Agnes Mallory (33 page)

Once, toward evening, she stopped, the mallet stopped. And I, who had been pacing aimlessly, stopped where I was and watched the door intently. I heard a sound from in there, which might have been a cough, which might have been a suppressed sneeze. But which might also have been a strangled sob, as of someone weeping violently but trying to hold down the noise.

I began to creep quietly toward the door. The idea was to listen, though I'm not sure I'd have had the courage to knock. But a floorboard creaked under me, and there was some swift shuffling in the studio, and then the hammering started up again – so I retired in defeat.

All this put me in a dark and heroic mood. That feeling of defiance rose in me again. It was beginning to seem as if my capacity for self-pity might not be bottomless after all, nor my willingness to submit to the cabin's grim and esoteric atmosphere. On top of which, I wanted her – though she cursed a blue streak and she wasn't blonde and didn't shave beneath her arms – I was crazy for her, had been cheated, so I felt, of some natural, formative intimacy with her, and did not want to waste another evening tiptoeing round her miseries while the law threatened to separate us again.

So a couple more hours went by. The sunset shift of birds came on outside, singing mostly low notes and sadly. The light beneath the pines around us thickened to a reddish loam. Agnes's hammering tapered off – a little earlier than usual, I thought. And I heard a thud and a rattling clank, as if she'd dropped both mallet and chisel to the floor in sheer exhaustion. So I imagined it, anyway. And I stood prepared for her in noble pose in the center of the floor. Waited while the usual sweepings and shufflings went on in the studio unseen.

Then back went the bolt. The door opened – just that exasperating crack. She slipped out so carefully, turned to shut the door so quickly, that she didn't even see me there, but was re-locking the door before our eyes had met.

But she knew I was waiting, must've known. And she stood with her back to me a long time, resting her forehead against the door, as if she barely had the strength to stand unaided. Still defiant, I stayed as I was, planning to outlast her, to hold my ground until she finally came around.

But my resolve broke. The silence in the cabin went on – in the cabin and its shadows – and I was suddenly afraid – I didn't know of what. I had some idea that when she did turn, she would fix me with a skeletal stare and whisper again,
I'm dead, Harry. I'm already dead
. I'm not sure I could have stomached that.

‘Agnes,' I broke out. ‘Come on, Agnes. Where's your work? Show me what you've been doing. Where the hell is all your work?'

Slowly, slowly, she pushed off the door, as if lifting a great weight that held her against it. She showed me the side of her face, and gave one of those belittling snorts that cut right into me.

‘I need a drink,' she said. ‘I need a beer.'

She looked, when she turned, too forbidding to mess with. I let her walk past me to the kitchen.

‘Shit,' I muttered.

Nonetheless, I did go after her. I stood at the kitchen entryway. And when she swaggered into it, bottle in fist, I confronted her, my hands in my pockets, my face set.

She sighed, as if I were just a bother to her. She swigged her beer arrogantly. She shrugged.

‘All right,' she said finally. ‘I don't know what good it'll do. But come on, if you want. I'll show you.'

She led me down that first path I'd taken, her beer bottle tapping her thigh as she walked. The sky, which was clear, wasn't quite twilit yet, but was just beginning to lose its substance in a richer depth of blue. This changed – the light, I mean, changed as we headed down, and as the trees closed in around us. There was real gloaming beneath the leaves and when it brightened in open patches it was never as bright as it had been in the patch just before. We heard the river as we went down, a thin hiss and gurgle at that distance. Then she turned off, as I had, onto the dog's leg, and I followed her, bending over, into the tunnel of low-hung boughs. The shade beneath them hurt the eyes, being not like night but just as deep; grainy and strange to peer through. And it wasn't much better when we came out into the meadow, where now the first dusk was spreading downward from the sky and staining all the wildflower glories a uniform grayish blue. With the grass high around her bare legs, Agnes crossed the meadow quickly, hewing to the eastern border of forest. I lagged behind, and panting at that. And my broken attempts to make conversation – to liven things up a little – did the proverbial lead balloon.

It was a long meadow, longer than it looked. I remembered that – how far you had to go to reach the center. By the time we came to the hollow of its crescent, where the woodline bulged out into the grass, the day was ending truly, the twilight becoming smoother and more dense. We came upon a white rag tied to a bowed sapling. It marked another trail, and Agnes turned onto it.

The forest was now diffusing into forms and shadows – fingery extensions, and jutting, grinning boles, tortuous vines and startled stones upstanding. As a New Yorker, I confess I began to grow a bit concerned about coming upon the stray werewolf in here or confronting a rampaging troll, say, in the dark. I told this to Agnes – it was a good excuse to pull up closer to her – and she surprised me with loud, delighted laughter, her white teeth flashing. I suppose I was consoled a bit that she, at least, had come into her element.

The trail went on, but she turned off it. ‘Hey,' I said, because she seemed to have stepped into an impossible thicket of scratchy brush. But when, in a hurry to be with her, I forced my shoulder through the first mass of briars, I found there was a way through where the foliage had been well trodden down. All the same, it was a narrow passage, and the whip-like branches lashed my face as I went after her, and thorns caught at my clothes.

So on we went, and the brush grew thinner after a while, and slowly, we emerged onto a scrubby plain where the trees were sparse and low. The pall of dusk was full upon us now, but the light was better here than in the forest. And I could see, there before me, with Agnes a small featureless shape moving beneath them, a staggered row of huge dead trees, their leafless branches reaching far into the dissolving sky. They were creepy all right. They looked like witches' brooms: going straight up then spreading raggedly from the vertical. They towered above us and loomed over us darkly.

‘Agnes!' I called out, spooked. She stopped for me. I kicked quickly through the high grass to her side. She raised her white eyes up to them and I raised mine.

‘What are they?' I said. ‘Why are they all dead?'

‘Elm trees,' she told me, and sipped at her beer. ‘Dutch elm disease. It came over in the Thirties with the European logs they used for furniture. The bark beetles take it from tree to tree. Almost all the old elms are dead up here now.'

‘Yiminey cricket!' I said. But she didn't laugh. In fact, when I glanced down, she was gone – she was moving off under these giants and past them. I hurried the hell after her.

It was unnerving to pass under those louring figures, to shuttle so close by their stout, knotted, staring trunks. I was glad to catch up with Agnes where she now stood, on a rim on the far side of them. She swigged more beer – swigged fiercely – and gestured before her. I looked out. Beneath our feet here, a gentle slope led down into a small, marshy valley. Just a sort of unkempt bowl in the earth, loud as a swamp with trilling insects and guttural frogs. Above it, all along the valley's rim, the dead elms stood, spraying up against the violet sky, their gnarled features sinking into silhouette slowly, as if reluctantly, as the night came on. Impressive, they were – they looked like the solemn guardians of the place. They were so impressive, in fact, that all my first attention was on the eerie effect of them, and it was several moments before I understood what I was actually seeing in the valley below.

‘Oh, for God's sake, Agnes,' I said then. ‘I mean, for God's sake.'

Now, it's a famous sight, of course. The pictures that little shnook from the local weekly snapped have been in newspapers and museums around the world. I even heard some crazy dame on TV once explaining that it was really Agnes's post-modern feminist masterpiece, and that poor old Roland destroyed it in the interests of some phallacious commercial conspiracy or something. Well, okay, that's her planet. But I was there, there with Agnes. I came on it in that gloam as if it were some jungle ziggurat in an impossible clearing, and there was no theorizing about it, I tell you, I knew right away: I was looking down at an epic work of pure self-destruction.

They were everywhere in the bottom of the valley. Their hands clawed up from the swampy earth, their faces gaped at the dying heavens, their bodies contorted with agonized grace into the heartbreaking blur of mulch and decay below. Some were lying on their sides, some stood like columns, most jutted at angles, half-sunk in the mud. The shrill, unceasing burr of the insects vibrated up from all around them, and it made me think at once both of the slugs and beetles ravening in their wood and of their own brainless cries – because they seemed to me to be rotting alive down there, all of them. And when that image came to me, I turned my face away.

Agnes took another pop at her bottle. She sat down on the slope, leaned back on her elbows, observing this masterpiece of hers with an insolent smirk as aggravating as any adolescent's. I felt it as a challenge to me, and got fired up again. Well, all right: I turned back and started edging my way down the slope.

The mud squelched up over my shoes as the land flattened under me. I had to pull up hard as I worked my way farther out toward the middle of the valley. The dead elms strung along the ridge stared down as I moved in among the discarded statues, and I felt chilled by that and unanchored, afloat, with all the empty space going dark all around me.

I came first upon an angel, fallen back on its Renaissance wings, and with a body carved in the final bloated stages of starvation. Its passive, beaten eyes looked into mine and I actually shivered at the sight of it. Part of one wing had liquefied and I could see the crawlies moving on the mulch. And I heard them busily chirping, which was horrible. And I staggered on through the mud. I came to a muscle man with the body of a snake, and then a small centaur raping a woman twice his size; further on, I found some sort of hunkering creature with a countenance like Apollo's – and they were all half-rotten, their color changing from the brown of sodden wood to a crumbling black which was indistinguishable from the earth. I splashed and stumbled from station to station, bracing myself on the thrashing tail of a lamia or the friable arm of a centurion gone mad. And, after a while, I paused, my figure at the center of those wooden figures everywhere, all those sculpted limbs and faces half-upreaching, half-submerged, surrounding me – and I looked up at her where she lay watching on the slope beneath the towering elms. And I thought:
What the hell is wrong with her?
And my blood ran sour as if, really, down deep, I knew.

By then, too, for all my inexpertise, I think I had begun to realize – what everyone says now, what I couldn't have exactly put into words – that even though the sculptures were melting away, they had remained artworks, somehow, still. The various forms and passages of their ruination had become part of them, even lent them a mysterious depth of time, like the lost arms of Venus de Milo, say, or the missing head of Victory. And just as I had when I was a kid – when she made that Play-Doh skull for me and I carried it home? – I had started thinking: Gee, you know, if she put her mind to it, she could really do something with some of this stuff. So that's the thought I held onto, the thought I resolved to carry up to her. And I pushed the other knowledge away.

It got darker – it was almost night. The hundred struggling shadows of Agnes's work were being dragged almost violently into the blackness as the surrounding elms frowned somberly down. Mosquitoes had already made a meal of my ankles and were now biting my arms and making that disgusting
zeet
noise in my ears. Swatting at them with both hands, I hauled my way back through the mud to the edge of the valley. I climbed up the slope again to Agnes. She still lay where she was, sneering triumphantly, insouciantly tipping her bottle up, though it was almost empty now.

I stood over her. I scratched my nose. I tried to think of the most encouraging response.

‘Gosh, honey,' I said finally, ‘some of that stuff looks pretty good.'

Agnes blew out a quick laugh. I wanted to slug her.

‘Well, come on,' I said. ‘What the hell do you want?'

She gave a frown – as if she were considering the question. She raised her bottle up before her and cocked her head like a painter viewing his canvas past his thumb. ‘If I could make a child,' she said. ‘All right? A real child of glory, so that every one who looked at her, or heard about her, or just sort of knew from the cultural buzz that she was there would feel … not just love … but that unbearable tenderness you feel when you see your own child and it's like your – body almost – your own body except exposed to life, stripped of that sense we all have of our own invulnerability, you know, and stripped of our crusts of caution … if it would make people feel that kind of desperate love, parental love …' She lowered the bottle, brought her hand to her mouth and wiped her lips with the back of it, but all the while staring out over the valley. ‘And then,' she went on cooly, ‘And then … if I could destroy her. See what I mean? Just smash her, pulverize her, reduce her to something that hardly had even existed because … well, for no reason, just because I wanted to, because she was what she was, because she filled some role in some play going on in my mind. Because she was a Jew. And then, and then, if everyone would feel her, see,
being
ruined, just feel it almost in the air, and every … caring or even uncaring heart would just … break open … just burst open and out would spill this – hot poison, this black grief all down the middle of their souls so that there would never be an end in all their lives to the grief, to the grief and the poison …' She flashed her hollowed eyes up at me, her mouth contorting. ‘
That
would be a work of art.'