The Early Stories (97 page)

the pen in my hand

the whiteness of the paper

a draft on my ankles—the stone floor—the sounds of the castle—your step?

Beware of Mark—he is strong—pathetic—my king brought low—he protects me. I am teaching myself to love him.

I would have loved the boat.

Love is too painful.

If the narcissi you planted come up next spring I will dig them out.

What a funny thing to write—I can't tell if this is a letter to you or not—I dismay myself—Mark thinks I should be committed—he is more mature than you and I
   do you remember the flowers and the books you gave me?

For my sake end it—your knock never comes—the winter here is hard—children sledding—the mountains are sharp through the window—I have a scratchy throat—Mark says psychosomatic—I hear you laugh.

Tr

Please return—nothing matters

My Dear Denoalen:

Your advice has been followed with exemplary success. Confronted with the actuality of marriage, the young man bolted even sooner than we had anticipated. The Queen is accordingly disillusioned and satisfactorily tractable.

Therefore I think that the several legal proceedings against them both may be halted at this time. By no means, however, do I wish to waive all possibility of further legal action. I am in possession of an interminable, impudent, and incriminating letter written by the confessed lover subsequent to his defection. If you desire, I will forward it to you for photo-static reproduction as a safeguard.

In the case that, through some event or events unforeseen, the matter were after all to come to court, I agree wholeheartedly that their plea of having accidentally partaken of a magic potion will not stand up. Yet your strong suggestion that execution should be the punishment for both does not seem to me to allow for what possible extenuating circumstances there are. It is indisputable, for example, that throughout the affair Tristan continued to manifest, in battle, perfect loyalty to me, and prowess quite in keeping with the standards he had set in the days prior to his supposed enchantment. Also, their twin protestations of affection for me, despite their brazen and neurotic pursuance of physical union, did not ring entirely falsely. It was, after all, Tristan's feat (i.e., slaying the dragon of Whitehaven) that brought her to Tintagel; and, while of course this is in no sense a legally defensible claim, I can appreciate that, in immature and excitable minds, it might serve as a shadow of a claim. It will do us both good, as fair-minded Englishmen, to remember that we are dealing here with a woman of Irish blood and a man whose upbringing was entirely Continental. In addition, there is the Queen herself as a political property to consider. Alive, she adorns my court. The populace is partial to her. Further, the long peace between Ireland and Cornwall which our marriage has assured should not be rashly jeopardized.

Weighing all these factors, then, and not excluding the private dispositions of my heart, I have settled on a course of action more moderate than that which you now advise. Tristan's banishment we may assume to be permanent. Return will result in recapture, trial, and death. The Queen will remain by my side. Her long sojourn in the Wood of Morois has without doubt heightened her appreciation of the material advantages she enjoys in my palace. My power and compassion have been manifested to her, and she is essentially too rational to resist their imperative appeal. As long as her present distracted state obtains, I am compelling her to submit to psychoanalysis. If her distraction persists without improvement, I will have her committed. I am confident this will not be necessary. On the remote chance that the “magic potion” is more than a fable, I have instructed my alchemists to develop an antidote. I am fully in control of matters at last.

All the best,                

(Dictated but not signed)

M
ARK:
R
EX
        

The Morning
 

He lived alone, in a room only she had ever made habitable. Each morning he awoke to the same walls and was always slightly surprised at the sameness of the cracks and nail holes and replastered patches, as if this pattern were a set of thoughts to which a night's solid meditation had not added the merest nick of a new idea. He awoke to the same ticking clock on the mock mantel, the same shivering half-height refrigerator, the same nagging sour smell that, behind the baseboard and around the sink, had come to live with him. He would dress, and boil an egg, and crack it on a piece of toast, and heat last evening's coffee, and rinse the plate and cup, and take up a book, and sit and wait. The chair would grow suffocating. The sense of the words would skid and circle senselessly under the print. He would rise, and walk around the room, pausing at every place where they had lain together, staring, as if terrified, at the bed that still bore two pillows. She was a nurse, and worked afternoons and evenings, and used to come to him in the mornings. He was a student, but of what, he had forgotten. As if to remember, he would look out the window.

Of the city outside, he could see several brick walls, and a small flat roof of pebbles her bare feet had consecrated in the summer past, and a rusty construct of metal, almost organically complex, that was a chimney or a vent or the mouth of a chute and that may or may not have been in use. In the broad gaps between brick walls he could see a skyline that had a gold dome in it, and delicate smokestacks which the morning sun whittled like church balusters, and parallel plumes of smoke quickly indistinguishable from natural clouds, and a kind of subdued twinkle, as upon a tranquil ocean, that testified to the world of activity the city concealed. At moments his dull attention caught, like a slack sail idly filling, a breath, from this multifaceted horizon, of the hope that set in motion and sustained
so many industrial efforts, so much commercial traffic, such ingenious cross-fertilization of profit, such energetic devotion to the metamorphosis of minerals, the transport of goods, the interplay of calculations, the efficiency of machines. The skyline then spread itself before his eyes like one of those laborious Asiatic pictorial conceits that compose an elephant out of naked maidens, or depict a tree of gods whose faintest twig doubles as a smile and whose smallest bud is also a fingernail. A sense of human constructiveness would seize him and try to lift him again into the airy realm of fresh ideas, eddying notes, scholarly ambition, and purpose. The forgotten object of his studies would present itself to him like a long-scorned wife who has taken a lover and again grown beautiful. He would panic with jealousy. But the pang, like a flitting glimmer from something reflective on the horizon, would pass; his eyes would shorten their focus and he would leadenly observe how the rectangular windowpanes were being rounded by the infringement of successive layers of paint carelessly applied to the muntins. A kind of demon of disconnection would abruptly occupy his body, and he felt his heart as an angrily pulsing intruder, his hands as hanging presences weighted with blood sent from a great distance. He felt within himself the intricate scaffolding of mechanical connection and chemical coöperation that upheld his life, and experienced its complexity as a terrible tenuousness. He would go to the sofa and lift one of the cushions. There, in a dingy sanctum of upholstery, lay a few long hairs, almost invisible on the black cloth. He would study them as if to recreate the head from which they had strayed, and the face that had masked this head with a soul, and the body that had given this soul extension. By picking up one hair and holding it to the light he could detect a faint ghost of the red-gold color that used to spill, a careless gift, across his bare shoulders. He would replace the hair, and restore the cushion, as spinsters press a flower into a Bible.

The room was, if anything, bigger than it needed to be. When he sat and tried to read, the unused space seemed to watch him with eyes of knobs and nail holes and knotted configurations in the carpet. The space cried for another person to occupy it. Two had just fitted in this room; their voices had flattened the walls, pressed the furniture back into its servile state of being wood and cloth, submerged the shuddering of the refrigerator and the ticking of the clock. When he opened the door to her (she always looked a little startled and wary, but why?—who could she expect it to be but him?), his heart would fill his chest so tightly he had to hold her against him, like a compress, for minutes while the threat of its bursting subsided.

From the first, their embrace had seemed predetermined. His hands always went to the same places on her back, one at the nape of her neck, the other at the base of her spine. Always he rested his face on the same side of her head, so that for all he knew now she might have worn a different perfume behind the other ear. The perfume he inhaled was powdery, a hushed fragrance less of flowers than of spice, strangely far away in the wilds of her hair, and tinged, perhaps only in his imagination, with an ethereal sweetness left from the hospital corridors. She was clean, beautifully clean, and he had associated this also with her work in the hospital, work which, it seemed to him, in its daily experience of bodies enabled her to accept, so totally, so frontally, his own.

Usually she would be wearing a street dress when she came, blue or green or brown, and when she left, at noon, she would be wearing a nurse's white uniform. Between these two costumes there was a third, when she was clothed in her skin and its aura; so that the morning, which in the days before she first came had been so single in its purpose and so monotonous in its execution, became instead a triptych, whose two side panels, when her footsteps had receded down the stairs and the outer door of the building had closed behind her, folded in memory over the central panel, whose beauty could not be remembered but had to be, each time, revealed. The very hours took their tint from the pattern of her visits, the hour after nine being blue or green or brown, the hour after that tan and auburn and pink and pale, and the final hour, the most hurried, often reduced to a few quick minutes, sheer white, like the flash that engulfs the screen when the film has run out and clatters loosely in the projector. Perhaps because these minutes were closest to him, across the long gap that separated him from her last visit, he saw them most distinctly—the square folds of her starched blouse, the sudden bun she composed with the hairpins they could find, the flat white shoes and plain cotton stockings that, in innocently shaping her calves and starkly emphasizing her female solidity, revived the erotic fire that her natural body, in its pliant naturalness, had damped.

He loved her in her uniform, and on the occasions when he had ventured into the hospital for a glimpse of her he felt in the corridors of identically uniformed women as if he were raiding a harem, or a cloister of the lascivious nuns who populate French pornography. There was, in her rising from beside him to don white, something blasphemous and yet holy, a reassumption of virginity emblematic of the (to a man) mysterious inviolability of a woman. It was like nothing else in his experience. A book, once read, can only be reread; a machine, used, imperceptibly wears out.
But she, she came to him always beautifully clean and slightly startled, like a morning, and left, at noon, immaculate.

Dressed otherwise, she was in comparison disappointing. Often she left her heels and silk stockings and street dress behind in his room, as a pledge to return. Their presence was not as satisfying as it should have been; there was an unease surrounding them, a vague request to be explained and justified. And when, in the night, she returned, and passed from the uniform into them, it was a descent. Dressed as other women, she became one of them, a woman who sat in restaurants, and ate the food, and drank sometimes too much, and nervously crossed and recrossed the legs self-consciously lengthened by high spike heels, and talked a little awry. He impossibly expected of her conversation the same total frontal fit her body gave him. The woman separated from him by a restaurant table was a needless addition to the woman who was perfect; she wished to add to the love that needed nothing but endless continuance. It was this woman who hinted of marriage, and it was this woman who, in the dim restaurant light, misread his word “unable” to mean “unwilling,” and took offense.