Fall on Your Knees (67 page)

Oh Rose, it’s not enough until I have all of you inside me, then give you back to the world fresh and new from my belly. She just said softly, “Oh,” for the longest time.

Imagine, in an alley. It’s not very romantic. But somehow it was. Terribly.

Crude but compelling.

The sign says “Lebanon”. Could I really have slept so long? Lily wonders.

“I said
out!”

Lily emerges from the gloom of the boxcar and the signalman is remorseful.

“Need some help there?”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Where you going, missy?”

“New York City.”

“Well you’re a bit off course in that case, ain’t ya.”

“I’m in Lebanon. Where’s New York?”

“Eighty or so miles back the way you come, to Portland then turn right, heh heh — hey, where you going?”

“Back.”

“You can’t walk.”

“Yes I can, don’t worry.”

Two hours later:

“Hello again, missy.”

“Hello sir. I forgot my mother’s diary on the train.”

He hand-pumps them over the rails twelve miles to the lumberyards. He climbs into twenty-nine boxcars.

“This it?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Bye.”

“Here.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t wait too long to eat it, there’s mayo in it.”

“Don’t worry.”

September 6 —
Music class every morning. Mecca every night. It’s clear which Rose is in disguise.

Sat. — 7 —
Yesterday Jeanne leaned in close to me and said, “You remind me of someone, peaches.”

I bit, I said, “Really, Jeanne? Who?”

And she said with her crooked smile that is, apparently, worth paying for, “Me.”

I didn’t say anything. She took a big drag off her fag, held it in, then exhaled. “I’ll bet your Daddy’s just crazy about you.”

I’ve taken to saying a Hail Mary before I come into the apartment.

Mon — 9 —
You have never seen two such professionals. The Kaiser is delighted with my progress. Sometimes he just says to me, “Sing,” and to Rose, “Miss Lacroix, play if you please.” And sits back. How the mighty have mellowed. We’re just gently sculling till November.

I do sometimes get a jolting sensation — no sooner do I take leave of Rose in the afternoon in her ribbons and bows and dead composers, than I meet my lover in the snazzy suit for a night of jazz and jive. We tried it. It’s made from a plant. Lovely aroma. Bought it from the Chinaman. Makes you lose time, makes you hear each note of music from every direction at once. Makes you make love slowly. But I haven’t bought any more because I don’t want my awake senses dulled. If all music is fascinating, then none is. And there’s plenty of time to slow down, there’s the whole rest of our lives.

For three nights we didn’t go to Mecca. I went to Rose’s place and waited while she doctored her mother and changed clothes. (I’ve given her the sash from my new green dress. I wound it round her charcoal hat to remind her. She said she doesn’t require reminding. Then she kissed me in that way that makes me hate time.) We dined and went out. We can’t stay at her place because of Jeanne’s “company”. We passed one of her gentlemen on the stairs the second night. An older light brown man with a paunch and a monocle. “He runs the credit union,” Rose told me. I guess Jeanne does pretty well. Covers her doctor bills, anyhow. Enough men will pay for a blonde princess even if she’s washed up and strung out.

It’s not her job that bothers me, it’s her. What I get from Jeanne is a big echo. Where is she really? She still hasn’t said a word about having seen us. I’m used to being there now when Rose gives her her shot. That’s all she cares about. She still cooks and sets the table for three every night, even though she is always horizontal by suppertime — come to think of it, I have never seen her eat. And I’m used to her sleazy stuck-up manner. The other evening she drawled at me, “I’m a Burgess, you know — I don’t know if Rosie told you — one of the Long Island Burgesses. My father was George Morecombe Burgess.”

And I drawled back, “Oh really. I’m a Piper, one of the Cape Breton Island Pipers. Perhaps you’ve heard of my father, James.”

Her smile is now more sneer than leer, which is how I know she respects me somewhat. She plays cat and mouse: “Kathleen, dear, don’t you have a young man waiting for you in torment somewhere?” And after a few more drinks, “Beware the dark fruit, darling. He’ll leave you high, oh so high, but dry, baby, to the bone.”

How am I different from Jeanne? She is addicted to morphine. I am addicted to Rose. A rose is not a poppy. That is how I am different from Jeanne.

Something happened after Boston. Lily kept to the highway with the water blinking on her left, and all was well until she noticed water on both sides. Then there was no more land. “Is this Manhattan?” It took a while before someone would answer her. A boy whipped a handful of sand and shells, “Fuckin moron.” A clutch of ringletted pre-debs giggled behind their hands and ran away holding their noses. A long open automobile whizzed by.

The sea was very pretty here, so Lily sat down on a wharf to read and wait until things became clear. A lobster fisherman told her where she was and gave her a juicy claw out of his cauldron.

“The water’s so blue,” she said.

“Is this your first time seeing the ocean?”

“No. But my ocean is grey and green.”

“Where you from?”

“Canada.”

“Oh yeah? I have a cousin in Vancouver, maybe you know her.”

“Maybe I do.”

Our first three nights after that first night: We stroll to Central Park. A place near the Pond. Rose brings a blanket and I bring choke-cherry wine. There’s a thicket that you enter like a rabbit. You crawl for ten feet or so, then you can stand up and see the stars. And only the stars can see you back. We spread the blanket, then we always share a glass of wine before we touch. I thought I would get calmer, surer, but each time we come close I feel almost sick at first. As though each time vibrates with the times before. I feel a terrible sorrow coming up my throat, I don’t know why. And it can only be consoled against the length of her body. Lying down with her for the first time — all the pain I didn’t know I had, till at her touch it disappeared like smoke. Is this what purgatory feels like? To burn painlessly? If so, why isn’t it called heaven?

When my fingers slide against beautiful Rose, when they swell her to a sweet unfolding and she puffs out like a sail at my every breath, when they glisten into her and disappear, it’s as though she were a soldier fallen in the field getting healed by me, her head to one side. I take off her uniform and she can finally come home. You don’t know how beautiful she is. Her hair finally released, black foam. Her skin, nocturnal waters worshipped by the moon, her white lover. I fold her clothes carefully and dress her with my tongue, my hands, my wet centre, the true balm of Gilead. Did you know it closes wounds and opens hearts?

My pale green silk dress is what they’d call an undergarment at home. I wear only it. It slips like skin and conforms to the slightest caress like the shirt of a Mongol warrior meant to smooth the piercing arrow’s exit from the wound. It casts an arboreal shade when I kneel above Rose and invite her to refresh herself in this cool glade. “Look,” I say. And I can feel the caress of her eyes. “Touch me.” And it’s the closest thing to having no skin. “Kiss me.” She guides my hips, lowering me to her lips as though to sip from a legendary flask. The more you drink the fuller it gets.

Rose was a bit shocked at first. But I have discovered something about modest people. They’re just waiting for the call. Then they are the first over the wall and into the temple. When she’s inside me I sometimes think of her fingers on the piano. Wicked, I know, but I can’t help it. She is endowed with a span of a tenth. I sometimes sing a line of
Traviata
between her thighs, which scandalizes her because she is as serious about sex as she is about music. Reverent.

When will she discover that I am from a lesser race of immortals? But the high deities have always needed pixies to persuade them down to earth. When she no longer needs an intermediary, will she still love me?

“I love you, Rose.”

“I love you, I love you, love you.”

“Who?”

“Kathleen.”

Then we bathe in the Pond.

When I arrived home on the third night — morning actually — Giles was up already with the coffee perking. I thought, oh no, this is it. She was in her heavy brocade dressing-gown with the Louis IV sheep frolicking — somewhere there is a parlour with a naked armchair. But really, what am I to make of her? She put the marmalade on the table and said wispily, “Kathleen, dear, I’d really rather you brought your friend home nights.”

I’m acting cocky here on paper but I nearly spewed. She said, “I know you two have formed an attachment and naturally friends lose track of time. There just seems to be so much to talk about.”

My throat closed, I couldn’t swallow the coffee. How much does she know? Does she imagine that we talk Verdi till dawn? That we plan to enter the convent together? But I said, “Thank you. It would be nice if Rose could spend some time here. Her home situation is not the most wholesome.”

“Poor thing. She’s welcome to stay and use the piano too, any time.”

Jesus Murphy! “Gosh,” I said, “that’s awfully generous of you, Giles.”

“No, Kathleen. It’s selfish.” She twinkled at me, sipped her coffee and crinkled the newspaper. I decided not to look a gift-horse in the mouth.