The Almanac Branch (14 page)

Erin smiled faintly, tried to. She glanced in the mirror over his couch, that mirror which was artistically crackled with silvery underlays, and saw how dry was her smile. What was she doing here? What were these boots doing on her feet?“I know,” and embraced him, and felt the warmth that drew her toward staying here with him, in the midst of what was possibly an act of anger, and impractical madness.

Segredo pressed on. “You know, I wonder whether you're making the right decision.”

“What do you think?”

“What do I think means, I don't know, means you're not answering the question yourself.”

“I know what I'm doing, I mean I know as much as anybody can know—”

“I don't want to argue, this is always the thing that irks me, you know that, this thing about your having been so nicely set up in the city, so comfortable, all that, and then when you had to come out here you were tortured—what does that mean about me? I'm just a person. I'm nothing special.”

That seemed like a sad thing for anyone to say about himself, and it struck her. “Gabriel, if I didn't love you I wouldn't be here with you, all right?” What could she say?

He walked away to the table in the kitchen. He was having a difficult time keeping his branching concerns (love of her, need for money, fear of his own drift toward treachery, fear of the commitment he knew lay ahead of him) calibrated through the course of their discussions, and thought to have a scotch, knowing she wouldn't like it, but also understanding that whenever he did, Erin did not complain about it, and often changed the subject, trying to sway his interest from the scotch back to her.

“What are you doing?”

“I'm going to have a drink.”

“You aren't the one who needs solace.”

“Look, your life isn't the only one that's been turned upside down here. You do it your way I'll do it mine.”

“That's so selfish.”

He brought the glass, stenciled with Pooh Bear's image, up to the lip of the bottle of scotch, and poured himself a few fingers' measure. He sipped, waited. She had gone to the bedroom. He had no notion whether she was packing her things to go home, whether she simply wanted to spend some minutes crying, just as she had so many days in a row before today, or what. He drank from the Pooh glass, into that heat of booze, and it was eager, brazen, bracing, foolish, relieving. It was great. Works so well, and works so fast, the ultimate wonder drug. She hated it when he drank, but fuck her, he thought, and inhaled the scotch again. Fuck all of them. There were possibilities here, if he followed them through to the end of the line, but did he want to make these steps toward a new life for himself? Why not leave things where they were? he thought. He was so mad, but not at her, not even at himself. Who to blame? Usually he didn't mind when she took off on these weepy forays trying to make him feel guilty, but it was getting old—even after, what, two months was it? All these rich mothers, he tried to tell himself, they were the same in the eyes of the Lord a bunch of nonessentials, a bunch of pedestrians bound to walk the wildest side of all, the hottest streets made, down there in flame town. And what was he supposed to do (he really was rather overpissed given the circumstances, wasn't he?—he brought the glass to his mouth again, and observed Pooh Bear's profile in reverse through the concave surface of glass), what was he supposed to say? which led him to call out from the kitchen, “I'd like to know just what it is I'm supposed to say? Like what is it you want me to do about it?”

Nothing. Quiet throughout the narrow cottage. Heglanced out across the folded-over, yellow grass that luxuriated over the rise, and watched the waves imitate the grass, folding over and over upon themselves down below, expressing such enthusiasm on their way toward the flat sand where together they splayed forward like one long, flat tongue, and withdrew again, folding back into the water until the next long flat water tongue pressed forward, maybe a bit farther into the beach, maybe not quite so far as the last—and he chuckled. Even the fucking ocean was going to stick its tongue out at him today, and not once, but over and over.

“Well, fuck you, too,” he said, and refilled his glass, which made Pooh Bear go good and scotch-brown.

What should he do? There was Erin, forlorn as all get out, down at the end of the knoll, past all his amassment of spare parts and metal objects that he used for his sculptural assemblages, leaning against a tree in the gnarl stand, no doubt crying. He could set his scotch on the table and go out to her. That was surely what he should do. He could stay here. He could go away for a while, go down to the city, leave her until she got it through her head what it was she must decide to do. He knew, he knew this thing wouldn't work out. How could it? The bed, no matter how passionate a place it might be at the beginning of the romance, inevitably loses its charm, wasn't that so? And speaking of things that lose their charm, Jesus—his eye skirted the edge of the sea bluff and came to rest on his half-finished sculpture, which was visible to her right, nearer the house.

Fuck fuck, he thought, appraising it. Fuck if it didn't look to him like a ponderous, hideous, crude grabble of wire, rods, beams, springs, all pitting with rust in the ocean air, a grand pointless ascending heap with a surly, arty title like Cat Got Your Nine Tail, or Apocalypse Whisk, or something, and all he wanted to do was to go down there and fire up the acetylene torch and cut the sculpture into pieces, cut the whole damn yard of materials into smallerand smaller steel fragments until the whole landscape was sheathed in iron leaves … and, having thought that, he caught himself thinking that that would make quite an interesting work of art in itself, and then he thought, Fuck you, to himself and turned to walk out the front door, in the opposite direction.

The phone rang. It was that lawyer. When it rains. “She's not here right now.” The lawyer left a message for her to call him as soon as she got in. He hung up, finished off the scotch, and peered out the window to see Erin. Instead, again, his attention got caught in the sculptures. They looked suddenly so paltry by comparison to her. Why bother with the stuff when you can live a real life? He studied something he had been working on not a few hours before and thought maybe the piece really ought to be burned into bits. The pile of formless iron could be the new piece. It was something to consider. He'd never seen that before in any of the galleries.

There was music coming in through the open door—it wound in an ascending embrace with the scotch, crisscrossing together like maypole ribbons, or snakes coiling their way up the caduceus, up through his spine and he felt suddenly benevolent toward Erin, looked down to where she stood—he had spotted her by then—and was at once fixed again by the thought of staying with her no matter what. The divorce as such meant nothing to him—what did he care whether she was still married or not? The settlement, he had to admit it to himself, the money that would come into his purview through the divorce, that was the thing that would mean something. He could never tell her, of course; he'd look miserable and grabbing. The reason he would want her to get her settlement was not so much that he wanted the money—he was, or could make himself be, content without—but rather because he sensed the day would come when she was going to miss having it. Then there'd be entire circles in hell for him to pay.

“Turn that shit down,” he was now out in front of thecottage, and marching toward the parked car from which the music was coming. Here he was picking up a whiffleball bat, his face going amber, and all he really wanted to do was maybe climb into the back seat of the car—the two girls, total strangers hanging out here for want of a better idea, looked up at him startled—and go wherever they wanted to go, the farther away the better. Behind the smoked glass, in the passenger seat, a finger rose, as the car pulled away in no great hurry. And yes, it was deflating, he knew, because the music wasn't even all that bad, just an ambience of artillery was all it was and that wasn't too distinct from the way he was now beginning to feel down in his gut. He struck his calf a couple of times with the airy plastic club (neighborhood kids were forever leaving toys in his front yard, what a life just drifting from one gratuitous insult to the next) and walked past the house down to the lower yard in back.

“I mean you realize that what you're doing here is crazy, right?” as he approached her tree.

Erin had heard him reach this dreadful part of the argument a couple of times before. It was the part she didn't like, because it simultaneously reinforced her thought to stay with him and made her feel that he could in fact let her go.

“It's not crazy.”

“I mean, look at this,” sweeping the whiffleball bat around the yard littered with automobile parts, rusted transmission blocks, truck shells, girders, imploded propane tanks scarred with metal flowers where the breach took place, shovel heads, bedsprings, steering columns, and on and on, this iron cemetery.

“So? It's what you do. I don't have any problem with it.”

“Well I do. This is just pure squalor here, there's no future here. I'm a mechanic, not a sculptor.”

“Gabriel,” she was drifting down the narrow, pebbly path toward the beach, Segredo following, “you're an artist.”

“I'm no artist, just welding all that junk together.”

“Of course you are.”

“I think you ought to think seriously, Erin, think very seriously about going home. It's not too late still.”

“Yes it is and anyway I'm not going. If you want me out of here, that's one thing—”

“That isn't what I want, why don't you slow down?”

Having reached the sand, she stopped. The pale fog reclined across a breadth of beach where the water hissed, and as the sun hadn't burned through the cloud cover all day there were no bathers along the stretch. “This is where I want to be. You are the person I want to be with. I myself don't care about legal tidiness in the matter, don't care what the State of New York considers me to be, all right?—”

Again that coalescence of money-wishing stirred, as a rod stirring water in a wishing well might stir the deposit of coins on its floor. “Fine,” and stared out over her shoulder, which was pressed against him, toward the fishing trawler out on the horizon, where the ocean was suffused with a color somewhere between pewter gray and butter yellow. The metal seemed alive, once more.

Night. Sparks poured down into the black yard and illuminated eerily the ring of trees that reached up toward the moon at that corner of the welding pit. Segredo stood on a heavy scaffold, about fifteen feet above the ground, and winced against all the profusion of fire he was creating. He liked working at night—the later the better, since fewer neighbors complained, having already gone to bed, thus missing the flashing rain of sparks and the annoying rumble of the generator motor. So there was that. That was one reason. Also, he preferred welding the pieces of his huge, bric-a-brac sculptures together after dark because doing so introduced a randomness into the process. This he considered aesthetically interesting. You selected your piece of armature by vesper light, you pulled it over to the work in progress, used the pulleys and chains to hoist it up into place, lit the torch and had at it—and in the morning you would find out what you'd assembled. It was cooler working with the hot metal at night, too, as well as being ten times more dangerous than working in daylight. All these elements—difficulty, risk, lack of control—at least gave him an out: if the sculpture was a grand failure, he could blame it on his process, and its random nature. If what he managed to construct seemed successful as a work of art, then the credit could be reserved entirely for himself. It was much like throwing I Ching: you read your hexagrams and trigrams, and if the sticks in their wisdom judge you positively, then all is well with your throw, and all is right with the world—if not, and you are a practical person, you are always free to doubt the reading, question the sticks, and proceed as if your fate was not something, after all, to be patrolled by chance.

It was into Segredo's cluttered welding yard that Berg and I crept, on an escapade. He asked me if I'd like to be his assistant on an adventure; flattered, I agreed. I don't think that Berg had a clear concept of what we were to accomplish, but we were committed to doing
something
. After all, we had gone to such trouble to sneak out of Scrub Farm and bicycle over the causeways, and around the head of the inlet to Segredo's neighborhood. The moon poured over the land and water. We hadn't encountered a single car on the road. It was late, and the island had, as they say, pulled up its sidewalks and retired for the night.

This was some time after the fact of Mother's having left the family had become a reality to Berg and me. Berg must have been sixteen, then, and I eleven. Whereas we had failed as fishing partners, had failed that is at our initial attempt to convert me into a Desmond figure for Berg to grow up with, we had, by then, forged a symbiotic relationship that relied increasingly on secrets, and inevitably onlies. What had begun with Berg's showing me the skin movies, and bringing us into that particular secret world, had ended in a fragile and hard-won friendship. To suggest that I had become a tomboy would be simplifying how far I had gone toward incorporating what I knew of Desmond into my own personality. It might not have been enough to satisfy Berg, but it was enough to be alarming to Djuna. I had transformed, past the megrims, past the light people, past the ravishments, into tough stock. It was a calm, quick, sweet, quiet transformation, and I don't think that it registered itself in an outward way. My clothes, as I remember them, were feminine, chosen by Faw, and Djuna, and occasionally, still, by my mother, when she was able to see me, take me into the city for the day, to have lunch and shop for such silly things as culottes and clogs and dirndl skirts. My habits, I believe, remained more or less as they always had been. Unlike the conventional tomboy I didn't suddenly stop bathing, say, or take a pair of shears to my hair. I didn't insist on smoking cigarettes or shooting woodchucks with a stupid little rifle. No, I knew better than to display to others the forms of my recklessness. And yet the most extreme example of this recklessness—my opening myself up to Berg, my hoping that he would accept me, that he would even like me—did contradict my basic secretiveness, and a habitual mistrust of my oldest brother that I had had since as far back as I can remember. This contradiction, this risk I took in letting Berg know me, is something I can account for only by considering it in the context of a disintegrating family.