Peaceable Kingdom

by Francine Prose

  Linda got up and went out. She walked toward the beach. She stared straight ahead and turned up the shore toward the ruins. Someone shouted to her, but she didn’t hear, she looked neither right nor left; the only sound was the ocean.

  She kept walking. She grew tired and knew she should turn around. Perhaps she passed the ruins, perhaps not. She felt herself slip comfortably into a staggery zombie gait. The sun was very hot, and there was no breeze from the sea.

  Linda kept walking. The light grew brighter until it seemed to her that there was nothing before her but a strip of light with dark bands on both sides. At first she knew that these bands of light and dark were the beach and the sky and the sea, but after some time she forgot that, and it was just a strip of light. Everything shimmered with heat, but still she kept walking, imagining now that faces appeared along both sides of the light, not waving or greeting her but just looking, silently moving their lips but not speaking, like people you see when you’re swimming, talking mutely on shore.

  Wasn’t this what she’d heard about death—that long road of light lined with faces? Was it possible that she was dying? There was so much here that could kill you—sunstroke, scorpions, sharks, disease, poison suntan lotion. She thought: How funny that Greg should be right—death was like Fire Island. But if this was death, why weren’t the faces welcoming—why didn’t they know who she was?

  Linda looked for Greg, but he wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere. If this was the afterlife, what had happened to her brother? And it was his absence that finally convinced her: this bright, endless road of light and indifferent faces wasn’t death after all, but a vision of life, of this moment—a picture, clear as a photograph, of what lay around and before her, of how little would be familiar to her and of all she had yet to go through.

  HANSEL AND GRETEL

  TACKED TO THE WALL of the barn that served as Lucia de Medici’s studio were 144 photographs of the artist having sex with her cat. Some of the pictures showed the couple sweetly nuzzling and snuggling; in some Lucia and her black cat, Hecuba, appeared to be kissing passionately, while still others tracked Hecuba’s leathery rosebud of a mouth down Lucia’s neck to her breasts until the cat disappeared off the edge of the frame and Lucia’s handsome head tilted back…

  This was twenty years ago, but I can still recall the weariness that came over me as I looked at Lucia’s photos. I didn’t want to have to look at them, particularly not with Lucia watching. I was twenty-one years old. I had been married for exactly ten days to a man named Nelson. It had seemed like a good idea to drop out of college and marry Nelson, and a good idea (it was Nelson’s idea) to spend the weekend in Vermont at his friend Lucia’s farm. At that time, I often did things because they seemed like a good idea, and I often did very important things for lack of a reason not to.

  Lucia de Medici was an Italian countess, a direct descendant of the Florentine ruling family, and a famous conceptual artist. She was also, I’d just discovered, the mother of a woman named Marianna, the love of Nelson’s life, an old girlfriend who, until that afternoon, I’d somehow assumed was dead.

  Striped by the sunlight filtering in through the gaps between the barn boards, Lucia and I regarded each other: two zebras from different planets. She was a small woman of about fifty, witchy and despotic, her whole being ingeniously wired to telegraph beauty and discontent. And what was Lucia seeing, if she saw me at all? A girl with the power that came unearned from simply being young and with every reason not to act like such a quivering blob of Jell-O.

  She said, “Up here in the wilderness I am working so in isolation, some days I want to ask the cows what do they think of my art.”

  “It’s…really something,” I said.

  “Meaning what?” Lucia said. I was pleased she cared what I thought, but hadn’t she just explained: when it came to Lucia’s art, the cows’ opinion counted? She frowned. “Prego. Watch out, please, not to back up into the fish tank.”

  I turned, glad for fish to focus on after Lucia and her cat. An enormous goldfish patrolled the tank with efficient shark-like menace, while several guppies hovered in place, rocking oddly from side to side. “I am scared of that big fish,” Lucia confided. “He push his sister out of the water, I find her gasping dead on the floor.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t the cat?” I asked.

  “Of that I am sure,” she said.

  I sensed that Lucia had tired of me, and I thought that now we would leave her studio. Instead, she switched on the stereo and voices filled the barn. Suddenly my eyes watered; it was my favorite piece of music, the trio from Così fan tutte that the women sing when their lovers are leaving and they beg the wind and water to be good to them on their way. Their sadness is a painful joke because their lovers aren’t leaving but disguising themselves as Albanians and seducing the women as a test, a test the women eventually fail, a painful joke on them all.

  I listened to the delicate, mournful tones, the liquid rippling of the strings, cradling and oceanic. There was grief in the women’s voices, pitiful because it is wasted, pitiful and humiliating because we know it and they don’t.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  “So you say now,” Lucia said. “This, too, is one of my projects. I think everything gets boring sooner or later, no? The most fantastic Mozart becomes unbearable after a while. So I have put this trio on a loop that plays over and over until the audience cannot stand it and runs screaming out of the room.”

  Lucia’s project depressed me. I felt personally implicated, though I knew: there was no way that she could have had me and Nelson in mind. In the ten days since we’d been married, Nelson had changed so profoundly that he might as well have gone off and come back disguised as an Albanian. You hear women say: Before the marriage my husband never drank or hit me or looked at another woman. But with Nelson there was nothing so violent or dramatic. Before the wedding he’d liked me; afterwards he didn’t.

  He had been my lab instructor in a college biology course. He was a graduate student in anthropological botany, writing his thesis on the medicinal plants commonly used by the rain-forest tribes he’d lived among for two years. It was rumored that most of his research was on Amazonian hallucinogens, so it made sense that he was often strange, mumbly and withdrawn—but a perfectly capable and popular lab instructor. He was blond and handsome and tall; he looked lovely in a lab coat. He came from an old Boston family and played jazz clarinet.

  Right from the start, our love had been tainted with cruelty. My lab partner was a squeamish boy, a Mormon from Idaho, who refused to cut into, or even touch, anything slimy. I enjoyed humiliating him, I feel I have to confess this, so as not to make myself sound nicer or more innocent than I was. From the other side of the lab table Nelson watched me grab the etherized frog from my partner’s shaky hands, and our eyes locked in the candle-like glow of the Bunsen burners. Later, Nelson told me that what had caught his attention was that my lab partner was in love with me and I had no idea. I believed that Nelson imagined this, but even so I was flattered—flattered and guilty and proud, all at once, for having made the Mormon boy suffer.

  Nelson was moody, given to brooding silences in which I knew he was grieving over Marianna. He didn’t like to talk about her or about his time in the jungle. I’d never met a man with a past he didn’t like to discuss, or for that matter a man with any past at all. Nothing had ever happened to the boys I knew in college, but they were so touchingly eager to tell you all about it. I was young enough to be enthralled by what a man wouldn’t say, and I believed the glitter dust of romance and adventure would sprinkle on me like confetti if I stood close enough to Nelson.

  Marianna had gone with Nelson to the Amazon, but she was demonically restless, she’d left and flown back every few months. Nelson said he always knew the night before she arrived. She used to hitchhike in with bush pilots who invited her along because she was so beautiful—beautiful and doomed.

  “If those pilots knew her,” Nelson said,
“they wouldn’t have taken her up in an elevator. Every time a plane took off, she was praying it would crash. She had a death wish instead of a conscience, she was born suicidal, it was a miracle she lasted long enough to meet me. Her suicide attempts got more and more serious until I couldn’t do anything to…” His voice trailed off and he took a deep breath that ended the conversation.

  I don’t know why I assumed from this that Marianna was dead. It helped, I suppose, that I was never able to ask the obvious questions: when and where Marianna died, and how exactly she did it. Instead, I went through Nelson’s possessions. I found his journal from the Amazon, and nowhere—nowhere—in it was one word about Marianna. Stupidly, this cheered me; it made her seem less important. I thought I’d learned something new about her, not something new about Nelson.

  He told me I made him happy. He said we should get married. He said we shouldn’t tell anyone, not even our parents or friends. I agreed, though it bothered me, not being able to boast that I’d been chosen by a handsome older man, the most popular lab instructor. In City Hall, we ducked behind a door when Nelson saw a judge who knew his father; and that was the last time he touched me, yanking me out of the judge’s way.

  For a week after the wedding he paced our hot cramped Cambridge apartment, staying up all night, listening to music: Bill Evans, Otis Redding, Bach—only the slow second movements. I couldn’t ask him what was wrong, if he thought we’d made a mistake. It didn’t take a genius to draw the logical conclusion when someone seemed so much happier before getting married—to you. I was not supposed to notice that I was sleeping alone in the bed that had also changed unrecognizably, grown colder and less welcoming since when we used to spend all day there.

  One morning Nelson brought me coffee. He said he knew he’d been rotten and he was mightily sorry. He said he’d eaten some things in the jungle that he shouldn’t have eaten, and now he had these episodes, he was gone for days at a time.

  “Episodes?” I said. “Gone?” Why hadn’t he ever had one in all the months we’d lived together?

  Nelson said we needed to get away: an impromptu honeymoon in Vermont. That morning we threw our knapsacks into his VW Bug. We drove with the windows open, my long hair streaming back, and for a time I felt we’d left our problems behind in Cambridge, along with my toothbrush and contact-lens fluid and everything else I needed. I kept wondering about Nelson’s episodes. Did he have them when he was driving?

  Early in the afternoon we turned into Lucia’s long, tree-lined driveway, which, Nelson said, always reminded him of the stately avenues of lime trees leading to Tolstoy’s estate.

  “How do you know Lucia?” I asked.

  “Mutual friends,” he said.

  Lucia ran out of the rambling spotless white farmhouse and kissed Nelson three times, alternating cheeks, then grabbed his shoulders and gave him a smacky kiss on the mouth. She eyed me coolly, then smiled flirtatiously at Nelson, as if he’d come to amuse her by showing off his very large new pet.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  “Polly. My new wife,” he said. “Polly, this is Lucia.”

  “Your new what?” Lucia asked, only slightly dimming my pleasure in his finally having told someone. “Welcome.” She embraced me swiftly, kissing my sweaty forehead.

  “Guess what?” she asked Nelson. “Just yesterday I got a postcard from Marianna. She is in India at an ashram, fucking hundreds of people a day. She writes she is finding enlightenment through nonstop tantric fucking.”

  Nelson touched the top of his car. His hand came away black with grime, and for a moment the three of us stood there staring at his hand. “I’m sorry,” Lucia said. “But if I can’t tell you, who can I tell? All alone I am going crazy.”

  “Marianna?” I said.

  “My daughter,” said Lucia. “Nelson’s friend.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “But I thought she was dead!”

  “My daughter is very much alive, thank you. Nelson, what have you been telling this child? Anyway, it is perfect you come. Marianna sends me a phone number where I can call her in India this weekend, we can go into town where is the nearest phone.”

  “There’s no phone here?” I said.

  “Of course not,” said Lucia. “Now come to my studio and see my new piece. I call it Così fan tutte, starring me and my cat.”

  Nelson said he’d see it later, he needed to walk, he’d been in the car all morning; Lucia tried not to look disappointed at being left with me. Nelson headed off toward a horse barn and Lucia led me across a field on a path tunneled between high grasses. I didn’t know what to say. I felt I should praise everything I could—nice house, nice land, nice view, nice sky—without sounding truly psychotic. Finally I said, “What beautiful blue flowers!” The field was completely blue.

  “Bachelor’s buttons.” Lucia sighed. “In Europe they are weeds. For years I never grow them. Then I learn they keep their color forever, Etruscan tombs are full of them, Etruscans bury them with their dead to stay blue in the afterlife.”

  For an instant the waves of heat shimmering over the field resolved into a miniature phantom funeral procession, Etruscans in white, bearing scythes and armloads of blue flowers; and in that instant I wondered if Nelson’s episodes might be catching.

  Then we went to Lucia’s studio and looked at the photos of her and her cat, and she played the Mozart that we listened to over and over. I could have listened forever and never gotten tired and been grateful for every minute by which it shortened the weekend. But after four or five times I said, “Okay! Enough!” It seemed required, like my admiring the field of blue flowers.

  Lucia switched off the stereo and said, “I am right, am I not? Now go find Nelson, and I will do another five minutes more work.”

  But it was five hours before Lucia emerged from her studio and found us on the lawn, bouncing grumpily in our metal armchairs. We had been arguing about Lucia, furiously but without speaking, so perhaps only I was arguing and Nelson was thinking about something else.

  Finally—after a walk through the scratchy fields matted with treacherous berry canes, and a long nap that Nelson took and I wasn’t invited to join—I’d mentioned the photos of Lucia and her cat. I suppose I expected some conspiratorial expression of normal distaste.

  Instead, Nelson said, “I love her. She’s absolutely bananas.” I recalled the lab partner I’d nearly dissected for Nelson’s benefit, and now I needed Nelson, and he was taking Lucia’s side. But there was no comparison. Lucia wasn’t some squeamish kid who made you do all his experiments for him. Lucia was Nelson’s very good friend and former mother-in-law.

  I had spent Nelson’s nap time in the airless library with its motley collection of books, tattered and reeking of mildew. These were mostly in Italian but there were also some volumes in English on folklore, magic, and witchcraft. It was no accident that I was drawn to a volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, nor was it accidental that I turned to “Hansel and Gretel” and read it for survival tips as much as for entertainment. This was the version in which the witch is fattening up the children and feeling the chicken bones Gretel holds out to deceive the witch into thinking the children are still thin.

  After I mentioned the cat photos and Nelson defended Lucia, I thought how different the story would be if Hansel were in collusion with the witch. So when at last Lucia appeared from her studio and said, “You children must be starving! I will make chicken with mushrooms,” I must have paled. Lucia said, “Nelson, look, your friend is half dead already from hunger.”

  “No,” I said, “I’m not, I’m fine, I’m not hungry at all.”

  Inside the house we found Hecuba licking a stick of butter on the dining-room table. Lucia buried her face in the cat’s black fur and, with many tiny kisses, set it on the floor. She opened a bottle of wine and put two glasses on the kitchen table.

  “From the state liquor store,” she said. “Imagine such a thing! I think it is so that they can keep track of how much
and what we are drinking. Now you two sit down. In the kitchen, I am a wild woman. A maniac. Watch out.”

  With that, she began to fly about, chopping, stirring, frying. “After dinner we will phone Marianna,” she said. “When it is seven here, I think, is nine in India.”

  Lucia reached up and took down one of several large apothecary jars full of what appeared to be dried lizards. “My mushrooms,” she said. “My beauties. I could kiss each one. This has been a fabulous year. Tonight with the chicken I will put in maybe eight kinds of mushrooms I find in the woods this spring.”

  “Do you…know a lot about mushrooms?” I couldn’t hide the tremor in my voice.

  Lucia laughed. “Nelson has eaten my mushrooms for years, and he is alive to tell the tale. Don’t worry, every mushroom I pick, I send a spore print to Washington for analysis. No one knows you can do this, but it is the only safe way. I have a good friend, he finds mushrooms all his life, last spring he eats something he has been picking for years, he barely has time to call Poison Control before he loses all sensation in his—”

  “I’ve got an idea,” said Nelson. “We feed Polly first and then watch her for twenty-four hours to see if she makes it.”

  It was the sort of intimate teasing that married couples indulge in, and I might have been encouraged that Nelson was choosing to do it if I hadn’t suspected that they were capable of sitting at the table, discussing Nelson’s research, Lucia’s art, and occasionally checking to see if I had survived the dinner. It crossed my mind that if I did die from mushroom poisoning, I would at least be spared going into town and phoning Marianna.