Glass Mountain

by Cynthia Voigt

  Her laughter bubbled up, like a girl’s. There was no nervousness in it, just appreciation of the silly clumsiness—hers and mine, and whatever was indigenous to our situation. I moved toward her, where she stood with her chin lifted.

  “It’s what lovers would do, what lovers do,” I said, “before they’ve even unpacked.”

  I was hidden behind the morning newspaper when she came out of the bedroom. I lowered the paper to just below my eyes: she wasn’t the kind of woman who scurried into the bathroom to make herself up, make herself presentable. She had wrapped the hotel bathrobe about herself and bumbled out for a cup of coffee, which I poured for her. She smiled vaguely at me; I mattered less than her own thoughts. I raised the paper again, to give her privacy. Her hair was tumbled, her skin glowed, and the thick bathrobe was not flattering. I smiled to myself: Alexis had a full-fleshed body, round arms and breasts, thick haunches, but she was no dumpling. A Renoir, I thought, or Titian. She swam, she’d told me; she walked a lot when she was in the country. How did I keep in such good shape? she wondered. “Lucky genes,” I’d told her, “and housework.”

  I had the paper up but I wasn’t reading. “Gregor?” Alexis asked. I lowered it.

  “Did you mean what you said?”

  What had I said? I wondered. I could account for most of the time but not all. “When?” I asked, wary.

  She lifted her face to laugh at me. “We’re lovers now, you don’t have to handle me like old crystal. You don’t have to handle me now, Gregor.” She stared at me. “Do I look like that too?”

  “Like what?”

  “I’m not sure—so plumped out, maybe. Smug?”

  Well, she did. That was it, exactly. “I’m afraid so.”

  “And did you mean it?” she asked again, breaking a roll, buttering it. “As to when, I’m not sure, I think it was before we had supper. And how did you know to stock the refrigerator with sandwich meats and cheeses? No, don’t tell me.”

  “What did I say?” I asked.

  She studied the roll in her hands. “You said ‘lovely.’”

  I remembered: I had held her hair back from her face, to frame her face with my hands; her little hands had been on my cheeks, at the time, one thumb smooth as water across my lower lip; her hair had been spread across the pillow and I saw what my hands had uncovered. For a minute, I was transfixed, immobilized. “Lovely,” I said. Alexis had a Renaissance forehead, broad and oval and slightly domed. Her eyebrows were a dark curve over deep eyes and under that forehead her face had character, symmetry. She wasn’t a beauty, Alexis, but she was lovely.

  “Or is that just something men say?” she asked.

  I folded the paper up. “Your forehead,” I began. “I don’t know where you have your hair styled, but you should sue them,” I began. “I could show you in a mirror.”

  “I’m not ready for a mirror. I haven’t washed my face. Or brushed my teeth, either. Do you mind?”

  I didn’t mind. “Neither have I.”

  “What do you think I should do?” she asked. “With my hair.”

  I didn’t have to stop to think. “Grow it long. Wear it up, away from your face, full, but not piled high, just back.” She was laughing at me again. “And baroque pearl earrings,” I completed the picture.

  Laughing, she asked, “Gregor, what are we going to do?”

  “Do?” I was reasonably sure she didn’t mean what a foolishly hopeful man might have hoped.

  “We can’t make love all day. Can we?”

  “We could, but…I thought, there are a couple of interesting museums, I’ve got tickets to the symphony tonight, there’s a zoo, there’s Fallingwater…”

  “You know Pittsburgh,” she announced her discovery. I didn’t deny it. “Did you live here?”

  “Once.” I distracted her by getting up. “I’m going to have a shower.” I kissed her and felt her hand once again on my cheek.

  “Am I supposed to feel as if I really know you now?”

  “If even the way someone kisses you tells you a lot about him, or her…”

  “Then I have you now.”

  “You have me now.”

  “And you have me,” she realized.

  “Only, I never would have guessed you’d be so talky,” I said. “No, that’s not a criticism.”

  She had twisted around in her chair, to look at me. “Am I supposed to feel tristesse?” she asked. “I don’t.”

  “Good,” I said. “Thank you. Now—”

  “Nobody tells you,” Alexis interrupted me. “How messy it is,” she answered my expression. “Like—like mud pies? Is that why nobody tells you? Because it’s messy and messy is—Or babies too, either, nobody tells you how messy they are. But I like that about things. I like them being messy, like playing in the mud. I like them real.”

  “Even with the flawed beginning?” I inquired.

  Her porcelain cheeks flushed but she didn’t drop her glance. “Not flawed. Just…really awkward. And as long as they finish up all right…”

  “And they did?” I inquired.

  “How dumb do you think I am, Gregor?” she asked me. “You know as well as I do that they—things—It’s just not like the movies,” she said. “It’s real.”

  What we did—the concert, meals, the Carnegie, a drive out to Rolling Rock to tour Fallingwater, the zoo, a Sunday afternoon drive west along the Ohio, and always returning to the hotel, to one another—what we did, which I remember vividly, is less vivid in my memory than the talking. The woman talked. Not empty chatter but a barrage of ideas and questions, as if she wanted our minds to achieve the easier intimacy of our bodies. Not even separate but equal, no, she’d raise her head from my naked chest, while my blood was still thudding along, to ask a question. Sometimes it would be direct: “What do you think about the possibility of extraterrestial life, never mind science fiction fantasy, but as an objective possibility?” “How would you go about reducing the deficit?” Sometimes, as I was slipping into satisfied slumber, she would rouse me: “Plato, in the Symposium, has Aristophanes argue that men and women were originally one body that got separated.” I would shift up on the pillow and guess, “You feel as if there is something to that idea? That’s the way you feel right now?”

  “You’re telling me it’s temporary, a temporary euphoria. But I know that.”

  “Although it’s only humans who make love face to face as standard practice,” I realized.

  “Is that true? What about monkeys, apes: do you know anything about their sexual practices? I don’t.”

  As we drove out of town towards Fallingwater, through lush western Pennsylvania foliage, the car humming along the sweet curves of the road, she asked, “Gregor? Why do people take sex so seriously? Make it so serious.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They do, in books, movies—Don’t look like that at me. If you don’t have actual experience, you have to get your information somewhere.”

  “There’s recreational sex, that’s an accepted phrase.”

  “No, I don’t mean that. Why are you so touchy? Are you feeling defensive? Don’t, I didn’t mean you. And sex-for-love, married sex too, it’s always shown as serious, serious business, earnest, charged with significance.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “I think it’s fun. No, that’s sloppy, I mean…glad. Joyous.” She reached over to put her hand on the back of my neck. “It’s really something, isn’t it, Gregor?”

  I wished she had told me that in the darkness of our bed, where I could have closed my eyes in silent celebration. “That’s you, Alexis,” I told her.

  “Oh good,” she said.

  And me, I thought, us.

  “If you had strong religious impulses, you’d approach God the same way, I bet,” I told her.

  “Like the singing nun?”

  I laughed. I couldn’t plumb the depths of her. I had sent down my line but it hadn’t yet touched bottom.

  “There’s something wrong wit
h the way we think about God, isn’t there?” Alexis said then. “Do you know anything about the Eastern religions?”

  She talked about her family, and her life. In that respect at least she was predictable. “I never fit in, never felt comfortable, with anyone, with any situation. Especially when I was a kid. Adulthood is easier, don’t you think?”

  I thought. I opened my mouth to comment.

  Alexis said, “I never knew what I was supposed to say, what anyone wanted from me—except my parents, and they’re devoted to me. Disappointed, but devoted. You know how parents are? Mine are just…more so. They don’t have any friends, just each other. But that’s enough for them.”

  “Do you? Have friends?”

  “A few, a couple of good friends, women. From schools, so they’re scattered all over the map. I don’t make friends easily, I don’t attract them, and then, once you’ve got your academic interests focused, you tend to run into the same people so…Do you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “There’s me,” she offered. “You know, I’ve told you all about my life. Took about ten minutes, didn’t it?”

  “At least twenty.”

  “But you don’t tell anything. I’m not criticizing, Gregor, just observing.”

  We were in the car, driving west along the Ohio River Boulevard, which runs beside the river. It was Sunday afternoon, and most businesses were closed along the highway, in the villages. Near Ambridge, I slowed to point out the mill, the long, low cement-colored buildings splayed along the river’s edge, windowless, flat-roofed. Row on row of cars filled the parking lots spread around it. The mill loomed. I turned off the Boulevard to drive down the main street of town. Flat plate-glass windows over gray sidewalks, neon signs grayed by grit, a few men out on the Sunday street corners, gray-green asphalt siding on the houses lined up along hilly side streets—I could only take so much of it, and we headed up, away from the river, into the hills, to the country inn where we were having dinner. “You grew up here,” she guessed.

  “Yes.”

  “Is your family still here?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t understand. But you don’t want me to, do you?”

  On the way back, I pulled to the side of the road on a hill high above the river. The sky had darkened over the bluff opposite, and the river looked like a broad flow of oil. Now the bluff was only a hunched dark mass, but I remembered.

  “There used to be—They used to pour the slag down over there, across the river. It was like a waterfall, golden, flowing. They tipped it out of cauldrons; it was like lava. Beautiful.”

  “A golden river, like a fairy tale.” She sat with her legs tucked under her, curled on the seat. The seat was deep enough, she was little enough to curl up on it. “Isn’t there a fairy tale, ‘King of the Golden River’?”

  “It was no river,” I said, reminding which one of us I’m not sure. “Slag runs at well over nine hundred degrees. Centigrade. I’ve seen a man burn his thumb off, in a second’s carelessness.” And heard him. And smelled it.

  “You’re showing me this as a metaphor,” Alexis said. She reached over; her little fingers traced my cheekbone, my eyebrow. “You worked in the mills.”

  I nodded.

  “You don’t look like a millworker.”

  “Appearances are deceptive.”

  “But you must have quit when you were young, eighteen.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You said you left home fifteen years ago. Fifteen from thirty-three is eighteen. Why did you?”

  I hesitated.

  “I don’t have any right, Gregor,” she said. “I understand.”

  I thought of that golden river, running down. It seemed to fall into the black water and disappear; in fact, it never reached the river but cooled like candle wax on the land below. “I might never have,” I told her, “except circumstances combined on me,” I said. “Ganged up. You know how sometimes circumstances do that?” She nodded, she did know. “I had a sister. I’m not sure you can understand this, without having had a sister or brother, but…she was my sister. She was wild, she ran wild, she was always self-destructive, that was her character. With schools, with our parents, she was always at odds with the world, always. Drugs were inevitable, I guess, but when I tried to tell my parents—She’d outgrow it, that was their line, nothing to get upset about. Just Lisa’s life. They wouldn’t be told, there was nothing I could tell them—they’d known a lot of people who were wild when they were young, and they all outgrew it—until it was too late, and then they just slapped her into an institution.”

  “I’m sorry,” Alexis said, and meant it. “You must have been angry—I know, that’s not the half of it. Do you keep in touch with them?”

  “Nothing your parents would accept as keeping in touch.”

  “What other circumstances did you mean?” she asked. “You said a combination of circumstances.”

  I shrugged. The slag fell over the bluff; I could remember the roar of it, but the sound didn’t carry across the river and up to our vantage point. “There was a girl and she got pregnant. I took all the cash I could get my hands on and left the country. Went to Europe. It seemed to me that if you had money you had everything, and if you didn’t ..…Do you have any idea what it’s like to work as hard as you can and barely get by? I didn’t see why—” I could hear the echoes of old despair in my voice and tried to lighten it. “I thought there wasn’t any real difference in people, so I decided to find out what I could do for myself. Get for myself.”

  “What became of the girl?”

  “I don’t know.” To her silence, I said, “That bothers you. If it matters, it bothered me too.”

  “Not enough to do anything, apparently.”

  “You asked me,” I pointed out to her.

  “I guess I wanted to hear something different—a solitary orphan’s sad tale. Where you didn’t…hurt people.”

  “I did as little of that as I could. My parents have two sons left, to look after them.”

  “And when you were abroad…?”

  “I started out doing anything, just to survive. I didn’t have any plans, just – surviving. Worked on the docks, shipped around the Mediterranean a little. I worked in a fish cannery in France and picked grapes and ended up bartending in London. I got along. That’s where I decided to get the papers for domestic service, London.”

  “So you could live in the style you wanted to. Learn firsthand how the rich live. So you could do a good imitation. It’s all right, Gregor, I’m just telling myself the truth. What you’re looking for is to find someone—”

  “To marry me,” I reminded her. “My intentions are honorable.”

  She didn’t bother quarreling with that. “I almost wish you luck,” she said. “You won’t mind living off your wife’s money?”

  I liked the way she assumed I would succeed. “I would. I wouldn’t stand for it. It would have to be what’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine.”

  She was too kind to mock me.

  “The great thing about Theo,” Alexis said, “is he’s not marrying me for my money. There’s no question of that. It’s a danger, you know. People look at you—at me—and see this marriageable trust fund. I used to see it happening, ‘Alexis Rawling, she’s an only child and there’s all this money.’ I couldn’t really tell, nobody actually gets dollar signs in their eyes, but…I couldn’t ever be sure. The only way to find out for sure would be to take on a whole new identity, what Sarah did, now I think of it. And look what happened to her. So I know that Theo isn’t marrying me for my money.”

  “Not in the accepted sense.”

  “Don’t be angry,” she said.

  “The only person I could be angry with is myself.”

  “Gregor, if I thought you loved me, I’d be upset. I would. I’d feel like I’d taken advantage of you.”

  “You haven’t,” I promised her.

  “Because I’m pretty happy, right now,” she told me
. “Let’s go home.”

  “Home?” I was almost tempted.

  “All right, back. To the hotel. To bed.”

  “Women are such realists.” I laughed.

  “Somebody has to be.”

  The plane ride back to New York was no more conversational than the ride out. She removed her ring and returned it to me. I removed mine and put both into my pocket.

  “So you must have changed your name and all,” Alexis said.

  “In the time-honored tradition.” I had the window seat. Sunlight gilded the tops of the clouds.

  “I’d like to have the nerve to do that. To make a whole new life as a whole new person, and find out who I really am.”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Don’t disillusion me. So it was Rostov, like in War and Peace. That’s why Rostov.”

  I took her hand, then let it go. “The trouble with intelligent women is that eventually they figure things out.”

  She wasn’t to be distracted. “But you’d never have me without my money. I’m not blaming you.”

  I put her into a taxi and watched it pull away. Then the taxi stopped, backed up. She rolled down her window. “I didn’t say thank you. Thank you, Gregor.”

  “It was a pleasure.”

  “It’s Gregor like in Kafka, isn’t it?”

  She made me laugh, tying up all the loose ends like that. “‘Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to find himself turned into a giant beetle,’” I quoted, for her satisfaction.

  “I like you, Gregor Rostov,” she said, and reached through the open window to shake my hand.

  “I’m a fraud,” I reminded her. “And you’re getting married in twelve days.”

  “Thirteen,” she corrected me. That time the taxi drove away without stopping.

  29

  The Triumph of Love

  If I’d known, or even suspected…

  If I’d had the slightest idea what the risk was, I would never have agreed to it, never gone off for the weekend, never have slept with her. Not having known, or suspected, I reverted to the pagan custom of not naming. I could have lost her and never been the wiser, which was preferable to losing her and being the wiser. It had nothing to do with telling her. It had everything to do with telling myself the name. To name the demon is to summon him forth. Or her.