“Yes.” Then he added, though he didn’t believe it, and he hated himself for his cowardice, “It could be temporary.”
“Oh, shit. Because I’m going to get better?”
She looked back at him then, her black eyes incandescent with pain. He couldn’t stand it. He went to her and took her in his arms. Her belly made the hug an awkward shape; he had to hunch to embrace her properly. She leaned on him and didn’t cry but went quiescent in a manner that suggested tears.
And out of nowhere, Ben was weak with love. His body was euphoric and he wanted to kiss her. It was an energy that filled him and insisted he could save her. He felt powerful; he felt he was a wonderful person; he would do whatever it took. It was wrong and Ben was afraid of it. He tried to think about what was going on on TV.
Then Kate detached herself subtly. She said, “Could I get a minute alone?”
“Sure.”
He let her go too quickly; it was clear he wanted to get away from her. But Kate had turned obliviously back to the drum. She laid her hand back on its skin.
When he got back to the living room, Sabine was on the couch with Martin and James, staring vacantly at the TV. She had showered and now wore a cashmere bathrobe, tailored for a man; Kate had an identical bathrobe, which Ben now realized must have come from Sabine. With her wet hair, Sabine looked scrawny and ill. She held her injured fist, now closed on a washcloth, stiffly at her chest. Ben could still hear a shower, and he almost told Sabine she’d left it running. But of course there was more than one bathroom here. The shower still running was Ian’s; he presumably was stuck in the flow of water, still scrubbing at what might be his own friends’ remains.
On the television, Bush was making a speech. Ben wondered if Kate knew Bush was president. He tried to imagine seeing Bush as president for the first time, but his mind drifted off. He imagined being in a tower when the plane hit. He imagined being in the plane.
Then Sabine said, in a constrained, nice voice, “Ben, could you take Kate tonight?”
“Take Kate? How?”
Martin said, “We were thinking she could stay with you, just while Ian’s here.”
“We’re broken up,” said Ben automatically.
“Ian needs a safe place,” said Sabine. “If Kate’s here, it’s all going to be about Kate.”
“We love Kate,” Martin said. “But if you could take her for just one day.”
“Ian doesn’t know a lot of people in New York, and half of them died today,” said Sabine.
Ben said, before he could stop himself, “Sabine, I thought you hated the people at Credit Suisse. I mean, I never heard of this Ian.”
“You’re kidding me,” Sabine said. “That’s the issue? I talk shit about people, that’s important today?”
At that moment, Ian walked in. He was wearing a bathrobe identical to Sabine’s, looking similarly wet and afflicted. He said, “Am I being discussed?”
Sabine looked at Ben and grimaced in annoyance.
Ben said, “It’s not about you. Sabine wants me to take my girlfriend home with me. But we just broke up.”
“She creates too much drama,” said Sabine. “And Ben came here to see her, so I don’t see the problem.”
“I was certain I heard my name,” said Ian.
“Look, you need some peace and quiet,” said Sabine. “You’re a human and you need some peace and quiet.”
“Oh, great,” said Ian. “It’s a psychiatric conference. You’re determining my course of treatment.”
Sabine said, “Trust me, you are not the psychiatric case here.”
“You’re really not,” said Martin.
Then Sabine and Martin explained Kate’s madness: how Kate thought she could travel in time, and walked around with a face like Munch’s The Scream, apologizing for the state of the world, which she thought she should have fixed in the sixteenth century. She thought she had a brother and a father, so every morning, she had to be told she didn’t, and every fucking time she was devastated. They’d tried pretending she did have a father and brother, but she always tried to call her father on the phone; she was unusually close to her nonexistent father. Kate was also just a really shitty roommate; she would never buy stuff like toilet paper, and when challenged on the toilet paper issue, she would claim she had bought toilet paper, but she’d traveled in her sleep to a different timeline in which she hadn’t bought toilet paper. Then she would cry. And it obviously wasn’t about the toilet paper, but still there had to be a bottom line.
At the end, Ian shrugged and said, “Half my family’s mad. My uncle just had to be rescued from a tree by the fire department.”
“No, Sabine’s right,” said Martin. “It doesn’t sound that dreadful, but it’s really distressing. We have to keep an eye on her at all times. And, if we hadn’t mentioned, she’s eight months pregnant.”
“My uncle thinks angels talk to him,” said Ian. “But he has to get up in a tree to hear it. Then he won’t come down, and he gets dehydrated and faints. He’s sixty.”
Kate came in then and everyone turned to her with false smiles. She held up a copy of King Lear. “Does anyone know this writer?”
Sabine said in a weary voice. “Yes, Kate, we know who Shakespeare is.”
“So he’s very well known?” said Kate.
“Kate, we do this all the time,” said Sabine. “You ask us if we know who Shakespeare is, and then we have to explain Shakespeare. Could we please not do that today?”
Kate was silent for a moment. Ben was thinking how to ask her to come home with him and struggling with the petulant feeling that it was unfair. Even though Sabine was more traumatized today, Ben was more traumatized by Kate specifically. But he’d come here, of course. He’d walked right into the trap.
Kate nodded at the television set. “I was thinking I might be able to fix this.”
“Oh, Kate,” said Martin.
“What’s this now?” said Ian. “Does she think she’s God now?”
“It’s the time travel thing,” Sabine said. “Kate thinks she’ll go into the past and prevent this horrible dystopia from becoming a reality. Then we’ll all live in Kate’s world, where everyone lives rent-free and there’s fucking world peace.”
“To be fair,” said Martin, “the world does feel a tad dystopian today.”
“Don’t encourage it,” Sabine said. “Last time it ended with her trying to jump out a window so she couldn’t make the world any worse. And today I would let her fucking do it. I don’t have the strength.”
“I wasn’t thinking of killing myself,” said Kate. “I was thinking of killing him.” She held up the book.
“King Lear?” said Ian.
Sabine said, “She means Shakespeare. She thinks she’s Shakespeare’s girlfriend.”
James laughed, then covered his mouth and muttered, “Sorry.”
“It’s okay to laugh,” said Kate. “It was just so weird when I saw all his books. In my world, he never wrote all this. And then I thought—I know this is a crazy person thing—I thought his writing must have ruined things somehow, so maybe he should die young. And if I think about it, most of what I’ve done in the dreams is making sure he lives and becomes successful. So I had this idea we’d have a vote about killing him, and then it wouldn’t all be my decision. I’m sorry if I’ve said all this before.”
Before Sabine could answer, Ian said, “Well, what is your other world like? We might not want to live in it.”
“I don’t know,” said Kate. But then she thought and answered, “People talked to each other in the street.”
“Sounds dreadful,” Ian said. “Put me down as a no.”
“No,” said Kate, “It was good, because everyone knew everyone else in the neighborhood. If you were broke, someone would always help you out. You could find a spare room if you had nowhere to stay.”
“My spare room,” said Sabine. “I mean, what if you’re an asshole? Do I still have to have you living with me?”
“
You have assholes living with you now,” said Martin.
They started to actually discuss whether Kate’s world was worth killing Shakespeare for. The absurdity was a welcome distraction, though Ben kept thinking it was bad for Kate. At least the issue of Ben taking Kate away was shelved, since Ian seemed to like having Kate there; Ian even took it upon himself to explain Shakespeare to her, and expanded on the subject of Shakespeare’s greatness while Kate looked bemused and faintly resistant. At last she said, “He wasn’t very good to me,” and Ian said, “No man is a hero to his valet.”
Then Kate told a story from her world, about the election of President Chen, the first Green president, and how there was an impromptu parade up Broadway, and the mayor was in it in a crazy red ball gown, sitting in an armchair on a makeshift float her staff were pulling with ropes, and people would get up on the float and dance with her; a friend of Sabine’s was in the band that followed it—a woman who didn’t exist in this world, or perhaps had not been able to escape from Afghanistan, the country of her birth that was, in Kate’s world, best known as a place where apples were grown, a place that the horn player, Safya, only left because she’d fallen in love.
Kate’s eyes were matter-of-fact, remembering; it was Sabine who got emotional, white-faced, so upset it wasn’t clear if she was angry or sad. Kate noticed and said, “I know this is crazy. Sorry, I know you don’t think this is real.”
Martin said, “You do have a sweet imagination, Katie.”
Sabine said, “Fine, kill Shakespeare. Do it. But can we please not talk about utopia today?”
After that, the conversation drifted back to the attacks, and they started to debate whether there would be a war. Ian said there’d better be a war, and belligerently talked about an eye for an eye, and the only language these people understood. The others gently demurred, until Sabine said they didn’t have to be so nice, because Ian wasn’t just bereaved, he was a neocon. Then they argued for real, which Ian seemed to appreciate; he cheerfully sneered about bleeding-heart liberals and said, “Tell me one place that isn’t a make-believe world where all that Kumbaya crap works. And don’t say Sweden or I’ll take a shit right here on the floor.” Then he launched into a rant about left-wing hypocrisy and how the really charitable people were conservatives, and talked about the month he’d spent in a trailer-trash region of Idaho, doing an internship for a rural entrepreneurship trust, and in that town—all redneck Republicans—there were two soup kitchens and everyone tithed ten percent of their income to charity, and if someone had an Alzheimer’s grandma, she lived in the trailer with the rest of the family and their seven rescue dogs, until Sabine couldn’t stand it and said, “You hated those people.”
Everyone laughed, and Ian said, grinning, “They did talk rather a lot about Jesus. And thought I was gay because I had an English accent.”
“Oh, how awful for you,” James said.
“You hated them,” Sabine said. “You called them troglodytes and said they shouldn’t have the vote.”
“They were troglodytes,” said Ian. “And they voted for Bush, so I think it’s very fair-minded of me to say they shouldn’t have the vote.”
Kate asked who Bush was, and everyone groaned. Ben took Kate’s hand and whispered the answer in her ear, and she leaned against his shoulder and cried a little bit. For a while Ben and Kate were whispering about Bush and Gore and her imaginary brother and father, while the others peaceably argued and watched TV and argued.
At last, Sabine turned off the TV and opened some twenty-year-old Scotch her uncle had been given by Mobutu, so Sabine got to talk about Mobutu’s atrocities; it put the destruction of the towers in perspective. The veterinarian arrived and gave Sabine five stitches. The veterinarian’s husband had come with her and brought a wheelie suitcase of vintage guns, “in case it all kicks off.” They all, except Martin, took pet sedatives. They all, including Martin, sat with guns on their laps and inspected the bullets with a certain sad prurience but, after some discussion, didn’t load the guns. They talked about Martin’s baby, sometimes directly addressing Kate’s stomach. They turned the TV back on, but there was no real news; they scoffed and turned it off. Then, frustrated by their helplessness, they went out to donate blood, and the line was two blocks long and they were woozy from Scotch and pet sedatives, so Sabine called a caterer and ordered sandwiches for everyone in the donation line. Then the whole line was turned away: too much. So they went and walked around the reservoir in Central Park, all breathing self-consciously, commenting on the possibly imaginary taste of smoke, and they felt consumptive and tragic as the sun went down and the buildings lit up above the trees in pale bright colors, like a coral reef glowing with bioluminescence or an alien city on a long-dead planet where humans couldn’t breathe the air.
20
It recommenced in Southampton’s barge, a slender ornament of teal and gold, which rocked on the water and trailed perfume: a fit conveyance to the land of dreams. The handles of the oars themselves were prettily painted. The oarsmen’s doublets matched the boat. Southampton sat on a velvet chair with rose petals strewn about his feet. At the bow of the boat, a recorder consort perched on a bench and played a watery, delicate tune to the beat of the splashing oars. Laden boats came and went from the water stairs of the nobles’ houses on the northern shore.
Emilia’s husband, Lanier, sat among the pipers. Above his recorder, his brown eyes followed Southampton’s hand as it stroked Emilia’s hair—Master Lanier a good-looking man, but unremarkable: the sort of man whose pretty looks are noticed and forgotten; who marries a nobleman’s whore for her fortune and spends it in a year on horses and shoes. Not only a cuckold, but (Emilia now knew) a pander to his own wife. A pleasant laughing fellow, but without her infidelities, no lord would want him; it would be a poor life.
So the recorder consort had been hired by the intercession of Emilia—that was his pander’s pay—and so Southampton was free to familiarly lay a hand on her bare shoulder, while she rested her chin on his knee and indulged a facile melancholy; she gazed at the dappling spoons of light on the water and thought of weeping black tears from her black eyes. There was the dagger at her waist, a whore’s trinket with an ornamental hilt that could nonetheless kill. She should know what she meant to do, but she didn’t. She knew she was going to Will.
Many years had passed here since she last woke. Ten years—a gap that felt punitive, ominous, a part of the things that had now gone wrong. Emilia was heavier and older; Southampton a grown, broad-chested man with a beard. It took her time to remember and to know how it was—that they were now old friends in the manner of friends who were once unsatisfactory lovers; that she’d been his mistress, then the confidante who covered for his trysts with men. She had lain with him in a chaste, sleepy nudity and told him tales of a later, better time, where the lion lieth down with the lion, where men may love if God so made them. When Southampton slept, she had crept from his side. She had cried at the window, writing letters, and the day dawned as she fell heavily asleep. A strange affair, a heady error of the young; a force that was spent and had become a peaceful medium for outings on the river. For trips like this, to the theater at Southwark.
With them today were three redheaded teenage girls who clutched each other and laughed when the barge rocked, nudging against the water stairs. They were the daughters of Harry Percy, being taken to their first London play. They held hands in a line as they climbed the bank and picked their way through the Southwark mud; they wrinkled their noses at the smell from the bear pits. It was still half a dream, Emilia still woozy as she followed their skirts up the theater’s stairs.
They took their seats on the stage itself, among the fashionable theater lovers and poseurs. A box keeper fetched the multifarious baskets of their picnic and was given a coin. The littlest Percy sat on the floor among the rushes; she hated a stool above all things, she said, while her sisters rolled their eyes. The theater was new and painted every bright color; red and green and blue
and gold; its wooden pillars had been painted to resemble marble. Whatever wasn’t painted was carved, and every flat surface was filled with the biblical pictures one saw in inns: Daniel flanked by grinning lions, Susannah interrupted at her bath, Dives tormented by long-snouted demons. It was open to the sky above. Then the noisy sea of heads, in the galleries and the pit below, all shoving and shouting to be heard over others’ shouts. Peddlers elbowed through the crowd, selling apples and hazelnuts and plaster souvenirs; they were followed by the peppershot crackling of nutcrackers.
Southampton began to tell the Percy girls about Will Shakespeare, whose tragedy would be played that day. He said in his youth Master Shakespeare been stricken by a curious madness. He’d fancied himself a Grecian warrior of the host of Alexander, and persisted in his folly many years, so his family despaired. In his madness, he fell into brawling and lechery; he got an old wife by lying with a gentleman’s daughter in a fit of antic lust.
“Fie!” said the eldest Percy in feigned amazement. “Do men do so?”
Then the Percy girls giggled and leaned on each other. Southampton said, with a glance at Emilia, “’Twas even said, he had lain with boys.”
At this, the girls hushed and made serious faces. They frowned at the stage with new respect, as harboring men who lay with boys.
“Yet he had not,” Emilia said. “Rumor often miscarries so; then the truth disappoints us with its dullness.”
Southampton touched her sleeve and said playfully, “Some portion of his madness remained when the man was with us at Cowdray; Mistress Lanier might attest to his strange lusts there.”
“Well, ’twas a strange season,” said Emilia. “Cows mewed and cats laid eggs. Great lords took actors for their friends.”
Southampton laughed and looked again like a boy. He asked if Emilia recalled when the men at Cowdray donned masks with the faces of cats and caught Harry Danvers and tossed him in a blanket. That was Will Shakespeare’s notion, though he had kept aloof from the doing of it, fearing Danvers’s resentment.
The Heavens Page 17
