Falling Idols (26 page)

She returned inside the church, intending to lock up, and got as far as turning out the lights before she knew its floor was all the bed she would need tonight.

And swaddled by spirits, she did not sleep alone that night, dreaming of longer days and the fall of empires, while warmed by the breath of goats.

“If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid

my angels will take flight as well.”

— Ranier Maria Rilke

In the beginning was the word; in the end, not even that. But words are small things anyway, trivial and puny and weakened by limitations. They are, like flesh and bone, inadequate to hold the full measure of what they struggle to contain. Like blood and lymph, they run when the skins that confine them are pricked.

In a world where word could become flesh, this was not the flaw, Austin knew.

It was the folly.

*

Let me tell you about loss.

Let me tell you about lies.

Let me tell you about disappointment and heartache and betrayal, o my.

Better yet, just let me tell you about pigs and mud. Take a lot less time and it’s the same thing, isn’t it? The mud’s filthy, it’s unsanitary because it’s mixed with shit, gets all over everything, but the pigs wallow in it just the same. End result? Only the happiest swine you ever saw.

I used to have the wallowing part down, at least.

You’d think the rest of it would’ve been easy.

I. Terra Firma

At the most unexpected moments she would think she’d seen him. He came when he had no business at all in her head, Gabrielle on one side of her life and Austin so far on the other it was a wonder she could even remember what he looked like.

But this was something more insidious than fond recollection. These were not memories, spawned by similarities in the faces of strangers, over which she would write his own. His face could
not
have remained the same, not the way he was living. Where Austin had been headed, these last eleven years would’ve cut and carved and eroded him, remade his once-sublime form into a degenerate parody of itself. No, these were nothing at all like memories — Gabrielle was, however briefly, seeing him as he must look now.

To a point, there was a logical explanation: New York was a dynamic and sinister place; he would be at home here. Austin McCoy would seek its pulse and wade through its chaos. If she thought she’d glimpsed him on Fifth Avenue it was only because he would have business there. If she saw him standing on a platform during a trip out to Long Island it was because trains had always appealed to him. Likewise subways — so why shouldn’t she see him beneath the streets, when the flashing of lights far along those grimy tunnels could strobe his half-shadowed impression anywhere on the other side of the window.

But why now, after eleven years? Whatever the reason, time-delayed pangs played no part in it.

I don’t miss him,
Gabrielle told herself.
I don’t miss him and I quit worrying about him years ago.

And when he called, how could she ever have told herself that she wasn’t, deep within, expecting it?

The talk was small at first and Austin did most of it, asking how she’d been, telling her that her name looked good up front in the magazine’s masthead.

“What are the offices like, the staff?” he asked. Remarking on the loose layouts, the splashy graphics. “Doesn’t seem like it’d be a very stodgy place to spend the day. Like Apple versus IBM, and you’re all fruit-pickers, right?”

She told him it wasn’t button-down, if that’s what he was driving at, then she heard him laugh.

“Corporate but ashamed, gotcha,” he said.

Gabrielle clenched the phone and lowered her voice to an edgy whisper. “If you had to call, then why didn’t you call me there? Why at home? Why call at all, Austin? Do you want to cause me trouble?”

How nearby was Philippe, anyway? Twenty feet? Twenty-five? The stereo on but not loud. He’d’ve heard the phone, but if she was lucky, nothing she was saying. She could lie afterward.

“You always did have a pretty pedestrian idea of trouble, didn’t you?”

“I’m hanging up now.” Empty threat. They both knew it.

After eleven years Austin’s voice was a dire peculiarity, something familiar made foreign by time. But she got past this quickly enough, that voice and its rasp remembering how to find its way inside her, slipping defenses and caressing memories she didn’t realize had been left so exposed. Austin had a magic and knew it, and eleven years doubled around on itself, the snake gulping down its tail. She had gone nowhere.

“I know you’ve been thinking about me lately,” he said. The rasp had roughened over the years. Like honeyed gravel now. “That’s my fault. It didn’t seem right to ring you up without getting you ready first. I hope I didn’t startle you.”

“You’ve got nothing to say that I want to hear.”

“I’m in Utah. Why not book a flight? Technically it’d be work-related, I really think you’re going to want to see this.”

“Oh god, Austin,” she whispered. “What have you done now? Or what do you
think
you’ve done?”

“Should I send you a picture? Maybe you should close your eyes for this one.”

“Don’t,” she told him. “Just don’t.”

“All right. But it’s not so much what I’ve done as what I’ve found. A hint — would you like that much?”

Two worlds: Philippe in the next room with his day planner for tomorrow and his watered-down excuse for jazz music; Austin in her hand, on the far side of then and now and always. She could hear laughter in the background and knew it had nothing to do with him. From her hesitant silence he divined the go-ahead.

“Think back to when we were kids,” he said. “It doesn’t have wings and it doesn’t have horns. Its voice isn’t anything special, either. But it’s got a sense of history like you can’t imagine.”

*

Let me tell you about hope, middle child in a family of bastard triplets, trapped between faith and charity.

Hope is the carrot of many colors, dangling from the stick before us, and we terrestrial mules plod diligently along after our goals only occasionally wondering why we’re no closer. A good day is when we look up high enough to still enjoy the sun. A bad day is when we look lower and see how much the carrot has rotted.

Hey. Hey. Let me tell you what magick isn’t. It’s not the conjuring of carrots out of nothing. It’s learning how to bend the stick.

*

That night in bed she made the first move and wasn’t coy about it, seizing Philippe and stuffing him inside her as soon as he was stiff. Gabrielle did most of the work, even when she rolled onto her back and pulled him around on top of her, shaking him by the shoulders and drumming him in the ass with her heels. It was all he could do to keep pace, never once seeming aware of how his body was being used to batter Austin out of her, her past, her thoughts, her cells.

Philippe had been too long in America. A few years closer to France and he would’ve smelled Austin on her breath.

“What’s the occasion?” he asked in the dark, afterward.

“Occasion? We’re down to needing occasions now?”

He began soothing her testiness, smooth palm along her hip beneath the sheets. “I’m only trying to remember the last time I went to work in the morning feeling sore down there.” Warm hand sliding down to cup her pubis. “I missed it and didn’t even know.”

She sighed agreement. That
was
a good feeling. Wanton.

“That ache right over the bone? I’ll feel it throb and then I’m not even where I really am. I can be looking someone in the face and they don’t have a clue most of me’s right back here.”

     
It was sweet and carnal and dopey romantic, and she couldn’t help but wonder if he’d first heard it from another woman, before her. That made it easier to admit the totality of tonight’s failure. Some people you simply couldn’t screw out of your system.

“Like magic,” she murmured.

“Oui.”
She felt him nod into her shoulder. “Like magic.”

Philippe slipped off to sleep before she did — why tamper with custom? His breathing grew slow and deep, and soon began to catch in his throat, soft palate zigging when it should’ve been zagging. He began to click with wet glottal snorts.

How quickly feelings could change once the brains were all banged out. Willing to die for him one minute, twenty more later ready to do the killing instead. Nothing messy, nothing sadistic. A soft pillow over the face. His was a face made for just such a murder, with a weak chin and a narrow forehead from which his hair was backing away. It would welcome the pillow, and the pressure.

He touched her thigh in his sleep and it quieted him, then guilt drove her from the bed, the room. She stopped when she found herself standing nude before the living room window, tips of her breasts flattening against the glass. Maybe someone was watching, somewhere on the street or from another apartment; she hoped so.

She raised a hand to her throat, experimenting with its fit, recalling another night’s suffocation. No pillows, just Austin’s hands. He had fingers suited for a pianist or a surgeon. He’d known how hard and how long to squeeze. No anger in it, only the lust for experience. She’d not really wanted him to but hadn’t forbade it either. The way it had amplified the orgasm she’d been on the verge of was terrifying, nearly turning what the French called
la petit morte
— the little death — from metaphor into reality. She’d enjoyed it so much that she knew she could never experience it again. Knew she could never do it to Austin because regardless of when she lifted her hands from his neck, he’d still believe she could’ve held on two or three seconds longer.

Did you see anything?
he’d asked.

Stars,
she’d told him.

Gabrielle looked for them now, in the sky. Couldn’t find a single one. In Manhattan night came in name only, the darkness as unnatural as the light that stole away the stars. Empty sky above, empty streets below, the West Sixties.

West. The Hudson River was west of here. So was New Jersey, the Newark airport. And then Utah. Go figure.

Back in the bedroom, Philippe’s fitful breath had graduated to an all-out snore. As she recalled, Austin slept like the dead, but she’d always assumed that was because he envied them what they now knew.

*

Let me tell you about God.

The kabbalists have a fundamental doctrine of belief that God is not a static being, but dynamic becoming. Process, as opposed to personage. I can accept this. It explains why so many prayers seem to come back marked
Return to sender
.

Sorry — God’s closed for renovation. Please try again next lifetime.

*

She had a window seat and a seatmate zoned on tranquilizers, thus all the privacy she wanted. Forsaking books and magazines in favor of memories and the patterns in the land 39,000 feet below. Farmland gridded in a dozen shades of green, the rich browns of fallow fields. Summer in the heartland. Easy to forget she’d been born somewhere down there between the oceans, enough years in New York by now to be entitled to the disdain of a native of either coast: flyover country, the interior … all state fairs, incest, and militias. A few more hours and she’d be wearing snobbery like a birthmark, outnumbered. People would point and snicker.