Little, Big (36 page)

"Well, 'rich'. I don't know about 'rich' . . . ." Well! There was an inflection like Smoky's, which Auberon heard for the first time in his own voice—that putting of imaginary doubt-quotes around a word. Was he growing old? "We could have bought a TV, certainly. . . . What's this show like?"

"'A World Elsewhere'? It's a daytime drama."

"Oh."

"The endless kind. You just get over one problem and another starts. Mostly dumb. But you get hooked." She had begun to tremble again, and drew her feet up on the bed; she pulled down the quilt and wrapped it around her legs. Auberon busied himself with the fire. "There's a girl on it who reminds me of me." She said it with a self-deprecating laugh. "Boy has
she
got problems. She's supposed to be Italian, but she's played by a P.R.
And
she's beautiful." She said this as though she said She has one leg, and is like me in that. "And she has a Destiny. She knows it. All these terrible problems, but she has a Destiny, and sometimes they show her just looking out mistyeyed while these voices sing in the background—aa-aa-
aaah
—and you know she's thinking of her Destiny."

"Hm." All the wood in the woodbox was scrap, most of it parts of furniture, though there were pieces that bore lettering too. The varnish on fluted and turned wood sizzled and blistered. Auberon felt an exhilaration: he was part of a community of strangers, burning unbeknown to them their furniture and belongings, just as they not knowing him took his money at change-booths and made room for him on buses. "A Destiny, huh."

"Yah." She looked at the locomotive on the lampshade, turning through its little landscape. "I have a Destiny," she said.

"You do?"

"Yah." She said this syllable in a way and with an attitude of face and arms that meant Yes, it's true, and a long story, and while possibly to my credit is something I have nothing to do with, and is even a little embarrassing, like a halo. She studied a silver ring on her finger.

"How does somebody know," he asked, "that they have a Destiny?" The bed was so large that to sit in the little velvet chair at its foot would place him absurdly low; so—gingerly—he got up on the bed beside her. She made room. They took up opposite corners, resting in the wings which protruded from the headboard.

"An
espiritista
read mine," Sylvie said. "A long time ago."

"A who?"

"An
espiritista
. A lady with powers. You know. Reads cards, and does stuff with stuff from the
botanica
; a
bruja
sort of, you know?"

"Oh."

"This one was sort of an aunt of mine, well not really mine, I forget whose aunt she was; we called her Tití, but everybody called her La Negra. She scared the shit out of me. Her apartment, way uptown, always had candles lit on these little altars, and the curtains drawn, and these crazy smells; and out on the fire escape she kept a couple of chickens, man, I don't know what she did with those chickens and I don't
want
to know. She was big—not fat, but with these long strong gorilla arms and a little head, and
black
, Sort of blue-black, you know? She couldn't have really been in my family. So when I was a little kid I got malnutritioned real bad—wouldn't eat—Mami couldn't make me—I got so skinny, like this—" she held up a red-nailed pinkie. "The doctor said I was supposed to eat liver. Liver! Can you imagine? Anyway, Granny decided that somebody was maybe doing a number on me, you know?
Brujeria
. From a distance." She waggled her fingers like a stage hypnotist. "Like revenge or something. Mami was living with somebody else's husband then. So maybe his wife had got an
espiritista
to do revenge on her by making
me
sick. Anyway, anyway. . ." She touched his arm lightly, because he had looked away. In fact she touched his arm every time he looked away, which had begun somewhat to annoy him, his attention couldn't have been more riveted; he thought this must be a bad habit of hers, until much later he saw that the men who played dominoes on the street and the women who watched children and gossiped on stoops did it too: a racial, not a personal habit, maintain the contact. "Anyway. She took me to La Negra to get it wiped out or whatever. Man I was never so scared in my
life
. She started pressing me and feeling me up with these big black hands, and sort of groaning or singing, and talking this stuff, and her eyeballs rolled back in her head and her eyelids fluttered—creepy. Then she dashes over to this little burner and throws some stuff on it, powder or something, and this real strong perfume comes out, and she rushes back—sort of dances—and feels me some more. She did some other stuff too that I forget. Then she drops all that, and gets real regular, like, you know, a day's work, all done, like at the dentist; and she told Granny, no, nobody had a spell on me, I was just skinny and ought to eat more. Granny was so relieved. So—" again the brief wrist-touch, he had stared into the mug for a moment "—so they're sitting around drinking coffee and Granny's paying, and La Negra just kept looking at me. Just
looking
. Man I was
freaking out
. What's she looking at? She could see right through you, she could see your heart. Your heart of hearts. Then she goes like this—" Sylvie motioned with a slow large black
bruja
hand for the child to come close "—and starts talking to me, real slow, about what dreams I had, and other stuff I forget; and it's like she was thinking real hard. Then she gets out this deck of cards, real old and worn out; and she puts my hand on them and her hand over mine; and her eyes roll up again, and she's like in a trance." Sylvie took the cup from Auberon, who'd been gripping it, in a trance himself. "Oh," she said. "No more?"

"Lots more." He went to get some.

"So listen, listen. She lays out these cards—thanks—" She sipped, her eyes rising, looking for a moment like the child she was telling of. "And she starts reading them for me. That was when she saw my Destiny."

"And what was it?" He sat again beside her on the bed. "A big one."

"The biggest," she said, mimicking a confidential, hotnews tone. "The very biggest." She laughed. "She couldn't believe it. This skinny, malnutritioned kid in a homemade dress. This big Destiny. She stared and stared. She stared at the cards, she stared at me. My eyes got big, and I thought I was going to cry, and Granny's praying, and La Negra's making noises, and I just wanted
out
. . . ."

"But what," Auberon said, "was the Destiny? Exactly."

"Well,
exactly
she didn't know." She laughed, the whole thing had become silly. "That's the only trouble. She said a Destiny, and a biggie. But not what. A movie stah. A queen. Queen of the World, man. Anything." As quickly as she had laughed, she grew thoughtful. "It sure ain't come true yet," she said. "I used to picture it, though. Like in the future, coming true. I had this picture. There was this table, in the woods? Like a long banquet table. With a white cloth. And all these goodies on it. End to end, heaped up. But in the woods. Trees and stuff around. And there was an empty place at the middle of the table."

"And?"

"That's all. I just saw it. I thought about it." She glanced over at him. "I bet you never knew anybody who had any big Destiny before," she said, grinning.

He didn't want to say that he had hardly known anyone who didn't. Destiny had been like a shameful secret shared among all of them at Edgewood, which none of them would exactly admit to except in the most veiled terms and only at great need. He had fled his. He had outrun it, he was sure, like the geese outrunning Brother North-wind on strong wings: it couldn't freeze him here. If he wanted a Destiny now, it would be one of his own choosing. He'd like, for instance, for a single simple instance, to have Sylvie's: to be Sylvie's. "Is it fun?" he asked. "Having a Destiny?"

"Not much," she said. She had begun to clutch herself again, though the fire had heated the little room well. "When I was a kid, they all made fun of me for it. Except Granny. But she couldn't resist going around telling everybody about it. And La Negra told. And I was still just a bad skinny kid who didn't do shit that was wonderful." She wiggled within the bedclothes, embarrassed, and turned the silver ring on her finger. "Sylvie's big Destiny. There was a lot of jokes. Once—" she looked away "—once this real old Gypsy guy came around. Mami didn't want to let him in, but he said he'd come all the way from Brooklyn to see me. So he comes in. All bent and sweaty, and real fat. And talking this funny Spanish. And they dragged me out, and showed me off. I was eating a chicken wing. And he stared at me a while with these big goggle eyes and his mouth open. Then—oh, man, it was weird—he got down on his knees—it took him a long time, you know?—and he says: Remember me when you come into your kingdom. And he gave me this." She held up her hand (the palm lined minutely and clearly) and turned it to show the silver ring, back and front. "Then we all had to help him stand up."

"And then?"

"He went back to Brooklyn." She paused, remembering him. "Man I didn't like him." She laughed. "As he was leaving, I put the chicken wing in his pocket. He didn't see. In his coat pocket. In exchange for the ring."

"A wing for a ring."

"Yeah." She laughed, but soon ceased. She seemed restless and plagued again. Changeful: as though her weather blew faster, fair to foul to fair again, than most people's did. "So big deal," she said. "Forget it." She drank, quickly and deeply, and then exhaled rapidly and waved her hand before her open mouth to cool the rum-flames. She gave him the cup and dug more deeply into the bedclothes. "What has it ever got me. I can't even take care of myself. Much less anybody else." Her voice had grown faint; she turned away, and seemed to be trying to disappear; then she rolled back, and yawned hugely. He could see her mouth's interior: her arched tongue, even her uvula. Not the pale rosebud color of white people's interior parts, but a richer color, tinged with coral. He wondered. . . "That kid was probably lucky," she said when she was done. "To get away from me."

"I can't believe that," he said. "You got along so well."

She answered nothing, only stared at her thoughts. "I wish," she said, but then no more. He wished he could think of something to offer her. Besides everything. "Well," he said, "you can stay here as long as you want. As long as you want."

Suddenly she flung off the covers and scrambled across the bed, getting away, and he had a wild impulse to grab her, restrain her. "
Pipi
," she said. She climbed over his legs, and down to the floor, and pulled open the door of the closet (it opened only wide enough to admit her before striking the edge of the bed) and turned on a light within.

He heard her unzip. "Wow! That seat is
cold!
" There was a pause, and then the hollow hiss of number one. She said when she was done: "You're a nice guy, you know that?" And any answer he might have made to that (he had none to make) was drowned in the roar of waters as she pulled the chain.

Preparing for their mutual bed was a lot of laughs (he made a joke about sleeping with a naked sword between them that she thought hilarious, never having heard of the thing before) but when the locomotive was stilled and darkness around them, he heard her weep, softly, smothering her tears, far away on her allotted side of the bed.

He supposed that really neither of them would sleep; but after long search, on this side and then that, after crying out (Ah! Ah!) softly several times as though frightened by her thoughts, Sylvie did find a pathway to the gate of horn; the tears were dry on her black lashes; she was asleep. In her struggle she had wound the bedclothes tortuously around herself, and he didn't dare extract much (not knowing that once passed to the other side she was as good as dead for hours). For sleeping she wore a T-shirt, intended as a souvenir for tourists' children, which showed garish and inaccurate pictures of four or five big City attractions, nothing but this and a pair of panties, patches of black silk on an elastic and no bigger than a blindfold. He lay awake next to her for a long time while her breathing grew regular. He slept briefly, and dreamed that her child's shirt, and her great grief, and the bedclothes twisted protectively around her brown limbs, and the deliberate high sexiness of her nearly nonexistent underwear, were a rebus. He laughed, dreaming, to see the simple puns contained in these items, and the surprising but obvious answer, and his own laugh awoke him.

With the stealth of one of Daily Alice's cats trying to find the warmth and not disturb the sleeper, his arm worked its way under the blankets and over her. For a long time he lay that way, still and wary. He half-dreamt again, this time that his arm, through contact with her, was turning slowly to gold. He woke, and found it asleep, heavy and dead. He withdrew it; it sprouted pins and needles; he caressed it, forgetting why it and not the other should appear in his mind as valuable; slept again. Woke again. She had grown greatly heavy beside him, seemed to weight her side of the bed like a treasure, the richer for its compactness, and richer still for being all unconscious of itself.

When at last he slept for real, though, it was of nothing in Old Law Farm that he dreamt, but of his earliest childhood, of Edgewood and of Lilac.

One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least

Which unto words no virtue can digest

—Marlowe
, Tamburlaine

The house Auberon grew up in wasn't quite the same house his mother had grown up in. As Smoky and Daily Alice had come into possession, the natural directors of a household composed of their children and Alice's parents, the reins of an old orderliness were loosened. Daily Alice liked cats, as her mother hadn't, and as Auberon grew up the number of cats in the house grew by geometrical progression. They lay in heaps before the fireplaces, their airborne down coated the furniture and the rugs as though with a dry and permanent hoarfrost, their self-possessed small demon faces looked out at Auberon from the oddest places. There was a calico tiger whose striped pelt made fierce false eyebrows above her eyes, two blacks or three, a white with discrete and complex black patches, like a melting chessboard. On cold nights Auberon would awake oppressed, toss within his bedclothes, and displace two or three compact dense bodies out of a deep enjoyment.