The Great Lover (6 page)

Everywhere an even radiation of pearly light direct on the gritted nerves. Unmoored, he drifts down the gallery, seeing through the windows the courtyard, the tree whose upper branches are lost in the gloom, the tall brick façades, and a confusion of colored lights and clustered reflections of lights, orange and violet. His reflection seems faceless at first, but this is the blur in his vision which is sharpening slowly. The windows flash by. He wafts against an azure streak of windows, spotted with lights.

*

He lives in the sewers, insulated by the water and the dirt suspended in this water — long wool sleeves down over fingers trailing in puddles — and in the black world between stations: black and pumpkin lights — snow bank stations — the trains shrilly call to one another blind and massive in the dark — black rushing silence, rent by screaming trains... Like the hideous angler fish of the ocean’s deepest places, he is an otherworldly scavenger drifting in currents heavier than avalanches, slow as glaciers, a sea wasp with a bridal train of tingling nerves that drift in the sewage time and again tangling in women’s dreams. He doesn’t resist, but the effort involved is always too much. It isn’t necessary to make the effort, but then the dream engulfs him anyway dragging him by the nerves and that is by far the greater ordeal. So when the undertow of her godlike whim draws at him, he must go, and make the effort. It is comparable to improvising a complex piece of contrapuntal music in coordination with other musicians who know what they’re doing and who are extremely precise doing it... the pull on the nerves wrenches him with a strong gentle sway into his core, they are meanwhile reaching out to fondle and garland the dream like limp braille-reading fingers.

An irresistible impulse drives him to pick from among the crowds on the subways, eyes gleaming with water through the rind of dirt, a shiny hard varnish on his face. Constant practice has given him total control over his stench; he can contain it on the subway cars using olefactory camouflage, then release it in a concentrated invisible attack if necessary, closing it around his victim like a suffocating cloak.

Black hair, neat as a pin, stylish. When she got off the train I felt hurt, as though a long, comfortable acquaintance were suddenly interrupted; as though she and I were already sweetly old and familiar to each other. I was always too late. She had me following her from room to room. Now at last we are in the room together, briefly. She touches a lamp standing by the door.

“
This would break up the lines of the room,” she says, and vanishes in the blackness of a huge window, leaving me alone.

I look around. The dream is still going. I put my hands in my pockets, glancing without great interest at the walls and ceiling, which billow a little, like projections on screens. They are even slightly out of focus. Or my eyes are. No, I see the lines in the floor clearly. Uncertain what to do next, I lightly kick the lamp and in her voice it says, “This would break up the lines of the room.”

I kick it again.

In her voice it says, “This would break up the lines of the room.”

*

The glowing amber-ivory blonde, fine-featured, gazing soulfully out the train window. An invisible jet of time or space or something like that streams from her eyes, and in exactly the same way a jet of water introduced into a pool induces the rest of the pool to flow with it or through it, I feel myself begin to flow and stream repeatedly through her eyes.

That night, in sleep, she watches a viscous tendril of smoke stretching across a shaft of pale sunlight, expanding to form a transparent canopy of grains too fine to see. This smoke — from a snuffed cigar or an incense stick or a snuffed candle’s wick — sinks toward the floor, seems to touch and sense it. There are dim white heaps of warm, crumpled linen in the hut’s shadowy corner.

The whitewashed hut stands in a little clearing of tall grass, surrounded on two sides by spellbound trees; nothing stirs among these ancient, shaggy boughs, and the gloom about their trunks is perfect. Overhead the warm, crumpled clouds race across the sky, infinitely deep and high and remote.

Half in the pale shadow of a tree by the path, she is standing in a colorless dress flowing to the ground, her hands resting on the skirts at her hips. The light of the sun slants across the lens of her unshaded right eye, illuminating the separate fibres of the iris, bleaching its green to grey. Her vehement face is dappled by freckles, and the shadows of leaves. She is transfixed by a thought, and stares as though it had appeared before her like a ghost out of the sunlight.

She looks up, past the hut, to the treeless slope above. High against the horizon, looming up like a tower, is the shapeless peak of naked rock. The slopes above the treeline are criss-crossed by wooden fences. Standing, by a fence below and beside the peak, interrupting the horizon, her lover faces her and the valley. He is wearing a nankeen vest, and has a fowling-piece cracked and resting on his right arm. His straw hat is pushed back above his brow, and his dog sits in the grass, just as still. He looks down, or rather back, to where he’d just been, using eyes not proper to him — they’re my eyes. These two are not looking directly at each other, but at some midpoint in the landscape which receives and relays the gaze of each to the other. His face, free and impassive, calm and happy like a god’s; her face, tense with a savage joy and expectation.

*

Young Katherine Hepburn type; from a distance she looked like a slight old woman.
Pale
skin, like wax paper, pink and red around the eyes — not from crying, could simply be from looking. Lean, wise-seeming face, precociously knowing. Swingy shoulder-length nearly grey-silver blonde hair in an old-fashioned style, a windbreaker over her dress. The man with her is the father, I suppose. They are conversing properly. She is cheery, but not bubbly or ebullient. Almost certainly very thoughtful. A hard-to-fool woman — ergo, less than perfectly happy. Mature, and resigned.

That night I feel the tug. It’s like the initial motion of the train, as it overpowers the
vis inertiae
. I speak this scrap of Latin to myself in the way I might dawdle a little on the threshold or stop to look for something I already know the whereabouts of, a way of jerking back or pausing for a moment when my will is split between wanting to go on and not wanting to go on. I suppose I’m under the impression that a bit of erudition might encloister me, putting me beyond her reach, so I wouldn’t have to go with her.

With a soft, tearing sensation, like the parting of lips, my nerves tug me and I go with her.

Spacious, limpid air resounding with outpouring sunlight of the hypnotic day, twinkling leaves in the trees and a glare shimmering on wet grass dark green as seaweed. A woman’s voice winds everywhere over the headstones, calling to her lover with a moaning song, luxurious and yearning. The love song comes out from a grave beneath a tree: the turf grows transparent and then vanishes, layers of earth underneath disappear like onion peels. In the pit, now, there is a shadowy coffin. The lid disappears; the pale violet radiance of her gauzy dress wanly mingles with her skin’s greys and blues, eyes sunken and head thrown back on the satin pillow, mouth slack. Faded hair the color of sun-bleached grass and tenuous as cobwebs streams back from her brow. Her song is still audibly emerging from her memory.

—
Beneath a tree, on a green hill, a hypnotic day with a view of a valley checkered with ponderous shadows of clouds, all frothing grass below the mountains, which blaze like scattered mirrors filled with giant sunbeams. They are alone, on a striped blanket, in the effortless shade of a widespread tree. There’s one moment in particular, when there was a feeling of tipping equilibrium, and somehow she had rolled onto her back bearing him in her arms partially on top of her.

—
Another memory is intruding, a painless, disembodied memory: she rolls into tiled room. His hands tug at her dress and she is kneading handfuls of his thick sweater, her body is unceremoniously lifted and dumped onto the table, a triangular rubber wedge under the small of her back. She thrusts her hands into his hair. The coroner plunges the bread knife into her abdomen and saws up to her sternum, then up in a Y shape across her chest. She raises herself slightly as he pulls her dress down, bringing her arms to her sides to help him slide it off, not looking into eyes she wouldn’t have remembered at all. Her hands are greedily rubbing the skin of his broad back, and the bone saw cuts through her ribs and the muscles around the sternum. The entire assembly is removed like the top of a pumpkin, tossed aside, exposing the heart. In her grave the memories can’t be divided, she is sighing. He covers her throat with kisses. The coroner tosses her flaccid heart into the tray of the grocer’s scale and speaks its weight to the recorder. Her back arches and her cries are briefer and briefer — swifter and swifter the coroner looping her intestines over his hand in a dripping brown bundle — my cries open out again and become desperate — her back arches as he thrusts his red arm up to the elbow into my body cavity to draw out the lungs. She wakes with stifled cries still seeming to feel the regular tug of the stitches sewing shut my empty corpse.

Dr. Thefarie checks his watch without seeing the time; it is a tic. He is waiting on an elevated platform, pacing back and forth a few steps every now and then. Strange hypnotized day. The cars passing under the elevated platform, odd variability of perspective as they come, pass, and drive away down streets visible to the end. Above him, a silver blemish in the sky, a sore spot, surrounded with eyelashes or scars.

The platform sways slightly, like the deck of a ship, and the train comes banging in. Dr. Thefarie boards the train, sitting by the window with his knees clamped in his fingers.

“
Man near me is making a pointless attempt to open his clandestine beer bottle with his house keys. Once we’re moving, every vista no sooner glimpsed than cut off by sailing buildings. The sun hits the scratches in the windows from a high angle and they shine like new wire. From the gaps opening and closing in the rattling doors, a breath of tarpits, gasoline, stagnant pipes and lights. Now look at this man self-importantly eating his plastic tray of vegetables, as though he’d thought of it all on his own. Paper in disarray on the floor of the train driver’s compartment, door swings a little to and fro. The exposed headline reads ‘—or be gone!’

“
We’re under ground. The tunnel lights appear vertically flattened, throwing off vertical lines of light, slanted like distinct Vs; these lines diminish in number as the source draws near. Rows of light bulbs like yucca plants are spaced out along the line. This interminable subway ride will break you down like an interrogation. Nothing is worse than a good-looking woman who doesn’t know how to dress herself—”

In a characteristic gesture, he taps the breast pocket of his tweed jacket, to feel the tube of pills there.

Brown horsey girl with plump feet, black and white clothes, and this small prim blonde with a ski jump nose, but the
real
vision, she’s coming through the turnstile. (Dr. Thefarie makes his transfer and leaves the scene — now we can be alone). Black hair medium-length and straight, fair, with glasses and red lips, lovely white dress with red blossoms. Her proportions are breathtaking. I want her and me pressed tight as Inca masonry.

Her dream is a silent film. She is a pale waif like Mary Pickford in a virginal frock. She will marry both of these high-stepping suitors, one dark one fair, both with stirrup trousers, snug-vested floating weightlessly together arm in arm through the door on pointed toes...

Years later they have become cowering old men with beards down past their waists. She comes home from work, grown into an enormous harridan of a woman, her hair in a kerchief and wearing an apron for some reason, her small feet in their dark practical hard shoes convey an impression of compact power and danger like horses’ hooves. The husbands wait helplessly afraid in the parlor of a huge dilapidated house. They fling their arms around each other shaking violently, knees knocking, their cheeks pressed together, staring at the front door. She storms through, swinging her heavy lunch pail, bellowing curses at them and brandishing her gargantuan arms in pantomime rage as strings of silent firecrackers go off in the corners. The husbands cower and wince, seem to shrink.

But now they have laid a cunning trap for her: one of these two husbands has released a little petted mouse into the room. She catches sight of it scurrying along the bottom of the walls and her eyes light up. She pounces, scooping the mouse up with one deft swoop she has it in both hands and tears it in her fierce teeth, blood dribbling down her chin, eyes shining like starlit water. The two husbands have taken advantage of this distraction and advance on her from behind carrying a huge portrait of her as a younger woman. Pulling the canvas free of its wooden frame they wrap her in it, now toss over her a massive and costly Persian rug so heavy it knocks her flat. In a twinkling, they’ve rolled her up inside and bound her with two lengths of twine. Her kicking feet protrude from one end of the bundle, but her head is inside. The two husbands clasp left hands and dance jubilantly around each other in a circle, wagging their right index fingers in the air. In their transports they hop over her, turn, and hop back, in perfect time, back and forth, in opposition.

Their children, legions of boys and girls in sailor suits, file into the cavernous kitchen below, in the basement. Chopping blocks stand there in rows, like schoolroom desks. The floor is inundated with pecking chickens. Each child goes to a block and takes up a meat cleaver. In exact synchronicity with their fathers’ little bounds, the children seize up chickens from the flagstone floor, slap them down on the blocks, and whack their heads off with a single chop. The husbands hop, the children chop, the husbands hop, the children chop...