by John Crowley
“He had amazing eyes,” she said. “Cutter eyes. When he came home in certain, well, moods. His eyes were like, just. Like weapons.”
“Certain moods,” Pierce said.
“Well.” She threw her hair from her eyes with a lift of her head.
“Was he suspicious of you?”
“He was sure I was fucking somebody.”
“Were you?”
“He’d want me to prove that I wasn’t.” Now her hands were moving slightly, small beasts stirring. Pierce watched them; they seemed to have their own intentions, of which they were becoming conscious.
“How could you do that?”
“Well he had ways that he thought proved it.”
“What ways?”
Her own eyes—likewise amazing—were turning inward now as they should: not clouding so much as growing bright but sightless, sheeted in ice but not cold, her lower lids beginning to rise over them. “Oh I don’t remember now really. He was just so crazy.”
“Rose. What ways.”
She said nothing for a long moment. Her hands were on the insides of her thighs, which were kept apart by the prow of the stool. He let her remember or imagine what ways. All this had happened in some bleak black city or town up in New York state; he could see the muscled tattooed forearm, the can of beer he was never without, damper and raiser of his notions. The oilcloth of the kitchen table. The linoleum whereon she had knelt.
What was his name? Wesley. Wes. She alluded to him at other times, but it was only at times like these that he grew a reality. They worked carefully together over it, with pauses for thought, his to frame questions, hers to answer them.
“Well Rose how could you have allowed him to do those things.”
“Jesus, I was I guess just so young. And scared. I was just so scared of him.”
“And how did that make you feel? Being so scared.”
Pause for the deciding of this, her lips parting. How did that make you feel? He asked not because he thought she could answer, but because the question itself so visibly stirred her. This was how it made her feel: made her lips open in this way, and her hands migrate. “It.” Pause. “It made me excited.”
“You learned that?”
“Yes.”
“And how did that make you feel, Rose. That excitement. I mean were you.”
Pause. Pause. The air in which they sat heated now by the fire and the delicate archæology under way.
“I was ashamed.”
“Uh-huh.” He crossed his legs differently, uncomfortable. “And how did that make you feel, that shame?”
“It made me feel.” Pause pause. “I guess more excited.”
Her hands had now met between her spread legs, one hiding what the other did. Pierce at this point could and sometimes did instruct her to stop; other times he chose not to notice.
And he would proceed with his little interrogatory until he decided (or gauged) that she had got far enough, and suggested that she go now into the bedroom; and she would rise obediently and go on silent feet, her long stride like a big cat’s—and after a time he would follow and find her; and if there were no further exactions to be made, if he had prepared nothing further or considered that she needed nothing further (he could consult only his own heat to guess) he would begin at once to fuck her, often not removing his own clothes; coaching her still, talking, talking, until at length, often at great length, they produced between them, hothouse-fashion, her orgasm, a great bloom sometimes that astonished both of them.
Tonight though there was more to do.
“Rose,” he said to her softly. “Over there by the door, on the table there, is the brown paper bag I brought in. That one.”
“What,” she said, a breath only, her eyes not leaving his face. He took her head in his hands and turned it toward the door, where the bag lay.
“That. Would you get it now please and open it.”
She rose, obedient, and went to take the bag; brought it back to the bed.
“Open it please, Rose.”
That implacable Soft Voice, where had he learned it, how did he know how to use it, how to speak gravely and with that awful kindness, as though they both labored together here under an injunction, a necessity that must be yielded to. When it was really he alone who laid the tasks upon her. This one being the next.
“Oh Christ,” she said.
“See someone like you,” he said. “Who can deny so much, pretend so much that things haven’t happened. You need to have sex happen to you that you can’t deny. That goes on reminding you, proving to you through the day that you did the things you did.”
“Oh Pierce.”
“We’re going to help you remember. We’re going to make sure you remember tonight. Is that all right, Rose?”
He took her head lightly again in his hands, feeling with awe and delight the soul within awake and arise as she sought for a way out of this one; felt her find it, and find that it was nothing but the way to which he had turned her: the way that led further in.
“I asked: Is that all right?”
This she did not answer for a moment, but he could see that she would; the word gathered again in her despite herself; all she was waiting for was for it to become unrefusable.
“Yes,” she said at length, not quite aloud.
“You need this, don’t you?” He waited. Nothing this time, but the air around their bodies palpably heated further. “Rose.”
“Oh please I can’t.”
“You can, Rose. You can whisper if you have to.”
Nothing still. She had turned to soft smoke in his arms. He drew her ear to his lips. “Say it, Rose.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Yes what.”
“Yes I need it.”
There. He wound her hair in his hand. She had begun to weep, shuddering. He pressed her cheek into the pillow, and opened her with his knee. No more talking, no more Soft Voice, a remorseless engine now, though inside him his heart was great and he wanted nothing more than to smother her with tenderness and gratitude, put away the things and kiss away her tears. But no it was not the time for that.
As he worked, he heard or overheard in some space of his soul phrases spoken, a voice, narrating the things he did to her even as he did them, things even that he had not yet done or dared to do. He knelt before her and placed his cheek against the hot marks he had made. It was a voice he was coming to be familiar with, accompanying these encounters. She offered to him the gift of her crying-out. As though he were able to do the deeds and at the same time, even somewhat in advance, read a histrionically somber and slightly phony account made long afterward.
One winter’s day she had fled Wes and the creeper apartment they shared in that town, fled with only a couple of suitcases (her round hatbox one of them) and three hundred dollars in bills; she took a taxi—Wes allowed her no car in his absence and had taken away her keys—to the train station, and, her heart beating fast, bought from the incurious agent a one-way to New York City. She was twenty-one.
Pierce, in his unsleeping bag before the fire, followed her to the station, the slush gray, the fur trim of her boots wet; her knuckles white where she gripped that bag. (She also lay asleep, in her bed in the room beyond, it was her house and therefore her privilege to take the bed, she had invited Pierce to share it but it was narrow and he would never sleep, he lay then in the bag awake of course anyhow.) On that train to New York, where she had no friends and yet toward which she went as much as she went away from Troy or Schenectady or wherever it had been, unwise and yet more knowledgeable than before, aware of something, of a her within her now awakened—on that train she sat next to a gent with a Mephisto beard and tinted glasses, and fell into conversation with him; and accepted, somehow unable to refuse, his offer to help her in the city toward which they both travelled, where he actually had a lot of friends.
Handed on then from party to party, stranger to stranger, as in a quadrille, she might well have drawn quic
kly close (there is no chance in dreams, or it is all chance) to a connection with Pierce, one that Pierce also might have been making his way toward. For of course he had been a New Yorker too then. So, back in that city, that city deep within, in that past which he made for himself, they did draw closer together: because just now the past was up for shaping, just as the future was. As a novelist might discover while he works a key plot element, one he all along needed but did not know he needed, that requires but a quick flip back to the earliest pages, a name change, a small biographical detail added—done—so the present could shape the past now in the time of the ending of the world.
A long time ago, and deep within. How do you like that. That warehouse in the film district, porno district too; winter, the smell of the damp overcoats the actors had discarded. Masks. He put his own on. A woman assigned to play opposite him, hi, already naked and masked and soon writhing in imitation lust in his arms, though he did not yet know her name. And together they two and everyone else there looked upon Rose. Masked too for her role, her starring role, so that later in the Faraways he could not nor could she recognize.
And so Pierce was now, thereafter, connected to her, by a bond he would never know he had been able to forge. To forge: which means both to make and to fake. In the time of the ending of the world those things are not always different.
He started awake, then, on the unforgiving floor. The fire was embers, still alive though beneath a hide of ash. Day was coming. He would not sleep again; he was grateful he had been granted so much. Thank you Morpheus, ungenerous god. He unzipped the mummy case he was ensconced in (What other males had made use of it? It had a smell he could not identify) and stood, still mostly clothed and yet not therefore ready for the day.
At the door of her bedroom he stood for a moment watching. Her dark head deep in its pillow and its dreams, where do they go. From where he stood she seemed entirely gratified, at peace. Sleep, the innocent sleep.
On the table beside her bed still lay the books and letters that he had found there yesterday, when he had arrived before her and found the place deserted: Bulfinch’s mythology, open to the Greeks, the children of Apollo; Phæton. A letter, unfinished, to her father, that he had read.
He felt again the little creepy thrill he had felt last night on the porch, to find how easily she could be fooled.
Though whether he had actually fooled her, or only induced in her—or helped her induce in herself—a willed suspension of disbelief (the same sort of state, he supposed, he was trying to induce in the readers of his book, who were to be thought of as equally ready to believe) he couldn’t know.
He watched her for a time, and then before his steady gaze awoke her he turned away, and as silently as possible got his shoes and coat and slipped out the glass door onto the deck. He went down the drive and to his car; he let out the brake and allowed the car to slide soundlessly down the incline and out to the empty road. He started it then, and turned around to head back down the valley of the Shadow and away. He drove far and fast, out of the town of Blackbury Jambs and out of the county, leaving behind for good his house by the river and that pile of paper on the desk in the study. The Faraways closed up behind him in the folds of autumn mist as he fled, as though they had not been. When he hit the interstate he turned north, or south, and kept going, as fast as his Steed could carry him.
8
No he did not flee, though he felt warned to do so, though in the weeks to come, the months to come, he would sometimes wish that he had: no he watched her sleep for a time, then yes he turned away, and as silently as possible got his coat and shoes, slipped out the glass door onto the deck; but only stood in the coming morning, feeling as clear and cold as it was. The only birds he heard were chickadees and jays, both taking notice of him, alerting the world.
He went out across the deck, littered with the remains of their hors d’oeuvres from last night, they had been too occupied to clean up. He saw that woodland creatures had apparently scavenged what they had left, had maybe been feasting even as the two humans were thus occupied. Little ears alert to the alarming sounds from within. He walked down the driveway and out on the road.
Sometime when he was a kid, just bursting into puberty, Pierce had found among his uncle Sam’s books one on sexual pathology, written, though he couldn’t know it then, in another and different world-time, Berlin 1920, and full therefore of the pathologies then apparent, gone now or become unapparent or subsumed in others; mostly it was about people (unimaginable to him, people named with just a job and a single capital letter, E., a butcher, G., a married woman) whose sexuality had become accidentally bound up—it seemed to Pierce that it happened easily and often—with something different from the persons of others.
Fetishes was the word the book used.
There was the woman who craved the touch of feathers; or the other who loved crystals, she laid them out lovingly on black velvet, dangled them provocatively before candle flames, dropped them one by one into cut-glass bowls of clear oil, where she could watch them sink slowly as she shivered and moaned in delight.
He had wondered, then, if such a thing might happen to him, that his own mighty feelings might get loose somehow and seize blindly on the wrong thing forever; it seemed not impossible, since just at that moment almost everything (running water, fur on his nakedness, thunderstorms) could alert them. He hoped that if it did, whatever it was he ended up with would not be loathsome or operose, as some of these were, or at least be easily acquired.
If it were, then he imagined it might not be so bad (and having read and thought to this point he was likely to be hard again, of course, the dumb dumb thing); it would be handy in a way, no muss no fuss, just the one little switch to throw, and endless refinements to pursue, each one getting closer to the potent node that had somehow formed, the simple powerful itch to be scratched.
And so it had turned out to be.
She had wept, once early on, when they were done and he held her, freed, in his arms: wept clinging to him, asking him “But did you like it? Did you really like it, did you, did you?” And he, not knowing why she wept, because of the pain he had made her bear, or because of her shame at wanting it and knowing he knew she wanted it, or from her capitulation to him, or because of how carelessly, how quickly and completely she had granted it to him—he said yes he had liked it very much, he had; yes really really he had. And held her, wondering, till she slept.
You had to be careful, though, so careful: one misstep, one misunderstood gesture, and the castle vanished. Pierce, though he allowed her to believe he was skilled in these mysteries, didn’t really have much of a grasp of the physics, the stresses and tensions he needed to apply to keep her immobilized, you’d have to be a goddamn physical therapist or a trained torturer, he spent hours pondering. For it was worse than embarrassing when his ropes slipped and his bonds failed to hold; she would free herself and look at him smiling like an impertinent child, waiting to see what would become of her for her misbehavior. And he must not shrug or laugh, or look nonplussed, but only nod, and raise the stakes.
But if his knotcraft was lacking he had another quality others might not have had: he was willing to go as far as she needed and could be forced to go, no holding back himself if she would not, a willingness that shocked her, moved her, made her come. So fast had the doors flown open before him down within her that (afraid then as he still was afraid) he had offered her a code she could use: a signal, he’d said, by which he would know that he had gone, or was about to go, farther with her than she could bear to go. He would not listen, of course, to any ordinary entreaties or pleadings, not to No no, not to Stop stop, no matter how pitifully or imperiously she said these. She had to say this: I tell you three times.
She had not wanted to pay attention to this. What did it mean, anyway? Why three times?
Children say it, he said. You know. What I tell you three times is true. But it was unknown to her, she had never chanced to hear what he would have tho
ught was a universal formula.
Anyway he was never to learn where her limits lay. Between them they constructed limits, and she would take them for her own, and then in the night, late, they would violate those limits, and cross into new country. He always supposed her own actual limits lay somewhere beyond those, and that she knew where they were or would know them if they came in sight. But he never reached them.
Wesley. That was the limit: he would have to be as crazy as she was to get that far. He hoped for her sake that she never again attracted, by the exhalations of her own spirit, a man capable of that rage, that. It was the one thing Pierce had never been able to summon up for her, or even imitate very convincingly: the sudden upwelling of male rage, the dangerous mad aggression like a beast’s, unpredictable in onset and consequences, like the fires and the fireworks that also so moved her.
No he was not like them, he was not, no he was not. There was a big difference, clear to Pierce: that kind of man wanted only power, and used sex, wielded it or withheld it or inflicted it, all to have power.
But hadn’t he used power, wouldn’t he again, wasn’t he already planning to use it, as a way to have sex? His pretend magic power, his chance knowledge of her insides, hadn’t he employed them ruthlessly, forza e froda, like a sex Machiavelli, a sex secret agent? Hadn’t he?
No. He didn’t think so. He could not hear the voice within him that might accuse him of it, though maybe it spoke. Pierce Moffett, though an adult male human, a mammal living on earth, nevertheless was able to believe that power and sex were realms of being not only different but opposed in their natures; that what power was guilty of, primordially guilty of, sex was not: sex, soiled or enchained or even bought and sold, was innocent.
He jammed his hands in his jacket pockets, feeling a shiver run across his rib cage. How much longer would she sleep? He looked at the watch he had not removed last night. A trout—he thought it was a trout—leapt from the Shadow as though inviting him to come play.
