Agnes Mallory

by Andrew Klavan

  And then she said: ‘Are you with that girl? The one in Vermont, the one who writes to you?’

  ‘No, no, of course not,’ I said. ‘I just need to be alone and think, that’s all.’

  So then, when she did start to cry, I figured it was because I was still lying to her, even now, which meant the marriage was pretty well over, which only I had already known.

  It was a few seconds before she got her voice again. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Christ,’ I said, clutching my breast in my fist. ‘Christ, don’t apologize to me, Marianne.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, after another silence. ‘Come back soon, all right? And don’t hurt yourself anymore. We love you.’

  I tried to tell her I loved her too, but the stone wouldn’t clear my throat.

  My hike that morning was not so successful as the first. I was too miserable, for one thing, and I got lost in a particularly scrubby patch of woods for another. I managed to learn the names of a few trees from another of Agnes’s handbooks, and then gave it up and worked my way back to the cabin around one o’clock. I ate a couple of cold chicken legs while Agnes hammered away behind her door. And then I drank a beer, which knocked me out on the sofa after last night’s sleepless hours.

  I was awake before the day started dying in earnest. I lay where I was, listening to the mallet go, my soul like an anvil. When I got up, it was to push back the grinning emptiness of the place a little. The room was beginning to gather shadows in the corners and basically get on my nerves.

  I paced the room a while and read the books on the shelf and paced the room again to the chisel’s rhythm. I found myself eyeing the bolted studio door every so often and I felt its draw on my curiosity and my yearning. I stepped outside only once – to break that attraction, and to breathe the cooling air beneath the pines and watch the sun setting into the green hills. Then, going back inside, I eventually wandered over to the clapboard wall that separated the main room from her bedroom. I studied the pictures hanging there; I hadn’t taken much notice of them before.

  It was a little gallery, five pictures in a straight row. Just photographs torn out of books or magazines and sloppily placed behind the glass of cheap snapshot frames. All were of sculpture from different times. I suppose I could identify them now, but I couldn’t then. There was some typical Egyptian king or other sitting stiffly on a throne; an absolute gas of a Greek soldier with a neat-o helmet and a face as noble as a god’s; a Roman emperor – Vespasian probably – pointing grandly over his dominions; a sexy Michelangelo nude seeming to rouse himself languorously out of the rough marble; and some sort of unpleasant mish-mash of slates or stones arranged out in the desert somewhere. I went over them carefully, to pass the time, feeling there must be some point to the arrangement. Great moments in sculpture, great sculpture on parade – something like that. Which shows you how much I knew about it.

  I was surprised by the sound of the bolt thunking home and turned to find Agnes already there. Leaning back against the studio door with both hands behind her. Still and stiff as a statue herself, as if petrified by exhaustion. Her cheeks were heavy again and her complexion sallow. She glared at me – sneered at me almost, I thought, as if to say: who let this idiot into my house?

  It didn’t matter: I was delighted to see her, and my mood warmed and rose.

  ‘Hi!’ I said.

  She snorted. She asked thickly: ‘Like my gallery?’

  ‘Uh … Yeah, sure.’

  She pushed off the door as if to come toward me, but instead she stopped where she was and rubbed her face with both hands, wearily. When she looked up, wincing, she headed past me for the kitchen. She waved the pictures away, going on as if it bored her.

  ‘Jew killers I’ve known and loved,’ she said.

  Puzzled, I examined the pictures again, even scratching the side of my head with a finger. ‘I guess I missed that.’

  She was in the kitchen now, out of sight. I heard her uncapping a couple of beers.

  ‘The Egyptians enslaved us,’ she called out. ‘The Greeks laid the groundwork for anti-Semitic theories.’

  ‘Did they? Man, they were clever.’

  ‘Their ideal of perfection inspired the Nazis. And the Romans fucking flattened Jerusalem, the Vatican set us on fire for laughs …’

  ‘And the modern guys bore us to death?’ I called back.

  She carried in the beers with a tired strut. Handed me a bottle. ‘That’s our answer. That inhuman, meaningless crap. Who would look at that shit if you could look at Michelangelo?’

  As she knocked back the brew, she fixed such a gaze of intimate rancor on the photographs that I gave up trying to kid her out of it. It was another of her humongous theories and typical that way, but more connected, I suspected from her letters, to these after-work depletions of hers.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘You mean, if we want to make good art, we have to be anti-Semitic again?’

  Her laugh was ugly. ‘What do you mean “we”, Jew-boy?’

  I managed to let this ride. ‘I guess I’m just not up on all the Jewish stuff, to be honest. I wasn’t raised that way. Hell, everybody hates everybody else most of the time. I figure you can’t get obsessed about it.’

  That’s what I said, all right. And why that – which sounded reasonable enough – should’ve seemed insipid to me at the moment, while what she said – which was kind of nuts – seemed profound, I don’t know. But Agnes gave me another what-an-idiot look, and I somehow felt I deserved it. Then she threw the whole thing over, half-smiling, letting out her breath with a whiffle.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, still not altogether pleasantly. ‘D’you call your wife?’

  She asked this, and then drifted away, yawning, to the front door. It was still standing open, despite the chillier dusk, and she leaned against the frame with her beer, looking out through the screen at the pines.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said softly, and hoped she’d leave it at that.

  And she did. She leaned in the doorway without speaking again. I swigged my beer, alone where I was. I was annoyed – disappointed, I guess, having been so eager to see her. In fact, I was beginning to feel a sort a grim ire against her depression, and against mine, and against the whole cabin’s blackening atmosphere; a sort of sturdy defiance, like those brave Englishmen feel in ghost stories when they go crouching with lanterns down the hallways of their haunted homes.

  Then bang went the woodstove door and up I woke – up after about two hours of sleep, having spent most of my time getting wretched over Marianne and Charlie and the Feds and how withdrawn Agnes had been over dinner last night and how much it all made me feel alone, poor boy. But now, as the throaty sussuration of the fire deepened, I rolled over on the sofa slowly, and there Agnes was, crouching right by me, her face close to mine, our noses nearly touching. And her smile was what you would have to call sunny. And she said, ‘Hiya, cutes. Wanna swim naked?’

  ‘Yeah!’ I said, and I sat up, throwing the cover aside.

  The Swimhole, as she’d named it, was where I’d figured it would be: down lower on the western path, past the dog’s leg which led to the meadow. Another turn off, on the left side this time, took us fairly tumbling down a steep forest slope until we spilled out onto a little sandspit at the river’s edge. Here, the White, though narrow, deepened into a strongly flowing pool, decorated with grey rocks by the banks and screened in by thick trees on either shore. It was a lovely place: the river winding out of view to left and right, the mountain’s morning mist hanging low over us, black birds shooting out of the trees and across the water to the far trees, and the air loud with the water’s confidential swash: it was a place of reminiscent mysteries. Indeed, a city boy like me had to wonder if some primordial Harry hadn’t summered in some such place and loved it well enough to work the memory into his generations: like the tunnel to the meadow, like the meadow too, the pool seemed to greet in me some inner impression of itself so that I had that sense again of an overriding
stillness.

  ‘It reminds me …’ I said, then hesitated, but she rewarded me with such a lively grin, that I finished: ‘Doesn’t it? Of the place behind your house?’

  ‘A little, I guess,’ she said.

  ‘Sort of anyway. I don’t know.’

  Agnes dropped our towels on the sand and stepped away from me. She moved out onto a flat boulder that cantilevered over the pool in a perfect diving surface. As she moved to the edge, she slipped the tatty green robe off and let it fall to her heels. Naked, from the back, she looked scrawny and brown and muscular, with a full valentine of a bottom only slightly paler than the rest. Along with your basic aching joy at seeing a woman nude, a powerful romantic sadness welled up in me, so that I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to dance a wild pan-dance to a frenzied bacchanal or just rip my own head off at the intolerable sweetness of mortality.

  I opted for getting out of my clothes: I peeled my shirt off. Agnes dove in. I stopped and watched her, grunting softly when I caught the fruity flash between her legs. Then, talking my dick down to a respectable angle, I worked my jeans off too. I was glad I’d been going to the gym, I’ll tell you, but a little ashamed at the pallid pinkness of my skin. As Agnes surfaced, whooping at the cold, I jogged quickly out onto the rock and hurled myself into the river.

  Well, it was cold all right, and we screamed and shivered our cheeks. And the current was stronger than it looked and swept me steadily downstream so that I had to splash and fight to pull up level with her.

  ‘Watch,’ she called – she had to shout over the White’s great murmur. ‘Like this.’ She did the sidestroke, facing me, strong graceful sweeps of her two hands. ‘You can swim and swim like this without moving.’ Because she was headed into the current, see, and it kept her right where she was.

  I followed suit, and there we lay together, motionless in the water save for our strokes, breathing hard into each other’s faces. Her nakedness was soft and ripply – and riveting – just beneath the surface.

  ‘Was I a total bitch last night?’ she called to me.

  ‘Not total,’ I gasped. ‘I think I’m falling in love with you too.’

  ‘Agh!’ she said. ‘We should be seventeen! This should be happening when we’re seventeen!’

  ‘I know. That’s what I keep thinking. Is there anything worse than not being seventeen?’

  ‘Being seventeen?’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Right.’

  Soon, I was exhausted, out of breath. Vanity-exercising in a gym, I was finding out, means just about nothing when you start hiking in woods and swimming in rivers. I had to head in. And that was hard work too. Making it back to the rock against the current, trying to climb but finding no good purchase for my fingers as my legs were pulled downstream. Eventually, I shuffled my way around, gripping the boulder, until my feet touched the pebbles on the river bed. Then I hopped and danced my way over the sharp stones to the strand.

  I toweled myself off while Agnes rolled over discretely on her other side and kept on stroking. Even after I’d dressed again, she went at it for a long time. I sat out at the end of the diving rock and watched her, and listened to the water and the sudden calls of birds, saw the mist burn off and the sky come out pale blue, watched the sun angle in through the downriver trees, felt my heart breaking. That sort of thing.

  Often, remembering, prick in hand, I have asked myself why I didn’t clasp her as she came out of the water and try my luck at drawing her wet body to the sand. The answer is unacceptable to me as I’ve become, and even taunts me, but at the time there simply seemed a mysterious rhythm to the thing. Having seen or sensed that it was this – this natural metabolism of desire – that had been shattered on our first go round, I was supersititious and careful of it. And in the mornings, when she was so charming and vital and all, I indulged my sadness and my panicked terror with the fantasy that, tended lovingly, the rhythm could be restored. I had it all backwards, of course: it was her morning cheer that was the most horrible thing about her. But how – as I always end up asking next in my scummy anguish – how was I to know?

  That morning especially, of our handful of mornings, we seemed a possibility. We climbed back to the cabin through the dawn woods hand in hand. She taught me – pretty comically – to make muffin batter while she zipped through the arcana of the coffee gizmo just as if by the way. We sat at the table with our feet up on the chairs, and for the first time, we talked about being children together. I recited my idylls about our little stream and our evenings, and she imitated her own witchy voice and rituals so that I had to smile a lot to hide how much they affected me still. Then we stopped for a while. We sat silently. For myself, I was afraid to go on any farther. I was afraid our old friendship would begin to seem strange or even sick in some way, if we talked about it too much. It’s the details, you know, that get you. I was afraid to murder the romance.

  But Agnes said: ‘So? Don’t you want to hear about your father?’

  I shrugged. ‘We never really had a chance to talk about it.’

  ‘Yeah, well. What would I have said? “Having a wonderful time with your Dad. Wish you were here?”’

  I kept my smile plastered on, gazing at the floor.

  ‘I mean, most of the time when he was there, with my mother, I was at school or something. I mean, obviously. But sometimes, I’d come home and he’d be there. I’d have my milk and cookies and he’d ask me what I was learning in school and that sort of thing.’

  ‘And he’d tell you those stories. The ones you used to tell me,’ I said, not looking up. ‘About astronomy and stuff.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. It sure seems like they were taking a hell of chance, though, doesn’t it? I mean, I could’ve just babbled to my Dad about the whole thing. They never told me not to.’

  I answered heavily: ‘Maybe you knew you’d lose him if you did.’

  ‘My father?’

  ‘Mine.’

  Now we were both making a careful study of the floor. I was beginning to feel a little ill.

  And Agnes said: ‘Look, it was probably a lot easier for him, you know. We were like this make-believe family he had on the side. He didn’t have to deal with our problems – he just got all the good stuff. He could just come by and fuck my mother, charm the kid, then do all his farting and stuff at home.’

  ‘You don’t have to talk about it that way,’ I said. I washed the taste of it down with coffee. ‘I’m sure it was nice for you.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘It was nice. Sue me.’ I snorted. ‘Forgive me,’ she said.

  ‘Oh Christ.’ I laughed. I pinched my eyes shut. ‘Oh hell, hell, hell. The man was just such a shlub at home. Whining, you know. Mourning all his lost chances. “I wanted to be an astronomer,” he used to say, “but … I had a family to support.” Like his life was my fault.’ Agnes leaned forward, listening sympathetically. It annoyed the shit out of me, her sympathy, but I went on. ‘What can I say? I wish I was there too. It’s just so weird to think there was this whole other Dad … or not maybe, I don’t know; maybe I just couldn’t see it or something. It’s like I used to wish sometimes I could’ve been there that time he was pitching woo at Aunt May. Before I was born. They oughta let you do that. Just watch some scenes before you’re born, just to fill you in. Then later you can say, “All right, the guy’s a beaten asshole now, but he did have this moment of romance or integrity or something.” I mean, it’s kind of like being half an orphan otherwise.’

  Agnes grinned and put her elbow on the table, her chin in her hand. She said wickedly, ‘Gee, Harry, and I thought you loved me for myself.’

  I made a face. I almost echoed that back at her but thought better of it – finally, finally, beginning to get the idea that it was I who was by far the stronger of the two of us. ‘Oh, shut up,’ I said.

  Staring at the floor, I heard her chuckle, and then sigh – and then drink and set her mug down with that definitive thud. She pushed her chair back. I looked up and saw her stand.
>
  ‘So when are you leaving?’ She always said the hardest things just as she was moving out of reach.

  ‘It better be goddamned soon,’ I said bluntly – and I was still surprised to see it hurt her, to get that glimpse of punch-drunkenness in her eyes. More gently I said: ‘I make it worse by staying. You know. I mean, Jesus, they could bring me back in handcuffs if they find me. I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but I happen to be scared out of my wits.’ And I still thought this was because of the police and the scandal and so on.

  Maybe Agnes knew better because she offered this as if to relieve me: ‘Well – anyway – I’m going to work now.’

  I sat where I was as she moved past. Sat and listened to the sounds of the studio door – unlocked, opened, shut, locked again. After a moment of suspense, I flinched: the mallet had started for the day.

  I hiked out and found the Path Through The Pines, which was kind of the property’s tourist attraction: not magical, like the other places, I mean, but just fun to see. The trees here had been cleared, I guess, at some point and replanted in tidy rows – half an acre, say, of white pines and then another half of red. When you walked from the first section to the second, the effect was of moving through a stark gray landscape – past empty silver shafts with their first branches high above eye level – and then into a field of rich shade and colors where the orange trunks rose from the red earth and bloomed in low boughs everywhere, bearing green needles and brown cones. You could even stand between the two halves, looking right then left, heightening the sense that you were on the border of two countries, two worlds. I found myself searching for some meaning to this illusion. I tried to read some hopeful omen into it, a pep-talk from the gods about my future. But that annoyed me soon enough. I couldn’t work up the superstition. I mean, how much pull was some dead lumberjack likely to have with the Feds?

  So I turned back – which provides only this small irony: that I must have been less than fifty yards from the southern ridge of the Valley of Dead Elms. Not that finding it those few hours earlier would have made much difference to my slow, unconscious ratiocinations. Laying aside any regret-filled daydreams I might have, I sincerely doubt I would’ve gone galloping back to the cabin to rescue Agnes from her personal krakens. I didn’t even know I was in that story. I thought I was in the Harry and Agnes Have A Bittersweet Romance story. Oh, and anyway, I didn’t find it, so what the fuck’s the dif?