Amaryllis Night and Day

  The room lived up to expectations. It smelled musty. There was no telephone or TV. There was a bare bulb in the ceiling which gave a pale-yellow tint to the darkness. There was one shaky bedside lamp with a 40-watt bulb. I lifted the chenille bedspread and bedclothes and felt the mattress: damp. Amaryllis sat down on the bed, looking not altogether in the mood for love.

  I was expecting another religious slogan on the wall but I was surprised to see a reproduction of Ryder’s Moonlight. Well of course it was my glim, wasn’t it. Had there been a moon when we were on the dark road? I didn’t think so.

  For a while I stood in front of the picture studying the little pitching vessel and the obscure figure huddled by the mast. The storm had passed but the loose sail streamed forward, untended, while the hull drove before the wind under a full moon. Was there someone at the tiller? Hard to tell. If there wasn’t, or if the rudder had gone, what was keeping the boat from broaching to? Two little dark clouds, like lost and wandering souls, moved across the clean-washed moonlit sky. That man huddled by the mast, would he ever get home?

  I do know Hopper’s work,’ said Amaryllis, ‘and Ryder’s too. I studied at the RCA but I left the year before you arrived. That’s where I met Ron Hastings and Cindy Ackerman.’

  ‘There’s always something new about you, isn’t there,’ I said.

  ‘About you too. What kind of a dump did you glim us into? Are you trying to tell me something or what?’

  ‘I can only get the glim started, you know that. I didn’t do the Brass Hotel and its decor and I didn’t do most of this. I could certainly do with a drink about now.’

  ‘Me too, but you seem to have left out the mini-bar when you glimmed this room.’

  ‘We didn’t pass an off-licence on our way here. Maybe they haven’t got any in greater Smallville. Maybe there’s still prohibition out here.’

  ‘They call them liquor stores in America,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Maybe you should have glimmed us closer to town.’

  ‘Well, I was following your instructions, wasn’t I. You asked for the Edward Hopper Mobilgas station and I didn’t bother to glim beyond that. Maybe one of your old glimmers could have done better.’

  She looked at me reproachfully, more in sorrow than in anger. ‘It’s very mean-spirited of you to throw that up to me. I’ve been open with you and this is what I get for it. You haven’t told me anything about your past but if you haven’t glimmed others before me I’m sure it’s only because you didn’t know how to.’

  ‘Amaryllis,’ I said, ‘mightn’t life be simpler if we just did things in the ordinary way and slept in the same bed at night and glimmed our individual glims the same as everyone else? Please don’t start crying.’ Because she looked as if she was ready to.

  ‘Goddam it, Peter, how many times do I have to tell you that if I glim alone I’ll find myself on that lousy bus again and I’d rather not, OK?’

  ‘All right, but do you mind telling me why we’re out here in the boondocks?’

  She got up and came to me and leant against me tiredly and I could feel how much she needed me. ‘I wanted to be here with you,’ she said in her smallest voice, ‘and I thought you wanted to be here with me.’

  ‘I do,’ I said with my arms around her. ‘Was it just the dark road you wanted us to come to or does the road lead to something else?’

  Still in her smallest voice she said, ‘I weep when I remember Zion. Are you going to let the phone keep ringing?’

  ‘There’s no phone here,’ I said. ‘It’s the postman.’ I woke up and answered the door and he gave me Nosferatu and The Creature from the Black Lagoon that I’d ordered from Amazon.com.

  24

  The Borgo Pass

  The voice of Mona Spägele, spidering delicately in a dim silken web of lamentation, rose and fell while the rain drummed on the studio windows. Barbara Strozzi had written L’Eraclito Amoroso in seventeenth-century Venice, tracing note by note the shadowy shapes of love’s sorrow for soprano, viola da gamba, bass lute, harpsichord, and raindrops. Barbara Strozzi with no CD player, no electricity, working perhaps by candlelight, perhaps by rainlight.

  What the painting needed, I saw now, was more space, more background: mountains, moonlight, mists rising where eyes gleamed in the darkness. The 18 × 24” canvas was too small. I put it aside, stretched a 24 × 32” canvas, toned it with cadmium red and alizarin crimson, and started again with Amaryllis’s face somewhat larger than before, ghosting it in as lightly as I could. Dark brooding mountains, yes, against a purply-pale sky with a full moon cold and implacable. A great ruined castle high on the peak. The Borgo Pass in Transylvania came to life under my brush, the dim road wending its midnight way through the Carpathians to the castle.

  By now her face came easily to me but the image refused to yield the idea of her. I’d been seeing her from the outside and I hadn’t really got past the Pre-Raphaelite nymph of her which was well enough in its way but by no means the whole story; there was another face under that one, a stronger, darker face. There were things to be done around the mouth, more work needed on the eyes, subtle emphases to be made here and there to bring out the inner reality of this woman who was not simply to be taken in at a glance.

  Wisely or not, I was in love with her but I was tired of dividing my life between the glimworld and the unglim, I wanted to be with her in the ordinary way, with surnames, telephone numbers, addresses, and meeting times and places in the waking world. I had begun to wonder about my own part in our glims and I’d become suspicious of my arrangements at the Pines Motel with its damp mattress and its 40-watt bulbs. I wanted to see Amaryllis but today some little edge of resentment kept me from hurrying from place to place trying to find her.

  The rain was steady; it was a drowsy kind of day and I slipped into something like a trance; my hand was working autonomously while my mind was between sleeping and waking. By mid-afternoon I’d had enough for a while and lay down on the studio couch for a nap. I didn’t want to glim Amaryllis – all I wanted was the sort of kip I’d been able to enjoy before I met her. In a very short time, however, I found myself in the Carpathian Mountains, at the Borgo Pass. Dark clouds raced across the face of the full moon and the howling of wolves came to me on the wind.

  I was turning this way and that, fearful of an attack from behind, when I heard the sound of hooves and the clatter of wheels. Four splendid coal-black horses came into view drawing a calèche. Amaryllis was on the driver’s seat, cloaked and booted and wearing a broad-brimmed hat. ‘Get in!’ she shouted as she reined in the horses.

  I climbed in. The top was down, the wind was rising. Amaryllis’s hair streamed out from under her hat. ‘Where are we going?’ I said.

  ‘Back to the Pines Motel.’ Her words were almost carried away by the wind. She shook the reins, whooped to the horses, and off we went, jolting along the road out of the mountains and the wind and the howling of wolves, down through a valley where the mists were rising, and on to the dark road through the pines, the crickets and the hooting of the owl to the Edward Hopper Mobilgas station. The moon by then had set. The man in the white shirt was stocking the rack with cans of motor oil again when we pulled into the forecourt.

  Amaryllis threw him the reins as she climbed down and he unharnessed the horses and led them away. She was once more in jeans and T-shirt as we left the station. The T-shirt said:

  Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.

  Nelson Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side

  Amaryllis took the front of the T-shirt between thumb and forefinger, pulled it away from her body, and looked down at it. ‘This is what I mean,’ she said as if answering a question I hadn’t been aware of asking.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I’ve never read Nelson Algren.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You glimmed this shirt and put me into it.’

  ‘I never said I didn’t.’
r />   We walked in silence for a while, listening to the crickets. ‘Well, I’m a little confused,’ she said, ‘about the way these glims are going.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  We were at the Pines Motel by then. We went to our cabin and she took the key out of her pocket and unlocked the door. ‘Honey, I’m home,’ she said, and tilted her head to one side and looked at me questioningly.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Mildew Haven,’ she said. ‘Our little love nest.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘When we got here I was feeling good about you,’ she continued, ‘but if you were feeling good about me I wonder why you glimmed me into this no-star establishment. Is it that you don’t really like me? You have doubts about this whole thing? What?’

  ‘I love you, Amaryllis. I’ve told you that waking and I’ve told you that glimming and it’s true. But I’m confused too – this motel came from somewhere in my mind that I wasn’t intending to go into. I don’t fully understand what’s happening with us.’

  I wanted to be here with you,’ she said, ‘because there’s a place farther down this road that I wanted to go to with you but I wasn’t quite ready for it yet. Do you know what that place is?’

  I saw black velvet, silver writing. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said.

  ‘I think you are and I don’t quite know where we go from here.’ There were scattered drops of rain at the windows, then the drops came closer together until they were a steady drumming downpour. The roof leaked in several places. I put the wastebasket under the worst one; the others had to do without. Fortunately the bed wasn’t under any of them. ‘At least we’re out of the rain,’ she said, ‘mostly.’

  ‘I’m sorry about this motel, Amaryllis. I’m kind of mixed up but I do love you.’

  ‘In that case,’ she said as she opened her arms to me, ‘maybe our body heat will dry out the mattress.’

  It did, or at least it made us forget the dampness. Later as we lay there pleasantly entangled Amaryllis said, ‘This next place that I want to go to – I have a feeling that you know it and you don’t want to go there. Am I right?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I think the problem is,’ I said as the doorbell rang.

  ‘You’d better answer the door,’ she said.

  ‘This cabin has no doorbell,’ I said.

  ‘All the more reason to answer it. Maybe it’s something really urgent.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like me wanting to come in out of the rain.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘well, then.’ And I woke up and went down to the front door to let her in.

  25

  Bowl of Cherries

  She was wearing a yellow mac with streams of water running down it and a sopping wet broad-brimmed green canvas hat. Her plimsolls were soaked and a puddle was forming around her as we kissed on the doorstep. ‘Were you with me just now at the Pines Motel?’ I asked.

  ‘Have you forgotten so soon?’ she said with a lewd grin, making more puddles as I drew her inside.

  ‘Never, but if you were with me in the glim you must have been asleep.’

  ‘That’s right; I fell asleep on the train from Embankment.’

  ‘But the doorbell just now woke me out of the Pines Motel where you told me to answer the door, and at that moment you must have been walking here from Fulham Broadway.’

  ‘But glims do that: you heard the doorbell and the glim backed up to give you what led up to that sound.’

  ‘Funny how the mind does that.’

  ‘The mind’s the funniest place there is.’

  ‘Isn’t it though. I hadn’t expected the Pines Motel and you, I was only wanting a little kip – I hadn’t been trying to pull you.’

  ‘Maybe you were and didn’t know it. Anyhow, I hope you didn’t mind being interfered with.’

  I kissed her. ‘I closed my eyes and thought of England.’

  ‘Plucky little man. I’ve come all the way from Maine or Massachusetts and I’m about ready for a drink.’

  ‘Boilermakers as usual?’

  ‘What’s a boilermaker?’

  ‘Whisky with a beer chaser.’

  I don’t want to chase it too far.’

  ‘No problem – in this house the bitter comes in less-than-pints.’

  Amaryllis hung up her wet things and followed me into the kitchen where I got two cans of John Smith and glasses and a tray. Then we went up to the living-room where the whisky was. I poured us two large Glenfiddichs and we clinked glasses. ‘Here’s looking at you, kid,’ I said.

  ‘Here’s looking right back.’ The whisky went down beautifully, the bitter rounded it off but I felt a slight edge in the air. Her T-shirt said:

  Life is just

  a bowl of cherries.

  Don’t be so serious–

  life’s too mysterious.

  Lew Brown &

  Ray Henderson

  ‘It’s nice that you give the credit,’ I said.

  ‘Where it’s due I always do.’

  ‘How do you choose your T-shirt for the day?’

  ‘I have three T-shirt drawers: Random; Support; and Think.’

  ‘What’s in Think?’

  ‘They’re mostly blank.’

  ‘Which drawer is this one from?’

  ‘Random. That’s the one with the most shirts in it.’

  ‘Is that the drawer you picked me out of when you tuned in that afternoon in South Ken tube station?’

  ‘You weren’t random; you were putting out Find-me vibes. So I found you.’

  ‘Did you think I was lost?’

  ‘Maybe you did.’

  ‘But today I’m not lost. Are you?’

  ‘No more than usual.’ We drank to that and chased it not too far. The rain on the windows curtained us off from the world.

  ‘Speaking of T-shirts, Peter – what about the ones I wear in your glims, what drawers do they come from?’

  ‘The same drawers where the Brass Hotel and the Pines Motel live.’

  ‘Very big, very deep?’

  ‘Deeper than some, I guess; shallower than others.’

  ‘Do you remember the words on the T-shirt I took off at the Brass Hotel?’

  ‘Yes, I remember them very well.’

  ‘Back then you said that Unnatural practices yes was a sort of code. What do those words mean to you?’

  I was in love with Amaryllis but we hadn’t yet reached a point where we told each other everything – in her case, not even a surname. Pondering what to say I went back in my memory to a time that was blurred and out-of-focus but big and vivid on the screen of my mind.

  26

  Unnatural Practices

  I might have been four or five, I’m not sure which, and we were either in Maine or Massachusetts. Afterwards I could never get Uncle Stanley and Aunt Florence to talk about it. We were on holiday in our car. At the start of each day’s drive Mum sat up front with Dad and I sat in the back with Stanley and Florence, between Stanley and the door. I kept getting carsick; it was an old Chevrolet and the smells of petrol and upholstery and Stanley’s cigars and aftershave combined with the motion of the car invariably brought me to a point where we’d have to stop so I could get out and throw up. After that they’d put me in the front seat and Mum would move to the back. I was less likely to become nauseated in the front but they never let me sit there until after I’d vomited; they clung to the theory that I could pull myself together and not be carsick.

  I remember a red sunset all desolate like the end of the world. On the radio a woman was singing ‘There Is a Balm in Gilead’. There was a dark road through pine woods. There was a shop that sold souvenirs. There was a jar of horehound drops. Dad bought me some. There was a black-velvet pillow with silver script lettering on it: For you I pine, for you I balsam. It smelled all piney, that pillow, like the dark woods of eternal rest in Jesus. The silver paint had its own smell. There was a black cat that purred and rubbed against my legs. It looked up
at me with its big green eyes as if it would speak but it didn’t. ‘She wants to be remembered,’ said the old woman who ran the shop. ‘Her name is Josephine; she has dreams.’ She was dressed all in black, that old woman. I wished I could have had that piney pillow but we never went back there.

  That evening Mum and Dad had a terrible row; they were shouting at each other and flinging their arms about but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. All I remember is Mum crying and Dad saying, ‘After all these years!’ Then they left me at the motel with Stanley and Florence while they went out. I think we watched I Love Lucy. Mum and Dad never came back; they were killed in a car crash. Stanley said, ‘Death is always there like a street on a Monopoly board; you could land on it at any time with no warning.’ I remember that but not the place where he said it.

  That same night I was put to bed in Stanley and Florence’s room. I was too little to know then but I think now they must have been drinking because they behaved as if I wasn’t there. I pretended to be asleep while they took their clothes off and got ready for bed and that was the first time I saw a woman naked. When they were in bed Stanley said to Florence, ‘You want unnatural practices? I’ll give you unnatural practices.’ I wasn’t sure what they were doing but Florence kept saying no and she cried afterwards.

  The funeral took place back home. The caskets were closed and there were lilies and the smell of them. A woman I didn’t know sang ‘There Is a Balm in Gilead’ and I felt as if that song and the desolate red sunset had followed me from the dark road and the pine woods. Writing this now I have the sudden crazy notion that everybody at birth is issued a little box of images, music, words and a few other things that will appear and reappear in varying combinations all through life.

  Stanley and Florence had no children, and after the funeral I lived with them in Connecticut until they sent me off to boarding school. Florence was always kind to me. Stanley had bad breath and the whole house stank from his cigars. I was very curious about unnatural practices and tried to find out more about them by peeping through the keyhole of their bedroom whenever possible. Stanley caught me at it and used his belt on me, which made me more cautious but did not deter me in my researches.