Mortal Love (3 page)

“Go play for half an hour, okay? And stay out of trouble.”

The first floor was dark, but light spilled down the stairway from the upper stories. I started climbing the steps, passing from rooms I recognized to rooms I didn't, until finally I reached the fourth floor.

It was bright up there, and cool. A not-unpleasant air of neglect hung about the corridor, and the house's pervasive smell of turpentine and oils. Drifts of dead insects covered the windowsills. I started walking, sandwich in one hand and dog in the other. I remember stopping in astonishment in front of a closed door. There was a piece of jewelry stuck on it, a gold-and-silver dragonfly with wings of silvered crystal. I tried to pick it up, and the dragonfly skimmed from my fingers, disappearing down the corridor toward a window.

I chased after it, but I wasn't fast enough: the dragonfly was gone. When I stopped, I saw that what was before me was not a window but a painting. I stared at it, sucking on my stuffed dog's nose.

It was a painting of a woman. She had very long red-brown hair falling across her face. She seemed to be asleep, but not in bed: she was lying on top of a mossy rock, which I thought was strange if she was supposed to be sleeping. What was stranger was that she was naked. And strangest of all was that a man, or a sort of man, was kneeling between her legs, grasping each of her calves and pulling them apart so that he could peer between them.

The picture was hung too high for me to get a clear look at what the man was staring at. So I put down my dog and ran through the hall, opening doors until I found a room with a footstool in it. I dragged this back and clambered onto it to examine the picture more closely.

The man had horns on his head, flat curling horns, almost hidden within his shiny black hair. The horns reminded me of seashells I found sometimes on the gravel beach. Once Red had shown me a very, very old one, hard as a rock, older than the dinosaurs, he said: an ammonite.

The man's horns were like that. He had long, slanting eyes and a very red tongue, like a bloodworm. As I stared, I began to get a jittery feeling in my stomach. I brought my face very close to the painting, until I, too, could see what was inside the sleeping woman.

Silvery green spilled from the cleft between her legs. At first I thought it was fog. But it wasn't fog; it was light falling from a tiny lantern, held by a tiny man. He stood in the recess between the woman's legs as though he were guarding a door, and as I squinted I saw that it
was
a door—a tunnel, opening in the mossy cleft and leading . . .

Where? I wasn't sure, but I was almost certain that I could see other figures, if I squinted just right and looked past the lantern bearer. An entire crowd of them, some tiny and others not small at all, giants they would be if only I could see them clearly. My heart began to race; I thought I might throw up.

Because there were still more figures in the painting, hidden in the trees and leaves: all watching, all staring at the sleeper and the peeking man—but also, I realized, staring at
me,
Valentine, the peeking boy.

“Remember me,” said a woman's voice. She said a word then that I did not recognize; yet it was somehow familiar to me, and I knew it was not just a word but a name. Her voice came again, a whisper, but when I whirled to look, no one was there.

“Red!” I shouted. I jumped from the footstool and ran toward the staircase. “
Red
—”

That was when I remembered my toy dog. I looked back and saw it lying near the wall. Something hovered in the air above it. A dark fluttery thing like a leaf or petal; as I stared, it floated down to land upon the dog's matted head. With a scream I raced down the steps, shrieking until I found Red in the kitchen.

“You know you should never go upstairs alone,” was all he said. In fact he had never told me any such thing. “You know that.”

He didn't ask what had frightened me, and he didn't seem surprised that I was scared out of my wits. If anything he seemed pleased, even relieved. He made me another sandwich and retrieved my toy dog, and we returned to the boathouse.

I began drawing all the time. Red started by buying me coloring books and crayons and cheap drawing paper, but after a very short while, it became clear that my talents were precocious, and we began raiding my grandfather's studio for still more pens and ink and color pencils. When I filled one sketchbook, we'd rifle Radborne's bureaus and closets for another.

It was years before it dawned on me that some of those pigments had been manufactured a century before. The dozens of empty sketchbooks we found were of similar vintage, their covers faded but the pages inside unblemished. One November day Red went up to Goldengrove and dragged Radborne's ancient drafting table to the boathouse. It was immense, custom made of mahogany with walnut inlays, and engraved with the initials JC. I always assumed they represented some other unknown ancestor who'd also been a painter.

All through the long island winters, I'd sit there with the woodstove burning, drawing while Red worked on bookshelves and cabinets and masts. The floor was covered with curls of pine shavings and balled-up papers. Red made me a special stool so that I could reach the drafting table.

“There you go.” He eyed me approvingly, his beard flecked with sawdust and cigarette ash. “You look like a real apprentice now.”

Day after day, year after year, I drew trees: labyrinthine trees that metastasized into vast yew cities, with ladders and ropes linking one level to another and long-eyed people rustling in the shadows. By the time I was eleven, the yew cities metastasized into the land that I named Ealwearld. I drew maps that formed the outlines of oaks and tamaracks, and detailed genealogies of the trees' denizens, who fought wars over fruit and walnuts and lobsters, carved spears and longbows from yew wood, distilled poisons from monkshood and skullcap.

Ealwearld was not a happy place. Its human-size inhabitants ate so much that there was never enough food for the smaller long-eyed warriors in the trees, whose nocturnal depredations upon their rivals involved blinding them with the stingers of wasps and yellow jackets or tying them by the hair to iron bedsteads and leaving them to starve. I'd go up to the fourth floor and look at my grandfather's paintings, sometimes incorporating his characters into my notebooks.

But then I slammed into puberty like a brick wall, and Ealwearld changed. Radborne's painting of the sleeping woman especially fascinated me, and gradually my imaginary land became her: a woman who was a vast tree, with boles for breasts and leaves for eyes and a mouth that opened into another, hidden country where even stranger creatures lived. I drew her obsessively, masturbating over the images when I was done. My childhood stories of Ealwearld became a chronicle of the woman, who had herself become a labyrinth. I hid these notebooks beneath a loose shelf in my room at Goldengrove. Eventually there were nine of them. I called the woman, and her chronicle, Vernoraxia. When I was fourteen, I saw her.

* * *

I was home
from Andover for Halloween. Red drove down and brought me back to the island for the weekend. Halloween was the closest my family—if you could call my brother and Red and me a family—ever came to celebrating a holiday together. For as long as I could remember, Simon had hosted a party on Halloween night. His friends from the city and D.C. would come up several days beforehand, taking over Goldengrove's spare rooms and studios; Red would fire up the propane lanterns and gas refrigerator, fill the fireplaces with applewood and oak, arrange to ferry any latecomers from the mainland, and invite all those island friends who were wintering over. It was the only time I ever felt as though I occupied the same world as my brother did, or his friends.

The day of the party was crazy, as always. Simon made multiple trips to the island general store and the harbor to get supplies. My brother's friends pillaged Goldengrove's closets and my grandfather's studio for costumes, trading makeup and wigs and drugs in the corridors, shrieking and blasting old Roxy Music albums on the ancient cabinet hi-fi. Radborne had kept two quartersawn oak wardrobes in his studio, filled with antiquated clothing that he used in his paintings—Revolutionary and Civil War uniforms, Edwardian gowns, Johnny Appleseed's ragged trews, medieval-style tunics that had graced models for Robin Hood and Maid Marian, Benedick and Beatrice, Tristan and Iseult.

But by the time I rolled out of bed late that afternoon and found my way to the second-floor studio, all of the good stuff was gone. A torn satin doublet lay on the floor, surrounded by green glass beads sprung from a broken necklace. On the windowsill was a bottle of Jack Daniel's, nearly half full. I took a long pull from this, then started looking for a costume.

It was slim pickings. One wardrobe was completely empty. Alongside the other, T-shirts and flimsy dresses were heaped like rummage-sale leftovers: nothing but crap. I kicked them aside, yanked open the door to see if there was anything left. Torn stockings dangled from a wire coat hanger like a snake's shed skin; on another, wooden hanger hung an old-fashioned woolen jacket. I pulled it out: dark burgundy, smelling of camphor and some kind of fruity perfume. It had glass buttons and enough detailing around the collar that I figured it must have cost a lot of money, once upon a time.

It was big, too big I thought at first. But I'd grown since last summer, shooting up nearly five inches, so I was now over six feet, though it would be another few years before I stopped growing. When I pulled the jacket on, I was surprised at how well it fit; and when I examined myself in the mirror, I was surprised at how good I looked. I pushed my lank hair back from my face and stared at myself unsmiling: a tall, slightly gawky kid.

Yet not even so gawky anymore: I could see that, and I'd heard it, from girls (and some boys) at school. I lit a cigarette, sat on the windowsill, and drank most of the rest of the Jack Daniel's.

By now I had a pretty good buzz on. Outside, it was already dark, not twilight or sunset but that terrible full dark that falls like a fire curtain onto the islands in late fall. From downstairs echoed my brother's idea of party music—Thomas Dolby, show tunes, Bryan Ferry crooning “Both Ends Burning.” I stared beyond the scrim of yews, the trees so black they were like rents in the sky.

“You don't fucking scare me,” I said, and stumbled into the hall.

There was no electricity at Goldengrove. Red had lit one of the gas mantles on the second-floor landing, and it sent a thin yellow gleam through the corridor. At the top of the steps, I recognized one of Simon's lawyer friends, despite his face's being hidden behind a rubber Ronald Reagan mask. A guy I hated, drinking a cup of tea between tokes on a joint. Before he could see me, I turned and staggered back down the hall. There was another set of stairs at the other end, a servant's passage that led to the kitchen, and I hurried toward it.

That was when I saw her. Standing in the doorway to one of those empty rooms where Simon's friends were camping out: a woman nearly as tall as I was, taller even, wearing chunky lace-up Frye boots and some kind of long hippie dress. She was swaying back and forth, her hands catching the gaslight in a weird way so that her fingers had a gray-blue glow to them. I usually avoided my brother's friends, but something in the way she was moving, the way she was watching me without seeming to look at me, made me stop.

It was her: the woman in the painting. Her long red-brown hair covering half her face, her eyes shining out green, then gold, then green again.

Green again.

I stopped, staring. Somewhere in the room behind her, something moved, small footsteps on a bare wooden floor.

“Is—is that a dog?” I said.

She stepped into the hallway. On the wall a mirror flickered—I thought it was a mirror—a figure moving, a dark, slow rush like water flowing across the wallpaper. Her hand moved to take my chin, tilting my head back so that I was staring directly into her eyes, splintered with gaslight, shining yellow gold then green, always green.

“You are very young,” she whispered. Her eyes grew unfocused; her breath upon my face was warm and smelled of cider. “So young, too young.”

I gazed at her wide-eyed, unable to move, unable to do anything until she began to tug off my jacket and let it slip to the floor between us. Her head tipped so that she was staring at me sideways; she began to move her hand through the air slowly, up and down, so that the light from the gas lamp flickered strobe-wise across my vision, slats of yellow light between fingers like cracked blue slates.

“Shadows,” she whispered. She looked and sounded like someone hypnotized. “See?”

Then her mouth touched mine, and I grabbed her, pushing her onto the floor and gasping as she pulled up my T-shirt, then unzipped my jeans and tugged them down. I thought of nothing, not discovery nor who she was, nothing but how she smelled, of apples and smoke, and how she felt under me, solid and liquid, moving and still. I fucked her, and it felt like hours, but it was only minutes, a minute, before I came, the same song from downstairs just winding to an end, the dog just completing its circuit of the room, the woman crying out but not in pleasure, even I knew that, but in disappointment and what sounded like despair.

“What?” I gasped, pushing myself up on my hands to stare down at her. “What, what is it?”

She was gone. On the floor beneath me lay someone else, someone I knew, a model named Maddy who was a sometime girl of Simon's. Eyes blue not green, hennaed hair, breath a bitter exhalation of meth and gin. She stared at me, then smiled crookedly, wriggling to pull down her dress.

“It's okay, sweetie,” she said. “You're just young, that happens. . . .”

I pulled away, staggering to my feet and yanking my pants up, bashing against the wall as I rushed to leave. There was no sign of my woolen jacket. Something fell to the floor, not a mirror but a drawing, its frame shattering and a spray of glass momentarily igniting the air.