The Solitudes

by John Crowley

  Pierce, hypnotized by Spofford’s careful hands working and careful voice making plans, only nodded. The maul, no crude bludgeon but a true tool, beveled and shaped with an offhand grace, entranced him.

  “A gift,” Spofford said again, trying the maul’s balance. “You’ll meet her. There’s a party tomorrow. A Full Moon party. Lots of people. She’ll be there.”

  “Oh?” said Pierce. “What do people do at a Full Moon party?”

  “The usual,” Spofford said. “Swim. Eat. Drink. Take drugs.”

  “And what’s this lady’s name?”

  “Rosalind.”

  Pierce laughed aloud. Spofford eyed him sidewise and said, “You never tumbled, right?”

  “If you mean by that,” Pierce said, “have I ever spoken vows, the answer is no.”

  “Aha,” Spofford said.

  “Tumbled, though,” he said, “yes. Not once. More than once.”

  He laced his hands behind his head. Spofford went on working, and did not inquire further. The afternoon was strangely loud, cicadas in competition and a thousand other lesser insects filling up the air with a changeful hum. The sun crept toward concealment in the mountains behind them. “I quit my job,” Pierce said at last, “because of a tumble.”

  “I thought you were fired.”

  “Quit, fired,” Pierce said. “Let’s not put too fine a point on it.”

  “And love was the reason.”

  “Love and money.” Chalkokrotos. “It’s a long story.”

  “And that’s why the trip to Whatsits College, in Conurbana. Job hunting.”

  “Peter Ramus.”

  “I don’t know if you’d like Conurbana so much,” Spofford said. “Who the hell is Peter Amos?”

  “I tell you what,” Pierce said. “Just for the time being, as long as I’ve run off, let’s not talk about Conurbana. Or Peter Ramus either. He invented, among other things, the outline.”

  Spofford laughed, and turned the smoothness of his maul against his palm. Pierce took off his brown spectacles: a darkness had come down suddenly as the sun reached the mountain’s edge, and long shadows sprang out across the yellow grass.

  She had led Pierce a pretty wild ride, and in fast company too. The danger she had always been a little bit in had excited him—it had excited her as well—and the excitement was magnified by the champagne she wanted and got, by the long nights on the town and the intense dawns alone together: all that was fueled by the coke, which in turn paid for it all or most of it—the remainder being the difficulty Pierce had at last come to. She thought of him as shelter; he had always, big-boned and ham-handed as he was, given the impression of great strength, not entirely an illusion; she thought of him as level-headed also, which was an error.

  He had bought into her deals in a small way right from the start. He couldn’t be sniffing up her capital for free, and it seemed sordid to buy from her in nickels and dimes; certainly he couldn’t refrain, not if he was going to be with her through those long icy nights, and he didn’t want to refrain even if he could have: the stuff she got was good, it was very good, Pierce red-eyed and jittery in class next day trying to explain the Enlightenment had no complaints.

  “What was that,” she asked him, “that she said, old lady Moldy Hairy Whatshername …”

  “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,” Pierce said, classes done and his tongue untied again by coke and champagne. “‘Never complain, never explain.’”

  “That’s it,” she said. “That’s my motto. Never complain, never explain.”

  She kept to it. Business got better, and more dangerous. She got Pierce out of his old slum apartment, to which he had held on through thick and thin, and into a wide glassy concrete-floored place with a view over the fairy towers of the black bridge to Brooklyn. More central. He went deeply into debt to the Barnabas credit union over this deal, his never-large salary was going out those wide windows, she was snowballing her share of the rent into some big bucks.

  “Snowballing,” she said, and laughed.

  He knew he was teetering, but teetering didn’t mean falling. He knew himself to be afraid, though, and a man afraid and teetering could not help showing he might fall. He tried not to show it: he wanted above all that she not think he was not up to her. The sudden decisions she needed ratified—the apartment, money in huge wads and what to do with it, indulgences proposed that he had never even heard of—coke helped him with those, coke was decisive, but coke was funny: it made your reach seem swift and sure, but often it made you lurch and grab; the floor of the apartment was littered here and there with unswept crumbs of glass from wineglasses he had reached for too boldly, too coke-boldly. The bed was the only safe place. They clothed it in eiderdown and sunburst sheets and mirrored it and pillowed it. By the time it was full-rigged she had begun to spend nights elsewhere.

  The telephone was a dreadful noise in that stone place at four in the morning. Pierce was alone, curled fetally on one edge of the big bed, it took what seemed hours to claw his way through the foamy bedclothes to the phone’s cry.

  It was the biggest deal, of course, the one that was to make him all his money back and double, that had gone wrong. In the ladies’ john of the clubhouse of a baseball stadium, opening night of the season, and some really dreadful characters.

  “Baseball stadium? What baseball stadium?”

  “How do I know? I don’t know anything about baseball.”

  It was all gone, money gone, stash gone, Pierce would never get the whole story.

  “Just so you’re safe, just so you’re safe,” he said.

  “Oh, I’m safe. It isn’t that. I owe you a lot of money.”

  “Forget it. Come home.”

  “I can’t. I won’t be coming over there for … a while. Change the phone. Change the locks. Really. But listen, listen. I’ll pay it all back, like I said. And more. Just wait.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Where are you? Where are you going?”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “You can’t just hide out alone. …”

  “I won’t be alone.” There was a pause, a pause long enough to be filled with a story, or an apology, or an excuse. Then: “Goodbye, Pierce,” she said.

  On the day he first met her, she had been masked and naked, and he was being paid by her mother to caress her.

  She was part Jew, part Gypsy on her mother’s side, and mostly Romanian, or perhaps a full half something entirely different, on her father’s side; she doubted her parentage. She thought her mother’s marriage was white; her father, an old-fashioned Broadway boulevardier, gentle and gay, had a secret hurt or weakness, never talked of much, which sent him early to bed and made him often vague, though always spiffy in a silk ascot and a neat white beard. He was “semiretired,” a successful writer of sentimental songs and TV jingles once, and a violin virtuoso too. He was a good host, offering Christmas champagne and black Balkan cigarettes to Pierce even before he was introduced, questioning him closely and then striking an attentive pose (he was an exquisite striker of antique poses) though seeming not to hear the answers Pierce made.

  It was her mother’s cicisbeo, Sid, who was also Pierce’s friend and landlord, who first brought her and Pierce together; and Sid who also later brought Pierce to her parents’ apartment on a sleety Christmas night. Pierce’s father, Axel, with whom Pierce usually spent Christmas, was in the hospital, and Sid, deeply sentimental about Christmas for reasons Pierce couldn’t fathom, had insisted that after the grim visiting hours were over, Pierce accompany him to this little party rather than (as he had intended) go back to his empty apartment and read.

  He recognized right off the ring on her left ring finger. She wore several rings, delicate silver ones, but the one on her left ring finger was an imitation Florentine one with a great glassy stone. When, at their first meeting, he had spent hours naked with her, he had had time to study it, among other marks now hidden from him. She took his hand with a smile of recognition, for she had seen his face. He
had arrived late that day a month before, at that huge and overheated loft somewhere in the West Forties (he would never come upon the place again); the others had already doffed their winter things and were masked; Pierce remembered the oddity of coming in among them clothed but naked-faced when they were the opposite.

  “We’ve met,” she said, when her father tried to make an introduction, forgetful of Pierce’s name. “Hi. ’Scuse me, Daddy, Effie wants to see you, everybody, she woke up.”

  Her mother—she called her putative father Daddy but her undeniable mother Effie, perhaps out of some desire to restrike a balance—was bedridden with flu, but wanted not to miss anything. Pierce brought in the box of chocolates that was all the cheer he had been able to acquire on a Christmas afternoon in Brooklyn, and these were opened and offered by Effie to the gathering around her bed.

  “Is Olga here?” she asked. “Oh I hope she can come. You never know with Olga, but she promised.” Effie wore pearls with her ecru satin bedjacket, an attractive woman much younger and seeming also to belong to a later decade than her husband, fifties to his twenties, or maybe twenties to his nineties.

  Her daughter sat on the bed. “You know Pierce,” she told Effie. “He’s an actor. You’ve seen him.” Effie ate a chocolate, smiling just the sly smile her daughter smiled.

  “Oh,” her father said (standing a little apart in the doorway, one hand except for the thumb inserted in his blazer pocket, the other holding champagne), “that’s how you know Sid? The movies?”

  “Sort of,” Pierce said, no actor at all in fact, though when Sid had recruited him for a day’s work, he’d assured Pierce that didn’t matter a bit. Sid himself, though he could convincingly, even with a certain air, describe himself as being “in films,” was in actuality a landlord, a born landlord in every sense, which is how Pierce had come to know him, Pierce’s building required minute and constant attention from Sid, who would far rather have been at work on his other enterprises, in films.

  “A dream sequence,” Sid had explained to him as he tried to conjure heat from Pierce’s stricken furnace that November. “A day’s work is all. Less. And twenty dollars in it for you too, not that you need the money.” Sid had just acquired the rights to a Japanese film, a piece of mild erotica that he thought might appeal to a certain audience, only it included no male nudity; a high court had recently allowed as how male nudity was not in itself grounds for prosecution, and Sid was sure his film could make money if it went to the absolute limit and could be so advertised. Noticing a scene where his much-tried heroine collapses into a deep sleep, Sid had thought of inserting a dream sequence just at that point, as full of naked men (and women) as he could make it, an Orgy Scene in fact, though “all simulated, all simulated,” as Sid said, gesturing No with the wrench in his hand. And masked: the masks disguising the fact that the dream-revelers Sid had hired were neither Oriental nor appeared anywhere else in the film—as well as giving the proper surrealistic touch.

  She was masked, then, when he was paired with her, and abstracted further by harsh lights that paled her tawny skin almost to transparency, unreal as a doll. Her mother, an amateur of several arts, had made the masks, and they were clever: just scarves of thin, silky stuff, almost transparent, on which Effie had painted Kabuki faces, beetling brows and outthrust chins. When the scarf was tied over the face, the features beneath gave some life and movement to the painted features—spooky and dreamlike indeed. Her mother had also, out of some fund at her disposal, paid for the shooting. Her husband knew nothing of it.

  Pierce understood nothing of this at the time, they were all strangers to him then but Sid, it was only explained to him by Sid in a hurried whisper as they mounted the stairs together to her apartment at Christmas. Sid didn’t whisper, though—Pierce couldn’t remember him ever mentioning it—that Effie’s own daughter had been among the dream-revelers. Or perhaps he had mentioned it, at some point, only it had not struck Pierce as it did now, among the family, at Christmas, drinking her father’s champagne.

  “Oh,” she said, “there’s the bell.” She got up from her mother’s bed with a bounce and went to answer it.

  “Are you going to play later?” Effie asked her husband, who struck a new pose, shy, coy.

  “Oh sure,” Sid said. “You must, must. It wouldn’t be Christmas.”

  “Olga’s here,” his daughter said, looking in.

  “Oh, tell her to come in,” Effie said. “I have to talk to her. Alone. Just for a while.” She passed the box of chocolates to Sid, and tidied herself.

  Olga was old, a sharp-eyed scarved head necklessly atop a tiny and plump figure, a beachball in flowing garments and heavy gold. Pierce was briefly presented, and was offered a ringed child’s hand and an absurdly deep, grandly accented “How do you do” that might have come from Bela Lugosi.

  “My mother’s cousin,” she told Pierce when Olga had swept on into Effie’s room. “From the Gypsy side.” She took Pierce to the sideboard, where food was displayed, catered, she said, nobody in this house could cook. She talked rapidly, her long earrings that might have been Olga’s trembling as she laughed or bent to the table, explaining family history, Christmas customs (Olga’s visit, her father’s recital on the violin). She lifted a cracker and caviar to her lips with her ringed hand; her breasts were free beneath a cashmere sweater, breasts he knew. She caught him looking. “Kind of funny, isn’t it?” she said, smiling her frank sly smile.

  He had writhed with her in exaggerated lust all morning, on hard platforms draped in dusty black theatrical velvets (the scene was laid in Nowhere, which was cheap). The action Sid had devised seemed to have been derived from the antique avant garde crossed with de Mille depravities, cavorting in abandon, and struck Pierce as operose and quite unerotic, but between takes he could simply look at her, absent behind her mask (once tied on, the masks were in place for the morning), and a strange jaybird freedom rising in him nearly made him giggle. She said she could use a smoke; she wondered what they were to do next; Pierce said he wasn’t sure, he thought now all the men together were to menace the heroine, sort of set upon her—a dark-skinned girl whose mask wore sad raised eyebrows and a red anguished mouth. He wondered aloud if part of the terribleness of this poor Japanese girl’s nightmare was that all the men she dreamed of were both hairy and circumcised. From behind her own painted cat’s eyes—she was a Kabuki sphinx, only lacking wings—his partner looked them over, and laughed, seeing that it was so; she brushed, absently, with her Florentine-ringed hand, the glittering sweat from her breasts (this was hot work), and though with a delicacy of its own it had remained unmoved through all its appearance on film, Pierce’s penis flexed and started.

  “I remember the ring,” he said, taking a cracker from her. Still Sphinx-like, more like her mask than he would have thought. “It’s an interesting one.”

  “Ugly, isn’t it?” she said. “But it’s got a secret.”

  “Oh?”

  She looked at him in an assessing sort of way for a moment, and then around the apartment. Sid and her father were greeting new guests (grandparents? one walked with a triple-footed cane). “C’mere,” she said.

  She led him down a corridor, past Effie’s door, which was partly open; Olga and Effie, hands clasped, were talking in low voices.

  “She’ll tell your fortune later,” she said to Pierce. “Really.” She pushed Pierce through another door, into the bathroom, and closed the door behind them. “She’s got cards, too, if you want cards.” She extracted one dangling earring and laid it on the top of the toilet tank. Then she raised the hand that bore the ring, looking intently at its stone as though it were a fortune-telling crystal, and with the thumbnail of her other hand she opened a catch and lifted back the stone.

  “A poison ring,” Pierce said.

  “Carefully, carefully,” she said. Within the ring was a dab of white matter. Moving with skilled care she took up the earring, and with its shovellike silver pendant she dipped into the ring, brought
out a load, and lifted it to her nostril; watching herself in the mirror above the sink, she inhaled it in a quick sniff, her nostril collapsing as though grasping it. “Why is it,” she said, “I wonder why it is, that people think Gypsies can tell fortunes. Why is that?”

  He could explain that. He watched, eyes wide, this bathroom a stranger place by far than that loft with its ersatz sex had been. She dipped the earring again and lifted it to him, feeding him, her mouth slightly open, kind nurse administering a powder, patient to sniff it all up, what a good boy. And again. “I could explain that,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Why Gypsies can tell fortunes.”

  “Olga’s good,” she said. “You might learn something.”

  He could explain, he could explain, it was not that he knew nothing else but for sure he knew the reason for that, even as he watched her treat herself again he felt doors within him, behind him, blowing open one by one, doors into the country of that explanation, and it made him grin. She closed the ring, and looking in the mirror she put back on her earring, not before touching its powdered tip with the tip of her tongue.

  She was turning back from the mirror when he caught her up, easily and not swiftly but neatly, as in a dance or an embrace of stars on film, and she melded with him as she had not ever quite done in Sid’s dream though willing enough it now seemed. Pierce marveled: it was as though he had been granted a wish, one of his adolescent wishes: that he could by some means know for sure beforehand that if he embraced a woman he would be welcomed; that he could somehow have already embraced her when the time for the first embrace was at hand.

  There was a knock on the door. “Just a sec,” she said over Pierce’s shoulder. They held each other, listening to the footsteps recede; they kissed again, turning now irrevocably to fire and ice.

  “Better go back,” she said.

  The living room was a new place, the books and pictures and the holly wound with tinsel and twinkling lights gayer now though somehow far off, amusing, richly festive.