The Steps of the Sun

  “What in hell is going on, Daddy?” Myra was saying. She really was beginning to look alarmed. “You come in looking like a crazed derelict and then you pull out this Baggie of what looks like dope. They said on TV that you were a drug addict.

  I let the glass sit there on the table and leaned back. I began buttoning up my shirt, less shaky now. “Well, there’s some truth in what they say, honey. I used morphine quite a bit. Got hooked on it in fact, trying to feed some dumb craving, but this isn’t morphine. No high comes with it. It’s only a painkiller.”

  “I’ll try it,” she said matter-of-factly.

  I stared at her. Was it this easy after all?

  “Daddy,” she said, “I trust you. And I’ve tried more painkillers than you have any idea of. Believe me, I’ve swallowed a lot of chemicals in my time.” She leaned forward, somewhat stiffly, and picked up the glass. Her hand was far steadier, despite the pain, than mine had been. “What do you call this stuff?”

  “Endolin,” I said. “Just drink it off. There’s no special taste.”

  She nodded and downed the glassful the way a sailor downs a beer. “Endolin, eh?” she said, with an edge of cynicism in her voice. Well I couldn’t blame her for being cynical, considering the number of things she must have tried. It was a testimony to her strength that, having used morphine and probably heavier stuff, she wasn’t a junkie herself.

  I said nothing. It takes endolin about three minutes to work and there was no point in talking it up. I felt nervous and got up just in time to take my coffee from Martha’s tray as she came in the swinging door from the kitchen. I looked at a couple of contemporary holographic etchings on the wall for a moment; but those damned 3-D things always hurt my eyes. I looked out the window down to the street, which was now empty. It was one of those phosphorescent sidewalks that glow green in the dark and it eased my eyes to stare at it for a minute. I was itching in several places. I should take a bath.

  Just then Myra said softly, “My God, Daddy!” and I turned around. She was still seated. Her face was strange and her mouth was half open in astonishment. As I looked at her she shook her head a couple of times.

  “Is something wrong?” I said, alarmed.

  She shook her head again, more violently, staring at me. I took a step toward her. She was beginning to cry. “Are you all right?” I said.

  Her face was very serious and the expression was one I’d never seen before. “How long does it last?” she asked.

  “About six hours.”

  “Will I have a hangover?”

  “Nothing, honey,” I said. “No hangover.”

  “Oh my God,” she said and burst into tears. I squatted somewhat awkwardly by her chair and put my arms around her and hugged her. I could feel some of that pain that had just gone out of her, feel the shock of it. After a moment she pulled gently away and stood up, not using her crutches. She began walking around the room slowly and taking an occasional little two-step. “I used to take morphine sometimes, or shoot myself full of procaine and dance for an hour or so. But the thing was I couldn’t really feel my body. And my head would be fuzzy.”

  “It just takes the pain away,” I said.

  Myra went over to a bookcase, put a steel ball into a box and Chinese dance music filled the room. She began dancing more confidently, her face open and surprised still. I seated myself and watched. It was overwhelming to see her moving easily like that, still a bit careful in her movements because of her long history of pain.

  After a while she stopped, perspiring and smiling now. She turned the box off and came and sat beside me. She let herself cry again for a minute, very openly and easily, holding her hands in front of her and flexing her fingers. We used to play chess with ivory pieces every now and then and sometimes it would make her wince in pain just to pick up a pawn. Now her fingers seemed completely easy and supple. After a moment she stopped crying and said, “How about that, Daddy? I think I always knew you’d come through for me.”

  “I wish I could have had it twenty years ago…”

  “Now is good enough,” she said. “When the pain is over it’s over.” She smiled a little wistfully. “Where did it come from?”

  “From the heavens,” I said. “From a star.” I pointed downtown. “A star in Pisces Austrinus, called Fomalhaut. It has a planet with only two living things on it: a kind of wonderful grass and the little, ugly plant endolin comes from.”

  “What’s the planet called? Or does it have a name?”

  “It’s named Belson, honey.”

  Myra laughed. “Just like you and me, Daddy.”

  I looked at her. “And your Great Aunt Myra.”

  ***

  I took a long, hot shower after that. Myra was able to find some men’s clothes that fit well enough, and I picked a denim work shirt and a pair of jeans that were a little loose in the waist. It gave me a tinge of pride to find my waist was smaller than whatever lover of Myra’s had left his pants behind. I brushed off my electronic running shoes and put them on over a pair of clean white socks. There is nothing quite like a shower followed by clean white socks. I was becoming a small fugue of good feelings; what I needed now was Isabel. And a few million dollars.

  After showering and putting on clean clothes I had a quiet drink with Myra in her living room. She had come down a bit from her high, but she smiled a lot. She asked me about my travels in space and I told her about Belson and Juno, although I didn’t mention Juno’s star. It was fun to talk with Myra that easily, leaning back into a soft couch with a drink of good whiskey, seeing her face for once relaxed and her body at ease. From time to time she would flex the fingers of a hand or work a shoulder joint just a bit, with a pleasant surprise. She wanted to know everything about endolin, and I told her everything I knew about it. How we had found it growing in fissures in Belson’s impenetrable obsidian, how I’d learned to concentrate it and preserve it. It was wonderful to sit there with the windows open in Myra’s big living room with the barely luminous New York street outside the window hushed with an August hush, and me with my clean white socks, my skin clean, my hair still dyed and my beard dyed and combed and a fresh shirt on my strong chest, letting the old guilt seep out of my pores and away into the nighttime, off to Fomalhaut and beyond, into the outer reaches.

  When I went off to bed a little before midnight, the moon was shining as full as a hundred-dollar silver coin into the bedroom window. On the night before, I had been its fellow orbiter, in a kind of sublunar funk; here I was now, a fugitive, a pirate, dispossessed, but tired and happy going to bed in a New York apartment, ready to sing hymns to the joy of my new life. “For he on honey dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of paradise.” Coleridge. Another junkie. What the hell. I slept like a baby for a dozen hours.

  Birds were singing when I awoke. Myra was up and had found Pain Chocolat and espresso for me and three fresh Havana cigars. Gueveras.

  I dressed in jeans and a gray tee-shirt and went barefoot into the kitchen and began making an omelet with a fried banana on the side. There was coffee on the wood stove. Yellow morning sunshine came in the kitchen window as still and humane as in a Vermeer. The cup I drank my coffee from was Spode and had a decoration of two small green frogs, facing each other amiably; my heart glowed warmly to see such frogs, and on such china. Myra was wearing a blue denim smock, and walked as if on air, as if she had never gone to sleep with fire in her joints, as if she had had a childhood of skipping rope and tag and dancing. Her hair was tied loosely in back in a bun, her hazel eyes smiled. “Let me pour you more coffee,” she said, and I remembered her as a bright-eyed two-year-old, as lovely and heartwarming a thing as nature ever made. I had forgotten how much I loved my child.

  “Honey,” I said to Myra, “do you know of an actress named Isabel Crawford? She was in the last Hamlet, playing the mother.”

  Myra pursed her lips a moment and then nodded slowly. “British?”

  “Scottish. In her forties. Very good-looking.”

 
“She’s a friend of yours then?”

  “Sure. Do you know anything about her? I need clues. I can’t find her.”

  “No, Dad, I’m sorry. I haven’t any idea at all. You could call her agent.”

  “I tried that last night on your phone. Called her director too, and her hairdresser. No luck at all. They’d like to know where she is too.”

  Myra nodded politely while I told her this. When I’d finished she tried to be casual, but I could tell she was picking her words with care. “Dad. Why don’t you give Mom a call? She’s in New York.”

  Something went tight in my stomach at that. I tried to sound casual too. It was beginning to feel like acting school. “Oh?” I said. “Where’s she staying?”

  “At your old place, Dad. The Pierre.”

  Jesus! I thought, Anna at the Pierre? It didn’t sound like her at all. “What in hell is your mother doing in New York?” I said. “She always claimed to hate it here.”

  “She was over for dinner a few nights ago, Dad. She said she was getting bored upstate and came down to do some shopping.” She looked at me. “Why don’t you ask her for lunch or something?”

  For a moment it was a seductive idea. Whatever Anna might possess of a longshoreman’s spirit, she was a hell of a person to talk with. I’ve never really enjoyed talking with a woman as much as I did with her. And I’d never had any trouble getting it up with her—maybe because her sexuality was no threat. I thought, standing there with Myra, of how nice sex with Anna would be—a spell of rain after a three-year drought. But then I thought of that damnable popping girdle and that righteous anger and I said, “Myra, it just wouldn’t be smart. Not now. I know what you have in mind, bless your heart, and I admit there might be something to it. But I don’t need the trauma right now. There’s something fragile in my spirit, and seeing Anna might shatter it.”

  Myra pursed her lips. “Okay, Dad. It’s your life.”

  “Oh yes, honey,” I said. “It sure is.”

  Chapter 12

  Isabel was not to be found in New York. I called everyone I dared call and learned nothing but what I had learned from orbit: Isabel had left for London six months before, in Hamlet. Hamlet closed four months later and no one had heard from her since, not her agent and not her friends. The agent was trying to get her to do the mother in Mourning Becomes Elektra—crazy typecasting for childless Isabel, with her teenage figure. She could be in Istanbul or Santa Fe or Aberdeen. I gave up temporarily and concentrated on business.

  It’s taken over fifty years of living to get my priorities right and to learn that love is more important than money. What fortune-cookie wisdom to spend a lifetime acquiring! But now that I knew it, circumstances forced me to put money first anyway. It was time to peddle endolin.

  First I found my friend Millie Shapiro in a little studio apartment on West Fifty-seventh. Millie is a retired makeup artist, once at the top of her profession. I knew her through Isabel; they were both cat fanatics. Millie was grumpy and shaky, but she expertly washed the cheap hair dye out of my hair and redyed it dark brown, with gray at the temples. Her breath was horrible, but when. I looked in her cracked vanity mirror afterward I had to whistle. She also trimmed my hair and beard for me in a kind of movie-star way that was far different from my usual rough-and-ready. She gave me a pair of black-rimmed glasses to wear and suggested I shift from cigars to a pipe and that I wear rings. I dismissed the pipe idea immediately; I have a hearty distrust of pipe smokers and tweedy people in general.

  Myra had managed to put together sixty thousand dollars in cash and had bought me a money belt at an Army-Navy store to keep it in. I paid Millie, asked her one more time if she had any notion of where Isabel might be, enjoined her to silence, and left. Good woman, Millie, and I trusted her.

  I did as she suggested and bought a couple of classy-looking rings at a costume-jewelry place. At a men’s store I finished my metamorphosis: tight Western jeans, army boots and a red silk shirt. In the clothing-store mirror I looked as if I’d been sent from central casting to play an aging gigolo—which was something of a laugh considering my recent troubles. Anyway, most people knew me from the covers of Time and Newsweek, and on those I’d been beardless and dressed in one of my famous lumberjack shirts. I was known as a “boyish eccentric”: the beard, red shirt and rings should throw people off as long as I could stand to go on looking that way.

  Actually, I figured they weren’t searching very hard for me. Baynes had the Isabel and the uranium and he knew there was no way I was going to get another spaceship. The next move was mine. The move I had in mind was checkmate. I went to Grand Central and bought a Pullman ticket to Columbus, Ohio.

  The train had a parlor car, with armchairs and magazines and little tables to set your scotch and soda on. The furnishings were shabby—frayed green curtains on streaked windows, a peeling mural on one wall—and the upholstery was that woeful green that is one of the perversions of U.S. railroading. But I felt at home instantly in that car. I was the first passenger there and I chose a window seat in the chair with the least-worn upholstery. It was ten-thirty in the morning; I ordered a pot of coffee and toast and settled back, clicking the rings together on my left hand, occasionally stroking my freshly trimmed beard and feeling a pleasant anticipation in my stomach.

  After a bit, a couple of priests came into the car and seated themselves prissily at the other end from me. And then a small, sexy woman came in and sat down alone. I began changing plans. Ever since that sight of the thighs of my fantasy sweetie who left my life in New Hope, Penn. I travel with the unconscious expectation of sex. It’s an expectation that, up to the point I’m writing about, had never been fulfilled. I’d had opportunities when I was younger and on my way to check out a coal mine or a merger or a commodities possibility—taking a firsthand look at Kansas wheat, say, or North Carolina firewood—but I’d always somehow fumbled or lost out or had gone horribly, maddeningly shy at the sight of a crossed pair of legs under the hem of a skirt. The awful truth is that women turn me on so goddamned much I feel powerless with them. Jesus, do I like asses and breasts and pubic hair and the sweet pungency of vaginal lips! Thighs. The backs of knees.

  All this response to a small, pretty woman entering a parlor car! Well. It had been a long time. I’d just got back from outer space and from a stretch as solo gardener on a slippery planet. A stint at impotence before that. It had been three years since I’d genuinely experienced a woman. Seeing her there, about forty, with splendid legs and an intelligent face and light-brown hair and a white blouse draping so nicely over her ample breasts, I immediately lost any notions I’d had of catching up on world news on my trip across country. I no longer cared about what had happened in politics or war or energy or show business or acts of God during my absence; I wanted to share my bed with that woman. She had been in the car about thirty seconds and I was in love with her.

  Little wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. How nice! Her back straight and her ass neat and firm under her skirt. Splendid! L&M marijuana cigarettes in the gold pack and a gold lighter to match, set with assurance on the little table by her seat. Quel délicatesse! She ordered pernod and water in a soft voice, flitted her eyes quickly around the car, passing over me with just the hint of a pause. Oh my God, how I love all those things women do! How I love a civilized New York woman who dresses right and talks warmly and knows how to order a drink on a train! Monuments should be built to such women. To hell with generals, admirals, presidents, artists, messiahs; a civilized, grown-up woman with an education and a firm ass is worth the whole lot of them.

  I was scared too. Fifty-three years old, a pirate, and I was beginning to panic at the realization that if I wanted something to happen between us I would have to make it happen. I have lost beautiful women to nobodies because of this fear, have sat stupidly by because I was afraid, down deep, that I wasn’t wanted and let some dumb, balding insurance salesman walk off arm in arm with a woman I’d been admiring for an hour. Oh yes. As easy
as I may be with actresses and showgirls, I can turn prepubescent and unintelligible in a flash, out in the real world. And damn it, I am a good-looking billionaire and a lamb at lovemaking—a gentle and affectionate lover when not plagued by psychosomatic wilt.

  All this whizzed around in me before my coffee came, before the train started moving. A minute at most. I knew I’d better act fast before things got even more complicated. Before that insurance man came in and plopped down beside her.

  I got up and walked over, fast enough so I wouldn’t feel my lack of poise. “Hello,” I said, “I’d like to have my coffee with you. It’s coming in a minute.” I tried not to think about my red shirt, my rings, my dyed beard.

  She looked at me with no alarm at all and my heart immediately grew lighter. “Okay,” she said.

  I sat down with surprising ease and introduced myself as Ben Jonson, using the name of my favorite Benjamin in the arts. She was Sue Kranefeld and a professor of history at Berkeley.

  “That’s terrific!” I said. “You can tell me about the Punic Wars and why Alexander the Great didn’t live longer.”

  “I’m in American history,” she said, which seemed to end that. Maybe she thought I was being facetious, but I meant it. I learned a lot about Scottish communism from Isabel.

  Her pernod and my coffee came at the same time, and just as I was pouring, the train pulled out of Grand Central.

  “I really love this,” I said. “I love starting a trip. I think I could spend my life doing it.”

  “Do you travel much?” She poured the water on her pernod and we watched it cloud up.

  I wanted to say I had just got back from the stars, zooming through light-years of void, but I replied that I traveled whenever I could and that I was in the coal-and-wood business, as a power-plant designer. Normally I don’t like telling lies, but on a train it’s part of the ambience.