Truth and Consequences

by Alison Lurie

  The lizard, though slightly less active, was still there in his back; but the lecture on church architecture had gone well, and the questions and comments from the audience had suggested several new lines of inquiry. Delia had been there as she had promised, though her congratulations afterward were irritatingly cut short by the arrival of Selma Schmidt. Selma, who like all the other Fellows seemed to have a kind of adolescent crush on Delia, had come up to pant and gush not over his talk, but over Delia’s latest story, actually pushing him aside in her haste.

  Ultimately, though, the interruption hadn’t mattered, because the following day Delia had come to Alan’s office to repeat her praise both for his lecture and for the artificial follies on his property. Moved by her enthusiasm, Alan had shown her, first, his watercolor rendering of the ruined chapel as it would look when completed, and then his drawings for several other possible projects. Delia’s reaction—impressed, amused—had been gratifying.

  “Yes—this is the real thing,” she had declared finally. “Have you shown it anywhere yet?” Alan had shaken his head. “You must have sent slides to your gallery, at least.”

  “No,” he had admitted. “I don’t have slides, and I don’t have a gallery. I did these drawings for myself. For the fun of it.”

  “But you should have a show.” Delia opened her great gray eyes even wider. “Everyone should see this work. You mustn’t be selfish.”

  “I don’t know.” He smiled. “It might be dangerous, you know. All these destroyed buildings, especially now. If they went on view somebody might report me to Homeland Security.”

  Delia laughed. “I suppose anything is possible,” she said.

  “But seriously, you know, some people might be angry.” He was quoting Jane now. When she had helped him move his drawings to the Center she had suggested that this wasn’t a good time to leave them lying about. “There’s some things you can’t make fun of,” she had warned.

  “No, no, no,” Delia interrupted, tossing back her heavy shock of golden hair. “You’ve got it all backwards. What’s happened makes your drawings more serious; it gives them a kind of visionary, prophetic quality. You see these monuments as simultaneously beautiful and endangered. I wonder—I have a friend in New York who runs a gallery. I think he might be interested. Would you let me contact him?”

  “Well—” Half doubting, wholly charmed, Alan had arranged to have photographs made of half a dozen drawings and the two follies on his property, and Delia had sent them off.

  Or so she had said. But since then, nothing. Over two weeks had passed and Alan had hardly seen her again, and never alone, until twenty minutes ago, when she had hastened by his office with her face averted, not responding to his greeting. Probably she was avoiding him. Either she hadn’t heard anything from the gallery, or his slides had been rejected and she was reluctant to tell him so. That had been Jane’s opinion when he mentioned the matter to her. She didn’t like to say this, she told Alan, but she would be surprised if anything came of Delia Delaney’s proposal. Yes, of course Delia had encouraged him, Jane said; it was the sort of thing she did. Already she had encouraged and then disappointed several people at the University.

  When Alan said he found this hard to believe, Jane gave examples. “She promised to go to lunch with Lily Unger and some of her friends, and then canceled at the last moment, said she had a headache. She’s persuaded Susie that Charlie Amir is in love with her, which of course he’s not. And she flatters all the Fellows and anyone else who turns up and promises to read their books or manuscripts, but then she never does, and when people try to reach her she isn’t there. She’s already missed one of our weekly lunches and walked out of the other two early. If you ask me, she’s here to collect her salary and do as little as possible.”

  It was clear to Alan that Jane had it in for Delia; he just didn’t know why. It was unlikely that she should be jealous—that had never been her nature, and anyhow he was in no condition to be unfaithful. He had never shown any enthusiasm for Delia’s writing, and when Jane had recently referred to her most famous book as “pretentious imitation fairy tales,” he hadn’t protested. But it wasn’t just that Jane didn’t like Delia—she also didn’t like his follies and ruins, especially now.

  She had been doubtful about this project from the start, and now her doubts had increased. In her opinion, Alan would probably do best to keep that side of his work quiet for a while. There were a lot of people, especially in New York, who would be upset if they saw paintings like his. When Alan suggested that they might be seen as ironic and amusing, Jane wasn’t convinced. “There are some things you can’t make fun of,” she had repeated.

  In spite of Jane,Alan was still sure—well, almost sure—that Delia really had liked his work and that she had tried to interest the gallery in New York. He considered going across the hall and saying that if her friend didn’t want it, it wasn’t her fault, and he was grateful anyhow. He didn’t want to become another pathetic claimant on Delia’s warmth and generosity of spirit. Everyone at the Center now continually vied for her time and attention, and it was embarrassing the way Susie and Mrs. Unger and the other Fellows and visitors and guests crowded around her in the hall and at lectures and at the weekly lunch meeting, maneuvering to sit next to her, smiling and staring and posturing and complimenting and, almost always, asking for favors. No wonder that sometimes at lunch she would excuse herself early and flee half fed to her office. Still, he had waited long enough.

  Sitting and then standing slowly, with pain and difficulty, he went to look across the hall. Delia’s tall paneled door, as usual, was shut. He knew now that often she did not open it when someone knocked, and only rarely answered her phone. He himself had never knocked or phoned: he did not want to be one of the intrusive people who at all hours of the day attempted to invade Delia’s privacy and interrupt her creative work.

  Yet as he started back, Alan heard a strange and disturbing sound: like someone breathing hard, gasping or wailing. At first he thought it was the autumn wind in the tall white pine tree outside his window; but the sounds weren’t coming from there. When he turned again to Delia’s door, which was in fact not quite shut, he could hear them more clearly. Someone inside was half sighing, half sobbing.

  “Delia?” he called softly. There was no answer. Slowly, Alan pushed the door open a few inches.

  At first the room seemed empty: the heavy dark-red velvet drapes were drawn, allowing only a few slashes of late September sunlight to carve up the gloom, and there was no one at the desk. Then he saw something like a bundle of crumpled white washing huddled on the sofa. Delia Delaney was lying there, staring at him silently.

  Or was that really Delia? She seemed somehow wan and limp, more clothes than body; it was as if all her life had gone into the great bush of red-gold hair.

  “Go away, would you, please?” she said in a half-drowned voice.

  “I’m sorry.” He began to back out of the room.

  “Wait. Who is it? Alan? Is that you?”

  “Yes. What’s the matter? Are you all right?”

  “No. I’m getting a migraine. Or I should say, a migraine is getting me.” She gave a thin imitation of a laugh.

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “Shall I go away?”

  “Yes—no. I’ve just taken something for it. It works about half the time if I take it soon enough, but it always makes me a little dizzy, a little drunk.” She laughed lightly, sadly. “If I’m lucky it’ll kick in after ten, fifteen minutes. I’d like to pass out until then, but I won’t. Come and talk to me, distract me.” Her voice was low, tremulous.

  “I—All right.” Alan crossed the darkened room and stood beside the sofa. Pale and ill as Delia looked, with great blue-violet smudges under her eyes, she was still voluptuously beautiful.

  “Tell me a story. No. Sing to me.”

  “I don’t know . . .” Clumsily and painfully, he lowered himself onto a nearby chair. “Okay, I’ll try.”

  Alan had
a light but true tenor voice, and a small repertory of old tunes and hymns, learned from one of his aunts. He chose at random.

  Down in the valley,

  The valley so low,

  Hang your head over,

  Hear the wind blow.

  “That’s nice,” Delia murmured, closing her eyes and stretching out on the sofa, so that most of a bare round white leg became visible, lit at the thigh by a thin stripe of sunlight.

  Build me a castle

  Forty feet high,

  So I can see her

  As she goes by.

  Allan paused, thinking that his unconscious had somehow directed his choice: that the Unger Center, with its brickwork parapets, was the nearest thing to a castle on campus; also that, counting the cupola, it was about forty feet high. Am I in love with her too, like everyone else? he asked himself.

  “Please, go on,” Delia whispered plaintively, and he complied.

  If you don’t love me,

  Love whom you please.

  Throw your arms ’round me,

  Give my heart ease.

  Maybe I just want to fuck her, that’s what the song says, he thought. Yeah, that certainly. But to make a move, even if it was welcomed, would precipitate a shameful disaster. It was months since he’d been able to perform normally; fear and pain and the fear of greater pain had always blocked him.

  “Don’t stop,” Delia begged, and Alan searched his memory for the innocent tunes his mother had sung to him when he was a small child.

  Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly,

  Lavender’s green.

  When I am king, dilly dilly,

  You shall be queen.

  He broke off, embarrassed by this second message from his unconscious, then went on through the remaining verses, stumbling over the last one:

  Some to make hay, dilly dilly,

  Some to cut corn,

  While you and I, dilly dilly,

  Keep ourselves warm.

  “That’s so nice,” Delia murmured, opening her silver-gray eyes, now rimmed with long wet dark lashes. “You know, I used to be called Dilly when I was little.”

  “Really.” Coincidence was still working against him, Alan thought. Or for him. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “A bit better, you know. I think maybe the pill’s going to work this time. Or maybe it’s your singing. You have a wonderful voice, so soothing.” She reached out one soft white hand to touch his.

  “Thank you.” I must get out of here before I do something stupid, Alan thought. Aware again of his pain, he rose agonizingly to his feet, leaning on the arm of the sofa.

  “Don’t go yet.” Delia smiled at him through the gloom. Already she looked less ill: a rosy flush had come into her face. As she pushed herself up slowly, her blouse slipped down to half reveal one pale, rounded breast in a border of crumpled white lace. “Come on. Sit down again.”

  “I can’t—my back,” Alan said. “It hurts like hell if I sit for more than a few minutes.”

  “Ah.” Unlike everyone else he knew, Delia did not express sympathy. “So what do you take for it?” she asked.

  “Different things.” Then, not wanting to seem rude, he added, “Codeine mostly. And alcohol.”

  “Does that work for you?”

  “Well, sometimes. But if I mix them or take too much I get a splitting headache. Not a migraine like yours, at least from what I’ve heard, but a kind of steady hammering pressure.”

  “I’ve had that. It’s agony. Vodka is a help, but what I really like is morphine, only it’s so hard to get here.”

  Alan looked at Delia with some surprise, realizing that they were having exactly the same sort of conversation that he often had with his back-pain pals. She’s an invalid too, he thought, feeling for the first time a rush of warmth that wasn’t admiration or lust. “I know,” he said. “It really works for me too.”

  “I went to see this silly little woman at the University Health Center, and she started whining about how it wasn’t medically advisable. That’s so stupid. My doctor in New York says you can’t get addicted to morphine if you only take it for serious pain.”

  “Mine says the same thing. Would you like to go and see him? I’ll give you the name.”

  “Not now, thanks. I’m going down to New York soon, I can get a new prescription then. I could have brought more with me, but I know it’s a mistake to block all my pain. Even if I could.”

  “How do you mean, a mistake?” Alan asked. “Hell, if I could block all mine without side effects, I’d do it like a shot.”

  “It’s cowardly. I know my migraines come for a purpose. They’re bringing me something I need.”

  “Really?”

  “But you must feel that too, about your pain. It’s there for a reason. I mean, don’t you feel sometimes, when you lie there suffering, that images or messages are coming to you, ones you’d never find otherwise? I know some of my best stories began as those strange kind of half-dreams, half-hallucinations I have late at night, or just before dawn, when I’m totally exhausted with a migraine. Isn’t it like that for you too?”

  “Sometimes,” Alan admitted, remembering that the idea of turning the Plaza Fountain into a picturesque ruin had in fact occurred to him as he lay awake in agony one black rainy night last summer.

  “When my aura starts, there’s no way of knowing what will come. Sometimes there are visions, sometimes nightmares, sometimes just blackness, oblivion.”

  “There’s times I could use some oblivion.”

  “Yes, but we can’t choose. In the end you have to accept your affliction as a gift. You have to ask, what is it trying to tell you, to give you? What has it saved you from, what has it brought you?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Alan said. It’s brought me Delia Delaney, he thought suddenly. If my back were well, she wouldn’t be speaking to me so intimately.

  She leaned toward him, her eyes hypnotically wide. “Inspiration comes from a dark, distant place, and it can’t come without pain. When I feel a migraine starting, it’s as if I can see these great black things flying towards me over the hills and over the city, half-bird and half-bat, with their claws out and their beaks open. Coming to hurt me and help me.”

  “Mine is just a big ugly reddish brown lizard,” Alan said. “Only it’s always there, in my back.” He laughed awkwardly; he had never mentioned the lizard to anyone, not even Jane.

  “But you can numb it with alcohol and drugs,” Delia suggested. “Stupefy it.”

  “Oh yes. And then I’m numb and stupid too.”

  “Yes.” Delia nodded. “I know all about that. Your life becomes a blur, a sort of sodden, mean half-life. There’s some pain still, but nothing to show for it.”

  “No,” Alan said. “And then you keep thinking stupid things. Like, It’s not fair. Why should I have this pain, and not other people? I mean, well, for instance”—he laughed awkwardly—“Jane and your husband aren’t attacked by bats and lizards.”

  “But they’re not creative people,” Delia said. She sat forward on the sofa and ran both hands through her tangled hair, combing it out into a great skein of red-gold silk.

  “Are you feeling better?”

  “Yes,” she said tentatively. “Yes, it’s gone. All gone. I’m just a little dizzy.” She stood up, putting one hand on Alan’s arm to steady herself. The crumpled white washing resolved itself into a gauzy low-necked blouse and a long pale flowered and ruffled skirt above bare white feet.

  “Oh, lord,” she added as if to herself. “Look at that, what a disaster.” She held out one hand, and Alan, touching Delia deliberately for the first time, took it. Delia did not pull away, but let her hand lie in his own, trembling slightly, cool and soft, with white rounded fingers, each of which ended in a long sharp silver-pink talon. It was like holding an exotic marine creature, he thought, some pale starfish or sea anemone.

  “I don’t see any disaster,” he said.

  “It’s the polish. I
t’s all chipping.”

  Alan bent closer; it was true that here and there the talons of the anemone were speckled with flakes of a darker rose. “It looks fine to me,” he told her. “But I don’t see—” he added, struck by this for the first time, “I mean, how can you do anything with nails that long?”

  “What sort of anything do you mean?” Delia asked, smiling oddly.

  “I don’t know. Cook, clean, shop, sew—the things women do.”

  “But I don’t do those things anymore.” She gave a little laugh and slid her hand softly away. “I especially don’t do them, and my nails are a sign that I don’t.”

  Alan looked from Delia’s hands, now clasped in a double underwater flower, to her smiling face. “Even so, isn’t it hard for you to work—to type on a computer?”

  “But I don’t. That’s the point,” she murmured, smiling up at him.

  “But then, how can you write?”

  “Oh, I can write. I always write by hand anyhow.” She turned toward her desk, which, Alan realized now, was empty of electronic devices. It held only a vase of flowers, a stack of pale-green paper, and a flowered china mug full of pens. “It’s the natural way—has been for thousands of years.”

  “Yeah, but—” Alan said, mesmerized.

  “I despise the idea of being separated from my words by a machine. I want them to flow directly from my mind down my arm into my hand and out onto the paper in one uninterrupted motion.” Delia demonstrated, stroking her bare rosy arm, long fingers, pointed seashell nails, and an imaginary sheet of paper in one slow, graceful gesture. “Just the way you do when you’re drawing, you know.”