The Almanac Branch (18 page)

Part III
Aerie

WE LOOKED DOWN
seven hundred feet, not even, and it seemed as if we could pluck the Pain de Sucre right out of the ocean. The airplane crabbed left and careered to the right in the fresh breezes, and we saw Les Gros Islets and the port of Gustavia. The deep blues of the water graduated into the turquoises we associated with the West Indies, and we began to wonder why the pilot had the nose of the aircraft pointed sharply down; our chests had tightened, and the heat in the small cabin seemed to have risen, and the bluff, covered in rubber trees, cactus, scrub, succulents, arid paths, and narrow roads, seemed also to have risen. The pilot, a striking black man with a Rolex watch on his wrist and fresh white uniform with natty epaulettes on either shoulder, looked back at us passengers just at the moment we thought it was possible we were not going to clear the ridge, and smiled. Then he turned around and brought the nose of the aircraft up and lit down on the shortest runway in the Caribbean.

This is St. Barthélemy, St. Barth, St. Barts, and as I drove up the steep concrete road toward the summit of Tourterelle, I could see why it would be an excellent location for something you might not want everyone to have such easy access to.

Cutts hadn't wanted me to make this trip, though of course I hadn't told him exactly where it was I was going. If he'd known that I was down here to find out for myself what I could about this church, and its connection to my father's trust—which more and more I had begun to believe Berg was tied up with in ways too intricate to be innocent—he might have risked even going to Berg, with the idea that the two of them could prevail. I had just met Cutts, and his wife Bea, a few months before; Berg introduced us. Cutts, like everybody I had met, it seemed, worked for Geiger. He was in New York. Like my brother, he was administrative, one of the people that existed toward the center of the spinning axis of the Sprawl.

Through my twenties—I took this trip over three years ago, just before I turned thirty—I associated less and less with anyone who was enmeshed in Geiger; after Warne and I fell apart and he converted into a functionary cog, as I saw it, no doubt putting a disparaging spin on what was likely a simple response (his need of employment) to a sad situation (our separation), I had little use for Geiger people.

Cutts was different, for me. In the wake of the separation I drifted, and continued to drift over the months and years. Where they went, those years, and to what end I had made it through my days I can hardly say. I'm not proud of having nothing to report here about that time. There are those who claim that your twenties should be the best period of your life. I saw movies, I read, I slept with a few men, I helped keep a home going for my wanderer father. Time just passed, is all. And until I was introduced to Cutts nothing stirred me very deeply; there were no flare men out my windows, Desmond seemed like a distant mirage; if my dreams were shot through with any instances of bright sexuality I never recalled them; when I did experience the occasional megrim, it was pure pain, which sent me to a dark and silent room that had no tales of Arabia, nor anything else in it.

What I had told Cutts was half true. “I'm going on a trip,” I'd said. He and I had met for a drink, without Bea, and I noticed that evening our friendship was moving toward what seemed to me to be an inevitability. I had never had an affair with a friend, or a married man, and didn't know whether I wanted to or not. I adored Bea, and felt I would have to give up the chance of having a sister in her if I followed my disorderly heart. When Cutts asked why I was going on this trip, I answered with surprising forthrightness, “Because I think it might be good to get away from you for a while.”

That he didn't argue told me everything I needed to know. He felt the same way I did about us.

The Moke groaned as I took it back over the narrow pass. I parked it on the side of the road when I saw a graveyard there, since cemeteries and churches are often proximate. The gum trees and cacti were very thick up here, and I sensed that the church might be hidden in the thicket past the graves. The air was dry and sweet. Far off, a hollow bell on a goat's neck clanged. I made my way between the burial mounds, which were formed of sand and small seashells piled over the site. Some of the mounds were decorated lavishly with purple and pink plastic flowers and lined with conch shells. Bees hovered over the graves, lazily, drawn to examine the flowers.

They were disappointed, of course, as was I. After looking around that entire remote part of the island for the rest of the day, I began to conclude that what I'd always suspected was right. I checked into my hotel down by St. Jean, sat on the balcony and watched the pelicans dive for fish. I found myself wishing that Cutts was here with me. The little bit of French I had went just far enough to make me feel even more isolated. I drank from a bottle of scotch a former guest in this room had left behind, and that the maids had somehow missed appropriating for themselves, and wondered how Faw did it, how he managed to feel content inside his own skin while staying on the road all the time. How does a person do it, make the road his home? I decided I would ask around, as best I could, the next day, about the church, but after a sleepless night found myself making arrangements to catch a flight back to St. John, and home. I booked on a flight for the next day. Even with some time to kill I stayed in my room. Saline, Colombier, Gouverneur's beaches, none of them attracted me. I didn't care aboutthe sun. The little lizard that lived in the flowering tree off my porch could have it all to himself.

That night, evening light along the water was bathed in brown-pink, the color of the pelicans I had observed—the same color as the pelicans we had watched as children on Shelter, fascinated by the way they folded themselves into a seemingly helpless heap to make their deadly dive.

Meantime, I had found what I came looking for, which was that there was nothing there to find.

It happened. It had to happen. There was no resisting it. And it wasn't as difficult to do, either spiritually or practically, as I had thought it would be. I existed in unquestioning oblivion for nearly six weeks. Why shouldn't I allow myself to be happy? Other people made it their constant concern, to be happy, to content themselves no matter what the cost to others, so why not I? I found myself able to brunch with Cutts and Bea on Sunday, share the newspaper, waste hours with them at the flea market, and then, come Monday midday, meet him at their apartment and make love with him on the same comforter Bea had bought at the outdoor market the day before. But it wasn't that my heart had hardened, or so it was I assured myself, rather that I had opened myself up to a broader life, one that need not make moral sense in order to strike a balance. If there were unfortunate paradoxes here and there that happened to help keep things interesting, then so be it. After all, I had no strong aspirations to sainthood anyway.

Although I was naturally afraid that Bea might come home to discover us together—that was what inevitably happened in these arrangements, as I had understood from the movies I'd seen in which this kind of thing went on—I reveled in the smell of the sheets, and loved feeling saturated in the combined anxiety of fearing discovery and the absent intimacy of Bea's presence in the room. Sweet Bea,goddamn it all—the scent of my best friend in the pillowcase was profoundly, disturbingly intoxicating, and I would turn my head as far as I could to the side as Bea's man covered me, and breathe in deep in order to draw inside me with this one sense all I could of Bea, while I took inside me the single thing that in this world Bea probably considered all her own, and in this way not only was I able to give myself to Bea's man but I was able to make myself, for just a moment, Bea's home. This was how it felt to me, anyhow. It wasn't that I was purloining, wasn't that I was taking anything from Bea. Rather I was opening myself up to her, you see. Empathizing. I was presenting myself as a gift to Bea, anonymous and secret, quiet and willing. Again, no logician, I can't present a formula that would explain just why what another person would call a simple treachery I saw as an act of humility and love. But that is how it felt to me then, and how it feels even now.

I moved under the warmth, moved down into the mattress with my hips, and I supposed that somehow in making that movement I was able to mark the sheets with myself, and so bring myself into them, become part of their fabric, too. And later, after I left, much later that night I would imagine Bea lying in those same sheets with her man (by then the ambiguity of “her” and whom it denoted would have blossomed like April petals on Scrub Farm's apple trees)—and the thought would be as exquisite as any actual moment spent with either Bea or Cutts. In some ways more exquisite, because I could think of it by myself, extend it and repeat it, do as I pleased with the idea. It wasn't a mean thought, either; wasn't, as I saw it, pleasure from seeing someone else suffer. That was for … for whom? I hardly could conjure what kind of emotional grotesque (or wacko, as Berg would call it, still using that word as an adult, still thinking that way about me his sister) derived satisfaction from watching another person in pain. Bea wasn't in pain, Bea wasn't suffering in any way. If anyone was suffering it was me, wasn't it?

“I love you,” he allowed one day, and his statement struck the most incongruous chord inside me.

“Don't say that.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know why not. Just don't.”

“But, Grace, I do, it's the truth. I mean I just do.”

“The truth? Give me a break,” was my response, and we both let it go.

Later on, that evening, back home alone, it came to me why I didn't want him to tell me he loved me. Because by saying he loved me he pushed Bea back further away from the two of us, and I suddenly understood how delicate and improbable was this emotional cat's cradle I found myself entangled in, languorous as a cat myself. He shouldn't say it because for one I already knew he loved me, so they were just dull little words that if anything muted, rubbed, reduced the very experience they attempted to image; and, further, even more important, the words were words that Bea couldn't say to me, and I, in order to be able—somehow responsibly—to have him as my husband, too, had to feel that ineradicable bond between Bea and myself. “I love you” were words made out of blades, and sharp ones at that. They were words that severed, didn't seam, didn't mend, yet didn't lacerate either. They cut clean, and left behind nothing but a sheer imbalance. The formula was: Grace loved Bea, Bea was her husband as much as Cutts. I looked down dizzily at the twin blurs of red, the parallel taillights down the avenue, heightened in the dank drizzle. What a pity to know, without ever having tried of course, that making love with Beatrice would be boring. And what a strange thing to suspect that if Cutts—as he was pressing his body into mine—could cry out, We love you, the spell I was already under would be made unbreakable, that I would be fully possessed by him, by them. Should I have been glad he didn't seem to have a clue how obsessive I would be able to get about
them
?

The next day, the mist-rain was still filtering downthrough the streets, creating silver tracery on the windows, and the city was embraced in phosphorescent-gray fog. I whispered, “I hate you,” into his mouth as I was kissing him, and tightened my arms around his back. He either didn't understand what I had said, or knew better than to question or contradict the statement, and in his silence unknowingly gained my commitment to him, as I turned myself over, allowed my hands to dangle over the settee's edge, and heard myself moaning, “My husband, my husband,” like some perfect slut.

And, with this, the thought that ran through her mind, the thought that made her move better than she had ever moved before, as a woman, as a sexual being, was that she was learning something about who Grace Brush could possibly be.

Who would have guessed?

What she couldn't comprehend, though, was how her involvement with her best friend's spouse (yes, admit it for all the cliche that it was) generated in her not one glimmering of guilt—at least not a glimmering recognizable as guilt—and, indeed, she didn't much try. The point would have been what? It was a moment that begged for practicality, rather, and what did begin to grow was her survivor's sense of the need to shelter their arrangement. Spread the odds, or even nix the downside odds, just as her father would do, if it were a business arrangement. They needed not just a safe refuge, she and Cutts, but a place that would nurture whatever form their lives together could take. It was only a matter of money, and since he couldn't afford it, he said, and couldn't in any very discreet way help her pay the rent on such a thing, given that Bea ran the family finances and wrote their checks, Grace said she would pay the rent. Money could be got, in a host of ways, from the family, and no one needed to be the wiser for it.

The “aerie”—their secret place, named by Grace, of course, and named in honor of the osprey nest—was always filled with sunlight, yellow and brown and gray. And though it faced away from the street, it was always prey to the noise of the city, of neighbors, of trucks, of the deep unnamable hum that spreads through the pavements and up in through the girders and frames of New York buildings, making the glass in every window shiver. It was so different from the island. It took her back to her days of enchantment, her days with the flare man, the light people, her childhood. The light streaming through their window seemed only to encourage whatever flame they were able to generate, and like most city people they'd long since learned how not to listen to the noise. Because circumstances kept them from sleeping there at night, they were never able to test the brightness of their love under the same cover of dark as most lovers—but it didn't seem to matter. Cutts, at least, was content with the arrangement. As for Grace, she had her good days and, after those first weeks of euphoria, her bad days.