And now as we come to the front of the building, this marble moves to green, in long bands along the floor, the floor itself an ever changing and intricate mosaic. Look. I see the ancient Greek key design. I see the patterns dear to Rome and Greece for which I don't remember names, but I know them.
And now, turning, we stood before a staircase such as I have never seen anywhere. It is not merely the scale and the loftiness, but again, the color: behold, O Lord, the radiance of the rose Carrara marble.
But attend first these figures, these bronze faces standing at attention, bodies of deeply carefully carved wood, curving into lion's legs and paws on their plinths of onyx.
Who built this place? For what purpose?
I'm caught suddenly by the glass doors opposite, there is so very much to see, I'm overcome, look, three great Classical Revival doors of beveled glass and semicircular fanlights, mullions black and spoked above, such portals for light, though the day or the night, whichever it is, is locked out beyond them.
The stairs await. Mariana says, Come. Lucrece is so kind. The balustrade is green marble, green as jade, and streaked like the sea, with balusters of a lighter shade, and every wall paneled in rose or cream marble that is framed in gold.
Look up to these smooth, rounded columns of pink marble, with their gilded capitals of double rich acanthus leaf, and high high above, see the broken arches of the cove, and between each a painted figure; see the paneled frame around the high stained-glass window.
Yes, it is day. This is the light of day streaming through the stained glass! It shines on the artfully painted nymphs in panels high above, dancing for us, dancing too in the glass itself. I close my eyes. I open them. I touch the marble. Real, real.
You are here. You can't be awakened or taken from this place; it's true, you see it!
We climb these stairs, we move up and up amid this palace of Italian stone and stand on a mezzanine floor and face three giant stained-glass windows, each with its own goddess or queen, in diaphanous robes, beneath an architrave, with cherubs in attendance and flowers drawn in every border, festooned, garlanded, held in outstretched hands. What symbols are these? I hear the words, but I see; that is what makes me tremble.
And at each end of this long dreamy space there is an oval chamber. Come look. Look at these murals here, look at these paintings that reach so high. Yes, richly narrative, and once again the bold classical figures dance, heads are wreathed in laurel, contours full and lush. It has the magic of the pre-Raphaelites.
Is there no end to combination here, to beauty woven into beauty? No end to cornices and friezes, moldings of tongue and dart, of proud entablatures, to walls of boiserie? I must dream.
They spoke in the angel language, Mariana and the other, Lucrece, they spoke that soft singing tongue. And there, I pointed: the gleaming golden masks of those I loved. Medallions set high upon the wall: Mozart, Beethoven; others ..., but what is this, a palace to every song you've ever heard and been unable to endure without tears? The marble shines in the sun. Such richness as this can't be made by human hands. This is the temple of Heaven.
Come down the stairs, down, down, and now I know, with heart sinking, that this must be a dream.
Though this dream can't be measured by the depths of my imagination, it is improbable to the point of impossible.
For we have left the temple of marble and music for a great Persian room of glazed blue tile, replete with Eastern ornament that rivals the beauty above in its sumptuousness. Oh, don't let me wake. If this can come from my mind, then let it come.
That this Babylonian splendor should follow on that bold Baroque glory cannot be, but I so love it.
Atop these columns are the sacrificial ancient bulls with their angry faces, and look, the fountain, in the fountain Darius slays the leaping Lion. Yet this is no shrine, no dead memorial to things lost.
Behold, the walls are lined in shining etageres that hold the most elegant glassware. A cafe has been made within these decorative reliefs. Once again I see a floor of incomparable mosaic. Small graceful gilded chairs surround a multitude of little tables. People talk here, move, walk, breathe, as if this magnificence were something they have taken utterly for granted.
What place is this, what country, what land, where style and color could so audaciously come together? Where convention has been overrun by masters of all crafts. Even the chandeliers are Persian in design, great silver metal sheets with intricate patterns cut out of them.
Dream or real! I turn and strike the column with my fist. Goddamn it, if I'm not here, let me wake! And then comes the assurance. You are here, most definitely. You are here body and soul in this place, in the Babylonian room beneath the marble temple.
"Come, come." Her hand is on my arm. Is it Mariana or the other lovely one--with the round face and large generous eyes--Lucrece? They commiserate, the two in a singing Latinish tongue.
Our darkest secret.
Things shift. I'm here all right, because this I'd never dream.
I don't know how to dream it. I live for music, live for light, live for colors, yes, true, but what is this, this rank, soiled white-tiled passage, the water on the black floors, so filthy that they are not even black, and look, the engines, the boilers, the giant cylinders with screwed-on caps and seals, so ominous, covered in peeling paint, amid a din of noise that's almost silence.
Why, this is like the engine room of an old ship, the kind you wandered aboard when you were a child and New Orleans was still a living harbor. But no, we are not on board a ship. The proportions of this corridor are too massive.
I want to go back. I don't want to dream this part. But by now, I know it's no dream. I've been brought here somehow! This is some punishment I deserve, some awful reckoning. I want to see the marble again, the pretty rich fuchsia marble against the side panels of the stairs; I want to memorize the goddesses in the glass.
But we walk in this damp, rank, echoing passage. Why? Foul smells rise everywhere. Old metal lockers stand here, as if left behind by soldiers in some abandoned camp, battered, stuck with cutout magazine girls from years before, and once again we view this vast Hell of machines, churning, grinding, boiling with noise as we walk along the steel railing.
"But where are we going?"
My companions smile. They think it a funny secret, this, this place to which they are taking me.
Gates! Great iron gates lock us out, but lock us out of what? A dungeon?
"A secret passage," confesses Mariana with undisguised delight. "It goes all the way under the street! A secret underground passage ..."
I strain to see through the gates. We can't go in. The gates are chained shut. But look, back there, where the water shimmers, look.
"But someone's there, don't you see? Good God, there's a man lying there. He's bleeding. He's dying. His wrists are slashed and yet his hands are laid together. He's dying?"
Where are Mariana and Lucrece? Flown up again into the domed ceilings of the marble temple where the Grecian dancers make their easy graceful circles in the murals?
I am unguarded.
The stench is unbearable. The man's dead! Oh, God! I know he is. No, he moves, he lifts one of his hands, his wrist dripping blood. Good God, help him!
Mariana laughs the softest sweetest laugh and her hands stroke the air as she speaks.
"Don't you see him dead, good God, he's lying in filthy water ..."
"... secret passage that used to go from here to the palace and ..."
"No, listen to me, ladies, he's there. He needs us." I grabbed the gates. "We have to get to that man there!" The gates that bar our way are like everything here--immense. They're heavy iron, fitted from floor to ceiling, hung with chains and locks.
"Wake up! I will not have it!"
A torrent of music crashed to silence!
I sat up in my own bed.
"How dare you!"
6
I SAT up in the bed. He sat beside me, his legs so long that even on this
high four-poster, he could sit in manly fashion, and he stared at me. The violin was wet. He was wet, his hair soaked.
"How dare you!" I said again. I reared back, bringing my knees up. I reached for the covers, but his weight held them.
"You come into my house, my room! You come into this room and tell me what I will and will not dream!"
He was too surprised to answer. His chest heaved. The water dripped from his hair. And the violin, for God's sake, had he no concern at all for the violin?
"Quiet!" he said.
"Quiet!" I spat at him. "I'll rouse the city! This is my bedroom! And who are you to tell me what to dream! You ... what do you want?"
He was too astonished to find words. I could feel his groping, his consternation. He turned his head to the side. I had a chance to look at him close, to see his gaunt cheeks and smooth skin, the huge knuckles of his hands and the delicate shaping of his long nose. He was by any standards--and even filthy and dripping wet--very handsome to look at. Twenty-five. That was the age I calculated, but no one could tell. A man of forty could look so young, if he took the right pills and ran the right miles and visited the right cosmetic surgeon.
He jerked his head round to glare at me!
"You think of trash like that as I sit here?" His voice was deep and strong, a young man's voice. If speaking voices have names, then he was a forceful tenor.
"Trash like what?" I said. I looked him up and down. He was a big man, thin or not. I didn't care.
"Get out of my house," I said. "Get out of my room and out of my house now, until such time as I invite you here as my guest! Go! It puts me in a perfect fury that you dare come in here without my bidding! Into my very room!"
There came a banging on the door. It was Althea's panic-stricken voice. "Miss Triana! I can't open the door! Miss Triana!"
He looked at the door beyond me and then back at me and shook his head and murmured something, and then ran his right hand back through his slimy hair. When he opened his eyes fully they were large, and his mouth, now that was the prettiest part, but none of these details cooled my anger.
"I can't open this door!" Althea screamed.
I called out to her. It was all right. Leave it be. I needed some time alone. It was the musician friend. It was all right. She should go now. I heard her protests, and Lacomb's sage grumbles beneath them, but all of this on my insistence finally died away, and I was alone again.
The creaking boards had charted their retreat.
I turned to him. "So did you nail it shut?" I asked. I meant the door of course, which neither Lacomb nor Althea could force.
His face was still, and this stillness perhaps resembled whatever God and his mother might have wanted it to be: young; earnest; without vanity or slyness. His big dark eyes moved searchingly over me, as if he could discover in all the unimportant details of my appearance some crucial secret. He didn't brood. He seemed an honest, questing being.
"You aren't afraid of me," he whispered.
"Of course I'm not. Why should I be?" But this was bravado. I did for one second feel fear; or no, it wasn't fear. It was this. The adrenaline in my veins had slacked, and I felt an exultation!
I was looking at a ghost! A true ghost. I knew it. I knew it, and nothing would ever take the knowledge away. I knew it! In all my wanderings amongst the dead, I'd talked to memories and relics and fed their answers to them as if they were dolls I held propped in my hand.
But he was a ghost.
Then came a great coursing relief. "I always knew it," I said. I smiled. There was no defining this conviction. I meant only that I knew at last there was more to life, and something we couldn't chart, and couldn't dismiss, and the fantasy of the Big Bang and the Godless Universe were no more substantial now than tales of Resurrection from the Dead or Miracles.
I smiled. "You thought I would be afraid of you? Is that what you wanted? You come to me when my husband is dying upstairs and you play your violin to frighten me? Are you the fool of all ghosts? How could such a thing frighten me? Why? You thrive off fear--"
I paused. It wasn't only the vulnerable softness of his face, the seductive quiver of his mouth; and the way his eyebrows met to frown but not to condemn or forbid; it was something else, something analytical and crucial that had occurred to me. This creature did thrive off something, and what was that something?
A rather fatal question, I realized. My heart lost a beat, which always frightens me. I put my hand to my throat as if my heart were there, which it always seems to be, doing these dances in my throat rather than in my breast.
"I'll come into your room," he whispered, "when I wish." His voice gained strength, young and masculine and sure of itself. "There's no way you can stop me. You think because you spend every waking hour doing the Danse Macabre with all your murdered crew--yes, yes, I know how you think you murdered them all--your Mother, your Father, Lily, Karl, such stupid monstrous egotism, that you were the cause of all these spectacular deaths, and three of them so ghastly and untimely--you think because of that, you can command a ghost? A true ghost, a ghost such as I am?"
"Bring my Father and Mother to me," I said. "You're a ghost. Bring them over to me. Bring them back over the divide. Bring me my little Lily. Bring them in ghostly form if you are a ghost and such a ghost! Make them ghosts, give Karl back to me without pain, just for a moment, one single solitary sacred moment. Give me Lily to hold in my arms."
This wounded him. I was quietly amazed, but adamant.
"Sacred moment," he said bitterly.
He shook his head, and looked away from me as if disappointed but mainly disrupted by the remark, but then again he seemed thoughtful and looked back. I found myself riveted by his hands, by the delicacy of his fingers and the hollow-cheeked yet flawless youth of his face.
"I can't give you that," he said thoughtfully, considerately. "You think God listens to me? You think my prayers count with saints and angels?"
"And you do pray, I'm to believe?" I asked. "What are you doing here! Why are you here? Why have you come! Never mind that you sit here, lazily and defiantly on the side of my bed. Why are you here at all--within my sight, within my hearing?"
"Because I wanted to come!" he said crossly, looking for a second rather painfully young and defiant. "And I go where I would go and do what I would do, as perhaps you noticed. I walked your hospital corridor until a gaggle of mortal idiots made such a riot there was nothing to do but retreat and wait for you! I could have come into your room, into your bed."
"You want to be in my bed."
"I am!" he declared. He leaned forward on his right hand. "Oh, don't even consider it. I'm no incubus! You won't conceive a monster by me. I want something far more critical to your life than the plaything between your legs. I want you!"
I was speechless.
Furious, yes, still furious, but speechless.
He sat back and looked down before him. His knees looked quite comfortable on the side of the high bed. His feet actually touched the floor. Mine never have. I am a short woman.
He let his greasy black hair fall down around him, in streaks across his white face, and when he looked at me again, it was a quizzical look.
"I thought this would be much easier," he said.
"What's that?"
"To drive you mad," he said. He affected a cruel smile. It was unconvincing. "I thought you mad already. I thought it would be ... a matter of days at most."
"Why the hell should you want to drive me mad?" I asked.
"I like doing such things," he said. The sadness flashed over him, knitted his brows before he could brush it away. "I thought you were mad. You're almost ... what some people would call mad."
"Yet painfully sane," I said. "That's the problem."
I was now utterly enthralled. I couldn't stop studying all the details of him, his old coat, the wet dust that had made mud on his shoulders, the way his big dreamy eyes sharpened and then mellowed with his thoughts, the way his lips were moistened with h
is tongue now and then as if he were a human being.
Suddenly a thought came to me. It came crashingly clear.
"The dream! The dream I had of the--"
"Don't talk of it!" he said. He leaned forward, menacingly, so close now his wet hair fell down on the blanket right by my hands.
I pushed back against the headboard for leverage and then with the full strength of my right hand I slapped him. I slapped him twice before he could get his wits! I pushed the covers back.
He rose and moved awkwardly away from me, looking down at me in pitiful bewilderment.
I reached out. He didn't flinch. I knotted my hand into a fist and struck him full in the chest. He moved back a few steps, no more concerned with such a weak blow than a human man might have been.
"The dream came from you!" I said. "That place I saw, the man with ..."
"I warn you, don't." He cursed, his finger flying out to point in my face even as he backed up and drew himself up like a great bird. "Silence on that. Or I'll wreak such havoc on your little physical corner of the world you'll curse the day you were ever born...." The voice faded out. "You think you know pain, you're so proud of your pain...."
He looked up and away from me. He drew the violin up to his chest and crossed his arms around it. He had said something that displeased himself. His eyes searched the room as if they could really see.
"I do see!" he said angrily.
"Ah, I meant as a mortal man, that's all I meant."
"And that is all I mean, too," he answered.
The rain outside slackened, grew soft and light, so that the various leaks and trickles gained in volume. We seemed in a wet world, wet but warm and safe, he and I.
I knew, knew as clearly as I knew he was there, I knew that I had seldom been so alive in my life as I was now, that the very sight of him, his being here, had brought me back to a fire in life I hadn't known in decades. Long, long ago, before so many defeats, when I'd been young and in love, perhaps I'd been this alive, when I'd wept over my failures and losses in those early energetic years, when everything had been so very bright and hot to touch, maybe then I'd been this alive.