William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (56 page)

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Jesus Saviour Pilot Me. The pain retreated once more toward the skin, tenderly, mercifully, and I thought: it’s a wonder our insides aren’t all destroyed. “That’s all right now,” I said. “I’m goin’ next door,” he said then, “I gotta get some sleep. We’ll stay up all night tonight, huh?” “If you want to, Tony,” I said. He kissed me on the cheek, lifting my breast up in his hand. I could smell the milk again, rancid and sour; then he stood erect, singing, “Saturday night is the
happiest
night of the week. Soo-o they say …” “Just let me rest for a while,” I said. “O.K., baby.” I don’t know when he left, that part is hard to remember; the door clicked sometime and I was alone sweating, sprawled out, listening to the whir of the clock. I lay there for a long while, listening; a fly buzzed somewhere in the room, heavy as slumber, stopped buzzing when it landed. I could see it in my mind: blown in off the fruitstands its feet sticky with oil from bananas, a long proboscis which moved in and out like a pump, legs hairy as a mink and strewn with microbes; I had left an orange on the table and I wondered if the fly was there sniffing around. In my clock Harry and I would be safe from flies forever; they’d drum about overhead blackening the sky, trying to get in, poking their noses through the skylight; we’d see the bearded prisms of their faces, the scowls: we’d be secure forever, guarded by chrome and immutable timeless steel. Something came down from above, a Wrigley wrapper fallen from heaven: it joined a bunch of dust, whirled away across the street, over the housetops. I rose up on my elbows, thinking, listening to the tiny whir of the clock. A subway train roared out of the South, went below somewhere shaking the building, was gone. I tried to think. There were birds in my mind, landbound birds whirling about, dodos and penguins and cassowaries, ostriches befouling their lovely black plumes, and these seemed mixed up with Bunny. Maturity and age aside and after all you are beyond the age of discretion, he’d said; at twenty-two a young lady should know her own mind, the letter went (or did I remember rightly?), maturity and age aside, my lovely one, you must try to settle this thing with Harry, as a lawyer I can tell you one thing, as a father another—let me tell you as the latter: having suffered heartbreaks enough for ten men I can assure you that the love which you know in your heart to be true
is worth every struggle,
though I’m a fine one to talk, stranded as I am now as it were upon a drifting raft from which the dear remembered shores of an earlier, better love seem to recede ever more ceaselessly into the mists of time. And I’ve tried to be good, but I just don’t know, I just don’t know: when I lay down in Darien with Earl Sanders he had a drink in his hand, and I shouted, “No, no, I’m a good girl, I was brought up right,” sounding like a child, but not knowing what else to say. On his shoulders there were liver-colored spots the size of silver dollars and I wept like a baby thinking: if Harry saw me, thinking of St. Catherine, of Orestes and Iphigenia and her knife:
my life hath known no father,
she screamed,
any road to any end may run,
and outside cars went serenely on the gravel springtime roads and I could hear children call beneath the trees. I pushed the alarm button down and sat up on the side of the bed. The pigeons fluttered off in a cloud of dust and feathers. I thought of Bunny’s letter and then of a letter I had written him: but I’d sent it home instead of the club, I remembered, and
why?
That scared me, but I thought about it anyway; perhaps she’d send it on to him, and then again perhaps she wouldn’t. Then I forgot about it. I walked naked to the stove and put water on for coffee. Things were better now for a minute, I sat down on a chair by the stove and watched steam rise from the saucepan, thinking things were better. Dormant, cautious, watchful, like that condor with one waking eye, the pain left me alone inside, lying somewhere beyond my womb; the pills held it off, and I put my brow in my hand and closed my eyes, listening to the hiss of the gas. There were moas now, and emus, big birds with arched gobbling necks and skin beneath their legs, as big as stilts, and prissed around in the sand, yet these, along with all the other ones, stood flightless in my mind, and noiseless, leaving me alone: I felt better. I put some Nescafé in a cup and poured water over it and sat down again. It was almost three. A subway rumbled underneath, I turned on the radio: this bomb they dropped yesterday, the man said, is big, 20,000 tons, 100,000 lives, which would save Dickie Boy, way out in the Philippines with his landing boat. Dickie Boy had a sweet lovely face but his mind was a sheet of paper upon which no thoughtful word had been written, and he couldn’t get it up, but it was so beautiful on the river and I wondered if I hadn’t been wrong: something flowers like time in my soul and I would be a child again and have Dickie Boy lead me along the beach and pick up shells; on the Rappahannock the dawn came up as red, and I remembered I was bleeding and I went into the bathroom and fixed myself. It was my last one. I scrubbed my face and brushed my lovely hair, for I must be pretty for Harry: he would have scolded me for forgetting. “You are always out of things, darling,” he’d say. “What’s the matter, don’t you think of tomorrow at all?” Or, “Come on now, I’m
not
nagging at you, but is it too much to ask, too much to ask, that you clean beneath the bed?” Or, “They say that jealousy is the meanest of emotions but what the hell was the big idea tonight?” That hurt the most and I thought
damn Harry, damn him,
and I stopped brushing my hair, for I was angry, I would
not
go, in spite of all the resolutions I made last night. I thought
you
just come back to
me,
but here: reason came on like a light in my mind, there was a flutter of wings, the birds fled across the sand, swiftly as a gale toward the horizon, and I smiled at myself in the mirror, feeling clean for a moment, and well. “It was always you,” he said, “who complained so bitterly before we got married. About this and that. About my neglect of you and the way I ignored you, none of which—” and he smacked his hand with his fist—“I’ve ever done. Now this. Who’s degenerating now?
Who’s
gone off the deep end?” That hurt the most—then—when he said it, because he was right, but he didn’t know about my plan for the clock, I couldn’t tell him—then—I didn’t want to, I was mad because he was right and when I lay down in Darien with Earl Sanders I was beneath him, sweating in the afternoon; I could
see
light through the fake chateau windows, a green million leaves, and I bit him on the ear pretending it was Harry I hated, until he shrieked: I liked that because it was Harry I bit. When it was over he turned on the Philharmonic; then I could hear the children call beneath the trees and I thought of Mozart dying in the rain. I put the brush back in the cabinet, Harry would think I was pretty. But I knew I must try not to think of Earl Sanders: that made me feel sad, and confused about Harry; besides, the birds came back and things shadowed over some—it seemed that a lot of light went away from the day and the birds came in a scamper across the darkening sand, surrounded me once more, in the bathroom, behind the confusing mirror. I turned out the light and got dressed, backwards: I should have waited until afterwards to comb my hair. My coffee was cool but I drank it anyway, and ate a doughnut. Grandmother made doughnuts, too, Bunny said: I should have dearly loved to see her and to crawl up into her lap. Then I washed the cup and the two saucers; Harry would like it, when we came back tonight, for everything to be clean: I’d show him. I went around straightening things, dusting the bookcase and the books and the shelves. He’d taken all of his paintings except one, of me. Green-eyed, beautiful, in the style of Renoir—but better, he’d said. That was two years ago. I dusted it carefully, looking at my eyes: they were tender, like I was then, I guess, and he hadn’t taken it because he didn’t want to remember me as I was: too goddam painful, he said, to see something all vivid on the canvas when you know it still lives, somewhere apart from you now, all lost and destroyed. I tried to explain to him about the clock: didn’t he see? But he said I was drunk and depraved. “I’ve tried my best to help you, Peyton, but I can’t do any more.” I watched my eyes, light went down across them like morning. I rubbed them with the rag and the dust came off clean. Nagasaki, the man said and he spoke of mushrooms and Mr. Truman: there were atoms in the air everywhere, he said, and he explained, but I couldn’t make much sense. My eyes came off clean, globed from the atoms falling slow or swift, I remembered, I see the suns, I see the systems lift their forms. Lucretius had a heart as big as all outdoors said Harry, but he, too—empires, lands and seas—he too, like these, went soaring back to the eternal drift. I knew I had to get out of there; it was hot, I could feel sweat rolling down my back. I cleaned out the ashtrays with a paper napkin and stacked them up neatly in the sink. Far below in the airshaft a voice rose, round and Sicilian, female, thick as juice from a tangerine:
“Vi-to!” To-to,
the echo went, up through the barred windows, past the crevices and the cool, soot-stained brick, the cracked, frosted bathroom windows, the drainpipes and the radio wires and the walls. “
Vi-to!
” It became still, a truck passed outside; I wondered who Vito was. I threw the doughnut wrapper in the garbage bucket, turned the radio up; sinfonie conzertante, like something ordered and proper and of another earth, morns by men unseen and a far fantastic dawn, but not very clear: there were Negroes on another station, remote, faint and blurred between the fantastic flutes and oboes and the ascending strings:
“Heal
dem, Jesus,
heal
dem!” and distant hallelujahs bare and absolute as a nigger church stuck out in a sunlit shabby grove.
“Heal
dem, Jesus!” I turned the radio off; I had a sign or something, and with all my sleep I was tired; the pain stirred, came up in my womb, but it was not much of a cramp. The place looked clean, and this would please Harry. I went to the door, but I remembered: I went back to the windowsill and got the clock. I cupped my palms around it, looking at the dots and hands, which shone with a clear green light in the darkness: we have not been brought up right, I thought, peering down into the alarm hole: there in the sunny grotto we could coast among the bolts and springs and ordered, ticking wheels, riveted to peace forever. Harry would like to know: rubies he’d love and cherish, in that light they’d glow like the red hats of Breughel dancers. I could hear the serene and steady whir, held it closer to my ear for the ticking, an unfitful, accomplished harmony—perfect, ordered, whole. Then I took the clock and stuffed it in my handbag. I opened the door and went out into the hall: there was a smell here of something cooking, spaghetti and heavy garlic, but a shadow passed over the day again, a tin can clattered down the airshaft, and darkness ran down the walls like a thicket of vines: I watched my hands darken and I trembled a little, thinking of home, yet I knew that this I must try not to think about too. I closed the door, heard a rustling: they followed me, I believe, the flightless birds that I couldn’t see, with a feathered rustling and sedate, unblinking eyes: here they came across the sands, peaceful and without menace, ruffling their silent plumes: I wanted to cry. This mustn’t. Yet I walked down the stairs, thinking not of home but of Grandmother again: she had snuff beneath her lip. “You gotta pay da rent?” said Mrs. Marsicano at the bottom of the stairs. “I will, Mrs. Marsicano,” I said. I smiled at her. She had a mustache and two moles, and she smelled sour and rank, like raw, faintly tainted veal. “I’m going to get Mr. Miller right now. We’ll be back tonight. He’s coming back to live in the apartment and he’ll pay——” But she said, “You tella me these things alla time. What I got to believe? Mr. Miller he been gone fa two months. You all the time say he’s gonna pay. How do I know? The check you gimme she bounce, you owe me one hundred and eighty dolla——” “We’ll pay you,” I said, still smiling at her. “Don’t you worry, Mrs. Marsicano, I’ll make that check good——” But “Ah, you makea me sick,” she said and turned to waddle away, scratching her arms, and her dog, a black mongrel with red-rimmed eyes, lifted its leg up and watered the stairs. I heard her tramp down the hall, saw her disappear into the darkness, the dog scuttling after. She was right and I knew it and the birds rustled somewhere in the hall: I listened for their noise but Harry would take care of me, I knew. I couldn’t think for a minute, thinking that the bank was full of money, my money, but then I remembered: all that which Bunny sent me on my birthday I’d spent, and I remembered the phonograph I had bought, and all the records, and the Benrus clock, my womb all jeweled and safe; it cost $39.95. Too much for a clock but I just knew it had to be a good one, and pretty, with fine turning hands: somewhere in the play someone said the bawdy hand of the hour is on the prick of noon. I peeked into my handbag; Harry’s was just right. Once he asked me who took my maidenhead and I said a bicycle seat named Dickie Boy: when we lay down that afternoon I heard Papageno singing in my sleep and I dreamed of dancers on a green fantastic lawn and sand and pyramids; it was the first time I ever dreamed of birds, they came sedately across the sand, and when we woke up Dickie Boy couldn’t get in. I looked; my clock was safe. I walked on down the hall and onto the sidewalk. A great wave of heat smoldered up from the concrete: you could see it smoky and transparent against the tenement walls and it pasted the dress against my back with sweat. Charles Marsicano was an imbecile and he looked at me with empty brown imbecile eyes and with sweat on his face like a layer of grease. Always his lips were open, they became chapped and peeling, and he spoke: “Where ya goin’, Peyton?” “I’m going up to Cornelia Street, Charles,” I said. “What for, Peyton?” “To get Harry,” I said. “Wan’ me to take your garbage down, Peyton?” “No, thank you, Charles,” I said, “wait till Monday.” “O.K., Peyton.” I left him standing on the stoop, sweating in the heat and the sun, working a yo-yo. He had eyes just like Maudie’s, and Dr. Strassman in Newark said, “Be calm. Be calm. That’s what we’re supposed to work out together.” But, “I don’t think I like you,” I said. The place was just like I imagined, antiseptic, therapeutic, clean, with metal venetian blinds, and Dr. Strassman’s nose was red from a cold. “But you see, I think I’m more intelligent than you,” I said. “Perhaps so, but certainly less stable,” he said. “Perhaps so,” I said, “but certainly more aware of the reason for my trouble.” “Perhaps so.” “Perhaps so.” But we went on for a while, and he said, “I wish you wouldn’t quit. I wish you’d have more patience——” and then I forget what he said, he was stupid and ignorant, wouldn’t he like to know about my clock, but he