The Almanac Branch (16 page)

What I thought I might have learned from Desmond, what I would take and keep for myself out of all this was this: by avoiding the normal paths of love there is an effective way to scale its stranger heights and emerge into a world where mere union may be the least of love's delights. But, of course, any celebrant of the flame knows that even the simplest of rituals are best performed with eyes closed, such as during a prayer, or at least under the blanket of sightless stars. Dark hours are the holy hours. In the dark blindness does become a virtue, and the heart can provide a tempo by which the flesh's music may be played. Like the Sufi poet Rami, I would sooner consume flame-shaped garlic, though, than any of your manna or celestial meat, or ground walnut mixed with spirits of wine, which Foucault suggests will ease a headache, and which goes to show how little he knew about such matters.

I pulled the curtains shut, went back to bed, and for the first time in my life pretended to have a migraine. Djuna offered to read to me, but I was too old for such things anymore.

Berg showed me the footage. Everything was shrouded in gray. The sparks looked like a white flower. The imagejostled because Berg had moved closer and closer to where Segredo had been welding. I was surprised how close he'd dared to get. Indeed, toward the end of that first part of the footage, it appeared that the shower of white was coming down directly on the viewer.

Then, the screen was black for a moment—you could see that there was something Berg had tried to shoot, but in the dark it had been underexposed—and afterward it was gray, and we were peering in a window, someone was moving around in the room, Segredo, and he was naked! I recognized the room, then. It was the same room I had been in, and though the camera was occasionally jiggled, so that the image blurred, I could see her there on the bed, still lying there, but awake. Segredo was talking. Since there was no sound he looked a bit silly, his mouth moving. He was pacing.

He went over to the bed and sat down, and I could see her put her arms around his waist and move her head over so it was in his lap. He was looking down at her, my mother, and even though the film was grainy, and jostling, and dark, I could see that the look on his face was one of contorted mirth. Maybe he was just happy, but to me this all seemed evil.

I didn't want to see any more of the film. I think that Berg called me a big baby. I didn't care, I went outside, and down to the osprey nest. Like most frustrated dreamers, I wished I could fly.

I began to live a back-and-forth life, after Berg was sent away to a private school. It was inevitable that we would eventually get caught, because Berg's boldness seemed to grow by exponential degrees with every fresh adventure. Faw promoted his interest in cameras and projectors, and took him several times a year along on business trips. Canisters of eight-millimeter black and white stock began topile up on the shelves in his bedroom at Scrub Farm, and indeed his whole room had been converted into a warehouse for tripods, lights, old still cameras he got from who knew where, a burgeoning closet of costumes, drawers of cheap jewelry and other paraphernalia. More than once I'd been coerced to play not just the lead but different minor characters in one of his silents. I'd worn a bear suit that stank of mothballs and urine and chased an old woman—I also played the old woman, with wig and overcoat—and never caught her because, of course, both figures could never be in the same frame at once. I had rowed into the waves like an Inuit princess, I'd run through the orchard as the harvest moon rose, a sheet over my head and my arms powdered white with flour, as part of his great Gothic romance, the most ambitious of all his precocious efforts, and the one about which he had sworn me into solemn confidence because of certain scenes he had in mind for me to play that would involve my doing “grown-up things.”

I probably would have been able to do those grown-up things, and with less fear than he might have presumed I would show, had Faw not shown up unexpected one night to find him down in the library, looking at those skin films he was supposed to know nothing about. I've never seen Faw more angry. Even when he had come down the stairs after having read the note Mother left, there wasn't such a stridency about him, nor such a sense of betrayal of trust. I know now why Faw erupted with such unwonted violence, and my knowing why is part of the reason I am obliged to set all this out straight for myself, for all of us really—but then, that day, when Faw shouted, “That's it, I've had enough of you, I've done everything I can do with you,” I was crying confused tears.

“We're all going down into the same hole, marines,” Berg said, “it's just the matter of when,” and then stood there, stoic criminal that he was, and stared hard at me with his mouth cramped shut. Don't admit to anything, was what his eyes were warning me, echoing “Don't complain,don't explain.” And when Faw asked me if I knew anything about what Berg was doing, I lied. This may have been the only time I lied to him. But just as the truth seems to be the only way to save all three of us now, a lie seemed the only way to save us then. Faw didn't want to hear me tell him I had been as involved with Berg's escapades as much as I had. Berg didn't want him to know, either.

After my brother departed for the academy up in western Massachusetts, I found myself alone. I lacked whatever mad energy is required to carry on Berglike adventures on my own, and his camera equipment, most of which he was forced to leave behind at Scrub Farm, I didn't know how to work. He agreed to write me letters from up there, but after I had sent three or four and never got any back, I gave up on him, and withdrew into my usual pastimes until Faw told me, one Sunday soon after, he had decided that it would be best for me to move back in with him in New York. The schools were better there, and we could have more time together that way, he said.

We journeyed this time not in a borrowed and beat-up truck, but on board a sailboat. This mode of transportation might have been as eccentric as that pickup had been, and even less practical—it took us all day, tacking back and forth in the gusty slate waters of the sound—but watching him, one hand on the rudder, one controlling the mast, made me realize once more what a figure of solid centrality my father was in my life. As invisible, most of the time, as the wind that plowed into the sail canvas, he was a powerful force, one I couldn't help but respect.

Faw's new place in the city was grander by far than what we as a family left in 1964. The decade had worked to his advantage, clearly, in all sorts of ways. We were up higher than any tree could grow, so the chances that the flare man—who by now seemed quite a remote phenomenon—would return were few. (Indeed, that he seemed to me a phenomenon rather than a being, a man of light, was proof of how far away I'd grown from my early, almost supernatural experiences. Try as I might, and sometimes I had tried, out at Scrub Farm, to will the flare man back, to conjure any of the light people, I failed. As much as they had terrified me, and as linked as they had been to the megrims, I felt a profound disappointment at my inability to attract them. The Greeks knew of tree-spirits—every tree had its own little resident deity—which were to be feared and worshiped, their boughs were the subject of adoration and beneath them there was orgiastic dancing and ritual sacrifices were made, so I knew that whatever I'd tapped into had some
justification
, however deep or unconscious it might have been. No Minoan, no Samantha or genie, however, I had become a helpless apostate. I closed my eyes, I opened them. Nothing. There was a clear sense, first, of abandonment, just as I had felt abandoned by the family. Second, as I got older, I began to realize that they hadn't forsaken me as such—it was I who had lost my powers, I, who was emerging as an adult, who lacked the child's freedom to create these visions.) I looked down from the twentieth floor, and saw the trees as meaningless brown and reddish blurs in the park and nothing more. An occasional migraine might come over me, like a squall cloud, running over the sea very low, hitting the island with a hot shower, the rain popping in dirt roads and making instant puddles and rivulets everywhere, and then blowing away just as quickly; and it would be oppressive and keep me indoors just like a squall does. The aura, the icicle hair, every portentous, foolhardy, mysterious consequence of the megrim seemed to be lost. And, yes, I was sorry these were lost, given that even in their most extreme manifestations, of which I must admit Desmond as lover might have been the most extreme, they were often the reward for the pain part.

I seemed to do better in school in the city. I don't know why. Heaven knows, by the time I was in high school my island ways had made me just as much an outsider in the city as my city ways, when I was younger, had made me an outcast on Shelter. There's nothing much to say about thisperiod of my life, except that it was later repeated—in its odd
absence
of reportable (this is a word?) experience—in my twenties. Boys I thought peculiar liked me, I think now looking back, for my own high peculiarities. Glands going, they figured me for an easy target, but were wrong. I don't remember any of their names. I don't recall what they looked like. They are all a bunch of random phantoms who've gone on, most likely, to lives that wouldn't interest me. And, harder for me to admit, the girls didn't reach me either. Maybe I was threatening, maybe plain odd. Among the most far-afield of outcasts I seemed to make no friends, not that I tried that hard.

Instead, Faw was my focus. Who was this man? What did he mean to me, what did he mean to himself and to the rest of the world, or rather—leaving the world, which hardly matters, aside—those in the world he touched? The older I got the more curious I got about the meaning of Mother's note—the hoax she referred to in it, a hoax she had found intolerable; what could it have meant? I'd always considered my own fabrications, whatever their genesis, to be the most creative, the most viable and meaningful audacities I knew of in my life, but I was wrong. Audacity was my father's forte. He was a wild force in his field of endeavor, I began to believe, more wild than religion, more wild than any sinner who nailed St. Peter upside down on a rood and spat into his upturned nostrils. Even before I knew whereof I spoke, the term “hoax” seemed too paltry for anything my father would do. Hoax was a lowly word, rhymed with coax, and he never stooped to coax anyone to do anything. He presented his case, you bought it or you didn't, and that was that.

The first moment I identified this audacity and understood the sweep of the Sprawl, became interested in its form and developed a new awe for its erratic energies, was in the middle of the night, when I was watching an old movie on the box (a Western, a clutch of men firing flintlocks on a log cabin, in which only two desperados werefighting back—the two were killed, the cabin burned down, end of movie)—and on came a commercial for something called Vintage Library of Art Film Society. Now, the society, catering to late night aficionados of the so-called “art” film, about which I will have more to say later, offered, much the way Time-Life offers insomniacs the chance to collect a series of thin tomes about this subject or that, high-quality reel-to-reel copies of the finest “art classics” ever “exposed on film.” Was this legal?(Yes and no: law prohibits advertising porn videos and porn films on television or radio—but it doesn't stand in the way of somebody putting together a good mailing list of those who've shown interest in the not-quite-X fare the Society was offering.) It intrigued me, and I even wrote the address and number down, knowing that I'd never want to become a member of the Society, but drawn to something about the way the man who was on the screen presented his case. Only later did I realize that the man was someone I had actually met, a long time before. I looked back in the almanac—something I seldom did, because the entries seemed more and more puerile to me, now that I was seventeen or eighteen—and, yes, I found what I was looking for. I had copied from Faw's notes the names of the dinner guests that one night at Shelter, the night that Berg was invited to the table, and recognized that the man on the screen had been Stuart Neden. What was he doing on inexpensive, early-morning air time? Why wouldn't he have gotten some peon to do the peddling?

Why shouldn't I ask? I thought; and so I did.

Faw was absolutely disconcerting in his response. “So?” he said, after I told him that the Sprawl, if Neden was still a part of the Sprawl, was somehow tied up with an operation called VLAFS.

He was amenable to talking about it, whatever. But the one-word response stripped me of any questions. What was I supposed to ask? Was I supposed to change all of a sudden into some sullied angel, some goodie two shoes? I was sullied, I felt, but no angel—and Faw seemed so comfortable with whatever he had to do with all this, that I couldn't even formulate the next question I would ask, let alone pose it to him. Given what I then asked, I imagine he'd have preferred it if I had engaged him in a discussion about pornography, the sociological pros and cons, the legalities, the negative impact of those real live angels who flapped their polyester wings around the shopping mall cinemas whenever any movie of a “provocative” kind came to ruin their neighborhoods … because I did it, I did what I thought I could never do, I asked him, “What hoax was it that Erin was talking about in that note?”

“What note?” he frowned; he was so easy a mark for me, just as I must have been an easy mark for him.

“The note Mother left you.”

He smiled at me a smile that said, What were you doing reading that note, that was for me, not you.

“Well, what did she mean, ‘hoax.'”

“Your mother, as much as I loved her, as much as I still love her, because you know I still love her—is limited, okay Grace?”

“Yes?” And I waited.

“It was irresponsible of her to have written that to me, and doubly so knowing that you were into everything, worse than a kitten, and that chances were ten to one you'd read that before I did.”