Ninety-seven . . . Ninety-eight . . . And with the slow crawl of the needle upward, his widening, broadening smile quite matched it.
Ninety-nine. . .
When it touched the one-hundred mark, there was a small explosion of boy: laughter, flailing arms, rollicking head.
In the back seat, Mrs. Evans, delighted, leaned forward to see what the joke was, but she never knew, never found out. So, content to be mystified, she settled back again to resume her knitting—her knitting!—that blood-red scarf her beautiful Jamie would never wear?
Then for whom was she knitting? Why had she started it again?
No one, nothing had told her; not quite yet.
It was chicken all right (he later discovered): a breast, but, bewilderingly, made into an almost perfect ball, all crunchy and brown on the outside.
Someone called Delia, who served him—a smiling, white-haired woman in a black dress and frilled apron, wearing a quilted mitten and warning him not to touch his plate because it was “piping hot”—leaned over and showed him how it was to be cut open. He watched, amazed. It was stuffed inside, and a small stream of melted butter with specks of green (“ ‘urbs and spices,” Delia whispered in his ear) oozed out, thick and steaming.
Mrs. Evans seemed a little doubtful. “You’d better try it,” she suggested. “We can always scramble some eggs or dream up a sandwich or two.”
But he found it delicious. Man, never, ever had he tasted anything like it: chicken so smooth, so meltingly rich that the first bite gliding over his tongue was something of a shock. Before the fork reached his mouth again, he saw a rash of gooseflesh cover his arms, then disappear.
He was less enthusiastic about something called an artichoke (Mrs. Evans spelled it for him)—a dull, grey-green “flower” that was to be eaten (he learned) with one’s fingers, pulling off petal after petal to dip in a tiny pool of lemony butter in a little curled leaf of a plate.
He ate most of it, however, thrilled because “some people have been known to die eating an artichoke,” Mrs. Evans told him, showing him how to avoid the spine which, if it caught in his throat, might choke him to death.
Fascinated, spearing the tender heart of his flower, Angel understood, he thought, how it got its name. The “choke” part was easy—shit!—it could choke you to death!—and the “art” was probably because it was something pretty (like a painting), a strange green flower. And the two parts put together with the “I” in-between, meant a kind of beautiful choking to death, or (i.e.) “I am choking to death eatin’ this beautiful art-istic flower.”
The sprawled giant of a house, hugging a hill, had been built with two “wings” (that’s what they were called) on either side of a big middle center with arched “pillows,” and it contained (Mrs. Evans had to stop to remember) “—oh! I don’t know: forty-two rooms, give or take a few.”
“Was it a hotel?” Angel asked. “I mean, did it use t’be?”
“No.”
“But how could one person”—with a flash he remembered Jamie—”or two, live in so many rooms, even with maids an’ all?”
“Well . . .”
How could one person, or two? She explained in detail. “My life wasn’t always—like this: private, alone. I remember the house filled with people: from the theater, and films—actors, singers, dancers—entertainers of all kinds. My husband, not Jamie’s father, my third husband, Mr. Harrison-Smith, who bought and maintained all this, was a very public person. He wasn’t happy unless tens of people were milling about. He didn’t care at all that most of them were opportunists, shamelessly using him. Why . . .”
But on the southwest side of the house as they turned, Angel discovered the swimming pool—God, it seemed as big as a lake, looked as deep as the ocean, still filled to its rim with water “because,” Mrs. Evans told him, “it’s better that way—to equalize the pressure and prevent the walls from cracking; and the logs there—” (he saw them at intervals lashed to the sides) “will break up the ice this winter when it freezes.”
She saw desire dancing in Angel’s eyes, and, with the sun high and strong, the area sheltered and windless, it seemed warm enough.
“In the cabana—that little house there, at the end, you’ll find some suits—” her face clouding with distress “—bathing trunks that will just about fit. And, I’m sure, a terry robe and towel. Do you swim?”
How shameful to admit that he couldn’t.
“Well then—” not surprised; “it doesn’t matter—just stay at this end, where it’s shallow; it begins at two feet and stretches”—pointing in the distance—”to five where the rope is and those colored buoys; then it drops off sharply and becomes very deep under the diving boards.”
She added as an idle afterthought: “Someone drowned there once: a young actress. They found more alcohol in her blood than water in her lungs.”
And she settled herself poolside in a white wicker rocker, knitting again, her eyes hidden by the darkest of sunglasses.
There were at least ten bathing trunks in the cub-ban-yub, all colors, many styles, from bikini to boxer, approximately the same size, exactly his. But for reasons he couldn’t and didn’t try to explain, he was unable to bring himself to wear any; he emerged from the shadows into the sun, a towel slung over his shoulder, in his own white jockey shorts. They were small, almost bikini in style, and flyless, so he thought Mrs. Evans wouldn’t even notice, imagining he was wearing one of the ones he was “ ‘asposed to.”
If she did notice, she didn’t mention it at all, watching him with pleasure as he splashed in the blue-green water, so covered with bright autumn leaves, it seemed a perfect carpet.
He stayed in so long his fingertips turned wrinkled and blue.
She called him several times, then begged him: “Angel, you’ll be ill!”
Finally he came out: grinning, boney knees shaking, teeth chattering. While she dried him, Delia was called on the poolside phone, and she brought out with her a huge brown blanket in which he was wound and half-hidden, like the folded creature in a dark cocoon, then instructed to squirm out of his shorts (she knew!) which were taken into the kitchen to hang in front of the stove.
She then rubbed and scrubbed his hair dry, but it was clear his marvelous Afro was ruined, and they both laughed as she held up a pocketbook mirror so he could see the fright-wigged horror he’d become, neither of them the least bit caring.
He then sat peaceful and warm and depleted in the sun, until his eyes, scanning the distance, found, nested in its exquisite landscaped setting, her son’s white tomb. She told him what it was.
It was clear she didn’t want to talk about it much, but his curiosity was overpowering.
“An’ that’s where he is—not buried in the groun’ like everyone else?”
She didn’t answer at all, and then he remembered seeing movies, like Dracula, where they showed you the insides of tombs where the coffin is right there, like just on a slab of stone or an altar, maybe right in the middle, or, if there were many corpses, in the walls, sliding in and out like drawers in a chest.
So that’s how Jamie must be (he thought) picturing vividly the dead boy—centered, since the tomb was his alone, high on an altar, maybe with big gol’ candlesticks all aroun’, or a flame burning eternally and forever.
They were too far away for him to see the ornate and mysterious keyless photo-and-audio-electric door that opened (he was eventually to learn from Dori) to a word and a gesture, but the heavy bars on the windows puzzled him.
This she was willing to explain. “They’re probably not needed, but provide protection against vandalism and desecration. The whole estate is fenced; a very high wall. You saw it, and the iron gate, as we drove in. But children—boys from the town—sometimes climb over. I don’t know how. I suppose they must make ladders of something or bring rope. Many times we’ve had to chase them, and once I called the sheriff. One boy, a little one, was deserted by the others and got lost; it took two hours to find him.”
>
Her voice, slow and low-pitched, had acquired such a lifeless quality, he was sorry he had asked about the tomb.
“The water was fun,” he said, grinning, his voice a lilt. “I never seen such a big pool; man, is that big! An’ all them dead leaves ticklin’ you when you swim!”
The knitting dropped from Mrs. Evan’s fingers and her hands fell into her lap. She turned her face, as if to warm it, to the sun, but really to take it away from Angel’s sight, because tears had gathered and begun to overflow.
An’ that’s where he is, not buried in the groun’ like everyone else?
And suddenly this child, this strange wild boy with his atrocious grammar and primitive sensibilities became useless and intolerable; repulsive . . .
How different he’d seemed when first they’d met! In their “quiet time” together, when she’d asked him not to speak, just to “be” with her, and she herself became lost to the sensible world, her experience of him had been uncanny. For a moment she felt that the boy was Jamie: Angel transfigured, the quintessential spirit of bodies transposed, with even the delicate scent of honey in the air, as if her son, arising from his tomb, had effected through her and the growing preternatural monument of her desire, a miraculous transubstantiation . . .
I’ll find a way!
Had it been a poem after all? More of her “morbid” poetry of death? Transfiguration! The boy couldn’t leave the slums where she’d found him; he brought the slums with him. He was impure, dense, corrupt, impervious to the clarity, the transcendance of loving spirit she’d sought to create and share with him.
Im lost. Please fine me.
How could she fine him, cleanse him, free him of his wilderness of self, if he wouldn’t confess where, how and in what manner he was lost?
Not a word about his mother, ever; her death, what had happened, when, why, the manner, the extent of his suffering—or about his father. When they spoke of him, the boy’s eyes closed, or half-disappeared in his head, while the tic returned in full force, chin jerking out. If she persisted, and once she did, the jerk became a constant, a continual, virtually orgasmic shuddering, until she held him firmly, hands pressed to either side of his head, to make him stop.
“Are you crying?” he asked shyly, discovering the trick of her turning her head away? “Did I make you cry?”
So sweet, so concerned, so completely disarming. That was the paradox! If she’d had a heart left to break, it would now have broken and scattered itself in fragments.
She took off her glasses and turned back her face, letting him see her tears. Why not?
“No, you didn’t, Angel,” she said softly, thinking to reassure him. “Not you . . . Not you . . .”
Then she was deeply sorry and angry at herself; because he wanted, so clearly wanted to have made her cry the way she cried for Jamie, his secret shy expression mingling disappointment, sadness and rage.
After luncheon—the chicken and the artichoke—dessert had been two double servings of homemade, butter-rich vanilla ice cream covered with shaved curls of semi-sweet chocolate.
Then, just before they left to drive back home, there was a big blue-and-white cup of velvety hot cocoa waiting for him with a scoop of whipped cream springled with chocolate “ants” and a few tiny silver seed “pearls” which were candy, too. He drained the last drop and ate all fourteen of the small, flat pink-frosted vanilla-cream cookies that came with this final treat.
So it should surprise no one at all that half-way back to New York, when Angel turned in agony to look at Mrs. Evans, she saw a face drained of color, the forehead glistening with sweat.
Dori stopped the car and, the boy’s hand in hers, she led him, staggering, knee-deep into the wet leaves at the side of the road. There, as she had done a few times with Jamie, she bent him over, and herself over him, like two dogs screwing, one hand on his stomach, the other holding his wet forehead while he heaved and gasped for breath, struggled, panicked, against the vast indignity of his tolerable urge, then surrendered, vomiting a river of chocolate and chicken and pink-frosted vanilla-cream cookies . . .
Cool, depleted, peaceful, unburdened, he lay stretched out on the back seat, his head on Mrs. Evan’s lap, while gently, with practiced thoughtless love, her fingers stroked his forehead, carressed his tangled hair; finally—tired, idle, dreaming—she became still, one hand resting against his chest.
She seemed asleep but wasn’t at all when the car reached the mid-town tunnel; and as it whooshed into its great open mouth, lights streaking by like popping flash cubes, Angel’s hand stole up and warmly, rather damply, curved over hers.
What happened next seemed her due, not “reward”—simply payment in kind for excellent work rendered.
Hadn’t she battered heaven’s doors, peered into every black hole she hoped might be hell—ever exposed, ever ready to pay any price to achieve what she desired, her principle being one of total, unlimited liability?
I’ll find a way!
And she had; desire finally becoming faith. So, heaven answered, as it had to. And hell, too, as it must. Or—what is probably closer to the truth, both—since they are one, anyway.
Whatever—the hand that stole over hers, damply, warmly, as the long black limousine sped toward the heart of the city, wasn’t Angel’s at all. It was Jamie’s.
There was nothing unusual to see, but calmly, without a single extra heartbeat, or even a fraction’s widening of the eye, Mrs. Evans reached—not for Angel’s “glass-cutting ruby”—but for the initialed ring her son loved so well and which had been interred with him. She did this quickly, not knowing how long the phenomenon would last.
Cool fingers—the blind reading braille—she traced out the message: Jde VR, on the ring, before it vanished.
Dori’s eyes left his driving for a quick puzzled glance back, something having disturbed him. Evidently the scent of honey had filled the front of the car, too.
Book IV
AFTER MAILING his thank-you card to Mrs. Evans, Bruno waited for what he desired to be a discreet lapse of time before he telephoned. Four days, five if he could last, would be sufficient. Above all, he didn’t want to appear over-anxious or pushy. But at the end of a mere 48 hours he was almost unable to stay away from the phone.
The delay had also made him nervous and ill-tempered, even slightly disoriented and careless at work. He made any number of mistakes, and was so preoccupied he sometimes didn’t answer when spoken to.
Where, where was his mind?
Where but in his divine lady’s small, smooth, perfectly-shaped, exquisitely-manicured, ultra-feminine hands?
If he closed his eyes, strained his senses to evoke it, he could still feel the touch of those beautiful hands, those kind and loving arms, lifting him like a cherished child, from the books on the antique chair.
He couldn’t remember a woman, any woman, any girl, all his life, not since the early days with his bewildered, uncertain mother, not even the nurses at the hospital when his appendix had to come out, ever touching him that way: willingly, deliberately, with such gentleness, tenderness and care.
Oh, but he was wrong. Yes. There’d been Lily, astonishing Lily of his highschool days, and for a moment his mind went back to recapture the event: a few words exchanged, a simple gesture that, to the girl had been only a daring interlude, a minute’s freaked-out fun at the senior prom, but to him could have meant the end of his life. Afterward, he remembered, he wanted to kill himself, and almost did.
He hadn’t wanted to attend the graduation party, but Mr. Kravitz, the gym instructor, thought the unhappy boy might enjoy watching the festivities from the balcony of the auditorium—the latter having been cleared of most of its seats as a dancing area for the event.
Also, if he watched, he could indeed do everyone “a big favor.” At ten o’clock sharp, he was to pull a string, releasing 300 multicolored balloons from their clustered nest on the ceiling.
This he did, precisely on time, and sat watching them drift
gracefully down, mingling with the ecstatic “oh’s” and “ah’s” of the dancers below.
However, behind the balcony, at the top of the stairs, was a lavatory for women, and just as he was about to leave, a girl from one of his classes, Lily Thompson, came out. She spotted him instantly, and her steady gaze held his as she continued, shamelessly, or quite as if no one was there, to adjust her underclothes below the white-sequined tulle of her ballet-style dress, held well above her waist. This done, she came directly and slowly down the stairs.
“Hello, Bruno”—her eyes heavy-lidded and slightly pink. (He knew that the boys, indeed had seen a few from the advantage of his high position, had drained several bottles of gin or vodka into the community punch bowl.) “Why ain’t you dancin?”
It seemed a stupid but not at first deliberately cruel and taunting question.
He had no answer she didn’t already know, and so just stood there, helpless, as was so often his habit with the countless torturers in the world who tried to bait him.
His silence was of no concern to her. “These—are—gardenias,” she said of her slightly wilted corsage, her enunciation exceptionally sharp, clear and loud, as if, besides being shockingly small and twisted, he was also an idiot, hard of hearing. “My boyfriend sent them to me—they were delivered?—by the florist’s truck?—for the dance?—Jimmy Greene?—you know him!—he’s in our biology class—the tall one with the red hair?— six-feet-two at eighteen years of age! Ain’t that amazing?” A moment’s pause. “How tall are you?”
No reply. She shrugged. “Well, I can guess. A yardstick would just about do.” She came closer. “Y’know, I’ve got a playhouse at home I used when I was four; you’d just about fit—if you ever needed a place to stay.”
Bereavements Page 12
