A Garden of Earthly Delights

  The greeting—“Hiya”—was uttered in a solemn tone. Swan smiled, and said, “Hiya” in return. He was surprised that the little boy was so soft-spoken, and so beautiful: his skin was pale and smooth as a doll's rubber skin, poreless, perfect; his lips reminded Swan of the lips of children in classical paintings, children who weren't meant to be human but of divine origin. Baby Christs, cherubs. “Want one?” The boy held out a roll of Life Savers to Swan, opened at one end. Across the room, seated uncomfortably in a plastic hard-backed chair, the boy's mother was smiling at Swan.

  She's got her kid to pimp for her.

  “No thanks,” Swan said.

  The child backed away, disappointed.

  “He's just like that, he's a friendly kid,” the mother called over, apologetically. Her voice was younger and softer than Swan might have anticipated. But Swan wanted nothing to do with them, with her. He would be seeing a woman that evening.

  Others in the waiting room were observing him. Judging him as out of place in Piggott's office, maybe. His good clothes, his air of impatience, disdain. The way in which he flipped the pages of magazines, and tossed them down. As if none of the magazines could tell him anything he didn't already know.

  At the Hamilton Statler, Swan was staying in a suite on the top, twenty-fifth floor; this was by far the tallest hotel in the city. He never drew the drapes. He believed he could feel the building sway, just perceptibly, in the wind off the lake. Scattered across a table were papers, most of them legal documents, he'd been going through with Revere lawyers earlier that day. In the other room, the bedroom, was the so-called king-sized bed in which he would lie that night; he would lie with a woman, that night; and above the bureau was an ornate-framed mirror that would record indifferently whatever occurred in that room, in darkness or in light.

  Swan had left his pistol in the room, of course. Hadn't wanted to carry it into Piggott's office. A small-caliber, twenty-two semiautomatic six-shot Remington; not an impressive firearm, made of ordinary stainless steel with plastic grips. It was secondor thirdhand, he'd paid less than two hundred dollars for it. If Revere knew that Swan had bought such a gun, and carried it on his person, the old man would have been astonished. Swan smiled to think of him stammering There's only one use for a handgun.…

  Swan wasn't so sure about that. He had yet to decide.

  At five-thirty-five, the name “Walpole” was called. Swan rose at once and followed a middle-aged nurse into an inner office, that smelled of varnish and disinfectant. There was Dr. Piggott frowning at him, as if trying to place him. A new patient? New to Hamilton? Swan had not realized, he would have to answer so many idiotic questions.

  Piggott was not a young man. He wore bifocals with flesh-colored nose pads. His teeth were obviously dentures. Yet his hands were graceful and his fingernails shone with cleanliness. His voice was paternal if somewhat mechanical—“What did you want to see me about, Mr. Walpole?”

  Never in his life had Swan been called Mr. Walpole! He smiled, confused.

  “I'm sure it's trivial. This symptom …” Swan paused, not liking that word, “symptom.” It sounded clinical, as if he were trying to usurp a medical term. “During the night I can't seem to sleep and during the day I seem to want to sleep. Only to sleep. Like there's a dark well drawing me down, the water is sweet, delicious …” Swan listened to these words, fascinated. He had never spoken such words aloud before. What he said was true, and yet: until he'd spoken the words, he had not understood, entirely. “Sometimes when I'm driving I feel my—I guess it's my brain?—my ‘consciousness'?— start to go out. Like a candle flame. I want only to close my eyes. The yearning is so strong.…”

  Piggott asked how long had he felt like this, how long had he been experiencing this symptom, and Swan said he didn't know, maybe a year.

  All my life.

  “I'm not sure, Doctor. I don't want to exaggerate it. I'm healthy otherwise, I think. I'm sure.”

  Piggott was examining him, his body. Listening to his heart and asking him to open his mouth, and to cough; staring into his eyes and ears with instruments; tightening a band of rubber around his upper arm. He'd begun to perspire. He felt that he was a body, a vessel that might have contained anyone, presented to this man, a stranger, as you might drive a car into a service station and have it “serviced.” What was Swan resided in his brain, inaccessible.

  Piggott was asking again how old Swan was, and Swan told him another time: “Twenty-five. No, twenty-six.” He wondered if the doctor believed him to be older. Had he an older heart, was his blood pressure that of an older man? Piggott asked, “Occupation, Mr. Walpole?” and Swan had to think. At the core of his icy perspiring there was something warm, peaceful, delicious: sleep. He wanted to sleep more than anything, just as he'd confessed to Piggott; but confessing had not erased his desire, as perhaps he'd thought it might.

  Yet, if he returned to the hotel, and lay down on the absurdly large bed, he wouldn't be able to sleep.

  “There's something wrong with me, isn't there? You can tell me, Doctor. My heart …”

  “No. Your heartbeat, your blood pressure, appear to be normal. I would guess that, ordinarily, your blood pressure is even lower than my reading, and my reading is low,” Piggott said. “ ‘Low' is good.”

  “Is it!” Swan smiled. “I guess I knew that. Of course. ‘Low' is the opposite of ‘high.' … High blood pressure.”

  He was speaking wildly. He sounded drunk. What had the doctor asked him? A question he had not answered.

  “I help my father on his farm. He owns a farm south of here. In the Eden Valley.”

  “And is this a large farm, Mr. Walpole?”

  “No. Not large.”

  Craftily he would not tell a stranger the truth. He was wanting to leave now, to put his shirt back on, escape. But Piggott was observing him closely. “You've said you have ‘no history' of illness. Not even childhood illnesses? Chicken pox, measles …” Piggott was jotting notes on a clipboard; Swan knew that no one would ever look at those notes again, this was a waste of time. He made brief answers, that sounded plausible. Piggott asked, “How about your mother? Your father?”

  “My mother has always been healthy. She's never been in a hospital that I know of.” Though she'd been hospitalized at the time of the miscarriage. “My father, he's an older man.” Swan gnawed at his lower lip, not liking what he'd said. An older man. He loved Revere, it was unfair to speak of him in such a way. Always the man had been an older man. Clara had married him because he had money, and he was older, and would die.

  Piggott said, in a careful, kindly voice, “Mr. Walpole, you seem to be rather nervous. Are you always so nervous?”

  “Nervous! I'm not nervous.”

  “You give that impression. Increasingly, now.”

  When Swan caught sight of himself in mirrors or store windows he was struck by his casual, rangy reflection—hair so blond it could only grow on the head of an idiot. His face was movie-actor bland, a face of mere surfaces. Why did this fool say that he was nervous?

  “I'm the opposite of nervous, Doctor. Like I told you, I keep wanting to fall asleep.”

  “I will refer you to a neurologist, to arrange for more thorough testing. But, first, will you tell me who is your regular physician, Mr. Walpole?”

  Neurologist! Possibly he had a brain tumor.

  “No one. I don't remember.”

  Piggott frowned at this obvious lie.

  “But where have you gone for medical examinations? Somewhere in the Eden Valley?”

  “What about the Eden Valley?”

  Swan spoke agitatedly. How did Piggott know where he lived?

  Piggott said, quickly, “I only meant, Mr. Walpole: surely someone in your family sees a doctor?”

  Swan shook his head, as if not understanding.

  The awkward moment passed. Piggott said, “I will need to take a blood sample, if you don't mind.”

  “Why should I mind? I have plenty of blood.”

/>   Swan thought that actual pain would be good for him. It would distract him. He was disappointed that Piggott called in the middle-aged nurse to take his blood, while Piggott left the room.

  Deftly the woman wrapped a strip of rubber around Swan's upper arm and tapped at his veins. She selected one, and began to slide the needle in, and Swan jerked his arm, knocking the needle away. It had felt like an insect's stinger. “Sorry! Did it hurt?” the nurse asked, and Swan muttered no, and they tried again; and another time his forearm jerked, involuntarily. A rivulet of sweat was running down his forehead. “Maybe your other arm. I'm sure I will have better luck.” The nurse meant to be good-natured, confiding. Swan had no intention of resisting like a child or a neurotic female; yet when the nurse began to sink the needle into a vein at the crook of his right arm, the arm jerked another time. “Maybe Dr. Piggott would have better luck.…”

  “The hell with Dr. Piggott. The hell with this.”

  Swan spoke calmly, almost pleasantly. He grabbed for his shirt, walked out of the room buttoning it. He passed by an office in which the old doctor was standing, but too quickly for either to make eye contact with the other. In the outer office, where the breathy receptionist was on the telephone, Swan remembered to take out his wallet and toss onto the counter several twenty-dollar bills.

  He returned to the hotel, where both doors to his suite were marked DO NOT DISTURB. He believed that, in fact, nothing had been disturbed in his absence, though lights flashed on the telephones meaning that someone had called. He checked the lining of his suitcase, where he'd hidden the pistol. He took it out, checked to see that the safety was on, and replaced it. Keep the safety on, son. Until you mean to use your firearm.

  Descending then twenty-five vertiginous floors to the swanky cocktail lounge where he ordered a scotch neat and drank it swiftly like medicine: the prescription Piggott had failed to write for him. “All I want is sleep, doctor. Barbiturates.” He sounded maudlin and self-pitying and yet: the sexy young cocktail waitress hovered near, with a sly smile. “No more, honey. I've had it.” He was through with women, or almost. Tipped the waitress a twenty-dollar bill, as compensation.

  At eight-thirty he met Deborah in the hotel lobby. She wore a stylish coat of black cashmere and carried a black leather purse. Her fair, fine hair was cut unnervingly short, as if to mock Swan: to mock any man who believed her female, womanly. Because this was the Hamilton Statler, Deborah had entered the lobby shyly; she was glancing about in dread of seeing someone she knew.

  “We're cousins. We have a right to see each other. It isn't fucking incest, is it?”

  Swan spoke quietly, pleasantly. Deborah frowned at him.

  “You're drunk.”

  “No. I'm waiting.”

  “Up in your room, you might have waited. Why down here? I feel so exposed.…”

  “Didn't you want to have dinner? I made a reservation.”

  “I never said dinner. I don't want dinner. I'm not hungry, for God's sake.”

  They were close to quarreling. Deborah had the tight-wound look of a cat about to claw. In the elevator, Swan kissed her. He kissed her mouth hard, hungrily. Deborah slid her arms around his neck and kissed him in return, then pushed him away, breathing quickly. “You do these things on purpose. You don't respect me.”

  Deborah was pulling off her gloves, impatiently. Swan liked to see her rings: the pretentious yellow diamond ringed by smaller diamonds, and the equally pretentious white-gold band. It was a ritual both seemed to enjoy, Deborah yanking off her gloves, Swan smiling at her rings. She'd been a married woman for how many years, Swan kept forgetting. Every night sleeping with a man not-Swan, and somehow that, too, was gratifying.

  When the door opened at the twenty-fifth floor, Swan pushed her out before him. Inside his room, Swan switched on lights and shut the door and bolted it. “I don't love you, I think I hate you. I hate myself with you, that's certain,” Deborah said. She tossed her gloves and purse down. The color was up in her normally sallow face; her eyes were moist. “Strange. I can come up to your room with you, but I don't think I could eat with you. Any normal thing. Any normal act. No.”

  Swan was unbuttoning the cashmere coat. He smiled at the woman's peevish, pinched face. She was close to him as a sister: though of course he'd never had a sister, what did he know? “What does all that mean, Deborah? Your preamble.”

  “Don't make me angry, Steven. Don't hurt me any more than you've already done.”

  “Deborah. I didn't know I'd hurt you at all.…”

  He was struck by her words. Even if she were fabricating, he was struck, for a moment faint with love for her.

  Earlier, Swan had ordered bourbon sent to the room. They each had a drink, standing. Swan kissed Deborah several times, in a way of greeting. Then she turned, went into the adjoining room and Swan followed her, and turned off all the lights except the bedside lamp. They were more comfortable with each other now, if still guarded. Swan was dizzy with the scent of Deborah's hair; so excited he had to hold himself back, and not overwhelm her. In the somewhat cold, unfamiliar bed, large as a football field Deborah remarked, she pressed her face against his beating throat, hid her face, and whispered that he was her only friend, even if she could not trust him he was her only friend on earth. “I think about you all the time, Steven. It isn't even that I love you, you are necessary for me. When we were children, I hadn't known. I took you for granted. You were always there, the ‘bas-tid.' Now I need you. I'm ashamed to say how I need you. I can say anything to you, can't I. I can do anything with you. You can't make me ashamed. You can hurt me, but you can't make me ashamed.”

  Deborah had slender, hard arms and legs. Her body was eel-like, warm and wiry and slender, yet with a muscular rigidity that seemed to Swan sexless. In the half-light Swan saw her large, dilated eyes, the eyes he'd been seeing for most of his life. It always surprised him that his young cousin had turned into a beautiful woman.

  “What did he say when you told him you were going out?”

  He meant Deborah's husband. Like Clara's husband, a well-to-do older man. But a city dweller, with two children from a previous marriage.

  “Never mind about him.”

  “Doesn't he wonder? This time of evening …”

  “I said keep quiet.”

  They made love ardently but haphazardly, like inexperienced children; Swan knew he was overexcited, overly forceful, yet couldn't hold himself back. Deborah liked to be hurt, but only to a degree. Afterward she kissed him, saying, “Something is happening with you, isn't it,” though not in a voice of inquiry; and Swan debated telling her about his desperation that day, making an appointment with a doctor whose name he'd found in the Yellow Pages. “I'm nervous, is all. Insomniac.” Deborah laughed, pinching the flesh at his waist. “You! I'm the one who's nervous and insomniac. You're healthy as a—steer.”

  Swan had only a vague idea of what time it was. How rapidly time was passing. He held Deborah, thinking I don't need anything else. Only just this. Yet he waited for something more to happen, some powerful passing-over of his love into her, or hers into him. Almost, it had happened the last time they'd been together. He had felt her body quickening beneath him, straining to be with him, so that she was left bathed with a dewy perspiration. Her skin burned, her eyes were widened and staring. This time, they were more conscious of each other, and edgy.

  The way a woman responds to sexual intercourse: such violence, such helpless passion, you want to think it means something more than it does. Swan guessed it must be so with women, witnessing a man's passion. Imagining themselves its origin, its cause.

  Deborah said, stroking Swan's forehead, “I'm thinking of going to Italy, in September. Venice, Rome.”

  “Is he going with you?”

  She stiffened, as if Swan had said something hurtful.

  “Well. I'll miss you.”

  They were silent. They drifted toward sleep. Somewhere far below on the street a siren wailed. Swan felt a rivulet o
f sweat running down his naked side, light as tickling fingers. Deborah was awake, and speaking in that way she did at such times, when they were faceless to each other. “D'you remember, Steven, when we were kids? It seemed to go on so long! You used to stay in the house, away from our noisy cousins. I used to watch you, in secret: reading your books. I loved you then, I think. And you—you'd never done a crossword puzzle, before me.…” Deborah stirred, and fluffed out her short damp spiky hair. The bedside lamp had a silken rosy shade that softened Deborah's features. “You didn't have dinner, then?” she asked. “I wasn't hungry,” Swan said. “Except for you.” He was feeling weightless, unreal. He guessed that Deborah had asked him to take her from her husband, to travel to Italy with her, and he'd pretended not to understand.

  “When I want to sleep, I can't. I'd thought I was, just now. But no. You woke me, talking.”

  “Oh, Steven. It isn't like you to be so self-absorbed.”

  Deborah was sitting up, not minding if her small pale breasts were exposed. She was capable of sudden vehement motions, near the end of a meeting with him. Swan said, alarmed, “Deborah, don't leave yet—”

  “Yes. I should.”

  “Honey …”

  Honey always sounded pleading. Close to begging.

  “It seems to mean so little, when I'm with you. Only at the moment. Then, afterward, there's no memory. Like an hourglass, making love with you. The sand runs down.” Deborah spoke thoughtfully, not accusingly. “I married him to leave home. And now I live in a large, beautiful house, I have a beautiful life, I know, and yet—none of it means much to me. I'm busy constantly yet I have nothing to do. There are books I try to read, but I can't seem to read them. I don't do crossword puzzles any longer, so it's as if my life is the crossword puzzle, I can't solve. I don't know what I want, darling. Except for you I have everything. And yet—”