by John Crowley
“Well. In it. There is a fabulously valuable first edition with illustrations by Botticelli. This isn’t that one.”
“No, well.”
“But it is a real nice sixteenth-century edition with wood engravings. Weird ones too. From the great days of weird book illustration.”
They had come to a stop on River Street, by the variety store down from the library, at the corner of Hill Street, up which Pierce’s street was.
“Valuable?” Rosie asked.
“Yes.”
“But not really …”
“Not. No.”
A little red Asp sports car was wiggling into a small parking space across the street from the library. It had several small dents and primed spots on it, as though it were accustomed to tangling with other cars. It just fit, finally, with its shapely rear end somewhat protruding.
“Say it again,” said Sam.
“Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,” said Pierce.
A long-legged woman climbed from the car, her dark loosely-braided hair aswing; Pierce thought he saw her notice their stationwagon, and then take no notice.
“You know,” Pierce said to Rosie, “I once thought she was you.”
“I know.”
“I mean I once thought she was Sam’s mother, and. Because of.”
“Yes.”
He had thought for a time that this dark woman—Rose Ryder, pulling a big bag from the Asp’s rear space and hooking it over her bare tanned shoulder—was the Rosie who was Sam’s mother, Mike Mucho’s soon-to-be-ex wife, and his old friend Spofford’s passion: she, and not carrot-topped Rosie here with him. Rose Ryder crossed the street to the library with a smooth pardlike stride that Pierce enjoyed watching.
“Hey. It’s Rose,” Sam said pointing. “Where’s Daddy?”
“I don’t know, hon. At work, I guess.”
“Are they still,” Pierce asked. Sam’s father Mike was also Rose Ryder’s lover, which had added to Pierce’s confusion.
“I don’t hear,” Rosie said, a little curtly. “I think it’s mostly over.”
“Huh,” Pierce said contemplatively.
“Are you getting out here,” Rosie said, “or do you want delivery to your door?”
Pierce unlatched and swung open the heavy door of the wagon, which scraped horridly against the sidewalk. “She was very, when I talked to her last,” he said, climbing out with his bags. “She seemed, and I was wondering what she would do if I.”
“I think,” Rosie said, “that she’d do anything the right man asked her to do.”
“Anything?” Pierce said in mock scandalized astonishment. “Anything?”
Rosie put the car purposefully in gear, and motioned Pierce to shut the door. It groaned and creaked on its hinges before shutting with the patented thump that was intended to signify solidity and worth.
“Rose didn’t say hi,” Sam said, miffed.
“She didn’t see us, I guess.” Jeez what tact, Rosie thought: to ask her about some other woman’s availability, and that one of all women. Still she felt instantly ashamed of herself for saying what she had said to Pierce about Rose, for revealing what she had revealed, if indeed she had really revealed anything: felt disloyal, somehow, having told something that no woman should tell a man about another woman, something which Rosie ought not to have known anyway, though she did know it.
Disloyal! Rosie lurched out into River Street more summarily than she had intended to, and Sam beside her laughed with glee to be rolled around.
Pierce had, in any case, no business to be making such inquiries. And as he put away his groceries in the kitchen cupboards of his second-floor apartment on Maple Street, he felt a curious lassitude in the contemplation, even, of pursuit; the lassitude maybe felt by the mountaineer who by squeezing from himself every drop of willingness and cheer has achieved a dozen subsidiary peaks, and finds himself now still snowbound, with only another and its joys ahead of him. The bear went over the mountain.
For a long time he had used to credit a malign fate with the disasters of his heart; he after all had always been willing, single-minded in his devotion, bound by his word and his need: it was they who always took off, wounding him atrociously, unforgivably, but he forgave them, all of them. At length he had come to understand that he had, after all, selected these women and not others out of the available population; they had not been brought him by a genie; he had selected them by his receptivity to their charms, whatever those exactly were, volatility, restless hotness, availability; huntresses, unaware themselves. He had chosen them (had acceded, at any rate, in their choosing of him) for exactly what made it unlikely they would stay. And that was a sort of insight, he thought, not nothing anyway: his histrionic vow had probably only reflected a reality his soul had come silently to face, that he was not the marrying kind, that he was bent out of true and unsuited to a wife ’n’ kids.
He had forgotten to buy capers, with which he had intended to dress his steak tartare, bachelor’s indulgence, why not a dish of oysters too you dope. And a half-bottle of dregs.
It was not as though the old dynamos row on row within him had been disengaged, he could not think how to disengage them even if he wanted to; if he was not constantly on the boil as he had been in the city, that was probably only because there was no daylong nightlong parade passing before him here as there had been there, the illusion of endless supply. Here in Smallville there was the other danger, fixation on the one or two who roughly match the inner template, scarcity confused with Fate’s special election.
That panther’s walk. He had actually embraced her once, kissed her deeply too, in a deserted summer-house on a branch of the Blackbury River. She hadn’t resisted him. Her unresistance had been complete, so complete as to be unnerving, at least to Pierce; as unnerving as insistent seduction.
That was last summer, when he had first visited this country. In the confusions of a night he had come to suppose this Rose was Rosie Mucho and therefore his friend Spofford’s beloved. For that reason he had gone no farther; for that reason, and because of a sudden alarm he had felt, a species of holy dread such as might come over a poor traveler who has unexpectedly entered a lost temple, and finds himself before the idol, above whose awful altar a lamp is still burning.
He finished the wine.
It might be, he thought, that his flaw lay in the stars of his birth. Pierce had recently applied to Val for his horoscope, as nearly everyone he knew in the Faraways had done, and then had listened to her analysis with attention in spite of a small unwipeable smirk on his face. We will always pay attention to vatic statements about our own natures, no matter how baseless. His own case was even less decidable than most, because of an uncertainty about his birth hour; he knew the year and the day, lucky Sunday ha ha, and when he asked Winnie for the hour she said she remembered five o’clock distinctly, but not whether it was morning or evening, and of course the whole heavens had swung around between the one hour and the other. Twilight Sleep, she said; she couldn’t remember much.
So Val made a stab at two different charts (perhaps not as thorough as she usually tried to be, she wasn’t getting paid double for this) and she found many little things different, and some big things the same no matter what the hour. In both, a basically cheerful and sagacious Sagittarian nature was over-borne by the leaden weight of Saturn, weepy Neptune too, a planet unknown to the science when it was a science. In the evening option, Saturn and the Moon, coupling joylessly in the House of Death, opposed poor Venus dejected in the wrong house: Did Pierce maybe have trouble with relationships? The big difference between the morning and the evening views, said Val, was their likely outcomes, the better or the worse.
Death or life?
Maybe not that drastic. Easy oppositions or hard ones. Val suggested (maybe it was too simple an out, but not unwise) that Pierce just go with the morning chart, and by acting on it make it his.
That put Saturn in the first house, imparting to the forming body and nature his own c
old sad dry qualities, predisposing the child to melancholy, to which Pierce was certainly subject. Any doctor of the sixteenth century could have pegged him as Saturnian at a glance; he would only have had to note the signs. Pierce stood before his books (where else, at evening’s end) and leafed through one. Here: a Doctor Johannes of Hasfurt, standard medieval authority, lists them: “A broad ugly face,” check. “Small eyes downcast, one larger than the other and having a spot or deformity,” check if you looked closely. “Connecting eyebrows, bristly black hair shaggy and slightly wavy,” check and check. “His beard, if he has one, is sparse, but his body—especially his chest—is hairy.” Check, this was getting a little much. Legs long, hands and feet deformed with a cleft heel, well no. Body “not too big” (Pierce’s was, he thought) and “honey-colored” (that would be nicer than his own untannable pallor) and “smelling like a goat,” hey now.
Clap that book shut, pull out another. There was always another to consult. He had offered some of these to Val, who said she’d rather listen, it sank in better. Here was Burton: bad luck to say “melancholy” without saying “Burton” right after. He carried the Anatomy to the bed, and lay down with it.
Third Partition, Section Two, Member One, Subsection One. Heroical love causing melancholy. His Pedigree, Power, and Extent. No power on earth found stronger than love. The part affected in men is the liver, and therefore called heroical, because commonly Gallants, Noblemen, and the most generous spirits are possessed with it.
Nice, Pierce thought, but a doubtful etymology. Heroical love, Amor hereos, that disease of the mind and members that melancholic Saturnian natures take for love itself, unable to hatch any other kind in their cold dry hearts. Doctors of the sixteenth century, medieval monks too, were quite sure you could die of heroical love.
Member Two, Subsection One. The causes of heroical love: Temperature, full Diet, Idleness, Place, Climate, Etc. Of all causes the remotest are the stars. When Venus and Mercury are in conjunction, Mercury in the ascendant, I am so urged with thoughts of love that I cannot rest—so far Cardan of himself, confessing what use he made of the time allotted to study. Yet some hold with Brunus his opinion, that Saturn in the nativity, by making for melancholy, most inclines to these thoughts of lust; such spirits are endowed with imagination in overplus, and can readily conceive all sorts of delights, of which they never tire; yet they pursue the pleasures of lust for their own sake, and give no thought to propagation.
Which about hit the nail on the head.
Brunus his opinion: that was Giordano Bruno, very likely, who bragged, who knows how truthfully, that he had coupled with a hundred women.
The part affected, meanwhile (back to Burton), is the former part of the head, for want of moisture. Gordonius will have the testicles an immediate subject or cause, the liver an antecedent. Fracastorius agrees in this with Gordonius: from thence originally come the images of desire, erection, Etc.; it calls for an exceeding titillation of the part, so that until the seed is put forth there is no end of frisking voluptuousness and continual remembrance of venery.
Pierce underlined that lightly in pencil: continual remembrance of venery.
Of course (as Austin saith) the stars do but incline us. Saturn in the ascendant might also make for dark solitary genius, coupled especially with Sagittarian clarity and aim; Bruno knew that too. Heroical love not for phantasms of flesh but for the lasting realities perceived by the questing intellect. That was the morning view. Antisocial squalor, introspection, geezerhood, eremita masturbans: the evening.
He pushed Burton from his lap.
Say the telephone rings now. The unanswered phone call he had made last month in the city returning to him tonight. Okay.
Ring, phone.
It wasn’t far from where he lay on the bed, he could pull himself roughly together and pick it up before the caller quit.
“Hello?”
Hi there. With a faintly shamefaced air of peek-a-boo.
“Oh,” he said. “Well. Hello.”
You busy?
“Christ no. I was just,” he said, “thinking of you.”
Small world, she said. He heard a jangle of bracelets as perhaps she shifted the receiver from ear to ear. So how are you. How’s the new life.
“The new life is good.”
The country bumpkin, she said.
“Haylofts,” he said. “Milkmaids.”
You, she said.
“And how ‘bout you?” he said.
Well you know, she said, reflecting. It’s summer. It gets so crazy.
“Hot,” he said.
It’s hot as hell right now, she said. I’m sitting n-k-d with the window open.
He could actually hear the summer city in the street below the window of her apartment, that apartment he had never seen but knew, cross between a Cornell box and the Watts Towers. She on the bed.
“So,” he said. “You’ve been good?”
I’ve been bad, she said, resigned to her nature, as he was not to his. So bad.
“Tell me.”
Crazy, she said, softly, as though pondering to what extent she should indulge him. Edgardo, she said. Did I tell you about Edgardo?
“No.”
I’ve been seeing him. Edgardo, she said, her voice lower, imparting the delightful secret, is the first person I have ever picked up on the street. Just, you know, got the eye, gave it back—stopped to talk—oh man.
“Good for you.”
But—oh it’s so. I can’t tell you.
“Tell me.” For he had conceived a shameful plan, which if he kept his voice level and his air insouciant, he might execute. “You can.”
Well, she said. He’s fifteen years old. Her hand shifted on the instrument. And oh God. So sweet too. I didn’t realize at first, but Pierce I think I got a cherry. I mean you just can’t imagine.
But he wouldn’t need to imagine. With his gentle hints he would nudge her toward the revelations she wanted to make anyway, occupied for all he knew as he was himself; and the long telephone line would grow warm with the passage of her words toward him and his encouragements, like the wire of a busy appliance.
Continual remembrance of venery. Once upon a time back in their New York life together they had been in bed, just commencing, when the phone rang; and to his exasperation she answered it; and he had decided to proceed anyway. It was her friend Lou, the Denver cowgirl. Lou this isn’t such a good time. Really really, Lou. Well do you want me to tell you what’s going on? And she had laughed her deep small laugh of satisfaction, had settled down watching Pierce at work and talking meanwhile softly to Lou, telling her more, going on telling her, while Lou cooed audibly on the other end; he even spoke to her him-self, Hi Lou, wish you were here?
Wish you were here. He wondered if she and Lou had ever. She always hinted. Wish I could if she did. Wish I. I wish. I wish. I wish.
He fell momentarily thereupon into a shocked slumber, until his own ferocious snore awoke him.
Ugh what a mess.
The telephone squatted torpid and cold in the far corner; it had not in fact rung for days.
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame.
That she should have become so deeply incised on his spirit, sole focus of his one-eyed Sagittarian attention, sole object of his melancholic’s extravagant forebrain lust—that was no surprise; what star was it though, he wondered, what complication of the melancholic condition, which caused this tendency—he had only recently come to notice it, how entrenched it had become—to erase himself from his own imaginings? Since she did not want to be with him, he imagined her with others; and in the brief instant when he believed he could feel what she felt with another, a bright shadow of what she actually might feel or have felt, then he came.
What slippery slope had he stepped on, when? Why could he not make himself afraid of what had become of him?
The summer bloom hadn’t yet left the sky, though it was after nine o’clock by the moonface of
his clock. From his bed he could see the yellow oblong of his friend and neighbor Beau Brachman’s window, across and down the street, alone alight in the black cutout of Beau’s house. Beau the renunciatory mystagogue, who whatever he was up to would not be occupied as Pierce was.
Pierce had, himself, turned on no lights, and so needed to turn none off; he only stretched out in his shirt, pulled up the sheet, turned his face away from the kitchen where the day’s dishes implored him, and fell asleep.
NINE
Beau Brachman had in fact been imagining a coupling, too: blind, humid, and hot, hot enough to turn the Androgyne inside out, and make him all male.
Beneath the lamp lit in his monkish upstairs apartment two books lay, one closed volume atop another open one, the two bound alike in maroon cloth that some tiny tropical mite had attacked, consuming the glue in speckled measle patterns all over, the consumption only stopped by the cold climate to which Beau had brought them. They had been published together by the Theosophical Publishing House in Benares, and that’s where Beau had found them: Thrice-greatest Hermes, by G.R.S. Mead.
He had read in them for a long time this fragrant night, after not having opened them in years; the sight of the familiar print of the pages and the familiar disposition of the paragraphs on them, the little black marginal glosses like wayside shrines along a rocky path, returned him to the hot nights and days when he had read them first.
He was not reading now, though. If Pierce could have looked into, instead of merely at, Beau’s window, he would have seen Beau motionless and shirtless in his armchair, a pair of headphones over his ears by which he was connected to a massy old tube amplifier (Fisher) and a turntable. He was hearing an oceanic Mahler symphony, or rather was borne on its tides without exactly hearing it, letting himself be taken up again and again by its pseudo-endless coitus prolongatus into or out of his own movie, for which the Mahler was the music. The script was the Poimandres of thrice-great Hermes, as retold by Dr. Mead long ago.
COME UP ON: a bright roiling chaos of light, infinite mild and good, pouring itself forth out of its own unplaceable center, like the clouds that lead to or compose movie heavens.
