Extreme Magic (21 page)

She leaned on her clasped hands, her glass put aside. “His weight. He’s been ashamed of it ever since—” She cleared her throat. “In recent years.” The little cough made the phrase sound like an obit. “Actually—actually, he must be fifty pounds more than that by now. But when he’s this way, he always says it. ‘Fourteen stone.’”

He nodded, as if this was always the way men reckoned weight in America. Then there was silence. Some people’s diffidence was helped by it, not hers. She was helpless against the years of her own silence. He felt that she was not to be left with it.

“Nobody else knows?” It struck him that he wouldn’t be much help to her if he kept to questions to which he already had the answers.

She shook her head. After a while, she said: “Maybe both of us were—” She grimaced at him, lowering her face in the coyness of agony. “Hoping you knew.”

“Audience?” he said.

Now the silence was his.

“Can you—speak for both?” he said. “Are you that much a pair?”

“Yes, why not?” she said. Then her face slipped into her hands; she must be exhausted, might want to lie down. He no longer knew anything about the energy of women. Though outside it was August, it was already autumn in this basement, in this summer-kitchen of yore. In that light, dappled from above, the polished racks and mallets and wickets, sets of balls, nets and checkerboards, hung as in an armor room, above the yellow, black, and green stripings on the modern, balsa-colored floor. Games looked ghostly when left to themselves, whether for an hour or a century. When she took her hands from her face, there were no tears on it in the place for them, only those crescents of flesh. “Why not? We suffer the same.”

He saw into that tiny, stifling pit. Must he envy it?

She got up from her chair then, and strode away from him. “One gets on better without talking. Pity is fatal.” At the target-frame, she knelt to a long, slender box at its base. “You won’t be coming back now. Better that you stop coming.” Box in hand, she stood up, her back to him, musing over it as people do who recover a memory, good or bad. “I didn’t even know he had these around any more. He tricked me into standing here. After all these years with it, I’m still not very bright.”

“Where did he ever get things like that, learn them? A circus?”

“Sligo?” She was staring at the wooden backboard. “By inheritance, you might say. He had a ve-ry rich…sporting inheritance, I’m told—at one time. Polo, fencing—though I never saw him at those. Guns.” For the first time, she switched about to look at the man hunched there. Then she turned back to the target and began drawing the knives from it, one by one.

He came up and watched, over her shoulder. All haft or all blade, the knives had the elegance of any such balance. The chest she was fitting them into was lined with purple velvet. “Marion? Talk, then. Since I’m not coming back.”

“What do you want to know?” She was intent on the shaft in her hand.

“I’m not sure. How can I be?”

“Ask.” Her whisper went into the box, with the knife. “I don’t know where to—how to. Ask!”

Another knife went into the box before either of them spoke.

“Why does he drink?”

“He always has.”

“Why do you stay?”

“He has no one—no, that’s not true. I left once. I even worked in—it doesn’t matter. Twelve years ago. We’d been married five. Then his landlady called—he had the dt’s. He had no one.” She held a blade over the box. “Neither did I.”

He watched the blade go in. “Is he often like this?”

“Comes and goes. Sometimes—more than a month goes by.” Her voice lightened to that.

All the knives were housed now except the six that had ringed her head, a zodiac sign filled with darkness.

“He will kill you.”

“Never has yet.”

He was silenced.

“Sorry. I meant—he doesn’t really want to. Or somewhere in between.”

He shivered. “Maybe you like it.”

“Maybe, once.”

“Not now?”

It came slowly. “Not now.”

She turned. “Once I wanted him to kill me, but that was only at first—Odd, isn’t it. Ought to be the other way round.” Quickly she dropped her eyes, and knelt to set the box, heavy now, on the floor, straightening its double row of hafts. “Twenty-four,” she said, and closed it. “You see—” she said, before she stood up again. There was something secretive about her face again, if not sullen—the cast of a struggle that could be as much against honesty as toward it. “I—used to be fond.”

He bent and lifted the box. “They’re heavy. Heavy as silver. Maybe Damascene.”

“Could be.”

“Better let me take them along with me.”

“Why?”

“Why!”

She answered him with a half-shrugged wave of the hand. He saw why, of course. The sun, now sinking outside, had reached even here, dappling on mallet and rope, on quoit and bow and all other implements for game, as outside it must be touching, one by one for tomorrow’s life, the trees.

“I don’t like to take away any of it. He hasn’t very much of his—of those years. Before he knew me. I don’t like to—seem against him.”

He stared at her.

“Don’t you see? He did me an injury. Long ago. And he can’t forget it. Forgive.”

“So you have to let him keep on—trying.”

“No. It was nothing physical. Not really. Not with
those.
He—” Her hand went to her mouth. “Oh—what does it matter? He married me under a false name.” She made an odd, stretching grimace with her lips, like a child released from medicine. “No worse than what I did to him.”

She swayed then, and he would have shut up—but she held her hand out, for the box.

“But don’t you want anything else!” he cried. He heard it echo. “You could leave. Again.” All the unaskable questions—to her, to anyone, tumbled out at once. “Can’t you pity
yourself!”

“I can, I do,” she said. “But not without Sligo.”

They exchanged a glance conjoined but unseeing, the mutual hold of two people in their separate ways looking back.

“Don’t come again.” Her voice was harsh. “I can’t afford the perspective.”

For help, he turned to the man sleeping there. It was said that sleepers remembered what was said while they slept, poison or balm in the ear. He wondered. In the hospital he had seen nurses speaking for hours on end to catatonics, who it was said registered everything, and if their lips ever broke open again, would recall. No one could lie there as Sligo was, except in stupor, the head sideways on the arm now, position otherwise unchanged. He could think of nothing to tell that ear. “Hadn’t I better help you get him to bed?”

“He gets up himself. After a while.”

“Will he remember?”

“Not always. Not—for a while.”

“Not until Mondays?” He slapped the box.

She held out her arms, hands cupped. Quite suddenly, he laid the box along them, and strode to the door. At his name, he stopped.

“You’re welcome,” he said, without turning.

“Guy—”

She was holding the box clasped to her as if it were an infant, or two dozen long-stemmed American Beauty roses. “Is it sick of me? That I stay.”

Hair prickled on his nape. Questions on leaving were so often for the leaver as well. He heard an answer, long ago inserted in his own ear. “Without help—” He choked on it. “Surely—? But why do you ask me?”

She bent her head.

The door behind him was stuck with dampness. He kicked it open. No sun came with it. “Without help,” he said again, half to himself, hand on knob. “I’ll come Mondays.”

When he got home, he began rustling up his usual meal for these nights, a cold evening supper anybody might have on his day of rest. During the week he was a fair enough straight cook, though he had never been able to become one of those over-interested bachelors. There were a number of other things he hadn’t been able to become, again or newly, but these did not intrude on him now. His mind was the merciful blank that warded off the black infections of others. Later on, when properly immunized, he might safely ponder those, but not now. As he banged the refrigerator door open and closed, crackled butcher’s paper and clinked dishes on a tray, taking comfort in all this domestic voodoo, he kept hearing a cat mewing at the small window which gave directly from bathroom shelf to high grass bank outside. He went to open it. The cat stepped in daintily among his toilet things, then drew itself up with the wariness of all cats that are helped. It was one he’d never seen before, a Siamese with the brown and buff markings called “points,” and the clenched head of its breed—like a child’s fist holding up eyes. At the sight of it, he could hear his mother, all her life a yearner for more than Hartford calicoes, sigh in her grave. This one would not be fed, but circled the house, calling, and after a minute he put it out again, through the same window. He himself preferred dogs.

When he had brought his tray to the screened porch—“terrace” the builder had called it—where he had all his meals summers, he heard the cat again, nosing at the screen and retreating somewhere into the dusk outside. He got up with a sigh of his own, fetched a dish of milk and set it outside, then sat down to his meal, on a low settle he’d placed to face the grove of trees that hid the river, holding the tray on his knees. Above the grove, the sky was still full of western light. After a moment, a cat came to feed, but not the first one—a black tom he’d fed once or twice before. Shortly, a high, silvery voice, young girl or young woman, wended here and there through the grove.
“Here,
kitty-kitty, here, Max.
Ma-ax.”
The tom lifted its head, then bounded off, in the opposite direction. This drama too had occurred before. The voice, still calling, after a while always blended away. He’d never decided whether or not the cat was Max.

He was still eating when a girl in a bathing suit stepped into the clearing and came toward him, head bent. Halfway, she stopped, facing the trees, put both hands to her mouth as if she were blowing on a conch and said faintly, “Max?” Circling the barn, not calling again, she came round to the screen door, hands locked behind her, head still bent, saw the dish and gave a start of surprise, saw him, and palms at her chest, gave another. He smiled tentatively at her, not sure whether she could see this through the screen at this hour, but did not rise. The heavy tray held him indolent now. The thin figure, dim in its faded robin’s-egg suit, barefoot, was close to a child’s. And it was his porch, his clearing, hidden without sign or path, where even in daytime he was almost never surprised.

“Excuse me,” the girl said, “but you don’t
have
a cat, do you.”

“Well, no, I don’t. But I’ve been feeding somebody’s.”

“Oh.” She seemed to peer in at him. “A black one? Oh, that’s ours,” she said, before he had a chance to nod.

“Oh, is he. I wondered. He always seems to run the other way.”

She giggled. About fourteen, he’d say, with those pointed little breasts that couldn’t be counterfeited, nor the way her hands latticed at them. “Oh, he’s just one I found. He’s been giving the others the worst habits. But the rest are really ours.”

“Are they.” He couldn’t help his stiffness toward those who were too casual to the young of any breed, even when they were themselves the young of another. “There did seem to be several, and there didn’t seem to be anybody—”

“My p—my people are away, you see.” The manner was suddenly elegant, the voice theirs from five to fifty, kin to the one he’d left only an hour ago. “Which ones have you seen?”

The tray felt heavy on his knees, too awkward somehow to rise. He judged her after all about twenty. “There was a Siamese here, just a few minutes ago.”

“Itty-
Katty!” She clutched her brow. “Oh God and criminy, that’s my mother’s, she’ll be frantic.”

“And a striped one, yesterday.”

“Fatty-Kitty! I haven’t seen her for
two
days. Oh dear, will I catch it. They’re not allowed in the house, you see. Because we’ve been staying at Gran’s.”

More likely twelve. She was small in size, and he hadn’t been around children. Possibly even ten. “We could go hunt up Itty, er, Kitty,” he said. “I don’t think the other one’s been around today. That is, Fatty, er,
Katty.
The striped.”

“Got you!” she said, clapping her hands.

“I beg your—”

“Itty-
Kat.
Fatty-
Kit.
Oh it drives everyone wild. Scat-rhythm, to coin a pun—as my father says. Makes you say it on the downbeat, you see. The other would just be Dixieland.” She peered in on him, as if at another world she expected to see there. “Jazz. We all pretend to be fan
a
tic on the subject. To annoy Gran.” Her voice was suddenly shy.

“Tell me something,” he said. “Is any one of those creatures named Max?”

“Why, that’s the one you’ve been feeding!” she said. “The
lost
one.”

“Oh, the lost one.” He looked down at the dish. “Good old Max.”

She giggled. “That’s what my kid cousin said. Bill, he’s a senior at Stanford. He was here till today, but he had to go back early.”

Good old Bill. Eighteen? He gave up. It was the gloaming hour, just before all cats became gray.

“Oh, don’t get
up,”
she said. “You finish your meal, fevvens sake. And don’t think of helping hunt—that’s my responsibility. I was going to ask you a favor, but not that one. If it wouldn’t be too much of a drag. Oh gee—well,
thanks.”
As she came through the door, she looked up at him. All he could be sure of was that she wasn’t ten. “I guess I ought to introduce myself, hadn’t I, I’m Alden Benjamin, we live just down the road.” She recited this rapidly.

“Oh, how do you do, I’m G—”

“Oh I know who you are, of course.” She refused a chair and sat on the floor, clasping her knees. “You’re Mr. Callendar.
Gwee
Callendar.” This last came very softly, as if it were being tried out for the first time. “The tenant,” she said.

“Ten—? Oh.” He glanced up at his own eaves, the fine old triangulated ones, deep enough for swallows to nest in, on whose rescue he had rubbed his knuckles bare.

She giggled. “Oh, I
know.
Not really, any more. But it’s always been called that, kind of, ever since the land grant—it was one, you know. Some revolutionary jerk, way back. And it’s marked that way on the map that went with it—‘tenant’s land.’” She gave a small, convulsive smile. “They still like to think…you know how p—” She coughed. “—people are.”