AEgypt (56 page)

He struck out down the meadow toward where the goldenhaired child toiled upward. Pierce did not follow. His head too turned partway toward the Rose behind him, Ryder; and then thought better of it, and turned again to the Rosie before him.

"She's a little nutso,” Rosie said to Spofford.

They had taken hold of Sam together, Sam having tripped in the grasping weeds knee high to her and surrendered to despair. “Daddy's not going without you, kid,” Rosie said to her. “Don't worry."

Spofford, grinning, hoisted weeping Sam to his shoulders, from where she still reached out histrionically toward her distant father.

"Going for a balloon ride, huh, Sam?” Spofford asked.

"It's amazing to me,” Rosie said. “She can't think about anything else.
I'd
be scared shitless."

Spofford laughed aloud, and the boom of it stilled Sam on his shoulders. “Hey,” he said then. “I'm sorry about the game."

"Yeah, well.” Pierce Moffett, solemn on the hillside, raised a hand to her. “So what was this big scheme?” she said. “You said you had a scheme."

"It's about sheep,” Spofford said. “I'll tell you later. I talked to Boney. He likes it."

Pierce, hands in his pockets when she reached him, staring oddly at her, looked even more stunned than he had the other day. “Hi,” she said. “You never met my daughter Sam, did you? Samantha. Say hi, kid, aw don't start crying again."

Pierce stared up, at Sam aboard Spofford. Maybe stunned was his usual mode or mood: he looked like he had just awakened in a strange bed, and was wondering how he had got there. A pleasant bed, a strange room. It was appealing, sort of. “So,” she said. “We're going back tomorrow? To old Kraft's?"

Pierce only went on studying her, as though deaf; at last he said, “Yes. Yes. If I can."

"I talked to Boney more,” Rosie said. “You know he's very interested in your, what you're up to."

"He seemed to be,” Pierce said.

"He told me to tell you that you should apply for a grant. From the Rasmussen Foundation.” She felt suddenly absurd, a character from television, altering some innocent's life. “He said not to let you get away."

"Oh yes?"

"Really. There's money there."

Now from the balloon, restless on the hillside, tugging at its moorings, Mike called out to Rosie. Spofford was already carrying Mike's daughter to him.

"So listen,” Pierce said as they fell in behind. “Can I ask you a question?"

"Well okay.” Pierce seemed of a mind to hang back, looking up the hillside in something like wonder.

"The man in the balloon is your ex-husband?"

"Yes.” As of today, in fact; as of today.

"And the woman with him in the balloon is his present wife?” “Rose? No. Just a friend."

"Aha."

"I'm his once and only. So far."

The vast black balloon, much vaster when you could look up into the void within, bent like a punchable inflated clown in a breath of breeze; the best flying weather was already past. Spofford had handed Mike's daughter over to him; she seemed now, clutching Mike with arms and knees, less certain of her desires than she had been.

"Okay, okay,” called out the skipper, tanned and haggard, great glove on his hand like an old-time motorman's. He organized the bystanders, including tall Pierce and Spofford, into a ground crew, who were to lay hold of the basket, and hold it to earth until his command.

"Michael,” Rosie said. “Did you get your letter today?"

"Yes."

"I got mine. Just today."

"Okay, Rosie, okay."

With his gloved hand the balloonist tugged at the rope of his burner as at a steam whistle or a trolley's bell, but the noise produced was shocking, like a blow. The basket rose, turning, lighter than air, and in turning brought the woman Rose around to where Pierce stood ready to lay hold.

"Hi.” She had a bottle of beer in her hand despite the hour.

"Hello,” Pierce said. “Rose."

"I remembered you,” she said. “At last.” The awful roar came again, the balloon rose up, Pierce grabbed hold; the girl Rose closed her eyes and her mouth, as though embraced from behind, and opened them again when the noise ceased. “The party at the river,” she said. “The boat."

"Yes."

"The little flask."

"Right.” The brand name of this balloon was printed on a tag sewn to the canvas lip of the basket. It was a Raven. “Right."

"You were getting into sheep.” The icy shimmer had come over her eyes again: about that there could be no mistake. “Do you live here now?"

"In Blackbury Jambs.” The basket had begun to move outward across the field. Pierce and the rest went with it.

"I might see you there,” she said. “I'll be at the library a lot."

"Me too,” Pierce said.

"Oh yeah really?"

He was running now to keep up with the Raven; Rose looked down at him and laughed. “Okay,” she said.

"Bye,” Rosie Rasmussen called out. “Bye. Bye. Hold tight."

The ground crew one by one let go, the short ones first, and then the taller; for some reason they continued running after it as it rose. The burner roared. The laws of physics, like a joke, pulled the vast taut bag up out of reach.

"Okay,” Rosie said, out of breath. She looked at Pierce, and then up at Spofford, and Pierce saw in her look something like abandonment, a shadow of the panic of abandonment, or thought he did.

"I think I'll go find a coffee,” he said.

"A thing I've noticed,” Spofford said to Rosie as they both stood watching the balloon grow smaller. “A thing I've noticed is that a woman who loves a man often will call him by his whole name."

"What?"

"Everybody else in the world can call a guy Bob or Dave, but the woman who loves him calls him Robert. David. Michael.” He went on looking up.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"If you don't know,” Spofford said, “then very likely it don't mean a thing."

"Hm.” She crossed her arms before her. She could see that Samantha in the wicker basket would not lift her face from the crook of her father's neck; Mike tugged laughing at her curls.

"What letter was that,” Spofford said, “that you both got? Was that..."

"From the court,” Rosie said. “The divorce. It says it's registered now, and we have a
decree nisi
."

"Oh.” Spofford took a small step closer to her, and clasped his hands behind his back; he studied the sky. “Oh."

"Yep.”
A new beginning
, Allan had said in the kind and courtly letter he had sent with the notice, but Rosie had no sense of what it might be the beginning of. Not an ending but a beginning, or The Beginning, like
Bitten Apples
: THE BEGINNING strung teasingly across the blank bottom of the last page, the rest of her life.

For herself it wasn't so bad, she could just keep on somehow, she thought, Ship of the Desert, not knowing where she walked. But for the daughter she had so thoughtlessly taken charge of she could project only a gloomy and loveless imaginary future, cared for or rather tended by a woman who had forgotten, if she ever knew, what love was, what people wanted or needed in order to live; some kind of alien being, a Mother from Another World.

Maybe she could die. Before everyone found out, Spofford, Boney. Sam might cherish her memory then, remember the good times, never discovering her secret.

"A decree nisi,” Spofford said, as though tasting the phrase. “And is that, like, a final judgment?"

"Not exactly.” Without seeming to have moved, the balloon stood at a further remove already, shrinking with distance. “It's a decree nisi. Nisi is Latin. It means unless."

"Unless what?"

"Unless a lot of things. Unless nothing, really. It's just a formality. You have to wait six months, basically, to get the final papers. That's all."

"Reminds me of a story I read somewhere,” Spofford said. He went on studying the sky, but not as though seeing anything there. “Seems there's this guy about to have his head cut off by a king. He's been caught fooling around with the king's wife. And he says, Wait a minute: If you will spare my life for six months, in that time I can teach that horse of yours to talk. Guaranteed."

Maybe, Rosie thought, they should climb in the car, and chase the balloon. Maybe it would get lost, fall into the Blackbury. Never come back.

"King says—why not? You've got six months. And he locks the guy in the stable with the horse. This is actually a very old story. So the king's wife goes to him there and asks him, How come you made this crazy promise? You can't really do it, can you? And the guy answers, Hey: A lot of things could happen in six months. The king could get sick and die. He could change his mind. The horse could die.
I
could die. And maybe the horse..."

"Oh Christ,” Rosie said, and grabbed for Spofford's arm. For some reason of the air's the balloon had suddenly sunk sharply before the burner lifted it again. Rosie felt a black rush of anger at them, at their danger, at their distance from her. “Sorry,” she said to Spofford, suddenly aware of his patient waiting for her attention to turn his way. “Were you telling a story?"

"Don't matter,” he said, smiling down at her.

"Sorry,” she said, and tears gathered painfully in her throat. She wanted to tell him: that she was sorry, that she really wanted nothing more than to turn back the way she had come, but that there was no way back. Whatever it was that lay on the other side of this, and she could not even tell if anything at all lay on the other side, that was the only direction she could go in, and alone.

How far into the forest can you go? The old grade-school puzzler. The answer is: Half way. Then you start coming back out. But how would she know when she had gone halfway? Until she knew, each step was only farther: each step a beginning.

"Sorry,” she said again, and patted his big shoulder, and turned away.

It was actually simpler this way, Pierce supposed; no needless multiplication of entities. And yet for a long time thereafter he would go on feeling the presence of one other, at least one; someone not either of those two, or both, or one or the other with a different story. No recounting of the facts could ever quite erase her.

Mike's wife and Spofford's girlfriend: one. Mike's girlfriend and Pierce's boatmate: two. All the others were only the one or the other in a different aspect, morning and evening stars, full moon and crescent moon.

He must have been wrong, he saw, to think he had had intimation from Rosie, Rosie Rasmussen, Rosie Mucho, in Fellowes Kraft's bedroom, that he, that he and she. No. Wrong. That was only his own Adam, growing restive; a blind man, whose misperceptions Pierce would have to get used to correcting for.

What if, unwelcome, he had, he had. Spofford's woman, too (was that right? That was right). He felt a hot rush of comical shame, of guilt twice unwittingly avoided, and laughed suddenly aloud. If these people he had come to live among—these sensible and happy people, mild as the day and the meadow—were to go on fooling him that way, quick-change artists, then he was surely wrong to say to Spofford that he would soon come to the end of them.

Day was full, and hot. He found a coffee, and sat with it at a table by the refreshment stand, under a striped umbrella, and opened the
Soledades
that Spofford had returned to him.

The First Solitude. In the sweet flowery season. It began with a shipwreck, and ended with a marriage: like a lot of good romances, Pierce thought, like more than one of Shakespeare's.

Not his, though.

A kind of blow of awful wonder that this might really really be so was struck somewhere well within him. It was so. Slowly, carefully, he crossed his legs, and let the pages of
The Solitudes
fan closed.

Celibacy, though—even the more strict celibacy of the heart and the intentions which Pierce had enjoined on himself—didn't mean chastity, necessarily. Probably would not, he thought, not given the caucus race apparently proceeding in secret all around him here. He lifted his eyes. The whole flying field—all the craft that were fit, anyway—seemed to be aloft now; they stood at varying distances from him through the air, large globes and small, like a lesson about the third dimension. There, the figures within too small to be seen, was the black one, the Raven.

He would have to be very careful, that's all; knowing himself, knowing how he was.

There were other stories, anyhow, he thought. There was the one about the shipwrecked man, naked and with nothing, who makes his way by his wits and his readiness (maybe his magic helpers too) and after many adventures comes to be king of the kingless country into which he has come.

And then, at length, sets out again.

From far above him, from aboard the Raven, the things and people below had also come to have an illustrative look: that clean and toylike aspect they have when seen from planes, the model cars moving soundlessly, the lawns and houses tidy and artificial-seeming. Relativity. Rose Ryder looked down, hands resting lightly on the canvas-covered wicker, feet too resting lightly on the nothing between her and earth.

She had noticed Pierce walking away from where Rosie Mucho and Spofford still stood together, but could not see where he had gone. She thought she might wave, if she could see him looking up. No she would not.

Pierce Moffett, funny name, both sharp and soft at once.

Sam cried louder whenever the balloon's burner was fired, hooting into the crook of her father's neck; otherwise she was just rigid, and Mike couldn't get her to raise her head to look. “See the Center?” he said. “See where Daddy works? Aw Sam."

If ever
she
were to have a child, if ever she were to find herself pregnant, Rose had decided, she would never tell the father. He would never see the child, borne by her in secret; never know it existed. Rose imagined talking to the guy years later, the child's father, say at a restaurant table, chatting, idly, about the past; and the child elsewhere, at play, growing. In secret.

The aeronaut beside her fired his burner again; the noise of it struck Rose like a blow, causing something deep within her to vibrate with it. Earth withdrew further. According to the science of Climacterics, whose method Rose had applied to her own life, this blue day was the first of her new Up Passage Year, heading for the plateau of twenty-eight: and despite Mike's warnings that Climacterics wasn't prophecy, she was sure sure sure that this was going to be a good year for her. Change for the better. She could feel it, like the shocking certainty of the burner's firing, at the root of her being.