A Saucer of Loneliness (16 page)

“Well,” he said. He made a circular gesture and put his hand down limply. He wet his lips. “Well, because you’d have what you wanted.” He looked at her hopefully and realized he’d have to try again. “You could make anyone do what you wanted.”

“Ah,” she said. “Why would you want to do that?”

“So you wouldn’t have to do your own work.”

“Aside from personal comfort—why would you want to be able to tell other people what to do?”

“You tell me,” he said with some warmth.

“The answers are in you if you’ll only look, Don. Tell me: Why?”

He considered. “I guess it’d make me feel good.”

“Feel good?”

“The boss. The Man. You know. I say jump, they jump.”

“Power?”

“Yeah, that’s it, power.”

“Then you want riches so you’ll have a sense of power.”

“You’re in.”

“And you wonder why I don’t want riches. Don, I’ve
got
power. Moreover, it was given me and it’s mine. I needn’t buy it for the rest of my life.”

“Well, now …” he breathed.

“You can’t imagine power in any other terms than cars and swimming pools, can you?”

“Yes I can,” he said instantly. Then he grinned and added, “But not yet.”

“I think that’s more true than you know,” she said, giving him her sparse smile. “You’ll come to understand it.”

They sat in companionable silence. He picked up a crumb of cake icing and looked at it. “Real good cake,” he murmured, and ate it. Almost without change of inflection, he said, “I got a real ugly one to tell you.”

She waited, in the responsive silence he was coming to know so well.

“Met a girl last night.”

He was not looking at her and so did not see her eyes click open, round and moist. He hooked his heel in the chair rung and put his
fist on the raised knee, thumb up. He lowered his head until the thumb fitted into the hollow at the bridge of his nose. Resting his head precariously there, rolling it slightly from time to time as if he perversely enjoyed the pressure and the ache, he began to speak. And if Miss Phoebe found surprising the leaps from power to birthday cake to a girl to what happened in the sewer, she said nothing.

“Big sewer outlet down under the docks at Twenny-Seventh,” he said. “Was about nine or ten, playing there. Kid called Renzo. We were inside the pipe, it was about five feet high, and knee-deep in storm water. Saw somethin’ bobbin’ in the water, got close enough to look. It was the hind feet off a dead rat, a great big one, and
real
dead. Renzo, he was over by the outlet tryin’ to see if he could get up on a towboat out there, and I thought it might be fine if I could throw the rat on his back on account he didn’t have no shirt on. I took hold of the rat’s feet and pulled but that rat, he had his head stuck in a side-pipe somehow, an’ I guess he swole some too. I guess I said something and Renzo he come over, so there was nothin’ for it then but haul the rat out anyway. I got a good hold and yanked, an’ something popped an’ up he came. I pulled ’im right out of his skin. There he was wet an’ red an’ bare an’ smellin’ a good deal. Renzo, he lets out a big holler, laughin’, I can still hear it in that echoey pipe. I’m standin’ there like a goofball, starin’ at this rat. Renzo says, ‘Hit’m quick, Doc, or he’ll never start breathin’!’ I just barely got the idea when the legs come off the rat an’ it fell in the water with me still holdin’ the feet.”

It was very quiet for a while. Don rocked his head, digging his thumb into the bridge of his nose. “Renzo and me we had a big fight after. He tol’ everybody I had a baby in the sewer. He tol’ ’em I’s a first-class stork. They all started to call me Stork. I hadda fight five of ’em in two days before they cut it out.

“Kid stuff,” he said suddenly, too loudly, and sat upright, wide-eyed, startled at the sound. “I know it was kid stuff, I can forget it. But it won’t … it won’t forget.”

Miss Phoebe stirred, but said nothing. Don said, “Girls. I never had nothing much to do with girls, kidded ’em some if there was somebody with me started it, and like that. Never by myself. I tell
you how it is, it’s—” He was quiet for a long moment. His lips moved as if he were speaking silently, words after words until he found the words he wanted. He went on in precisely the same tone, like an interrupted tape recorder. “—like this, I get so I like a girl a whole lot, I want to get close to her, I think about her like any fellow does. So before I can think much about it, let alone
do
anything, zing! I’m standin’ in that stinkin’ sewer, Renzo’s yellin’ ‘Hit’m quick, Doc,’ an’ all the rest of it.” He blew sharply from his nostrils. “The better a girl smells,” he said hoarsely, “the worse it is. So I think about girls, I think about babies; I think about babies, it’s Renzo and me and that echo. Laughin’,” he mumbled, “him laughin’.

“I met a girl last night,” he said clearly, “I don’t want ever to think about like that. I walked away. I don’t know what her name is. I want to see her some more. I’m afraid. So that’s why.”

After a while he said, “That’s why I told you.”

And later, “You were a big help before, the wasps.” As he spoke he realized that there was no point in hurrying her; she had heard him the first time and would wait until she was ready. He picked up another piece of icing, crushed it, tossed the pieces back on the plate.

“You never asked me,” said Miss Phoebe, “about the power I have, and how it came to me.”

“Din’t think you’d say. I wouldn’t, if I had it. This girl was—”

“Study,” said Miss Phoebe. “More of it than you realize. Training and discipline and, I suppose, a certain natural talent which,” she said, fixing him sternly with her eyes as he was about to interrupt, “I am sure you also have. To a rather amazing degree. I have come a long way, a long hard way, and it isn’t so many years ago that I first began to feel this power … I like to think of you with it, young and strong and … and good, growing greater year by year. Don, would you like the power? Would you work hard and patiently for it?”

He was very quiet. Suddenly he looked up at her. “What?”

She said—and for once the control showed—“I thought you might want to answer a question like that.”

He scratched his head and grinned. “Gee, I’m sorry, Miss Phoebe, but for that one second I was thinkin’ about … something else, I
guess. Now,” he said brightly, “what was it you wanted to know?”

“What was this matter you found so captivating?” she asked heavily. “I must say I’m not used to talking to myself, Don.”

“Ah, don’t jump salty, Miss Phoebe,” he said contritely. “I’ll pay attention, honest. It’s just that I—you din’t say word
one
about what I told you. I guess I was tryin’ to figure it out by myself if you wasn’t goin’ to help.”

“Perhaps you didn’t wait long enough.”

“Oh.” He looked at her and his eyes widened.
“Oh!
I never thought of that. Hey, go ahead, will you?” He drew his knees together and clasped them, turned to face her fully.

She nodded with a slightly injured satisfaction. “I asked you, Don, if you’d like the kind of power I have, for yourself.”

“Me?”
he demanded, incredulously.

“You. And I also asked you if you would work hard and patiently to get it.”

“Would I! Look, you don’t really think, I mean, I’m just a—”

“We’ll see,” she said.

She glanced out the window. Dusk was not far away. The curtains hung limp and straight in the still air. She rose and went to the windows, drew the blinds down. The severe velour drapes were on cranes. She swung them over the windows. They were not cut full enough to cover completely; each window admitted a four-inch slit of light. But that side of the building was in shadow, and she turned back to find Don blinking in deep obscurity. She went back to her chair.

“Come closer,” she said. “No, not that way—facing me. That’s it. Your back to the window. Now, I’m going to cover my face. That’s because otherwise the light would be on it; I don’t want you to look at me or at anything but what you find inside yourself.” She took a dark silk scarf from the small drawer in the end of the gateleg table. “Put your hands out. Palms down. So.” She dropped the scarf over her face and hair, and felt for his hands. She slipped hers under his, palms upward, and leaned forward until she could grasp his wrists. “Hold mine that way too. Good.

“Be absolutely quiet.”

He was. She said, “There’s something the matter. You’re all tightened up. And you’re not close enough. Don’t move! I mean, in your mind … ah, I see. You’ll have your questions answered. Just trust me.” A moment later she said, “That’s
much
better. There’s something on your mind, though, a little something. Say it, whatever it is.”

“I was thinkin’, this is a trapeze grip, like in the circus.”

“So it is! Well, it’s a good contact. Now, don’t think of anything at all. If you want to speak, well, do; but nothing will be accomplished until you no longer feel like talking.

“There is a school of discipline called Yoga,” she said quietly. “For years I have studied and practiced it. It’s a lifetime’s work in itself, and still it’s only the first part of what I’ve done. It has to do with the harmony of the body and the mind, and the complete control of both. My breathing will sound strange to you. Don’t be frightened; it’s perfectly all right.”

His hands lay heavily in hers. He opened his eyes and looked at her but there was nothing to see, just the black mass of her silk-shrouded head and shoulders in the dim light. Her breathing deepened. As he became more and more aware of other silences, her breathing became more and more central in his attention. He began to wonder where she was putting it all; an inhalation couldn’t possibly continue for so long, like the distant hiss of escaping steam. And when it dwindled, the silence was almost too complete, for too long; no one could hold such a deep breath for as long as that! And when at last the breath began to come out again, it seemed as if the slow hiss went on longer even than the inhalation. If he had wondered where she was putting it, he now wondered where she was getting it.

And at last he realized that the breathing was not deep at all, but shallow in the extreme; it was just that the silence was deeper and her control greater than he had imagined.

His hands—

“It tingles. Like electric,” he said aloud.

His voice did not disturb her in the least. She made no answer in any area. The silence deepened, the darkness deepened, the tingling
continued and grew … not grew; it spread. When he first felt it, it had lived in a spot on each wrist, where it contacted hers. Now it uncoiled, sending a thin line of sensation up into his forearms and down into his hands. He followed its growth, fascinated. Around the center of each palm the tingling drew a circle, and sent a fine twig of feeling growing into his fingers, and at the same time he could feel it negotiating the turn of his elbows.

He thought it had stopped growing, and then realized that it had simply checked its twig-like creeping, and was broadening; the line in his arms and fingers was becoming a band, a bar of feeling. It crossed his mind that if this bothered him at all he could pull his hands away and break the contact, and that if he did that Miss Phoebe would not resent it in any way. And, since he knew he was free to do it, knew it without question, he was not tempted. He sat quietly, wonder-struck, tasting the experience.

With a small silent explosion there were the tingling, hair-thin lines of sensation falling like distant fireworks through his chest and abdomen, infusing his loins and thighs and the calves of his legs. At the same time more of them crept upward through his neck and head, flared into and around his ears, settled and boiled and shimmered through his lobes and cheeks, curled and clasped the roots of his eyelids. And again there was the feeling of the lines broadening, fusing one with the other as they swelled. Distantly he recognized their ultimate; they would grow inward and outward until they were a complete thing, bounded exactly by everything he was, every hair, every contour, every thought and function.

He opened his eyes, and the growth was not affected. The dark mass of Miss Phoebe’s head was where it had been, friendly and near and reassuring. He half-smiled, and the sparkling delicate little lines of feeling on his lips yielded to the smile, played in it like infinitesimal dolphins, gave happy news of it to all the other threads, and they all sang to his half-smile and gave him joy. He closed his eyes comfortably, and cheerful filaments reached for one another between his upper and lower lashes.

An uncountable time passed. Time now was like no time he knew of, drilling as it always had through event after event, predictable
and obedient to rust, springtime, and the scissoring hands of clocks. This was a new thing … not a suspension, for it was too alive for that. It was different, that’s all, different the way this feeling was, and now the lines and bands and bars were fused and grown, and he was filled, he was, himself, of a piece with what had once been the tingling of a spot on his wrist.

It was a feeling, still a feeling, but it was a substance too, Don-sized, Don-shaped. A color … no, it wasn’t a color, but if it had been a color it was beginning to glow and change. It was glowing as steel glows in the soaking pits, a color impossible to call black because it is red inside; and now you can see the red; and now the red has orange in it, and now in the orange is yellow, and when white shows in the yellow you may no longer look, but still the radiation beats through you, intensifying … not a color, no; this thing had no color and no light, but if it had been a color, this would have been its spectral growth.

And this was the structure, this the unnamable
something
which now found itself alive and joyous. It was from such a peak that the living thing rose as if from sleep, became conscious of its own balance and strength, and leapt heavenward with a single cry like all the satisfying, terminal resolving chords of all music, all uttered in a wingbeat of time.

Then it was over not because it was finished, like music or a meal, but because it was perfect, like foam or a flower caught in the infrangible amber of memory. Don left the experience without surfeit, without tension, without exhaustion. He sat peacefully with his hands in Miss Phoebe’s, not dazzled, not numb, replenished in some luxurious volume within him which kept what it gained for all of life, and which had an infinite capacity. But for the cloth over her face and the odd fact that their hands were dripping with perspiration, they might just that second have begun. It may even have been that second.