The Almanac Branch (30 page)

Then the screen image jump-cuts to a gypsy woman withone glass eye. “Nasturia was one who knew how to read the lines of a person's palms. My parents brought me, early on in my life, to her, hoping against hope that she could identify the reason for my problems. I had been very ill, and our family had moved to this place on doctor's orders, in the hope of restoring my health. But for all the natural beauty and calm of island life, I was still subject to fits and sinful hallucinations. Desperate about my uncouth nightmares, and my fantasies, which were evident to my parents by the way I moved as I slept, fitfully, moaning and heaving, bathed in the salty water of my own flesh, my parents, frustrated by the failures conventional wisdom and medicine had shown in my case, brought me to Nasturia.”

The palmist, in whose own facial wrinkles we are able to read a long, hard life of quackery and falsehoods, smiles a knowing smile. Obscured if not hidden beneath her heavy makeup, we can discern, is a person who possesses both a melancholic understanding of what a bitch life is and a failure to have, herself, warded off its nastiest demon: the demon of growing old ignorant.

She studies the child's hand with admirable concentration. She frowns, as we might expect. Then she looks up to the parents, who stand, worried expressions on their faces, behind their daughter, and darkly mutters, “This bodes evil.”

The mother leans forward and tells the palm reader to elaborate.

“How do you feel, honey?” the palmist asks the girl.

Grady answers, most reserved, “Fine.”

“You want to go on?”

Grady says, “Yes.”

Drawing the hand closer to her dark eye, the palmist reads, “An absent Mount of Jupiter suggests degrading proclivities, the Mount of Venus being rather excessive indicates coquetry and frivolity beyond measure. The Line of the Head reads of a lack of steadiness of mind, I am afraid. None of which is, as you can see, good. However,there is more. Her Line of Life, while being neither normal nor short, is formed of a double J—you see? you see these fishhooks here?”

The father asks, somewhat unimpressed with the palmist's confidence in her craft, about the meaning of the fishhooks.

The palmist smoothly ignores his hostility. “These lines tell of one who shall enjoy success in war.”

And she smiles knowingly at the girl, and the girl is seen to smile back at the old hag, her face flooded with innocence.

The parents aren't pleased with the reading.

The palmist stresses, “I can only read what fate has traced there in the flesh, I cannot shape the girl's fate myself,” and as she pauses for a moment the camera tightens in on her face, slowly, so that we are close enough to imagine her breath on our cheeks when she says, “One thing I can tell you is this. If she were my daughter I know I'd keep a close watch on her.”

The scene was hokey to just the degree Berg wanted it to be hokey, and yet eloquent enough, he believed, so that it achieved precisely the mix of tones he was looking for. Fair enough. It was under way. He'd got his filmic conflict going. The music was to be understated, and that would be a plus, keep it from getting too arty.

When he had first sketched out this opening, he was aware that his audience, now three-four minutes into the action, would be getting restless, maybe begin shifting in their seats, wondering when they were going to be delivered what they'd come looking for, whether it be simple action, or skin trade materials. The palmist could, of course, request to be left alone with the girl, usher the parents to a waiting room, and summon her two twisted sons to the chamber to perform, perhaps, some sort of ritualistic act with the girl to cleanse her of the curse that her palms declared was upon her. The sort of tribal ambience, the narcotized luxuriance of a classic like
Behind the Green Door
might be effected had he invented a scene like that.

But, Berg reminded himself, classic or not,
Almanac
wasn't to become some piece of pulp porn trash nor a cruddy mail-order tape; it was a family portrait, a Film with a capital “F,” and he disciplined himself to stick to the—well, if not facts, as such, at least the testimony his memory wished to preserve on its celluloid canvas.

He knew, further, that he would have to discipline himself to coordinate his need for accuracy in some kind of measure with the market imperatives he knew Analise would have in mind: he wasn't prepared to be irresponsible, given how much money it had by now become evident would have to be siphoned off the Trust to make the thing a reality. So, he gambled the scene that revealed how fate had doomed her was enough of a prelude, and decided not to spend the money and shooting time it would take to further develop and shade the background to Grady's character. He would skip ahead some years and show her as a flowering adolescent, obsessed with her brother.

I felt unhurried as I biked over the first, then the second causeway, maybe because it felt so unusual to be traveling in this childhood mode again, slow and yet covert, and I was enjoying the sea air, and the skittering of the pebbles as the rocks ran fingers through them, foaming and chewing incessantly at the manmade span that led out toward the house.

Enjoying the sea air? I could have laughed if it had been less painful; such a pathetic figure I must have cut in the eyes of those two boys down on the shore, surf casting into the wind, who glanced back to see this woman cycling along toward Ram above them on the road. To them I must have seemed ninety, seemed ancient, with my Soho blacks fluttering into my body, my black ankle boots and blackstockings moving up and down against the pedals of the bicycle that I'd borrowed from the hotel. In the city, this was the absolute in feminine garb—at least downtown, where I had gone so often to meet Cutts at the aerie. But here, on this rather desolate road, on this island, at this time of evening, I must have looked like a witch, and a wicked and ridiculous one to boot. But rather than shout something derisive at me, they ignored me, turning back to the darkening water and casting again. I could have told them that fishing here on this side of the causeway was not going to avail them of any catch, not in this month, at this hour—Desmond, Berg, and I had tried to fish the bay from this concrete strait before on many occasions under similar conditions with no success. But I thought, let them learn for themselves. That's what I was still doing, wasn't it? Learning for myself. And besides, they hadn't even laughed at me. Solipsism, is what it's called, when a person is so far gone into the sorrows and joys of apperception that she believes everyone is looking, measuring, admiring, ridiculing her. Solipsism is when you think that one of the primary reasons the sun bothers to rise in the morning is to show you once more to the world for appraisal. Whatever streak of it I had running through my nerves and blood and heart I could damned well do without, but it was in me, like sap in the spring brush, sap out of the wound of a late-pruned maple branch.

So. Picture a witch but one without powers, one who wouldn't know necessarily how to crack a mirror at the right moment, or wiggle her nose in order to make all the most inane complications that happen in a life disappear, and there was Grace, approaching her own house, ditching her borrowed bicycle in the scrub—plentiful yet out there, whence the name of the farm originally. The irony (are these things ironies, or sublime cruelties?) of me coming to a stop at just about the same place in the road that Segredo parked his car all those years ago, when he'd come to Erin, did not escape me—but I did not fight what had by thenbecome an inevitability, a purpose. To find out just what it was that Berg was doing. And to make up my mind who I was, how I could define myself in the midst of all these other ideas, and movements, all these decisions.

The grounds of Scrub Farm I knew better than my own body. Every tree, every stone, every rise in the grade. I was the most viable insurgent. And—for the solipsist I accused myself of being—the most self-deprecatory. Everyone, I am convinced, has experienced this moment in their lives, when they “snuck up” on someone. Common as grit in a hen's gullet, would be how Web might say it.

The windows cast a yellow onto the holly and junipers, and the tiny berries on the ferethorn burned bright under what had become a convergence of sun afterglow and early moonlight. My old library window, the window that I had stood at so often as a girl, glowed with a butterscotch hue. There were a number of lights on in the house, upstairs and downstairs, though the carriage house was dark. I made my way down toward the far shore where the carriage house looked out toward Coecles head, and peeked in the windows to assure myself no one was inside, then used a key to let myself in the back door. The rooms smelled of (guess what) potpourri, ever so mild. The familiarity of the smell was, in this new context, heartwarming to me, and I could feel my pulse, which had risen as I'd ventured across that open space in the twilight, now return to a regular tempo.

I sat down. I didn't know my way around Djuna's rooms—indeed, even when I was living at Scrub Farm I had only been in the carriage house on a few occasions, once to bring Djuna her medicine, maybe once to help her carry plates of cookies she had made for a surprise party for my father on his fiftieth birthday. Of course, I didn't turn on any lights, but as I sat on the floor in the foyer, my eyes adjusted to the darkness, and soon enough I got my bearings, rose, and walked toward the open staircase—still quite charmingly rickety—and went up to the second story. In Djuna's bedroom the potpourri was positivelyheady. What was it about these women that would make them want to keep bowls of dead and decaying flowers in their houses? I found her telephone, which was on the bedside table. Without thinking about it I dialed the number for the farmhouse.

Luck was with me, and it surprised me a little that it was, because I hadn't anticipated Berg would allow anyone to answer the telephone besides himself. “Brush residence,” she said, the woman who answered; her voice was very direct. That is to say, it was as if she lived there herself, so calm was her tone.

“Is Djuna Cobbetts there?” I asked.

“Hold on a moment, please.”

I looked out the window toward the house, which was slightly above me toward that rise which marked the long summit of Rams Island. Evening had come now, and the lights in the windows burned brighter. Light streamed out of my own bedroom window into the cherry tree. These people were incorrigible.

“Mrs. Cobbetts is out of town right now, may I take your name, and I'll have her get back to you.”

“When do you expect her back?” I ventured.

“I'm not sure, but if you'll give me your name—” and then I was sure I could hear in the voice the beginnings of anxiety, and I made a small mistake, I suppose, by hanging up. I considered calling back with some line like, We must have been disconnected, but thought instead to leave matters where they stood, and at any rate I had got the information I'd wanted. I lay back on the bed—her mattress was so soft I sank into its downy mass—and made another mistake. Well, not so much a mistake as an unconscious alteration in my plan. I fell asleep. When I woke up, it was still dark outside, and I got up quickly, cursing myself, and saw that the lights in the farmhouse were all off now, except for one. The library window was still aglow.

After smoothing Djuna's bedspread, I went downstairs, out the back door again, locking it, and walked up the brickpath toward the house. Stars blanketed the sky. The air was damp but not as cold as autumn night air can be. I was wide awake now. Careful not to make a sound, I walked out around the house on the orchard side, past their cars and the garden in front of the house, to get myself in a position to see what was going on in the library. The light went on and off, very rapidly, flickering, and gave eerie sprays of intoxicant whiteness out into the foliage. Berg was projecting onto the wall some footage. He was wholly absorbed with what he was doing. He looked exhausted, but burnished by the light. I moved in closer and watched in the silence of the predawn, peering into the window in the same way that the light people and the flare man and that ghost boy with the origami hat made out of newspaper had.

What I saw—over Berg's shoulder—was the same old, sea-roughed rows of trees that Desmond and I had played in as children, the same orchard I had just skirted on my way around the house. There was a naked girl and I knew at once who she was supposed to be.

An orchard. Quiet as Pompeii, or an underwater cathedral. Shadows running over the grass as heavy as clouds. The trees lengthening with their fruit. Grady has taken a basket down to pick apples, or pears, or apricots, whatever remains unharvested. The fruit seems to be fake. Her dress is diaphanous. Close up on a suggestive, dying flower over whose pistil a bee has impressed itself. The bee and flower bob in the breeze, as the camera pulls away, lazily as the sated old bee, and focuses on Grady, who is now spreading a blanket beneath one of the trees. She looks around and, seeing that there is no one in the field, slips first out of her camisole then her skirt. The delicate beads of sweat that ring her forehead suggest that an Indian summer's heat has settled in over the orchard, and makes us feel as lightheaded and sleepy as the girl herself feels. She stretches,and as she does, the sun and shadow through the leaves dapple her torso. Lying on the blanket we see her narrow buttocks rise and fall as she unaccountably begins to squirm, slowly, distending her limbs, and pushing her fingertips lightly across her muscular, flat stomach down to the hairless mound where her pubis unfurls like some cosmic anemone. Her tongue cowers at the hollow made by her pursed lips.

“Grady?” a voice calls from behind somewhere.

So enraptured with her own movements and the ascendant heat of her game, she hasn't heard him.

A boy, unclothed, his skin luminous, steps out from back in the woods, and walks up to where she lies. “Hi,” he says; she squints up into the light at him, but says nothing. A few leaves from the trees have blown onto the blanket, and Grady brushes a leaf out of her hair, which is fanned around her head. “They said I'd find you down here.”