Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  Bemused, Luke used to ask why the fat one needed so many women whispering in his ear, like a crush of cottonwoods around a sulphur spring; although Luke loved his moody but affectionate wife sincerely, he detested depending on her, or, worse yet, her expecting him to take care of her as if she were a child.— If I choose to be with her, he said in those last years, then I need to allow her to modify me.— Hence Luke sought to learn from his Stephanie how to be cheerful, at which she intermittently excelled, especially in the morning; and how to be effective with strangers by being social; that came easily to her. He admired her beauty even as she aged. Truth to tell, Stephanie was a fine-looking woman. In shape and deportment she partially exemplified a certain tall ex-ladyfriend of my neighbor’s named Angeline, who had jilted him more cruelly, since with greater awareness, than Victoria; but Angeline’s signature characteristic was treachery, while Stephanie adored her husband desperately even when she raged against him. They were both loyal. After he moved out, the marriage appeared to lack what a young person might call a “future”; then it got better year by year; and the month before his death Luke calmly reported (which seemed impossible) that it was improving day by day. Whenever his surgeries, chemotherapies and radiation treatments reduced him to that state of dependence which he so greatly feared, Stephanie ruled him with great love, showing his oldest friends the door when he tired, hounding the doctors to be less absent, sleeplessly spoonfeeding him her heart’s best blood. Stephanie and the moon-gazer invariably got along well, because the latter respected her authority. She told Luke that she loved this fat friend of his; she was sweet that way.

  Even while praising Stephanie, Luke occasionally used to invoke another woman. Long before Stephanie, he had loved an Eve with commendable seriousness, admiring without knowing her, barely revealing his interest, perhaps to prevent her from disdaining him. Before Eve lost her youth she moved away and married someone else. Her name came sweetly to Luke’s lips. After uttering it he’d say: And then I realized that what I thought I remembered was just pieces of a dream.

  What would have happened if you’d married her instead of Stephanie?

  Oh, nothing. Stephanie’s perfect for me.

  For our dying moon-gazer, as for Luke, the Eves, the Angelines and their sisters were heavenly dreams; through them his life might be infinitely multiplied. Just as he grew better acquainted with his father after the latter’s death, once he knowingly began to die he came to know his bygone women better; they could no longer save him, but their images comforted him; it might have been that way for Luke with his dream-Eve, who was one of his dearest secrets—not to be exposed to others.

  Asked whether he might find Eve after death, Luke, as so often when she came up, changed the subject. Perhaps by then he had managed to lay aside his dream of her, for even before he met Isaac, Luke had always wished to depart an empty house, carrying the fewest necessities on his back. As for Isaac, he had certainly left nothing behind! He might still be alive in the stillness of rock-crowds in some dry wash, alone in the desert where it becomes practical to listen to life and death. As for Luke, where he had gone was unknown. He had always been stronger than this fat friend who survived him. To the southwest the gibbous moon remained high over the snow-corduroyed rock-hills, while the sky grew orange over the sharp blue ridge behind which the still unseen sun was approaching. Luke and Raymond planned out their climb, while the third one, the fat one, sat by himself. Raymond sought to persuade him along, kindly assuring him that it didn’t matter if he couldn’t make it, but he preferred not to be the cause of failure on what might and did prove to be Luke’s sole chance to reach the summit; so he sat alone, his incapacity (which scarcely humiliated him at all) as glaring as the line of a salt lake on the horizon at noon. To be sure, he would have liked to keep them company—for much the same reason that he later wished that there might be a way to reach the cemetery through the drawer of his father’s desk—or instantaneously to traverse the Straight Wall of the moon.

  In the summer after Luke’s death he had walked to the shore of a certain high lake and sat on the rocks for a long time, watching the cattails trembling and the clouds pressing as tightly upon the mountains as hands smothering someone’s face; and the water altered from ultramarine to turquoise to milky grey as he sat there with the tears coming so easily and silently that he felt healthy while the wind carried off his tears as quickly as they appeared; and he sat in a kind of ease, listening to a bluejay, waiting for the tears to cease, so that he could return into the sight of others without embarrassment. On the far side of the lake rose a saddle between snowy mountains, too far and high for him to aspire to, although perhaps Luke could have reached it. At last a cold wind arose from the lake, and overcame his remaining tears; as he sat shivering, he couldn’t help but wonder how the smallest birds stayed warm. Sometimes in his boyhood he used to see frozen sparrows in January; how did the others get through to summer? That might be one more thing which he used to know. His teeth chattered. A robin darted on the gravel beach, seeming to play with the waves, chasing them out and flying back when they came in. He felt chilled now, so chilled! Then he began to get dizzy. He sat for a long time, until the sun returned, and the wet rock took on color.

  Stephanie, greyhaired and crushed, still worked (and kept an ageing quarter horse); once or twice a year he phoned her and they spoke of Luke, not for more than twenty minutes. What Luke had left in her heart was, of course, the couple’s secret.

  It was the anniversary of Luke’s death. He telephoned her. She asked how he was.— No complaints, he said. What about you?

  She was in debt. Luke’s estate resisted liquidation; it tired her so; she didn’t know how to go forward.— To this he didn’t know what to say.

  A cramp stuck him, so he said goodbye, perhaps too quickly; unaware of his condition, she might now suppose that he felt bored with her. But what was he supposed to do? Soon enough, like Victoria, he would lack the capacity even to roll that gravestone off his chest. The nausea was a longnecked bird within his chest; now it opened its wings. He could not imagine how this could be necessary. Why shouldn’t he have lived forever, becoming ever happier and richer? (Not even his witch lover could have promised that; in fact, her love kept dragging him down beneath the ground.) Withdrawing the moon map from his father’s desk, he searched for a likely growing-place for those chilly, waxy flower-buds which had so pleased Victoria; they were bluish, almost grey, yet also as brilliant as the white lip of a calla lily on a sun-field’s edge. Perhaps they originated in the Marsh of Sleep. This was one of the questions which it was surely inappropriate to ask of Mr. Murmuracki.

  There was a telephone message from the entity pretending to be his doctor: A new insurance form was required of him. The laboratory informed him that he was expected for more blood tests at six forty-five tomorrow morning, and he was supposed to have been fasting for twenty-four hours. Meanwhile into his mail slot came an invoice for forty-seven thousand dollars, which the insurance company declined to pay on his behalf, although the patient advocate in another city might or might not adjust the bill. He made two phone calls on this subject, listening to recorded music until pain and nausea released him. Wondering how much of his life he had dribbled away on such unworthy matters, he decided that he would lose no more time on doctors, except to get more pain pills. If they made it inconvenient to get those, he would go straight to the graveyard and dwell with Victoria.

  He lay down. Closing his eyes, he seemed to perceive a moist, heterogeneous blackness crawling with stars. Somewhere within it, the tall blue people sat on high thrones, and the laughing green people rolled from side to side. Whom these might be he did not know. Seeking to dream of Victoria, he sank deeper into that blackness. The blue people were watching him, evidently from farther away. The green ones had gone. He heard something chewing, but it was his heartbeat. His ears were singing and roaring; he must have chewed too many pain pills.

 
; 26

  Once he surprised a certain long green swamp-snake, and after smoothly backing away, her tiny head raised high to watch him, the creature suddenly flashed her long white belly sideways, whipping her head around to point into the highest darkest grass; then she was gone, presumably underground. His dream went away similarly. In its first recession he thought to keep all of it in his understanding, but then it somehow turned, and some essential yet already meaningless edge of its anatomy glittered like sunlit water on dark rock, after which he could remember only that he had dreamed of Victoria very beautifully and possibly happily.

  It was dawn. Pain greeted him. Staggering to the toilet to vomit up blackness, he exhausted and disgusted himself. But the sun shone in on him through the bathroom window, so he chewed up five pills, swallowing them very slowly and carefully, with innumerable sips of water, so that he would not sick them up again, then rose to his knees. He asked of himself whether living remained worthwhile, and replied that it was. He then asked what he wished to do with his days. To be sure, the answer had something to do with Victoria, but just then he desired, he knew not why or how, to express regret, or undo or redo the past. Luke, who in that last year had sometimes been angry, often grieved and occasionally felt gratitude, used to remark that what he felt at any moment was less important than that he attend to those feelings and feel them to the full. One trait which he and Luke possessed in common was adeptness at drinking the bitter cup. So he sat on the toilet, with the sun on his face, feeling sorry for himself, then expressing regret indeed, earnestly, for all the women he had not loved better, and the many lessons he had never learned, including uncovering who Victoria had or might have been to him and why he had written her those poems. But above all he regretted his years of near indifference to the sun and the stars.

  Now he felt better. Chewing two more pills just in case, he stood up. He went downstairs to the kitchen and made himself a banana milkshake. He drank it in careful little sips. He washed the blender. This took him half an hour.

  He opened his front door, meaning to go out into the day, but the sunshine nauseated him instantaneously. Bitterly he crept upstairs to lie down like a corpse in a coffin, staring straight up at the ceiling until late afternoon.

  27

  Do you remember when you said you like to pretend?

  So?

  Well, you know, Victoria, I was just reading in one of your old letters about that Indian print bedspread you spread out in your window seat at college; and if it would please you—

  I thought I’d already left you by then.

  Not quite.

  Yes, I do remember, and I hung some ferns from the ceiling—

  And your moon map—

  No, that was when I left you.

  And on the walls you had prints that argued with each other—

  Correct! Did I write you which ones?

  No.

  I must not have wanted you to know.

  I didn’t keep any secrets from you.

  You can guess now, if you like.

  Well, you were very intelligent and didn’t want to be conventional—

  Was I?

  Were you conventional?

  Yes.

  I think you aspired to an upper middle class life, which was what you came from. When you were seventeen you tried to run away from it, but you wanted children and security, and—

  Are you criticizing me?

  No. I think you did well. I wish I’d had both of those together. When I was seventeen I—

  Tell me.

  Actually, I don’t remember much about when I was seventeen. I’m sorry, Victoria.

  Well, this is all very pleasant! she cried bitterly, and he realized that forgetfulness terrified her.

  What did your Indian print bedspread look like? I can try to buy you one sort of like it, and I’ll spread it over your grave when I come visiting, and we can sit on it.

  That’s sort of girly.

  Well, isn’t that the sort of thing you—

  Actually, I don’t feel like pretending at the moment.

  And my stomach is hurting me, so I’ll be going.

  Did you know that I can see your tumor?

  What does it look like?

  It’s like a blackish-purple jellyfish with a mushroom head. Very delicate, with translucent tendrils; there’s one coiled most of the way around your backbone; when it reaches your throat you’ll die. It’s beautiful.

  Thanks for that. I’ll see you when I feel better.

  Don’t wait too long. And bring a nice bedspread or blanket for us to sit on. I want blue and—

  I’ll pick out the pattern.

  I offended you, didn’t I?

  You did your best, he said, laughing a little. She laughed like water coming out of a narrownecked bottle, and he went away.

  28

  When he was seventeen he used to feel grief almost unto despair whenever his meetings with her had been concluded; he certainly felt nothing of the sort nowadays; of course, he had been granted quite a few years to get over the loss of her—and now she couldn’t get away from him. Even if she declined to come out he would know that she was lying on her back six feet under him, with darkness in her eyesockets.

  29

  Tell me about all your women, she said. I vaguely envision your life as a very complicated orgy, with all sorts of women loving you and then hating you.

  No, it hasn’t been like that, although I’ve certainly loved a lot of them.

  Actually, don’t tell me. It’s not that I’m not curious. I’d just rather not know.

  You’d respect me more if I were a ladykiller.

  I do prefer strong men. If you’ve let them all do to you what I did to you, that would disgust me, to tell the truth.

  Do you remember the high school dance, when you invited me and then picked that boy who was—

  Smarter and better put together? That wasn’t me. That was Zoë Conway, who became a state prosecutor. Of course my news is out of date, but I think that if she had died I would have heard about it. You invited me to the dance, but I turned you down. We all gossiped about it.

  And Zoë disinvited me at the last minute, so I never—

  What changed you? Because, now that I think about it, you actually are a ladykiller, a very successful one. You know how to keep my interest. You don’t need me the way you used to—

  Because I’m dying.

  No, that’s not all of it.

  Well, I’ve had a lot of pussy in my time. That gave me confidence. And I’ve been good at pleasuring women, which is the most important thing.

  What would you like to do with me right now? Not that I’d let you.

  First I’d strip off that winding-sheet of yours—

  Why do you keep calling it that? It’s my favorite leopard print dress—

  And I’d very carefully brush the ants and dirt off your bones. I’d get in between your ribs and clean with a child’s toothbrush. And while I did that, I’d be singing to you, songs from when we were seventeen. I’d clean out your eyesockets with cotton swabs, very very gently, in case there’s anything left, and I’d comb your hair—you still have some. I’d comb it straight down your backbone. I’d brush your teeth for you, and I’d kiss you where you used to have a mouth. I’d scour out your pelvis with sweetgrass and lavender oil. Then I’d start kissing you there. I’d lick your bones right there. And afterward I’d go to a jeweler and buy a ring that would fit your pretty skeleton-hand, Victoria . . .

  At least you can make me laugh. Honestly, I don’t find much to laugh about when you’re gone.

  Do you wish I stayed longer?

  Actually, your visits make me guilty. You don’t have much time left, and I’m not giving you anything.

  Yes you are.

  Do you love me?

 
I’ll take a leaf out of your book, and say: I’m not going to tell you.