The Heavens

by Sandra Newman

  Then Will said in Emilia’s ear, “I fear I have offended you, madam.”

  She stiffened. “Offended me? I know not how.”

  “Nor I. Yet I am sorry for it.”

  “And if you should offend me, it were no great matter. I am no one to you, sir. It can be no matter.”

  He was about to object, when a stir went through the room. Southampton had risen from his table on the dais, and other gentlemen hurried to attend him. The frothy gentleman stood up with a foolish smile and began to pull on his gloves.

  When she turned back to Will, she found him watching her. She ended up looking at Will’s hand, still loosely holding his knife—a long hand, marked by ink, the pads of the fingers visibly callused. He must play the viol, as many actors did.

  She rose from the table. Will rose, too, and bowed very slightly to her. He turned out to be a tall man, which she hadn’t noticed before, which made her feel wrong-footed. He walked beside her as they left the hall, and was telling her about the plays he’d written, plays “infant-like and green,” but which had won an approval beyond their worth. He was now like any man talking to a woman: a little too prolix, a little too loud, a little too aware of the impression he made. But it was also a joke; within it was intelligence, a tune half-heard in the wind. He was smarter than Emilia was. She was afraid.

  And they followed the tide of the crowd up a broad stone staircase and into the gallery, where a long array of windows showed the rain still falling outside, all the world cat-gray. At the far end of the gallery, a viol consort were arranging their chairs. The musicians were Frenchmen and Italians, all known to Emilia; the men of her youth.

  That was when she thought of Will’s name and was instantly convinced it was the key. As it came to her, the air changed. Her palms tingled. Will was telling the woeful tale of Lord Strange’s Men, embattled by the worthies of the City of London, and now unhoused by plague. She interrupted him, saying: “All I know of you is Will. It seems not name enough for such a well-approved man.”

  He balked, then bowed. “I am William Shakespeare. I repent me that I have no better news.” Then he paused. It was the pause of an author who hopes his auditor will recognize his name.

  She didn’t. Kate didn’t and Emilia didn’t. And yet it was as if she did recall it. It gave her a vertiginous déjà vu. For a moment, she was even sure she would wake; she knew the shibboleth and she would be freed.

  She wasn’t. People went on chattering around her. Some women now wore Mistress Bewley’s masks; among the crowd were faces of green and scarlet velvet, embellished and embroidered. On some, the eyes were occluded with lace. Emilia was sweating now, afraid. She had to wake up, but he was real. He had brown eyes. He was masculine and tired.

  She looked away to where the viol consort were preparing to play. One of the fiddlers was watching her—a Bassano cousin who had once put his hand up her skirt on a flight of stairs. Catching her eye, he licked his lips. She flinched.

  “Madam?” Will said. “Is aught the matter?”

  She said, “Yon fiddler is a countryman of mine. A base fellow.”

  Will followed her eye. “Your countryman—so, a base fellow of Surrey?”

  “Nay, an Italian. And a Jew.”

  At this, a superstitious qualm appeared in Will’s face. Of course—she knew belatedly—she couldn’t be a Jew. It was a thing you couldn’t say about yourself. It was a gaffe Emilia couldn’t have made.

  But something had shifted. She pursued it, saying, “My father was a Jew of Venice. ’Tis true: I am of that hated race.”

  He said cautiously, “Much evil is spoken of Jews. But men will speak villainously of anything strange. I am sure they say much that is false.”

  “All true,” she said (and the room grew vague; the words flew ready from her mouth like a curse). “There is no devilish thing, but ’twas invented by Jews. Witchcraft is our proper religion. We get our wealth by usury and our children by fornication. Why, ’tis by our villainy that the plague came into the world.”

  She turned from him again; she was almost done. Couples had joined now, preparing to dance. The nasty Lupo had his bow poised, his violin tucked underneath his chin. Another fiddler nodded and all the bows struck. The music struck up. Lupo’s face seized and disappeared in concentration, like biting down hard on an idea.

  People jigged and hopped in a distant light. All waning, and she said as the room fell away, “Jews are devilish spirits; we abide by night in a fiery realm. There can be no friendship between our peoples. We live in your nightmares, and you are but our dreams.”

  Then she seized and disappeared. The world went black. She stretched out her hand and felt a sheet, Ben’s arm, the caressing breeze from a ceiling fan. But Will’s voice pursued her with the slow, tired cadence of a man who has seen through a frivolous evasion: “I had not known it. And do the Jews dance?”

  15

  Then they all lived at Martin’s house. All of them who’d been at the hospital went, because the baby went there, because his things were there. Then somebody always had to be with the baby. It was tricky to coordinate if people didn’t live in the house.

  Kate stayed there, so Ben stayed there. José stayed, and slept in Oksana’s ballerina room, where Oksana came and went, never seeming to notice José, although Ben assumed they must have sex. Even Sabine stayed on and off; she felt responsible for everyone’s disasters, so she had a bed delivered and it became her second home. The ground floor was all mail-order brides, and they made a lot of noise and had fights and sobbing episodes but somehow made the place feel cheerful.

  The only one who didn’t live at Martin’s was Martin. When finally contacted by phone and informed he had a baby not genetically his, he had said in a bruised small voice, “Oh, God, does that serve me right for not adopting? I’m tempted to say it serves me right,” then went and checked himself into a rehab. An ex-boyfriend dropped by to pick up his clothes and told them Martin had experienced a mental collapse.

  “I’ll mental collapse him,” said Sabine, but no one did anything to Martin. They lived in the house.

  The baby’s name was a sticking point initially. Oksana had named him Qued Nodian McDaniels, McDaniels being Martin’s last name and Qued Nodian a name from a series of dreams Martin had, in which he was introduced to men with ridiculous names—Merguidd Wink and Pluribus Fudge and Qued Nodian—and woke up laughing. He’d talked about the dreams a lot when he was thinking of baby names, though he’d decided to name the baby Ryan.

  However, Oksana was obsessed with Qued Nodian, because (she said) she had dreamed about him too. She’d decided he was real and asked everyone if they had ever met Qued Nodian, and even once approached a man on the street to ask if he was Qued Nodian. She said Qued Nodian was her fate. She never did find him, so (as she commented in her unearthly, toneless voice) she had made him in her body. And she said the name would give the baby power. She said, “I think he will be grateful he has not a name like every person.”

  This outraged Sabine, who insisted on calling the baby Ryan and enunciated Ryan domineeringly and stared people down, so in her presence they called him Ryan. But he seemed like a Qued, very pensive and Zen, with lily-white skin and coal-black eyes; a changeling from the Pluribus Fudge universe or from a sci-fi movie about uncanny children born to unsuspecting small-town couples. Not cute but pretty, even when he was a newborn. He gazed beatifically at nothing, then (as his eyesight developed) at everything, squirming restlessly as if he couldn’t wait to get out of this irrelevant body. Kate said he was preparing to turn into a butterfly. Sabine said he was planning to invade Poland. Ben said he was the sort of baby you would see from the window of an airplane, crawling insouciantly on a cloud. José said Qued was like all other babies and hadn’t they ever known a baby? But it was clear he did it from a knee-jerk humility, hoping to be contradicted.

  Oksana was the mother, of course, but she exerted no rights. As soon as she was on her feet, she left and spent her days making a
film about the Union of Unreasonable Workers; she often slept in their squatted office in Bed-Stuy and didn’t come home for days. When she appeared, José followed her around with Qued in his arms and tried to reason with her. She said she was a monster. She said she was depressed. She said childbirth was monstrous, all people were monsters, and she didn’t have the will to pretend. When she left, José would get hives and have to lie in a bath of cold water; even the mail-order brides considered Oksana’s behavior beyond the pale because they loved José, as all girls did. Sabine said they had to keep Oksana away from “Ryan” before she turned him into a troll, because Oksana was a troll, she was of the troll race. Ben said keeping Oksana away would be surpassingly easy, but Sabine said, “I know José, he gets what he wants, it’s that Navy SEAL shit.” Kate said Oksana was a nut that perhaps even Navy SEALs couldn’t crack, and Comfort, the Liberian mail-order bride, said, “Not Navy SEALs, not God, can make that woman love her own baby, oh.”

  So Qued was an orphan; so they stayed. For days, for months, for whatever it was. Just baby time, like living at the bottom of the sea. The night sea: Qued woke the whole house with piercing, choking screams; then everyone convened at his cradle, sitting on the nursery floor in the dark. Someone warmed the formula and someone made chamomile tea. Brought wine. They took turns walking with Qued, who nursed or continued to scream, or nursed then screamed. They told stories about other babies. About being babies, and mistakes their parents had made. Kate’s map of Centauria and Zoof loomed above them, shadowy in the dark; the tenebrous fairies rode along the baseboard. They fell asleep on the floor. They fell asleep at the kitchen table. An alarm rang, and José stomped back and forth among them and showered and dressed, annoying like a fly that had got into the room. Then he went out to work, a relief. Ben dangled his keys in front of Qued so Qued could grab a key with an infantile satisfaction that focused his body. Qued peeped, and Ben said, “Key. Key. Key,” while Kate was warming up more formula. Or a mail-order bride walked back and forth with Qued in her arms and sang in a mail-order bride language, while other mail-order brides made eggs and Ben and Kate slept on the sofa and dreamed about Qued.

  Kate or Ben went out and came back. José came back and went out. People came, people left. It was as if they never left. That spring (to them all) was a baby-scented ritual: a basin where Qued screamed as he was washed; heaps of laundry being carried down to the basement, past the dark racks of Martin’s wine cellar to the dank alcove where the washer/dryer was; the looping scene of the diaper bin lid springing open and your hand casting in the heavy warm diaper; the thermometer for the formula, another baby wipe, Qued waking up, Qued sleeping.

  Toward evening, Sabine appeared, full of the world. She was a breath of fresh air, though all she did was complain. Sometimes she leaned over Qued and complained to him in baby talk. The immigration bill her congressman had sponsored was dying in committee; a rival, evil congressman had introduced a rival “guest worker” bill that was legalized slavery. She’d campaigned for this president, and now he was all about “balancing the budget.” The left wing was nothing but doe-eyed idiots raising funds to raise awareness, and all the money went to their own salaries. The best lacked all conviction, and the worst were full of passionate intensity, and the best weren’t even that good. The best took marching orders from the worst. You couldn’t get anything done, and Sabine was thinking of taking that job at the investment bank, because what was the point? She felt like King fucking Canute.

  Qued squeaked in her arms and Sabine said, “Aw, that’s cute. He thinks it’s a joke. No, he wants me to join the investment bank and leave all my money to him. I’m onto you, kiddo. I see right through you.”

  And Sabine calmed down because, baby. It was spring already (somehow), and they went out back and put burgers on the grill. They were happy all night because babies like happiness. Bea, the Filipina mail-order bride, taught them all to tango because she was taking a tango class; José came home again and played the guitar. They were a family. Or something like a family: when the door closed, it kept something in. It made them feel their fragility. Sabine’s complaints made them feel their fragility, as if this house were the last outpost of civilization in a land overrun by barbarians, and perhaps that was what all families were, or felt like. All good families.

  And Kate would sing to Qued (a spooky Icelandic lullaby they’d learned from a transient mail-order bride):

  Sleep, sleep, you black-eyed pig

  Fall into a deep pit of ghosts …

  And they were up all night in a deep pit of ghosts where they’d forgotten how to sleep or to abandon anyone and loved this creature who was born among them, who gave them something to be.

  Meanwhile (in the parallel world outside of Martin’s house) Ben was laid off from his job. When he thought of it, he pictured a cow’s skull in a trackless desert: the economy. He was living on his savings and applying for everything: jobs he wasn’t qualified for and didn’t want, jobs in Vietnam and jobs in Cleveland, jobs involving moral compromises that made him despise himself for applying.

  On nights before job interviews, he stayed alone at the apartment in Queens to sleep, although he didn’t like being there alone. He would end up staring out the window with the television on behind him, wishing he still smoked. Then he wouldn’t sleep. Couldn’t sleep without Kate. After the interview, for a few days he would feel as if he already had that job and be accordingly elated or filled with self loathing. A Schrödinger’s life, he didn’t know what he was. Then he didn’t get the job, and he was nothing.

  Kate had another mural gig, a picture of a teddy bears’ picnic for Sabine’s cardiologist’s baby. Ben would visit her at the cardiologist’s house and they would listen to NPR while she worked, then go back to Martin’s together and look after Qued together and sleep together. When Kate wasn’t there, Ben felt unpleasantly exhilarated, freed from some necessary stricture, as if he’d been ineptly launched into space. He needed Kate’s weight or her wild long hair or the prescient movements of her hand when she drew. She went through the world so easily, like a dandelion seed floating on the wind.

  In the throes of that need, he asked her to marry him. It was a morning when José had taken Qued to the park and the mail-order brides were sleeping in. Ben and Kate were planting marigolds in Martin’s backyard, and Ben just said it, and he added that he couldn’t buy a ring right now, but he’d get a job soon and then he would. Kate said she didn’t like rings anyway. “They make me feel like I have something on my hand.” Ben laughed and stood up as if everything was settled, and they went straight out to get a marriage license without even changing their clothes.

  It was there, at the courthouse—where you had to take a ticket and wait for your number to be called, so it was like a very beautiful DMV; marble floors and polished oak, but at the end of the day, you were waiting with a ticket in your hand—Kate mentioned the dream again.

  It began with her asking, “Have you heard of a poet called William Shakespeare?”

  Ben was startled from a reverie about getting married and it took him a moment to focus. Then he said, “I don’t think so. Should I have?”

  “You haven’t? A sixteenth-century poet?”

  “I might have, but I don’t remember. Why?”

  “I dream about him.”

  “Oh.”

  His oh was a bleak and critical note, but Kate just smiled. She said, “He keeps reappearing in my dreams. It feels as if he must be important, but I looked him up, and he just dies without doing much of anything.”

  Ben forced a smile. “Are we sure this was a real poet?”

  Kate was sure. He had certainly existed. He’d written some plays that weren’t extant and a long poem called Venus and Adonis. They had a copy of the poem at the New York Public Library, but when Kate requested it, it turned out to be missing. She supposed other copies must exist somewhere. Anyway, he’d died young. There was a record of his burial in London in 1593, when he was thirty years old.
And what was odd was, 1593 was the year Kate always dreamed about. “Anyhow, I keep dreaming about this poet, and I can’t figure out what it means.”

  “I have a favorite sixteenth-century poem.”

  Kate balked, then said, “Okay,” and made a listening face.

  “It’s Thomas Wyatt.” Ben recited:

  They flee from me that sometime did me seek

  With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

  I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

  That now are wild and do not remember

  That sometime they put them self in danger

  To take bread at my hand …

  He stopped because he couldn’t tell if Kate was listening. She looked harsh, distant. Her eyes were black black—insect black, like the eyes of a sapient and beautiful wasp.

  “Kate?”

  She said, in a suppressed, sad voice, “When I have a dream now, I’m afraid I’ll wake up and you won’t be there.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “I don’t mean I’m afraid you’ll leave.”

  “Then what do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling.”

  “Kate, are you sure you want to get married?”

  She said, “Yes,” but in a way that didn’t satisfy Ben. He realized they weren’t really going to get married. They would get the license, but then it would just sit in a drawer. Nobody would mention it again.

  He thought this but refused to believe it. He said, “I really want to marry you.”

  Then their number was called. They went to the window and provided ID and filled out forms, behaving very cheerfully and naturally. And they walked away with the license, relieved, and Kate said dazedly, “That’s good, anyway.”

  The next week—and somehow this felt like a shocking, unforeseeable blow—Ben got a job. It was at Exxon, in the public relations department, so something that you couldn’t do and be a good person. But he couldn’t turn it down. It was reliable money. It was structure and people depending on you. Even though he didn’t want to do the job, he wanted it like wanting to breathe.