Searches & Seizures (25 page)

“There isn’t time.”

“There
is,
there
is.
”

“If I thought there were…Oh, Brewster, if I really thought there
were
—” she said, and broke off.

“There
is.
I make a vow. I make a holy vow.” I crossed my heart.

She studied me. “I believe you,” she said finally. “That is, I believe you seriously
wish
to undo what you have done to yourself. I believe in your penitent spirit, I mean. No. Don’t kiss me. You must be continent henceforth. Then…”

“We’ll see?”

“We’ll see.”

“The next time, Jane, the next time you see me, I swear I will have met your conditions.”

I bowed and left and was told where I was to sleep by a grinning Plympton. He asked if, now that I had seen Jane, I would like to go with him on a tour of the estate.

“Not just yet, Freddy, I think.”

“Jane gave you something to think about, did she?”

“Something like that.”

Was ever any man set such a task by a woman? To undo defilement and regain innocence, to take an historical corruption and will it annulled, whisking it out of time as if it were a damaged
egg
going by on a conveyor belt. And not given years—Jane’s disease was progressive, the mask a manifestation of one of its last stages—nor deserts to do it in. Not telling beads or contemplating from some Himalayan hillside God’s extensive Oneness. No, nor chanting a long, cunning train of boxcar mantras as it moves across the mind’s trestle and over the soul’s deep, dangerous drop. No, no, and no question either of simply distributing the wealth or embracing the leper or going about in rags (I still wore my mourning togs, that lover’s wardrobe, those Savile Row whippery flags of self) or doing those bows and scrapes that were only courtesy’s moral minuet, and no time, no time at all for the long Yoga life, the self’s spring cleaning that could drag on years. What had to be done had to be done now, in these comfortable Victorian quarters on a velvet love seat or in the high fourposter, naked cherubs climbing the bedposts, the burnished dimples of their wooden behinds glistening in the light from the fresh laid fire. By a gilded chamber pot, beneath a silken awning, next to a window with one of the loveliest views in England.

That, at least, I could change. I drew the thick drapes across the bayed glass and, influenced perhaps by the firelight and the Baker Street ambience, got out my carpet slippers and red smoking jacket. I really had to laugh. This won’t do, I thought. How do you expect to bring about these important structural changes and get that dear dying girl to marry you if the first thing you do is to impersonate Sherlock Holmes? Next you’ll be smoking opium and scratching on a fiddle. Get down to it, Ashenden, get down to it.

But it was pointless to scold when no alternative presented itself to me. How
did
one get down to it? How does one undefile the defiled? What acts of
kosher
and exorcism? Religion (though I am not
ir
religious) struck me as beside the point. It was Jane I had offended, not God. What good would it have done to pray for His forgiveness? And what sacrilege to have prayed for hers! Anyway, I understood that I already had her forgiveness. Jane wanted a virgin. In the few hours that remained I had to become one.

I thought pure thoughts for three hours. Images of my mother: one summer day when I was a child and we collected berries together for beach plum jelly; a time in winter when I held a simple cat’s cradle of wool which my mother was carding. I thought of my tall father in a Paris park when I was ten, and of the pictures we posed each other for, waiting for the sun to come out before we tripped the shutter. And recollected mornings in chapel in school in New England—I was seven, I was eight—the chaplain describing the lovely landscapes of Heaven and I, believing, wanting to die. I recalled the voices of guides in museums I toured with my classmates, and thought about World’s Fairs I had attended. The ’36 Olympics, sitting on the bench beside the New Zealand pole vaulter. I remembered perfect picnics, Saturday matinees in Broadway theaters, looking out the window lying awake in comfortable compartment berths on trains, horseback riding on a fall morning in mountains, sailing with Father. All the idylls. I remembered, that is, my virginity, sorting out for the first time in years the decent pleasures of comfort and wonder and respect. But—and I was enjoying myself, I could feel the smile on my face—what did it amount to? I was no better than a gangster pleading his innocence because he had once
been
innocent.

I thought
impure
thoughts, reading off my long-time bachelor’s hundred conquests, parsing past, puberty and old fantasy, reliving all the engrams of lust in gazebo, band shell, yacht and penthouse, night beaches at low tide, rooms, suites, shower stalls, bedrooms on crack trains, at the carpeted turnings of stairs, and once in a taxi and once on a butcher’s block at dawn in Les Halles—all the bachelor’s emergency landing fields, all his makeshift landscapes, propinquitous to grandeur and history, in Flanders Fields, rooms with views, by this ocean or by that, this tall building or that public monument, my backstage love-making tangential as a town at the edge of a map. Oh love’s landmarks, oh its milestones, sex altering place like sunset. Oh the beds and oh the walls, the floors and bridges—and me a gentleman!—the surfaces softened by Eros, contour stones and foam rubber floors of forests, everywhere but the sky itself a zone for dalliance, my waterfalls of sperm, our Laguardias of hum and droned groan. Recalling the settings first, the circumstances, peopling them only afterwards and even then only piecemeal, a jigsaw, Jack-the-Ripper memory of hatcheck girl thigh and night club singer throat and heiress breast, the salty hairs of channel swimmers and buttocks of horseback riders and knuckles of pianists and strapless tans of models—sex like flesh’s crossword, this limb and that private like the fragments in a multiple choice. And only after that gradually joining arm to shoulder, shoulder to neck, neck to face, Ezekielizing my partners, dem bones, dem bones gon’ walk aroun’.

Yes? No. The smile was
still
on my face. And there in that Victorian counting house, I, lust’s miser, its Midas, touching gold and having it gold still, an ancient Pelagian, could not overcome my old unholy gratitude for flesh, and so lost innocence again, even as I resisted, the blood rushing where it would, filling the locks of my body. “Make me clean,” I prayed, “help me to make one perfect act of contrition, break my nasty history’s hold on me, pull a fast one at this eleventh hour.”

A strange thing happened. The impure thoughts left me and my blood retreated and I began to remember those original idylls, my calendar youth, the picnic and berry hunts, and all those placid times before fires, dozing on a couch, my head in Mother’s lap and her hands in my hair like rain on the roof and, My God, my little weewee was stiff, and it was stiff now too!

It was what I’d prayed for: shame like a thermal inversion, the self-loathing that
is
purity. The sailing lessons and horseback rides and lectures and daytrips came back tainted. I saw how pleased I’d been, how smug. Why, I’m free, I thought, and was. “I’ve licked it, Jane,” I said. “I’m pure, holy as a wafer, my heart pink as rare meat. I was crap. Look at me now.”

If she won’t have me, I thought, it’s not my fault. I rushed out to show myself to her and tell her what I’d discovered. I ran over it again to see if I had it straight. “Jane,” I’d say, “I’m bad, unsavory from the word go, hold your nose. To be good subsists in such understanding. So innocence is knowledge, not its lack. See, morality’s easy, clear, what’s the mystery?” But when I stepped outside my suite the house was dark. Time had left me behind. The long night of the soul goes by in a minute. It must have been three or four in the morning. I couldn’t wake Jane; she was dying of
lupus erythematosus
and needed her rest. I didn’t know where Plympton slept or I would have roused him. Too exhilarated by my virtue to sleep, I went outside.

But it was not “outside” as you and I know it. Say rather it was a condition, like the out-of-doors in a photograph, the colors fixed and temperature unfelt, simply not factors, the wind stilled and the air light, and so wide somehow that he could walk without touching it. It was as if he moved in an enormous diorama of nature, a crèche of the elements. Brewster Ashenden was rich. He had lain on his back on Ontario turf farms and played the greens of St. Andrews and Burning Tree, but he had never felt anything like Duluth’s perfect grass, soft and springy as theater seats, and even in moonlight green as billiard cloth. The moon, perfectly round and bright as a tennis shoe—he could make out its craters, like the eternally curving seams of a Spalding—enabled him to see perfectly, the night no more than the vaguest atmosphere, distant objects gyroscopically stilled like things glimpsed through the whirling blades of a fan.

What he saw was like the landscapes behind madonnas in classical paintings—one missed only the carefully drawn pillars and far, tiny palaces—blue-hilled horizons, knolls at the end of space, complex shores that trailed eccentrically about flat, blackish planes of water with boulders rising from them. He thought he perceived distant fields, a mild husbandry, the hay in, the crops a sloping green and blue debris in the open fields, here and there ledges keyholed with caves, trees in the middle distance as straight as the land they grew from. It was a geography of eclectic styles and landscapes, even the sky a hybrid—here clear and black and starred, there roiling with a brusque signature of cloud or piled in strata like folded linen or the interior of rock.

He walked away from the castle, pulled toward the odd, distant galleries. His mood was a fusion of virtue and wonder. He felt solitary but not lonely, and if he remembered that he walked unprotected through the largest game preserve this side of the Kenyan savannah, there was nothing in his bold step to indicate this. He strode powerfully toward those vistas he had seen stretching away in every direction from the manor. Never had he seemed to himself so fulfilled, and never, unless in dreams, had such seeming distances been so easily negotiated, the scenery changing every hundred yards or so, the hills that had appeared so remote easily climbed and giving way at their crests to tiny valleys and plains or thick, sudden clots of jungle. This trick of perspective was astonishing, reminding him of cunning golf courses, sudden doglegs, sand traps, unexpected waterholes. Everything was as distinctively charactered as foreign countries, natural borders. He remembered miniature golf courses to which he had been taken as a child, each hole dominated by some monolithic feature, a windmill, perhaps, a gingerbread house, a bridge, complicated networks of banked plains that turned on themselves, culs-de-sac. He thought that Duluth might be deceptively large or deceptively small, and he several miles or only a few thousand feet from the main house—which had already disappeared behind him.

As he came, effortlessly as in any paradise, to each seamed, successive landscape, the ease of his arrivals added to his sense of strength, and each increment of strength to his sense of purity, so that his exercise fed his feelings about his heart and happiness. Though he had that day made the long drive from London, had his interview with Jane (as exhausting as it was stimulating) and done the hardest thinking of his life, though he had not slept (even in London he had tossed and turned all night, kept awake by the prospect of finally meeting Jane) in perhaps forty hours, he wasn’t tired. He wondered if he would ever be tired again. Or less gay than now. For what he felt, he was certain, was not mood but something deeper, a stability, as the out-of-doors was, as space was. He could make plans. If Jane would have him (she would; they had spoken code this afternoon, signaled each other a high language of commitment, no small talk but the cryptic, sacred speech of government flashing its secret observations over mountains and under seas, the serious ventriloquism of outpost), they could plan not to plan, simply to live, to be. In his joy he had forgotten her death, her rare, personal disease in which self fled self in ultimate allergy.
Lupus erythematosus.
It was not catching, but he would catch it. He would catch
her.
There was no need to survive her. Together they would grow the wolf mask across their eyes, death’s big spreading butterfly. It didn’t matter. They’d have their morality together, the blessed link-up between appropriate humans, anything permissible between consenting man and consenting woman—anything, any bold or timid configuration, whatever the one craved and the other yielded, whatever whatsoever, love’s sanctified arrangements, not excluding the deathbed itself. What need had he to survive her—though he’d probably not die until she did—now that he had at last a vehicle for his taste, his marriage?

He was in a sort of clearing. Though he knew he had not retraced his steps nor circled around, it seemed familiar. He stood on uneven ground and could see a line of low frigid mountains in the distance. High above him and to his right the great tear of the moon, like the drain of day, sucked light. At his feet there appeared the remains of—what? A feast? A picnic? He bent down to investigate and found a few clay shards of an old jug, a bit of yellow wood -like the facing on some stringed instrument and a swatch of faded, faintly Biblical cloth, broadly striped as the robe of a prophet. As he fingered this debris he smelled what was unmistakably bowel.

“Have I stepped in something?” He stood and raised his shoe, but his glance slid off it to the ground where he saw two undisturbed lumps, round as hamburger, of congealing lion waste. It came to him at once. “I
knew
it was familiar! ‘The Sleeping Gypsy.’ This is where it was painted!” He looked suspiciously at the mangled mandolin facing, the smashed jug and the tough cloth, which he now perceived had been forcibly torn. My God, he thought, the lion must have eaten the poor fellow. The picture had been painted almost seventy-five years earlier, but he understood from his reading that lions often returned to the scenes of their most splendid kills, somehow passing on to succeeding generations this odd, historical instinct of theirs. Nervously he edged away, and though the odor of lion dung still stung his nostrils, it was gradually replaced by more neutral smells. Clearly, however, he was near the beasts.