Lucius was trapped in the kitchen. He couldn’t go back upstairs until he heard the opening and closing of one door and the opening and closing of another, and so he waited, too stimulated to iron anymore, too bereft to move, even though he was cold, his feet were cold, and he waited a long time, shut out of love, the way he always had been, the way he probably always would be. All that happened upstairs happened only in his imagination, his vivid imagination, calling to mind the gut-wrenching image of what it must be like to be naked with another person, skin on skin, to have sex, to say I love you, to be loved in return, that moment when your heart flies over the cliff into the great and tender abyss. As for the rest of it, the penetration, the heaving, the film of sweat, the ultimate climax, his imagination did not run that far. The rest was lost to him, like a novel he put down somewhere and couldn’t find again to see how it all turned out. Tears came to his eyes and flowed down his face, catching in the stubble on his cheeks. Where was he to go, frozen, as he was, on the other side of the plate-glass window that descended when two people locked themselves in the embrace of the night? The same stars shone on Lucius Walter. Stupid. A grown man crying in a strange kitchen at three in the morning, a hot iron on the table and a dozen sodden books. He felt a sudden rage and despair deep as a well. Where was he to go? Love, for him, was archaeological, a dig for a treasure he would never find. He wept. Goddamned books. He carefully turned off the iron and sat, weeping, until he heard the heavy door upstairs open, then a pause, and then close, then bare feet creaking on the wide planks of the hall, another door opening and closing softly.
There he was, a grown man crying in the cold kitchen, the fires out, in a grand house on the Rappahannock River. Finally he felt he had waited long enough, and he rose with effort and left the kitchen, leaving the one light on, and made his way up the grand staircase. At the landing he sat in the big window and wept, as the millions of stars blurred in his vision until the whole night sky was a sheen of light, a brilliance without any pinpoints of particularity. He sat until the sky began to lighten and the moon began to pale over the river, and then he made his way to his cold bed, and slept as though dead, his pillow wet with tears.
19
LUCIUS WALTER DID not appear at breakfast. The evidence of his work was spread all over the kitchen table, the books upright, the cold iron; there was no space, so they ate in the huge dining room. Now that the house was peopled again, Priscilla and Clarence no longer ate with Diana. They had returned to their customary roles of mistress and servant, and Diana, while sad, realized the rightness of it, the inevitability.
Diana, at the head of the table, looked tired but luminous. Her skin had taken on a transparency that brought out her bones, generation after generation of selective breeding carrying her through her exhaustion and wonderment and confusion about the events of the night. “I love you,” he had whispered in her ear. “I love you forever and ever and ever.” These romantic boys with their far-fetched notions, their bravery with their heart’s undertakings, their willingness to step off the cliff and into the vast abyss of love’s explosive rule.
She had believed him. Hadn’t she? There was no doubt about it.
Looking at him now, fresh, shaved, exuberant, did she believe him still, in his corduroys and his white shirt and his sweater thrown over his shoulders, did she believe him still? And did it matter, in the face of his torrential love for her?
And how was this going to be? How, under Ash’s watchful eye, could they even meet? Because after all, once the first rush of passion had raced through them, it was all plans and assignations, and plots to find half an hour here or there where they might reasonably be absent, be alone.
Gibby loved her, and yet at breakfast he largely ignored her, talking with Ash about plans for the day, fishing, riding, and she was not the woman who had given herself to the redheaded gymnast only a few hours before. She was the mistress of a great house, five at table, the Canton china, already planning dinner, a standing rib, a charlotte russe for dessert, and all that that entailed, the glasses, the linens, the work. Always the work.
How did people stand it? How did they bear to lie naked in each other’s arms in the dark, the outlines of their bodies written only by the moon, to kiss, to swoon, to go into one another’s bodies, and emerge to find themselves at the breakfast table planning dessert and picking wines from the cellar?
“Ash, excuse me,” she said, stopping for one minute their excited conversation. “Could you pick the wines for tonight? A Pommard, I think. I haven’t been down there in ages. I don’t know what’s left.” She told him the menu. “And a tokay. I don’t want Rose to think we’re just country bumpkins.”
“Of course, Mama. Champagne, I’m assuming. Could be fun,” Ash said, a wide smile on his face.
“For whom?” Diana answered, laughing.
“For one and all.” Gibby laughed too. “We’re the Three Musketeers, and d’Artagnan has arrived. Not to mention little Sancho Panza, not to mix my literary tropes.”
How could all this be happening, this normal life, the general run of things, after last night? Did men forget? He called her love, he called her darling, all this not five hours ago. Who was this redheaded boy who crept into her room in the moonlight and took her wholly, possessed her entirely, and then sat across the breakfast table from her now, putting strawberry jam on a piece of toast? How was this possible? She yearned for him. Let the world go away. Let the books rot. Let Rose go back to New York. Let the house fall down. She had never said “I love you” before. Did he think she didn’t mean it? Had he heard it so often it had become a commonplace of speech to him? How deep in the forest was she, and would she find her way out? She wanted nothing but his body. Perhaps, in this way, men and women were truly different. For a woman, once the fire was lit, it burned forever. Hotter and hotter the longer it was ignored or denied. For a man, it went on and off, like the heater in a London flat you slipped a shilling into so it gave off only so many minutes of heat, no more.
Lucius Walter joined them, unshaven, wild-haired, his eyeglasses bent as though he had slept in them, with lowered eyes and shy apologies. The rest of them were finished, and had things to do, so with apologies of their own, they left him sitting alone at the vast table, drinking the hot coffee Priscilla kindly brought immediately and eating cold buckwheat cakes. He was dying for some soft-boiled eggs, but when Priscilla asked, he was too shy to ask for anything. He didn’t want to cause trouble. There was trouble enough coming to this house.
So he sat alone, in the way he had realized in the night last night he would always be the last to arrive and would always sit alone. Stop it, he thought. No more self-pity. There was plenty of work to do. He was surrounded by pretty people, in a grand house. Buck up. The iron waited. Not a grand piano, a Bösendorfer. Not paints and brushes, or the shoes of a ballet dancer. An iron. The most mundane of household items. The tool of his trade. The tiresome monotony of it. Let them have their liaisons and their lust and their perversions. It had nothing to do with him. Let them wear their silk dressing gowns while his was fifteen-year-old terry from Brooks, the monogram washed so many times it had unraveled to the point of illegibility. Let her stay up all night and appear at eight fresh and shining like the tower on the hill, her body once again her own secret possession. He had a skill. They needed him more than he needed them. As soon as the thought entered his mind, he knew it wasn’t true. He needed them desperately, a secret he must never show.
The point was, it was hard not to get mad, mad at all the things he didn’t have that they took for granted. Wine cellars and docks and sloops and brightwork. And love.
So what he really wanted in his heart was to go back to bed and stay there all day, all year, forever. Why should he try to move in this world he wasn’t born to, and would never, ever enter? And what would he do with his own fearsome desires? What—and this was the eternal question, what would become of Lucius William Walter? What love awaited? What heroism? What beauty? What
encompassing act of kindness?
The future, as he saw it through the steam of his coffee, was as vague as the sheen of the night sky only hours ago, seen through his secret tears. He had scanned both the vast horizon and his coffee spoon, and there was nothing there.
At breakfast they all acted as though nothing had happened in the night. The world had shattered into a million bits. There was no putting it back together and they didn’t even notice. Didn’t even notice.
But he did. Lucius William Walter, in his threadbare robe, saw everything.
20
THE BOYS ASKED her to unlock the gun cabinet. For the first time in years, she got the key from her jewel box, and there they all were, hunting rifles from Holland & Holland, exquisite, shiny, well used, from the days when twenty or thirty of Virginia’s finest got together to shoot duck on autumn weekends. They looked in admiration for a long time before they chose. She told them the provenance of each gun. The duck hunts in the fall. The governor shooting, drunk, and bringing down a fine mallard, on the table by suppertime. The look and smell of twenty ducks hanging on the back porch, draining and waiting to be eaten. All of them drunk at dawn when they went out. This gun had misfired, and blinded the first son of one of Virginia’s finest families. It was not play, she reminded them. It was sport. Fall sport.
“Did you ever shoot?” Gibby asked.
“My mother could shoot out a turkey’s eye at a hundred paces,” Ash said.
“Be careful, Gibby. I’m a natural-born killer.” She paused, looking out over her fields to the river. “How I loved it. Getting up at dawn. Putting on the shooting clothes that would seem ridiculous to me now. Tweed everything. Enormous knickers. Argyle socks. Brogues. Father would let me have a sip of brandy. And then we would go out into the dawn with our hunting dogs, Preacher and Judge, spaniels, bird dogs who got so excited, perfectly trained, me beside the governor or some senator or titan.
“At first they babied me, pretended I was one of them but snickered behind my back. They babied until I yelled out, ‘I got it!’ and brought down a twenty-eight-pound turkey, the hardest of all the birds. After that, I was just one of them. How I loved it. The kick of the butt of the gun against my shoulder when I knew my shot was sure. Waiting for the sound, the raising of a covey of pheasant or a brace of ducks on the river, and the dogs would race to raise the birds, and then twenty men would shoot to kill, and birds would fall, and everyone would shout, ‘It’s mine! I got one!’ and the dogs would swim out and bring them in in their soft mouths. It was thrilling. Then they all looked at me, but I didn’t say anything, just smiled, because what did it matter? Let the governor have his day. Then more brandy out of sterling flasks all around. You two go out and play. When fall comes, I’ll show you how to hunt for real.”
She remembered it all so well, the smell of gunsmoke, the camaraderie of men, hitting a turkey dead-on, in the head, the hardest bird to shoot, and after that there was no condescension, no smirk on a single face when she joined them and accepted the swig of brandy that was offered. And after, while the men ate the huge breakfast that was always waiting for them when they came back to the house just after dawn, hands freezing, each man carrying a brace of ducks over his shoulder, then came the cleaning, her particular task, the wadding and the rod, the black on the cotton, the patience it took, herself as ravenous as the men, but not willing to leave one rifle uncleaned.
Now Gibby and Ash were moving out on a perfect spring day. Totally unschooled, with lethal weapons in their hands. What game did they hope for? A rabbit, at best. They knew enough not to shoot one of the eagles that perched in the black pines along the shoreline. But off they went, eager for the pop of the finest rifles in the world,
Lucius had been given a room away from the action, with his books, which he took day after day from the dozens in the freezer, and he spent the days ironing and listening to the jazz in his head. Once he started working, the torment of the breakfast table left him alone, and there were only the pages, one after another, the steam from the iron, the books coming back to life and being put back carefully in order on the mahogany shelves.
Ironing books, in a room as far removed from the life of the house as possible, with the incessant noise of the builders who were putting the room back together, repairing the damage, first removing the giant limb, cutting it up for firewood with a chain saw that roared into life exactly at nine, the moment they rose from the breakfast table.
Or in the kitchen at night, one light on, cold, in his bathrobe, everybody long upstairs and in their beds but secretly not. Alone in both places, unnoticed, the invisible laborer with his single skill, his other being exhausted.
He pictured a dinner party, some dinner party somewhere, the horsey beauty on his right, immaculate breeding in blue silk and pearls, big pearls, the handsome man on his left, asking the inevitable American question, the man sleek in his custom-made tuxedo, Lucius in his threadbare thrift-shop find: “So, what do you do?” And Lucius’s face reddening with embarrassment: “I iron books.” And the man looking at him blankly and turning away, never to look back, when he might have said “restore books,” or “curate libraries,” anything to make it more glamorous, to keep the conversation going, so the man might have said, “Oh, really? How fascinating,” and then they might have launched into a conversation and the man might have lit his cigarette, lit both their cigarettes with his gold lighter, and the man might have looked into Lucius’s eyes and seen possibilities, the churning fire of passion. But that’s not what he said. He extinguished that fire before it was lit, as he always did. And the affair with the handsome stranger was unbegun before it had the slightest chance of starting.
Lucius the dependable extra man. Lucius who could be counted on to cover his despair by hanging a spoon from his nose. Lucius the court jester. Lucius whose big trick, unseen so far at Saratoga, was that he could walk on his hands up and down a flight of stairs, his eyeglasses and change falling and tinkling as they bounced down the stairs. Lucius who could pick any lock with a paper clip. Who could make an egg stand on its end. Lucius who slept alone, who would gladly give the other half of the bed to any man who asked him, for warmth, for sex, for comfort, for the sheer pleasure of not having to wake up alone. Lucius, who would surprise and dazzle the world one day.
He tried to imagine another man’s skin against his. It felt like a well-ironed book, crisp, flat, perfect. He remembered the dark trysts he had had in movie theaters, in the back room of bars that only some men knew about, and they felt crumpled and useless, ready to be thrown in the bin. And here he stopped. He had never had sex in a bed. He had never had sex naked. He didn’t know their names or remember their faces. Sad Lucius. Sad, self-pitying Lucius, who could hang a spoon from his nose, who could do many things, with cards, with hard-boiled eggs, silly tricks to say to the world, It’s all right. I’m fine. I’m perfectly fine, while inside, empires crumbled, and there was no end to the desolation. He was forty-two, half over. If not now, when? Ever? Never? Never was unacceptable, a bottomless pool in which he drowned again and again. There were five of them in the house. Two of them were having sex, he was sure of that. That left one, and he thought he knew which one. The weeks had gone by, and would continue to pass. He would make this happen. He would make one man love him, and if not love, accept him for a night. We all need encouragement. Without it, we wilt, like roses left in an empty glass when the water evaporates.
It was ridiculous, he knew. This would not happen. But even the thought of it made the blood course faster in his veins. Lucius the invisible one. Please, please stop and see me. Look at my face, my eyes. Let me touch you, here, and here. Please, I am begging. Without it, I will die.
How long had he been here? The days were infused with such a sameness, it was hard to tell. The iron, the book put back on the shelf. The reconstruction of the library was now done. They had dressed and gone to church at least three times.
He must have been here two months. It was hard to tell,
but that’s what it must be. The boys seemed never to run out of amusements, Diana out of chores. She had written to the dressmakers of Paris, and the boxes had already begun to arrive, marvelous things, perfectly au courant. She wore them at dinner. Time had passed. He had arrived with the storms of late winter, and now the halcyon days of spring were on them like a whisper.
Did he go to her every night? Did they find ways to get away from the other boy and meet in the daylight? Suddenly, without his noticing, there now seemed to be no end to the money. The house was filled with servants, the girls in starched white aprons over black skirts, with white cotton blouses and equally starched white caps on their heads, polishing and dusting the entire day. Rooms that had been closed were opened and aired out, everything taken out and dusted and polished and put back. Now that the weather was nice, the gigantic rugs were taken out into the yard and beaten and aired for the first time in years.
And there were men as well, handsome boys from the village in black pants and white shirts, with jackets they wore if company ever came, although none had arrived yet.
He lay on his bed all afternoon and pondered these events. Every once in a while the pop of a shotgun brought him out of his half sleep, the boys out shooting at rabbits or what birds Preacher and Judge could raise. Whatever they would bring home would be so infested with buckshot it would be inedible, but he guessed they were having what most men considered to be fun.
That was the problem in a nutshell. As hard as he tried. Lucius William Walter was not most men, and he never would be. Lying down into the comfort of a twenty-five-year marriage, the dandling of a small grandchild on his knee, the papery, geriatric kiss of old age—these were not to be his. Unless he accepted the niceties of a crisply pressed page as a reason, there was no reason to live.
He tried.
He tried very hard,
The Dying of the Light Page 15
