The Early Stories (134 page)

“You've done all right,” she said seriously, awed. Then she laughed.

“What are you laughing at?”

“It reminded me of something, and now I know what. I once knew a Chinese bachelor who lived like this, in the middle of Philly. It smelled like this. Maybe it's the kerosene. Let me smell you.” She unbuttoned the two top buttons of his shirt, tugged down the neck of his undershirt, put her snub nose against his skin, and sniffed. “You don't smell Chinese yet, you still smell like Stanley. Your heart's thumping.”

“It's been a time.”

“I didn't think you wanted me to come.”

“I don't think I did want you to come.”

“But I'm here now, huh?”

“You're here.”

“How cold does it get at night?”

“Not so bad now. We'll be O.K. Are you hungry?”

“Thirsty.”

He looked down into her face to see in what sense she meant thirst, but the sun was low and his own body blocked her from the window light, so all he felt of her face was its shadowy warmth and a gingery perfume that perhaps dwelled in her hair. He gave her the cot and put a blanket on the floor beside it, so that each time he awoke that night he saw her above him, her bare bent arm luminous, her heavy body floating cloudlike on the spindly crossed legs of the cot and bellying the underside of the canvas. As if it had become possible to tamper with the sky and move the moon, he reached and touched, and then became confused, for, as her body encircled his and slipped across his fingertips, she seemed now vast and now terribly thin, thin with a child's expectant thinness as her frame yearned toward some sought position in relation to the fixed stars of his own system.

He slept late, awaking to the sound of her working on his stove. The metallic rummaging annoyed him; she seemed to be tinkering inside his head. From the back, in faded blue, she looked swollen, having feasted on him. She cursed his kerosene burners, which were reluctant to light. He turned her from his stove and, naked, used his body as a wedge to separate her from the instruments, the stove and pans, of his private life. She yielded complacently at first, but by the time he was through her eyes were strained by anger. Dabs of sunlight shuffled on the coarse floor like coins perpetually being counted. He lay upon an adversary who in a single
space of breathing might swell enough to overthrow him. They rose, and her storm came—the tears, the scorn, the stony-voiced repetitions, the pitiable reversals toward tenderness. Looking past her head, his chin burning in the halo of her uncombed hair, he saw the window giving on the morning woods as an aquarium from whose magic jagged world of green leaves stricken with sunshine this weeping would keep him forever sealed. He gave her breakfast and walked her to the edge of the land, where the steel company's No Trespassing signs were posted.

“I won't come again,” she said.

“It's too hard for you,” he told her.

“You know what you're doing?” she asked, and then answered, “You're pouring yourself down the drain.”

“I'm just like you in the trailer,” he said, smiling and watching her face for the reflection of his smile. “Independent.”

“No,” she said, in the tone of dry calm that followed her storms, “it's been forced on me. But you're choosing.”

How grateful he was, after all, to his visitors!—for each of them left him something to clarify his situation. He was choosing, yes, and, treading back through the woods, welcomed by the calls of unseen birds and the gestures of unnamed plants, he sought for some further choice, some additional dismissal with which he could atone for the night's parasitic pleasure. He smashed the mirror. He held it squarely above the hearthstone, so the last thing it reflected was a slice of blue zenith, and let it drop. The fragments he swept up and buried in a place far from the house, covering the earth with leaves so he could not find the spot again. But from that sector of woods, for a while, he felt watched, by buried eyes. The sensation passed in daylight but persisted at night, when it gave his sleep depth, as had knowing when he was a child that his mother, moving around downstairs, would on her way to bed come into his room and touch his forehead and tuck the kicked covers around him. Insomnia ceased to visit him. After Loretta's visit, he grew drowsy at twilight, was often unable to read a word, and rose with the sun.

He never saw so well, saw so much. Chill April yielded to frilly May. Buds of a hundred designs had broken unbidden. He became aware, intensely, of tiny distinctions—shades of brown and gray in the twigs, differences in the shapes of leaves, the styles of growing, a cadence expressed in the angle at which a hooved branchlet thrust from the parent branch. That he could not articulate these distinctions or could hardly name a dozen trees and flowers bathed the populations of growth in a glistening transparency
like that left by mist; as his mind slowly sorted the sea of green into types, he greeted each recognized specimen not with its name but with its very image, as one remembers a sister whose name, through marriage, has ceased to apply. His mind became a beautiful foreign book whose illustrations were enhanced, in precision and wonder, by the unintelligibility of the text. First venturing onto the spaced beams of the floorless house, he had thought of a church organ's pedals, and now the finely tuned strata of distinctions, fixed yet pliant, seemed a greater instrument, either waiting to be struck or else played so continually that an instant of silence would have boomed in his ears. The patient intricacy of moss and grass fascinated him. There was no realm so small that it repelled distinctions. Stanley felt the green and reticulate mass around him as so infinitely divisible that the thickness of a veil was coarse in comparison. Nature, that sturdy net of interlocking rapacity, dissolved for him in its own unsayable exactness, and ceased to exist, or existed merely as the description of something else.

Some boys came to see him: his two nephews and a friend. The friend was thin, new in the town, with a close-cropped skull and brown eyes so dark they seemed round. Stanley felt, awkwardly entertaining his guests, that he was addressing mostly this stranger, for the familiar leeringness and the competitive jostling of his brother's boys were things which he had determinedly ignored even when he shared a house with their noise. His visitors seemed chastened by his strangeness. He could not think what to show them; these boys had expected, perhaps, some piece of work, some monument to testify to the accumulation of his days. But there was nothing, nothing except the shelter on which he had ceased to make improvements—that, and Stanley's delicately altered sense of actuality. He walked them through the woods, showed them the overgrown rectangle of rubble where a barn must have stood, pointed out the tidy deposits of pellets with which the smaller mammals of the woods declared their presence, bid the boys bend with him to examine a bank where a combination of exposed roots, rocks, moss, and erosion had created a castle, or chain of castles, inhabited by ants. The boys began to crush the ants; Stanley shouted, and they backed from him, and he glimpsed his gauntness, his bristling red beard, in their eyes. They explored, taking him farther in the woods than he had ever thought to go alone, to a point from which the smoking chimney of a house and a glinting strip of highway could be seen. On the way they made themselves clubs and smashed them against dead branches and pitched their entire weight against dead young trees whose skeletons had hung vertical, undisturbed, for years,
upheld by the arms of the trees that had stifled them. Wherever they circled, the boys flushed death, finding the cough balls of owls wadded with mouse bones, the bloated elongated corpse of a groundhog mangled by dogs, the mysteriously severed forefoot of a deer. The matrix of abundant life held for them only these few nodes of slaughter. Stanley gave each boy an apple to provision their trek home, and sent them off with no invitation to return. In parting he sensed a susceptibility in the third child, a curiosity in those round eyes not quite satisfied, a willingness to be taught that offered itself to Stanley, in the midst of his slow learning, as a new temptation—to be a teacher. But the boy disappeared with the two others.

Stanley, who when he had lived among men had infrequently bathed, because the drawing and pollution of water seemed a waste, now bathed often, because in the nearby rivulet the water ran pure night and day and not to have used it would have been a waste. The stream was only inches deep and a man's width wide; to wet himself Stanley had to lie on the bed of red sand and smoothed sandstones and make of himself a larger stone that the little stream, fumbling at first, consented to lave. To wet his back he would roll over and lie staring up at the explosive blue rents in the canopy of leaves and feel the icy stream divide at his scalp. Then he would rise, dripping, a silver man, and walk naked back, slightly uphill, through the warm ragged mulch of last autumn's leaves. He had thought of building a dam, but the thought offended him. Still water would attract mosquitoes. More obscurely, the gap of water while the stream pooled would carry through the woods toward the sea as a kind of outcry betraying his existence here. Yet, though there was no natural pool where he could so much as squat, it was important in this bathing that every inch of him, even his eyelids, know the water. Otherwise he could not walk through the woods married to the surrounding purity.

One day, thus returning, he was conscious of being watched, but blamed the buried mirror until he saw, standing startled in the lake of ferns in front of the house, the third boy, alone. The boy was the first to speak. “I'm sorry,” he said, and turned to run, and Stanley, seized by an abrupt fear of loss, of being misunderstood, ran after him—a terrifying figure, probably, gaunt and wet and wordlessly openmouthed among the serene verticals of the trees, his penis bobbling. The boy ran faster, and Stanley soon stopped. His pounding heart seemed to run a few paces farther and then return to the protection of his shaking rib cage. He was amazed at himself, ashamed. His spurt of pursuit had reversed months of patient waiting, waiting—he saw now—for himself to be overtaken. He
saw how narrowly he had escaped a ruinous distraction, a disciple who would have diluted his vulnerable solitude and siphoned goodness from him faster than it could be secreted.

Now, each morning, he awoke with a sense of having been called. At first, it was the slightest of sensations, imparting a shadowy, guilty restlessness to his waking motions. Gradually, as the sensation was repeated on the following three mornings, the unheard voice gathered to itself clear impressions of masculinity, of infinite gentleness and urgency. It was distinct from any dream; he knew what dreams were, and this call cut through them. The call took place, as near as he could judge, in the instant between his dreams' stopping and his eyelids' opening. But also it seemed to underlie the dreams, like a telephone ringing in another room; the dream phantoms derived from his memories of humanity were mocked and made doubly phantasmal, performing in patterns constantly twisted and interrupted by an underlying pressure. In his desire to hear the voice, so to speak, face to face, to grasp its masculinity and taste its urgency direct, Stanley fell asleep as if diving toward a rendezvous. For two nights, in reprimand, the voice was silent. A humble learner, he concluded that the voice had been unreal, that he was drawing close, as Bernard had predicted, to going crazy. The next morning, the seventh since the sensation had first touched him, it touched him strongly, just as the dark was softening. He sat up in answer to a command spoken in the room and perceived that the call was a condensation, like the dawn dew, of a reality that existed continually, that persisted through daylight. The minute truth of bark textures, the many-layered translucence of leaves, the stately gliding intervals between tree trunks all bespoke something that wanted to be answered, a silence unsure of itself. But it was so shy, so tactful, that to hear it distinctly would be like—as Stanley had once read of counterfeiters doing—dividing a dollar bill edgewise with a razor blade.

Though he turned aside to cook, to eat, to swing his ax into a fallen birch, the sensation remained, singing in the spaces between ax strokes, permeating the day. It was within reach, the graduation he sought, the final clarity, a tissue width removed from apprehension; it was waiting for him to be totally still. Then, he knew, this vaporous presence would condense into words and pour itself generously into his mind. He bathed, dried himself, dressed in fresh clothes he had himself washed in the brook and to whose clean faded fibres adhered a few reddish granules of sand, like sacred salt. He composed himself on the broad flat threshold, and listened. A single twig lay half in, half out of an oval of moisture that the
shape of the stone had collected. A breeze transparently touched the treetops, and in a flickering of green the high leaves sharpened themselves against the whetstone of light. A silence embraced all phenomena; the sound beneath the silence approached. Stanley leaned his back against the door frame, wondered vaguely what the wood itself felt, and relaxed into a joy not very different from fear.

The forest shattered; Morris broke from the trees and ran panting toward him, shook him, cursed him. “You've ruined us! You've made fools of all of us!”

Stanley could not speak, he was so deeply locked in the fibrous grasp of what had almost overtaken him. He looked up at his brother and saw a walking fever, a flushed pink skin that seared his green mind painfully.

“What got into you? The kid was so scared he went for days without telling. Bernie's been fighting to keep you out of jail. They're right behind me. I ran ahead to get you to put your clothes on.”

But he had them on. Though tempted to protest, and aware that Morris wanted a response, Stanley chose not to desecrate his portion of the silence. He turned his head and saw the erect shadows that had appeared on the far edge of the field of ferns. Bernard, his two boys eager like hounds, the third boy, quailing, transfixed in the cataract of misunderstanding. There were two other men. One wore wine-colored slacks, a zebra shirt, and sunglasses, which he removed. It was Tom, come from California, clothed more strangely than a hermit. And a man in a gray business suit: with his new clarity of vision Stanley saw that he was a medical officer, or an agent of the steel company. He saw them all as standing upon a sea of more than crystalline fragility, achieved cell by cell in silence. Then they came rapidly toward him, and there was a thumping, a bumbling, a clumsy crushing clamor.