Extreme Magic

by Hortense Calisher

  As for Alden, the girl—He looked up at the trees, behind and behind whose layers there was somewhere a tower from which she had spied on him. He thought of the feather in her hat. Probably the next ten years would show. It might be touch and go—as to whether or not she would be singled out.

  Toward dark, the Siamese returned to the edge of the clearing. All that week she had been away—since Monday. Her flanks were fallen in. As she drank greedily from one of the other cats’ saucers, he remembered with a contraction of sadness how, last time, she had proudly refused to be fed. When she had cleaned herself, she stood off and regarded him, eyes opening and closing, head tucked in. He had no trouble identifying of whom she reminded him—that snub head, those mask-clenched eyes. Nor had he any intention of taking her return as an omen—this random, itty-kat vagrant between silk pillow and forest. Just because he was now aware of what must have been being enacted for years at the Canal Zone, didn’t mean he could interpose there. Marion’s note had made him see his place—he was audience. All the watching in the world couldn’t force their stagelight closer to his own quiet demi-brown. After a while, as the moonless night closed in, he could no longer see for sure whether or not the eyes were still regarding him. Only a stencil remained, a head-shaped importance of darkness with the light behind it—ringed round with knives.

  On Saturday, as he did the week’s shopping in town, he found himself looking with a purpose, in the store queues and the parking lots, down the market streets and at crossings. He was looking for a family, never the same one of course but one always constituted the same, that over the years had now and then presented itself to him without warning. He didn’t see them. But the quality of the change came home with him, like the edge slid into one at the change of seasons. He had never before looked.

  On Sunday, he began the turnout of the barn, long self-promised, and never yet done. The weather was glorious, as people were no doubt saying all over the nation. Out on that highway from which he was a quarter-mile in, the smart ones were already bearing back to the city, to be safe there on the murderous third day of the holiday. There and elsewhere, cars must already be smashing and piling up, duty bound to fill in that annual Tuesday headline for which the funeral presses were waiting. Tuesday seemed to him distant as a new life, or an old one that had to be resumed. It was Monday, day of the smash, that had to be got through, here where the great stasis of land, water, and tree would uphold him in the silent conjunction of all their valleys. As he dragged object after object out on the lawn, none, however curious, lovely or valuable, seized him with that griping in the bowels of possession which afflicted others of his trade. He was neat of habit; there was really no need for this housecleaning. But he had an urge to see the barn as empty as it had been when he came. Meanwhile, there were corners of his eyrie he had forgotten. He turned up the first table he had refinished but had never sold, of itself an honest maple, but in the last rays of daylight too auburn by far. In its drawer, he found the one relic he had saved from the burned rubble, only because it predated it—a small vase of cloudy glass with a cheap scene scratched on it, from its position in his mother’s window, in his childhood always called the “sunset” vase. By nightfall, the place was emptied, except for his huge rolltop desk, weighted with business, that had been the first thing in here anyway, and hanging above it, that archaic reminder to “Resource.” He left those two inside, all the rest of the array turned out to the starlight. The night was as clear and soft as the inside of a grape; no rain would fall. Even if it did, all he stood to lose was some of the money which helped to keep him suspended in life, immovable to the waves of need. And he had all Monday to put everything back. He brought his bedroll to the center of the lawn, and lay for a long time looking up at the barn’s dark ogives, that now seemed to breathe with him, in their earlier communion. The barn was what he loved; he had rescued it.

  By late afternoon Monday, he had everything back inside and in order again except for the lamps and the pictures, touches of comfort with which he would fill out the evening. He walked down to the mailbox on the highway: though there wouldn’t be any mail, there was always a chance that someone had left a note there. And it was his usual walk. Less than halfway back, having found nothing, he heard the clear bell of the telephone, brought to him by the river, a nagging rhythm of a phone that went on for a long time. It had stopped well before his desperate run brought him up short in front of it. The call had been a friend’s of course, faithful Poll perhaps, homing from her three-day weekend, or Quent reporting in, or any other of his phone regulars, like him suspended in a network of friends, not relations—horses running abreast in their own National, and today, like the rest of the world, galloping home. Still he stood there, and at last he dialed the Canal Zone.

  On the instant, he heard the buh-beep, buh-beep of the busy signal, a quietus he might listen to now for as long as he wanted. They had taken the receiver off, as usual. They were in the eyrie couples made for themselves. That settled it. He listened to it telling him so—just then, it stopped. On the other end, someone had replaced the receiver. He redialed, heard the ring and the connect. No one spoke, but the wire was live; he could hear heavy, animal breathing. “Sligo?” he said. “It’s Guy.” In the pause, he could still hear that strangely reassuring pulse of brute calm. Then the line went dead. “Sorree,” said the operator, when he made his plea. “Sorree,” she repeated—a flute stuck at the stop of eternal patience. “That line is out of order now.” He hung there, in the queer dejection, less paralyzed than timeless, of those accustomed to lives ordered and rebuffed by the phone. When he wheeled about, the girl was standing in the archway of the barn.

  “Well…hi!” he said. It was hard to focus on her, but he was grateful for it. “Welcome back.”

  She was dressed just as he had last seen her, in what must be her “best” and now showed up as rather badly worn, and perhaps not even hers to begin with. Only the angle of the hat was still freshly her own, as if just before he turned she had reached up and knocked it back like a forelock. At his blinking smile, her hands clasped at her breast. It didn’t go with the hat.

  “Well,” he said, “and how was Bianca La Borgia?”

  She shook her head ruefully. “Don’t. We were horrid.”

  “Oh, were we?”

  She took a step forward. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she said deeply. “That your name wasn’t Gwee.”

  He couldn’t think of an answer.

  “Bianca says you would pronounce it the English way. Guy. And that even if you didn’t, the French don’t say Gwee, but G-gee.”

  “They do? I don’t know French.”

  A perfect aureole spread on her face, in time with a long intake of breath. “If that isn’t just like you.”

  “Not to know French.”

  “No,” she said, on another breath like a chord. “To be the way you are.”

  “Tell me about Bianca,” he said.

  She spun halfway on a heel, came inside, touched a table, intimately tap-tapped a lamp. “Oh, you’ve changed things around. You’ve tidied.” She gave him a gay smile, turned away again, and spoke nonchalantly over a shoulder. “There were some boys there too. Putrid. We both agreed on that. Simply putrid. Anyway, Bianca had to wear her retainer the whole weekend.”

  “Her—” Impossible medievalisms came to mind.

  She gave him one of her shrewd, flat looks. “Teeth. She’s having them straightened. And she cheated all last year in Switzerland, and didn’t wear it. Now she’s getting to look all chipmunky again, so she has to.” She almost giggled. “When she has it in, her mouth looks just like Penn Station. Which reminds me.” The giggle was born as a shrug. She whirled again, infinitely Gallic. “Anyway, the boys had to hang around somewhere, and—I was there.”

  He grinned. “All in your own teeth.”

  She hung her head. “Of course,” she said in a low voice—“I didn’t let them make out, though.”

  “Oh?” The ph
rase was new to him. “Of course.” He felt like a father. “Er—Penn Station, what were you going to say that it reminded you of?”

  “Oh that. Bianca’s dream. We sat up all night, exchanging them. She has this dream she’s walking around inside something’s mouth, a great big pink cave. She has it all the time.”

  He laughed out loud. “Common enough to all races. Jonah and the whale.”

  She stared meaningfully, making their eyes meet. “Don’t be sil-ly!” Then she blushed. And suddenly she began to speak very rapidly. “Bianca says, you should never let a boy your own age make out. She says in France it’s the same for girls as for men now; you have your first aff-aire du coeur with a much older person. Like in Bonjour Tristesse.”

  “You forget I don’t know French.” He took out a cigarette but didn’t offer her one. “Is that why she cheated—in Switzerland?”

  She nodded, head bent.

  He lit the cigarette. “Well, I can see you certainly stayed up all night.”

  “We talked a lot about you. Bianca thinks—” She whispered it. “Bianca thinks you’re wonderful.”

  “Oh, she does, does she. Why, what could that little—what could she possibly—” He broke off, to look at her.

  “Your…your life,” she said. She was close enough for him to see that her eyes had filled with tears but that she was holding on to them, not letting them spill. It was too lovely a sight to turn from. He could see what she was going to be.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me about the cats?” he said.

  “Oh, the cats—they can manage.” The new planes about her mouth quivered, in time with her shrug. This time, she carried it off.

  “You know…Alden,” he said. “I believe you’ve made it. You’re natural.”

  “Oh? And meanwhile I’ve changed, I’d rather be a mystery.” She said it lightly, and carried this off too.

  “You are,” he said. “I suppose you’re both.” She was near enough for him to identify her smell. He was stupid enough to touch her on the shoulder.

  “Oh—” She made the most awkward of gestures, a cygnet breaking its glassy dream of itself—and yet saving it. She touched her throat, jerking her hand away from it toward him, as if, if she could, she would give him its apple. “Oh,” she said. “You’re just saying that.”

  The kiss tasted of all she wanted to give him. He held on to her, merged in what for her was only a whole summer’s ache. Behind them, the barn waited, a bed among the trees, prepared. He well remembered that summer of himself. But even while he held her, in this silence a quarter-mile from the highway, he could hear within himself the sound of lives, regular as rockets, riding to their Monday smash. He had his perspective. He was the one who was unnatural here.

  He was able to force her away from him. She was smiling, not in retrospect. He couldn’t see the landscape she was looking at, but he could remember how it had felt to be there. “I’d like—”

  He stopped, for honesty. That his wife had been just this age when he’d had her, that his own child would have been the same age by now, was merely one of these peculiar marvels of time from which people made almanacs, hoping to tether within reasonable, man-made bonds the life that kept escaping onward. If this girl once stayed the night, she’d want to stay on always—he knew that much about her. She was no Bianca. And a week ago—he knew himself as well. A week ago, he would have singled her out.

  “But I’ve got to go,” he said. It was true, the minute he said it. “I’ve got to run off this minute to somebody, somewhere.” He put his hand on her cheek. “It’s the only thing I can say to you worth a dime.”

  He could see its worth, from her face—even at her age. He was the one who was running. She was the audience.

  She knelt to the line of feeding dishes and hunched there, playing hand-over-hand with them.

  “It’s important, where I’m going,” he said. “That much you can believe.”

  She stood up; she nodded—both with her new grace. More than this was beyond her. “See you around.”

  “Oh, Alden,” he said. “Luck.” He said it as if he could give it to her. “Luck!”

  She must have looked at him this way from her tower, small but dependable, up among the dead flies, and the dark nervous greens of summer. She was able to toss her head. “No sweat!” she said. A talisman floated down to her from somewhere, a bit of Hollywood or Stanford, or even Spain. The corners of her mouth turned down, or in. “Don’t sweat the small stuff!” she said.

  When she was well enough away, he reminded himself how seventeen loved promises. “And Alden—”

  She turned, as if to a teacher, or a parent, without hope.

  “No more binoculars. Promise me?”

  Whatever her age was, it judged him. “Opera glasses,” she said. “Parker’s.”

  She was well into the trees, almost lost to view, before he called after her. “The Siamese! The Siamese came back.”

  Out on the highway in his car, it couldn’t be said that he had forgotten her, an after-image still resident in his body, in his now conscious flesh—the catalyst—sunk like a performer through a trapdoor. Around him, real cars whizzed loud as imaginary ones, but with the coarser hopes of people who were on the move. He wanted to put it to them, call out to them—I’m with you again. I’m part of this violence.

  The road to the Canal Zone was solitary in the dusk, but halfway there, he thought he saw lights—were there people? It was the hour on the riverland when brilliance came and went in patches of gilt, the mauve mingling with the sun. His step crunched on the gravel. The courtyard was empty. In it, the Canal Zone squatted with the prescience of an old building, at dusk aware of all its history, tawdry and benign. The lower level of the games room was black under its overhung eaves. The top story, where the bedrooms were, was dim. Light was pouring like music from all the windows of the main floor bar. He could see the chandeliers at every second-story window, at battle with the retreating sun. Who could have entered the close-coupled dream that went on here, that only the personae themselves made real? Yet there wasn’t a sound, not a sound of trade.

  Then in the bedroom story, a window was flung up. A figure appeared between its shutters and looked down at him. Beneath her wrists, the dim, pompom row of geraniums were a row of footlights that hadn’t sprung on. “How did you know?” she said. “I rang and rang, but no answer, and then he…how did you know to come?”

  Now that he saw she was safe, he understood better his own errand—he knew for whose rescue he was here.

  “Your phone’s out of order now.” This was reality; he remembered it—a blow, good or bad, that slowed the mind.

  “He’s cut the wires. Oh, hurry. I haven’t heard him for the last hour. I’m afraid…that he—”

  “Where is he? Down there?”

  “Go there first,” she said. “I can wait.” She saw his bewilderment. “I’m—” Her shame told him that he was still a stranger. “I’m locked in.”

  He ran up the service stairs, and released her. They crept down them, interlaced like skaters. “What’s that you have in your hand?” he said, but she was already ahead of him, across the passage into the main barroom.

  “Yes,” he heard her whisper to herself. “Yes.”

  Sligo stood in the damage like a man in a prism, angled at from all sides. His posture, bent at the knees, head in the vise of the shoulders, arms close to his sides, was like that also, a double image of a big man superimposed on a smaller one, a man enclosed in the bottle of himself. Around him, chairs were kindling, tables crumbs of zinc, their chromium legs junked skyward. A tidal hand had swept the glasses and decanters to a thousand refractions, through which waters were still seeping. The mahogany pillars of the bar had been scored, and behind them, the dark pride of the room, the etched mirror that ran its width, was irised open from end to end.

  His eyes were what was moving. By these, they too could see his hallucination. It traveled wall over wall, haunted corners, or was sometime
s beneath him, a small thing that teased. He tremored to it. Sometimes he screamed to it, though no one could hear. Clearly, he himself knew he was seeing it. In the hospital, these had been the most desperate.

  Behind him, Marion crept closer, in her hand a syringe. His eyes whitened in their sockets; he saw her. Now that he saw her, she walked steadily toward him, at a bridesmaid’s pace. He trembled under her advance, but differently. He saw her, and knew she was real—this was her role. Above their heads, one saw the thousand refractions of it, of who might have forced the role on whom.

  She stood beside him now, waiting. It was like a wooing. And quite suddenly, he was able to move. He moved with caution, outward through the parallelograms. He even pantomimed to her that he wasn’t dangerous. See, I’m only grasping for the bar, steadying myself against it. So that I can stand, and bear what you have for me. His lips turned in. The sound that came from behind them wasn’t fear, but the catholic moan of all animals, forgiving someone for the general pain. Then he held out his left arm. Cool as a lay sister, she took care of him. Then she stepped aside. But her eyes flickered a signal, at Guy.

  Sligo surveyed them, amiably. Sleep was already arriving in him; he was sane with it. The shakes caressed him once, then he stood pridefully straight. He extended his right arm, palm stiff, as one did for doctors; he could have balanced a tray. Slowly he clenched the hand to a fist, drew the fist in toward his own chest and outward, shoulder high, his eye following it as if magnetized. Head in bas-relief, he stood that way, a gladiator measuring the strength in his mortal glove. He spoke to it, clearer than Guy had ever heard him, but his eye did not turn. It wasn’t possible to say whom he addressed—a plaster cast perhaps addressing its own inhabitant, its small Greek soul.

  “I saw you coming,” he said. “All the time.”

  He raised the fist, triumphant. Too late, they saw, shining beneath it on the counter, the glass case, still intact with its ring. He plunged the fist in through the case and down. As the glass trap darkened with his blood, he smiled.