The Changeling

by Joy Williams

  He had had beautiful eyes. Before he got his notions, he had been normal enough, gorging himself on chocolate rabbits at the appropriate time of year, learning how to sail and water-color and so on, and doing everything with those beautiful and commanding eyes which were a luxurious violet color like certain depths of the sea.

  In his illness, he said that he could see the blood moving though the veins of things. He said he thought he could induce the birds and the butterflies and animals of the picture books to come to life, to totter out of the books, leaving holes behind them. He said he was sure he could do this except he was afraid.

  The child was overstimulated. He had been reading since the age of four. They all read at four. He worried about nuclear power and volcanoes and Beethoven’s deafness. He worried about the people who wrote to Miriam and told her the terrible things that had happened to them. Thomas encouraged him in these worries because he thought they honed the mind. Thomas told Johnny he could do anything if he just set his mind to it. Wasn’t Uri Geller able to make a closed rose unfurl just with the power of his thought? Hadn’t Christ made a fig tree wither with just the power of his annoyance? Well, now Johnny was setting his mind to something analogous to dying, and Thomas was off ruining other babies’ minds. Miriam had four-month-old twins, Ashbel and Franny, and Thomas was probably at them, even this very moment. Thomas loved babies. He would hold the twins and talk to them in French, in Latin. He would talk to them about Utrillo, about knights, about compasses. Thomas loved babies. He loved children. When they got to puberty he sent them off to boarding school and forgot about them.

  In the bar, she took a breath of air, as though she were tasting freedom, and coughed slightly. She slipped her finger into Sam’s small fist. She liked her baby. She was glad they were together, alone. She was glad that neither one of them would ever have to see Thomas again. She supposed, however, that the baby might grow to miss his cousins. And his father. Pearl herself would not miss Walker much. It was true that once Pearl had seen Walker with her heart but that was no longer so. Pearl didn’t know Walker very well which was why she always set great store upon seeing him with her heart. He was very seldom on the island. She didn’t know his business. She imagined that it simply might be taking women out to lunch and then sleeping with them. She had often wished, in the months when she was pregnant, that he would have been content enough to do just that with her, instead of bringing her back to his family and marrying her.

  That seemed unnecessary.

  He could still have given her her baby but she would not have had to spend that lonely year on the island where she was the only one, it seemed, with any ordinary sense at all.

  She was going to keep Sam calm and common. She would not let him play in a questionable manner. Everything would be bought in a store and have some sort of a guarantee. When he got sick, she was going to call a doctor.

  Even when Johnny weighed only eighteen pounds, Thomas had not called a doctor. He had brought over a psychiatrist. It was like contacting a voodoo priest, Pearl thought. The psychiatrist had come over to the island in a velour jogging suit and had spoken at length about love, rage and the triumph of hateful failure. The psychiatrist had suggested that Johnny was a very willful, angry, even dangerous little boy.

  Miriam had cried. They all realized that Johnny was willful. He had always gotten everything he wanted, usually just by the demands of his beautiful, insistent eyes. But it didn’t seem so bad. It didn’t bring anybody any harm. As for the idea that Johnny was angry and cruel, how could anyone, least of all Miriam, believe that? Miriam could only remember him as the child who fell asleep on her white bed after a day in the sun, smelling wonderful, tiny sea shells stuck to his bottom.

  A tear popped up in Pearl’s eye as she thought of Miriam, crying. Poor Miriam. She could see her sitting by Johnny’s bed, trying to talk to him, trying to bring him back, away from the dark child’s path.

  Poor Miriam. She told Pearl that she would sit in Johnny’s room and see all the confusions in poor Johnny’s head. There was a smell of sex and death and cooking, Miriam said. The slap of bodies coupling and quarreling was terrific. The racket of baroque construction. The cries and slithering, the giggles and complaints. The babies and fabulous animals. The old men. It was dark in Johnny’s room, but the people in his head were beautiful luminous clouds, delineated by flowing golden lines. The darkness, Miriam said to Pearl, held only the path. The children’s path. Dark.

  Pearl put a pretzel log in her mouth. It tasted as though she were eating her napkin. Miriam made wonderful pretzels. Pearl might never get a decent pretzel again. Miriam was the best cook Pearl had ever known. She loved to bake and make. If it weren’t for her, everyone was well aware, the children would live on nothing but honeysuckle and berries. She loved cooking. She never wearied of it. The gathering, the selecting. The boning, chopping, grating. The only day she ever made a mistake in the kitchen was the day her husband, Les, had abandoned her, a week before the twins were born. She’d put sugar instead of salt in the béchamel.

  Les had been a mess. He’d been the gardener. They’d found him when the family had vacationed once in Sea Island, Georgia, in the days before Thomas decided they shouldn’t vacation. Les was a borderline simpleton with a big handsome face and a large appetite. Miriam had never paid much attention to him. She was too busy with her sewing, cooking, shopping. How Miriam loved to shop! She approached supermarkets with joyously clenched teeth. Pearl had never done well in supermarkets. She saw Miriam as a successful conqueror penetrating a hostile country, routing out the perfect endive, the blemishless peach, the excellent cheese . . . Miriam had confided to Pearl once that she was glad Les was gone. Miriam had told Pearl he had a business bright and shiny as a carrot.

  Pearl looked at the rings of moisture her glass had made on the barroom table. She rearranged Sam in her arms. There was a crack in the formica that had hair in it. Pearl put her cocktail napkin over it. On the napkin were animals drinking and playing poker. Pearl put her hand over the cocktail napkin.

  On the wall in Johnny’s room was a picture Thomas had given him. It was a face made up from the heads and parts of animals. Arcimboldo. All the children thought it terribly witty. They envied Johnny for having it. Johnny adored Thomas for having given it to him. Pearl had never thought it very witty. She found it disgusting. A picture razored from an art book. Antlers, ears tusks, haunches, tails, teeth . . . making up the head of a man. The man’s bulbous nose a rabbit’s haunches, his hair a tangle of wildcats and horses, his eye a wolf’s open mouth. No wonder Johnny had nightmares, that wretched thing being the last he saw before he fell asleep at night. The head’s adam’s apple, a bull’s balls . . . Well, that was rather witty, Pearl thought.

  Poor Johnny. Pearl could not remember what he looked like. Sometimes her memory was not good at all. Pearl would be the first to admit that her mind was like a thin pool, on the bottom of which lay huge leaves, slowly softening. Or had Thomas said that to her once? Rudely.

  She remembered enough, actually. More than she cared to. She remembered the way the psychiatrist had stood in the living room, while Miriam wrung her hands, and said, “Your child dreads to become alive and real because he fears that in doing so, the risk of annihilation is immediately potentiated.”

  She remembered Miriam confessing to her once that she had taken to spanking Johnny. She did it tentatively, for it felt so queer, and then stopped almost immediately and began to rock him. His pale bones floated beneath her anxious hands. She cradled him in her arms and pressed her face into his hot tangled hair. Everything felt wrong. She combed out his hair with her own hairbrush, hoping it would order his thoughts. She put a little copper bell on the table beside his bed so that he could call for her should he want her, should he ever change his mind. Pearl remembered Miriam’s hopeless voice drifting out of his room:

  “Mommy’s leaving now, but in the morning I’ll make you french toast. You can put up the flag. You can go quahoging w
ith the boys . . .”

  Never again would Miriam see the tiny sea shells on Johnny’s bottom. Never again would he come back as he had been. Never, never, never. You cannot keep things the way they are. They go away. They change. There has never been an exception to this rule. No mercy has ever been shown.

  Oh to bring back the days when stars spoke at the mouths of caves.

  To go back to those times when one could not know, for the darkness, in what ways they had lost their former selves . . .

  Pearl was beginning to feel a little nauseated. On the plane, she had won a bottle of champagne by being the passenger who, in a contest over Richmond, had come closest to guessing the combined ages of the flight crew, a number which she could not now recall. She had drunk the champagne all by herself.

  The drinks here didn’t taste as good as the ones she made herself on the island. It was the sulphur in the ice cubes here or something.

  A well-dressed woman with terrible breath came up to her table and bent down over Sam. She jiggled a swizzle stick at him. She thought he was wonderful.

  “What all flavor is that little thing?” she asked Pearl. “Chocolate or vanilla?”

  Blankly, Pearl looked at Sam and then at the woman.

  “It’s just an old country expression,” the woman said, “to mean boy or girl?”

  “Oh,” Pearl said. People are nice here, she thought. Sam jumped in her lap. Pearl closed her eyes, and finished her drink.

  When she opened them again, the woman was gone. Across the room behind a phalanx of bottles was a mirror. Pearl did not look good in it. In the mirror, a couple appeared to be sitting beside her with a small alligator on the table between them. When Pearl turned and saw the actual table, she saw that it was so. The alligator was of the size one usually finds deceased in southern gift shops, next to the kumquat jellies. This one was dully alive. Its small feet made a gently, rustling sound, like leaves.

  “You’re just too much, Earl,” the woman said.

  “It’s got a dong in it big as its whole self, you know that?” Earl said. “Goddamnedest thing.”

  Pearl firmly signed her check with her room number. She got up and began walking out of the bar. Her legs felt as though they were wrapped in mattresses.

  The bartender interrupted her careful progress. “Ma’am,” he said. “There’s a call for you.” Unsurprised, she took the phone, and shifting Sam to her other arm, put the receiver to her ear.

  There was nothing. A fading singing. Like a child’s nonsense rhymes. Or perhaps it was a problem in her inner ear.

  She put the receiver back on the hook and went into the lobby. She took the elevator up to the fifth floor. She walked down a long corridor. There was a maid there, pushing a cart, collecting supper trays that guests had left outside their doors. The maid had a piece of cheese in her mouth.

  Pearl fumbled a moment with the lock to her room, then pushed the door open. The room was cool and cramped. Someone had wheeled a crib into the room. There was a crib and a bed and a chair.

  Walker sat in a chair, facing her.

  “Hello,” he said. He got up and touched her face with his fingers.

  “Darling,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The first time Pearl had ever seen Walker, she had been shoplifting in a department store. Walker had seen her in the act of committing crimes and he had taken her off with him. This was the way it happened one year ago. Even when she tried to remember meeting him another, more respectable way, she couldn’t, because that was the way it had happened.

  Pearl had had several hundred dollars worth of stuff jammed in her shoulder bag. She had been going up and down the escalators, a bored pretty girl with freckles. A delightful girl wearing a paisley dress with a little round collar. At that time, she had been married for six days to a young man named Gene Jones. In her bag she had fancy jams and jewelry, sweaters and books and an espresso coffeepot. She did not know how to make espresso and Gene did not like coffee. It made him go to the bathroom and Gene did not like the bathroom, which Pearl did not keep very clean. Gene drank only apple juice. He was a level-headed young man, determined to win a school board seat in an upcoming election and thereby launch himself into politics. Now he was just a gym teacher but soon he would be a state representative. It was just a matter of time. But at the time of their marriage, he was just a gym teacher and smooth all over from the many showers he took. His hair was always damp. He chewed sugarless gum and could draw in his belly so tight that there was just about two inches of him between his belly button and tail bone. When he took her to bed he had a gymnast’s routine and timing. He performed as though clocked. They made love four or five times a day and he managed to utilize all the positions he knew each time. There was a pace to their love-making that made Pearl feel healthy and calm. Nevertheless, the unsubtle sex between them soon became tediously balanced between the childish and the corrupt. When she was not in bed with Gene making her graceful and studied offerings, she did not like him much. They lived in a small hot house on a sand alley. Outside there were rats and birds. There was one very ill, slow rat that had wandered around outside the house for all the six days that she and Gene had been married. Pearl would shout at it through the screen. It appeared about the same time every morning and would walk wretchedly back and forth in the short grass. It was really not an unpleasant-looking rat—that is, it did not have sores or patchy fur. She really didn’t mind it much. She pitied it for whatever gruesome end was waiting for it.

  The house came furnished. The woman who owned the house would come over every day and chat with Pearl. She would tell her about her husband. Her husband’s name was Arthur and he was fifty-five. “Just the age when most men start to slow down,” the woman would tell Pearl. “But Arthur is still going strong.” The woman told Pearl that her husband got especially aroused right after he sprayed their property for bugs. “I noticed it last year,” she said. “We had ants and roaches and right after Arthur sprayed he would start to look for me. He would get so passionate that he didn’t care if I did my housework or even cook. Last year was bad enough, but this year it’s worse. On weekends he sprays sometimes two and three times a day. It’s really getting me down.” Pearl felt sorry for her landlady. “I’m so tired,” the woman would tell Pearl.

  Gene and Pearl didn’t have anything of their own except a television set. Television light was marvelous to fuck by, Gene always said. Pearl tried to imagine buying a lot of things and having a lot of possessions but she didn’t quite know what these possessions would be. She had never collected things, even as a child. Buying and having things seemed to be a way of knowing who one was. One was an aggregate of interests and desires. People received energy and solace from wanting things and then getting them. Pearl wanted energy and solace. She felt that if she could only get interested in and knowledgeable about a kinky subject, for example hockey or sharks, she would be a more contented person. She could not just be fucking all the time. Soon something more would have to happen. Pearl did not feel that she was a real person. She felt that she deceived Gene terribly.

  The fifth day of their marriage fell on a Sunday and they spent all day in bed. Pearl had plumped some pillows behind her back and was gazing at Gene’s sweaty, quivering shoulders. She felt that imagination was not what it was cracked up to be. She felt that innovation was impossible, for was there not always the ambiguous memory of any act? She patted his shoulder comfortingly. He was just like anybody else after all. He did his best. She could not stop patting his shoulder. Finally he stopped and rolled over. Pearl went into the kitchen and boiled some water for tea. She was twenty years old and didn’t know anybody. Her parents were dead. The only relative she had was an elderly aunt who had been living in the Polynesian Village Hotel somewhere in Arizona for two years. It was expensive, she wrote to Pearl, but she loved it. Outside her window was a hedge pruned into the shape of the Polynesian God of Happiness. The place was highly organized and much more comprehensive th
an life. The aunt sent Pearl recipes.

  “Oh,” Pearl said aloud. She did not want any more recipes. She returned to the bedroom and looked at Gene for a long time. He was sleeping in the white Magnavox light. Couldn’t one get cancer from television?

  “Ohhh,” she said again, a sound more like the sound of love than any she had been able to muster. He was so substantial lying there. Would there be no end to it? She felt ghostly with her solitude. The hedges outside her window were in the shape of dying hedges. It was a woman, it must have been, back in the beginning of things who decided that death should be a part of life. A man wouldn’t have thought of it. Women chose death so that they would always feel sorry.

  Gene’s eyes wandered open. “My beloved,” he said thickly at her and then fell asleep again.

  The next morning, Pearl decided to go to the store. She wanted to do something she had never done before and in that way discover something about herself. She felt that her real self was walking in a sisterly manner beside her, holding her hand but otherwise not being very instructive. She stole the shoulder bag first. She put her own plastic navy-colored purse on the floor and shoved it most of the way under a counter with her foot. Her purse held her driver’s license and six little sugared doughnuts on a card that she had bought from a machine that morning in a gas station. It also had her wallet with ten dollars in it. She took the money out and put it in her new bag. As she walked down the aisles she tore the tags off the bag with her thumbnail and let them drop to the floor. No one touched her shoulder. No one told her to come with them. She went upstairs and down, taking things. It was so easy to have things! She felt a little better.