Slow Sculpture (16 page)

He said, “Well, I didn’t want you to wake up.”

She said the only bitter thing she had ever said to him. She pointed at his crotch and said, “You use that as a kind of sleeping pill for me, don’t you?” Then she went back inside.

He stayed to pack away the magazines and then followed.

She seemed to be asleep so he got in quietly and did not touch her. They did not talk about it in the morning.

That night they went to another party, and no less than three cats told him at different times how great his threads were. Well, she had good taste, she knew what looked good. The party was beautiful people and two guitars and a side table full of things made of rice and a lot of different kinds of cheese and wine—a desert. When they got home she went to bed and he went into the bathroom to get rid of the desert inside and out, and a terrible thing happened to him. He looked into the mirror and did not know who that was in there.

I mean it was a great haircut and the guru-style collar on the cotton-satin shirt-jacket was so well-cut it did not look freaky, and then there were the deep-buffed reversed-calf boots, like suede so nappy it was almost fur. But none of it was him, nothing he remembered, nothing he ever thought about when he thought Me. A terrible thing.

He took off all the clothes and hung them up and put them and the shoes away. Then he took off the medallion and put it on the TV and went to bed and right to sleep.

She was up ahead of him as usual and breakfast was ready.

He went out into the garage naked and found his black cords and the Western shirt with the rawhide on the pockets, and his old lineman’s boots, and put them all on. He came in and ate. While he was eating she told him she had done everything in the world to make him happy. He agreed that she had and said it had all been great.

It was Saturday and he hopped in the Monster and went down to the Rents. He felt very strange, holding something inside of himself
locked down tight, knowing it was no good to let it all out because he couldn’t explain it to anybody if he did. They remembered him all right and got the 6-by-10 hitched on and the mirror mounted in half the time. He drove back to the house and up the driveway to the garage and loaded all his stuff into the trailer. It didn’t take too long.

She came out and watched him finish. “Come inside.”

He just shook his head and vaulted into the bucket. She came over and stood beside the Monster, holding her hands together real tight. “Knightly, Knightly, what is it? Tell me what’s the matter.”

He could only stare blindly at the tachometer. The only thing that came to him seemed so crazy he could not bring himself to say it: I want my real name back. He said, “I’m no good at explaining things, Hon.”

But she was. She knelt by the Monster so he could look down into those double-arched eyes in that frame of coppery-yellow, and she said how she had been thinking and thinking, and she realized how wrong she had been. She began a whole list of promises. She said, “I’ll try to learn about cars and go with you to the dragstrips and the shops. I’ll pick it up quickly, and then I’ll pay more attention to the way you want to look and not the way I want you to look. And I never realized it but I shouldn’t’ve made you quit the Emergency and live the way I live.” And more, like about she never had found out what he used to eat before he met her, she just cooked what she thought he ought to like without asking. She would change, she would change. Any way he wanted her to, she would change.

He almost had a thought worth saying, something about what happened to people when they had to change, but he couldn’t get it into shape. Maybe later she could figure it out for herself. He started the motor and shifted into low and checked the mirrors on both sides, and then throttled way back so she could hear him. He said, as he began slipping the clutch, “It ain’t any of those things, Hon.

“It’s you.”

She didn’t know who he was when she met him; well, not many people did. He was in the high orchard doing something under a pear tree. The land smelled of late summer and wind: bronze, it smelled bronze. He looked up at a compact girl in her mid-twenties, with a fearless face and eyes the same color as her hair, which was extraordinary because her hair was red-gold. She looked down at a leather-skinned man in his forties with a gold-leaf electroscope in his hand, and felt she was an intruder. She said, “Oh,” in what was apparently the right way, because he nodded once and said, “Hold this,” and there could then be no thought of intrusion. She knelt down by him and took the instrument, holding it just where he positioned her hand, and then he moved a little away and struck a tuning-fork against his kneecap. “What’s it doing?” He had a good voice, the kind of voice strangers notice and listen to.

She looked at the delicate leaves of gold in the glass shield of the electroscope. “They’re moving apart.”

He struck the tuning fork again and the leaves pressed away from one another. “Much?”

“About forty-five degrees when you hit the fork.”

“Good—that’s about the most we’ll get.” From a pocket of his bush jacket he drew a sack of chalk-dust and dropped a small handful on the ground. “I’ll move now. You stay right there and tell me how much the leaves separate.”

He traveled around the pear tree in a zigzag course, striking his tuning fork while she called out numbers—ten degrees, thirty, five, twenty, nothing. Whenever the gold foil pressed apart to maximum, forty degrees or more, he dropped more chalk. When he was finished the tree was surrounded, in a rough oval, by the white dots of chalk. He took out a notebook and diagrammed them and the tree,
and put away the book, and took the electroscope out of her hands. “Were you looking for something?” he asked her.

“No,” she said. “Yes.”

He could smile. Though it did not last long, she found it very surprising in a face like that. “That’s not what is called, in a court of law, a responsive answer.”

She glanced across the hillside, metallic in that late light. There wasn’t much on it—rocks, weeds the summer was done with, a tree or so, and then the orchard. Anyone present had come a long way to get here. “It wasn’t a simple question,” she said, tried to smile, and burst into tears.

She was sorry and said so.

“Why?” he asked. This was the first time she was to experience this ask-the-next-question thing of his. It was unsettling. It always would be—never less, sometimes a great deal more. “Well—one doesn’t have emotional explosions in public.”

“You do. I don’t know this ‘one’ you’re talking about.”

“I—guess I don’t either, now that you mention it.”

“Tell the truth then. No sense in going round and round about it, ‘he’ll think that I—’ and the like. I’ll think what I think, whatever you say. Or—go on down the mountain and just don’t say any more.” She did not turn to go, so he added, “Try the truth, then. If it’s important, it’s simple, and if it’s simple it’s easy to say.”

“I’m going to die!” she cried.

“So am I.”

“I have a lump in my breast.”

“Come up to the house and I’ll fix it.”

Without another word he turned away and started through the orchard. Startled half out of her wits, indignant and full of insane hope, experiencing, even, a quick curl of astonished laughter, she stood for a moment watching him go, and then found herself (at what point did I decide?) running after him.

She caught up with him on the uphill margin of the orchard. “Are you a doctor?”

He appeared not to notice that she had waited, had run. “No,” he said, and, walking on, appeared not to see her stand again pulling
at her lower lip, then run again to catch up.

“I must be out of my mind,” she said, joining him on a garden path. She said it to herself, which he must have known because he did not answer. The garden was alive with defiant chrysanthemums and a pond in which she saw the flicker of a pair of redcap imperials—silver, not gold fish—which were the largest she had ever seen. Then—the house.

First it was part of the garden, with its colonnaded terrace, and then, with its rock walls (too big to be called fieldstone) part of the mountain. It was on and in the hillside, and its roofs paralleled the skylines, front and sides, and part of it was backed against an out-jutting cliff face. The door, beamed and studded and with two archers’ slits, was opened for them (but there was no one there) and when it closed it was silent, a far more solid exclusion of things outside than any click or clang of latch or bolt. She stood with her back against it watching him cross what seemed to be the central well of the house, or at least this part of it. It was a kind of small court in the center of which was an atrium, glazed on all of its five sides and open to the sky at the top. In it was a tree, a cypress or juniper, gnarled and twisted and with the turned-back, paralleled, sculptured appearance of what the Japanese call bonsai.

“Aren’t you coming?” he called, holding open a door behind the atrium.

“Bonsai just aren’t fifteen feet tall,” she said.

“This one is.”

She came by it slowly, looking. “How long have you had it?”

His tone of voice said he was immensely pleased. It is a clumsiness to ask the owner of a bonsai how old it is; you are then demanding to know if it is his work or if he has acquired and continued the concept of another; you are tempting him to claim for his own the concept and the meticulous labor of someone else, and it becomes rude to tell a man he is being tested. Hence “How long have you had it?” is polite, forebearing, profoundly courteous. He answered, “Half my life.” She looked at the tree. Trees can be found, sometimes, not quite discarded, not quite forgotten, potted in rusty gallon cans in not quite successful nurseries, unsold because they are
shaped oddly or have dead branches here and there, or because they have grown too slowly in whole or part. These are the ones which develop interesting trunks and a resistance to misfortune that makes them flourish if given the least excuse for living. This one was far older than half this man’s life, or all of it. Looking at it, she was terrified by the unbidden thought that a fire, a family of squirrels, some subterranean worm or termite could end this beauty—something working outside any concept of rightness or justice or … or respect. She looked at the tree. She looked at the man.

“Coming?”

“Yes,” she said and went with him into his laboratory. “Sit down over there and relax,” he told her. “This might take a little while.”

“Over there” was a big leather chair by the bookcase. The books were right across the spectrum—reference works in medicine and engineering, nuclear physics, chemistry, biology, psychiatry. Also tennis, gymnastics, chess, the oriental war game Go, and golf. And then drama, the techniques of fiction,
Modern English Usage, The American Language
and supplement, Wood’s and Walker’s rhyming dictionaries and an array of other dictionaries and encyclopedias. A whole long shelf of biographies. “You have quite a library.”

He answered her rather shortly: clearly he did not want to talk just now, for he was very busy. He said only, “Yes I have—perhaps you’ll see it some time,” which left her to pick away at his words to find out what on earth he meant by them. He could only have meant, she decided, that the books beside her chair were what he kept handy for his work—that his real library was elsewhere. She looked at him with a certain awe.

And she watched him. She liked the way he moved—swiftly, decisively. Clearly he knew what he was doing. He used some equipment that she recognized—a glass still, titration equipment, a centrifuge. There were two refrigerators, one of which was not a refrigerator at all, for she could see the large indicator on the door: it stood at 70°F. It came to her that a modern refrigerator is perfectly adaptable to the demand for controlled environment, even a warm one.

But all that, and the equipment she did not recognize, was only furniture. It was the man who was worth watching, the man who
kept her occupied so that not once in all the long time she sat there was she tempted toward the bookshelves.

At last he finished a long sequence at the bench, threw some switches, picked up a tall stool and came over to her. He perched on the stool, hung his heels on the cross-spoke, and lay a pair of long brown hands over his knees. “Scared?”

“I s’pose I am.”

“You don’t have to stay.”

“Considering the alternative,” she began bravely, but the courage-sound somehow oozed out, “it can’t matter much.”

“Very sound,” he said, almost cheerfully. “I remember when I was a kid there was a fire scare in the apartment house where we lived. It was a wild scramble to get out, and my ten-year-old brother found himself outside in the street with an alarm clock in his hand. It was an old one and it didn’t work—but of all the things in the place he might have snatched up at a time like that, it turned out to be the clock. He’s never been able to figure out why.”

“Have you?”

“Not why he picked that particular thing, no. But I think I know why he did something obviously irrational. You see, panic is a very special state. Like fear and flight, or fury and attack, it’s a pretty primitive reaction to extreme danger. It’s one of the expressions of the will to survive. What makes it so special is that it’s irrational. Now, why would the abandonment of reason be a survival mechanism?”

She thought about this seriously. There was that about this man which made serious thought imperative. “I can’t imagine,” she said finally. “Unless it’s because, in some situations, reason just doesn’t work.”

“You can imagine,” he said, again radiating that huge approval, making her glow. “And you just did. If you are in danger and you try reason, and reason doesn’t work, you abandon it. You can’t say it’s unintelligent to abandon what doesn’t work, right? So then you are in panic; then you start to perform random acts. Most of them—far and away most will be useless; some might even be dangerous, but that doesn’t matter—you’re in danger already. Where the survival factor comes in is that away down deep you know that one
chance in a million is better than no chance at all. So—here you sit—you’re scared and you could run; something says you should run; but you won’t.”