The Language of Paradise: A Novel (33 page)

“My walls
will
slide into my floors, no matter how hard I try to separate them,” she warned. “Perspective is quite beyond me. Outdoors is easier, the trees give me clues.”

Gideon and Leander exchanged one of their smiles, and Gideon took out his little book and wrote down what she said. He does this often now, inscribing her most commonplace remarks as if they were the droppings of a sage, precious for the mere fact of who produced them. She finds it disconcerting.

“Oh, that bugaboo perspective!” Leander said. “I assure you, it’s nothing but the Devil’s trick. Sleight of hand, sleight of eye, it’s all the same foolery—no different from the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t I divert my students with on rainy days. Forget the deceiving imp, dear girl, and paint what you see.”

So she is painting away, quickly and with a broad brush, laying down thick swathes of color with a child’s abandon. She isn’t even trying to make it true, only to slap the images down as her eye takes them in: Papa’s desk, now Gideon’s, with its row of massive black tomes leaning shoulder-to-shoulder like mourners at a funeral. The engraving table squat in the center, suspended in air along with the woodstove. The braided rug—
their
rug—levitated like a magic carpet. Sophy brings these floating objects back to earth with a few stark stripes for floorboards—she ignores the blandishments of the Serpent, urging her to consider the vanishing point—and where the stripes end, ventures a bold line across and down each side. Behold the walls! The room is like the inside of a treasure box, filled with curiosities. The window is an afterthought here, an intruder in her snug little container. She fills in the white square with feathery strokes of green, a reminder of the burgeoning spring that awaits them outdoors.

When the painting is done, Sophy pushes her chair back from the easel to see what she has wrought. She can’t help laughing. Her innocent eye has begotten a bad dream of a room, but she feels as tender toward her creation as a mother might feel toward a newborn with a harelip; she loves it for its flaws. Leander and Gideon have been lingering nearby, watching her work while they pretend to do other things. She has been performing for them—taking her revenge for their ogling.

They observe her. It is the price she pays for being admitted to their conversation. In their presence she feels like one of Micah’s animals, admired for her oddities. They praise her for what she does poorly, and shake their heads over her better efforts. “You were thinking too much,” Leander said the other day, dismissing one of her old landscapes. “Why make a slavish copy of the world when you can see it fresh?”

She can tell by the expression on their faces that she has done well this time. “Marvelous!” Leander says. “Such exuberance! You are a prodigy in reverse, Sophia. You have not lost your child’s eye. You go back to go forward, and so must we all.”

Gideon is more restrained. He bends and drops a kiss on her head, as if she were, in fact, the infant savant they fancy her to be. “A great improvement on the original. I think we should hang it here, and feast our eyes on its colors when these dull old walls close in on us.”

Sophy stifles the pang she feels when Gideon condescends to her in front of Leander. Reminds herself that in an hour or so he will not be treating her like a child at all. “Since I’ve been so clever,” she says, “perhaps you won’t mind if I paint outdoors tomorrow. I am confident I can ruin the garden too.”

THE TALK IS, MOST DAYS
, worth the price of their scrutiny. Gideon stumbles at first—not a month free of parish duties, he is sluggish from having held back for so long—but soars to the heavens as his ideas take possession of him. He lives in a lucid fever now, his mind always tuned to a high pitch. This afternoon he returns to his pet subject, the Fall of Language, traveling back to the beginning to fill in what the first pages of the Bible failed to explain.

When God spoke the world into being, piece by piece, the distance between the Deity and his Creation was short and charged. (Gideon points one tense forefinger at the other, and Sophy can almost see lightning crackle between them.) Words and the things they represented were one. But ever since the Serpent stretched his twisty neck around the Tree of Knowledge and bandied words with Eve, the gap between Name and Object has been growing. Eons of subtle distortion, of abstraction, of careless speech have sundered that organic unity. As for the beasts that Adam named, these days they would be labeled in Latin and classified according to their common attributes, their singularity lost to the ruthless democracy of science. Words are only signposts now, slung around the necks of creatures whose essence they once perfectly expressed: a wholeness so profound, Gideon insists, that it is no sacrilege to liken it to the One Flesh of marriage. Remnants of this unity are everywhere, most tellingly in those rhetorical flourishes we call the figures of speech. Simile and metaphor? Good soldiers picking through the detritus of the shattered city, trying to reconstruct the ruins.

“One might even,” he says carefully, gazing over her head, “extend the analogy to the act of love . . .”

Sophy looks down at her lap. How can Gideon say such things in front of a guest? He knows as well as she what they will be doing when Leander leaves.

Today, it seems, he will never go. The two of them are deep in discussion, Leander sprawled in the desk chair, Gideon pacing back and forth as he rattles on about gathering speakers of other tongues to join them in the great task of restoring language. Together they will excavate primal roots and assemble a dictionary that will give the enlightened the keys to a new Eden.

“Perhaps a few pupils, to begin with,” Leander says. “Then a small school, a workshop for scholars. The Institute for the Rejuvenation of Language, or some such title. It is not too soon to think about a place.”

Leander tethers Gideon’s ideas to earth. His magic is the practical kind. Presto, he shrinks the heavens to the size of a house, and Gideon smiles and nods, not the least deflated. If she were to offer such commonsense suggestions, he would sigh and tell her she doesn’t understand.

Suddenly, Leander is up and shrugging his coat on in haste, as if a clock chimed the hour in his head. “Be happy, children,” he says at the door. Lately it is this way whenever he visits. Sophy suspects secret signals, but fends off the notion. It is unbearable to think that the schoolmaster arranges their intimacy—that he intrudes even here.

Gideon closes the curtains. He fiddles with the bolt on the door—rusty because no one ever used it until now. He lights the lamp on the desk, keeping the flame low, and scrawls on one of the papers strewn across the surface. Sophy waits, quiet, in the corner. Difficult to gauge his mood today. He isn’t agitated; his movements are leisurely, he has perhaps expended himself in talking. No matter how still she tries to be, her heart always starts to jump at this moment. She knows how the mole feels when the owl circles lazily overhead.

NOT SO LONG AGO
their lovemaking was soft and slow, his touch careful, as though he feared to damage her. She had been the bold one then—her mother’s daughter, teasing him and showing her saucy side, but only to bring him on. At times he seemed to be somewhere else, but she told herself that this was his lofty nature: angels may condescend to fleshly pleasure, but they cannot relish it like ordinary men.

These days he is a different sort of angel. Avenging. He has a mission to complete, and in its service he becomes the lover that Solomon sang about, terrible as an army with banners. There has always been a coldness in him, but it was of the mind: a will to know, clear and pure as a block of ice. Now that same will is lodged in his body, and she is the object—or the means. They do things together that she has never heard or thought of: shaming things that stay with her all the next day as she goes about her work. If it’s a child he wants, she would like to tell him that the straight path is as effectual as the twisted. Even if, for them, it isn’t so.

He is smiling, a good sign. “You have a smudge of paint on your face,” he says. “The first time I saw you at your easel, it was a streak of green. I remember thinking how natural it looked. Your true character showing through.”

Sophy wants to ask why, exactly, her character had a botanical hue, and whether the shade has changed over time. Instead she says, “What color am I today?”

“Carmine, I think. Across one cheek, like a savage.” He looks around. “No, don’t wipe it away—we can use a touch of color in this drab room, don’t you think?”

“I don’t care how the room looks, so long as it is ours.” She feels offended, as if he had criticized her dress—plain enough, Lord knows. She should at least have taken off her apron, which bears the stains of a week’s cooking along with splotches of paint. Quickly she unties it and tosses it to the floor.

Gideon shrugs off his jacket, lets it drop. Without intending to, Sophy has set things in motion. Obediently she begins to undo the fastenings at her neck, but he puts his hand over hers to stop her.

“Let’s pretend we’re in the room you painted,” he says.

She doesn’t have a chance to ask what he means. He takes her by the shoulders and pushes her against a wall. Pulls up her skirts. When she cries out, he presses his mouth into hers and feeds her own words back to her. “The walls
will
slide into the floor.” He says this again and again, timing it to his thrusts. Words break into pieces; only fragments reach her ear. “The walls
will
. . . walls
will
. . .” He brings her down to the floor to finish, groaning as he gives the last of what is in him.

Afterward he is too spent to leave her. Sophy puts her arms around him and strokes his back, as best she can, pitying him for his emptiness. They were lower than the beasts tonight. Her spine is a long bruise, every crevice in her body is sore. But something has been planted: she feels instantly and unaccountably strange, her juices muddled like one of Papa’s homemade wines, and yet, lit from within. Mama said she always knew.

Sophy wonders whether the study might be an anteroom to this new world Gideon and Leander are always talking about: the old certainties still in place, but upended. We must go back to go forward, Leander says. Sink low to accomplish our higher purpose. Her eyes, shut all this time, open wide. Above her the ceiling spins—or is it the floor?

CHAPTER 28

____

BRICKS AND MORTAR

“
A
MIRACLE? HOW MANY TIMES MUST I TELL YOU? YOUR
brother-in-law is a stubborn man, but not beyond reason. All I did was ask him.” Leander flashed his teeth and put the water jug to his lips, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he drank. All morning they had hauled debris from the upper story of James’s house, shedding clothes as they worked, until the July heat drove them downstairs.

They had been laboring for weeks to make the main floor habitable: white-washing the walls, putting glass in the windows, sanding the floors. Micah had been enlisted to make doors and had promised to construct mantels for the parlor and dining room before the cold weather set in. Leander’s pupil, Lem, had been hired out to a neighboring farmer, but came when he could to help his true master with heavier tasks, and to work outside. The soil was rutted and full of stones, not yet fit for planting, and, as Leander pointed out, who ever heard of an Eden without a garden?

“Now, if I were a true miracle worker,” Leander said, “I could solve the problem of the nursery. I really thought the attic might do. I saw it lined with bright quilts to cheer a baby’s eye, sunlight and birdsong pouring through the little window. But sound will float up, and the extremes of temperature might be too much. We mustn’t risk the little one’s health.”

“Miracles are ordinary life for you. You’ll wave your wand, and mumble a spell or two, and the answer will come to you.” Gideon spoke with more confidence than he felt. Leander’s mention of the baby as a creature affected by heat and cold made him uneasy.

Without a shirt his friend looked even more massive—the sort of genial giant who could conquer a small country with a toothy smile and a few deft twists of an iron girder. For such a colossus, persuading a haunted man to relax his grip on the seat and symbol of his heartbreak would be no great matter. Still, Gideon never ceased to marvel that they were at rest in the same room they’d broken into months before—this time with the assent of the builder. Landlord now: James professed indifference to the house’s fate, but had allowed himself to be convinced of the virtue of collecting rent. The money, for the time being, would come from Leander. He was as vague about its origins as the Reverend had been about his business in the city. “Since you persist in calling me a magician, let me do this one trick,” he’d said when Gideon protested. “Turn a pile of paper notes into a roof and walls. A home for our dream.”