Little, Big (35 page)

Now how many years' bad luck is that for someone, he thought, wondering if he had escaped something.

"I'm putting you in the folding bedroom," George said as he led Auberon by flashlight through the mostly empty warren of buildings that surrounded Old Law Farm. "It's got a fireplace at least. Watch that stuff there. Up we go."

Auberon followed, shivering, carrying his bag and a bottle of Doña Mariposa rum. A sleety rain had caught him on his way downtown, slicing cleanly through his overcoat and, so it felt, through his skinny flesh as well to chill his heart. He had hidden from it for a while in a little liquor store whose red sign—LIQUOR—went on and off in the puddles outside the door. Feeling intensely the shopkeeper's impatience at his free use of a place of business for profitless shelter, Auberon had begun staring at the various bottles, and at last bought the rum because the girl on its label, in a peasant blouse, arms full of green cane-stalks, reminded him of Sylvie; or rather seemed to him what Sylvie would look like if she were imaginary.

George took out his bunch of keys and began hunting through them abstractedly. His manner since Auberon had returned had been glum, distracted, unaccommodating. He talked ramblingly about the difficulties of life. Auberon had questions to ask him, but felt he would get no answers to them from George in this state of mind, so he only followed silently.

The folding bedroom was double-locked, and George was some time opening it. There was electric light inside though, a lamp that on its cylindrical shade carried a panorama, a country scene through which a train moved, its locomotive almost devouring its caboose, like the Worm. George looked around the room, finger to his lips, as though long ago he had lost something here. "Now the thing is," he said, and then nothing more. He gazed at the spines of a shelf of paperbacks. The locomotive on the lampshade began to travel slowly through the landscape, caused to move by the heat of the bulb. "See, we all pull together here," George said. "Everybody does his part. You can dig that. I mean the work's never done and all. So. This is all right, I guess. That john's the closet, the other way around I mean. The stove and stuff is off, but eat with us, everybody chips in. Well. Listen." He counted his keys again, and Auberon had the feeling he was about to be locked in; but George slipped three from the ring and gave them to him. "Don't for God's sake lose them." He managed a bleak smile. "Hey, welcome to Big-town, man, and don't take any wooden nickels."

Wooden nickels? It seemed to Auberon as he closed the door that his cousin's speech was as full of antique rubbish and battered ornament as his Farm. A card, maybe he'd call himself. Well: a peculiarity felt more than perceived about this folding bedroom became clear to him as he looked around: there was no bed in it. There was a wine-red velvet boudoir chair, and a creaky wicker one with pillows tied on; there was a shabby rug, and an enormous wardrobe or something of glossy wood, with a bevelled looking-glass on its front and drawers with brass pulls at the bottom; this he couldn't figure out how to open. But there was no bed. From a wooden apricot crate (Golden Dreams) he took wood and paper and made a fire with trembling fingers, contemplating a night on the chairs; for sure he wasn't going to try threading his way back through Old Law Farm to complain.

When the fire was hot he began to feel somewhat less sorry for himself; in fact as his clothes dried he felt almost an elation. Kind Mr. Petty of Petty, Smilodon & Ruth had been oddly evasive about the status of his inheritance, but they had willingly advanced him a sum against it. He had it in his pocket. He had come to the City and not died or been beaten; he had money, and the prospect of more; real life was beginning. The long, long ambiguity of Edgewood, the stifling sense of mysteries continually propounded, never solved, the endless waiting for purposes to be made clear and directions pointed out—all over. He had taken charge. A free agent, he would make a million, win love, and never go home at bedtime any more. He went to the tiny kitchen attached to the folding bedroom, where the dead stove and a lumpish refrigerator presumably also dead shared the floor with a tub and a sink; he dug up a white coffee mug all crazed, wiped the husk of a bug from it, and got out his bottle of Doña Mariposa rum.

He was holding a mugful of this in his lap, looking into the fire with a grin on his face, when there came a knocking at the door.

It took him a moment to see that the dark shy girl at his door was the same he had seen breaking eggs in a golden gown. Dressed now in jeans faded and soft as homespun, and clutching herself so tightly against the cold that her multiform earrings shook, she looked far less large; that is, she was just as small, but she had hidden the energy that had made her seem so large before under the bushel of her compact shape.

"Sylvie," he said.

"Yah." She looked away down the dark hall, and then back at him, in some kind of hurry, or in some annoyance, or something; what? "I didn't know anybody was in here. I thought it was empty."

He so obviously filled the doorway that there was no answer he could make to this.

"Okay," she said. She allowed one cold hand out from where it hid in her armpit, so it could press her lip against her teeth to be bitten, and glanced away again, as though he were compelling her to stay here and she were impatient to get away.

"Did you leave something here?" She didn't respond. "How's your son?" At this the hand that had been pressing her lip covered her mouth altogether, and she seemed to weep, or laugh, or both, still looking away though it was obvious she had no place to go; at last he saw that. "Come in," he said, and motioned her in, stepping aside so she could enter and nodding encouragement.

"Sometimes I come here," she said as she came in, "when I want to be, you know, alone." She looked around her with what Auberon supposed was a justified air of grievance. He was the intruder. He wondered if he should yield it to her, and go sleep in the street. Instead he said: "Would you like some rum?"

She appeared not to hear. "So listen," she said, and then nothing more. It would be some time before Auberon realized that these words were often as not a mere vocable in City speech, and not intended to roughly command his attention, as they seemed. He listened. She sat on the little velvet chair and said at last, as though to herself, "It's cozy here."

"Mm."

"Nice fire. What are you drinking?"

"Rum. Would you like some?"

"Sure."

There was, it appeared, only the one cup, so she and he passed it back and forth between them. "He's not my son," Sylvie said.

"I'm sorry if I . . ."

"He's my brother's kid. I got a crazy brother. Named Bruno. Like the kid." She pondered, staring into the fire. "What a kid. So sweet. And smart. And
bad
?" She smiled. "Just like his
papo
." She gripped herself more tightly, drawing her knees up almost to her breasts, and he could see she wept inwardly, and only by this constant pressure against herself kept it from spilling out.

"You and he seemed to get along well," Auberon said, nodding in what he realized was an absurdly solemn fashion. "I thought you were his mother."

"Oh, his mother, man," with a look of pure disdain touched only faintly with pity, "she's sad. She's a sad case. Pitiful." She brooded. "The way they treat him, man. He's going to turn out just like his father."

This was apparently not a good thing. Auberon wished he could think of a question that would draw the whole story from her. "Well, sons do turn out like their fathers," he said, wondering if it would ever seem true of him. "After all, they're around them a lot."

She snorted in disgust. "Shit, Bruno hasn't seen this kid in a year. Now he shows up and says, 'Hey, my son,' and all this. Just because he got religion."

"Hm."

"Not re
lig
ion. But this guy he works for. Or follows. Russell—what is it, I don't know—I go blank. Anyway, he says, love, family, blahblahblah. So here he is on the doorstep."

"Hm."

"They'll kill that lad." Tears did gather in her eyes, but she blinked them away, none fell. "Damn George Mouse. How could he be so dumb?"

"What did he do?"

"He says he was drunk. Had a knife."

"Oh." There being no reflexive in the language Sylvie had to speak here, Auberon was soon lost among the "he"s and had no idea who had a knife or who said whd was drunk. He would have to hear the story twice more in the next days before he sorted out that brother Bruno had come drunk to Old Law Farm and, under the press of his new faith or philosophy, demanded nephew Bruno from George Mouse, who in Sylvie's absence and after a prolonged debate which had threatened to turn violent, had yielded him up. And that nephew Bruno was now in the hands of bedeviling and loving and deeply stupid female relatives (brother Bruno wouldn't stay, she was sure of that) who would raise him just as her brother had been raised after
his
father's desertion, to vanity, and wildness, a touchy ungovemability and a sweet selfishness no woman could resist, and few men for that matter; and that (even if the child avoided being put in a Home) Sylvie's plan to rescue him had failed: George had forbidden the Farm to her relatives, he had enough troubles.

"So I can't live with him any more," she said—George this time, doubtless.

A strange hope rose in Auberon.

"I mean it's not
his
fault," she said. "Not his
fault
, really. I just couldn't any more. I'd always think of it. And anyway." She pressed her temples, pressing in the thing there. "Shit. If I had the nerve to tell them off. All of them." Her grief and bedevilment were reaching a climax. "I never want to see them again myself.
Never
. Never never." She almost laughed. "And that's really stupid, 'cause if I leave here I got no place else to go. No place else."

She wouldn't weep. She hadn't, and the moment was past now; now blank despair was in her face as she looked into the fire, both cheeks in her hands.

Auberon clasped his hands behind him, studied an offhand, neighborly tone, and said, "Well of course you can stay
here
, you're welcome to," and realized he was offering her a place which was much more hers than his, and flushed. "I mean of
course
you can stay here, if you don't mind my staying too."

She looked at him, warily he thought, which was proper considering a certain bass obbligato in his feelings just then which he was in fact trying to conceal. "Really?" she said. She smiled. "I wouldn't take up much room."

"Well, there's not much room to take up." Become host, he looked the place over thoughtfully. "I don't know how we'd arrange it, but there's the chair, and, well, there's my overcoat almost dry, you could use that for a blanket. . . ." He saw that he himself, curled up in a corner, would probably not sleep at all. Now, though, her face had closed somewhat at these cheerless arrangements. He couldn't think what else to yield up to her.

"I couldn't," she said, "have just a corner of the bed? Like down at the foot? I'll curl up real small."

"Bed?"

"The bed!" she said, growing impatient.

"What bed?"

Suddenly getting it, she laughed aloud. "Oh wow," she said, "oh no, you were going to sleep on the
flaw
—I don't
believe
it!" She went to the massy wardrobe or highboy which stood against one wall, and, reaching up along its hidden side, she turned a knob or pulled a lever, and enormously pleased, let down the whole tall front of the thing. Counterweighted (the dummy drawers held lead weights), it swung gently, dreamily down; the mirror reflected floor, and then was gone; brass knobs at each upper corner extruded themselves, slipping out as the front came down, and became legs, locking in place by a gravity-worked mechanism whose ingenuity he would later marvel at. It was a bed. It had a carved headboard; the top of it, as wardrobe, had become the footboard, as bed; it had a mattress, bedclothes, and two plump pillows.

He laughed with her. Displayed, the bed took up most the room. The folding bed room.

"Isn't it great?" she said.

"Great."

"Room enough for two, isn't there?"

"Oh sure. In fact . . ." He was about to offer the whole of it to her; that was only right, and he would instantly have done so in the first place if he'd known it to be hidden there. But he saw that she assumed he was ungentlemanly enough to assume that she would be grateful for half, and assumed that he assumed that she. . . A sudden cunning shut his mouth.

"You're sure you don't mind?" she asked.

"Oh no. If you're sure
you
don't mind."

"Nah. I've always slept with people. My granny and I slept together for years, usually with my sister too." She sat on the bed—it was so plumply high she had to hoist herself up with her hands, and her feet didn't reach the floor from it—and smiled at him, and he smiled back. "So," she said.

The room transformed was the rest of his life transformed, everything not already metamorphosed by the departure and the bus and the City and the lawyers and the rain. Nothing now would ever be the same again. He realized he had been staring wildly at her, and that she had lowered her eyes. "Well," he said, holding up the cup, "how about a little more of this?"

"Okay." While he was pouring it, she said, "So how come you came to the City, by the way?"

"To seek my fortune."

"Huh?"

"Well, I want to be a writer." Rum and intimacy made it easy to say. "I'm going to look for a job writing. Something. Maybe television."

"Hey, great. Big bucks."

"Mm."

"You could write, like, 'A World Elsewhere'?"

"What's that?"

"You know. The show."

He didn't. An absurdity in his ambitions became clear to him when they bounced back, as it were, from Sylvie, instead of (as they always had before) paying out endlessly into futurity. "Actually, we never had a television set," he said.

"Really? Well, I'll be." She sipped the rum he gave her. "Couldn't afford one? George told me you guys were real rich. Oops."