The Second Coming (33 page)

The reason you are living here is to take possession of your property and to make a life for yourself. How to live from one moment to the next: Clean the place up. Decide on a profession. Work at it. What about people? Men? Do you want (1) to live with another person? (2) a man? (3) a woman? (4) no one? (5) Do you want to make love with another person? (6) “Fall in love”? (7) What is “falling in love”? (8) Is it part of making love or different? (9) Do you wish to marry? (10) None of these? (11) Are people necessary? Without people there are no tunneling looks. Brooks don't look and dogs look away. But late afternoon needs another person.

What do I do if people are the problem? Can I live happily in a world without people? What if four o'clock comes and I need a person? What do you do if you can't stand people yet need a person?

For some reason when she read this note to herself, she thought of an expression she had not heard since grade school: “Doing it.” Was “doing it” the secret of life? Is this a secret everyone knows but no one talks about?

She “did it” at Nassau with Sarge, the Balfour jewelry salesman, thinking that it might be the secret of life. But even though she and Sarge did everything in the picture book Sarge had, it did not seem to be the secret of life. Had she missed something?

On the days she walked to town she found herself sitting on the bench near The Happy Hiker. One day the marathon runner saw her and sat down on the bench beside her. Again he shook hands with his fibrous monkey hand. Again he asked her to crash with him in the shelter on Sourwood Mountain. Again she said no. Again he loped away, white stripes scissoring.

Another afternoon a hiker asked for a drink of water at the greenhouse. Unshouldering his scarlet backpack, he sat beside her on the floor of the little porch. Though he was young and fair as a mountain youth, his face was dusky and drawn with weariness. When he moved, his heavy clothes were as silent as his skin. He smelled, she imagined, like a soldier, of sweat and leather gear. They were sitting, knees propped up. His arm lay across his knee, the hand suspended above her knees. She looked at the hand. Tendons crossed the boxy wrist, making ridges and swales. A rope of vein ran along the placket of muscle in the web of the thumb. Copper-colored hair turning gold at the tip sprouted from the clear brown skin. The weight of the big slack hand flexed the wrist, causing the tendon to raise the forefinger like Adam's hand touching God's.

As she watched, the hand fell off his knee and fell between her knees. She looked at him quickly to see if he had dozed off but he had not. The hand was rubbing her thigh. She frowned: I don't like this but perhaps I should. Embarrassed for him, she cleared her throat and rose quickly, but the hand tightened on her thigh and pulled her down. Mainly she was embarrassed for him. Oh, this is too bad. Is something wrong with me? The dog growled, his eyes turning red as a bull's. The man thanked her and left. He too seemed embarrassed.

Was there something she did not know and needed to be told? Perhaps it was a matter of “falling in love.” She knew a great deal about pulleys and hoists but nothing about love. She went to the library to look up love as she had looked up the mechanical advantages of pulleys. Surely great writers and great lovers of the past had written things worth reading. Here were some of the things great writers had written:

Love begets love

Love conquers all things

Love ends with hope

Love is a flame to burn out human ills

Love is all truth

Love is truth and truth is beauty

Love is blind

Love is the best

Love is heaven and heaven is love

Love is love's reward

“Oh my God,” she said aloud in the library and smacked her head. “What does all that
mean
?
These people are crazier than I am!”

Nowhere could she find a clear explanation of the connection between “being in love” and “doing it.” Was this something everybody knew and so went without saying? or was it a well-kept secret? or was it something no one knew? Was she the only Southern girl who didn't know? She began to suspect a conspiracy. They, teachers, books, parents, poets, philosophers, psychologists, either did not know what they were talking about, which seemed unlikely, or they were keeping a secret from her.

Was something wrong with her? What did she want? Was she supposed to want to “do it”? If she was supposed to, who was doing the supposing? Was it a matter of “falling in love”? With whom? a man? a woman? She tried to imagine a woman hiker's hand falling between her knees.

Naargh,
she said.

The dog cocked an eyebrow. What?

Is one supposed to do such-and-so with another person in order to be happy? Must one have a plan for the pursuit of happiness? If so, is there a place where one looks up what one is supposed to do or is there perhaps an agency which one consults?

Who says?

Who is doing the supposing?

Why not live alone if it is people who bother me? Why not live in a world of books and brooks but no looks? Going home one evening, she passed Hattie's Red Barn. Young folk were dancing and drinking and joking. Couples came and went to vans. Someone beckoned to her from the doorway. She did not belong with them. Why not? They were her age. They were making merry, weren't they? and she would like to make merry, wouldn't she? They were good sorts, weren't they? Yes, but not good enough.

You have to have a home to make merry even if you are away from home. She had a home but it was not yet registered. A registrar was needed to come and register her home in the presence of a third party, a witness. Upon the departure of the registrar the third party would look at her and say: Well, this is your home and here we are. She would make sassafras tea. Then they could make merry.

Perhaps she had not sunk deep enough into her Sirius self. If one sinks deep enough there is surely company waiting. Otherwise, if one does not have a home and has not sunk into self, and seeks company, the company is lonesome. Silence takes root, sprouts. Looks dart.

On the other hand, look what happens to home if one is too long at home. Rather than go home to Williamsport, she'd rather live in a stump hole even though her parents' home was not only registered with the National Registry but restored and written up in
Southern Living.
Rather than marry and have a life like her mother, she'd rather join the navy and see the world. Why is a home the best place and also the worst? How can the best place become the worst place? What is a home? A home is a place, any place, any building, where one sinks into one's self and finds company waiting. Company? Who's company? oneself? somebody else? That's the problem. The problem is not the house. People are the problem. But it was their problem. She could wait.

4

The man watched her from the bunk but she didn't mind. His look was not controlling or impaling but son and gray and going away. Her back felt his and the dog's eyes following her, but when she faced them, their eyes rolled up into their eyebrows. The mornings grew cold. It was a pleasure to rise shivering from her own potting-table bunk and kneel at the Grand Crown stove and start a fat-pine fire for its quick blazing warmth and busy crackle-and-pop which peopled the room. Outside, the great dark rhododendrons dripped and humped in close, still hiding croquet balls knocked “galley west” in 1890 tournaments. This dreary cold clime is not getting me down!

The first morning the man said: “You gave me a bath.”

“Yes. And washed your clothes.” She dropped the clothes on him. “You can put them on.” She was stiff. She had slept with the dog on croker sacks. From the army surplus store she bought two scratchy Italian NATO blankets and made a bed of pine needles on a slatted flat, which she propped on four upended big pots.

They talked about the once cool-feeling now warm-feeling cave air blowing above them. He told her how Judge Kemp had saved the cost of kerosene for the greenhouse but think what you could save. Your overhead is zero. (It made her feel good that her
overhead
was not over head and pressing down on her but was nought, had gone away.) You could grow produce all winter and sell at one hundred percent profit. Grow what and sell where, she asked. I don't know, he said, but we can find out—is that what you want to do, make a living here? I don't know, she said.

One morning when she returned from her woods latrine, a comfortable fork in the chestnut fall, which she used and where she deposited his excretions from a Clorox bottle and a neatly folded packet of newspaper, she found him sitting in the doorway in the morning sun. His swellings had gone down except for the knee, the scrapes had dry scabs, and his eyes were all right, not the inturning Khe Sanh white eyes but gray and clear and focused on the dog. His scruffy yellow beard looked odd against his smooth platinum-and-brown hair. Was he nodding because he knew what he was going to do? He nodded toward the other doorjamb as if it were the chair across his desk. She took it, sat down.

“Now, you've done a great deal for me. I would thank you for it but won't, for fear of upsetting your balance sheet of debits and credits. I know you are particular about owing somebody something, but maybe you will learn that's not so bad. I don't mind being in your debt. You won't mind my saying that I would do the same for you, and take pleasure in it, and furthermore can easily see our positions reversed. What I wish to tell you is that I accept what you've done for me and that I have other things to ask of you. I don't mind asking you. There are things that need to be done and only you can do them. Will you?”

“I will,” she said. I will, she thought, because now he knew exactly what had to be done just as she had known what to do when he lay knocked out on her floor. I'd do anything he asks me, she thought, hoist anything. Why is that?

“Do you have a calendar?” he asked.

She gave him her Gulf card.

He looked at it, looked up at her, smiled. (Smiled!) “Wrong year.” She shrugged. She was afraid to ask what year it was.

“What is today?”

“The fifteenth.”

“Hm. It seems I've been gone two weeks.” His gray eyes met hers. She didn't mind. “How much money do you have?”

“One hundred and eleven dollars and thirty-one cents.”

“What are you going to do when your money runs out?”

She shrugged. “Find employment.”

“Doing what?”

“Hoisting maybe. Also gardening.”

“Hoisting? Hoisting what?”

“Anything.”

“I see. You wouldn't consider my paying you something, or lending, until you get paid for your ah hoisting.”

“How much money do you have?” she asked.

“On me?”

“On you and off you.”

“About fifty or sixty million.”

“Gollee.”

“That's enough to employ you.”

“No, that would throw things off-balance and render my Sirius unserious.”

“Why shouldn't I pay for my room and board?” he asked her.

“To give one reason if not others, you don't have a dime. I had to go through your pockets before washing your clothes.”

He laughed then winced and put a hand to his side. “I can get some.”

“When you do, there will be time for a consideration of remuneration. The only thing in your pockets was a slip of paper which said
Help! With tiger, fifty feet above.
I was wondering about the nature of the tiger you were over and above.”

“It doesn't matter. Could you do the following things for me in town? Do you have pencil and paper?”

She opened her notebook.

“Go to Western Union, which is at the bus station, and send the following telegram to Dr. Sutter Vaught, 2203 Los Flores, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Send this message: Plans changed. Forget about letter. Read it if you like but tear it up. Don't act on it. Will write. Barrett. Send it straight message.”

“Straight message,” she repeated, hoping he would explain but he didn't. Probably he meant send it straight to Albuquerque and not roundabout by way of Chicago. “Is that all?”

“No. Go to Dr. Vance Battle's office. See him alone. Tell him I want to see him. Tell him where I am, tell him I want to see him today and ask him not to tell anybody or bring anybody with him.”

“Anything else?”

“Go by the library and get a book on hydroponic gardening.”

“Okay.”

“Then go behind the bus station and see if my car is still there. A silver Mercedes 450 SEL. My keys are under the seat. Drive it to the country-club parking lot. Park at the far end, which is nearest to here.”

“Okay.” She swallowed. Very well. Drive a car? His car? Very well. If he asked her to drive the car, she could drive the car. “Okay. Why were you in the cave?”

“What? Oh.” Now he was walking up and down the greenhouse not limping badly, shouldering, hands in pockets. Does he notice how clean and smooth the concrete is? She felt the floor with both hands; it was cool and iron-colored and silky as McWhorter's driveway. She wished he would notice her concrete, the best-cured concrete in North Carolina. “I go down in caves sometimes,” she said. He told her about the tiger.

“But the tiger wasn't there.”

“No.”

“Then—?”

“Then what?”

“Then there was more than the tiger?”

“Yes.”

“You were trying to find out something besides the tiger.”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“I was asking a question to which I resolved to find a yes-or-no answer.”

“Did you find the answer?”

“Yes.”

“Which was it?”

“I don't know.”

“So you came back up and out.”

“Yes, I came back up and out.”

“Is that good?”

“Good?” He shrugged. “I don't know. At least I know what I have to do. Don't worry.”