“Of course it’s a thing,” said Ben, frustrated. “You’ve seriously never encountered that?”
“I mean, maybe very old people might. Or conservative people. But people we know?”
“You don’t think people on the left will forget everything they claim to believe and get down on their knees for a soldier? You really never saw that happen?”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“People don’t make sense.”
“But the American army,” Kate said stubbornly, “doesn’t it just … bomb peasants from the air? Or it did, when it even did anything. I just can’t see how it’s admirable.”
“That isn’t all soldiers do. It certainly isn’t what Navy SEALS do.”
Then Ben talked about the Guatemalan intervention, and Kate was nonplussed and didn’t seem to understand. She asked if José was in the Guatemalan navy. Ben answered irritably, “No, he was born here. And anyway, he’s Mexican, not Guatemalan. And I said he was in the SEALs.” Kate said it just seemed weird that America’s navy would be in Guatemala, and Ben said, “Well, no kidding.” Then he said, to put an end to it, “Anyway, he wasn’t bombing people from planes. That’s really not a Navy SEAL thing.”
“Right,” Kate said. “The navy is boats.”
Then, when she saw his expression, she laughed, but her laughter seemed anxious, forced. Ben was possessed by the irrational conviction that she did know José and had some ulterior motive for hiding it.
Otherwise it was a happy period. He’d finished writing his dissertation, and he and Kate sat up nights discussing whether he should look for a geologist job in Bolivia, Nigeria, some interesting country, and imagining how they would live in those countries and if it would be practical to have a cat there or if they should just get a cat and stay in New York.
And there was a day with Kate (the first day of the blizzard) that exemplified that happiness. He’d bought her a copy of his favorite Dr. Seuss book, I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, about a creature so beset by troubles it decides to leave its home for the utopian city of Solla Sollew. The creature has a series of misadventures getting there; then when it arrives, it finds that, while Solla Sollew really is a paradise where no one ever suffers, it has one problem: a Key-Slapping Slippard that lives in the keyhole of the only door, so no one can get in. Kate was delighted with the book. Improbably, she’d never heard of Dr. Seuss; presumably she’d spent her childhood reading spooky Hungarian children’s books. In fact, she talked about the book her mother had mentioned, the book by her mother’s old friend Gabor, The Boy Who Got Lost in a Dream, and how as a child Kate had tried to escape into dreams, like the hero of the book. But she couldn’t; it was like Solla Sollew.
Then Ben talked about his childhood and how his family went to Kolkata every year to visit his mother Swati’s family, a huge, excitable, close-knit family who all lived in two adjacent apartment buildings owned by Swati’s great-uncle Vikram, and they trooped in and out of each other’s apartments all day in a massive, multistory cooking effort; the instant you arrived you were assailed with food and invited to take a bath and pinched, and everyone rudely commented on your size and clothes and teeth. It entranced little Ben; he would fall asleep in his mother’s lap to the adults’ interminable looping conversations in which they refought the Nepalese War and argued through the films of Majumdar shot by shot and quoted Bengali and American poetry, gesticulating and laughing uproariously and pounding their chests, but by Day Two, Ben’s mother would fight with her parents and weepingly accuse her sisters of excluding her and be accused in turn of flirting with their husbands, and on their final visit she lost her temper so badly she shrieked with no words, just squalled inarticulately, hands raised claw-like toward her sisters, then she plunged one hand into a pan of frying luchis and had to be rushed to the hospital. Ben’s father went with her, though Swati’s family scolded him and told him he should stay with his son. But they didn’t comfort Ben. Ben was lost, underfoot in a mob of angry relatives railing in Bengali about his mother, and at last he crept away and fell asleep in a bathtub. The following year, great-uncle Vikram died and Swati sued her family for a share of the apartments and they cut her off. They cut Ben off as if he’d never existed.
Kate pulled Ben down onto the bed then, as if he were crying and needed to be comforted, although he’d told the story in a brusque, cold voice, the voice he always used to talk about his mother. Kate wrapped her arms and legs around him and nuzzled his neck and, slowly, Ben relaxed absolutely; it was as if he were lying underneath a waterfall that coursed through his body and washed it all away. Kate said, “You could cut her off too. I’m giving you permission,” and Ben said, muffled as if with sleep, “I only talk to her once a week now. And there’s my dad.” He shut his eyes and Kate kissed him on the cheek and said, “I just wish I could fix it for you.”
Then they had sex twice and read the Dr. Seuss book aloud to each other and recited lines from it while they made spaghetti, and the snow fell all day long, and the city outside became a Solla Sollewish sketch, the buildings softened with snowy mist and topped with oversized white hats, the trees outlined in white, with handfuls of snow uplofted in Seussian abandon.
12
She was the daughter of a courtier, yes, but a low sort of courtier; a Queen’s musician. Worse, no Englishman but an Italian. Worse than worse, a Jew by birth. “Jew” was never said in Emilia’s presence, but the fact of it appeared in her black hair, black eyes, her ineluctably unwhite face. Never spoken and always there, like unshed tears.
Her father having died when she was small, Emilia was given to the Countess of Kent to be fostered and to work at the interminable needlework gentlewomen did. A boring idyll, a country house. Big rooms that were never warm. The women gathered their chairs at the hearth. Emilia often played her lute while the others sewed and gossiped. Angels were painted on the ceiling above, and the tapestries’ softer pictures were hung about: a Juno glared at the bleeding saint on the opposite wall; a hunt frolicked over a painted cloth that billowed in the chimney’s draft. There was a chair with one short leg, which Emilia used to rock unthinking, muttering her Latin declensions as she worked her needle.
There were also real hunts, to the singing of hounds, her heart stooping as the hawk stooped and arrowed from the sky to pluck a fleeing hare. Outdoors; everything one might dream. The fairy-gray clouded sky and the fairy-green misted wood. Her tall horse shying at a sparkling brook. All dreams. What Kate had dreamed; it now awakened and was Emilia’s life.
Then the love story, such as it was: Emilia had ridden to court with the countess’s household. She’d danced under the eye of Elizabeth, an onyx head among fair heads. She had danced, and the pipers playing were the men of her childhood, her onyx-headed cousins.
Lord Hunsdon was stiff among the dancers. A thing that happened to fatherless girls: old men. But he was still a fine warlike man, and he was Lord Chamberlain and the Queen’s own cousin. It didn’t matter that he was married, that he had fourteen children grown. There was never any question, and the countess encouraged it. There was no decision to be made.
He kept Emilia richly. She was Hunsdon’s whore, but she was Hunsdon’s. She wore his jewels and damasked silks. She had the Lord Chamberlain’s ear. She was eighteen and a nothing, but every nobleman courted black Emilia. They gave her presents: a silver caul; her little dog, Dinah; a doll dressed to showcase the fashions of France. They whispered to her about their sad ambitions and begged her to bespeak her lord—and she did so happily, feeling her power. Hunsdon laughed and swore to be ruled by her, and it was heady for such a young girl. Heady to be touched, even if the hands were pale and liver spotted, cold. Heady to be shivering, nude, in a curtained bed. To confess to Hunsdon’s priest, confess real sins that made the priest hoarse.
And when the Queen was suffering toothache, black Emilia sat at her feet and piped for her, and, at the Queen’s bidding, danced to her own piping until her notes went awry for lack of br
eath. Then Her Majesty laughed, forgot her pain, gave Emilia a gift of velvet sleeves.
When Emilia miscarried her first baby, Hunsdon sent her a doctor at Shoreditch. She lost the second baby at Somerset House, his house. She could watch his barge come and go on the Thames from the window where she bled, seated on heaped linen. But her third baby grew, became a telltale bump, and she was married off to Lanier, Emilia’s needy cousin, a piper who expected favors from Hunsdon and grew unpleasant when he was rebuffed. A strutting meacock fool, said Hunsdon, a popinjay. Well, it was true.
Now Hunsdon needed no mistress more, he was grown too old. He had a dozen bastards of various stamps and five sons from his honest wife; he needed no bastards more—said Hunsdon.
And Emilia wept, brought low. Was lost. A cast-off, big-bellied whore.
Those were the facts of Emilia, which she’d woken knowing. She sat up in bed at Horne, and it was there like the answer to a riddle: Emilia’s life. Two months had passed. Sad Will had gone away. She was alone with the precarious world; with the fearful knowledge that she had to save the world.
Well, this time she would go about it logically. Last time she’d let herself be led—by Will, who was real—or she’d decided he was “real.” She’d given what he asked, let him use her name. She had made a small, deliberate change.
But then she’d woken in a skewed, weird twenty-first century, where people talked about “the economy” as if all motivations were forms of greed; where the air was stale with car exhaust—you could hear the cars in bed at night; they were even in Manhattan where it made no sense. Then the war in Guatemala that they called an “intervention,” a war that had never existed before Kate dreamed about Sad Will.
Well, now she had Hunsdon in her mind like a sign, like a tool in her hand, like a hammer for a nail. Hunsdon was the greatest man Emilia knew. He had always been the obvious move.
So, the work of getting dressed: a hundred fussy businesses of tying and tugging, of Mary’s poking fingers. Walking down the hall to the smells and chills of morning, to the day outside. Still sore from childbirth, she needed a leg up from her man, Arthur, to mount her horse.
And rode for Nonesuch Palace.
So, riding on the frosty overgrown road, the green view interrupted by her horse’s ears. Arthur rode ahead of her, humming. There was the treacherous, vertiginous pleasure of the dream, where details were too vivid and emotional: the horse’s rocking walk and the damp in the wind, flies veering in with an abrupt big buzz then vanishing into the air. For a while, they were surrounded by a flock of sheep, which followed them, bleating and getting underfoot. Arthur tried to frighten them off with his sword, but the sheep dodged indifferently, unalarmed.
An hour’s ride from Horne; no matter. It was still morning when she spotted the turrets of Nonesuch Palace—the loveliest of royal palaces, a Xanadu, an ivory confection with teal and gold decorations on its facade. The clouds appeared to be its clouds, pretty ornaments whose rain and lightning were diversions to watch from its hundred windows. Riding to its gate, you believed in the divinity of princes. It looked like the abode of an effeminate god.
The porter knew her and made no trouble. She left Arthur with the horses at the gate. Then the chilly hallways, the sconces she passed, their candle flames wavering with the breeze she made, their heat a little dangerous by her face. Cold air whispered at her ankles with the movement of her skirts. In some corners, a piss smell lingered. Where people were, it was a war of perfumes and the companionable reek of sweat. Gold chains ornamented her hair, and the pearls at her ears bounced as she went. She was a toy. It was a game. It was Emilia’s airy element. So to Hunsdon’s door, through everyone she met by the way; a half-dozen circumlocutions and kisses, the old prevaricating dance of court.
At his door. It was done. Hunsdon’s man bowed her in. She had time to be aware there was something wrong as Hunsdon rose from his desk.
Then his well-known face, and the hurt of it. He looked at her as a lizard looks up from a wall, as if a wall spontaneously grew a lizard in order to unfeelingly look.
“Mistress Lanier,” he said coldly. “I had not thought to see thee here.”
“I pray you, sir … I would speak with you.” Already Emilia was crying.
Then the dream misbehaved. It didn’t like Hunsdon. The dream didn’t want him, the dream wouldn’t have him. It spat him out like a pip. Time skipped and became a strange, intelligent blackness, in which she had knelt and wept into her gloves, their scent of musk and leather stifling, while Hunsdon said something not to the purpose. Promised her money. Whatever men said.
Then she was back in the hallway, alone with her sob-red face. Unnerved. She didn’t understand how the scene had rebelled, had fallen out from under her and dumped her here. She supposed it hadn’t been Hunsdon she wanted. He was something the dream wouldn’t let her do.
She pondered, still weeping lightly, leaning against the chilly wall. It was beautiful to be heartbroken, it was as pleasurable as a thing could be. But pointless. On the wall in front of her, the iron branches and tender flames of a sconce changed subtly and formed the peaks of an apocalyptic city: its broken towers, its airless sky. Where everyone was dead. Static muttered in her head. She could not make a mistake.
Then it cleared: farther down the hallway, a door had opened on a flourish of sunlight. Into the light stepped a youth, white and gold, a celestial apparition—the Earl of Southampton. His face was beardless still, the eyes pale blue and with the lashless look of redheads. His auburn tresses, artfully curled, fell almost to his elbows. He was six feet tall and as lovely as a waterfall, as pretty as a flowering tree. White silk, white velvet, cloth of gold. A gold filigree earring in one ear. Emilia knew him from her days of attendance on the Queen: an uncanny, androgynous youth with the despotic pout of the beautiful, who can never be sufficiently loved.
He noticed her, then he noticed her tears. She turned to him—smiled to him—unembarrassed. This court was a friend to tears. There was never so hospitable a place for tears. She felt her task appear and faced him with the fearful elation of a warrior. The moment opened wide.
“Lady,” he said. “Why do you weep?”
She lifted a hand to her tearful face. “My lord, I know not. What is it maidens weep for? Mayhap, for the sailors lost at sea?”
“Nay, madam.” He smiled, taking the joke. “I think it is not for sailors.”
“Then for mortal time, perhaps? For the springs that will never come again?”
“Yet I think not. Not for time nor spring.”
“Then it may be I weep for nothing? ’Tis but a woman’s watery nature?”
“Nay. Nor that.”
She made a disapproving frown. “Well, to be sure, my lord, it is not for love.”
He laughed and came forward impulsively to kiss her—his affection a potent thing, a flourish of light. She was smiling, her tears feeling fresh on her face. He smelled of sweat and roses. She felt it in the palms of her hands, in her loins. It was right. It was Southampton she had wanted all along.
Then he seemed to feel a scruple and turned to look back. In the doorway from which he had come, as if created by the earl’s idea, now stood Sad Will.
13
Ben saw Oksana again, and first had feelings about her, the day after the blizzard of 2001. The snow had stopped but the streets weren’t cleared. Ben had gone to work on foot because his boss called in a panic, but the trains still weren’t running from Queens. Then at lunch Ben went out walking again, infatuated by the streets without traffic, the dumbstruck cold that made his skin feel helpless, the new bright sky in its childhood blue. Ben headed to the park, and on Fifth Avenue, a Car Free NYC gang had built a five-foot snow wall across the street. On its side, they’d pinned a banner saying: 213 KILLED BY CARS IN 2000. A few parka-ed children were balanced on the wall, pretending to be walking on a bridge across a bottomless chasm. The Car Free people were drinking from thermoses while waiting to obstruct the snowplow. Ben re
cognized a girl he knew and accepted a sip of whisky from her thermos; he didn’t like to drink in the daytime, but it was one of those things you had to do to feel you were fully alive.
In the snowy expanse of Fifth Avenue, there were workers on their lunch hour having snowball fights while other people’s children tried to intercept the snowballs. Two women from Les Girafes, distinct in giraffe-print hats and scarves, were building igloos for the homeless on the border of Central Park and singing a smutty French version of “The Internationale.” Ben could only follow the first few lines: Stand up, penis of my brother; stand up, prisoner of trousers. A few homeless men were waiting, not helping but loudly praising the women to each other and calling them Florence Nightingales. Ben sipped the whisky and was briefly high on it, balanced on hope like walking on a bridge across a bottomless chasm; he gazed at the pure white avenue and believed the world could be saved.
It was when he was handing the thermos back that he turned and spotted Oksana. She was on the park side of Fifth Avenue, walking with an involuted shy-girl hunch he’d never noticed in her before, which perhaps she didn’t have when she was naked. The clothes she wore were dismal: a threadbare pink ski jacket whose hood was trimmed in dirty white fake fur and which strained and jutted with her pregnancy, shapeless red woolen pants, and grubby once-white tennis shoes. Her platinum hair was neatly combed, but the haircut revealed was aggressively bad—a bad mullet. With clothes on, she looked about fifteen years old.
When she’d said she went naked because of her clothes, Ben had assumed she was messing with Sabine. Now he realized she’d been stating a fact, and that alone changed Oksana in his mind. Also, in the grubby attire, her face shone out and was kitten-like, exquisite. It was suddenly understandable why the yacht man (for instance) was in love with her.
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