AEgypt (24 page)

The huge words made Rosie swallow. “Well, it's not really anybody's fault,” she said. “Really."

Allan had picked up a long yellow pencil and now held it balanced between his fingers like a drumstick, bouncing its eraser on his desktop. “Really?” he said. “You know what it seems to me, Rosie? It seems to me that maybe you haven't really tried everything to work this out with, with..."

"Mike."

"You seem to be sort of jumping into it, if you don't mind my saying so. I mean maybe therapy..."

"Mike's a therapist."

"Oh ho. Shoemaker's children, huh."

"What?"

"What I'm saying,” Allan said, “is that I think you should wait. I think you should try other solutions, other than divorce I mean. Take a vacation. Rest. Get away from each other for a few weeks. See how it looks to you then.” His drum-taps altered. “To tell you the straight truth, Rosie, I would not be willing myself to initiate proceedings for you at this point."

Whatever way it was that Rosie looked at him then, whatever her face said, caused him to gesture at her defensively with his pencil, as though sketching, and to say, “Now wait a minute, wait a minute, all I'm saying is this: I'm going on vacation
myself
for a couple-three weeks, starting tomorrow, I'd have gone today if it wasn't for, oh well, anyway: let us, you and I, make an appointment to get together exactly three weeks from today. And see. And just see what's become of everything in that time.

"You never know,” he said.

A strange sickening letdown had begun within Rosie; it could not be that she had urged herself to this to have it all come to nothing, to one more exhortation to patience: could not be. She crossed her arms, feeling truculent.

Allan tossed down his pencil. “Don't get me wrong,” he said. “I'm not saying your problems are trivial or anything, or that in three weeks you might not still want to pursue this. But the thing is, in the no-fault divorce we've been talking about—even if you decide divorce is the only way for you—this no-fault divorce requires that both parties be in agreement about it. You can't get it by yourself."

"No?"

"No. In a no-fault divorce, you're going to the court and saying
We agree that our marriage has failed
. If one of you
doesn't
agree, well then."

"Then what."

"Then you would have to go back to the old method. You'd have to
sue
for divorce, and you'd have to have grounds."

"Uh-huh,” Rosie said.

"A reason,” Allan said. “You'd have to have a reason to get a divorce; a good reason.” Subject to his dark and mournful gaze, Rosie lowered her eyes. “Do you feel you have grounds?"

Rosie nodded.

"What grounds?” Allan asked.

"Adultery,” she said.

Earl Sacrobosco was tickled, really tickled (his words) at Pierce's recapitulation, which was total and just in time for the semester's beginning. He had never really doubted it, he said, and had never ceased including Pierce in his plans for the year; he rubbed his hands and grinned as though he had personally brought Pierce back alive to the hard chair before his desk.

The deal offered Pierce in the spring had been somewhat sweetened by an exiguous raise, but it was saccharine to Pierce, the extra would be going chiefly back into the Barnabas coffers, remaking his loans had burdened him with a higher rate of interest. There was a penalty too to be paid for his quick arrogance in the spring: a speech had to be made, Earl would not have minded a prolonged one, about Pierce's reason for a change of heart. Well, he had come to see (he said) that he had dismissed too quickly a position and a college he had invested many good years in; he had had time to think (humble jailbird before his parole board) and a maturer eye could perceive that, though the road ahead might be a long one and the journey couldn't be hurried, Barnabas deserved Pierce's commitment. All this said as briefly as was consistent with true repentance, while ashes fell in Pierce's heart. He didn't need to say what his real reasons for returning were; Earl was aware, and communicated his awareness, that Pierce had simply nowhere else to go.

It was further agreed (Earl clearing his throat and getting down to business) that in place of the ambitious course of Pierce's own devising which had been rejected by the Curriculum Committee, Pierce could take on two additional units of Elements of Communication, which was reading and writing for analphabetic freshmen.

"Getting back to basics,” Earl said. He had discarded the rug he had long worn, and looked better for it, though it was evident why he had worn it: his bald pate was the sort that grows a dirty fuzz all over, with a dark smudge at the front like an Ash Wednesday penitent's. “Personally, I was very interested in the course,” he said, clicking the mechanism of a ballpoint and releasing it. “It did seem pretty graduate-level, though. And I'm afraid that I agree with the committee that there just wouldn't be the call for it."

"It was an experiment,” Pierce said. His long arms hung between his knees, he wrung his hands, he wanted to get out.

"We've already got a reputation to fight of being a fad school that gives a useless degree. Enrollment's down, transfers are up. We've got to have solid food here."

"Readin', writin', and ‘rithmetic,” Pierce said.

"All that stuff is coming back,” Earl said. “It's a new age."

That same afternoon (his heart somewhat in his mouth, he had spoken to her only coldly, briefly, infrequently since the time she had so heartlessly ditched him, long ago, lifetimes ago) Pierce called the number of the Astra Literary Agency and asked for Julie Rosengarten.

Strange, he thought, how an old name can take up such room in your throat, he had not been certain for a moment if all of it would come out.

"I'm afraid she's on vacation,” said a voice like Julie's. “For almost three weeks."

Doing well, then, or very badly. “Well my name is Pierce Moffett, and Julie and I..."

"Oh god, Pierce."

"Julie?"

"Honestly, I'm on vacation. Oh god. I was honestly literally just walking out the door to catch the train."

"Huh, well..."

"My finger was on the button of the machine. Honestly."

She was awed by a fateful moment: he knew how she looked just now, it was a face he had seen often.

"I don't want to hold you up,” he said. “But I have something I want to talk to you about."

"Yes!"

"A book idea."

"Yes? God, Pierce, if I hadn't just crazily picked up the phone."

"Well, when you get back."

"Yes. Yes yes yes. Pierce. I knew we'd talk again, talk for real. I
knew
it. There's so much, so much to say."

"Yeah, well."

"Three weeks. Three weeks to the
day
. Lunch.” She named a restaurant he knew, one they had used to frequent but whose name he had himself not thought of in a long time, still open apparently; did Julie still go there? “I can't wait to hear this idea. You know I always thought you could do a book."

Had she? “It's a good one. You know some of it already, in fact."

"Really? I can't wait. Pierce, I'll miss my train."

"Have a nice time."

"I'm sorry, sorry...."

"Go."

He cradled the receiver, and sat down on the broad bed; he put his hands on his knees and watched within the strange currents set up there by the sound of her voice, the old inflections.

Three weeks. He should have something firm, on paper, he supposed; a pitch, a proposal, for her to take away with her, and sell. He supposed there was no reason not to start on that right now.

There was, then, he thought cockily (his heart though still strangely full and his hands still on his knees), there was some use you can put these old lovers to. For sure she owed him one.

He ought to get up now, and roll out the elaborate electric typewriter, powder blue, which the Sphinx had once taken in trade from an anxious customer and given to Pierce for Christmas (see how useful, how helpful?), and place beside it a pile of blank bond paper. He ought to get out his old proposal for the course Barnabas College had not wanted to offer, and study it.

Mystery 101. How history hungers for the shape of myth; how the plots and characters of fable and romance come to inhabit real courts and counting-houses and cathedrals; how old sciences die, and bequeath their myths and magic to their successors; how the heroes of legend pass away, fall asleep, are resurrected, and enter ordinary daylit history, persisting as a dream persists into waking life, altering and transforming it even when the dream itself has been forgotten or repressed.

More, though. To be a book, a real book, it would have to contain not only the mystery but the detective, not only the dream but he who dreams it. To be a book, it would have to have a plot; it would have to be very different from what's usually called history, it couldn't be a simple addition of facts, or any kind of arithmetic at all, no it would almost have to be a sort of calculus, a differential calculus of self and history, inside and outside; it would require one to
play
history in the same way that chess masters play chess, not laboriously working out the consequences of possible moves, but perceiving as by a sixth sense the powers of the pieces to be or to do: a thing that can't be done by logic or training or application, no, it's an ability you have to be born with. It's a knack. A gift.

She
did
know the idea, she did, though not in the intelligible form it had at length achieved in his mind. She had been there when the first inklings of it had broken in on him, and in the time after she left him he had become almost as obsessed with it as with her: sometimes indeed they had not seemed like different things. And the sound of her voice just now had opened like a key the box of those days.

And those days then too would have to be a part of his book, wouldn't they? The days when he had become a popular teacher at Barnabas, the days when he stood at his slum window en route to the most revelatory metaphor—he would have to recover those days as well as the enterprise that had filled them.

He got up, at length, and did bring out the huge typewriter. He rolled a sheet of paper within it, and sat for a time before it. He rolled and lit a cigarette, and put it out. He got up; he changed his shirt; he turned up the laboring air-conditioner, and stood looking long out the window at the burnt and brownish evening.

Set out, set out. He wished it were already fall, season of wisdom and work. He wished he had not so carelessly hurt his head and heart when younger with abuse of substances, Thomistic notion. He sat again, and took out and discarded the piece of paper he had put into the machine, it seemed somehow already stale; he inserted another, and sat before it hands on his knees, the typewriter seeming to have somehow grown in the meantime even a little larger than it had been before.

"I don't understand about history,” Rosie said to Boney. She was washing and he was drying their dinner dishes; it was Mrs. Pisky's day off, when she went to visit her sister in Cascadia.

"Yes?” Boney said.

"How much of it do they really know?"

"How much of what?"

"History.” She held up to the light a cleaned plate, so old and fine the light shone dimly through it. “I mean this book by Fellowes Kraft. He knows tiny details of things, and he just tosses them out, like of
course
. I know it's a novel, but still.” She realized she didn't know quite what she was talking about. “Still."

"Every history is a kind of story,” Boney said. “You couldn't really understand it if it weren't. If it were just everything that happened."

"But do they know everything that happened?” Of course they didn't: not even historians: that was obvious. They just made up a story out of what they did know. Just the way Fellowes Kraft did. Only historians never said what parts they made up. “In this book, there's a character who's like a magician,” she said.

"I remember,” said Boney. He took off his blue-tinted glasses, and wiped them with the dishtowel, and put them on again.

"Not only,” Rosie said, “not only does he take a photograph of Shakespeare—he never could have, right?—he also reads his horoscope. And then he has him look into like a crystal ball. To see what he can see."

"Yes,” Boney said. He had stopped drying dishes.

"A crystal ball,” Rosie said. “And old Will looks in it."

"Yes."

"And doesn't really see anything, even though he sort of pretends to. To please the old man, who he's sort of scared of. He tells him that someone will come along who
can
see things in this glass. That's the message he pretends to get.

"Now first of all,” Rosie said. “Nobody knows anything much about Shakespeare. As I remember. Especially his childhood."

"I think that's right,” said Boney.

"And then a magician. With a crystal ball. I mean."

"Well,” Boney said. “As a matter of fact, that person is very real. Oh yes. Very real. Doctor John Dee. He really lived, in the place where he's described in that book as living, and he really did do the things he's described as doing. He did. He was an adviser to Queen Elizabeth, and perhaps a sort of consulting physician as well. He was a mathematician and an astrologer, when those two things weren't very different. He had what was likely the largest library in England at the time. And he was also, really, what he is in that book: a magician."

"A photograph?” Rosie said. “Of Shakespeare?"

"Well,” said Boney.

"It's as if,” Rosie said, “he every once in a while, for the fun of it, pretends that the world used to be different than it is, and things could happen that can't anymore."

"Hm."

"But it wasn't. They couldn't."

Carefully, Boney hung up his dishtowel, thinking; then, finger to his lips, he left the kitchen. Rosie turned off the taps and, wiping her hands on the seat of her overalls, followed him.

"Sandy knew so much,” Boney was saying, going purposefully through the long dark dining room. “He knew so much. It used to amuse him to put things in his books that he knew everyone would think he had made up, but which he hadn't made up at all. And he liked to have things—real things—in his books, alongside all the imaginary things; I mean, he liked to have, in his possession, a real silver dish from the time he wrote of, and describe it in his book along with all the imaginary silver dishes: a real one hidden among the imaginary ones. Or a jewel, or a weapon. If he could have a thing that his characters really had once owned or used, it pleased him even more. He spent a lot of his time looking for such things.