The Bookman's Tale (10 page)

I drove up to the main street, did a right, drove past the doctor's building, thought she might be standing on the sidewalk. Drove on past the hotel. Saw a clock on a church, nearly six o'clock. Heavy traffic now. Lights green, lights red, wiped the sweat off my face at a red light. No left, did a right. Saw a sign, “Loretto Street,” pulled up at the
Denver Auto Park
, Mike making change for somebody.

“Didn't find her?”

“Can I use your phone?”

“Help yourself.”

I phoned the doctor's office, got a recording. Phoned the hotel. “Is my wife waiting there in the lobby?” “What's she look like?” I hung up. Who can say what his wife looks like? I walked up to the corner, no idea why, just to keep moving. Cop by a lamp post watching the traffic like it was a TV movie. I said, “Excuse me, officer, but I can't find my wife” (nutty thing to say but I was going nutty). Before he could say anything something caught his eye and he walked off, and I leaned against the lamp post and said aloud but just for myself, Now look here! slack off a little bit. Don't press the emergency button. She may be standing there by the pawn shop now, or sitting in a taxi (a long walk from the doctor's office).

I got the car from Mike and halfway to Valmont Street, on a main street in the midst of home-going traffic I thought I had better phone the pawn-shop man to watch out for her on the sidewalk and tell her to wait there, I was on the way. Plenty of space in front of a corner drug store and a phone booth and I pulled over and stopped. Before I could open the car door a motorcycle cop zipped up beside me, boiling. “Get this car out of here!” “My wife—” “Can't you read.
NO PARKING ANY TIME
.” “I've lost my wife—” “Get it out!”

Pyt said, “Quite a pickle, Mr. Pickle!” and Ray said, “Let him finish,” (seeking his wife, as the Doctor was seeking Meg, Ray seeking Claudia, Pyt himself seeking the rest of his sunken doubloons—and nobody, according to the Doctor, going to find just what he sought?).

I drove on.
NO LEFT
.
NO TURN
. busses, crowds waiting. Red light. Green light. Where was I going? Valmont? Loretto? Couldn't say. Car ahead made a right, I made a right. Green light, squawking horns behind me. And there she was! On a corner. She hadn't seen me. I slammed the horn, slammed it again. “Hey! Hey! You!
You
!”—I couldn't remember her name—

“But Edward, even if your company doesn't publish fiction you know people that do,” the taxi slowing at a road fork, turning off into a dirt road slanted up the mountainside, hardly more than a trail. He said, Oh there were plenty of people who published fiction—sensing the old familiar situation taking shape again: eager writer, wary publisher, out-of-breath swimmer and just-in-time lifeguard (or seeming so to her, Janet Somebody, accounting for her troubling herself with someone her father's age), he lifting a hand at a far-off sound like faint thunder out of cotton-boll clouds that flashed him an uneasy picture of a road like this in a tropical cloudburst.

She said, “Drums,” adding, “Tumbas. Pans,” as if annoyed at his bringing up such irrelevances, then went on with what she was saying in a way that made him see Mary intent on finishing a seam in her sewing machine, “And besides, this isn't exactly fiction, not exactly.”

He said, Most fiction wasn't “exactly fiction,” his words bringing back to him his earlier thought that her book derived somehow from the “back country”—and might after all be of some interest to the Press? (the taxi striking a pothole as if to signal him a No, the jolt throwing the side of her arm against him, flooding his mind with other arms, other responses, like far-away voices on turn-of-the-century phones, hardly recognizable).

“If you think it's any good you could send me to somebody. If it's no good you wouldn't have to. No obligation,” touching the side of his hand as if to reassure him. He said he wouldn't have a chance to read it here, would only be on the Island a day or two, the words carrying a sort of negative that was like his crippled response to her touch. Leading him on to soften it a little with, “Tell me about your book,” an invitation that was like offering a writer a chair whether you wanted him to sit down or not—and they always “sat down”. Or like asking “What's his name?” of the fond mother, or “How old is he?” He knew from experience you needed to be prepared for a full answer.

But he wasn't ready for, “It's about what you will feel when you read it,” laughing a little as if she had overdressed it and adding, “I'd have to recite the whole book to show you what I mean—not that I couldn't do that.” He said he would leave her his address, she could send it to him; doubting that she ever would and in any case postponing the need to sample it, dip into it, search about for a gentle negative. And becoming even more wary of it when she said, “It's about myself,” though he managed a “Why not?”

“Myself to the age of possibly six months.”

He couldn't help smiling at her profile in the dimness, couldn't help saying, “A short story?”, which she ignored, in no mood for trivial fun, or not hearing him through what she was thinking, quiet for a time, facing the bouncing light-beams brushing over the forest alongside, the upright trees given a tilt by the slanted road—watching the lights, but as if she might come back to her manuscript any minute.

And he in the silence asking himself What did he make of this girl, this woman?—appealing to him (literally, wanting his help), and in another sense not at all appealing to him; leaving him half annoyed at her persistence, her assurance, and at the same time sympathetic for her concern with this book she had put together. Watching her face, with its features that added up to what in his twenties he would have called pretty but that nowadays suggested an individuality that interested him more—or might, if he asked some everyday questions about her life to bring his information up to the level of hers about him.

Held back from asking, though, by the chance such questions would lead her to think he was more interested in her than he was, would read her book with more interest than he really would; and besides, whatever came of this trip into “the back country” (the “District of Look Behind,” she had called it once) he was too old to have it matter much who his companion was. Certainly he was not particularly “drawn” to this one (in his old-fashioned terminology)—too somehow “suspended” for his antique tastes—and yet the touch of her fingers had stayed with him as if they had smudged him with a color. Not as their touch would have done in his twenties but longer than he was prepared for today, since the two seconds, the half-second, that had changed his life, crippled him, left him immune to such touches—and enjoying the immunity in a Pyrrhic sort of way, as he half enjoyed aging for the narrowing space in which disasters had to operate; but hoping, and believing, such immunity would end at the sight of Claudia, swept away in the flood of past images.

And yet he had a liking for these writing people driven to underscore their lives with words as if to reassure their doubts of existing, and he brought up the book again as you might return a pencil you had borrowed. “Your story, don't you think it would be better to finish it first? It's hard enough for a publisher to guess about a novel even when it's finished,” saying it partly as good fatherly advice and partly for the possibility such a delay might let him escape reading it altogether—the mention of “story” throwing him back for an instant to the Christmas party and Erik handing out “ballots” for their vote: “Your ballot, madam,” to Sarah-Wesley, the mate beside her brushing him away with a word in Norwegian, and, “Would you like to see my School? I have pictures.” “Oh, yes I would.”—And the vote on the stories never taken—

The woman beside him saying, “It's almost finished,” dismissing it, lifting her chin as if listening to the drums, closer now and giving the effect of seeming larger drums, then saying as though she had been thinking of nothing else, “There's no telling what you're going to see, Edward. It's like a scuba dive into another world, that's the same world too.” He said the chef seemed to have reservations about their going, and she said, “Oh Hugh Jim! ‘Old year dying, new year borning'—what of it! We celebrate New Year's too, don't we? If that's what they're doing,” hardly hearing her for the question that often crossed his mind in the presence of almost any woman: Would he want to be married to her? as you might pass a house and wonder if you would like to live there. Usually answered by, Under no circumstances! Also the answer in regard to this one, “attractive” to many, no question, but not to him—the reason too subtle to point to, unless it rested on his own shortcomings.

“Lot and his daughters once, somebody told us, or something remotely like it. Somebody else said it wasn't ‘Lot' at all, they never heard of Lot. But ‘Old year dying, new year borning,' that's not so far away from Lot and his daughters.”

He said he had forgotten the story of Lot, and she said, “Oh you remember Lot. Where the older sister said unto the younger, ‘Our father is old and there is not a man in the earth to come unto us after the manner of all the earth …'” voice trailing off as the car made a sharp turn onto a different surface and shortly stopped in a wider space beside an oxcart with solid wheels and shafts resting on the ground, the wooded slopes beyond it vanishing like sorcery as the driver cut the lights.

And springing out again as he pulled them on in reflex to the sudden voice beyond the cart saying, “Hold it!” as a tall man in a sleeveless coral-red shirt moved past the wheels. He and the driver gripped each other's forearm in a fraternal greeting, the driver mumbling what might have been “Hugh Jim” and nodding his cap a quarter-inch in their direction, the man motionless for a moment as if to give his thoughts a steady landing-place then holding out the pink flat of his hand in a gesture of “Wait!” and disappearing into the trees, the bamboo, the driver close behind him.

Disappearing as if into the drum-sounds, the pounding ornamented now with lacy fluttering slaps breaking the sustained rumble that he seemed to feel as much as hear, a sort of visceral hearing as if his whole body were listening, every hair lifting to listen, the girl moving closer beside him (or he moving closer to her) as if seeking shelter from rain or from wind, or from they hardly knew what, no words between them as though the muttering drums carried words enough—the man reappearing in the orange glow and gesturing behind him, saying nothing, then pressing the light switch and producing darkness like a soft explosion, pitch black about them lined with cracks of light through the bamboo.

They stopped by a tropical tree as if the scene below them demanded a halt, stood for a minute among the spread of exposed roots as if hoping to interpret the drumbeats, then crouched on the side of the slope, gazing down into a clearing in front of a hut, ignored, if noticed at all, by a circle of festively dressed men and women seated crosslegged on the level ground, lanterns before them set in front of metal basins on edge as reflectors, a smoldering fire in the middle mostly ashes seeming to produce no smoke but only wisps of an aromatic scent that he couldn't place, the scent floating up like smoke. Drums in a cluster across from the hut pounding like hearts of strong runners—72 to the minute, brief flutters of 144, then back to 72—bass drums from oil barrels, tenor drums from barrels sawed in half, from trunks of trees. The sudden grip of her hand seemed as much a response to the drums as a need for simple contact, though he wondered if he weren't reading himself into the movement, the touch of her fingers crossing out the years between them, or some of them.

Dancing bodies—young men, young women—all bare-chested, all wrapped in swinging colored skirts corded at the waist, women hardly distinguishable from men except by their young tight breasts, the frailty of their shoulders and the just-offbeat sway of their hips, all shining with sweat in the lantern light and the fire light like wet tin, dancing to the thumping drums and the undulating rope of wordless moaning from the circle—the half-circle—moaning that rose and fell in an up-and-down unfolding rise and fall like the road they had come by, climbing into shrill peaks of sound that fell abruptly into sound-valleys as if crowded over a cliff, the dancers making a drum out of the hard earth with their pounding feet, all of it with an unaccountable feel, for him, of being preparatory, making him think of “Overture,” but Overture to a Second or Third Act, as if he had missed the opening, he and his hostess—seated halfway up the slope, elbows on a bed of leaves that were dry but still held a smell of mold suggesting damp earth below, as what they saw seemed laid on much they didn't see, only felt, only smelled, the dancers moving to the rhythm of the slapping hands, the moaning, the almost-singing, girl breasts swinging just out of cadence like alto voices under soprano.

Then a lull in the moaning, the drums only murmuring, and two youths leading out of the hut a frail and ancient man in a striped robe to his bare feet and seating him gently in a weathered wicker chair with a high back as if presenting the High Priest of the ritual (or Gran Met himself!), the drums suddenly silent in a sort of reversed fanfare, the dancers still, motionless in a half-circle facing the chair, the throne.

The whole of it resolving for him into an impulsive need to touch this young half-his-age body beside him; that moved against him as if on the swell of the same wave, he leaning across her and kissing her stranger's mouth, reminded of Claudia by the river and the gallery of memories she moved in like a shadow among the light-dark-light images in front of him, in front of them. She whispering, “Lot?” in a question, and after a moment, “‘And the first born said unto the younger, Come, let us make our father drink wine and we will lie with him, that we may preserve the seed of our father.…'”