Love and Sleep (47 page)
Why do we awake with boners from dreams of night cities, our fathers, hope.
It was as warm as day. Pierce pushed aside the sheet that covered him, and looked up into the mirror that he had hung cantilevered over the bed, in which he was accustomed now and then to see pictures of the bed's former life in the city, pictures that, like old hand-colored photographs, grew more not less remote and unreal as he applied his tints to them. I will take it down, he thought.
The muslin curtains he had hung in the sun-porch window stirred. He noticed that, the stir of breeze. And then Robbie was beside his bed. Standing slim tall wandlike in his white undershorts over Pierce.
What is it?
I don't want to sleep out there.
What do you mean?
I don't want to sleep out there. I'd rather sleep here.
Well but, Pierce said; Robbie allowed him to stare and murmur, only smiling and possessing himself, arms wrapping his long torso; and then he placed his forefinger gently against his lips, and pulled away Pierce's sheet.
Shine of his thigh in moon- and street-light as he climbed up, still smiling, nearly laughing. When he pressed against Pierce for the first time (for they had not yet truly embraced, not wholly, shy maybe in the day), Pierce could feel the heat still emanating from him, the sun he had walked in all day to find his father.
Morning and the cicada's whine, and a light of unearthly clarity (so it seemed to Pierce, Day One in a world new-hatched) filling his apartment. He sat on the daybed with the gray ledger in his hands, wherein Robbie was chiefly kept (so far, so far).
How light but not fragile he had felt, satin-skinned and not soft: somehow like holding a bird and not a beast. The crown of his head, that one of Pierce's hands could compass; the strong vulnerable tendons of his neck. “Well I will forget a lot of things,” Pierce wrote, heart a hot lump in his throat, “but I will not forget that. I wept, after, a little; and he wanted to know why, wasn't it fun? And I said it was fun, and I said I didn't know why. But I did."
He put down his pencil, vividly conscious suddenly of what he had done, what acts; startled and shamed to see himself at them.
So. He had not, it seemed, escaped harmless from his own father's sexual tortuosities, only he had not had evidence of them till now. Robbie was doubtless nothing more than a cryptic gateway through which his inheritance had come. Maybe this was how such tendencies commonly first emerge, issuing as harmless fantasy, a Young Friend, a Chum, whose love is offered with magical swiftness and complaisance. Only then come the stalkings, the sordid crimes.
Though actually (Pierce thought) Axel wasn't bent that way; he'd often professed a horror of child molestation, had despised those he knew who confessed to or rejoiced in such tastes, and been puzzled by them too, where's the fun.
Not Axel's genes then even to blame probably. And yet even Axel might understand the love.
But how could he have, how. When the last thing he would want to do was to hurt his own son. Pierce chewed his pen's end. Can a phantasm be hurt? He would have to consult his experts. If one were, it would of course be only the creator or possessor of the phantasm who would suffer (and suffer the more as the phantasm were more present to him). That seemed obvious, and also seemed not to matter; he could not evade what he had done merely by denying the reality of his victim.
But hurt, hurt, how hurt anyway: he clapped his brow and laughed, near tears again: how hurt, when it had been Robbie who had made the invitation, who had gently mocked Pierce's inhibitions, who at morning, elbow on the pillow next to Pierce's, had looked down on him with a smile of selfless pleased godlike sweetness probably no child of thirteen had ever truly smiled. Pierce had only accepted: though he had, admittedly, elaborated and gone on elaborating the consequences of his acceptance all by himself, all that blue-and-white morning, astonished at his own ceaselessness, as though he were thirteen again himself.
For all of that had been present too in his wish from the beginning; and from the beginning he had known it, but had kept from himself the secret.
He wondered if Robbie had known it too, if it had been part of his plan, imagined as he dozed on the bus or crossed the mountain on foot. What was it in Robbie, a natural bent, an overplus of generous feeling, what? There had been a boy at St. Guinefort's, Pierce's old school, a charmer to whom a copulation was among the necessary first offerings of a friendship, it was like a warm handshake, a hug, a swap of cherished belongings.
Well: Pierce would learn in time.
"Because he's going to stay with me now, ever after,” Pierce wrote defiantly. “One of his grandparents recently died; the other is a little gaga; so it shouldn't be hard, with my new fairy wealth, to make it all legal. He'll love it around here, I think, away from the city, and raising him will take all my resources, maybe some I don't yet know I have, all right, all right. I didn't have anything else anyway to do."
He lay down the pencil then, and attended only to the rising spring that had come forth in him, a burble of possibilities, some of them contradictory, succeeding one another rapidly and without his conscious participation. Robbie would grow, he would change. Of course he would. Certainly he would love others; girls too, Pierce thought it likely. Dates. In fact it might be that the two of them would rarely again, would not even once more.
And yet they would not cease to be lovers, never ever, no matter how Robbie grew or how often or for how long life parted them, never ever.
He showered and shaved, a whole working morning having vanished away, and dressed. He stood on the steps of his building rolling a cigarette and remembering small details of the night and morning that had passed: thinking he knew, now, what those nuns felt who in the night or at Mass were embraced by smiling Christ or His Angel, made to cry aloud as they were pierced with arrows or made to take fiery swords upon their tongues: he knew just how hard it might be for them to make a distinction between such experiences and ones which other fleshly people might share with them.
He walks with me and He talks with me and He tells me I am His own. Pierce could not have imagined this solution to his difficulties in advance, but a solution it seemed to be. Doesn't matter, doesn't matter. He stepped off purposefully down Maple Street toward Hill Street, though he had no purpose, and needed none.
His mailbox at the Post Office was empty, except for an extremely small package from New York City, whose handwriting and address he didn't at first recognize. Wrapped in brown paper that had before wrapped something else. He turned it in his fingers, teasing himself with its oddness for a minute.
As he opened it the problem of who had sent it was unwrapped too in his mind, the address, her changeable hand. Oh sure.
The Sphinx in New York had sent him, inside the brown paper, a matchbox from a City restaurant; and inside that, folded absurdly small, three hundred-dollar bills. And something else: a button to pin on his shirt, gathered on a junktique hunt presumably. It bore a wreath of tiny greeting-card roses, and in churchy script the words
Be of good cheer.
He held the little button, feeling his soul topped up with luck and love. Maybe he had been wrong, about three wishes. What if, in coming upon Robbie and making him manifest, he had not completed a triad but instead had discovered an unsuspected malleability in the whole wide world? Maybe after wishing all his life for this and that, carefully framing his wishes or moaning them out in the desperate midnight, he had somehow hit on the trick of it; just as after he had blown fruitlessly through puckered lips for weeks and months he had found himself suddenly, though doing nothing apparently different, able to whistle.
Was there, in that case, anything else he would care for? He felt beside him the smiling cosmic waiter, the long menu, not able yet to be read, but coming maybe clearer.
On River Street, he glanced sidewise at the boys on their bikes, sunstreaked moptops, golden-tanned and lithe. It might be that a nice square wrist, a frank smile, borrowed from one or another of these kids could help clothe Robbie in flesh, who remained discouragingly not quite but almost discarnate. But these real physical boys, the idea of, of. No. The approach was unthinkable, and the imagined sensation repellent, or at least weirdly unlikely, like eating snails or bathing in milk.
"Hi."
"Hi there,” Pierce said. “How was the game."
"Okay."
"Hey, good.” Turning away from them, seeing them try to place this tall shambling guy (teacher? parent?); laughing inwardly and blushing. No he had
not
somehow contracted a new sex perversion overnight. He didn't want a new class of bodies to handle or a new sort of thrill to stir his jaded heart: he wanted a person, just one, this person alive to him and with him even now.
He would walk out of town, he thought. At the end of River Street there would be two ways he could go: up the road leftward, which traveled past the better residences and out to tidy farms and thence upward, spiraling around Mount Randa; or rightward across the bridge to the Shadow River road, a poorer part of town, a steeper way upward. He thought he would choose when he got to the crossroads. Which way, son? You pick.
But when he came to the steps of the Blackbury Jambs Library, which faces on River Street, he saw Rose Ryder just coming down them, her bookbag over her shoulder and papers in her arms. The two of them drifted to a halt together, at the bottom of the steps. The moon, almost too pale to see in the sky above the library, slipped undetectably into a new sign.
"I said I'd see you here,” she said. “Eventually."
"Yes,” Pierce said.
She had indeed said so, not long ago, even as she rose away from Pierce and from the earth in the basket of a hot-air balloon. That was at a festival up on Skytop, marking summer's beginning. The basket contained not only her, Rose Ryder, but Mike Mucho and his little girl as well. The balloon was a Raven, vast and black. Pierce could almost hear its burner sound on River Street.
The Blackbury Jambs Free Library was completed in 1898, a sort of Shingle Style building with a central dome and wings, paid for by the Carnegie Foundation and opened on July Fourth, wrapped in bunting. In the entranceway is a mounted slab of mud with a dinosaur's footprint embedded in it; in the children's room a frieze of North American mammals, faded now almost to ghosts and surprising the unwary child who looks up to find them there. All of Fellowes Kraft's novels are there, of course, and a couple of his other books as well; he used to look into them, surreptitiously, to see if anyone was taking them out. He used the Blackbury Jambs Library a lot, despite having so many books of his own, and Pierce was eventually to come upon several of the Library's books among his, years overdue.
Rose Ryder worked there two or three mornings a week, in the big wing to the left of the entrance. She arrived early and made her place at a long table, by a green-shaded light; she took out from her bag a big pad of graph paper, a steel ruler, a fine-pointed draftsman's pen, and a pocket calculator for the math, which otherwise defeated her. Then she got up, went to the low shelves on the north wall (beneath a portrait of George Washington) and drew out a volume of the
Dictionary of American Biography
, and carried it back to her place. There she opened it, and as though practicing a sortilege, she riffled the pages, let them fall open randomly, and with her eyes closed put her finger on a name. If the entry or the life proved too short, she took the one before or after it.
She would pick up her ruler then, and score a line across the pad's width in peacock ink (her choice). Then, carefully counting squares, she would draw sharp parabolas, up and over the line and down under it again, a sine wave. She usually did this work the night before, but not last night, too crowded with crazy incident. At the top of the first parabola she wrote the number seven; and at the tops of the others, multiples of seven: fourteen, twenty-one, twenty-eight up to the last year of the life she was charting. It looked like this:
When she had done this, she could begin the more subjective or judgmental part of her work, the creative part as she thought of it, the part she was good at: seeing how the life thus charted met or did not meet the predictions of the system (or of its inventor rather) about the nature and common course of life, the shaping force of its seven-year cycles. When she was all finished, and the particular life had yielded up its shape, then its accidents and incidents would be used to refine further the system's generalizations. She would have time, in the course of a morning's work, to thus dismantle and reassemble four or five lives.
Not this morning, though.
"Closed,” she said to Pierce. “All day."
"Oh yes?"
"Fourth of July,” she said, and somewhere nearby a string of crackers went off. Ladyfingers. “I just forgot."