Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (34 page)

I wonder though, if it is ever possible to leave a woman’s bed feeling entirely whole, not as if something, however small and unidentifiable, is missing. If such a place exists, I have yet to find it.

There is nothing missing, however, in all the talk and speculation that gathers itself around our table each night. We have a small gnome of a man who comes once or twice a week, named Pietro, who is an amateur local astronomer and has shown me the heavens in a way I have never seen them before. He has a dreamer’s soul, and therefore we speak the language of one like spirit to another. Often we can stretch out on the grass behind the casa and stare at the heavens for hours altogether and never need to say more than a sentence here or there.

July____, 1955

I noticed that terrible brilliance at the edges of my vision today. At first, I thought it was merely aftershocks from the sun on the sea, or rather I hoped it was. I do not want to have one of my episodes here. I do not want to have them anywhere, for that matter, but somehow I know this will, should it arrive, be a bad one. I dare not run, for it runs with me, fleet and dark, taking off the chains that bind it even now. Like Shelley, I would find a wild wood and stretch my frame in the gloomiest of shades to try to quench the unceasing fire that gnaws at me like a beast with an insatiable appetite.

But I cannot find the wood. The pit looms and I will fall.

July____, 1955

It is never easy to describe time spent with the Crooked Man, not even to myself. I shudder to bring such thoughts into focus, as I only want to travel away from those times, as far and as fast as I can. It is like being in and out of focus in your own emotions, your surroundings—in short, reality—whatever constitutes that fragile state. Sometimes it is like a broken mirror afterward. You can only summon the most distorted of images and make out fragments of a picture you don’t particularly want to see. This time, I carried something clear out with me, as though I held something precious and knew it, so took care to protect it through whatever dark and filthy landscape must be crossed to get to the other side.

It was a woman. It sounds mad now but I could swear I felt someone take my hand and pull me toward a sanctuary where the noise stopped and the whisperings of the Crooked Man were silenced. A place where it was cool and I could just rest. I don’t know if I saw her face, felt her skin or… what? I didn’t carry the memory of those things out with me, but I feel the trace of her along myself, as though she wrote directly upon my soul. But I don’t know the words that were carved thereon.

I knew her. She was as real as this paper beneath my hand, as real as the broken colonnade that runs down to the sea. But she was more than these things. I knew her in a way that seemed to have little to do with time. She was my ‘soul without my soul’, as Shelley once put it. But even Shelley, with his passions and loves, did not truly believe in the ‘Epipsychidion’—mourning the loss of this ideal. For poets know better than others that such things do not happen in this realm. But oh, how we all long for it. Whether we can express it in words or not, still we yearn.

She lay down beside me and took my hand in hers. A strange peace descended over me at her touch and I could feel her weight on the mattress, smell her scent, fresh and somehow soft. She touched her hand to my face and told me to sleep. And I did.

I awoke and, of course, she was not there. She had only been a fevered dream, a beautiful dream that seemed more real than the waking world, but a dream nonetheless. I felt a terrible loss, as though I had lived a life with her in some other time, some other place, but now we could only meet in dreams, in that fragmented landscape of my brain and heart at its lowest and darkest.

Tonight I sat by the window in my room, the scent of the sea strong, and found lines of Rilke running through my head.

You who never arrived
In my arms, Beloved…

I don’t know her. She never existed and yet tonight I feel the cut of loss as deeply as if someone had torn my heart out.

“I miss you.” I said it low, looking toward the sea, but I said it to her—she who never arrived.

July____, 1955

Andrei has been stalking around in an icy silence for two days, since I managed to get up out of my bed and rejoin the world. I finally confronted him today and asked him what the hell was wrong with him.

He flashed me one of his haughtiest looks and said, “If you’re planning to commit suicide, I’d rather you didn’t do it on my watch.”

I refrained from pointing out that this was somewhat rich, considering his tricks on the Eiffel Tower.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said, though my heart was thumping in my chest. I have no memory of the last few days other than the dream of the woman.

He gave me one of his iciest looks, the one that makes you feel like an undesirable bug caught in someone’s soup. Then his expression changed.

“You really don’t remember, do you?”

“Remember what?” I asked, fear making me peevish with him.

“Yasha, you were walking into the sea when I found you. If I hadn’t wakened in the night, you would have drowned. You don’t remember, do you?”

I shook my head, feeling sick. I have done some very stupid things during previous episodes, but not to this extent, not something that might actually have killed me, and without even a vague memory of it.

“I was yelling at you as I ran down the shore. You never even turned your head. You seemed completely unaware that I was there, as though you were in another place altogether, even after I grabbed you and dragged you out. I shook you hard, I was so angry, and you just looked at me like you weren’t sure who I was or why I was shaking you.”

There is no way to tell him the vision I was caught up in, how I did not even feel the waves wrapping round me, ready to pull me in and down, that I was on another far plane where the Crooked Man rules and it is always night. There are no words to explain and so I did not. Andrei seemed to sense this for though he is normally given to large and very verbal fits on anything that upsets him, he merely shrugged and said, ‘Yasha, you are well now. That is all that matters. Eat, for the love of God, before you disappear.’

One cannot explain a journey with the Crooked Man to one who does not travel those ways. It is to touch the drought, to know such aridity of soul that one thinks one will never know water again, either spiritually or mentally.

July____, 1955

A letter from my father arrived today. It was, as usual, filled with paternal admonitions to come home for at least part of the summer. Guilt had begun to dribble in at my toes the minute I took it from our postman. I even contemplated putting it aside and not reading it. But filial guilt did its work and I read it.

I just want this summer free of the yoke that comes with being a Kirkpatrick. I just want to be me for a few months. How weak that sentence sounds yet it sums up all that I feel, what I want right now. I see my life stretching out before me. I know my duty, and for now I  want to run in the opposite direction, for I know my feet will take me back to what I must do eventually.

Such is duty and Catholic guilt, a powerful cocktail.

August____, 1955

We went sailing yesterday on the Gulf of Spezia, just as Shelley and his friends had done so long ago. As it turned out, our trip mirrored a little too closely the one Byron and Shelley embarked upon in Switzerland.

The day was perfection, the sun on the water, a slight breeze in the air and the sails unfurled against a sky so deep blue that it seemed a sea entire that we might dive into and lose ourselves swimming amongst celestial bodies.

Such are the ruminations of mad poets not sensible sailors. The sailor would have noted that the sky was perhaps a shade too deep, that the breeze was ruffling the water in more than fanciful play. Still, it seemed that the storm broke very suddenly, for when next we looked up the sky was a dreadful mottled green and the wind turned from sprite to banshee in the space of a few heartbeats.

I knew we could not outrun the wind. We’d have to run bare poles into the waves and hope to ride it out until the weather cleared.

Andrei is not a natural sailor and had turned roughly the color of seaweed. It occurred to me, between trying to reef the sails and bail the boat simultaneously, that it wasn’t the least bit Romantic to be doing exactly as Byron and Shelley had done—albeit neither of us has a pregnant cousin back at the house. But in all other aspects this was a moment of poetical déjà vu. Byron and Shelley had survived it, mind you, though the terror Shelley felt at the time, being that he could not swim, must have been horrific. Andrei and I are both strong swimmers and I felt sure we could manage if we had to. I just prayed, fervently and aloud, that we would not have to. Andrei meanwhile, clung to the edges of the boat for dear life, soaked by the waves that were lapping over the sides.

I suggested, in what I felt was a mild manner considering the circumstances, that he help bail some of the rapidly accumulating water out of the boat, only to have him glare at me out of a face that was a rictus of terror. I realized any rescue we affected was going to have to be purely by my own efforts.

It was a full hour before we made shore and there were times that I thought we were going to end up down with the weeds and crumbled roads at the bottom of the Gulf. But as often happens with such things, the fear of what the outcome might have been didn’t hit me until later when I was entirely safe.

My main emotion upon stumbling, drunken with relief, onto solid ground was that sense of ridiculous joy in one’s own existence. Andrei, bilious and furious, did not share this feeling in the least.

He faced me on the shore, obviously in the grip of his operatic Russian temper. This image might have been more fearsome if he hadn’t had seaweed hanging off one ear like a pirate’s earring. I made the mistake of laughing and thought for a second that he might hit me. Instead, he drew himself up in his very haughtiest White Russian stance and said,

“If I die young and tragic, I do not—James—intend to do it in water!!”

And with that, he strode up the shore toward the house. I stood there bemused, for the man surely could not be blaming me for the weather. But he only calls me by the Anglicized version of my name when he is truly upset.

Russians are impossible.

August____, 1955

My lovely, cool divorcée has proven to be less than cool about separation, as the autumn puts its head upon the horizon. She hasn’t been happy recently, because since my visit with the Crooked Man I haven’t been as frequent a visitor to her expensive linens. She wants me to go to Rome with her, says the universities there are as fine as anything England can offer, tells me that her house is big and lonely and that she needs her Apollo there to warm its halls. She did not receive the word ‘no’ well, despite how gently I tried to phrase it.

After last winter, after the mess and the potential scandal, I have been careful to disentangle myself once I thought a woman’s emotions were becoming too deeply involved. I think I lingered too long with Francesca, for which I am sorrier than she will ever know, but I do not love her and will not pay her the disrespect of pretending that I do. Besides, I am no one’s Apollo or Dionysus. I am merely a human being with all the failings of our species.

Women want me to say things that I can’t find it within myself to say. They want promises that are empty, and they would know they were empty as soon as the words fell from my tongue.

August____, 1955

I have spent the last three days with Clothilde and feel ruthlessly sorted. I forget how perfect in its alignments and elements her world is. I feel ironed out and far more sensible than when I left Italy. I have used good china, slept on flawless linens, had my mind scoured out with pithy and remorseless Gallic good sense and been restored to myself fully.

August____, 1955

You cannot avoid what must be done, not forever. Only perhaps for a short time and maybe that’s why older people sigh over youth and think it was some halcyon time. But it isn’t, is it? We are aware of how brief this span is, and are already feeling the weight of expectation that hangs over all our heads—of what others want for us and from us. From the beginnings of youth, one can already see the end on the horizon.

August____, 1955

Andrei accuses me of having grown a Catholic conscience and leaving him to fend on his own with the entire female population of these redolent hillsides. It’s not my Catholicism that has reared its head, rather the girl that came to me in my dream—or was it a dream? Since my episode, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that I am, in some way, being unfaithful to her when I am with another woman. It’s ludicrous, not something that can be explained, and so I don’t. Andrei is welcome to believe that I am struck with religiosity rather than insanity.

Myself, I do not feel insane, but I am intensely aware of the absurdity of remaining faithful to a woman who does not exist. Why then can I not shake the feeling that she does indeed exist, some where, some time?

August____, 1955

I have been shot at by an irate father, not through any peccadillo of my own but through Andrei’s dallying. The bullet missed me by about an inch while I was sitting reading Shelley, half asleep and dreaming about the poet’s last demon-haunted days. The bullet was a sharp alarm that lodged in the bookcase just behind my head. At first I thought I was having some dreadful hallucination, being that I saw a white, furious face at the window with my own reflected back right beside it. However, I soon recognized Signor Martelli and managed to duck before the next shot. I suppose Andrei and I look enough alike that I could see how easily the mistake was made.

I managed to duck the next two bullets while yelling in Italian that he should cease and desist, and pointing out that I wasn’t the promiscuous Russian rogue he was after. Said promiscuous Russian rogue was thankfully absent, giving me time to bring Signor Martelli in and calm him down with a boatload of grappa and pecuniary promises. He was in an altogether more receptive state of mind by the time Andrei returned, though I had hidden the pistol in the meantime in case the mere sight of his daughter’s seducer inflamed him back to the heights of Latin revenge.