A Garden of Earthly Delights (59 page)

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 of 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—”

“Go to Italy. Don't wait until September.”

“You'd let me go, I suppose? Yes.”

“I can't very well stop you, can I?”

“You used to talk of traveling to Egypt. And India. Remember your map books? We pretended we were ‘homesteaders' in Alaska.”

Alaska! He remembered, but vaguely.

Suddenly Deborah was saying in a low, hurtful voice, “Look at your mother and my uncle Curt. They loved—they love—each other, so much. For years she was his mistress, just a girl who couldn't have known whether he'd marry her, or care for her really; she had his child, she had faith in him. And he adored her … he adores her. That's why people hate them, out of jealousy.”

Swan rubbed his hands against his eyes. “Deborah, you're talking about my mother.”

“I know it, so what? I admire Clara, too.”

“You hate my mother. You've said.”

“She dislikes
me.
She sees through me, my pretensions. She's the only genuine Revere, because she isn't a Revere.”

Swan lay very still, thinking. Sleepless for so many hours he felt that thinking, the activity of his brain, was a kind of gluey fluid through which he had to propel himself, with an effort like swimming. If you cease that effort, you drown.

“I used to dream I would break free to some other country, and I'd be myself, there. I would know when I arrived, I would be so happy. Now it's different. I'm like a bulb that's burning out. Except for you I just keep going. I'm not even unhappy about it, any longer.”

“Steven, please—”

“It's like everything was decided when I was born. Like in a book, or a map. I was never able to see it.”

“Do you mean God?”

“God? What about God?”

“Seeing you. Seeing us. From some perspective we can't have.”

Swan felt the insult, that Deborah should interpret his predicament in a theological way. There was that limitation to her, the country-girl's failure of imagination, he despised.

To amuse her he told of seeing Piggott. A doctor out of the Yellow Pages. “And he couldn't draw blood out of me. My veins are all dried up.”

“What doctor? Why?”

Swan shrugged.

“Is something really wrong with you? Steven.”

It excited him to be called by that name; it might have been that he was being mistaken for another man. Swan pulled Deborah down beside him, wanting to hide himself in her body; to get through to her what he knew he must tell her: that there was a great love dammed up in him but it could not be loosed. The more rigid that love lay inside him, frozen hard, the more frantic his body was to convince both her and himself that he really did love her. She was saying, half-sobbing, “Steven, I love you—I love you. Please.”

At the very end, when he felt his backbone arching, his body dissolving in a spasm that sucked the breath out of him, he shut his eyes upon the flux of light only to see Clara's young adoring face melt in and out of his vision.

By train and by airplane. All around the world.

After she left, he dressed and went downstairs. He asked for his car. He must have looked strange because the man at the desk stared at him; when Swan returned his stare he looked away. Music was coming from somewhere behind them. Sentimental dance music, love music. Swan waited for the car to come and now it seemed that time was drawn out: there was a gilt clock over the elevator whose minute hand jumped with the passage of each minute, but very slowly, very frigidly did it move so long as Swan watched it. Some people came in, laughing. The telephone rang at the desk. Swan watched the clock. He thought it might be broken, then the minute hand jumped. At this rate it would take him a week to get there, he thought. In his imagination the highway between here and Tintern stretched out for thousands of miles, not marked on any map, a secret distortion more relentless and sterile than the great wide deserts of the Southwest, marked so blankly on the maps he had tacked up in his room at home.

Finally the car was brought around. Swan gave the man a dollar. When he drove off it seemed to him there was a slight shove, as if he were pushing off to sea and someone had given him a helpful shove with his foot. Swan squinted to get his vision clear and saw a policeman rubbing at his nose with a professional look, not three yards away. The city lights were confusing but he knew enough not to think about them. No matter how the night lights shone and wavered
before him, he would drive right through them and think nothing of it. He drove slowly. He could not quite believe in the reality of his big automobile, so he had no reason to believe he might crash into someone else. Everyone else was floating by. Then he saw that it had begun to rain: was that why he had thought he was going to sea? At once the rain turned into sleet. The streets would be dangerous. It was late March, struggling into spring.

That morning Clara had said, “It's sure trying to get sunny.”

For several hours he drove straight into the sleet. No one else on the highway except trucks flashing and dimming their lights to greet him. Swan felt absurdly touched, that strangers should signal to him as if they knew him. He had to wonder: was there a secret alliance of individuals, to which unknowingly he belonged, and was it wrong of him to feel such indifference for it? Outside, shapes and ghostly lights floated by in the night, part-lighted service stations, roadside restaurants, houses, rising up and falling away in silence. He drove on. His foot became numb from the constant pressure, he was afraid to slow his speed. He had become one of those fated actors in the movie he'd seen, speeding into the dark unthinking, in the knowledge that a final scene awaited, words and actions had been scripted for him to fulfill.

He arrived at Revere Farm before morning.

Clara kept a back porch light burning, who knows why! Swan hurried from his car without troubling to shut the door, and ran to the porch. Its white wrought-iron railings were slick with ice. With the childish panic of one who'd been locked out of his house, Swan pounded on the door. He was panting, his breath steamed. Then he thought to take out his key. His fingers were trembling so from the cold, he could hardly jam the key into the lock. Overhead he heard a sound. Someone was calling. He swore and turned the key in the lock and managed to get the door open.

Clara was approaching, cautiously. She had no idea who he was: he saw his mother, Swan thought, as a stranger might see her, and was struck by her wild, astonished-looking ashy hair, her youthfulness. A silky pale-orange kimono-robe flapped around her, he was aware of her breasts encased in the bodice of a matching nightgown. Recognizing him, Clara became at once frightened, and angry.

“You! For God's sake, what are you doing? Are you drunk?”

“Is he awake? Tell him to come downstairs.” Swan was pleased with himself, he spoke so calmly.

“He thinks it's somebody trying to break in. He'll get the gun.” Clara went to call up the stairs, “It's just Steven! Your son!” There was silence upstairs. Then Swan heard Revere's slow, heavy footsteps. “Never mind, Curt, it's all right!” Clara called.

Curt.
Swan still resented that name, somehow.

“No, let him come down. I want to talk with him.”

Clara stared at him. “You what?”

“I want to talk to him. You and him.” Swan could not stop shivering. There was a roaring in his ears like a distant waterfall. “We can sit in the kitchen here. Please.”

“Steven, what? Are you drunk?”

“Go sit down, I said please.”

“Your father will—”

“Shut up, Clara.”

“Look, who are you talking to?”

“I said, shut up.”

Still he was calm. He would remain calm. He dared to push his mother before him, dared actually to touch her, the silky kimono she'd purchased for herself in a Hamilton store, the fleshy heat that exuded from her. She stared at him, swallowing; she was frightened, and yet would hide it; her eyes narrowed like a cat's, yet she sat at the table where Swan had pulled out a chair, in the dark. Fumbling for the switch, Swan turned on the light and saw that the kitchen was gleaming with smart new lime-green tile and glass cupboards. Fine polished cherrywood paneling hid the old, ordinary walls.

It came to him in a flash: the Reveres, and Clara and himself, seated at the old rectangular woodtop table. He could rememeber Curt Revere's seat at the table and he could remember Clark's but he wasn't sure where Jonathan had sat, or Robert. And where he'd sat, the youngest.

“Is he coming down, or what?” Swan asked. Now he was becoming impatient, listening for Revere's footsteps on the back stairs.

“He's an old man. What the hell do you want with him, like this?
Can't it wait till morning? Are you in trouble, is it something that happened in the city? You didn't hurt anyone, did you?”

“Where is he?”

“If you want him, go get him yourself.”

They waited. Clara was breathing harshly, looking at Swan and then away, wiping at her eyes, as if she saw something in his face she wasn't yet ready to absorb. She was frightened, Clara was frightened at last. Long ago he had known she must be punished, she had sent him away with five dollars to buy his own lunch, she'd left his miniature antelope in the back of a taxi, she cared nothing for
him
. It was this judgment she saw in his face, yet could not believe.

Swan glanced down and saw that he'd tracked up the tile, his wet feet were leaving small puddles. And still he was shivering.

“Yes, look at you, you'll be sick in the morning,” Clara chided. But her words didn't quite convince either of them. Then she said, in a softer voice, “Swan—”

“Don't call me that!”

“What are you going to do?”

Revere descended the stairs slowly, one of his knees was stiff with arthritis. An old farm dog, your heart was wrenched with pity for such dogs, their baffled eyes snatching at your own. Swan half-shut his eyes. Damn he did not want to feel pity. When Revere stood in the doorway Swan saw that he'd hastily put on overalls—old work pants that were faded and soiled. His voice was hoarse, baffled.

“Steven? What are you doing here?”

Swan said, louder than he wished, “Come in here! Sit down!”

He took out his pistol and lay it on the counter, so that they could see it. His hands were shaking badly.

“What are you—”

“Stop! I can't stand you talking!” he shouted at Revere. “Come in here, sit down with her, be quiet.”

Revere came in, haltingly. He was staring at Swan's pistol. He had never seen it before, he did not approve of handguns. Since Robert's accident he did not approve of firearms on his property. Clara was sitting limply, hugging herself. She too stared at the gun, and then at Swan, startled, assessing. Her face was clammy-pale. Swan had
never seen her so
respectful
. In the vestibule she'd looked young but in the bright overhead light you could see she was not young, fine white lines in her forehead, at the corners of her eyes, bracketing her mouth. Her skin was sallow, it was skin that now required makeup. It was not a skin to be examined closely.