Galilee

  She cast her makeshift fan aside, and got to her feet. Whatever the reasons for her feelings, she had them, and they weren’t about to evaporate just because she couldn’t get to their root. She wanted Galilee; it was as simple as that. And the possibility that he’d sailed away without telling her where she could find him made her sick with sorrow.

  Niolopua was sitting on the front step when she got back to the house, drinking a can of beer. There was a ladder leaning against the eaves of the house, and a great litter of pruned vines on the lawn. He’d been hard at work, for a while at least. Now he was simply sitting in the sun, drinking his beer. He made no attempt to conceal what he was doing when Rachel appeared. He didn’t even stand. He simply squinted up at her, his face pouring sweat, and said:

  “There you are . . .”

  “Were you looking for me?”

  He shook his head. “I was just surprised you’d gone, that’s all.”

  He set his beer can down at his side. It was not the first he’d had, she saw. There were three more empty cans sitting there. No wonder the shyness he’d evidenced at their first meeting had disappeared. “You look like you didn’t sleep very well,” he said.

  “As it happens, I didn’t.”

  He reached into his bag and pulled out another beer. “Want one?” he said.

  “No. Thank you.”

  “I don’t always drink on duty,” he said, “but today’s a special occasion.”

  “Oh?” Rachel said. “What’s that?”

  “Guess.”

  She could no longer keep up a pretense of bonhomie: his tone was irritating her. “Look, I think you should just pack up your tools and go home,” she said.

  “Oh do you now?” he said, popping the beer can. “And what if I said to you: this is home.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she replied, and went to open the front door.

  “My mother worked here all her life. I’ve been coming here since I was a baby.”

  “I see.”

  “I know this house better than you’ll ever know it.” He turned away from her, now that he was certain he had her attention. “I love this house. You come, one after the other, and you act like the place belongs to you—”

  “It doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the Geary family.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Niolopua said, “it belongs to the Geary women. There’s never been any men come here. Just women.” A look of contempt crossed his face. “Why can’t you have your husbands service you? Why’d you have to come here and . . .” the contempt deepened “ . . . and . . . defile everything?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Rachel said, turning back from the door and going to stand right beside him. Niolopua didn’t avert his gaze. He stared right up at her with something very close to hatred on his face.

  “You don’t think about what you do to him, do you?”

  “Him?”

  “It’s not like there’s ever any love.”

  “Him.”

  “Yes. Him.”

  “Galilee?”

  “Yes! Of course!” Niolopua said, as though she was an imbecile for asking the question. “Who the hell else would it be?” There were tears in his eyes now: of rage, of frustration. “My mother was the only one who ever loved him. The only one!” He looked away from Rachel, and tears dropped from his eyes onto the wooden steps. “He built this house for her.”

  “Galilee built this house?” Niolopua nodded, still not looking up. “When?”

  “I don’t know exactly. A long time ago. It was the first house to be built on this shore.”

  “That can’t be right,” Rachel said. “He’s not that old. I mean he’s what, forty? If that.”

  “You don’t know what he is,” Niolopua said. There was a measure of pity in the remark, as though Rachel’s ignorance was more profound than a lack of information.

  “So tell me,” she said. “Help me understand.”

  Niolopua took a mouthful of beer. Stared at the ground. Said nothing.

  “Please,” she said softly.

  “All you want to do is use him,” came the reply.

  “You’ve got me wrong,” she said. He didn’t respond to this. At last she said: “I’m not like all the rest, Niolopua. I’m not a Geary. Well . . . no that’s not true . . . I married a man I thought I loved and his name happened to be Geary. I didn’t realize what that meant.”

  “Well, my father hates you all. In his heart, he hates you.”

  “Your father being?” She paused, realizing the answer. “Oh Lord. You’re Galilee’s son.”

  “Yes. I’m his son.”

  Rachel put her hands over her face and sighed into her palms. There was so much here she didn’t comprehend: secrets and anger and sorrow. The only thing she grasped with any certainty was this: that even here, even in paradise, the Gearys had done their spoiling. No wonder Galilee hated them. She hated them too. At that moment she wished every one of them dead. A little part of her even wished herself dead. There seemed to be no other way out of the trap she’d married into.

  “Is he coming back?” she said after a time.

  “Oh yes,” Niolopua replied, his voice monotonal. “He knows his responsibilities.”

  “To whom?”

  “To you. You’re a Geary woman, whether you like it or not. That’s why he’s with you. He wouldn’t come otherwise.” He glanced up at her. “You’ve got nothing he needs.”

  He was being cruel for the satisfaction of it, she knew, but the words stung her nevertheless.

  “I don’t need to listen to this,” she said, and leaving him on the steps to drink his warm beer, she went back into the house.

  IV

  i

  It’s no accident that events of great significance, when they happen, do so in clusters; it’s the nature of things. Having been a gambling man in my youth, I know from experience how this principle works, for instance, in a casino. The roulette table suddenly becomes “hot”; there’s win after win after win. And if you happen to be at the right table at the right time then the odds are suddenly tipped spectacularly in your favor. (The trick, of course, is to sense the moment when the table cools, and not to keep betting beyond that point, or you’ll lose your shirt.) Observers of natural phenomena large and small, astronomers or entomologists, will tell you the same thing. For long periods—millions of years in the life of a star, minutes in the life of a butterfly—nothing of moment seems to happen. And then, suddenly, a plethora of events: convulsions, transformations, cataclysms.

  Of course it’s the apparently tranquil periods that deceive us. Though our instruments or our senses or our wits may not be able to see the processes that are leading toward these clusters of events, they’re happening. The star, the wheel, the butterfly—all are in a subtle state of unrest, waiting for the moment when some invisible mechanism signals that the time has come. Then the star explodes; the wheel makes poor men rich; the butterfly mates and dies.

  If we think of the Geary family as a single entity, then the first of the events that would transform it had already taken place: Rachel and Galilee had met. Though much of what happened in the next few days had, at least superficially, nothing to do with that meeting, it seems from a little distance that everything else was somehow precipitated by their liaison.

  I don’t entirely discount the possibility. Any feeling as profound (and as profoundly irrational) as the passion which moved these two has consequences; vibrations, which may begin processes utterly remote from it.

  In this sense love is of different order to any other phenomenon, for it may be both an event and a sign of that invisible mechanism I spoke of before; perhaps the finest sign, the most certain. In its throes we need neither luck nor science. We are the wheel, and the man who profits by it. We are the star, and the darkness it pierces. We are the butterfly, brief and beautiful.

  All of this was by way of preparing you for how things proceeded with the Gearys in a shor
t space of time following Galilee’s encounter with Rachel: how all at once a system that had survived and prospered for a hundred and forty years came apart at the seams in forty-eight hours.

  ii

  For those who knew Cadmus Geary well the most certain sign of his sudden deterioration was sartorial. Even though he’d had bad, and sometimes extended, periods of ill health from his early eighties on, he had continued to pride himself on the way he looked. This had been a preoccupation since childhood. There’s a photograph taken of him when he was barely four years old in which he presents himself like a little dandy, clearly proud of his perfectly pressed shirt and his immaculately polished shoes. He’d more than once been mistaken for a homosexual, which never troubled him. He’d laid more women that way.

  Today, however, he refused his freshly laundered clothes; he wanted to stay in his pajamas, he declared. When his nurse, Celeste, gently pointed out that he’d soiled them in the night he replied that it was his shit and he liked its company. Then he demanded to be taken downstairs and put in front of the television. The nurse complied, and called in the doctor. Cadmus would have nothing to do with being examined however. He told Waxman to go away and leave him alone. Noncompliance, he warned, would result in a withdrawal of all funds made by the Geary family or any of its trusts to medical research, along with Waxman’ s retirement bonus.

  “He still sounds like the Cadmus we all know and love,” the doctor told Loretta. “Do you want me to try again?”

  Loretta told him not to bother. If there was some worsening of her husband’s condition she’d call. Much relieved the good doctor duly did as Cadmus had demanded and went away, leaving the old man to sit on the sofa and watch baseball. After an hour or so Loretta brought some food in: soup, half a toasted bagel and some cream cheese. He told her to set it down on the table, and he’d get to it later. Right now, he said, he wanted to watch the game.

  “Are you feeling all right?’ she asked him.

  He didn’t take his eyes off the screen, though his features showed not a flicker of interest in what was going on. “Never better,” he said.

  She set the tray down on the table. “Could I get you something different . . . maybe some fruit?”

  “I’ve already got the shits, thank you,” he said politely.

  “Some chocolate pudding?”

  “I’m not a child, Loretta,” he said. “Though I realize it’s a very long time since I proved it to you. I’m sure you’re getting a good fucking from somebody—”

  “Cadmus—”

  “—I just hope he appreciates how much of my money you’ve spent getting your tits tucked and your ass tucked and that belly of yours all stapled up—”

  “Stop that!”

  “Did you get a pussy tuck while you were at it?” he remarked, his tone not once wavering from the lightly conversational. “You must be sloppy down there after all these years.”

  “Don’t be disgusting,” Loretta said.

  “Do I take that as a yes?”

  “If you don’t stop this—”

  “What will you do?” he said, a tiny smile coming onto his parchment lips. “Throw me over your lap and spank me? Remember how I used to do that to you, love? Remember that lacquered hairbrush you used to present me with when you were in need of a little discipline?” Loretta was having no more of this. She walked smartly to the door, her heels clicking on the hardwood floor. “Don’t you ever wonder how much of it I told people about?” he said.

  She stopped a yard short of the door. “You didn’t,” she said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Of course I told people. Just a select little group. Cecil of course. Some members of your family.”

  “Oh you are a filthy, disgusting old man—”

  “That’s it, sweet pea. Let it out. It may be your last chance.”

  “You never had any shame—”

  “If I had I daresay I wouldn’t have married you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nobody else would have had you. Not with your reputation. I thought when I first got you naked: there isn’t anywhere on this body that’s still virgin territory. Every inch of it’s been licked and pinched and screwed and smacked. I found that quite arousing at the time. And when people said, why her, she’s a whore, she’s slept with half of Washington, I used to tell them, I can still show her a few tricks she hasn’t seen.” He paused for a moment. Loretta was quietly weeping. “What the fuck are you crying for?” Cadmus said. “When I’m dead you can tell everyone what a brute I was. You can write a book about what a dirty-minded, decadent old goat I was. I don’t care. I won’t be listening. I’ll be too busy paying for my sins.” At last, having not taken his eyes off the screen throughout this exchange, he slowly, painfully, turned his head to look back at her. “There’s a special hell for people who die as rich as us,” he said. “So say a few prayers for me, will you?” She looked at him blankly. “What are you thinking?”

  “I was wondering . . . if you ever loved me.”

  “Oh sweet pea,” he said. “Isn’t it a little late to be sentimental?”

  She left without another word. There was no purpose arguing with him; clearly his medication was disordering his thoughts. She’d have to talk to Waxman; perhaps the doses were too strong. She went upstairs and put on a dress she’d had made for her the previous season, but had then never been in the mood to wear. It was white, and rather plain, and when she’d first tried it on she’d thought it made her look pallid. But now, seeing herself in the mirror, she approved of its severity; and of the somewhat frigid quality it conferred.

  He’d called her whore, and that wasn’t just. She’d had her high times, to be sure: what he’d said about there not being a piece of her body untouched was true. But so what? She’d made the best of what God had given her; taken her pleasures where, when and with whom she could. There was nothing shameful in that. Indeed, Cadmus had been perversely proud of her wild reputation at the beginning. He’d liked nothing better than to know that their courtship was the subject of gossip and tittle-tattle. And yes, she’d succumbed to the demands of vanity several times, and gone under the knife. But again: so what? She looked ten years her own junior; fifteen in a flattering light. But she had no wish to use her beauty the way Cadmus had implied. Once she’d taken his name, she’d had one lover only besides Cadmus, and even that had barely lasted a week. It would have been nice to think she’d broken his heart, but she harbored no such illusions. He’d been immune to love, that other one. He’d sailed away when he had finished with her, and nearly broken her heart.

  So out she went, dressed in white, leaving Cadmus sitting on the sofa in front of his beloved baseball. Of course, he saw none of it. He hadn’t actually watched a game in months. There was something about sitting there that helped him remove his thoughts from his present condition—from its pain and humiliation—and talk himself into the past. He had work to do there; things to put in order before death took him and he found himself removed into that special hell made for the rich.

  Catholic atheist that he was, he half-believed in that hell; half believed he would suffer—if not eternally at least for a long, long time—in a barren spot where every comfort wealth and power could bestow was denied him. He’d never really cared about luxury so he wouldn’t miss the silk pajamas and the Italian shoes and the thousand-bucks-a-bottle champagne. He’d miss control. He’d miss knowing he could get any politician, to the very highest, on the phone in five minutes, whatever their affiliations. He’d miss knowing every word he uttered was scrutinized for a clue to his desires. He’d miss being idolized. He’d miss being hated. He’d miss having a purpose. That was the real hell waiting for him: the wasteland where his will meant nothing, because he had nothing to work it upon.

  Yesterday he’d cried quietly to himself at the prospect. Today, he had no tears left. His head was just a cesspool, filled with dirty little words that he had no use for now that his bitch-wife had g
one. Gone to get herself fucked, no doubt; gone to spread her cunt for some stinking donkey-dick—

  He was saying the words aloud, he vaguely realized; talking filth to himself while he sat in his own caked shit. And in his head there were pictures to accompany the monologue; too blurred for him to know if they were excremental or erotic.

  Somewhere in the midst of all this confusion there were other concerns he knew he should address. Business unfinished, goodbyes unsaid. But he couldn’t pin his thoughts down long enough to name them; the dirt kept distracting him.

  At one point the nurse came in and asked him how he was doing. It took the greatest effort of will not to let out a flood of filth, but he used the last remnants of his self-control to order her out of the room. She told him she’d be back in ten minutes with his noon medication, and then left.

  As he listened to her footsteps receding across the hall he heard a whirring sound in his head. It seemed to be coming from the back of his skull; an irritating little din that rose in volume by degrees. He tried to shake it out—like a dog with a flea in its ear—but it wouldn’t go. It simply got louder, and more shrill. He grabbed hold of the arm of the sofa so as to pull himself to his feet. He needed help. A head awash with dirty words was one thing, but this was too vile to be endured. He got to his feet, but his legs weren’t strong enough to support him. His hand slipped out from under him and he fell sideways. He cried out as he went down, but he heard no sound. The whine had become so loud it overwhelmed everything else: the crack of his brittle bones as he hit the floor, the din of the table lamp as it came smashing down, caught by his outflung hand.

  For a few moments, when he hit the ground, he lost consciousness, and in a kinder world than this he might never have found it again. But fate hadn’t finished with him yet. After a period of blissful darkness his eyes flickered open again. He was lying on his side where he’d fallen, the whine now so loud he felt certain it would shake his skull apart.