But she can never be a stranger to me. I’ll follow that.
I’ll use the rest of the money I was saving for Christina.’ She would know that’s how I bought the land. But not what I’d been saving the balance for.
She doesn’t even nod. ‘What I wrote. I never printed it up.’
I exchange stares with the word processor. One couldn’t call it a glare, on either side. In my boyhood I was fond of a drawing I had of Aladdin’s lamp. The genie had risen from the spout, long and elastic, but only half formed.
A sharp twiddle on those fully formed keys there, and we’re free of it. Her record.
Is she suggesting that I—? She’s capable of anything.
On the bedside table, next to my book, is my own sheaf in its thick envelope, right under the fresh page she’d been scratching on. The envelope is one of those heavy-grade mud-colored packets carried by lower-class European diplomats perhaps, or maybe their spies; I get them from the last of the corner drugstores down here. Inside it, the sheets I write on are a thin tan, as tough and resistant as the town that makes them.
‘Tearing paper is harder. That paper. I used the Italian. Are you sure you’re up to it?’
She stretches out a defiant hand. It touches my book instead. She draws the hand back.
‘And why can’t we each destroy our own?’ I shouted it.
‘Because—we wouldn’t,’ she whispered. ‘Or you—wouldn’t. And maybe not I.’
A sheaf, a whole sheaf. It’s like that litany the Jews say—at Passover is it?—A loaf, a loaf, something like that. Meaning, it’s what you have on hand, to offer?
Plus all I meant still to say. Of how age isn’t at all as I thought it; a menopause of the life principle, a general decline. Or a birthing—by the bodily pain Gemma and I haven’t had much of yet—back into the general delivery.
It’s like life. A total disease. Or parade. I think the Sisters, those nuns, would understand that I mean. Whatever it is, it’s worthy of being spoken of every day. But it’s also a nitpicker’s paradise.
For Gemma grabs up my sheaf, tumbles out of bed, and brandishes it with that triumphant air women have when they’re forcing themselves to do what they’ll regret. ‘Here. Do it, then. And I’ll do mine.’
As she advances I see how the pretty feet have grown greenish with veins, and the toenails have yellowed to horn. Guilt says I should be ashamed to observe this; age says I have that right. They are like my own. These days I see everything of the flesh so near. And all of it as my own flesh—even children. What is happening to us—is it as great as anything in literature—and what any child can see?
Close she comes, closer—will she touch me first, or this machine? A misnomer, as I know. What’s sitting on the desk here is a progression almost without matter, of replicas without devotion to any original. A succession of tumbrils, of many little tipcarts, ready to thrill once and deliver their load—to the abyss.
‘What’s that blot on the back of your gown?’
She turns slowly, sneaking up on it the way women do when they fear that menstrual blood has seeped through. ‘There’s no blot on my dress, Rupert … Rupert!’
I have to brush away auras to see it, but it’s there.
‘Yes there is. And on the bed, too. That great inky blot.’
Fritillary shapes fly there to mask that great spreading, big as a third body on the bed that is empty of us.
‘My pen, my pen bleeds for us,’ I hear myself cry. Then I fall.
As one does knowingly, lightly through cloud.
HOW MUCH LATER DID I wake to find the two of us on the floor, her arms nursing both of us, below her tranced stare?
I saw again with full clarity now. But she was dead away, blank among her nimbuses.
‘What was I going to do just now, Gemma? A minute ago?’
She is facing our wall, blued now with dusk. Or was it now early morning?
Did she get to the desk before I blanked out? I thought not. My papers are where she must have dropped them. In exchange for me.
I am weak, but nothing I now confront is speckled or shaded beyond the ordinary. Her arms are rigid, thralled, but strong. And when addressed during these lapses, she will often answer to the point, as a person in full command might do, though absently. When I tell her doctors this, they shrug—and don’t credit my clarity.
We are one person now, made up of two. Advantage must be taken of it.
‘Gemma. You were going to tell me. Why must we destroy it.’
‘Destroy what?’
‘What we wrote.’
She is silent, struggling. ‘Oh that.’ She shrugs—but not with the minimal tic of her doctors. A long-hoarded, slow rise of the shoulders, arms crossed, hands nursing her elbows. ‘Because—’ She gets it out quite tonelessly. ‘Only one of us will be—read.’ She arches toward that wall as if to a person, her hands slipping to the floor. ‘No! That’s not what I mean.’ Her palms realize what they are pressing. She turns them up, spreading her fingers. ‘I mean—one of us will be left unread, that’s all … What am I doing on the floor? … Rupert—what are you?’
I could lie, pretend. I could say that we fell out of bed—wrapped in a mutual dream. Once in the early years we did do that. After sex and sleep it was, and we awoke laughing. On this same floor. I see the two of us, ruddy and moist.
But with what is creeping toward us, better to be as honest as we can. There’ll be enough clouding up. ‘I fell—in one of my attacks. You came after me. We must have both conked out.’
‘Get back in bed!’ she says—from the floor. That’s my Gemma.
I would prefer to stay at the desk. But she’s herself again. So am I. These are the moments that must be saved. The ones when we are both ourselves.
‘Bed welcome,’ I say, once we are in it. ‘Hand me my pen.’
She sighs luxuriously, handing it to me. ‘And there is no—blot—now?’
‘None.’ But for a while, I don’t write.
One half of our joint record will be read, by the survivor. The survivor’s half will not be read, by the dead. How simple. The builder saw, three-dimensionally, what this apostle of print did not.
One of us will be read. The other never will be. My heart is wrung for both of them.
But isn’t that what always happens? One half a couple has to go on, unread from then on. And is that why some people—Gemma—raging against that impasse, want willfully to destroy? Before destiny can get to them?
‘I can afford to be—lost,’ I say. ‘I already have a record—of sorts. But yours must not be.’ It might never have anyone else, except me.
‘I don’t mind. I won’t have said that much you haven’t. Above our lives. We talk so alike now’ She flashed me a humble glance. ‘And print—it’s not my medium.’ Her voice wavered on that, her hand hovering over the night table, seeking some medicament. Was she thinking of that White Plains relic of her medium? ‘Let’s have breakfast!’ she said, and sprang out of bed.
‘But—’ I point to that wall, on which long shadows are converging. It’s not morning after all. That blue was dusk.
‘I know. But we can choose now, you know. We can do anything.’
‘How right you are.’
When she comes back with her laden tray the room is in half-dark. I switch on the bed lamps, then turn them off again. Aided by the reflected streetlamps, this seductive semidark will last for some time. Half the poems in that book were written in it. The bedlights are on a stat that at a flick will light both, or one and one, and grade each down as wanted. This house is old but has its modernities—quite a few—that I have never thought of as crude. They are hers—her words.
Still, we must get out of this house. So much of the world only now and then laps at its edges. Black water, when it does come, seeped from other people’s basements—why do I think that? When our own basement is as dry as a bone.
Above the bed tray, that old side-pocketed one whose wicker she scrupulously repaints,
telling me meanwhile how much the catalogues now charge for them, her face is serious. ‘Look what I found when I moved the tray.’ We haven’t used it recently. Except after sex, I don’t relish meals in bed.
I turn over the packet of cigarettes, Benson & Hedges, in their smart, uncrumpled pack, only one gone. Kit’s, her trademark, for all the years we knew her. Plus those butane lighters, scattered over her friends’ houses like seed.
‘No lighter?’
‘No. I looked.’
The omelet is as plump as on our first morning together, the espresso as strong. Our digestions have lasted. Kit’s cigarettes have been dropped in the melee of provender on the night table. I pick them up. ‘She didn’t smoke while she was here.’
‘She knows we don’t now. Knew.’
Haven’t for twenty years. I quit first, then Gemma. I take out two cigarettes. I recall this brand as ovals; these are not. A pity. ‘Let’s.’
In memoriam? She doesn’t have to say.
Our smoke goes straight up. And still makes us cough. Carefully we grind out the stubs.
‘Gertrude’s gathered in the crowd,’ Gemma says. ‘In her own way.’
I sit up hard. ‘Never. Not us. It’s on me—whatever we do now. And on you. And Gemma—listen.’ Now is the time. ‘You remember that water system I had at the farm—the old ram?’ I lean back on the pillow, dreaming it. ‘What a sound it made.’
She nods that rhythm, and herself, into the crook of my arm. ‘“Like circumstance,” you said, “nudging destiny.” I was never sure what you meant.’
Nor was I. But in those words I could hear the ram. ‘The new land has water for such a system. And a ravine just right for it. No pond yet—but easy. Will you build me a house on it?’
How quiet she is. Then she reached up to stroke the cords of my neck, all too prominent these days. ‘You’re my building,’ she whispered. Then she rolled over on her face. Against my breastbone, the dry sobs came, deep and regular, a sound like quicksand sucking in. That I had pulled her from?
I can’t sob. But I had to get up and pee or else wet the bed. The body calls the tune these days. And who says a man don’t pee sitting down?
When I return she’s flung back against the headboard like a Nike, eyes closed. ‘I’m seeing it. Drawing it.’ The tears seep down. ‘Psyche, psyche, psyche,’ she says, eyes fast shut. ‘That’s a bird.’
At her side of the bed the fancy Roman-numbered clock the girls brought us one year from Italy ticks on. It came with its own gift card, on which the Latin text, Ars longa et vita brevis est—in my youth usually translated as ‘Art is long and time is fleeting’—was inscribed in both the Latin and the Italian. Under which someone, I suspect Arturo, had painstakingly lettered: ‘Art is long going, time fleets.’ At the first sight of which, I am not ashamed to say, I added: ‘On little cats’ feets.’ But the clock, still baring its gaunt numerals like a patrician with black teeth, ticks on. Perhaps we should sell it with the house.
Can she build the new one? Her blueprints were always as beautiful as lace. No contractor ever had trouble with them. But there’s more to it than drawing. We shall have to act together—as one. As a single, slightly damaged persona we now are. Taking care as we can that the Rupert half and the Gemma half are not non compos mentis at the same time. Plato would be interested.
Funny—how the schoolboy Latin filters back, tasting of penny candy and smelling of Father Schlegel as he whiffed past the one little Protestant. I shall be bobbing for apples next, with childhood’s long scoop. But the meditation that comes with these penny memories is plenty adult, staring as it must into death’s eyeless eye.
Gemma’s eyes are open now.
‘We must use the whole house of ourselves,’ I said. ‘Not close up room after room in us, and live in one. As old people do. And we must let history in. We tend to stop it at the door.’
‘I shall miss this kitchen,’ Gemma says. Had she misunderstood my meaning? No, she had not. For then she giggled. ‘But maybe the Prendergast will turn real.’
Lazily now, she watches as I write, each of us feeling her mind stream into mine. ‘What’s that you’re writing?’ she says. Is she teasing?
‘An—archive.’ The end of one.
‘Ah—yes that’s it,’ she says. ‘Not an almanac. Archives are not so—relentless, day after day. They—accumulate.’
‘And can be printed up.’
When I scold I can see in her face that waif under a piano, her mouth an overturned U. I did print up a copy of my half, just in case. And put it in the bank, for Christina.’
‘Just in case?’ I had to smile. Just in case she was the one to survive? No smiling matter. But I have to. ‘Well.’
‘I knew you wouldn’t mind.’
‘No.’ Scarcely.
‘I mean—if you could have known.’
‘No.’ It strikes me that the boundaries between what one will or will not know—and when—are gently blurring. ‘No—I wouldn’t have minded Christina.’
She has to smile too, but there’s no malice in it. Acceptance, rather. ‘Well.’
And then, right here on the page, this new cheaper lined paper so simple to destroy or keep, a true solution comes to me. As it must have come to Sherm and Kit, in their way. As to all death’s apprentices. How to end. How to go on.
‘We’ll read them both, tomorrow. Side by side, here. I—yours. You—mine.’
Her hand steals into mine. ‘Or—on the plane. Rupert—I bought you a ticket too.’
After a minute she says: ‘Are you surprised?’
Not really. Not if I look at our lives straight. Or at our generation.
‘Secrets—’ she says, ‘have you minded them much? As—breaches of promise?’
Absolutist that I have been, I have minded—some. Even though I too have read them. I read a page or two of her record before it left the house. ‘I try not to. After all, what did we promise? Faith—without works.’
I see her nod through the shadow. At this house our only light is as we like it best—the tenacious rose-prickling of the city, from outside. On a nest.
‘And do you mind?’ I said. ‘My secrets?’
‘No.’ She said it faintly, sleepily. ‘They sparkle—in the dark.’
That will be the last thing she says, I thought—the last I will have to record. Then her voice came strong—‘And in the new house I’ll say Living—at least once a day’—and faded.
We are all apprentices. When looking into the eyeless eye. I reach across her body for the inhalator, holding it like a weapon.
I see the pond, jeweled with duck. The ram rides in, and retracts. Whoom, a-duh. A-duh—whoom. I hear the moss budge. Our nest here still smells of the sexual. I touch her there.
So the blank wall darkens. As we ride toward it.
Our bed a skiff.
As any child can see.
About the Author
Hortense Calisher (1911–2009) was born in New York City. The daughter of a young German-Jewish immigrant mother and a somewhat older Jewish father from Virginia, she graduated from Barnard College in 1932 and worked as a sales clerk before marrying and moving to Nyack, New York, to raise her family. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled In the Absence of Angels, appeared in 1951. She went on to publish two dozen more works of fiction and memoir, writing into her nineties. A past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, the worldwide association of writers, she was a National Book Award finalist three times, won an O. Henry Award for “The Night Club in the Woods” and the 1986 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for The Bobby Soxer, and was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1952 and 1955.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and inc
idents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1987, 1996 by Hortense Calisher
Cover design by Kelly Parr
978-1-4804-3742-5
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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