Endless Things

by John Crowley

  She took a seat, her seat, on the pillowed mattress on the floor, folding up with an easeful practiced motion, like a cat. “So hey,” she said; she looked at him, and laughed, as if he'd prompted a funny memory of their life together, though he'd done nothing.

  He sat on a low velvet hassock.

  "You going alone?” she asked. “All by your lonesome?"

  "Yep.” He nodded, nodded, no help for it.

  "I'd go,” she said.

  "Hey,” he answered, and opened his hands again, ready when you are, any time; and he felt a long impossible future come to be and then burn out.

  "So you didn't get married, out there in the country,” she said to him.

  "No. Nope."

  "Nobody good enough for you."

  "Right."

  "You're a good guy,” she said. “You deserve somebody good."

  "Don't say that,” he said.

  She picked up from the cluttered low table beside her—it was a wooden cable spool, he guessed, covered in scarves—a cigarette holder, jade.

  "How's your mother?” he asked.

  "Aw. The same."

  He thought of her mother's apartment, a big old-fashioned place on the other side of town, where at Christmas once an old Gypsy woman had told his fortune. An old, old Gypsy; and her mother; and her.

  "And you?” he asked. “Steady guy?"

  "Two,” she said, and laughed. “Yeah. I sort of got them spelling each other, you know?"

  "Do they know about each other?"

  "Actually no. One of them works way downtown, days, and I see him at night. The other is up around here, and works nights. So."

  "Cox and Box,” said Pierce.

  "You're not kidding,” she said. “Anyway it's fun.” She turned the cigarette holder in her small smooth hands. “So come on,” she said. “Tell me how you've been. You know you don't look all that hot. I don't know about the beard."

  He had just begun to grow it. He rubbed it now, a scratchy sound. “Not all that hot, no."

  "No?"

  He clutched his brow, and she came closer to where he sat, and, smiling, put a hand on his knee. “I'll tell you something,” he said. “When I moved out of the city. After you ... well. The day I moved out. I made myself a promise. That I'd give up on love."

  Still smiling, she shook her head: don't get it.

  "I thought I'd had enough,” he said. “After you. I mean enough in both senses. Enough to last me; and as much as I could take."

  "Wow,” she said. “Dumb idea."

  He nodded. But it was true: he had thought that all that had happened between the two of them was enough to fill a soul to overflowing, and if time ever emptied his, new wine could not, surely should not, be poured in.

  "So, what,” she said. “You were going to join a monastery?"

  "No no,” he said. “I wasn't going that far. I'm not the monastic type. I was just going to. To keep my fancy free."

  "Really."

  "Really."

  "Don't tell me,” she said, profoundly tickled. “It didn't work out."

  He hung his head.

  "Jeez, Pierce,” she said. “You never go to the movies? Read a book? Don't you know what happens to people who make promises like that?"

  He did, he had known very well, but those were only stories after all, and because they were, the end or final capitulation to Love in effect came first in them; the initial vow of abnegation was just a means to it, and all the chastening errors and humiliations that lay in between were nothing, nothing at all, the confusions of a night, everybody already knew, even the suffering fool himself seemed to know from the beginning, because he was after all in a story: so you laughed, for him and with him.

  "So who was she,” Charis asked with a sigh: let's get started.

  "Her name was Rose."

  "Huh.” She seemed not quite to believe this. “And what was she like?"

  What was she like. Pierce for a moment couldn't answer. He had been lately experiencing a sort of intermittent catatonia, a division of consciousness when certain questions were put to him, wherein lengthy explanations or ponderings occurred within him even as his mouth opened and his jaw lifted and dropped saying things other than the things he thought, or nothing. What was she like? She was like him: he had once in bed told her that, though he didn't really believe it. He had told her that he knew what it was like to be her, her on the inside; but he never knew if she believed him. Really, nothing that he knew about her or that she had said about herself accounted for her, just as it might be said to him, Here is a night-blooming orchid that awakens only once a year and smells of flesh—all that could be said about it was that if it didn't, then there would be no such bloom. The same for Rose.

  "And so what happened?"

  He stopped again, chin wagging for a moment like a ventriloquist's dummy whose partner has fallen silent. He thought to say he had got lost in a haunted wood, because he thought he saw her go that way, or simply because he lost the right way. The thorn trees there bled when he cut them with his sword. He had met himself—right hand raised, in strange clothes, coming toward him, about to speak a warning, ask an unanswerable question. But he turned away, and went on. He was tricked into binding and whipping his beloved, and only discovered his mistake (that it wasn't his beloved, or his blows weren't kisses) too late.

  "Ooh. She liked that stuff?"

  "She did."

  "Do you?"

  "I did. Because she did."

  She waited.

  "It was,” Pierce said. “It was um. It was actually a lot of fun. I have to admit.” He saw reflected in her face the whiskery skull-grin he was making, and ceased.

  "Nobody's ever gonna hit me,” she said.

  "No,” he said, sure of it.

  "I mean sometimes a little spank,” she said. “On the behind. Sometimes it feels good. Right on that hole."

  Her level cool eyes. Never complain, never explain: her motto, she always said. In dreams he had seen her too sometimes, Charis, on the path ahead, turning to look back, with just those eyes. Or maybe it wasn't her, or Rose either, or anyone.

  "But listen,” she said, cross-legged now on her divan, a little idol. “Weren't you afraid you might go too far with her? That's what I always wonder. Like how were you supposed to know if she. You know. Didn't want to."

  "Oh she could tell me,” Pierce said, and ground his hands together. “Even if I wouldn't listen when she said no. Wasn't supposed to listen."

  "Then how did she tell you?"

  "She could say: I tell you three times."

  "'I tell you three times.’ That's it?"

  He lowered his head, bare and ashamed.

  "Okay,” Charis said cautiously but not judgmentally, calm counselor or therapist. “So go on."

  So go on. Iter in antiquam silvam, stabula alta ferarum. They had gone on, into the forest primeval, where the beasts den in the deep dark. How far in did they go? Only halfway: then, of course, they began to come out again, though he at least didn't know that. He told about the cutting of her hair, how deeply that got her too, another set of wires crossed; how he had been able to overmaster her simply by showing her the scissors (territio realis) and taking her hair in handfuls, gentle but firm, and not to be refused. And other things.

  "So let me see if I get this,” Charis said. Her black brows knitted. “You've got this woman who likes stuff. Needs stuff. She has to have stuff, but she can't say she wants it. So you get her somehow so that she can't get away, strap her up real good, and then while she's that way you do the stuff to her she wants you to do. The stuff she needs. While she says, No no, please no, and you don't listen."

  He nodded.

  "You figured out what she wants, and you gave it to her. Without her asking. Or even admitting. Which she couldn't do."

  He nodded still.

  "Well. Jeez. A person can't ask for more than that, Pierce. Isn't that just love? To do that for somebody? Isn't that what it means?"

&nbs
p; Could it be that her eyes regarding him were soft? He turned away, feeling a great heaving in his chest as though the hurt heart there were making a break for it; clapped a hand over his mouth to keep it in. It had only been a month or so since he had broken for good with Rose. Not long, not long at all. Real love: if it was, would Charis know, someone like her? Maybe she alone.

  "So where is she now?” Charis asked softly. “Are you still...?"

  "No. No no. She's gone."

  "Gone? Like vanished?"

  "To Peru.” He searched his coat pockets for something he didn't find. “Last I heard."

  "Peru."

  "She became a Christian,” Pierce said. “A sort of Christian. She joined a cult, actually."

  "A Peruvian cult?"

  "They have some sort of connection there,” he said. “A mission."

  "Like converting people?"

  "Bringing them the message. The Word. They're a tiny group, but they pretend to be international. The Powerhouse International."

  "The what house?"

  "Powerhouse. The Bible is the powerhouse.” To say anything about them, to use the fraught words they used, was to him like touching dead flesh, or being spat on by strangers, why? For how long?

  Charis shook her head in wonderment. “So when she got converted, that was the end of that stuff, huh? You and her. The things you did."

  "Well,” he said. “No. Not right away."

  "Oh no?” she said. “No?” She laughed greatly, as though some simple truth about humanity, or women, or life on earth had been confirmed. “Uh-huh. So then how did it end? Between you?"

  "Well, her faith,” he said. “So-called. After a while it just got insupportable."

  "Really."

  "Really.” Insupportable, that was the word, he couldn't support it, for our support is reason, and what our reason will not support we let fall, we walk away from it, everybody does, except those people; it was all he had done, all that he needed to admit he had done. Insupportable. “God,” he said. “Old Nobadaddy. Guy in the sky. I mean, come on."

  "Hey,” she said. “You know I believe in God."

  "You do?"

  "Sure. Don't look so amazed. I could never have got through the stuff I had to get through. Never. I couldn't go on.” She laughed a little, at herself, at what his face showed. “I mean I don't go to like church, I'm not, you know, good. But still. Yeah. Never could have made it. Without him. Who can."

  For just a moment, a vast moment, Pierce knew what that would be like: the ground of being your own friend and helper, a pour of power out of elsewhere into your heart, without judgment, asking nothing, giving all that was needed, the last resort. For a moment it was so: everything was unchanged, no different and yet all different. Then it was gone.

  He stood. Winter light was citron in the windows now, and Pierce thought he knew why she didn't light lights—she had no power, no bill to pay. He hadn't removed his coat. “Okay,” he said.

  "Pierce,” she said softly. “Don't go."

  She got up herself, and took his arm. She poured him liqueur in a tiny glass of many colors. For a long time they sat together, and he listened to her story of her own life, and felt the gnaw of boredom it's not uncommon to feel in the presence of one you love and have long ago lost and can't have. She gave him a tour of her apartment, bedroom kitchen front room all in a row, like the apartment he was living in when they first met, the same he had lived in with Julie Rosengarten before: an Old Law apartment. The refrigerator, unused, was covered in a glamorous fringed shawl on which embroidered beasts and birds cavorted in Eden. Outside on the windowsill a bottle of juice and a loaf of bread and some plastic containers kept cool.

  "You ever going to get electricity?"

  "It means signing up for stuff. I sublet, Pierce. I pay my bills in cash. I'm invisible."

  The bedroom, offered to him with the same gesture that his own bedroom had been offered to him by the Chief. More full of more things, this strange art form or indulgence she spent her time and thought on, arrangement of miniature stage sets, marionette tableaus, dioramas no one would ever see but her and her friends and lovers. He thought about her growing old, and turned away.

  "Aren't these valuable?” he asked, pointing to a cluster of miniature women gathered like a coven on the refrigerator's top, a mermaid, a Barbie, a Betty Boop, and a Betty Crocker. The one he had noticed was an ivory Chinese figurine, nude and marked with fine blue dashed lines: the kind that, he understood, women once used when consulting doctors, pointing out their pains on its bare body rather than uncovering their own.

  "Dunno,” she said. She lifted it from among the others. “You think so?"

  "I think they are."

  "You need it,” she said.

  "I do?"

  "You do,” she said, and, taking his hand, she put the little lady into it. “You do."

  He could close his fist around it, and hide it completely: almost. Charis named a figure, less than it was worth surely, but still a good sum. He'd thought, of course, that she meant it as a gift, and tried not to let it show that he'd thought so. He only nodded sagely, studying the thing; then he gave it to her to hold while he got out money. Money of the foundation's, meant, he told her, for his trip.

  "Well, sure,” she said. “And here's your first souvenir."

  "Okay."

  She offered to find something to wrap it in, but he took it and put it bare in his overcoat pocket. “She'll be all right,” he said.

  "Okay.” She slipped her arm in his, walked the few steps to her door. “People learn things about themselves, you know, Pierce. They do, finally. Sometimes what they don't want to know."

  "Yes."

  "Me, I've learned that I don't really have a warm heart. I mean it doesn't warm up by itself.” She tapped it lightly, the place where it was hidden. “I need to be loved. Somebody's gotta love me like nuts. And if they do, then...” She made a two-handed catch-fire gesture and a sound. “You know?"

  "Yes. I do."

  "You have a warm heart,” she said. “A real little steam engine in there. I always thought."

  "Oh,” he said. “Well. I don't know. I just feel that I failed her. She went over to them because she was in trouble, in real trouble. Fatal trouble almost, really. Yes, I think so. There was a night, a night on the hill, in her car, when she. Well. Never mind. But I couldn't see, couldn't admit that she was in such trouble, and do something for her. Something. I couldn't."

  Charis listened, saying nothing.

  "So how can I call it love? When I did nothing?"

  "Hey,” Charis said softly. “It's not like she was counting on you.” She studied him. “Was she?"

  "No."

  "There was no deal, was there?” She crossed her thin arms before her, cold in her doorway. “There's got to be a deal made. You guys never had a deal like that, did you?"

  "No."

  "See?"

  He must have looked unconvinced, because she took his lapel, looking up, her golden eyes. “You're a good guy,” she said. “You ought to get somebody good. But Pierce.” She waited till he looked at her. “You got to make a deal, and make it stick. You and her. You got to know what deal you've made, and it's got to have something for you, and something for her. You got to deal. Even I know that."

  She tugged his high head down toward hers to kiss his cheek. He thought of the last time he and she had parted, when money had changed hands too. And a kiss and an embrace that was like having all your lost treasure returned to you at once, and at once taken away again; and then the door closed and locked.

  A deal. He had certainly never struck a deal with Charis, though possibly he had assumed she had issued terms, terms that he thought he had accepted: that wasn't the same thing as a deal, he guessed.

  He hadn't told Charis that he had asked Rose to marry him, one night, one endless night. It was all he could think of to do, and it was not in order to rescue her, but himself: if she could say yes, then her soul would not be
theirs, she would not be their captive forever and his own soul die. That was the deal he offered. She didn't take it.

  It turns out—he'd read the literature, actually—that such affairs as theirs was don't often flourish or last long, because at bottom what the two folles in the folie à deux want from each other is impossible to have, indeed what each one needs makes it impossible to give what the other wants. For A wants B to place herself—say her just for instance—entirely in his power, willingly, in each instance: to say Yes with all her being and desire. But B needs A to deprive her of her will, take away her power of assent or dissent, so that what is done is not done by her at all.

  So what they do, A and B, is to pretend, for each other's sake, on each other's behalf: A pretends to unfeeling cruelty, B to resistance and ultimate capitulation. And, sly game players that they often are, they can go on long pretending, but the farther they press the game, the closer comes the moment when the contradiction becomes clear to each of them, not always the same moment for both unfortunately. That's why it's so often A who in the end is on his knees, and saying Please please, and B whose eyes are cold and turned away, wondering why she's there.

  Poor A, poor B.

  In the street it smelled of snow coming. He turned toward the subway, closing his coat with his right hand, pocketing his left. The little figurine—he had already forgotten it was there—slipped into his fingers, and the sudden touch of her ivory flesh was mild and pacifying. For the next months she lay there, he felt her placid curves amid the loose pence and marks and lire, the maps and subway tickets; when his trip was done and he hung the old coat on a hook, she remained. The winter after that he got a new coat, a wadded parka like everyone else's, and not until the old coat was gathered up one day with other things for the Salvation Army did another hand reach in and find her there amid the long-ago litter, unremoved.

  * * * *

  He returned to Brooklyn and Park Slope, and to his father's house. Axel was still not there, and neither was the Chief; the young men who came and went and lay around gave him beer to drink and a spot on the couch before the big TV that had come to inhabit the corner. The Ayatollah's face and pisshole eyes, that seemed to hang on the screen like Emmanuel Goldstein's for a full two minutes’ hate.