by Marvin Kaye
attached to her. Attached very closely.
Is this her shadow, or is she the white shadow of it!
9
Having sat for ten minutes, no longer writing, holding her pen upright, Yse
sighs, and drops it, like something unpleasant, dank, or sticky.
The story's erotographic motif, at first stimulating, had become, as it must,
repulsive. Disgusting her—also as it should.
And the murder of Vonderjan, presented deliberately almost as an afterthought,
(stifled under the slight white pillar of his succubus wife).
Aloud, Yse says almost angrily, "Now surely I've used him up. All up. All
over. Per Laszd, I can't do another thing with you or to you. But then, you've used
me up, too, yes you did, you have, even though you've never been near me.
Mutual annihilation. That Yse is over with."
Then Yse rises, leaving the manuscript, and goes to make tea. But her
generator, since the party, (when the music machine had been hooked into it by
that madman, Carr) is skittish. The stove won't work. She leaves it, and pours
instead a warm soda from the now improperly working fridge.
It is nighttime, or morning, about three-fifty A.M.
Yse switches on her small TV, which works on a solar battery and obliges.
And there, on the first of the fifteen mainland (upper city) channels, is he—is
Per Laszd. Not in his persona of dead trampled Gregers Vonderjan, but that of his
own dangerous self.
She stands on the floor, dumbfounded, yet not, not really. Of course, who else
would come before her at this hour.
He looks well, healthy and tanned. He's even shed some weight.
It seems to be a talk show, something normally Yse would avoid—they bore
her. And the revelation of those she sometimes admires as overordinary or
distasteful, disillusions and frustrates her.
But him she has always watched, on a screen, across a room when able, or in
her own head. Him, she knows. He could not disillusion her, or put her off.
And tonight, there is something new. The talk has veered round to the other
three guests—to whom she pays no attention—and so to music. And now the TV
show's host is asking Per Laszd to use the piano, that grande piano over there.
Per Laszd gets up and walks over to this studio piano, looking, Yse thinks,
faintly irritated, because obviously this has been sprung on him and is not what he
is about, or at least not publicly, but he will do it from a good showman's
common sense.
He plays well, some melody Yse knows, a popular song she can't place. He
improvises, his large hands and strong fingers jumping sure and finely trained
about the keyboard. Just the one short piece, concluded with a sarcastic flourish,
after which he stands up again. The audience, delighted by any novelty, applauds
madly, while the host and other guests are all calling encore! (more! more!
Again—don't stop). But Laszd is not manipulable, not truly. Gracious yet
immovable, he returns to his seat. And after that a pretty girl with an unimportant
voice comes on to sing, and then the show is done.
Yse finds herself enraged. She switches off the set, and slams down the tepid
soda. She paces this end of her loft. While by the doors, forty feet away, the
piano, dredged from the Sound, still stands, balanced on its forefeet and its phallic
tail, hung in shade and shadow. It has been here more than a month. It's nearly
invisible.
So why this now? This TV stunt put on by Fate? Why show her this, now? As
if to congratulate her, giving her a horrible mean little failed-runner's-up patronizing
nonprize. Per Laszd can play the piano.
Damn Per Laszd.
She is sick of him. Perhaps in every sense. But of course, she still wants him.
Always will.
And what now?
She will never sleep. It's too late or early to go out.
She circles back to her writing, looks at it, sits, touches the page. But why
bother to write anymore?
Vonderjan was like the enchanter Prospero, in Shakespeare's Tempest, shut up
there on his sorcerous Island, infested with sprites and elementals. Prospero, too,
kept close a strange young woman, who in the magician's case had been his own
daughter. But then arrived a shipwrecked prince out of the sea, to take the
responsibility off Prospero's hands.
(Per's hands on the piano keys. Playing them. A wonderful amateur, all so
facile, no trouble at all. He is married, and has been for twelve years. Yse has
always known this.)
Far out on the Sound, a boat moos eerily.
Though she has frequently heard such a thing, Yse starts.
Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises.
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
She can no longer smell the perfume, like night-blooming vines. When did that
stop? (Don't stop.)
Melted into air, into thin air…
10. Passover
They had roped the hut house round, outside and in, with their amulets and
charms. There were coloured feathers and dried grasses, cogs of wood roughcarved, bones and sprinkles of salt and rum, and of blood, as in the Communion.
When they reached the door, she on her bare, navy blue feet, Jeanjacques felt all
the forest press at their backs. And inside the hut, the silver-ringed eyes, staring in
affright like the staring stars. But presently her people let her in, and let him in as
well, without argument. And he thought of the houses of the Chosen in Egypt,
their lintels marked by blood, to show the Angel of Death he must pass by.
He, as she did, sat down on the earth floor. (He noted the earth floor, and the
contrasting wooden bed, with its elaborate posts. And the two shrines, one to the
Virgin, and one to another female deity.)
Nothing was said beyond a scurry of whispered words in the patois. There
were thirty other people crammed in the house, with a creche of chickens and two
goats. Fear smelled thick and hot, but there was something else, some vital
possibility of courage and cohesion. They clung together soul to soul, their bodies
only barely brushing, and Jeanjacques was glad to be in their midst, and when the
fat woman came and gave him a gourd of liquor, he shed tears, and she patted his
head, calming him a little, like a dog hiding under its mistress's chair.
In the end he must have slept. He saw someone looking at him, the pale icy
eyes blue as murder.
Waking with a start, he found everyone and thing in the hut tense and
compressed, listening, as something circled round outside. Then it snorted and
blew against the wall of the hut house, and all the interior stars of eyes flashed with
their terror. And Jeanjacques felt his heart clamp onto the side of his body, as if
afraid to fall.
Even so, he knew what it was, and when all at once it retreated and galloped
away on its shod hoofs, he said quietly, "His horse."
But no one answered him, or took any notice of what he had said, and
Jeanjacques discovered himself thinking, After all, it might take that form, a white
horse. Or she might be riding on the white horse.
He began to ponder the way he must go in the morning, descending towards
the bay. He should reach the sea well in advance of
nightfall. The ship would
come back, today or tomorrow. Soon. And there were the old buildings, on the
beach, where he could make a shelter. He could even jump into the sea and swim
out. There was a little reef, and rocks.
It had come from the sea, and would avoid going back to the sea, surely, at
least for some while.
He knew it was not interested in him, knew that almost certainly it would not
approach him with any purpose. But he could not bear to see it. That was the
thing. And it seemed to him the people of the Island, and in the hut, even the
chickens, the goats, and elsewhere the birds and fauna, felt as he did. They did not
want to see it, even glimpse it. If the fabric of this world were torn open in one
place on a black gaping hole of infinite darkness, you hid your eyes, you went far
away.
After that, he started to notice bundles of possessions stacked up in corners.
He realized not he alone would be going down the Island to the sea.
Dreaming again, he beheld animals swimming in waves away from shore, and
birds flying away, as if from a zone of earthquake, or the presage of some
volcanic eruption.
Nanetta nudged him.
"Will you take me to St Paul's Island?"
"Yes."
"I have a sister there."
He had been here on a clerk's errand. He thought, ridiculously, Now I won't be
paid. And he was glad at this wince of anxious annoyance. Its normalcy and
reason.
11
Per Laszd played Bach very well, with just the right detached, solemn
cheerfulness.
It was what she would have expected him to play. Something like this. Less so
the snatch of a popular tune he had offered the talk show audience so flippantly.
(But a piano does what you want, makes the sounds you make it give—even true,
she thinks, should you make a mistake—for then that is what it gives you. Your
mistake.)
As Yse raised her eyes, she saw across the dim sphere of her loft, still
wrapped in the last flimsy paper of night, a lamp stood glowing by the piano, both
of whose lids were raised. Her stomach jolted and the pain of shock rushed
through her body.
" Lucius—?"
He was the only other who held a key to her loft. She trusted Lucius, who
anyway had never used the key, except once, when she was gone for a week, to
enter and water her (dying) plants, and fill her (then operable) refrigerator with
croissants, mangoes, and white wine.
And Lucius didn't play the piano. He had told her, once. His amouretta, as he
called it, was the drum.
Besides, the piano player had not reacted when she called, not ceased his
performance. Not until he brought the twinkling phrases to their finish.
Then the large hands stepped back off the keys, he pushed away the chair he
must have carried there, and stood up.
The raised carapace of the piano's hind lid still obscured him, all but that flame
of light which veered across the shining pallor of his hair.
Yse had got to her feet. She felt incredibly young, light as thin air. The thick
silk of her hair brushed round her face, her shoulders, and she pulled in her flat
stomach and raised her head on its long throat. She was frightened by the
excitement in herself, and excited by the fear. She wasn't dreaming. She had
always known, when she dreamed of him.
And there was no warning voice, because long ago she had left all such
redundant noises behind.
Per Laszd walked around the piano. "Hallo, Yse," he said.
She said nothing. Perhaps could not speak. There seemed no point. She had
said so much.
But "Here I am," he said.
There he was.
There was no doubt at all. The low lamp flung up against him. He wore the
loose dark suit he had put on for the TV program, as if he had come straight here
from the studio. He dwarfed everything in the loft.
"Why?" she said, after all.
She, too, was entitled to be flippant, surely. "Why? Don't you know? You
brought me here." He smiled. "Don't you love me anymore?" He was wooing her.
She glanced around her, made herself see everything as she had left it, the
washed plate and glass by the sink, the soda can on the table, her manuscript lying
there, and the pen. Beyond an angle of a wall, a corridor to other rooms.
And below the floor, barracuda swimming through the girders of a flooded
building.
But the thin air sparkled as if full of champagne. "Well, Yse," he said again,
"here I am."
"But you are not you."
"You don't say. Can you be certain? How am I different?"
"You're what I've made, and conjured up."
"I thought it was," he said, in his dry, amused voice she had never forgotten,
"more personal than that."
" He is somewhere miles off. In another country."
"This is another country," he said, "to me." She liked it, this breathless fencing
with him. Liked his persuading her. Don't stop.
The piano had not been able to open—or be opened—until he—or she—was
ready. (Foreplay.) And out of the piano came her demon. What was he? What?
She didn't care. If it were not him, yet it was, him. So she said, archly, "And
your wife?"
"As you see, she had another engagement."
"With you, there. Wherever you are."
"Let me tell you," he said, "why I've called here."
There was no break in the transmission of this scene, she saw him walk away
from the piano, start across the floor, and she did the same. Then they were near
the window-doors. He was standing over her. He was vast, overpowering,
beautiful. More beautiful, now she could see the strands of his hair, the pores of
his skin, a hundred tiniest imperfections—and the whole exquisite manufacture of
a human thing, so close. And she was rational enough to analyse all this, and his
beauty, and his power over her; or pedantic enough. He smelled wonderful to her
as well, more than his clean fitness and his masculinity, or any expensive cosmetic
he had used (for her?). It was the scent discernible only by a lover, caused by her
chemistry, not his. Unless she had made him want her, too.
But of course he wanted her. She could see it in his eyes, their blue view bent
only on her.
If he might have seemed old to an Antoinelle of barely sixteen, to Yse this man
was simply her peer. And yet, too, he was like his younger self, clad again in that
searing charisma which had later lessened, or changed its course.
He took her hand, picked it up. Toyed with her hand as Vonderjan had done
with the hand of the girl Yse had permitted to destroy him.
"I'm here for you," he said.
"But I don't know you."
"Backwards," he said. "You've made it your business. You've bid for me," he
said, "and you've got me."
"No," she said, "no, no, I haven't."
"Let me show you."
She had known of that almost occult quality. With what he wanted in the sexual
way, he could communicate some telepathic echo of his desires. As his mouth
covered and clasped hers, this delirium was what she felt, combining with her
own.
She had always known his kiss
es would be like this, the ground flying off from
her feet, swept up and held only by him in the midst of a spinning void, where she
became part of him and wanted nothing else, where she became what she had
always wanted… nothing.
To be nothing, borne by this flooding sea, no thought, no anchor, and no
chains.
So Antoinelle, as her vampire penetrated, drank, emptied, reformed her.
So Yse, in her vampire's arms.
It's how they make us feel.
"No," she murmurs, sinking deeper and deeper into his body, drowning as the
island will, one day (five years, twenty).
None of us escape, do we?
Dawn is often very short and ineffectual here, as if to recompense the dark for
those long sunsets we have.
Lucius, bringing his boat in to West Ridge from a night's fishing and drinking
out in the Sound, sees a light still burning up there, bright as the quick green dawn.
All Yse's blinds are up, showing the glass loft, translucent, like a jewel. Over the
terrace the snake-tree hangs its hair in the water and ribbons of apple green light
tremble through its coils.
Yse is there, just inside the wall of glass above the terrace, standing with a tall
heavyset man, whose hair is almost white.
He's kissing her, on and on, and then they draw apart, and still she holds on to
him, her head tilted back like a serpent's, bonelessly, staring up into his face.
From down in the channel between the lofts and towerettes, Lucius can't make
out the features of her lover. But then neither can he make out Yse's facial
features, only the tilt of her neck and the lush satin hair hanging down her back.
Lucius sits in the boat, not paddling now, watching. His eyes are still and
opaque.
"What you doing, girl?"
He knows perfectly well.
And then they turn back, the two of them, farther into the loft where the light
still burns, although the light of dawn has gone, leaving only a salty stormy dusk.
They will hardly make themselves separate from each other. They are together
again and again, as if growing into one another.
Lucius sees the piano, or that which had been a piano, has vanished from the
loft. And after that he sees how the light of the guttering lamp hits suddenly up,
like a striking cobra. And in the ray of the lamp, striking, the bulky figure of the
