Incubus

by Ann Arensberg

  Until now I had been watching Adele, whose movements, as always, were hypnotic. She was lying flat on her back, as quiet as she ever got, a twitch here, a scratch there, a yawn, a stretch, an adjustment of sunglasses. Then my eye took in Adele’s surroundings. How could I, a gardener, my mother’s daughter, have failed to see the bed of daffodils blooming just south of Adele’s large but slim-ankled feet? A planting as garish as a picture in a bulb catalogue, too many colors and too many varieties, planted too close together: twenty-four-inch-tall giants; six-inch miniatures; light yellow, dark yellow, pink, white, and bicolored; large cups, split cups, trumpets, doubles, multiflowered. I wondered why they were in bloom so late in June and who had put them in, chosen to plant them at the edge of the woods so far from the cabin, crowded them into a narrow patch instead of sowing them in natural drifts.

  I asked my sister, although I didn’t expect her to know. She was ignorant enough of gardening to think that daffodils could spring up like wildflowers, without human agency. Narcissi have long-lived flowers, lasting two or three weeks unless the weather is very blustery, and many of these specimens had already begun to wilt (petals first, cups last). “How many times are you going to ask me?” Hannah said. “I don’t care how long the damn things have been in bloom. I didn’t see them.” To hear her side of it, the flowers had appeared overnight, as if by magic, as they did in fairy tales or Greek myths. We got down to some sisterly wrangling about how I thought I was better than she was because I could cook and make things grow and how she thought I was a brain-dead housewife. Bickering was thirsty work, so we drank all the iced tea and left none for Adele. I looked down to see if she was showing signs of dehydration.

  Adele was lying on her stomach. She must have been asleep or she would have felt the presence of the large black dog sitting just above her head. Unmoving, barely three feet away, he seemed to be on guard duty. He sat so still he might have been one half of a pair of statues. Smooth-coated and glossy, like a Labrador retriever, he had the heavy head, long muzzle, and powerful frame of a mastiff, a breed as old as the wheel and the plow. Adele changed position, flopping over on her right side, facing the woods. As she turned the dog turned with her, so he was pointing in the same direction.

  “Jesus,” said Hannah, “he’s gigantic.” “Have you seen him before?” I asked. “Does his owner live around here?” “In case you hadn’t noticed, there isn’t anyone else ‘around here.’” “All right, don’t snap at me. What if he’s dangerous?” “Well, if he’s been lost in the woods,” Hannah said, “he must be hungry.” “Do you have anything he could eat? Even bread. We have to go down there.” “You do,” said Hannah, “I’m not going anywhere near him.”

  We went indoors to inspect Hannah’s larder. Her food supplies were hanging from a beam in old-fashioned pie safes, cages made of wood with wire mesh between the slats. There was a hunk of cheddar sweating in its cellophane wrapping, a can of corned beef, a can of cocktail frankfurters, and a box of Ritz crackers, unsealed. These salty foods were no better for the dog than they were for Hannah, but the only other items in her stores were two spotted pears and a bunch of limp carrots. I opened the little wieners and arranged them on a plate. I anticipated the dog’s relish, as I did with any creature I was feeding. If he were aggressive or nervous, food would tame him. I left Hannah unwrapping the oozing cheese, ruminating about whether or not it was still good to eat. I had crossed the porch and descended the steps before I saw that the black dog was gone. I thought I should take the plate down to Adele anyway, in case he came back. I turned and called to Hannah, whose answer was unintelligible. I expect she was tasting the cheddar.

  When I turned around again, the dog had reappeared; only this time he was facing in my direction. I felt a pang of uneasiness but I continued forward, holding the plate out in front of me, hoping the sausages would guarantee my welcome. There was something wrong with that dog. He was much too deliberate. His behavior was not dog-like. Never once, as I made my way toward him, did he shift his gaze, scratch a flea, become distracted by a movement in the grass. He met my gaze with a fixed, vacant glare, as if he were in a trance. Halfway there, I put the plate on the grass and walked as casually as I could back up to the cabin, where I intended to shut the door, no matter how hot it was.

  Hannah came out to meet me and asked if I had fed the dog. I looked back and saw the plate where I’d left it. The plate was full but the meadow was empty except for Adele, who was lying flat on her back with her arms and legs extended, like Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of a man in a circle. I said, “You’ve got to put an ad in the paper and a notice at the post office. He must belong to somebody.” “Let’s wake her up,” said Hannah. “She’ll be red as a lobster.” We agreed to give her ten more minutes, and in the meantime my sister wanted to show me her tomato plants and the cucumber vines she was training against the back wall on kitchen string, which I told her at once was too weak a support unless she was growing the miniature pickling varieties. When I warned her that tomatoes were heavy feeders, she said they’d have to survive on junk food, the way she did. It was time to call Adele. We thought we could make her hear us if we stood ten paces or so from the cabin porch and both yelled at once.

  The black dog was sitting next to her head, staring down into her sleeping face. If we had gone ahead and shouted, we might have caused a terrible accident: Adele opening her eyes and screaming, frightening the dog, the dog attacking her, sinking his teeth and holding on as mastiffs have been bred to do since man walked upright. Hannah stood looking down for several minutes—silencing me with a gesture when I tried to speak—at the picture made by the rosy nude and the coal-black dog on a rectangle composed of colored squares against a sweep of green. It was an intimate, enigmatic image, canceled all at once when Adele rolled away from the dog and rose to her knees, lifted her arms and stretched as high as she could, unkinking her back. She moved on all fours to the edge of the checkered beach towel, where she had dropped her underwear and an oversized tee shirt with the slogan “U.S.A. Out of North America” in blue letters. The dog followed her as she crawled, sat behind her while she dressed and tied her hair back with an elastic.

  Finally, Adele stood up and began to gather her belongings, which were scattered all over the towel—sunglasses, baby oil, library book, hairbrush, tarot pack. Hannah grabbed my hand. The black dog was standing four feet to the right of Adele, level with her waist. If she leaned over to retrieve her bandanna, she would be nose to nose with him. Either the dog managed to stay just out of eyeshot or Adele was in a torpid condition from the heat and the sun. Several times she brushed by him, but she seemed to be entirely unaware of him. “She can’t see him,” said Hannah, gripping my hand even tighter. “She needs glasses,” she added. “Those sunglasses aren’t prescription.” “She needs glasses for distance, not for close up.” “Cut it out,” Hannah said. “He’s there. He has to be there. Both of us can see him.”

  Adele started up the meadow, carrying her sack and her towel. The dog followed behind her. From our vantage point Adele was so tall that she hid him from sight, except for an occasional flicker of haunch and tail when he stepped out of line. “She’s bringing him up here,” said Hannah. “She’s acting like a magnet.” We spent a few minutes arguing about which of us was frightened of dogs; whether mastiffs were supposed to be gentle or fierce; whether a dog was attracted to the smell of menstrual blood, the way bears are; whether our grandmother’s cocker spaniel’s name had been Brandy or Biscuit. By the time we left off, Adele was almost upon us. She was swinging her sack as an expression of high spirits, then swung it a little too far to the front and managed to trip herself with it, a remarkable achievement. She apologized, as she always did after these antigymnastic feats of hers. I ran out to help her up, forgetting about the big black dog. There was nothing to remind me of him. At some time during the ascent, he had disappeared. We didn’t mention him to Adele. It seemed pointless to frighten her.

  Later that afternoon A
dele asked me to drop her at her apartment over the Bissells’ garage. She said she hadn’t done her laundry for two weeks and couldn’t stay for supper. It was over two weeks since Henry and I had been alone at the dinner table. I found that I missed him intensely, as if he had been in Australia. The mushroom crop was short-lived that year, but I managed to gather enough morels under the apple trees in the churchyard to make a mushroom fondue, which I liked to serve over slices of fried bread. From the kitchen garden by the back door I picked several sprigs of marjoram, the freshest-smelling herb and my favorite. Some chopped marjoram and a clove of garlic sautéed briefly and removed from the pan were all the seasonings wild mushrooms required. For our salad I picked red lettuce, sorrel, and rocket, which I had planted in the shade. For dessert I had strawberries from the Marston farm. The meal so far was too dainty for a man Henry’s size, but I had no intention of turning on the oven. He would have to be content with whipped cream and sugar on his berries.

  Ethics Committee meetings always ran late, since they were chaired by Bishop Hollins. The Bishop had usually read a recent inspirational bestseller like To Thine Own Self or Soulcraft and liked to quote passages that fit the cases under review. That day’s case was an odd one—a minister in Red Beach on the St. Croix River who had taken a job as one of the second-string movie reviewers for the biggest paper in the area, the Calais Gazette, in order to supplement his clerical income. Apparently his flock objected less to their pastor moonlighting than to the fact that he had been spotted watching The Exorcist nine times at the drive-in theater; and they were convinced that number was only the tip of the iceberg. “Did you send him to a shrink?” I asked Henry when he walked in, as hot and dusty as if he had driven a Conestoga wagon to Portland instead of the Dodge. “Actually, yes,” said Henry, a little sharply. “The poor bastard thinks the demon was using his father’s voice.”

  I kissed Henry and told him he had plenty of time to take a shower. I wanted to set the table on the screened-in porch, pick a few flowers for the centerpiece, put out candlesticks and votive lights, serve the morels, which were as precious as gemstones, on Tante Rosalie Beaulac’s porcelain plates, which were rarely used and needed washing. When everything was ready, and myself combed and powdered and zipped into a scoop-necked cotton dress, I filled the wine bucket with ice and brought it to the table. The porch was flickering with lights, filled with the sweetness of moss roses in a bowl and the evening fragrance of nicotiana blooming just outside the screens. I was startled by my own unawareness. I believed I was creating a setting that would be worthy of that aristocrat of mushrooms, the morel, when in fact I had been staging a seduction scene.

  The air at supper was charged with the possibility of sex, but it was also saturated with heat and the fumes of wine. Somehow I never told Henry about the black dog because he got me laughing so hard at his imitation of Bishop Hollins, who had never seen The Exorcist, trying to grasp the plot from shorthand descriptions fired at him by the five committee members. Bishop Hollins had a lot of trouble with the idea of evil, anyway, especially the idea of a supernatural source of evil. According to Henry, the Bishop believed that the root of evil was the lack of summer job opportunities for high school students. Laughter gives rise to intimacy, so I spent a certain amount of time on Henry’s lap, with his hands taking liberties, until it was incumbent on me to serve our dessert. I don’t know if I left his lap because Henry loved strawberries or because I was perspiring and making him sweat, the exchange of calories beginning to reach the discomfort level.

  Once we might not have been so punctilious about dessert. The berries could have waited on the counter, softening in sugar, turning a darker and darker red, for as long as it took, sometimes until the following morning, when they would be swimming in juice. We might not have cared about the heat, perspiration serving as a lubricant for moving body parts. As it was, we picked at the berries, dunked a few in sugar, forwent the cream altogether. Henry washed the dishes while I cleared the table. He went upstairs first because I had to transfer nineteen dozen sesame wafers from cooling racks to airtight cookie tins. If I left them till morning, they would lose their crispness. In a long-term marriage, chores often seemed to take priority over carnal impulses.

  There was nothing left of Henry by the time I went to bed. He lay sprawled on his back with his arms and legs flung sideways, as if he had fallen from a great height, his mouth gaping, his penis stretching limp across his thigh. His penis was transparently pale and thin, almost tubular, the instrument of a boy in early puberty. I made preparations for bed carelessly and quickly, spot-cleaning with a damp washcloth, neglecting the bottoms of my feet. All the windows were open and the electric fan was revolving; but it was still a night for sleeping uncovered. I took off my bra but left my pants on. I saw no reason to remove them, since there was no danger of anyone approaching me. I slept in my underwear as a way of showing Henry that I expected nothing. I climbed into bed, keeping well to my side, another signal to Henry, if he were interested in reading my signals.

  Henry was snoring, a gravelly sound interrupted at intervals by a gasp or a hiccup. He had already reached the farther shores of the river of forgetfulness. At such times, my mind produced fantasies of subjection, of stroking him upright, mounting and riding off with him. I always imagined him awake and participating at the climax, which is all that differentiated this fantasy from necrophilia. I jiggled his shoulder to make him change position and stop the snoring. As I watched him turn over so dutifully, I saw the flush on his cheek and the back of his neck, and I kissed the place behind his right earlobe, remembering that I loved him in a human way—poor overworked brute who carried a whole congregation on his shoulders. Our sexual estrangement was an endless mystery and a source of sadness.

  At first I thought it was a dream, but my eyes were open. As soon as they adjusted to the dark, I could see that everything in the room was in its rightful place. Nothing was happening the way I remembered it, but after so long, my sexual daydreams had begun to have a gothic quality—floating chiffon, swooning rapture, the eagle flying off with a dove in its talons, motifs from what my grandmother Beaulac called “housemaid’s literature.” Instead, he was lying on top of me, pinning me down, he who was always so careful to prop himself up on his elbows. His breathing was heavy and disordered, rising periodically to a grunt, with an alarming pause before the next breath, as if it were the last he might ever draw on earth. When I tried to free my arms, I found they were immobilized. I wanted to ask him to shift his weight but he was cutting off my breath, so I could only whimper. He felt cold, and smelled as if he’d been spending the night under the bed where the dust balls gathered. After almost a year of abstinence, his technique had altered drastically. There was only one explanation for his loutish behavior. Although he had no prior history of sleepwalking, he must still be asleep—and we know the unconscious is ignorant of sexual etiquette.

  Were we engaged in sex at all, when you came right down to it? How could I be sure he had entered me? By now my lower body was anesthetized. Sooner or later the partner on top should begin to make back and forth movements, but he lay there inert as a stone, growing heavier and heavier. Maybe he had been awake at the onset and fallen asleep during the act, a fit commentary on my attractions and the condition of our sex life. It was anger that was suffocating me as much as his heaviness. I swear if I had been able to move any part of me—hands, teeth, knees, feet—I would have used it to injure him. For this shambling, careless parody of love I had been waiting a year, or close to it, keeping myself like an acolyte in the temple, praying to be delivered from bitterness, striving to be worthy when the time came. I thought how much I wanted to throw him off, pictured him falling and hitting the floor, cracking his head; then, suddenly, I found I could jiggle the little finger, then all the other fingers, one after another, of my left hand.

  As soon as I moved the pressure was gone. I gasped with relief, waiting until I could breathe normally. He must have given up on me, r
olled back over to his side of the bed, gone to sleep again. If, in fact, he had ever been conscious. Then I heard the sound of his slippered feet on the stairs, slap/glide, slap/glide, and I wondered why he would wear his slippers, even backless ones, on such a hot night. I imagined he was headed for the porch to seek fresh air and finish the night on the wicker chaise longue.

  I was too worn out to follow him. The nape of my neck and the small of my back were soaked with sweat. I believed I could go to sleep, after all; and on the way I reviewed a parade of thoughts, about rape, attempted rape, and rape in marriage; about how cold he had felt while he covered me, so cold I had never even begun to perspire, in spite of the heat, until after he left me. I did not like to sleep on my back. Reluctant to make even so small an effort, I flopped onto my left side, yawning and stretching my arms and legs, extending them into the empty space on his side of the bed.

  I thought it was empty. I hit a barrier of flesh the size and shape of Henry, who said, “What?” in Henry’s voice when I bumped into him, who was warm and damp and smelled of soap. He muttered, “Go to sleep, Cora.” Then I knew with the greatest sense of relief, as well as accomplishment, that I had had a nightmare, my first nightmare, the kind practiced dreamers describe as being so real you wake up and think it’s still going on.

  When did I wake up from the dream? Before or after I heard the slippers flapping down the stairs? As an unskilled dreamer, I needed a frame of reference for interpreting dream images, and Henry’s bookshelves were stocked with Freud, Ernest Jones, and Jung. However, I was not so ignorant as to believe that the cold, heavy-breathing man on my chest was the real Henry, except on one level. I was even aware that the backless slippers were a “Freudian” symbol and the dark heavy man was more “Jungian.” I also knew that some psychologists believed that every element in a dream is an aspect of the dreamer. That being the case, the oppressive figure must be the embodiment of some inner complex or cultural convention that was stifling my growth, and if Henry was implicated it was only in the general sense that a husband is a man—and society, up to the present, has been dominated by men.