That’s what led to our argument, our quarrel. “It’s a beautiful poem,” I allowed. “Truly beautiful. And I really hate to tell you this, but I’m afraid you’ll have to rewrite the poem. Because Rachel McLowery didn’t jump into the millpond. She was pushed. By Marshall Allen.” Oh yeah? Diana challenged. Says who? “Says me,” I said, and then there we were, yelling at each other again for the first time in quite a while. I couldn’t very well come right out and admit that I had been creating Daniel Lyam Montross’s story all along, but I tried to reason with her, saying (or yelling, because we were talking very loudly at each other), WHAT OTHER REASON WOULD DANIEL HAVE HAD FOR KILLING MARSHALL ALLEN? HUH? YOU TELL ME THAT! IF YOU’RE SO SMART, HOW ARE YOU GOING TO JUSTIFY HIS SHOOTING DOWN THAT IDIOT IN COLD BLOOD? and Diana came back at me with, BECAUSE HE WAS MISTAKEN! BECAUSE HE JUST JUMPED TO THE WRONG CONCLUSIONS! RACHEL WASN’T MURDERED, SHE KILLED HERSELF, AND THAT’S WHAT MAKES IT SO MUCH SADDER AND POIGNANT! and I yelled back at Diana, OH YEAH??? SINCE WHEN IS IT SADDER TO KILL YOURSELF THAN GET MURDERED BY A HALF-WIT BULLY? LISTEN, SWEETHEART, YOU’D BETTER JUST STICK TO BEING A REPORTER OR RECORDER AND STOP TRYING TO INTERFERE WITH THE PLOT! and she yelled back at me, WHAT MAKES YOU THINK THAT YOU KNOW MORE THAN I DO??? WHAT MAKES YOU THINK THAT YOUR IMAGINATION IS ANY BETTER THAN MINE??? and I answered that one, all right. BECAUSE, DEAR HEART, I’M THE PYGMALION WHO CREATED YOU AND WHO LOVES YOU, GODDAMMIT, BUT YOU AREN’T ANY MORE CAPABLE OF CREATING ME THAN YOU ARE CAPABLE OF LOVING ME!!!! And that shut her up for a while, I guess, because I was right, after all. I don’t think she loves me, or ever will. I thought that after I had saved her life the way I did, she would be so grateful that she would have to love me, but instead I think it just makes her feel guilty; she knows she owes me some kind of debt, but she can’t love me, so she hates me because I make her feel guilty for not loving me. I was ready to go on arguing as long as she wanted to, but she didn’t want to. She put me to sleep. She left me asleep a long time, while she went off and had her fun with Daniel. When she brought me back, I don’t know how many hours later, she “announced” that she and Daniel Lyam Montross had been discussing this matter, and that Daniel Lyam Montross agreed with her that he must have been mistaken in jumping to the conclusion that Marshall Allen had pushed Rachel McLowery into the millpond and drowned her. He hadn’t had any real evidence, she said. He was contrite and sorrowful, she said he said, even if Marshall Allen was a worthless creep who didn’t deserve to go on living, but he was sorry he had killed him without knowing that Marshall wasn’t responsible for Rachel’s death. Furthermore, she said, she and Daniel Lyam Montross had “agreed” that when we got to Lost Cove, North Carolina, Daniel should be given the opportunity to tell the story of his life there, in verse, because he could do it more effectively in poetry than I could do it in prose. I felt, I felt—what’s the word? I felt just awful.
She loved him more than she loved me, that was clear. And it wasn’t just the filial love of a girl for her grandfather. I didn’t believe that “grandfather” business any more, anyway. Daniel Lyam Montross had been my creation, and she had only latched onto him…and not only latched onto him but taken him away from me. I felt excluded and unwanted and unnecessary. I felt that maybe I didn’t even love her any more, and this set me to wondering again about what love really is, and it reminded me that Daniel Lyam Montross, when he had been my age, nineteen, had been for a while preoccupied with this subject (listen to Tapes #134a through #139c). He had thought, at the time, that he was very much in love with Rachel, and because he couldn’t have her he loved her all the more. And because that idiot Marshall Allen could have her, it nearly drove him mad with love for her. And he wondered, was this love only desire? Finally he had put the question to Henry Fox. He and Fox were just sitting in the yard one day, watching Pooch gnaw his fleas, when apropos of nothing Daniel had asked Henry Fox, “Henry, do you believe in love?” But Henry Fox, looking away from him in pain, would not answer him, and even Pooch stopped chomping his fleas and gave Daniel a mournful look. A week or so later he had again sought an opportunity to broach the subject with Henry Fox, and asked, “Is there such a thing, Henry? What is love? Or is there only desire?” But once again Henry Fox could not—or would not—speak. Convinced that he would get no answer from Fox, Daniel had begun to look elsewhere. He asked Melissa. Melissa said that love is to like as applejack is to cider: love is merely a more potent form of liking. But this answer, for Daniel, only raised two larger questions: Is it possible to love without liking? and, Is it really possible to like without loving? So he put his question at the next opportunity to Rachel, thinking perhaps her weird woodsy mind knew answers to unfathomable questions. He asked her bluntly, one evening when they were sitting together in the privy, “Do you know what love is?” And after a moment she replied, Yup. “Then tell me,” he said. “I need to know.” And she gave him this definition of love: “Love is when you want for something to happen to you and know that it won’t, but want it because it won’t.” Daniel mulled this over for a considerable length of time until he thought he grasped what she meant, and so the next time he visited Henry Fox again he repeated Rachel’s definition to him and asked, “Is she right, Henry? Is that it? Is love only expecting something that won’t come?” But Henry Fox only looked more mournful than ever, and changed the subject, asking Daniel how he was getting along in his new trade of carpentry. Finally Daniel had to ask his question of the only other person in Five Corners from whom he might expect a clear answer: Judge Braddock. Since Daniel had resigned the schoolmastership, he and Braddock were no longer on regular speaking terms, but occasionally they had coffee and a moment’s chat in the lobby of Glen House, and on one of these occasions Daniel steered the conversation around to popping his question. Judge Braddock’s first reaction was suspicion or evasion, or at least uneasiness, that this serious topic was so casually thrown into a mundane and civil conversation, but then Braddock drew himself up and delivered himself of a rather pompous monologue (Tape #138c) on the subject, declaring that love was, among other things, the elevation of the baser instincts, the substitution of purity for grossness, the triumph of the mind over the body, the aspiration for perfection, and the appreciation of true beauty. Daniel sat out this monologue and took leave of Judge Braddock no wiser than before. He returned yet again to Henry Fox, and reported Braddock’s oration to him, which Fox regarded as “a lot of flatulent buncombe.” Then Daniel said, “Henry, if you won’t tell me what love is, at least tell me why you won’t tell me.” And Fox answered, “Because you are much too young. A man only learns the answer, if ever, when he’s gone through years of loving or trying to love, and years of trying to be loved and not being loved. Forget it for now. Love is like a ghost: everybody talks about ghosts, but not many folks have ever seen one, and those who did see one never could believe what they were looking at. Come back when you’re thirty-five or forty and if you still haven’t learned it, I’ll tell you.”
Have I said enough about you, Dan, for the time being? May I, please, say a little about Diana and me? Our sixth day back in Five Corners was supposed to be the day, according to my “program,” when we could finally make love again, “fuse” again. But of course she had rejected my program as a “game.” That was all right; I began to realize how artificial it was. If she were going to love me, it would have to be spontaneous. But still I thought—and hoped—it might happen on that sixth day. It was a good day. Diana seemed more interested in me than usual. After supper, she said she wanted me to talk about myself. She reminded me that I had made her tell me all about her childhood and her relations with her father and so forth. Now, she said, it was my turn. Tell her about my life, she said. Talk about my father. How did I get along with him? Was he very severe or disapproving, etc.? I didn’t very much enjoy talking about my father, or even thinking about him at a time like that, but I was flattered she was taking an interest in me, and she kept asking me questions to draw me out, just as I had done to her. Did h
e punish you? she asked. Yes. How? With his belt. You mean he just took off his belt and lashed you with it? Yes. Where? Not on your face? No, just on my butt. Sometimes, on my back. He just took it off and hit you? He didn’t say anything? No. He would just unbuckle it and slip it off and start swinging. It got to where, eventually, that even when he was undressing or changing his clothes, or even, you know, unbuckling his belt so he could slip his shirt back down inside his pants, I would think he was getting ready to clobber me and I would shriek and run. Like those dogs of Pavlov. That used to give him a laugh. Sometimes he would deliberately unbuckle his belt just to get a rise out of me.
“Oh, Day,” she said, and pressed my hand. Why did he belt you? What sort of things did you do wrong that he belted you for? Well, I said, the worst I can remember was, when I was about nine years old, I had this toy wagon, big enough to give a dog a ride in, sort of an old beat-up toy wagon, and I was fixing it up, I was painting it firehouse red, out on our front walk. I had newspapers spread so none of the paint would get on the walk or the steps but I was careless, I guess, and a few drops had splattered on the cement. Well, he came home from work, and when he saw that paint he really went into a rage and took off his belt while I was down on my knees painting the toy wagon and he started lashing me for all he was worth and I tried to crawl up the steps and into the house to get away from him but he just kept at it; I guess he must’ve had a bad day at the office and was taking it out on me, but anyway he kept belting me all the way up the steps and through the door where I crawled and kept crawling down the hall to the kitchen where I hoped my mother was, who might make him stop, but she wasn’t there for some reason, so he just went on belting me, me lying on the kitchen floor, until I guess his arm got tired and he had to quit.
Diana was very affectionate that night, and I think she might even have made love with me if I had kept talking and told her the story about the worst thing that ever happened to me. I had put her in a pitying and affectionate mood, but I stopped too soon. The reason I stopped was that I suddenly remembered that it was right after Diana had been telling me about her own childhood that she had been shot, and I had this very nervous feeling, not a premonition but just a sense of caution, that if I kept on telling her about my childhood something terrible might happen to me. So I stopped, just short of telling her about the worst thing that ever happened to me, which I couldn’t’ve told her anyway, because it would have embarrassed me too much: about when I was twelve years old and my father had opened the bathroom door and found me playing with myself, and I had locked him out and tried to hang myself with my belt from the shower-curtain rod, but the shower-curtain rod had bent, and he later beat me up with his belt for bending the shower-curtain rod even if he couldn’t beat me up for playing with myself. Maybe if I had been able to tell Diana about that, she might have felt affectionate enough to make love with me that night. But because I couldn’t, she didn’t. We held each other in our arms in the sleeping bag and went to sleep, and that was all. But sometime in the early morning, before dawn, I woke up and discovered, as I often do, that I had an erection. What is there about dreams that does this? The dream I had been having at that particular time didn’t seem to have anything to do with sex. It was something about climbing trees. Is climbing trees a sexual thing? Anyway, there I was with a very stiff and itchy erection, and a very bad case of solipsitis. I decided: Now I must determine if she is really real. She was sleeping on her side, with her back to me. Turned away from me even in sleep. She was wearing her ankle-length flannel nightgown because it was a cold night, a very cold night, a dozen degrees or so below freezing. Very gently I worked her nightdress up from her ankles until it had cleared her bottom. She wasn’t wearing any underthings. I embraced her back gently and moved my picket beneath her bottom and to her velvet. She didn’t stir, but the folds of her velvet involuntarily moistened at the touch of my picket and eased my going in. And oh, I knew she was for real, then. Perhaps only because such a long time had passed since I had been there before was the reason that I didn’t last very long, just a few gentle strokes, before everything blew out of me and I felt as if I had climbed the highest tree I ever climbed, and leapt out of it, and died a nicer death than a real death would have been, and was buried in the earth of her body, and rested there in peace.
Later that morning, she woke up, looking happy and innocent as if she didn’t have any idea what I had done. She got out of the sleeping bag and went off to use the latrine. But very soon she came running back, holding out her fingers and looking at something on them, and all at once she began yelling at me, DAY, DID YOU FUCK ME IN THE NIGHT??!! DID YOU, DAY??!! YOU DID, DIDN’T YOU, DAY!!?? OH, GOD!! OH, OH, GOD!!! and she showed me her fingers smeared with my still-wet seminal fluid and then she smacked me across the face with those fingers, and began yelling some more about whether I’d forgotten that she was out of pills, and this was absolutely the very worst time of the month for her, and she was almost certain that she would be pregnant. HOW COULD YOU DO SUCH A THING??!! HOW COULD YOU BE SO THOUGHTLESS??!! THIS IS SIMPLY FURTHER PROOF, IF ANY WERE NEEDED, THAT YOU DON’T HAVE ANY THOUGHT FOR ME AS A PERSON!! YOU JUST USE ME TO MASTURBATE WITH!! THAT’S ALL YOU WERE DOING, WASN’T IT??!! JUST MASTURBATING WITH MY SLEEPING BODY!!!! I wanted to die. I wanted to kill this whole goddamn story, right then. I wish I had. Why prolong the misery?
But later Diana seemed to be sorry that she had hit me and that she had said such ugly things to me. I’m just not myself, she said. We’ve got to get out of here pretty soon. We’re just about finished, aren’t we? And she added, If I’m pregnant, don’t worry about it; it’s very easy to get an abortion in New York.
Later, in the afternoon of that same day, we were pleasantly surprised by a visit from Dr. Fox. Maybe I shouldn’t say “pleasantly surprised,” because I’m not certain just how I felt when I saw him coming. He was on snowshoes, and was carrying an extra pair under his arm. He explained that he had been required to leave his car a mile back down the road when the snow got too deep. He asked me how I was and then said, “Don’t you think it’s about time to go? Don’t you think you’ve been here long enough?” Not quite, I said. But soon. Any day now. There was still something I had to find out, I said. Dr. Fox stayed a while and chatted, but I didn’t feel very talkative at that particular time. I decided I would walk him back to his car, on the other pair of snowshoes. I told Diana that I had always wanted to get the hang of walking on snowshoes, so I strapped them on and walked him back to his car. Walking on snowshoes is really pretty simple, once you get the hang of it. Hang hang hang of it. At his car, Dr. Fox said, very earnestly, “Come with me. Now.” What? I said. And leave Diana? Doc, your solipsitis is worse than mine. Very well, he said, and told me to keep the snowshoes. “But I’ll come back again in a few days,” he said, “and if you’re still here I’ll drag you out. Bodily.” He got into his car. Doc, I said, there’s something I’ve been trying to find out. Maybe you could tell me. What is love? Do you know what love is? He just looked at me. I think I stumped him, for once. He mumbled something about he hadn’t given it much thought, not lately, at least, and he had always tended to take it for granted that the subject either needed no definition or was incapable of one. Then he said, “If that’s what you’re trying to find out, I’m not sure that this is the right place for it.”
Now this is the next day, the last day, the last Day. That was yesterday that Dr. Fox was here. Doc, you were a good guy but you couldn’t tell me what love is. Maybe you were right, though, that this isn’t the right place for it. I’ll have to seek it in some other place. But I found out what it is. Yes I did. Diana discovered that there was nothing wrong with her tape recorder after all. Maybe she had forgotten to push the little red Record button. Last night she made a recording of Daniel Lyam Montross’s last night in Five Corners. It was after Rachel’s death but before he killed Marshall Allen. He went up to Gold Brook Chateau for the last time, to say goodbye to Henry Fox, but also to demand that H
enry Fox finally tell him what love is. I want to play this tape (Tape #199b) of Henry Fox’s last monologue to Daniel. There are sounds of Fox blowing his nose occasionally, and sniffling, but he wasn’t crying.
Hear Fox’s Last Tape:
She was my daughter. You didn’t know that? She didn’t know it herself. Joel doesn’t know. Melissa married him when she was already pregnant but refused to marry me. Maybe Rachel inherited from me my insanity. You know everyone in Five Corners thinks I’m crazy. They’ve thought it so long that I think it myself. I know my father was insane, so if Rachel didn’t inherit it from me she got it from him on the bounce. Heimerich Voecks was a mad Austrian dentist who mesmerized my mother in order to fill one of her cavities while filling another one of her cavities. He did a thorough job on both, but she never saw him again.
So you want to know what love is. Do you really think you loved Rachel, and didn’t simply desire her? Do you know why you didn’t love her? Because it takes two. It takes two to make a love. No, I don’t mean because she didn’t love you. Maybe it was the other way around. Let’s start with back in the days when she used to share the privy with you all the time. Why do you think she did that? Just because she considered it wicked or bad or animalistic? Perhaps, but that’s only part of the answer. What does “privy” mean, by the way? It’s another one of our syncopes. Syncope for “private,” also maybe a syncope for “privity,” which is a word you’d do well to learn. Yes, I know you’re getting tired of words, but words are all we have to reach each other with. “Privity” means what two people together know between themselves, a shared secret. So why do you think Rachel wanted to share the privy with you? Because she had a secret she wanted to share. Because she had a million secrets she wanted to share. Her whole It she wanted to share, so It would be your It too, and yours hers.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 60
