Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (76 page)

Smarter and better put together? That wasn't me. That was Zoë Conway, who became a state prosecutor. Of course my news is out of date, but I think that if she had died I would have heard about it. You invited me to the dance, but I turned you down. We all gossiped about it.

And Zoë disinvited me at the last minute, so I never—

What changed you? Because, now that I think about it, you actually are a ladykiller, a very successful one. You know how to keep my interest. You don't need me the way you used to—

Because I'm dying.

No, that's not all of it.

Well, I've had a lot of pussy in my time. That gave me confidence. And I've been good at pleasuring women, which is the most important thing.

What would you like to do with me right now? Not that I'd let you.

First I'd strip off that winding-sheet of yours—

Why do you keep calling it that? It's my favorite leopard print dress—

And I'd very carefully brush the ants and dirt off your bones. I'd get in between your ribs and clean with a child's toothbrush. And while I did that, I'd be singing to you, songs from when we were seventeen. I'd clean out your eyesockets with cotton swabs, very very gently, in case there's anything left, and I'd comb your hair—you still have some. I'd comb it straight down your backbone. I'd brush your teeth for you, and I'd kiss
you where you used to have a mouth. I'd scour out your pelvis with sweetgrass and lavender oil. Then I'd start kissing you there. I'd lick your bones right
there.
And afterward I'd go to a jeweler and buy a ring that would fit your pretty skeleton-hand, Victoria . . .

At least you can make me laugh. Honestly, I don't find much to laugh about when you're gone.

Do you wish I stayed longer?

Actually, your visits make me guilty. You don't have much time left, and I'm not giving you anything.

Yes you are.

Do you love me?

I'll take a leaf out of your book, and say:
I'm not going to tell you.

I don't love you at all. But I'm undeniably attracted to you.

Because I'm alive, I guess.

That's much of it.

Would you ever choose to live with me? I mean, if you couldn't go home—

You do love to make up stories, don't you?

So do you, darling! This morning I was rereading one of your old letters—

I told you to destroy them!

Well, I didn't, because I was in love with you—

But I
told you
!

I never promised.

Yes you did.

Anyhow, you wrote it exactly a week before my seventeenth birthday (you were always conscientious about dating them, Victoria). You had dreamed you had sleepwalked to the shower, and later you wondered if you had really dreamed it or—

Did you ever show my letters to anybody?

No.

Swear it.

I swear. But what does it matter to you?

Well, it does. It may seem stupid to you—

What's the longest you've cried?

Here? Sometimes I've cried for a year or two straight. But I'm enjoying your visits now, even if I occasionally get irritated.

Thank you.

By the way, do you have a best friend?

He's dead.

Then I might have met him.

No, he's not at the cemetery.

What's his name?

Luke.

Of course I don't know him. Why is he your best friend?

For years he was almost like my older brother. He taught me how to organize weight in my backpack. Whenever anything went wrong in my house, he could usually fix it or tell me how to. There were certain things he didn't deal with, like leaky roofs or doors out of true. He did a lot for me. When my father was alive, he and my father used to do things for me . . .

It's good to be sad, said Victoria. That makes you more like me.

Gazing up at the constellated sky, he felt as if he were about to sink into black water which was snowed with cattail-down. It was getting dark earlier nowadays. Carefully he inquired: Can I love you except by being sad about you?

I'll consider that.

Luke was very wise. He said so many things that I always remember. For instance:
Don't keep making the same mistake. Make a different mistake.
And I could talk to him about my love life. When I was younger I used to ask him for advice, and then when he was suffering with Stephanie I wanted to give him advice, just because I loved him and that was something I could give, and sometimes it helped him, or her, but he was more his own man than I was. Now I think I'm becoming more my own man; I don't know why—

Because you're dying.

Into his mind came Luke's assertion that dying could become freedom. Even while he felt relatively well, Luke had begun giving up ever more experiences and aspirations as well as things, in order to die better. But he and Stephanie never had children. That must have made it easier. Victoria had fought death, for her children's sake.

Luke, to whom trust came hard, had gentled toward him over the years, but until the end, so it seemed, could not help but suspect even this close friend of selfish motives. If he made a date with Luke for lunch, Luke would pick him up at the station—then let fall some grim remark which implied that Luke knew very well that his friend was using him to get a ride. Or he might give Luke a book he had read and liked, in which case Luke might say that it must not have been a good book, or the moon-dreamer would have kept it. As for him to whom Luke had given so many rides over the years, he himself had surely been negligent or ungrateful on occasion; he and Luke had hurt each other every now and then, mostly by saying no. Of the two of them, Luke was more generous with his capabilities, having more; while the moon-dreamer more easily gave away money and possessions to others. What Luke did for his wife—the repaired washing machine and balanced checkbook—often went unnoticed by her; what he blamed her for were her temper and her flightiness. It must have been his cancer which inspired or compelled him into trusting Stephanie. About the cancer Luke once said: What I hate more than anything is throwing up. That must be the reason I got this disease, so that I have to throw up over and over again.— And so it might be argued that the illness refined or at least steeled him, or at least that he could have made a virtue out of his suffering. Not Victoria!

Why are you quiet? Do you need to go?

Victoria, tell me how long I have to live.

I already said I wouldn't.

But you know?

Of course I do.

If I had a month, I'd live differently than if I had three, or—

And then you'd want to know whether I love you, and what I will and won't do, and which sort of
future
we'd have, when I've already told you how I feel about futures. That was another reason I left you. You demanded certainty from me. What seventeen-year-old girl can give that?

But you married at twenty-one. Are you glad that you did?

I'm so grateful that I had children.

When we were seventeen, you told me that you might marry for money. You were laughing when you said it—

If I'd lived to be forty I might have had an affair. Maybe with you. But I never would have married you.

Why not?

Because nobody changes very much, so what I disliked in you would have remained. Besides, you wouldn't have loved me as much as you did before. It's refreshing to be adored. You'd stop doing that if you knew me—

I don't adore you now.

Well, that's not very nice! I'm going now.

Turning away from him, Victoria sank under the grass. The last he saw of her was her beautiful blonde hair.

He had forgotten that she had sent him more than one photograph. As he sat in his study that afternoon, too unwell to consider going to the cemetery, he withdrew a letter from his father's desk; on the back of the envelope she had written
amusing enclosures
and
Inside are pictures!!!!! Lions + tigers, monkeys, cats and zebras
and she had drawn a heart dripping two drops and then she had written:
If I wrote you in French could you understand it?

For a time he held the letter in his hand, smiling. How many pictures had she sent him, after all? (The more he read, the more she was winning him over.)

She was at the zoo, and her lovely hair was blowing. Perhaps her sister, who might still be alive, and if so perhaps a grandmother, had clicked the shutter. She had lowered her head and closed her eyes when she smiled. In a high-necked white blouse and a paisley skirt, she stood before a giraffe, which cocked its head at her, its neck at a rigid near-horizontal, while she held a small blue balloon at her left breast, clasping her pretty long fingers together across her waist, the string wound around them. This photograph had not decayed so far into the red as the other; the sky was purple, the phony rocks reddish, the animal perhaps a bit more red than brown, but Victoria had barely begun to flush; her hands remained as fair as ever, and her blonde hair scarcely intimated red. He turned it over. On the back she had written that she loved him.

My mother is fine—no complications, no cancer. Help me. I know you are. Love me.

Victoria,
he cried out,
help me; love me!

No one answered.

There remained to him this sweet world of unread letters; perhaps it was better to guard them as if they were the future, rereading only a few; they were his treasures, or possibly the verdict against him. The true horror, much worse than that of the death which already drooled at his shoulder, was the fact of who he had been at seventeen. The reason he had clung like death to Victoria was that hardly anyone else would come near him! In high school he finally began to have friends, for the hormonal allurements at puberty can be so irresistible that we learn to disguise our faults in hopes of losing later rather than sooner; the shy girl parts her hair over what her mother helpfully assures her is the uglier side of her face; the farmboy takes more showers, and the boy who loved Victoria learned to hide his kinship to ghouls, skeletons and rotting corpses; in his summer nightmares the graves flipped round like lazy susans to fling death in his face! He always woke up smelling it. Years later, when he witnessed death without dreaming, he found that it smelled quite different—more vomity when fresh, more like garbage later on—but the death in his dreams intermittently continued to exude a sulphurous vileness, perhaps because he had once believed in hell, not to mention his own badness; certainly something about him was wrong, and when he was young his schoolmates would tear at him in a frenzy, children scratching at their common scab; he never should have existed at all! Later he disguised this fact; hence women loved him. Was it because he focused the lens of his own so-called love upon pleasuring them, so that, lost to his expert ministrations, they mistook procedure for soul? Give the devil credit; he'd had a knack; even Victoria, his first patient, appeared to enjoy the operation as far as it went. Better yet, he performed it sincerely. But certain natures are born in the shadow. In his first grade art class he was already drawing pictures of lightning-storms, carefully coloring the sky black and purple. Why are some people like that? I repeat: He should never have seen the sunlight. Nor did he mean to see it. When Luke and Raymond departed
on that final hike, the reason that the moon-gazer stayed behind was that he'd spoil everything otherwise; he'd never been able to live among others; he slimed over everything he touched! No wonder Victoria fled him! What he should have done upon receipt of his fatal diagnosis was to remember all this, in order to begin to answer the question: Why am I this way? Some creatures are shadow-born, yes, but
why
? And who are they? Were death oblivion and could he rush into it, like a child darting under the bedclothes at night before the monsters come, then there might be scant interest in hunting this subject, but Victoria's postmortem consciousness unfortunately proved that avoiding or denying one's identity is not so easy. Once upon a time there had been that witch who loved him, the one who mixed green potions; why hadn't he loved
her
? She knew who he was (he supposed), and even liked it. But Victoria, who rather than being noble was possessed by a selfishness as ordinary, healthy and therefore as good as the movements of her bowels, intuited who he was and knew that she had to get away. He said to himself: To begin to see myself I must diagram the movements of the living ones whom I repel. Death had struck Victoria, shattering her skull and cramming fistfuls of worms inside her brainpan. She had sought to run from death, which had begun with a kiss, sucking those round pale breasts with which he had played in his seventeenth summer, then insinuated itself within the glands, clawing into her armpits, nibbling here and there until her strong young bones were breached—and she screamed, wept, vomited, perhaps prayed or pretended to for the sake of those children to whom she clung as he once had to her; she would have done anything to be selfish and move her bowels a little longer. Now her bowels pulsed with moonlight; to him she was more beautiful than ever. But she had gone over
there,
to this other man whom she had married. And when he was a child, the other boys, punching him a few times, had then kicked him into his place, which was westward of here, where the moon rose. Had he stayed hidden on the lunar surface (or at least concealed between broken marble urns), no one would have troubled about him—but perhaps the moon was another of those localities which were too good for him. Waiting for the school bus, in one of those winters before Victoria wrote her first note to him, he stood by himself, and then a girl in a ski parka grappled him, having fun, bullying him but also being sexual with
him, and of course that excited him; he didn't know how boldly to grapple her back; it lasted but a moment, and then a strong, healthy boy, who hated cancer, came and punched him in the face. He had never told Victoria, who felt his unwholesomeness anyhow, sure enough. The fact that he later learned to love himself because women loved him is evidence that evil things need not find trouble in continuing to exist.— But
why
was he evil? It kept coming back to that. Had he asked the other children, and had they been able to articulate their loathing, they might have said: Because you're
different.
— And why was he different? Why does the rat seek out putrescent flesh? Rats aren't evil, are they?