Aegypt

  Could he? He could and would. If fools fell for the stories he would retail, let fools fall for them; for himself, he was smart, and if he did not know the way to say one thing which had the effect of another, a much more qualified, even a contradictory, thing, then his long Catholic upbringing, his expensive education at St. Guinefort’s and at Noate, had gone for nothing. We thank You O Lord (he blasphemed, exulting) that You have concealed these things from the simple, and revealed them to the wise.

  They couldn’t make Bruno give up his large world, in the end, and take their small one instead: and so in February of 1600, that white-numbered year, they took him from his cell in the Castel Sant’ Angelo, and, dressed in white penitent’s robe and seated backward on a donkey, he was led to the Campo dei Fiori, the Field of Flowers (Pierce imagined a meadow filled with spring blooms), and there they tied him to a stake, and burned him.

  But Pierce would not be burned: no, even if he aimed for the same powers, the same infinite grasp and freedom that Bruno had aimed for. That was the difference between then and now: Pierce would not be burned.

  ‘So,’ said Allan Butterman to Rosie, inviting her with a hand to sit, elegant again in soft tweeds and a shirt blue as the October day. ‘So now.’

  ‘So,’ Rosie said. She swiveled slightly in her comfy chair, feeling quite at home here on her third visit. ‘It seems like it’s okay, and he doesn’t mind.’

  ‘Doesn’t mind?’

  ‘Well we had some talks. And he didn’t really want to talk about anything legal. But I wanted to get it decided and over with. And he said he thought we should talk a lot more, and anyway he didn’t like the idea of “no fault” when it was me who walked out. So I explained to him what you said. What our options are.’

  Heart beating hard and throat dry, stuttering somewhat from overrehearsal, she had made her speech, explaining to Mike that if he didn’t want to participate in a no-fault divorce she intended to sue him for divorce on the grounds of adultery. The awful weightiness of this, which seemed at the same time as weightless and illusory as some big scene in a movie, had ended discussion for the day; Mike, saying he was unsure of his ability to control his response, left the Donut Hole, neutral ground where at a deserted hour they had met.

  It was a little like playing Rock, Scissors, and Paper, this countering of Mike’s psychotherapeutic strategies with her new legal ones; sometimes when the hands came down she won, sometimes he, but at least she didn’t always lose.

  She had left it at that for a few weeks, feeling like a gambler who has put up a big stake and waits for the other side of the table to see it or fold; she pondered this scary and exhilarating sensation, the sensation of having power, of being out on a limb that was strong enough to hold her. When she thought she had waited enough, she made this appointment with Allan Butterman, and then called Mike to get an answer: Allan, she said, would have to know how he was to proceed.

  And Mike had been reasonable. He had, apparently, lost interest in tormenting her about it all, as though he weren’t up for the game; he had seemed – as since their separation she had felt him more and more often to be – distracted, not altogether there, to be on the point of turning away saying Yes yes half over his shoulder, his eyes elsewhere. Rosie supposed she knew the cause, though it surprised her.

  ‘This same woman?’ Allan said.

  ‘The same one,’ Rosie said. ‘I thought it was just going to be a fling. It looks like it’s more than that. It looks like he’s kinda swept away. But really he’s always been sort of a dope about women.’ That had used to be one of Rosie’s real strengths, that Mike had been a dope about women, that she had known it and he had not. She swiveled thoughtfully in her swivel chair. ‘I wonder if he’s still in his Down Passage Year.’

  ‘His what?’

  ‘That’s in Climacterics,’ Rosie said. ‘It’s sort of a new science Mike’s inventing. I can’t tell you a real lot about it, because I don’t understand it really, and also because I’m not supposed to talk too much about it, it’s basically a simple idea and he’s afraid if the wrong person hears about it they’ll steal it.’

  Allan stared at her, seeming to be pondering something other than Climacterics.

  ‘It’s about how life is divided up into these seven-year periods,’ Rosie went on, at least wanting to reassure Allan she wasn’t talking nonsense. ‘Every seventh year you sort of hit a plateau, where you’re pretty sure of yourself and have a good hold on things. Then gradually you descend, like on a curve, through a Down Passage Year; then you bottom out, and there’s an Up Passage Year, and finally you plateau again, seven years later. Psychologically.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Allan said.

  ‘It really sort of works,’ Rosie said. ‘You can draw it on a curve.’ It did sort of work; it described Mike’s own life better than it did any other life he had applied it to, but Rosie remembered seeing her own ups and downs reflected pretty truly in the chart Mike had drawn for her shortly after he had worked out The Method, as he always called it, with those audible capitals. She remembered his excitement, passion even, and her own wondering assent, a winter’s night years ago . . . With a wholly unexpected heave, like a freak flood, she filled up suddenly with grief, and covered her eyes, a sob caught in her throat.

  ‘Oh god,’ Allan said. ‘Oh don’t.’

  She looked at her lawyer; his face was a shocked mask of pity. Her own rush of feeling receded before his. ‘Wow,’ she said, and snorted. ‘Sorry, sorry, where did that come from.’

  ‘No no,’ Allan said. ‘No, oh god it’s just so rotten.’

  She laughed, fragments of her broken sob caught in it. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘You got a hankie?’

  He proffered a box. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Go ahead and cry. That schmuck.’

  ‘Allan,’ she said, blowing her nose. ‘Really I’m okay. Calm down. What’s next to do.’

  ‘This is exactly why I don’t do divorces,’ Allan said, massaging his brow. ‘I just really can’t take it.’

  ‘What now,’ Rosie said. ‘What now.’

  Allan cleared his throat vigorously, and drew out a long yellow pad and one of the new sharpened pencils he always had (never dull or short, what did he do with used ones?), and tugged at his ear. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay. What we have to try to do is come to an agreement now, you and Mike and his attorney and I, about various matters pertaining to your life with Mike, and try to make it as mutually acceptable as possible, and simple enough that even the judge can understand it.

  ‘So let’s see. Let’s make a list. First is custody, of, of . . .’

  ‘Sam. Samantha. I’ll get custody.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ He didn’t write. ‘And Mike?’

  ‘I’m sure Mike won’t want custody. We haven’t really made it clear though.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I mean it’s clear to me.’

  Allan favored her with a smile, a smile of almost professional approval, and wrote. ‘Well and you’ve got to be clear too about visiting rights, support, some kind of decision-making process about insurance, and schooling, and who informs who about when the kid goes to the dentist, the hospital . . .’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘As long as you’re still talking,’ Allan said. ‘If attorneys do it, it costs more, and maybe you get an agreement nobody likes but the attorneys.’

  ‘Okay. Okay.’ Her heart had filled. Sam.

  ‘Support?’ Allan said.

  ‘Are you working now?’

  ‘I was,’ Rosie said. ‘Teaching art, at the Sun School.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘But it looks like they don’t need me now.’ It looked like the little alternative school, housed in a small made-over mill in Stonykill, was going out of business, declining into mess and recriminations.

  ‘If you can,’ Allan said, ‘it might be best to stay unemployed. Till after the decree.’ He drew a line across his pad. ‘Okay. Property to divide . . .’

  ‘Not really an
ything,’ Rosie said. ‘A house, but the hospital paid the down payment and holds the mortgage, so. And then stuff. Just stuff.’

  ‘Stuff,’ said Allan, nodding. ‘Stuff.’ The way he had of speaking, that seemed to weight all his words with a huge burden of feeling: Rosie thought it must be a trick of some kind, or an effect he wasn’t really conscious of. But then again maybe not, maybe he did feel the woes and pains of his clients as deeply as he seemed to: maybe, like a practiced weightlifter, he was able to support a larger burden than most people. A cowlick had sprung up from his plastered black hair, and his eyes were sad again. Rosie found herself liking him a lot. ‘I don’t care about it,’ she said. ‘I don’t really want any of it.’

  ‘Sure,’ Allan said. ‘You know, back when I did do a lot of divorces, everybody always said, “I don’t want any of it, let her have it, let him have it.” And you know what all the awful arguments, all the pain was always about? Stuff.’

  ‘Are you married?’ Rosie asked.

  ‘I used to sit here and listen to people grieving about a car, a TV, jewelry, a goddamn set of porch furniture, and I would think, how petty can people be, can’t they rise above all that? Didn’t their love mean more to them than these materialistic details? It took me some time to figure out that love is in the details. It’s in the books and records and the stereo and the convertible. Love is always in the details. And that’s where the pain is too.’ His eyes, sadder even, were on her, and his white hands folded before him. ‘Not married,’ he said. ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘I’ve been wondering something,’ Rosie said, beginning once again to swivel in her chair. ‘You know the old castle down in the middle of the river, on the island?’

  ‘Butterman’s.’

  ‘Was that you who built it, your family I mean?’

  ‘Well sort of. Some distant connection. I’ve never worked it all out.’

  ‘I hear I own it. That the family owns it.’

  ‘I think that’s right.’

  She smiled. ‘Not part of the settlement,’ she said, and Allan laughed, the first time she had seen him do so. ‘What I’ve always wanted to do,’ she said, ‘was go and go in. I never have.’

  ‘Neither have I.’

  ‘You want to, sometime?’ She stretched out in her chair. ‘You being the family lawyer, and all.’

  He strummed his pencil on the leather drumtop of his desk. ‘I wanted to give you one funny piece of advice,’ he said. ‘You know that even if this no-fault approach works out, it’s going to be about a year from the trial date before your divorce is final.’

  ‘Oh my god really?’

  ‘Six months after the trial, you get a judgment nisi. Nisi is Latin for “unless.” Unless something untoward comes up. Then there’s a ”nisi period” – six more months, for you guys to think about it, and decide maybe you don’t want it – ’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘Or more importantly when you can file objections to the settlement. Objections saying that the other party acted fraudulently, or that new facts have come to light. Say, new facts relating to making a correct decision about custody.’

  Rosie said nothing.

  ‘People don’t always know how they feel at first,’ Allan said gently. ‘They can change their minds. And if they do change their minds, and if they do want to do something other than what they agreed to do at first, then they’re going to be looking for grounds on which to make an objection. And they have a whole year to look. Okay?’

  Rosie began to understand; she lowered her eyes, feeling reproached.

  ‘All I want to say,’ Allan said, even more gently, ‘is that if uncomplicated custody is what you want, and what you can get now, then my advice to you is to be a model single parent until those final papers come. If you need to know what one is, I’ll spell it out. And if you can’t be a model single parent – if you can’t be – then Rosie you ought to be a damn careful one.’

  Before she left town that day, Rosie stopped at the library, to return her latest Fellowes Kraft novel, and take out another. The one she returned was The Court of Silk and Blood; the one she chose, without much thought, was called A Passage at Arms, and had a seascape, galleons, and a compass rose on the cover. Afternoon was late when she drove out of the Jambs, autumn afternoon closing suddenly.

  The things, she thought: the cars and house and stuff, all that to deal with. No marriage could be over till that was done. Hm.

  She thought that probably Mike would find the stuff a big problem, but Mike was a Capricorn, a holder-on to things, and their disposition would always strike him as requiring a lot of thought. Rosie, however much of her soul she might hide in a pair of dangle earrings or a box made of inlaid woods, only and always avoided stuff: life, it sometimes seemed to her, was an obstacle race, full of stuff to be leaped, skirted, lost and left behind. In her own natal chart (still in its manila envelope, now somewhat crushed, on the seat beside her), the second house – Lucrum, ‘like lucrative,’ Val said, ‘money, possessions, jobs, stuff like that’ – was empty of compelling planets.

  The sun set, leaving a glassy lavender and peach twilight in the cloudless West. In the mountains above Rosie’s station wagon, deer walked, fattening on the apples of old orchards; down on the river, fallen leaves floated south, gathering in colored rugs at eddies and backwaters and on the shore of the little pleasure-ground that Spofford owned. At nightfall, a flock of migrating starlings returning to the towers of Butterman’s made a banner in the air above the castle that snapped, as though in the wind, before the birds settled to rest.

  By lamplight Rosie read A Passage at Arms, about buccaneers on the Spanish Main. That magician character who took Shakespeare’s picture in Bitten Apples, the one whose crystal ball Boney had shown her, appeared in it, lending maps to Sir Francis Drake, plotting with the Queen against the Spanish. Rosie wondered whether really all of Kraft’s books were sections out of the one story, cut out and offered individually, as a landscape painter might cut up a big view into little ones framed separately. The English won out over the Spanish, but the Spanish king, brooding spiderlike in his magic palace, planned revenge. Rosie took it back (late and foxed with autumn rain, Sam had left it outdoors) and chose another.

  She would read them all, in the end; she would read them in Allan Butterman’s waiting room and in waiting rooms at the courthouse and the accountant’s office (the affairs of her dissolving family were an impenetrable mess). She would read them standing on lines at the bank and the Registry of Motor Vehicles. She would read Sam to sleep with them, who at bedtime cared more to hear the peaceful sound of her mother’s voice making grown-up sense than any story Sam herself would be required to grasp. She would put them down when her eyelids trembled to close, often past midnight, and pick them up when she woke, way too early to rise, before Mrs. Pisky or even Sam was afoot.

  Yet Rosie was not, actually, a great reader. Cumulatively, she had not read a lot in her life; in normal times a thick book, a long tale, held no special attraction. Only at certain times, as though it were an old fever contracted in childhood and breaking out periodically, did she fall into books; and when she fell in she fell all in. It was escape: she was quite clear about that. Often she had known just what it was she was escaping from – though during her first year married to Mike, the year of John Galsworthy, she hadn’t known; and she hadn’t at all understood the first outbreak, in some ways the severest, the year her family moved to the Midwest and Rosie worked her way steadily and blurrily through not only the collected Nancy Drew but all of Mr. Moto and the Biography shelf of a branch library too, reading lives that did not strike her as materially different from fictions, learning facts she would never altogether forget or ever remember exactly about Amelia Earhart, W. C. Handy, Edward Payson Terhune, Pearl Mesta, Woodrow Wilson, and a host of others. That year she walked continually in her life carrying another life, the one inside books, the one that engaged her the more intimately; her living was divided in two, reading and not
reading, as completely and necessarily as it was divided into sleeping and being awake.

  No more than about waking life did it occur to Rosie to pass critical judgments on what she read. It engaged her or it didn’t; when it engaged her she could not have said why. Never, in her intense period of reading mystery stories, did it occur to her to try to figure out what the author was up to, what the solution was; she thought once, looking back, that she hadn’t really grasped initially that these stories which she liked were mysteries, that each one would have a solution; if she had read one that didn’t, she would not necessarily have felt cheated. What she really liked about them, she thought, was the same thing she liked about biographies: they went only one way.

  There was a kind of novel that didn’t, and made Rosie feel uneasy: a kind of novel that it seemed you could only go about halfway or two-thirds into before you somehow started coming back out. All the incidents and characters that appeared in the first half of the book, the ones that created the story, would reappear (sometimes even in approximately reverse order) to complete the story, as though the book’s second half or last third were a mirror image of the first, with the ending exactly like the beginning except that it was an ending. It wasn’t that such books didn’t resemble life; Rosie didn’t know if they did or didn’t; but if they did, then it might be that life too had a mirror half, that its direction all one way was illusory, and Rosie didn’t know this to be so only because she hadn’t entered on the later, the cursory wrap-up part of her own life.

  Once when she had picked up a novel at a tag sale she had found pasted on the fly leaf a yellowed newspaper review of it. The review seemed to like the book but complained of its somewhat mechanical plot. When Rosie read it she found it to be one of those with a mirror final third. So what she had been perceiving all along (she realized with surprise) was plot – a thing she might have said novels have and biographies do not, without knowing just what she meant by saying that. And now she knew.