Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (82 page)

Now he could never get enough of gazing down into the dark water, with its greenbladed stalks paling as they went deeper. He peered and studied as earnestly as if one could truly understand the difference between water and air, which one needed to comprehend in order to determine where the downgrowing reflections of reeds might truly be, if they were anywhere. He thought to spend hours, perhaps the rest of his life, watching these water-pictures, which lived more active lives than their tangible upward-growing shadows, for as the water trembled, or a fish-moon arose in their mist, they altered as their doubles could not.

Perhaps it was in this place beneath the flocks of crying geese that he should have sought Victoria all along, rather than in her grave; for wasn't
it merely the rotting part of her in the latter place, and isn't a ghost necessarily unclean by being chained to its carrion? A ghost, perhaps, might claim otherwise; but in any event, here amidst the paling reeds seemed as close as he could ever get to the lost bright part of her, which if it had been anything like his (not that he knew) must have died long before the rest.

He felt very ill now. When he breathed, the stinging air seemed to ripple around his nostrils, as if he were lying on the bottom of one of those sloughs where the sky puddled across the ground like mercury, and dark water were streaming across his face as he gazed upward, never to know who or what might be lying in any of those blackly bright pools around him.— He said to himself: I need to take stock here, and . . .

Unlike most of his other friends, Luke had always been able to understand the benefit of doing inventory; and when he told Luke that he had discovered this or that thing or act which he could sell, Luke approved, understanding the meaning of labor. If Luke were here now, and preferably still possessed of his superb vision, which had deserted him in his early fifties, then some of this might get categorized and even saved—for instance, these young cattails lying down together, their necks broken, their heads heavy with dew. Luke would have known what to do. In this Raymond had resembled him, for what could be more organized than the many shelves around Raymond's shop, and all his many cabinets, some with pull-out metal basins to catch shavings, wax dust and loose diamonds, and Raymond's various lamps, his footrest drill, the chisels all in place? Once he had been alone at Raymond's, the grinding wheel slowing down from a whir into a wheeze, and there had been silence, and before that, when he was seventeen, he was kissing Victoria, kissing her so greedily and gratefully; don't let the grinding wheel slow down. So what would Luke have said? He would have pretended to say something else, disguising his advice as valueless. Shivering, either with fever or with emotion, he thought about his best friend's death, and then Victoria's, although it was not as if he thought, much less had “learned,” anything in particular about them, the dark little swallows rising on either side of him, the breeze refreshing yet somehow also hurting him, chilling his fevered face, his chest aching, a single monarch butterfly hanging on the tip of a reed, opening and closing its wings, jittering its antenna while the
reed swayed in the breeze; and slowly, finally the insect expanded its wings. He thought about Victoria, his thoughts of her like dark swallows speeding away, the day resolving into reed-fingered sky-pools as his fever increased, and he glided over the grass. A fish snapped in the water. He sought to cool himself by touching a reed, whose chill stung his fingers and made him shiver without relieving him from burning. A half-torn formation of swallows swayed and twisted in the air until he grew nauseous. Wandering away from them, he forgot his own existence until the muck-perfume which he had been smelling since daybreak inexplicably called attention to itself, and he found the sun now high in a dark oak like a pure white gall. A dewdrop on a leaf twinkled whitely and vibrated. Sun-shards whitely cut the darknesses of various other leaves, while others were backlit entirely or in part, and many remained silhouetted. He could not understand any of this. Spills of sun-milk on the silver-red shadow-grass further baffled him. He vomited, although no blood came up. To pass here without even knowing why, in the tang of rot, the licorice of anise, as a meadowlark's notes bubbled up through water which was in fact air, this was his reward for having once been seventeen. Luke was right. It was better off to die alone, passing in and out of the sun, and perhaps when it happened he would even be grateful. All of his experiences had become lovely reeds around him. Craving the shock of coldness from them, he took up another of Victoria's long unread letters in his hands; he was standing over his father's desk, struggling against another cramp in his belly; now he was lying on the bed, chewing up a handful of pills. Silver lichens and withered berries hung inside his eyelids. Victoria's letter lay across his heart. After awhile the pills began to help him, and his sorrows sped away like morning swallows.

He lay on his back, his limbs as still as certain white bubbles on the black water; and now he allowed himself to remember his last meeting with Victoria.

Will you stay up all night talking with me? she had said. I feel so lonely.

I'll try, if my stomach doesn't bother me too much.

Don't bother if you don't want to; I don't care.

I hope you do.

Well, I like the feeling that there's someone here right next to me. That's what I always wanted. It didn't matter who it was. Don't get hurt; I'd rather have you with me right now than almost anyone—

Who would you prefer? Your children?

No, not them. They'd feel too sad here.

Victoria, what would it be like if I came down to you?

I'd hate it; I couldn't stretch out. That's how I always used to feel in college when some man spent too many nights in my bed.

Well, when I die—

I'd
hate
it, I said!

Then what did you get married for?

Oh, I wanted children. And he was right for me—very soulful, more intelligent than you, generous, a little detached—although he later did become jealous, especially when I took up writing you at the end.

He loved you?

They all did, or thought they did.

You must have been good in bed.

I wasn't totally sure about men at first. But after I realized I could fake anything, I did as I pleased. If they'd only known! But they gave me what I wanted and it was pretty easy to give them what they wanted, so I used them and never felt used.

Congratulations.

You never got to find out, but anyhow I was very good at it.

I'm glad, he said wearily. I did find out a little, since you and I—

Were
you
good at it?

Yes. Yes, I think so. I've gotten compliments—

Compliments don't mean anything, Victoria informed him with a smile. They're just something that women do.

Well, maybe some were more sincere than you.

Please, please don't get irritated! We're only chatting—

Were you ever my girlfriend?

Certainly not, the dead woman giggled.

I thought you were . . .

Listen. I keep telling you: Our physical encounters were very limited. I placed very little emphasis on them, but I came to see that you felt differently. You took them in their proper light, not as a game the way I did.

But since I took them in their proper light, then maybe—

I've never cared to feel obligated.

When you talk like that, I can't decide whether I'm alone with you or just alone.

When we were seventeen, I used to think you never got irritated.

Victoria, how old are you?

Seventeen.

I'm your past, she said after awhile, but you're almost nothing to me. Why am I saying this? What makes me so cruel? I don't understand myself anymore.

You didn't hurt me; I wish I could help you.

I believe in following my heart, even if it's dead and rotten. Even when I don't understand myself—

What do you mean?

I don't know. I see your tumor shining.

What color is it now?

Green. It's hurting you; you'd better go.

Will you allow me to visit you again?

Thank you for being a gentleman, said Victoria. Yes. I allow you.

Why can't I make you feel better?

Nothing can change me! laughed the lovely seventeen-year-old girl, her tears shining silver in the moonlight.

I don't believe that.

Do you want me to claim you?

Then what?

You just lost your chance. When you were seventeen you would have given yourself to me without any questions.

Victoria, you're such a tease! Do you want me to claim
you
? I offered to dig you up and keep you in a flowerpot. Didn't that happen to somebody's head in the
Decameron
? But he was murdered. Well, so were you—by cancer . . .

I want you to lie down with me.

She reached toward him, and he saw moonlight in her eyesockets. He knew that he truly was almost nothing to her, just as had been the case when they were seventeen. All she had ever desired, perhaps, was a partner with whom she could play again at the game of life. So he hesitated. When he began to turn away from her, he felt cold between his shoulderblades, as if something evil might reach for him. But what could harm him now? Moreover, why should her aspirations be judged unworthy merely because he signified little to her? And who had she ever been to him? The girl to whom he had written those morbid poems had certainly not been Victoria, but his own figment. He rose up from her grave. She said nothing, but a cold foul gust blew up around him from behind, stinging and numbing his lips. Now the back of his neck began to tingle as if spiders scurried on it. Perhaps she was angry. What did anything matter? All his memories—of her, Luke, his life and even the moon—resembled midges streaming up out of the sweating grass: at intervals the cloud of them took on certain provisional shapes which might have meant something, whereas the solitary insect which he squashed against his cheek had been so arbitrarily itself that his interpretative apparatus could not distort it into anything. Admitting that his life had been as meaninglessly active as bright green sedges writhing in the river wind impelled him into a consoling valuation of meaninglessness. The women who had passed over him like cool river waves over greenish sand, and certainly Victoria herself, what had they signified—for what did anything, when no life could be seen whole and coherently except by something which outlived it? This thought, self-serving as it might have been, he swallowed like one of his pain pills. Returning to her, he knelt down again, expecting to surrender himself to the mercy of some unclean thing, but there was nobody.

Victoria, Victoria! he whispered.

Slowly then she oozed back out of her grave, her face sparkling with silvery tears. He bent down low to kiss her, and as he approached her face he grew overwhelmed again, as he had at seventeen, by its loveliness, with the long blonde hair flowing over the blurred skull in semblance of a waterfall photographed in a lengthy exposure so that the impression
of droplets and foam was retained in a statistical sort of form although there was only white haze; she smiled at him, and her bone-claws reached up through the dirt to rest lightly upon the back of his head as she drew him down to her, her wormy mouth widening until he drowned in her face.

Close upon dawn, exhausted, joyful, sad and nauseous, he seated himself on Mrs. Emilia Woodruff's headstone and said: Did you like it?

I found it very satisfying, thank you. But listening to the moon eats me up. Can you hear it?

No.

I shouldn't scorn you for that, but I can't help it. Does that hurt your feelings?

On the other side of Victoria's grave, the ghoul lay on its belly with its arms and legs splayed like a lizard's, and it watched him grinning and breathless. He felt something between pity and affection for the thing; doubtless they would soon become better acquainted. Perhaps it knew where treasure lay (another broken pot with tarnished ovoid coins).

Remembering Victoria's question, he replied: Not anymore.

Then I won't tell you what the moon says.

The ghoul fawned on him, grinning ever more widely until its rotting lips began to split. It smelled even worse than she. He said: Victoria, I'm not feeling good—

Well, you don't have much longer. I'm grateful that you choose to spend so many nights with me.

And after I—

Will you please stay until sunrise?

If you want me to. Do you see that thing over there?

Don't speak of it.

Maybe you don't care . . .

No, I enjoy these conversations, she whispered. But I feel at a loss.

Why?

What you said to me last time, I cherished that, I really did. But I don't know you!

What did I say?

Actually, right now I'm so bored and tired; I wish I could retreat farther down, deep down under the clay. I could . . .

You could what, Victoria? Victoria, is there something you'd like me to do?

Don't come anymore. Now that we've—

All right.

Why did you agree so easily? I wanted you to say—

I won't say it. As you reminded me, I don't have much time left. If you want me to go, I—

I'm sorry; I get cruel when I'm bored.

Then shall I go?

She did not answer.

Smiling wearily at her, as if he were the dead one and she a child exciting herself with grief and anger over an imaginary injury to her favorite doll, he asked: Victoria, why are you that way?

What do you expect? I'm thirty-six going on seventeen.

He began to shiver; he was only feverish. Dawn came.

I don't need anyone very much, she remarked. It's a cold feeling, a feeling where I know I should be crying and I can't.

Victoria, he said, I wish, I wish . . .