The Solitudes

by John Crowley

  And so, though Axel’s long and impassioned wooing of him had been often irritating; and though it was in general impossible to have actual conversation with someone whose stream of consciousness scoured the banks and overflowed the channels of any temporary subject; and though all of Pierce’s friends and lovers had found Axel pretty well unbearable for anything longer than a brief visit, still Axel held Pierce’s attention. On the whole he genuinely liked his father, which he found, sometimes, strangest of all. When late at night, “exalted” as Axel said by wine, weaving distractedly through the Brooklyn streets he knew and loved, Axel would sing Thomas Moore songs in a sweet clear tenor, Pierce even loved him.

  “Tomorrow,” Axel said, this Christmas full of misgivings, “tomorrow to fresh fields, and pastures new.”

  “Fresh woods,” Pierce said. “It’s fresh woods.”

  “Tomorrow to fresh woods. And pastures new.” They had come along, after dinner, arm in arm, to the Brooklyn Heights embankment, to look out over Manhattan—the final part of their recently evolved Christmas ritual, every part of which had become instantly precious to Axel. Here, usually, they observed poor Hart Crane’s apartment, now owned, to Axel’s annual disgust, by the Jehovah’s Witnesses; usually, Axel expatiated on the skyline, spoiled, he thought, by the two titanic cigarette cartons far downtown, they every year offended him anew. Tonight he seemed not to see them; he had drunk more than usual, Pierce unable to deny him a second bottle. “Oh Pierce. You must promise me. That you won’t abandon me.”

  “Oh, now Axel.”

  “You mustn’t abandon me.” With a dreadful hollow tone. And then mitigating it with forced insouciance: “Your old dad.” He took Pierce’s arm again. “You wouldn’t cast off your old dad, would you? Would you? We’re buddies, aren’t we, Pierce? More than father and son. We’re buddies, aren’t we?”

  “Sure we are. Of course we are. I’m telling you, it’s not that far.”

  “And so the youth arose,” Axel said, with a sweep of his arm, “and twitched his mantle blue.” He laughed and camped the gesture: “Twitched his mantle blue. Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new. Oh see me home, Pierce, just see me home, it’s not that far. I beg you.”

  He did love his father; he was a burden but Pierce was not very often truly ashamed or wearied by him; and yet he did wonder, as he took a taxi back across the river toward Manhattan, the city’s fiery parcels all undone, how much having Axel for a father had to do with that vow he had felt himself compelled to make on the night of his birthday: did wonder (cold hands thrust deep into his peacoat pockets, cold heart just for the moment empty) how much the effects of that strange and unhealing wound Axel had somehow long ago sustained had descended to him, and how much it might have to do with the wound that Pierce had begun to know was open and unhealed within himself.

  Well. Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

  And so in the spring Spofford came down from the Faraway Hills in his old truck, and he and Pierce loaded it with the contents of Pierce’s apartment, except for three dozen cartons of books sent separately. Spofford’s truck was an open pickup, and they both looked anxiously at the sky as they loaded, but the day stayed fine. They hung in the elevator the brown rugs the super insisted they use, and in this padded cell, two busy madmen, they rose and fell accompanied by Pierce’s desk, typewriter, bed, dishes, pictures, bibelots, and an ornate broad mirror heavy as a tombstone, all of it looking misplaced and somehow tawdry and ashamed when taken out into the spring sun.

  Pierce had made all his goodbyes, dinner the night before with the Sphinx the most lavish of them. She had got herself, she said, a tiny old-law apartment, one of the few still left in a chic neighborhood uptown where some of her old customers lived; she wasn’t yet able to afford electricity, lived by candlelight and ate out, and wanted no telephone. She had begun to make a kind of living going around to thrift shops and rummage sales, acquiring knickknacks, printed souvenir scarves and hand-painted ties, costume jewelry, ephemera, “art drecko” she said, laughing and lighting another cigarette. Her resale prices of these items were inflated to reflect the sureness of her taste and the skill of her hunting; she hawked them to acquaintances, often those same old customers of hers, their desires for such stuff were strong and their wallets were full. A floating antique store.

  Maybe (he said, at the brief evening’s end, exhausted for some reason but compelled to go on, no doubt for the same reason) he could see this little candlelit place. His own place being in such chaos tonight …

  No, she didn’t think he could. It was a dump really. Maybe when she got it fixed up.

  “I’ll be gone by then.”

  “You’ll be back. And I’ll come visit you.”

  Pierce, imagining her high heels on his front path, her perfume beside the Blackbury, thought that unlikely. And yet it was probably no more unlikely than that he himself should have done—or come a few quick steps from the verge of doing—what he was about to do: move. He had gone one recent evening full of spring odors on a walk down University Place and around Gramercy Park, peering into the locked park where the grass was green and the tulips opening. He walked the park’s perimeter, looking into the tall windows of spacious apartments that bordered it, paneled places he had always coveted. He thought: Maybe if a place like that one, or that one, were mine; a key to this park; enough income to support it—then maybe I’d stay. The Sphinx remote uptown notwithstanding. “Make me an offer,” he said to the city. But it made none, and neither did the Sphinx, she only kissed him smokily and without tears and told him to write.

  And now he was packed and departing.

  Never liked this place anyway, he thought, looking around his bared apartment, bleak-looking with Pierce’s life taken out of it, the oblong ghosts of his pictures on the walls, the few good and many strange things that had befallen him here either swept away with other detritus or packed to be taken. He shut the door on it forever, and clumped away down the corridor in his new country boots, carrying the last of his belongings, a tall red kitchen chair. This item crowned the pile in the truck, and with it waggling unsteadily above, he and Spofford rattled out of town, looking, Pierce supposed, like Okies fleeing a drought. And on the next morning Pierce stood on his sun porch watching dark and silver lights come and go in the Blackbury River beyond, his hands thrust into the sleeves of his sweater and an unbidden grin on his face.

  Okay, he said, not exactly aloud, speaking to all powers whatever that might bear his three wishes in their hands; okay, come now. Come now, ’cause I’ve made my own fortune, I’ve saved myself, I can make it from here: come now so I can turn you down. “Come now,” he said, “right now,” for he did not know how long this moment or this strength would last.

  NINE

  At about that hour, Beau Brachman across the street came out onto his balcony in the sun, the first morning sun strong enough to tempt him out; and he lay on the little platform he had built there a prayer rug. Moving with thoughtful care, but feeling inwardly a little of the glee of a journey undertaken after long confinement, he mounted the platform and folded his legs beneath him. He placed his hands on his knees, as on a belvedere or the rail of a ship. He looked outward, over the roofs of town and the sparkle of the river.

  He would go only a short excursion, he thought, being out of practice; would only go out to see, like the woodchucks also now newly abroad, like the hawks returning, what had become of the world since he had last got a clear look at it.

  Twenty minutes passed, twenty minutes measured by the clock in a teapot’s belly that stood on a kitchen shelf at Val’s Faraway Lodge, twenty minutes on Boney Rasmussen’s self-winding Longines with the lizard band.

  Turning, carefully, on the somewhat unsteady prayer rug, Beau aloft looked back down at his abandoned self still sitting firmly on its prayer rug on its balcony. He turned away then, and looked over the northwestern mountains, which from his balcony facing the river he had been unable to see: Mount Merrow, clad
in birch woods; Mount Whirligig, with a girt castle on its top; Mount Randa chiefest of them all. Turning further that way, Beau saw the Monument on its brow, like a unicorn’s horn.

  Upward. The valleys of the Faraways, seamed with roads and rivers, all pale in the spring sunlight, the roads still dusty with winter’s sand and salt and the meadows puce and lifeless. A few cattle abroad: there, he noted without surprise, was Rosie Mucho’s great Bison station wagon, lumbering toward town and an appointment with a lawyer or a judge; there, a little more unusual, was Val’s Beetle, out and about, nearly meeting Rosie at the Fair Prospect bridge. A dozen other trucks and cars were revealed as up we go, a little red convertible, a rattletrap pickup. Beau lifted his eyes: he was ascending the hills.

  Up high here the air was clearer, the center of the sky darkening to cobalt as the pellucid sky above a desert does, and the reticulated mountain ridges were sharply cut and clear to him. Mount Merrow where the rich lived, in glass houses on steep slopes, looking outward; taller Mount Whirligig, in motion now—it was apparent to Beau as he approached it—like a clockwork toy. The castle on its summit came and went, as though it were two-dimensional, invisible when edge-on, visible face-front, visible, invisible. Two-dimensional or not, though, it had a dark within, and Beau sensed a kind of forcing going on in there, a forcing as of a winter bulb: as though a foetus were being painfully articulated in the darkness limb by limb. Beau felt a sharp disgust. What was it? This far from earth, Beau apprehended not sights so much as meanings, imports, symmetries and discordances, and he apprehended them the more intensely the further away he got and the darker the air grew: as though he went progressively blind, and meaning, like a flavor he tasted, grew that much stronger to his senses.

  Mount Randa then, its bald brow and its wrinkled face bearded in trees patiently waiting to green. Hawks banked restlessly in the troubled air around the cliffy cheeks. On the slopes Beau could see, making his way up a steep track as of an old tear, a pilgrim, amazed with weariness and longing for the summit: toward which Beau himself now spiralled lazily, hawks falling beneath his flight-path. The summit. And—as the hills bent their gaze on him, as the sky took notice—Beau sped toward the Monument.

  What it was, or seemed to be as Beau came closer to it, was a stone pediment, carved with crowded letters; and on the pediment a stone elephant, inelegant and strong, who lifted his trunk and bent his thick neck to squint at Beau approaching; and on the elephant’s back an obelisk, cut with hieroglyphs, bird animal and thing. Strong elephant! As Beau circled above him, the obelisk swung beneath, a pointer, a gnomon; Beau hovered there until the Monument was still, and then, with delicious vertigo, he felt himself spilled from his rug.

  His sure, bare foot, extended, touched the tip of the obelisk; his knee bent, and with all his strength he vaulted upward, elephant and obelisk shifting and straining behind him in compensation, nearly toppling but not toppling. Beau shot a vast distance into the darkening sky.

  Stars were visible. And he was visible to them.

  His vault had pushed him to escape velocity, and now he traveled with undiminishing speed; but there was not, or did not seem to be, an infinity to travel in. The vastness resolved itself into nested spheres, like the wings and drops of an old-fashioned stageset, containing him and constraining his flight. There were spheres of air and fire; beyond them the spheres of the seven Archons coming and going like mechanical racehorses in their tracks. Beyond them, arm in arm in arm like paper cutouts, twelve vast figures girdled the topless and bottomless heavens, Æons, six of them below the horizon and six above, the six who had seen him leap. They really looked down on him now: and their eyes were not kind.

  Heimarmene. The whizzing gears of heaven. Beau knew well enough that heaven did not stop with them, that beyond them were spheres that they themselves had not heard of and could not imagine, every one lifetimes wide, containing lifetimes of labor and errantry and laughter and tears to cross before the next could be reached. Beau would put each one inside him as he crossed it, growing larger, growing toward his own infinitude, until at last he met his infinitude coming this way to meet him.

  As yet, though, he had not even reached the first sphere of fire, where who knew what awaited him. He had ceased to speed outward, and only floated, vertiginous and suddenly heavy.

  Afraid? Afraid, too.

  There was a name for each of those powers he must pass by, and the spheres they made, the Æons that composed them, the suffering that they occasioned (all one thing); once Beau remembered the name of the first, and had a voice to speak it with, he would begin to cross.

  But not now. Already he was falling back, the weight of his heart tugging at him, knocking at his iron ribs.

  Knocking. No, it wasn’t his heart at all. Beau tumbled backward out of the air, over the mountain, past the obelisk and grinning elephant, head over heels onto his prayer rug, and onto his balcony on Maple Street. Someone was knocking on his door.

  “Beau?”

  He came in from the balcony to see Rosie Mucho, peeking around the corner of the door, a comic mime of bashful intrusion.

  “Beau? You up?”

  “Come on in, Rosie.”

  “Gee, Beau, I’m sorry, were you, were you …”

  “What is it, Rosie? You want to leave Sam here, right, even though it’s not her schedule.”

  Someday, he thought, someday: he would go on, and just not return. Once get beyond the border, and you need never cycle back; instead of returning, you pass on. Realm on realm, forever, every one different.

  “It’s kind of an emergency,” Rosie said. She let herself further in, and Sam red-cheeked from the outdoors came with her, holding her mother’s pants leg.

  “It’s okay,” Beau said. “Rest, rest. You want tea?”

  “I can’t.” She came to him and drew him out of Sam’s earshot, Sam having stopped to squat before a wary tiger cat curled on the rug. “Here’s the thing. I have to go to court, in Cascadia. Mike and me. Can you believe the nerve? It’s all his fault we have to go, and just an hour ago he calls to say he can’t, he doesn’t have a car. I have to give him a lift.” Her face showed huge disbelief. “Can you believe it?”

  “Easy, easy. You’re flying right out of your body. It’ll be okay.”

  She closed her eyes, and took her elbows in her hands; breathed deeply; opened her eyes, as from long sleep, and as though onto a changed world: all to calm herself. “Okay,” she said. “It’s a little crazy.”

  Beau with a touch undid her locked arms, and took her in his own, pressing his breast tightly to hers. Tears sprang, absurdly, to Rosie’s eyes, brought forth like a reflex action by Beau’s hug. After a considered moment, Beau let her go.

  “Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, abashed and grateful. “Bye.”

  Sam’s curly head, a little tracking station, turned to follow her mother’s head as it left Beau, bent to kiss her, rose again to go. “Back soon, Sam. Be good.” The tears in Sam’s own eyes, which had been rising and sinking for some time, spilled over then, but Rosie was gone down the stairs.

  She picked up Mike outside the Donut Hole, honking her horn to get his attention. He had, between the last time Rosie had seen him (in court) and now, shaved off his mustache. She chose to take no notice of this. He climbed into the wagon and pulled the huge door shut; he greeted Rosie, at once shamefaced and pleased with himself.

  “The cat that ate the canary,” she said.

  “I have never,” he said, still smirking, “understood what that idiom is supposed to communicate.”

  “I have to say first,” Rosie said, “that I am really annoyed at you for this.” She moved the machine around to face the other way, the highway and Cascadia. “I just can’t help thinking you do it on purpose.”

  “I have a purpose,” Mike said, turning now more grave. “I do have a purpose. I don’t suppose that’s what you mean. But you might credit me with some better motive than just trying to annoy you.”

>   Ever since the separation agreement had been arrived at (a pretty simple document whose existence nevertheless embarrassed Rosie profoundly) Mike had set about tinkering with it, altering it and adding to it. He would brood over this or that clause or condition, and (often enough late at night) would call Rosie, and want to talk about it; long rambling not unfriendly calls, about marriage and justice and his feelings. When Rosie refused to talk with him anymore, he got his lawyer to call hers—his lawyer was a little light-boned grey-eyed fierce-faced woman Rosie shrank from, who was apparently willing to go to infinite pains for him; and eventually the niggling had accumulated to such an extent that now the agreement had to be seen again by the judge.

  “It was important to me,” Mike said, “and I am a person too in this situation, Rosie, which …”

  “I won’t talk about it, Michael. Allan told me not to talk about stuff with you and I’m not going to talk about stuff.”

  The car turned out from the Jambs onto the highway south, joining the lanes of traffic going to Cascadia, where the county courthouse is.

  And yet it was probably true, Rosie thought, that he didn’t really do it to annoy her. He was just more into it than she was; his own needs, what he felt was fair to him, took up more of his attention. Allan Butterman told her that hers should take up just as much of her attention, but they didn’t. For Rosie merely having to negotiate over the stuff, the money, the rights, made them not worth having; the sharper the negotiation, the less worth having. Surrendering stuff took less negotiating than struggling to keep it, and so if Allan hadn’t been there she supposed she would have just surrendered it all, and lived with that.

  “Well, how are you then, in a general way?” Mike asked. “If that’s okay to bring up.”

  “All right,” she said warily.

  “You doing anything?” He was looking not at her but out the window, as though searching for something, the way TV actors in cars do to fill the time while they say their lines.