Little, Big Part 34

A Year to Place Upon It Auberon, after another scalding yet kindly draught, began, closing one eye, to measure out his new demesne. The regularity of it surprised him, since its tone was not regular but bosky and artless. Yet the benches, gates, obelisks, marten-houses on poles, and the intersections of paths had a symmetry easily adduced from where he sat. It all depended from or radiated outward from the little house of the seasons.

That was all hopeless guff she had instructed him in, of course. He did feel bad about inflicting such a lunatic on his family, not that they would notice probably, hopeless themselves; and the price had not been resistable. Odd how a man of wide sympathies like himself started such hares and harebrains wherever he went.

Outside the park, framed in sycamores from where he sat, was a small cla.s.sical courthouse (Drinkwater's too for all he knew), surmounted with statues of lawgivers at even intervals. Moses. Solon. Etc. A place to put a law-case, certainly. His own infuriating struggle with Petty, Smilodon Ruth. Those coffered bra.s.s doors not yet open for business the locked entrance to his inheritance, the egg-and-dart molding the endless repet.i.tion of delay and hope, hope and delay.

Stupid. He looked away. What was the point? No matter how gracefully the building accepted his case in all its complexity (and as he glanced again sidelong at it he saw that it could and did) it was needless. How could he forget all that? The doles they eked out to him, enough to keep him from starvation, enough to keep him signing (with an increasingly furious scrawl) the instruments, waivers, pleas and powers they presented him with as those stony-eyed immortals there proffered tablets, books, codices: the last of the last had bought this gin he now drank of, and more than was left in the bottle would be necessary for him to forget the indignity of his pleading for it, the injustice of it all. Diocletian counted out wrinkled bills from petty cash.

h.e.l.l with that. He left the courthouse outside. In here there was no law.

A year to place upon it. She had said that the value of her system was how it would cast up, spontaneously, what you didn't know out of the proper arrangement of what you did.

Well: there was a thing he didn't know.

If he could believe what the old woman had said, if he could, wouldn't he then set to work here, commit every tulip-bed and arrowheaded fence-post, every whitewashed stone, every budding leaf to memory, so that he could distribute among them every tiny detail of lost Sylvie? Wouldn't he then march furiously sniffing up and down the curving paths, like this mutt that had just entered with his master, searching, searching, going sunwise then antisunwise, searching until the one single simple answer arose, the astonis.h.i.+ng lost truth, that would make him clutch his brow and cry I see?

No, he would not.

He had lost her; she was gone, and for good. That fact was all that excused and made reasonable, even proper, his present degradation. If her whereabouts were revealed to him now, though he had spent a year trying to learn them, he would avoid them of all places.

And yet. He didn't want to find her, not any more; but he would like to know why. Would like to know (timidly, subjunctively) why she had left him never to return, without a word, without, apparently, a backward glance. Would like to know, well, what was up with her nowadays, if she was all right, whether she thought of him ever, and in what mode, kindly or otherwise. He recrossed his legs, tapping one broken shoe in the air. No: it was just as well, really; just as well that he knew the old woman's batty and monstrous system to be useless. That Spring could never be the spring she had blossomed for him, nor that shoot their love, nor that trowel the tool by which his rageful and unhappy heart had been scored with joy.

In the First Place He hadn't at first found her disappearance all that alarming. She'd run off before, for a few nights or a weekend, where and for what reasons he never pressed her about, he was cool, he was a hands-off guy. She hadn't ever before taken every st.i.tch of clothes and every souvenir, but he didn't put it beyond her, she could bring them all back in an hour, at any hour, having missed a fleeing bus or train or plane or been unable to bear whatever relative or friend or lover she had camped with. A mistake. The greatness of her desires, of her longing for life to come out right even in the impossible conditions under which hers was lived, led her into such mistakes. He rehea.r.s.ed fatherly or avuncular speeches with which, unhurt and unalarmed and not angry, he would counsel her after he welcomed her back.

He looked for notes. The Folding Bedroom though small was such a chaos that he might easily have overlooked one; it had slipped down behind the stove, she had propped it on the windowsill and it had blown out into the farmyard, he had closed it up in the bed. It would be a note in her huge, wild round hand; it would start "Hi!" and be signed with x's for kisses. It had been on the back of something inconsequential, which he had thrown out even as he searched through inconsequential papers for it. He emptied the wastebasket, but when its contents lay around his ankles he stopped the search and stood stock still, having suddenly imagined another sort of note entirely, a note with no "Hi!" and no kisses. It would resemble a love letter in its earnest, overwrought tone, but it wouldn't be a love letter.

There were people he could call. When (after endless trouble) they had had a phone put in, amazing George Mouse, she had used to spend a good amount of time talking to relatives and quasi-relatives in a rapid and (to him) hilarious mixture of Spanish and English, shouting with laughter sometimes and sometimes just shouting. He had taken down none of the numbers she called; she herself often lost the sc.r.a.ps of paper and old envelopes she had written them on, and had to recite them out loud, eyes cast upward, trying out different combinations of the same numbers till she hit on one that sounded right.

And the phone book, when (just hypothetically, there was no immediate need) he consulted it, listed surprising columns, whole armies in fact, of Rodriguezes and Garcias and Fuenteses, with great pompous Christian names, Monserrate, Alejandro, such as he had never heard her use. And talk about pompous names, look at this last guy, Archimedes Zzzyandottie, what on earth.

He went to bed absurdly early, trying to hurry through the hours till her inevitable return; he lay listening to the thump and hum and squeak and wail of night, trying to sort from it the first intimations of her footfalls on the stair, in the hail; his heart quickened, banis.h.i.+ng sleep, as he heard inhis mind's ear the scratch of her red nails on the door. In the morning he woke with a start, unable to remember why she wasn't next to him; and then remembered that he didn't know.

Surely around the Farm someone would have heard something, but he would have to be circ.u.mspect; he restricted himself to inquiries that, if they ever got back to her, would reveal no possessive distress or fussy prying on his part. But the answers which he got from the farmers raking muck and setting out tomatoes were even less revealing than his questions.

"Seen Sylvie?"

"Sylvie?"

Like an echo. A kind of propriety kept him from approaching George Mouse, for it could be that it was to him she had fled, and he didn't want to hear that from George, not that he had ever felt compet.i.tion from his cousin, or jealousy, but, well, he didn't like any of the possible conversations he could imagine himself and George having on the subject. A weird fear was growing in him. He saw George once or twice, trundling a wheelbarrow in and out of goat sheds, and studied him secretly. His state seemed unchanged.

At evening he fell into a rage, and imagined that, not content with leaving him flat, she had engineered a conspiracy of silence to cover her tracks. "Conspiracy of silence" and "cover her tracks," he said aloud, more than once that long night, to the furnis.h.i.+ngs of the Folding Bedroom which were none of them hers. (Hers were at that moment being exclaimed over, one by one, elsewhere, as they were taken from the drawstring bags of the three brown-capped flat-faced thieves who had abstracted them; exclaimed over in cooing small voices one by one before being put away in a humpbacked trunk bound in black iron, to wait for their owner to come and claim them.)

And in the Second Place The bartender at the Seventh Saint, "their" bartender, didn't appear for work that night or the next or the next, though Auberon came every night to question him. The new guy wasn't sure just what had happened to him. Gone to the Coast, maybe. Gone, anyway. Auberon, having no better post from which to keep vigil when he could no longer bear the Folding Bedroom or Old Law Farm, ordered another. One of those periodic upheavals in bar life had taken place among the clientele lately. As evening drew on, he recognized few regulars; they seemed to have been swept away by a new crowd, a crowd that did superficially resemble the crowd Sylvie and he had known, were in fact the same people in every respect except that they were not. The only familiar face was Leon's. After an inward struggle and several gins, he managed a casual question.

"Seen Sylvie?"

"Sylvie?"

It might well be, of course, that Leon was hiding her in some apartment uptown. It might be that she had gone to the Coast with Victor the bartender. Sitting his stool before the broad brown window night after night, watching the crowds outside pa.s.s, he concocted these and several other explanations of what had happened to Sylvie, some pleasing to him, some distressing. He fitted each out with motives planted in the past, and a resolution; what she would do and say, and what he. These would grow stale, and like a failing baker he would remove them, still pretty but unsold, from his case, and replace them with others. He was at this on the Friday after her disappearance, the place packed with laughing folks more bent on pleasure, more exquisite than the diurnal crowd (though he couldn't be sure they weren't the same). He sat his stool as on a solitary rock amid their foamy rus.h.i.+ng back and forth. The sweet scent of liquor mingled with their mingled perfumes, and all together they made the soughing sea-noise which, when he became a television writer, he would learn to call "walla". Walla walla walla. Far away, waiters tended to the banquettes, drawing corks and laying cutlery. An older man, white-templed less it seemed from age than by choice but with an air of subtle ruin about his nattiness, poured wine for a dark, laughing woman in a broad-brimmed hat.

The woman was Sylvie.

One explanation that had occurred to him for her disappearance was her disgust with her poverty; often she had said, as she pawed furiously through her thrift-shop clothes and dime-store valuables, makes.h.i.+fting an outfit, that what she needed was a rich old man, that she'd turn tricks if she only had the nervea"I mean look at this clothes, man! He looked now at her clothes, nothing he had ever seen before, the hat shading her face was velvet, the dress nicely constructeda"lamplight fell, as though guided there, into its decolletage and lit the amber roundness of her breast; he could see it from where he sat. A small roundness.

Should he leave? How could he? Turmoil nearly blinded him. They had ceased laughing together, and raised their gla.s.ses now, topped up with lurid wine, and their eyes met like voluptuaries greeting. Good G.o.d, what nerve to bring him here. The man took an oblong case from within his jacket, and opened it to her. It would contain icy jewels blue and white. No, it was a cigarette case. She took one and he lit it for her. Befcre he could be harrowed by the characteristic way she had of smoking her occasional cigarette, as individual as her laugh or her footstep, thronging crowds intervened. When they parted, he saw her take up her purse (also new) and rise. The john. He hid his head. She would have to pa.s.s by him where he sat. Flee? No: there was a way, he thought, to greet her, there must be, but only seconds in which to find it. Hi. h.e.l.lo. h.e.l.lo? Heh-lo, fancy meeting a His heart was mad. Having calculated the moment at which she must pa.s.s by, he turned, supposing his face to be composed and his heart-thuds invisible.

Where was she? He thought a woman just then pa.s.sing near him in a black hat was she, but it wasn't. She had disappeared. Pa.s.sed by him quickly? Hidden from him? She would have to pa.s.s him again on her return. He'd keep watch now. Maybe she'd leave, covered with shame, sneak away sticking Mr. Rich with the bill but no favors. The woman he had for a moment thought to be hera"in fact years and inches different, with a practised lurch and a gravelvoiced excuse-mea"worked her way past him, and through the ma.s.sed exquisites, and took her seat with Mr. Rich.

How could he even for a moment have thought a His heart turned to an ember, to a cold clinker. The cheerful walla of the bar faded away into a sound of silence, and Auberon had a sudden horrible percipience, like a dropped ball of mental string madly unwinding, of what this vision meant, and what would now, must now, become of him; and he raised a trembling hand for the bartender, pus.h.i.+ng bills urgently across the bar with the other.

And in the Third He arose from his bench in the park. Traffic had grown loud as day grew bright, the City flinging itself against this enclave of morning. Without reservations now, but with a strange hope in his heart, he moved sunwise around the small pavilion and sat again, before Summer.

Bacchus and his pards; the flaccid wineskin and the checkered shade. The faun that follows, the nymph that flies. Yes: so it was, so it had been, so it would be. And below all this pictured la.s.situde was a sort of fountain, the sort where water gushes from a lion's or a dolphin's mouth: only this wasn't a lion or a dolphin but a man's face, a medallion of grief, a tragic mask with snaky hair; and the water was not issuing from his sad-clown mouth but from his eyes, falling in two slow and constant trickles down his cheeks and chin into a sc.u.mmy pool below. It made a pleasant sound.

Hawksquill meanwhile had gone to her car in its underground den, and slipped into its waiting seat which was clad in leather as smooth as the backless gloves she then drew on. The wooden wheel carved for her grip and polished by her hands backed the long wolflike shape neatly around and faced it outward; with a clanking the garage door opened and the car's growl opened fanwise into the May air.

Violet Bramble. John Drinkwater. The names made a room: a room where pampas gra.s.s stood in heavy floor vases purple and brown, and there were Ricketts drawings on the lily-patterned walls, and the drapes were drawn for a seance. In the fruitwood bookcases were Gurdjieff and other frauds. How could anything like a world-age be born there, or one die? Moving uptown in knight's-moves as the clotted traffic forced her, her impatient tires casting up filth, she thought: yet it may well be; may well be that they have kept a secret for all these years, and a very great secret too; and it may be that she, Hawksquill, had come close to a very great mistake. It would not be the first time a . The traffic around her loosened as she set out on the wide north road; her car threaded through it like a needle through old cloth, picking up speed. The boy's directions had been eccentric and wandering, but she wouldn't forget them, having impressed each one in place on an old folding Monopoly board she kept in her memory for just such a use.

The Thirst that from the Soul doth rise Doth ask a drink divine; But might I of Jove's nectar sip I would not change for thine.

a"Ben Jonson Earth rolled its rotundity around, tilting the little park where Auberon sat one, two, three days more faceupwards to the changeless sun. The warm days were growing more frequent, and though never matching quite the earth's regular progress, the warmth was already more constant, less skittish, soon not ever to be withdrawn. Auberon, hard at work there, hardly noticed; he kept on his overcoat; he had ceased to believe in spring, and a little warmth couldn't convince him.

Press on, press on.

Not Her But This Park The struggle was, as it had always been, to think rightly about what had happened, to come to conclusions that took in all aspects, that were mature; to be objective. There were mult.i.tudes of reasons why she might have left him, he knew that well, his faults were as numerous as the paving-stones of those walks, as rooted and th.o.r.n.y as that blooming hawthorn. There was after all no mystery in the end of love, no mystery but the mystery of love itself, which was large certainly but as real as gra.s.s, as natural and unaccountable as bloom and branch and their growth.

No, her leaving him was sad, and a puzzle; it was her disappearance that was insane and maddening. How could she leave not a wrack behind? He had thought of her abducted, murdered; he had thought of her planning her own vanis.h.i.+ng, just to drive him mad with bafflement, but why would she want such a madness? Certainly he had raged, frantic, at George Mouse, unable to bear it, tell me you son of a b.i.t.c.h where she is, what you've done with her, and saw his madness reflected in George Mouse's honest fear as he said "Now now, now now," and groped amid his souvenirs for a baseball bat. No, he had not gone about his searching in the most lucid frame of mind, but what the h.e.l.l was to be expected?

What the h.e.l.l was to be expected, when after four gins at the Seventh Saint he would see her pa.s.sing by in the crowds outside the window, and after five find her sitting on the adjacent stool?

One trip only to Spanish Harlem, where he had seen her replicated on a dozen street corners, in halter tops, with baby carriages, chewing gum on crowded stoops, dusky roses all of them and none of them her, and he had abandoned that search. He had forgotten utterly, if he ever really knew, just which of these buildings on highly individual hut at the same time identical streets had been the ones she had taken him to; she might be in any of those aqua living rooms, watching through the plastic lace of curtains as he pa.s.sed, any of those rooms lit by aeqeous television and the red points of votive candles. Even worse was the checking of jails, hospitals, madhouses, in all of which the inmates had obviously taken over, his calls were shunted from thug to loony to paralytic and finally cut off, by accident or on purpose, he had not made himself clear. If she had fallen into one of those public oubliettes a No. If it was madness to choose to believe she had not, he would rather be mad.

And in the street his name would be called. Softly, shamefacedly; happily, with relief; peremptorily. And he would stand looking up and down the avenue, searching, stock still amid the traffic, unable to see her but unwilling to move lest she lose sight of him. Sometimes it was called again, even more insistently, and still he would see nothing; and after a long time move on, with many halts and backward glances, having at last to say out loud to himself that it wasn't her, wasn't even his name that had been called, just forget it; and curious pa.s.sersby would covertly watch him reason with himself.

Mad he must have seemed, but whose G.o.d d.a.m.n fault was that? He had only tried to be sensible, not to become fixated and obsessed with the imaginary, he had struggled against it, he had, though he had succ.u.mbed in the end; Christ it must be hereditary, some taint pa.s.sed down to him through the generations like colorblindnessa .

Well, it was over now. Whether or not it was possible for the park and the Art of Memory to yield up to him the secret of her whereabouts didn't interest him; that was not what he was at work on there. What he hoped and believed, what seemed to him promised by the ease with which the statuary and greenery and footpaths accepted his story, was that once he had committed the whole of his year-long agony to thema"no hope or degradation, no loss, no illusion unaccounted fora"then he would someday remember, not his search, but these intersecting pathways that, leading always inward, led always away.

Not Spanish Harlem but that wire basket just outside the fence, with a cerveza Schaefer and a mango pit and a copy of El Diario crushed in it, MATAN as always in the headline.

Not Old Law Farm but that old marten-house on a pole, and its battling noisy occupants coming and going and building nests.

Not the Seventh Saint Bar Grill but Bacchus in basrelief, or Silenus or whoever that was supported by goat-footed satyrs nearly as drunk as their G.o.d.

Not the weird pursuing pressure of his madness, inherited and inescapable, only that plaque fixed to the gate where he had entered: Mouse Drinkwater Stone.

Not the false Sylvies that had afflicted him when he was drunk and defenseless but the little girls, skipping rope and playing jacks and whispering together as they eyed him suspiciously, who were always the same yet always different, perhaps only in different outfits.

Not his season on the street but the seasons of this pavilion.

Not her but this park.

Press on, press on.

Never Never Never The cold compa.s.sion of bartenders, he came to see, was like that of priests universal rather than personal, with charity for all and malice toward almost none. Firmly situated (smiling and making ritual and comforting gestures with gla.s.s and cloth) between sacrament and communicant, they commanded rather than earned love, trust, dependence. Best always to placate them. A big h.e.l.lo, and the tips subtle but sufficient.

"A gin, please, Victor, I mean Siegfried."

Oh G.o.d that solvent! A season's worth of summer afternoons dissolved in it as his father once, in a rare burst of enthusiasm for the sciences, had in school dissolved something blue-green (copper?) in a beaker of clear acid till it did not exist at all, didn't stain its solvent with even the faintest veridical residue; what had become of it? What had become of that July?

The Seventh Saint was a cool cavern, cool and dark as any burrow. Through the windows the white heat showed the more blank and violent to his eyes when they were accustomed to the dark; he looked out at a parade of blinking, harrowed faces, bodies as nearly unclothed as decency and contrivance allowed them to be. Negroes turned gray and oily and white people red; only the Spanish bloomed, and even they sometimes looked a little blown and wilted. The heat was an affront, like winter's cold; all seasons were errors here, two days only excepted in spring and a week in autumn full of huge possibilities, great glamor and sweetness.

"Hot enough for you?" said Siegfried. This was he who had replaced Auberon's first friend Victor behind the Seventh Saint bar. Auberon had never enjoyed any rapport with this thick, stupid one, named Siegfried. He sensed an unpastoral cruelty in him, an enjoyment almost in others' weaknesses, a Schadenfreude shadowing his ministry.

"Yes," Auberon said. "Yes, it is." Somewhere, far off, guns were fired. The way to avoid being disturbed by these, Auberon had decided, was to regard them as fireworks. You never anyway saw the slain in the streets, or as rarely as you saw the dead bodies of rabbits or birds in the woods. Somehow they were disposed of. "Cool in here, though," he said with a smile.

Sirens wailed, going elsewhere. "Trouble someplace," Siegfried said. "This parade."

"Parade?"

"Russell Eigenblick. Big show on. You didn't know?"

Auberon made gestures.

"Jeez, where you been? Did you know about the arrests?"

"No."

"Some guys with guns and bombs and literature. Found them in the bas.e.m.e.nt of some church. They were a church group. Planning some a.s.sa.s.sination or something."

"They were going to a.s.sa.s.sinate Eigenblick?"

"Who the h.e.l.l knows? Maybe they were his guys. I forget exactly. But he's in hiding, only there's this big march on today."

"For him or against him?"

"Who the h.e.l.l knows?" Siegfried moved off. If Auberon wanted details, let him get a paper. The bartender had just been making conversation; he had better things to do than be grilled. Auberon drank, abashed. Outside, people were hurrying by, in groups of two and three, looking behind them. Some were shouting, others laughing.

Auberon turned from the window. Surrept.i.tiously, he counted his money, contemplating the evening and the night ahead. Soon he would have to move downward in the drinker's scale, from this pleasanta"more than pleasant, necessary, imperativea"retreat to less pleasant places, brightly-lit, naked, with sticky plastic bars surmounted by the waxy faces of aged patrons, their eyes fixed on the absurdly cheap prices posted on the mirror before them. Dram shops, as old books had it. And then? He could drink alone, of course, and wholesale so to speak: but not in Old Law Farm, not in the Folding Bedroom. "Another of these," he said mildly, "when you get a chance."

He had that morning decided, not for the first time, that his search was over. He wouldn't sally forth today to follow illusory clues. She couldn't be found who wanted not to be found. His heart had cried out, But what if she does? What if she is only lost, and searching for you even as you search for her, what if only yesterday you came within a block of one another, what if at this moment she sits somewhere nearby, on a park bench, a stoop, Somehow unable to find her way back to you, what if she is even now thinking He'll never believe this crazy story (whatever it would be) if only I find him, if only; and the tears of loneliness on her brown cheeks a But that was all old. It was the Crazy Story Idea, and he knew it well; it had once been a bright hope, but it had over time condensed to this burning point, not a hope but a reproach, not even (no! No more!) a spur; and that was why it could be snuffed.

He'd snuffed it, brutally, and come to the Seventh Saint. A day off.

There was only one further decision then to make, and he would (with the help of this gin, and more of the same) make that today. She hadn't ever existed at all! She was a figment. It would be hard, at first, to convince himself of how sensible a solution this was to his difficulty; but it would grow easier.

"Never existed," he muttered. "Never never never."

"Wazzat?" said Siegfried, who usually couldn't hear the plainest request for replenishment.

"Storm," Auberon said, for just then there was a sound which if it wasn't cannon was thunder.

"Cool things off," said Siegfried. What the h.e.l.l could he care, Auberon thought, aestivating in this cave.