere and sometime he had to bend, grimace, crouch (crouched on the beach: mechanized faun, neck curved), dip his whole head into a vat of fake youth—there is no other way to get a good result.

The thing was visible. Impossible, after all, not to have seen it—sea-change at the scalp. The man who drew the crosses had noticed it at once. From my father's body, green with a moss of dried vomit (or green as one of those antique bronze statues divers now and then pull out of the sea), nothing shone.

(I interrupt for Enoch, though his turn is not yet. Reading
Anna Karenina
aloud to my mother, he one day began to talk of characters in life and literature. In literature, he said, a character is interesting because he changes. Fiction, despite its professions, cares only for stabilized types, and fiction amazes when it produces a person who plausibly reverses his nature. Not so life. In life, where not plausible but shocking reversals are commonplace—if only we are clever enough to witness them—it is just the opposite: in fickle life nothing amazes more than unchangingness. That is why, he said, we are so infrequently surprised by the people we know.)

The skipper of the parenthesis will have missed Enoch's cool half-paradoxes. Never mind. I thought my father more splendid than any other being, and not because he amazed by never changing. He never changed; he did not amaze. I had been amazed to come on a boy knocking at a ball in a ruined field, but what would I have felt to find a man like William or a man like Enoch?—it would have contradicted and corrupted all that I imagined of my mother's early time. My father devised and invented himself, and chose to stay at the crest: the same for my mother, the same for me. And the splendor of this was its perfect naturalness and logicality: what else shall Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck be if not a boy? I forgave him his devices; I would have had him yield more. Let them discover that his heels are split, or that he carries in his pocket a half-eaten mushroom (the fly amanite, with its visionary properties), or anything else incredible and magical—that his eyes are agate, his nostrils wrens, his teeth the horns of pygmy deer; that his nose hangs on a pivot; that he wears rings; that limb by limb he can be pried apart and kept in a jewelled box; that his death too is sham and he meanwhile merely hides grinning behind a tree, commanding that company of investigators to feast on his torso. Anything: I would believe it, and envied Stefanie who still steadily and liturgically wailed, talking now of suicide: "I could kill myself, really I mean it, I could die this minute"; but plainly she would live to be old, thin, resentful, duped, sly. Suddenly no one was bored—not the doctor, not the Coast Guard officer, not the audio man, not the men with the notebooks, not her fiancé. Just then she gave out a sense of raw presence; of totality: she had had her life, now it was over, she needed no more, the rest was commentary. All at once everyone acceded to her cry. No one denied it, no one told her it was nonsense. Envy had them in thrall—the girl had had her moment. She had it and it was gone. Faith in her claim showed in their faces. They looked religious. They were believers: her moment had passed, it would never come again. William's son knew it; it subdued him; they all knew it. Some careless secret, already lost, already half-forgotten, nothing extraordinary, marked her mouth: perhaps it was joy, perhaps it was an adventure, perhaps it was neither. She scarcely remembered. What has happened and will not come again is easily recognized by everyone, but the moment of recognition itself is unique and terrible, like birth and disclosure, and like these cannot be re-experienced. Once is all. Over that cluster of men and motors the irretrievable passed its stale wing.

She spoke again of the two boats. They had taken the little boat for the quiet. The quiet was the thing—so as not to wake the Purses. At dawn there was one star left over. The rest was clouds, long and spread out. Then came the sun, not gradually, but all at once, plink! He never wanted the little boat, it was her fault. She was afraid of the Purses. The big boat might churn them out of the tents and down the hill, it had a burr like death. She imagined them all lined up on the sand, the whole mob yowling and ogling. She wanted to row away, quiet and private in the new air. The moon was gone. With the oars rolling out it was like beating on cotton. No one heard. No one woke. There was a little hard wind that smelled of morning and of autumn. She slipped down into the
hull to escape the spray and the cold wind. They were going for the middle of the bay. The idea was to get far out and then switch to Mrs. Purse's motor. She wanted cake for breakfast. They were going to tie up for breakfast at a fancy place in Rye, half dock half restaurant. He said again they should have taken the launch and had their comfort, no one ever tied up there in a shabby little tub, not even tub, bowl. He asked did she want to row awhile. No, no, it was cold, cold. He spat over the side and went on rowing. His arms hoisted like wheels. The sun drifted nearer and nearer, splattering in the water. He spat. She looked over and saw the foam of his spit fall into the hole in the water. The oar made a dark deep hole. Then the water whorled up and filled it from below, and the sun ran in. The motor now, he said. No, no, too soon. Everybody could hear, even pussyhead. Poor pussyhead, to see them fly away, at least he would be having the launch for himself, still he'd be mad all the same. We should've taken the launch, Nick said. No, no, stupid noisy ship it was, all those kids would hear and then the whole world would know where they were at. He spat again: the motor now. She held the oars for him while he turned to pull on the string. Why d'you spit like that? To catch fish with, nothing draws them like human spittle, they come down from Alaska and up from Peru, the flounder and the salmon, for a whiff of human wetness. I want cake for breakfast not fish. The motor did not catch. He pulled on the string again. The motor did not catch. I think it's too soon, we're not out far enough, they'll hear us, you better wait before starting it up. No, he said. And spat. He looked angry. Why d'you spit like that? Nothing, don't talk. Are you mad at me about the other boat? Nothing, don't talk. He pulled on the string and the motor brayed. There. She came out of the hull and watched the fork of their wake. It was seeded with gold. That's better, he said, talk if you need to› I was afraid the damn thing wouldn't get started. The blades drilled the water and now they began to take on speed. She laid the oars like a pair of crutches down at the bottom under their feet. He was holding the steering handle and she saw his teeth biting at the wind. He shouted, but the noise of the motor was too loud and she did not hear. She crawled back to him and yelled into his ear, See, I told you, we could wake the dead with this thing and the other one's even worse, I told you, but the wind almost plucked her tongue out, and she felt her words leap away as though they were energies of their own. They sat close in the stern, and if they looked straight forward to the prow they could not see the water, the boat's point rode so high. They made their own waves behind them and slicked head after head off the waves that kept getting in their way in front. She decided to try screaming at him again, and let out as few words as possible, very near his face: You're not mad about not taking the big boat any more are you? He shook his head, but now she did not know whether this meant No or merely that he could not hear. She saw his teeth again, and realized from his funny unfurling mouth that he was not answering her, it was singing coming out. The water's like a nylon stocking, we're making a big long run in it, but she knew he could hear her as little as she could hear him. She wondered what he was singing. This is much better, I hate that ship, it doesn't feel like this, I'm so hungry, I feel so happy, I wish I had that Hershey Bar we left in the other boat, I want chocolate cake. She leaned against him and could tell in his chest the vibration of his singing. It was like a buzzer in an electric alarm clock, it was as if she could turn it off if she wanted to but she was too happy to stir. Across the water there was a fringe of green and brownish-yellow. It was autumn turning. She reflected that autumn always came after summer, it was never any different, why was that, why did it always happen in the same order like that? Other things didn't always come off in exactly the same order every time, though some things did, for instance first you were engaged and then married, never the other way, first you were young and then old, even though it didn't
have
to be that way, for instance a baby didn't have to be a baby, it could look like ninety years old when it was born and then get better-looking and stronger and all, and then when it was really ninety years old it would be ready for sex and everything, and then it could die when it began to look like a little baby, that would be interesting, that would mean only little tiny coffins and it would even save a lot of room in graveyards so they could use some of the graveyard space for more tennis courts and things. Swimming pools and even stadiums.