Little, Big (52 page)

"
Coño
," she said. "There's never anything in here."

"Yeah? Is that so," he said with heavy irony from within the imaginary study. "I guess it must be broken." He rose, and reached for his coat. "What do you want?" he said. "I'll go get something."

"No,
papo
. . ."

"I have to eat too, you know. And if the refrigerator won't supply it."

"Okay. Something good."

"Well what? I could get some cereal . . ."

She made a face. "Something
good
," she said, with a twohanded, chin-uplifted gesture that certainly expressed her desire, but left him no wiser. He went out into a new-fallen still-falling snow.

As soon as she closed the door on him, Sylvie was swept by a tide of gloomy feeling.

It amazed her that he, brought up the baby boy in a household of sisters and aunts, could be so endlessly solicitous, take so much of their daily domestic life on himself, and bitch so little. White people were strange. Among her relatives and their neighbors a husband's chief domestic duties were eating, beating, and playing dominoes. Auberon was so good. So understanding. And smart: official forms and the endless paper of an aged and paralytic welfare state held no terror for him. And not jealous. When early on she'd developed a pressing crush on sweet brown Leon who waited at the Seventh Saint, and indulged it a while, and lain then next to Auberon every night rigid with guilt and fear till he'd wormed the secret out of her, he'd only said he didn't care what she did with others as long as she was happy with him when she was with him: now how many guys could you find, she asked herself in the clouded mirror over the sink, who would act like that?

So good. So kind. And how did she repay him? Look at you, she insisted. Bags under your eyes. Losing pounds every day, pretty soon—she held up a warning pinkie in the mirror—like
this
.
Flacca
. And not bringing home shit, useless to herself as to him,
un' boba
.

She'd work. She'd work
hard
and pay him back everything he'd done for her, the whole oppressive relentless treasure of his goodness. Toss it back in his face. There. "I'll wash fuckin' dishes," she said aloud, turning away from the small pile of them by the squalid sink, "I'll turn tricks . . . ."

And was it to that that her Destiny led her? Bitter-faced and rubbing her horripilated arms, she paced from bed to stove like a caged thing. What should free her bound her, bound her to await it amid a poverty, an impoverished day-to-day existence different from the long, hopeless poverty of her growing up, but poverty nonetheless. Sick of it, sick sick sick! Self-pitying tears sprang to her eyes. Damn her Destiny anyway, why couldn't she trade it for a little decency, a little freedom, a little fun? If she couldn't throw it away, why could she get nothing in exchange for it either?

She climbed back into bed, black resolution in her mind. She drew up the covers, staring accusatorily at the middle distance. Dark, asleep, far-off but built into her very stuff, her Destiny couldn't be resigned, she'd learned that. But she was tired of waiting. It had not one single feature she could determine, except that Auberon was in it (but not this squalor; Somehow, not even this Auberon), but she'd discover it now. Now. "
Bueno
," she said, "All right," and took a stem attitude under the covers with arms crossed. She'd wait no more. She'd learn her Destiny and begin it or die; she'd drag it out of the future where it lay by main strength.

Auberon meanwhile plodded to the Nite Owl market (surprised to find this was Sunday and nothing else open, what do weekends mean to the leisured poor?) through snow that lay just for this hour virginal and new, his the first feet to begin its long defilement into rotten slush more black than white. He was angry. In fact he was furious, though he had kissed Sylvie gently farewell, and would kiss her again in ten minutes when he got back, just as gently. Why didn't she ever even acknowledge the equability of his temper, the sunniness of his disposition? Did she think it was easy to maintain, easy to press down honest indignation into a soft answer, every time, every single time? And what credit did he get for his efforts? He could sock her sometimes. He'd like to give her one good punch, quiet her down a little, show her just how far his patience had been tried. Oh God how awful even to think it.

Happiness, he had come to see, his happiness anyway, was a season; and in that season, Sylvie was the weather. Everyone within him talked about it, among themselves, but no one could do anything about it, they could only wait till it changed. The season of his happiness was spring, a long, skittish, changeful spring, as often withdrawn as proffered—like any spring: but nevertheless spring. He was sure of it. He kicked the wet snow. Sure.

He mooched indecisively among the few and expensive goods the Nite Owl offered—one of those places that keep up a marginal existence by being open on Sundays and deep into the night—and when he had made his choices (two kinds of exotic juices for Sylvie's tropical palate, to make up for punching her) he drew out his wallet and found it empty. As in the antique joke, a moth should lazily fly out. He scrabbled in his pockets, inside, outside, under the eyes (reserving terrible judgment) of the counterman, and at last, though having to resign one of the juices, made up the amount in found silver and linty pennies.

"Now what?" he said when, snow on his hat and shoulders, he opened the door of the Folding Bedroom and found Sylvie in bed. "Having a little nap?"

"Leamee alone," she said. "I'm thinking."

"Thinking, huh." He took his sodden paper bag into the kitchen and messed around for a time with soup and crackers, but when he offered her these she refused them; in fact for the rest of that day he could hardly get a word out of her, and grew afraid, thinking of her familial streak of madness. Dulcet, kind, he spoke to her, and her retreating soul fled from his words as from a cutting edge.

So he only sat (his imaginary study moved into the kitchen since the bed remained opened and occupied) and thought of how further to indulge her, and of ingratitude; and she struggled on the bed, and sometimes slept. Winter deepened. Black clouds formed over their heads; lightnings answered lightnings; north winds blew; cold rain poured down.

"Hold hard," Mrs. Underhill said, "hold hard. Somewhere here a slip's been made, a turning missed. Don't you feel that?"

"We do," said the others gathered there.

"Winter came," Mrs. Underhill said, "and that was right; and then . . ."

"Spring!" they all shouted.

"Too fast, too fast." She beat her temple with her knuckles. A dropped stitch could be fixed, if it could be found; a certain unraveling was in her power; but where along the long, long way had it been? Or—she cast her eye along the vast length of Tale unfolding from the to-come with the steady grace of a jewelled and purposeful serpent—was it yet to be? "Help me, children," she said.

"We will," they said, in all their various voices.

This was the problem: if what had to be discovered lay in what-was-to-be, then they could discover that easily enough. It was what-had-been that was hard to keep in mind. That's the way it is for beings who are immortal or nearly so; they know the future, but the past is dark to them; beyond the present year is the door into aeons-ago, a darkling span lit with solemn lights. As Sophie with her cards probed an unfamiliar future, pressing on the thin membrane that separated her from it, pressing here and there to feel the advancing shapes of things to come, so Mrs. Underhill felt blindly among the things that had been, searching for the shape of what was wrong. "There was an only son," she said.

"An only son," they echoed, thinking hard.

"And he came to the City."

"And he came to the City," they said.

"And there he sits," Mr. Woods put in.

"That's it, isn't it," Mrs. Underhill said. "There he sits."

"Won't be moved, won't do his duty, wants to die of love instead." Mr. Woods clutched his skinny knee in his long hands. "It could be this winter will go on, and never stop."

"Never stop," Mrs. Underhill said. A tear was in her eye. "Yes, yes, that's just how it appears."

"No, no," they all said, seeing it so. The freezing rain beat on the deep small windows, crying in mourning, the trees lashed their branches at the implacable wind, the Meadow Mouse was seized in the Red Fox's desperate jaws. "Think, think," they said.

She knocked again at her temple, but no one answered. She rose, and they retreated. "I'll need advice," she said, "that's all."

The black water of the mountain pooi was just unfrozen, though jags of ice like broken stone projected around its margins; on one of these projections Mrs. Underhill stood and sent down her summons.

Sleepy, stupid, too cold even to be angry, Grandfather Trout rose from the dark depths.

"Leamee alone," he said.

"Answer up," Mrs. Underhill said sharply, "or it'll go hard with you."

"What," he said.

"This child in the City," Mrs. Underhill said. "Greatgrandson of yours. Won't be moved, won't do his duty, wants to die of love instead."

"Love," Grandfather Trout said. "There is no force on earth left stronger than love."

"He won't follow the others."

"Then let him follow love."

"Hm," said Mrs. Underhill, and then "hmmm." She put her thumb to her chin and her finger along her cheek, resting her elbow in the cup of her other hand. "Well, perhaps he ought to have a Consort," she said.

"Yes," Grandfather Trout said.

"Just to trouble him, and keep his interest up."

"Yes."

"It is not good for man to be alone."

"No," said Grandfather Trout, though whether in agreement or denial was hard to tell when the word issued from a fish's mouth. "Now let me sleep."

"Yes!" she said. "Yes, of course a Consort! What have I been thinking of? Yes!" At every word her voice grew greater. Grandfather Trout sank quickly in fear, and the very ice melted away by inches from beneath Mrs. Underhill's feet as she cried "Yes!" in a voice of thunder.

"Love!" she said to the others. "Not in the Was, not in the Will Be, but Now!"

"Love!" they all cried. Mrs. Underhill threw open a humpbacked trunk bound in black iron and began rummaging in it. She found what she wanted, wrapped it featly in white paper, bound it with red-and-white twine, neatly waxed the ends of the twine to keep them from raveling, took pen and ink, and on Mr. Woods's bent back addressed a label: all in less time than it took to think of it. "Let him follow love," she said when the package was made. "And so he'll come. Willy." She dotted a final i. "Nilly."

"Aaaah," they all said, and began to drift away, talking in low voices.

"You'll never believe this," Sylvie said to Auberon, bursting through the door into the Folding Bedroom, "but I got a job." She'd been out all day. Her cheeks were red with March wind, her eyes bright.

"Hey." He laughed, astonished, pleased. "Your Destiny?"

"Fuck destiny," she said. She tore from its hanger the coffee-dyed outfit and flung it trashcanwards. "No more excuses," she said. She pulled out work shoes, sweatshirt, muffler. She banged the shoes on the floor. "Have to dress warm," she said. "I start tomorrow. No more excuses."

"That's a good day," he said. "April Fool's."

"Just my day," she said. "My lucky day."

He laughed, raising her. April had come. And she in his embrace felt a thing that was at once relief at a danger avoided and a foreboding of that same danger, and her eyes filled at the safety she felt, within his arms, and at its fragility too. "
Papo
," she said. "You're the greatest, you know that? You really really are."

"But tell me, tell me," he said. "What's this job?"

She grinned, hugging him. "You'll never believe it," she said.

Me thinks there be not impossibilities

enough in Religion for an active faith.

—Sir Thomas Browne

In the tiny offices of Wingéd Messenger Service were: a counter or partition, behind which the dispatcher sat, chewing always an unlit cigar and plugging and unplugging the cords of the oldest PBX in the world and bellowing "Wingéd" into his headset; a line of gray metal folding chairs on which those messengers not at the moment carrying messages sat, some as still and lifeless as unplugged machines, some (like Fred Savage and Sylvie) engaged in conversation; a huge and ancient television on a chain-flown platform out of reach, forever on (Sylvie, if she wasn't running, caught episodes of "A World Elsewhere"); some urns full of sand and cigarette butts; a crackle-finish brown time clock; a back office, containing a boss, his secretary, and at odd hours a hearty but ill-looking salesman; a metal door with a bar; no windows.

It wasn't a place Sylvie liked to stay in much. In its bare, fluorescent, hard-finish shabbiness she recognized too many places where she had spent too much of her childhood: the waiting rooms of public hospitals and asylums, welfare offices, police stations, places where a congress of faces and bodies in poor clothes gathered, dispersed, were replaced always by others. She didn't, fortunately, have to spend much time there: Wingéd Messenger Service was as busy as it had ever been, and out on the cold spring streets, bound in work-boots and hooded sweatshirt (looking, she told Auberon, like a teenage dyke, but cute), she made time, glorying in the crowds, the posh offices, and the oddly-assorted secretaries (snooty, harsh, and mannered; slovenly; kind) whom she gave to and took away from. "Wingéd Messenger!" she shouted at them, no time to waste. "Sign here please." And away, in elevators crowded with soft-voiced, fine-suited men on their way to lunch, or loud-voiced back-slappers returning. Though she never learned midtown as Fred Savage knew it—every underground access, every passageway, every building which, facing on one avenue, evacuated onto another, saving half a block for a walker—she did grasp the general, and find shortcuts; and she made her lefts and rights, ups and downs, with an accuracy she was proud of.