Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (72 page)

I understand, he said.

Don't call me back unless you want me. Otherwise it will hurt me too much. Do you promise?

I promise.

You'll use it for some other girl, I know. You don't care about me.

Of course I care about you. I love you—

Then marry me.

No.

Please, why can't you love me?

I don't know.

Is it because I'm old?

You're not old.

What is it about me? wept the witch. Nobody loves me.

I love you.

Goodbye, said the witch, and walked away without looking back.

He lay awake in the darkness thinking about Victoria until it began to seem as if she were thinking about him. His stomach hurt. He rose and visited the bathroom. In the mirror by the medicine cabinet, he saw the specter of himself, unshaven, pale, grimacing and bewildered, with dark hollows under his eyes. How could this be him? He tried to smooth down his sweaty grey hair, swallowed two antacids and three pain pills, and returned to the darkness. Now he could nearly see Victoria standing over him in midair. She too was thinner than formerly, but no less beautiful. Her long hair, which he had remembered as sunny yellow, now appeared silver-white like lunar beams—not grey like his, but as young as ever. He was neither ecstatic nor afraid. A slow joy settled upon him, as if she were bending over him, tossing her hair upon his chest.

He knew that a wall of agony awaited him; he was already in its shadow. Above swam the pitted moon; below hung a pale gall alone in an oak. Of course this had little to do with Victoria, who might indeed distract him from his impending appointment with the wall, which for some reason he began to imagine as pertaining to an old-fashioned New England churchyard. He had never visited her grave, and in fact had scarcely wondered where she was buried. A quarter-hour on the computer sufficed for that: West Laurel Hill, near the edge of town. A map appeared on his screen. He zoomed in and in, until the site had minutely located itself.

The grand trees behind the entrance arch recalled a trifle of the verdancy which framed our great nineteenth-century mausoleums, supposedly forever. The hill which once looked down on forest, church, field and brook, warning off colored people and Jews, was now an uninspired slope of homogeneous late-twentieth-century slabs. The great stele of every rich man was ringed round—at a distance, to be sure—by granite footnotes to the poor, many of which flew miniature American flags. It was late afternoon. His stomach ached. A bird-shadow sped over the breathless grass, whose scent resembled cured tobacco. Each tombstone's zone of shade had contracted, hiding all but snout or whiskers under the cracked plinth. Now he passed through another wealthy old section.
Bemused by those dishonest arched doorways which looked from hillsides, as if the dead could see out and the living were invited within, he remembered his dream of his father's desk. Bypassing two marble cornucopias which had been gnawed at by automobile exhaust, he arrived at the new section containing Victoria's hill—more precisely, a modest mound whose crest alone had been sold by the time the twentieth century began. He sorted through the lesser bric-a-brac of modern tombs. In a thicket of stair-plinthed granite crosses, square slabs, gravestones which epitomized the negative spaces cut out of archways, he presently found a monument to Mrs. Emilia Woodruff, who lay
SAFE IN HER SAVIOUR'S ARMS
, and beside her rotted Victoria.

She had sent him another photograph; the baby, who sat in her lap, wearing a plaid skirt, must have been about ten months. What if he and Victoria had had children? He remembered her eidetically from the time when she had been his sweetheart. In this family photograph (already time-stained on the back—a blotchy scarlet like some rare lichen), she failed to resemble the girl he had loved. Her blonde hair had thinned a trifle and taken on a reddish tint—the color of the three children's hair. Although she had lost her baby fat, her face remained unwrinkled. Had she owned so many freckles at seventeen? She was smiling, and he liked her cheekbones very much. He assumed the person at whom she was smiling to be her husband. She and the children were sitting on the steps of a suburban house, evidently gazing into the sun, because she was squinting, as was the middle child, who was grimacing, clutching his toy spaceship. The baby was clenching her fat white little fists, staring sideways at the eldest boy, whose eyes were also narrowed against the light but was seeking in sweet submission to look into the photographer's eyes. Victoria's expression could have been read as happiness or compliance. She wore green. With the infant on her lap and the two others on either side of her, drawn in by her pleasantly pale hands, she concealed most of her body from him in this image, which no doubt she had chosen for just that reason; she had stepped out on her husband, but innocuously, careful to assert her familial self. Had the husband discovered who had received this photograph, he could at least have told himself that Victoria was not alone in it; moreover, her collar came up nearly to her chin. She wore white crescent earrings. No, she did look happy! She was the center
of a young, healthy and prosperous family. Now she was a skeleton, or ashes.
You will not be aware of this,
said another letter,
but it is the anniversary of my mastectomy and I am supposed to be happy that I survived and all of that.

Now with the mourners and other regular people gone, the front gate locked, the crows returned to the cemetery grass, watching him sidelong through their metallic ring-eyes. In case there might be a watchman, he hid inside the bell-cupola of the Bartlett mausoleum. The moon emerged suddenly, much as illnesses, realizations and heartbreaks so often do; so that it was now time to call up Victoria. How welcoming would she be? Sometimes in that last year he used to telephone Luke to see how well he was enduring, imagining that he was performing some virtuous duty, only to discover that Luke was bored with talking, or with him. Why shouldn't this be worse?

From his shirt pocket he withdrew the card through whose means she had first reestablished communication: distantly formal, and as haughty as ever—how he would have hated to be married to her!
You, for all I know, do not remember me. But, I think you remember at least a little.
That was Victoria for you—certain of her effect.
I've always felt bad for snubbing you so awfully. There were extenuating parenting and adolescent circumstances, but I was very horrible. I'm sure you would have been dumped (or vice versa) but later I learned to do it and accept it with some small degree of grace.
The next lay tidily folded in its envelope, with a cancelled twenty-nine-cent stamp of wild columbine:
Even though I have been thoroughly faithful in every possible way, Ryan, I think, lives in fear he'll lose me to something: a cause, a job, another man,
and I'll bet you liked it that way, didn't you, Victoria? The third was typed singlespaced and went on for several pages. She had confessed to calling him and then hanging up.
There are probably unresolved feelings for you that probably contributed to my feeling embarrassed. Please be flattered. I don't have feelings for many people—at least, not embarrassing feelings! I think it is ridiculous that there has to be closure for every relationship, friend, choice.
Yes, you would think that. No wonder you hated to die.
I can't tell if you mind questions. I think that in fact you do. I hope this reaches you before you are gone again to find your cigarette stand girl. How were the polar bears? The cold north, it sounds very appealing to an ice princess like me.

I dislike other people's children but they like me because I treat them well and feed them and bring goldfish to class.

The moon resembled a marble wreath when he poured the liquid onto Victoria's grave.

Her smile was a flower without scent. He felt more saddened than beguiled.

When he came home, he took his pain pills and pored over the moon map. Then he read two or three of her oldest letters. Playfully, the cancer flexed its fingers within his entrails. Taking up a pen, he began to write a reply, for practice, so that he would know what he ought to say to her.

The second time he visited, worn down by the sweaty brightness of his summer evenings, Victoria was sitting on her tomb, in one of those midlength skirts which had been in fashion when she was seventeen, with her white hands in her lap and her knees shining like moonlight. She had combed her hair just so over her shoulders; he had never seen her so formal. She gazed straight ahead.

You must have suffered so much, he said.

Don't speak of it.

He thought her way of expressing herself old-fashioned.— Do you mean it still hurts you? he said.

Actually, I guess it doesn't make any difference now.

The last time I called you, the nurse said you were too weak to talk. And then I didn't know for a long time. I was afraid to disturb your family. But I could imagine your physical agony, and the emotional agony of leaving your children behind—

She turned half away.

Has he remarried?

I think those questions are intrusive, said Victoria.

Which ones?

Any of them. I'm not asking you any.

I did notice that. Come to think of it, maybe you don't know if he—

You believe that I don't want to know anything about
you.

Or maybe that you know everything you care to. Can the dead read minds or see the future?

I've learned not to force any issue, said Victoria.

Why should that be such a secret? he demanded, which he would never have done at seventeen.

Surprisingly, she smiled at him.

He said: Next time I'll bring you flowers.

You're having a bad year, aren't you? said Victoria.

You could say that.

You think you used to love your life, but you never did.

How do you know?

I'm not in a position to complain about anything.

Not with a marble slab on your chest! he replied, meaning to be wry but merely achieving bitterness.

Sometimes it hurts me. It's the heaviest thing I ever had to bear.

I'm sorry. You're having a bad time, too. Should I get you out of there?

It wouldn't do any good. But flowers, flowers would be nice—

What kind would you like? I never got you any before, so I don't know.

I love moonflowers. But you won't be able to get them. You don't even know what they are.

At seventeen he would have been crushed or at least disconcerted. Now he barely noticed humiliations of this sort. Rising, he said: I'll bring you six white roses.

To go with my complexion?

And with your pretty winding-sheet.

I'm not wearing one.

Then don't wear anything.

Victoria's ghost giggled. He blew her a kiss and went away.

The disk on the lunar map was more or less the same tarnished yellow-silver-green as the key which had finally unlocked his desk drawer. Through the loupe which formerly belonged to Luke's jeweler friend Raymond, he observed the Fra Mauro formation where Apollo 14 landed.
The enlarged dots taught him nothing, for even the acutest seeing, if it is of the wrong sort, can mislead more perplexingly than sincere blindness. Do you believe me? Sit down at the cemetery's edge; send your eyes into the ground. Behind the raspberry leaves lies a fern between whose green ribs ivy manifests itself like grey-green shadow; between the ivy leaves hang teeth and fangs of crisp darkness scattered in air as if new-smitten from a monster's jawbone; but now, just when you begin to wonder whether you might in time perceive moonflowers within those black places, the noon sun intrudes, perching like a hot puppy upon your shoulder, panting light into your sweating ear, slobbering rays of brightness into the sweet black places, chasing away their darkness more quickly than your vision can follow; so that all that remains behind the ivy leaves is tea-brown dirt partitioned by grey stalks. Now you must go away until late afternoon; not until then can you ever hope to find moonflowers. So flee the sun; lay down the loupe; and may the eyeballs of desire be your jewels.

Below the Mare Tranquillitatis, just east of where Apollo 11 touched down, the narrower, canyonlike windings of the Mare Nectaris went south, petering out in a confusion of craters of which Fracastorius (latitude 20˚ S) was the most impressive; and in the cratered badlands to the northwest was Catharina, which allured him because it was a woman's name. Rheita, Vega, Biela, Messala, Agrippa, Caroline Herschel, Gemma Frisius and Hypatia kept her company. He had a fancy that after he died, if he really wished to, he could take Victoria to that region. Well, wasn't it all fancy at this stage? There was no reason he should prefer her over others, since for so long she'd scarcely visited his thoughts. Come to think of it, that might be the very reason he dwelled on her—because he
hadn't;
in which case the excavation had to do with self-knowledge. But what the dirt that rooted her had to do with the moon, that he certainly could not say.

Not wishing to show himself up by asking for moonflowers, he wandered discreetly into a florist's shop, glancing into the dimmest refrigerator cases in case some bluish-white or greenish-yellow blossoms might whisper. Before he had completed his escape, the darkhaired young
woman coaxed him back, promising that she could help him. Like many people who work with plants, she had unassuming ways, which must have reassured the shy and the sorrowful. He hesitated.

If you feel like describing the occasion, said the woman, carefully snipping off a rose stalk, I might be able to put something together for you.

Thank you, he said. But it's difficult to describe.

I understand, she said. Well, thank you for coming in.

Do you always have white roses in stock?

Almost always. Most of the time you don't need to call ahead.