The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories (26 page)

I looked at everyone. Everyone who deserved to be here after so much good work. Wonderful souls. The shit of the earth.

“The dead love you, Joanne. Welcome home!”

“T
HEY HAD THE MOST
beautiful child in the world. It was simply that. When still an infant in its baby carriage, people peered in fondly and came away stunned. The parents grew permanently helpless expressions that silently told these passers-by they couldn’t understand it either: yes, the child was theirs, but its enormous ethereal beauty was as incomprehensible and impossible to them as to the awed observers. The Tibetans live with the Himalayas in their backyard, but they can take no credit—they’re just lucky for the view.

“The father searched toy stores for things worthy of the child’s attention: dolls that spoke four languages and answered difficult questions, balls that came when you called their name, crayons that lasted forty years. He bought it a cat named Fib that lied so well and entertainingly that none of them ever knew when it was telling the truth, but they didn’t care.

“They lived in a small apartment by a railroad station in the country. Both parents worked at the station. The father sold magazines and cigarettes at the
Tabak,
the mother, in her waitress uniform, bustled from table to table serving railroad workers tureens of tea, big and hot enough to steam open every envelope in the world. Harried travellers, not knowing how lucky they were to be there, asked her endless questions about the next train, how much coffee cost, who owned the child who, sometimes when bored, flew through the room in its bluebird blue airplane.

“Locomotives taught it the secrets of iron and slowing gracefully. The child watched them with great care and came away filled with the capacity to pull a hundred and fifty cars, to lower crossing gates three miles away.

“In truth, there is no place on this earth for such a child. His name was Florian.”

His wife came into the room and waited until he had stopped writing before she spoke.

“His temperature is the same.”

The man looked at his own son’s name—FLORIAN—typed on the paper in front of him. He closed his eyes and knew there was no hope. There was only small magic in the world. Never enough to go around, not nearly enough to write a dying child back to life.

Like the magical one in the story, his own son had gone through early childhood untouched by the small pesky fingers of young diseases: mumps, measles, chickenpox. The parents considered this a small stroke of luck but nothing more. They assumed he would meet up with them sooner or later, and with little more than a face full of polkadot spots for a week, would glide on. He would grow up to ride a two-wheeler too recklessly and, falling, break an arm. A real hurt—a white cast or two to mark the passage from three wheels to two. Or climbing a tree, he’d slip and end up with a deep, small, lifelong scar on his chin, his perfect cheek.

But it was pneumonia. A fall cough turned muddy and deep: fever hot enough to scare the fingertips. An oxygen tent—comical, monstrous cousin to the thing we store carrots in in the refrigerator.

His favourite books lay unread in his lap. Happy stuffed animals alongside his hot unmoving hands inside the tent. Spots and drops of bright colour inside the transparent, aseptic shell that would house him until he died.

The child looked at his parents with the pitying, ageless eyes of one who has seen the impossible and returned for a little while; war victims, hundred-year-old men, the dying. He never wanted anything—cool juice, a story read to him, his hand held. It made them frantic, it drove their uselessness home to them again and again and made them hate themselves, each other. It is easy to understand why.

“Write him a story. You’re the famous writer. You could do that, couldn’t you?” Her eyes accused him of everything and nothing. She was right, however. He could write his son a story.

They lived far out in the Austrian countryside, near a railroad station where two tiny trains a day stopped for a few minutes on their funny crawl to and from Vienna. He had always wanted to live near a train station. With the success of his book, he suddenly had the means to buy a Hansel and Gretel house, complete with
bauern
furniture, low arched ceilings, “1849” painted crudely over the front door. And, best of all, a clear view of the train station across a field of fledgling pine trees. It pleased him to know some day his son would have the choice of cutting down the trees for the view, or else keeping them and having his own small forest.

But the child died before the man’s story was finished. The fingers never moved; the breath just decided one day to stop rather than fight its way to the boy’s hot, tired skin.

“When Florian was five, his father took him to Vienna one Sunday to visit the Prater. The boy wanted to climb the cables of the
Riesenrad
and look out over the city he would some day possess. But his father said no. Instead, they paid their fares and rode the ferris wheel the proper way. The boy was bored. When his father turned to admire the wonders of the Wienerwald, Florian pushed open a window and slid out into clear space, lined only by the pigeon-grey spars and steel cables that held the gigantic wheel together. When the father turned back, he was not at all surprised to see the boy was gone. There was no way to hold lightning in a fist or on a leash.”

He read that section to his wife and then put it down to sip his tea. Her hair was the colour of tea—old tea now that the boy was gone, brown more than the warm, autumnal red it had been when the child was alive.

“Why do you make me listen? Don’t you know how much it hurts? It was his story. He’s dead now! Why don’t you stop and write something else, for God’s sake? He doesn’t need stories any more. Every time you even say ‘Florian’ it cuts right into my heart.”

“But it
is
Florian, don’t you see? Since I started it when he was alive, if I continue to write, he still lives on, in a way.”

“Oh, really? Where?” The words were a vicious froth on her lips. “I don’t hear him, do you? His toys aren’t all over the floor. They’re in that
box
in the cellar. His clothes are
always so clean
now!” She got up and fled the room, the pain of loss making her wish she were dead, he were dead, everything dead.

The man put on his coat and walked out into the early spring night. The weather had been beautiful for three days; a rare warmth at that time of year when, usually, it was much greyer and colder.

The sweep of stars across the country night made him feel empty and lost. The only thing he felt like writing was a story for his dead son.

He walked towards the trees; dark, short shadows against the moon-blue earth. A lone dog barked in the village, a car drove away into the night.

The night so full of secret gifts for him; the smell of dew-covered pine, shooting stars, animal sounds ... But he stood there too alone and afraid to accept them. He was too young and successful to think about his own death, but the balance had tipped and he had no desire to support the weight that had been cast upon him. His son was dead, his wife walled off in impenetrable guilt.

The door opened and his son came in, dressed for bed.

“Dah-dee, I bring you present.”

He put the pen down and looked at the smaller version of the child he had been writing about in the story.

“Mommy says you working, but I bring you present.”

The boy, his hair recently cut in a summery monk’s bowl, handed the man a cock-eyed construction of blue Tinkertoys.

“A plane, Dah-dee. I show you.” He put it on his father’s desk and pushed it back and forth, making a three-year-old’s version of airplane sounds. He ran it up and over the pages the man had already written, across the empty ashtray and red, unopened packet of cigarettes.

His wife called from the other room, warning the child that Daddy was working and he’d better come out of that room right now—Or Else!

The little boy looked naughtily at his father and ran out of the room, victorious.

The television was on in the other room. He heard its murmur of German voices, his child’s bangings, then his wife’s footsteps, much heavier and slower now that she was nearing the end of her pregnancy.

As always, he had read her the story as it developed. She made good and helpful suggestions, but he wondered how she really felt about it. How could she stand to hear of even the fictional death of their beloved son, of the bitterness and approaching madness he’d assigned her in this strange and, ultimately, unnecessary story?

He had taken the boy to the park to play in the sandbox several days before. It was just after dinner, and no other children were around. The boy, agile and fearless, jumped up on the monkeybars and crawled around and over the red iron maze. A line came to the man as he watched his son play. “They had the most beautiful child in the world.” It came out of nowhere but he liked it and rolled it around like a single marble in his hand.

I
KNOW NOTHING ABOUT
horses. They are dramatic, nervous, often beautiful. And they leave me cold. How could something so big and powerful allow itself to be tamed so completely?

I was walking the dog in the park. It was a gorgeous, first touch of spring afternoon, full of sharp and lush smells. I love forgetting the aromas of a season and then knowing them again for the first time. The dog was going nuts. She was off the line, racing around not knowing where to go first, wanting everything. She’s a young thing, silly and loving. The two of us were enjoying each other’s company.

There are two parallel paths in that park—one for pedestrians, the other for horseback riders. The puppy didn’t know what to make of these moving mountains when they clopped up slowly and by. But instead of racing after them she froze, her only sign of life that long white tail whipping back and forth like a windshield wiper at high speed.

We’d walked for half an hour without seeing one. It seemed she had forgotten their presence in her universe until the sound of galloping came from behind us and the poor thing leapt straight up in the air. Landing, she scrunched down close to the ground, as if under attack. That made me laugh out loud and I turned to see if the horseman had caught her performance. The galloping slowed and the horse chuffed indignantly—why are we stopping? Why are you reining me in? Shiny brown, muscles rolling and braking. Its head was pulled to one side, eyes and teeth flashing white. It took me a moment to recognize the man on board, but when I did, what a shock! Gordon Epstein. One of the great, pre-eminent liars I have ever known.

“Harry Radcliffe! What are
you
doing in Europe?”

“Hi, Gordon. I’m working on a project near Salzburg. And you?”

Before he answers, let me tell you about Epstein. We met in prep school twenty-five years ago. Some people change as they grow older, while others only become more of who they were at fifteen. Caterpillars vs. snakes. Epstein was a snake. His one great talent was an ability to lie successfully. He was a natural liar the way other kids are natural athletes or intellects. But remember, while few of us are really athletic or smart, we all lie. So to be a great liar one must be at the same time more perceptive, witty, sensitive ... than those around you. If for no other reason than the danger of being caught. Epstein walked into that school as a tenth-grade fifteen-year-old nobody (like the rest of us), cased it out a few months, then made his play. He seduced the movers and shakers with the right amount of praise, back-patting, backstabbing, and politicking. Teacher liked him because he knew enough to do well, but not superbly and thus challenge or throw them off in any way. He learned the lingo, he played slightly off-centre sports—soccer and lacrosse—which enabled him to make the teams. A strong “B” student, varsity athlete, a hale enough fellow to make people happy to know him. Someone said the world is divided into two kinds of people: the first kind we say, “Oh Boy!” when they enter a room. The second we say, “Oh Shit!” By the end of our sophomore year, most of the school said, “Oh Boy!” when Gordon arrived.

Yet most of the success resulted from his intense dishonesty. Study Epstein hard enough and you could see the effort he was making; the frequent looks of concern or fatigue or straight fear way back in his eyes or smile while he spun his webs and told the tales while keeping track of past ones, which were like dangerous caged animals that, without constant checking and feeding, broke their restraints and charged.

He wasn’t found out until our senior year. By then, however, he was way beyond their grasp. Class president, full scholarship to a good university, a girl on his arm at the Spring Prom who had flown in from California for the weekend and did nothing but gaze at him with pride and lust.

How Epstein was discovered was a gradual thing. After three years at the same school some of the lies and double-crosses were bound to get back to their source. Good people who once believed in him started saying “Heyyy, what is this?” and telling others their suspicions. Maybe half our class realized the truth by the time we graduated. Those who didn’t defended him strongly enough to make the others keep their anger and grumbles mostly to themselves.

While these years were passing, I floated somewhere near the middle of the class. Gordon had little use for people in the middle so he paid me little mind. He paid me
no
mind. But obviously I watched him because even then I appreciated a good scoundrel. Although I was probably one of the first to sense what he was doing, I rarely said anything when his name came up because he was no more important to me than I to him.

Throughout high school I was only
there,
floating like a goldfish with an occasional flick of my tail. Yet once I entered college and discovered architecture, I quickly became the self-assured, obnoxious success I am. In later years whenever I remembered, I asked about Epstein. Once in a while his name appeared in the alumni journal or over a drink with one classmate or another I happened to run into at an airport or train station. He went to college, graduated, disappeared into the rest of the world. From every indication, he had peaked in high school and simply gone on to live a forgettable life. At different times I heard he was in business, teaching, social work.