She trailed one hand in the water. ‘Warmer than the air,’ she said. ‘How can that be.’
‘A swim?’ he said, his heart all in a moment in his throat.
‘Well lookee here,’ she said, hand in the single patch pocket of her dress. ‘I have found a number here in my pocket.’ She held it up to him, between a V of fingers like a Lucky in an old ad. ‘Do you have a match?’
In its flare she looked at him, her face changed or revealed further by matchlight; questioning or for some reason uncertain, afraid even. The match went out.
‘There,’ she said, pointing.
They entered onto the river, a wide avenue black and bordered with immense trees; an avenue of humid sky matched it above. The current turned them idly toward the mystery of the bank; Pierce unshipped his oars and dipped them. As faint as though proceeding from the blurred and goldfish constellations, the tinkle and murmur of the party’s music.
‘You’re going to get stuck,’ Rosie said calmly.
He pulled his right oar, but the boat struck something projecting from the bank, and swung around. It was a little wooden landing stage, and the boat lay up there now ready to be tied, like an old horse who has led a new rider back to its stable.
Okay. All right. The little pier led to stairs, though nothing could be seen at the top of them. ‘Explore?’ he said. ‘Go ashore and forage.’
‘Oooh.’
But he had thrown the painter around a piling in two quick loops, that boating trick at least he remembered. He rose to help her out.
‘What if somebody lives here.’
‘Friendly natives.’
‘Maybe a dog.’
Her hand was small and moist, and he felt, hand on her back to put her ashore, the cotton of her dress slide against the silk of her skin. Beside her, he offered the flask again. They listened to the silence.
‘Don’t be a scaredy-cat,’ she said, taking his arm. Slowly, in care for their bare feet uncertain of the ground beneath, they went up the stairs – logs only, forced into the soft earth, and a big root commandeered – beneath pines that warned them away in awed whispers.
‘A house.’
A cottage; a big screened porch and a chimney, a swayed rooftree outlined against a moonlit open distance. The pine-needlestrewn path led up to it. It was dark.
‘Who’s doing that in the dark,’ she whispered.
‘What.’
‘The piano.’
He could hear nothing.
‘The piano,’ she said. ‘Wake up.’
There was no piano. They walked around the house; it was a strange composite, its patent moonlight side was stucco and had two stubby pillars supporting an entablature over the door and two arched windows. The big screened porch in back was an afterthought. Beyond what seemed in the moonlight to be velvet lawns and topiary but may have been only meadow was a tall house, many-chimneyed, on a wooded rise.
‘Their cottage.’
‘Probably.’ The big house was dark too. Why were they whispering? Their tour took them back to the dark side, the screened porch. It needed repair: here by the door a hole big enough for a hand. Pierce put a hand through, and as though he were practiced at this, a yegg, a spy, slid open the bolt.
It was not, any of it, any choice of his, except the choice to do all that was offered. If he had been led by some shining psychopomp into a fabulous otherwhere, Elysium’s fountains and mountains, he could not have felt more removed from his daily self, less responsible. Drink this. Eat this. And she went ahead of him through the door, taking slow steps, wondering.
The place had been long uninhabited. Two broken wicker chairs were all the porch held. Rosie tried the door into the house; it was locked. But the large window beside it, when Pierce pushed it up, gaped open, making a shocked noise like an indrawn breath. He stepped over the low sill.
Odor of mothballs and mice, moldered wallpaper and dead summers past. When, where had he once before broken into a locked place that smelled so, a place where old summers had been left? There was a rolled rug like a cadaver in one corner, but nothing else. Moonlight lay in cool rhomboids on the floor.
‘What if it’s not safe.’ Her voice was loud in the vacant indoors. She turned to face him, slashed with window light, and with a single step he was with her.
She met him with no surprise but with what eagerness he couldn’t tell; he fed not greedily but wholly on her anyway, as though drinking water; when he was filled, momentarily, and drew away, she parted from him with a little drunken bob like a bee-visited blossom; and, her hand falling from his breast where she had pressed him but not pressed him away, she walked off. ‘This is the living room,’ she said.
There was another room after that, where a card table cocked a bad leg back as though favoring it, and a black stove had pulled its long arm half out of the hole in the wall. Kitchen. Bathroom. ‘Oh look,’ she said. ‘Secret.’
A door in the bathroom led to a further room. Another addition? There was no other way into it, it seemed, except through the bathroom. An iron bedstead stood askew there, stunned, caught out, a thin buttoned mattress sprawled across its springs. Pierce from the door watched Rosie approach it with slow steps. Then she looked back at him, sharply he thought, as though he had surprised her here, startled her – and then he had come up behind her and encircled her.
She suffered him, hands idly, unseriously tugging at his hands, head fallen back against his shoulder. He gathered up her dress and their two left hands went together between her legs; her hair was short, thick, like the nap of a velvet. She turned to face him then, and he freed her for that, but when he did so she slid from him and walked away, saying something he didn’t understand.
‘What?’
‘. . . if the dancing’s all over, and I have to get up early tomorrow.’ Her dress had curtained her again, though she hadn’t tidied it. ‘I’m always the last one dancing.’ She looked at him idly, as though he were her guest here and the visit was growing protracted. He had a mad thought that she knew this room, had long known it; and, for it was in some way the same thought, that he could do anything at all to her here, anything, and would meet with no resistance but this strange inattention. It was not he she was wandering from.
‘I know I shouldn’t,’ she said, pushing back her hair, ‘I know I shouldn’t, but if you still have that little bottle, I’d like another sip. If I may.’
He was to ignore that. He knew it; he was to refuse in fact to listen further to anything she said; that was why she said it. The hair rose on the back of his neck, the hairs too along his arms.
‘Sure,’ he said, unpocketing the flask. ‘Sure, here you go, only let’s go. Enough of the haunted house.’
‘Scared?’ she said, and laughed, and came and took his arm; he gave her the bottle, and she tipped it up as they went back through the house. ‘I live in a house like this sometimes,’ she said. He helped her through the window. ‘I mean on the river, a cottage, it’s nice, I like the water so much. There’s your bottle back. I think the little stopper on a chain is the cute part.’
Arm in arm, gay companions again, they went back to the boat. Pierce, his heart and loins confused and turgid, didn’t know whether he had cheated himself, or failed her, or escaped harmless, only that he had come down from an upper floor he hadn’t known he was mounting to. It was the shock of finding himself heedlessly stepping up onto the topmost stair that had raised the hair on his nape, that had made him think to go back.
She standing in the corner by the iron bed, stoned, dreaming, in two.
Hands and head at odds, making jokes, he pulled clumsily out onto the water. The moon was going down, and the river was darker; against the current he fought the wretched boat back into the gurgling channel, and she was no help. She had got the giggles now, and found his exertions hilarious; she razzed him as he struggled, oars caught in grasping weed, sweat tickling in his eyebrows. ‘Come on now,’ he said, growing afraid he might be lost, ‘let’s keep our heads, l
et’s keep our heads,’ but that was a punch line too. She stopped giggling only when, at last, they entered onto the backwater and he pulled for the firelit shore.
‘Well!’ she said cheerily, disembarking. ‘Thanks for the lil boatride.’ She gave him a hand. ‘It was nice meeting you. You’re very interesting.’
‘Nice to meet you,’ he said.
‘I’m sure I’ll see you around.’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘At the county fair.’
‘I like the fair.’
‘Is that a fact.’
Not all the drink and smoke had melted the strange ice behind which her eyes had grown vague. She stepped lightly away from him up the beach, the hem of her sundress swinging; Pierce put his hands back in his pockets and turned to the water, whose gold had faded. One fat man in an inner tube floated there, paddling softly.
Now what on earth, Pierce thought. A sudden draft of hereness and nowness. Where was Spofford? He was coming toward him from the woods on the opposite side of the campground; in the light of a fireplace where trash was burned and, doubtless, the last marshmallows toasted, he waved to Pierce.
The piper had gone, and most of the others. Pierce was struck suddenly by a thought: These people now all have to drive cars to get home. How do they manage? How will she?
‘Good party,’ said Spofford. He was consuming a piece of cake, one hand held below it like a paten for the crumbs.
‘Fun,’ said Pierce.
‘ ’Bout done?’ Spofford asked.
‘I’m with you. Whenever you want.’
Spofford seemed thoughtful, though he smiled. He tossed crumbs into the fire and dusted his hands. ‘Good party,’ he said again, with satisfaction. He looked around his premises, assured himself that there were enough of those careful guests left whose pleasure it is to tidy up, and said, ‘Let’s go.’
If she has an accident, it will be partly my fault, Pierce thought. He almost thought to reproach Spofford: You ought to watch out better for her. You don’t know what danger she puts herself in.
Oh lord.
Spofford threw the brown blanket into the truck. ‘Did you meet people?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t mean to just throw you to the lions there.’
‘Oh, sure.’
‘I should have taken you around.’
‘I got on.’
‘Nice people. Mostly.’ He grinned sidelong at Pierce, starting the truck. ‘And old Mike didn’t show up, it seems.’
‘No?’ said Pierce, feeling foolish. What had he been up to, what? Putting his gross foot through the fabric of relationships he didn’t begin to understand, in a country, his friend’s country, that he had just come into, a guest. Where he didn’t really belong at all.
The truck jounced out onto the darkling highway, Spofford whistling softly between his teeth. When they had gone a long time in silence, Pierce said, ‘I guess I ought to be getting back.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Duty. The Future.’
‘Whatever you say.’
Night, wind, the sweep of the truck’s headlights. The moon was gone. Pierce hugged himself, weary, amazed. He seemed suddenly to have been gone from home for an age.
‘Hey,’ Spofford said, and took his foot from the accelerator. In the roadway stood a deer, a doe, motionless on delicate stilts. The truck coasted to a halt, and the doe, as though deciding at length to take fright, remembering to be shy, dived away with neat assurance into the tangled wood. A big raindrop spattered on the windshield, and then another.
‘Here comes that storm,’ Spofford said.
*
When Pierce awoke in Spofford’s bed on the far side of the night the rain had ceased; at some point Spofford must have got up and opened the windows without waking him, for they were open now. The night was clear, or clearing; Pierce could see a single star in the window’s corner.
It was a noise like the approach of a tiny high-speed drill that had awakened him. For a long moment he gathered the world around him, listening to Spofford snoring softly in his sleeping bag in the next room; waiting for the mosquito at his ear to settle and be slapped; living still in the long rich dream he had been dreaming, allegory of the lumps in Spofford’s bed and the insect orchestra outside.
What had it been all about now . . .
Standing with an old man looking over a far country at dawn or at evening, a country so far it was made of time not space. Standing, yes, at a cave’s mouth with that old man who had a star on his forehead.
Standing, being shown that country, why, how had they come there. Pierce struggled to keep the softly closing doors open, the doors into the further-back parts of the dream, years-long parts, the doors closing blindly, why must they, why.
Oh yes. Oh I remember
Years-long, his education at the hands of difficult masters . . . Or was it only the one master, the old man, in different disguises? The savage unwittingness bred out of him by tasks he could still sense, could taste but not remember, puzzles to solve and paradoxes to resolve, oh I see, I get it, but whatever had they been, duality, identity, metaphor and simile. Journeys, or illusions of journeys, for it seemed, had seemed, had kept on being proved or revealed to him that he had not ever left the confines of the deep-down place where this schooling had gone on, not till now; not till he was taken by the hand and led up, up a long earth-damp tunnel following the old man’s lantern, and out the cave’s mouth, to be shown the way into the far lands; clear air real at last, dawn winds ruffling his hair and the master’s robe as they stood together there to part forever. He knew his task; he knew his arms and his enemies. And he saw, by the old man’s clear sad eyes, that oh he would do his best, he would, but that he would forget it all, everything he had learned, his task, his education, who he was and where he had come from, everything; would remember, when he had traveled far, nothing but how far he had traveled; would remember only and vaguely that he was a stranger here in this sad country, in these sad streets, in this sad dark cell where he waited for the girl to bring him sandwiches and milk and . . .
Oh yes! Pierce came fully awake, remembering.
A tray of sandwiches and milk brought him as usual by the smiling girl, the child who had been so kind, teasingly kind, as though she were not really sorry for him at all; the tray brought him as usual, as it had been for years, the only break in his work, what work, his years-long education down here, that cot, this lamp, those books – only today there was a letter propped against the glass, a letter. A letter! He didn’t have to open it, just the sight of it was enough, he remembered suddenly everything: who he was, how he had come there, oh yes! Yes! The whole latter part of the dream, the aged master, the task, the words of power learned, the far country seen, that was all his sudden memory as he picked up the letter, a blank bond envelope glowing like milk glass; memory, washing him like clean water.
Oh yes, oh God what a relief to remember and not lose it. Pierce lay still on Spofford’s bed feeling with deep gratitude his possession of his dream, a sensual pleasure like the scratching of an itch or being washed in clean water. Amazing, amazing. Why, what is it, how can flesh and blood come up with such stuff, how can flesh feel it. My lord life is strange. How is that Meaning comes to be? How? How does life cast it up, shape it, exude it; how does Meaning come to have physical, tangible effects, to be felt with a shock, to cause grief or longing, come to be sought for like food; pure Meaning having nothing to do with the clothes of persons or events in which it is dressed and yet not ever divorceable from some set of such clothes? A star in his forehead. A star.
The mosquito with an enormous racket came close to his ear again, and settled, instantly ceasing its noise. Pierce waited with awful cunning for it to get comfy. After a long moment, when its delicate proboscis was inserted, itch-fluid flowing, Pierce could locate it exactly; and with a swift box to his ear he slew it. He grunted with relief, rolling his trophy into a pellet between his fingers, his ear ringing from the blow. A bug in his ear. There were stories of people
driven mad by unextractable bugs lodged in the ear canal.
He stretched across the bed’s terrain and tasted the cool air passing unhindered through the little house and as though through his body too. He had a sudden percipience, a pearl seemingly distilled from the clear waters of his dream, of how he could go about getting out of hock to Barnabas College and perhaps make a future for himself that was not a cell. Yes. Simple. Not easy, but simple. It would take nothing but cunning, and years of work; but some of those years of work had already been put in, under that lamp, among those books
Dawn was coming. The window was a pale square of greenish light, a fretwork of dark leaves and a white moth fluttering for egress. Pierce threw off the sheet and rose, wide awake; he went to the window to free the moth that beat against the screen.
The task had been to forget, of course; what he had seen in his master’s eyes was not reproach but pity; the task had been to forget, to become clothed in forgetfulness as in robes and armor, robes over armor, layer upon layer, so that he could come to pass disguised into this sad city. The very journey and the far country to cross had been forgetfulness.
A hiatus in his work. A long hiatus. But he remembered now.
He leaned his elbows on the windowsill, looking out, face in his hands like a gargoyle. In the street, dogs barked; wind chimes, camel bells, a tambourine idly shaken. The stifling caravanserai all awake.
She had known all along, of course, who had been keeper or jailer or both; no wonder she had smiled, no wonder she had shown him solicitude but no pity. He could almost hear her laughter behind him.
For now the world began to move beneath him once again, dawn winds rising as night turned pale. The tents were struck, the caravans stirred, the drivers cried out and wielded whips: camels, hooting and complaining, rose up, on two legs, on four legs, their tall packs swaying and jingling, exotic goods borne out of the colored centuries. Set out, set out: past the old gate that led to the East the striated sands went on levelly toward the horizon, toward the goldgreen sky whereon blazed a single star before sunrise. Steely-white ovoids with a high unworldly hum were ascending two four six from beyond the arid pinkish mountains, catching the light of the unrisen sun: starships, archons jealous and watchful. Beyond those mountains the fertile plains, the city and the sea. The task lay ahead, stretching so far as to be made of time not space, time’s body, and yet not uncrossably far; and a country he knew, after all, or had once known, a country he had crossed before.