Love and Sleep (48 page)

"Well hell,” he said. “Then come have a coffee with me."

She looked back up at the building, at its flags flying, as though it might relent and open; then back to Pierce.

"Okay,” she said.

"It's a long-term project that I'm assisting someone on,” she said to Pierce in the Donut Hole, settling on this formula not quite comfortably he thought. “A someone,” she immediately added, “who has recently sort of lost interest."

"Oh?"

She picked up and tore in two a fragment of her pastry, looking out the front window of the little shop toward the river. She pondered what appeared from her face to be a grievance, and he waited to see if she would air it.

"It seems to me unfair,” she said.

"Hm."

"When a project has gotten to a certain state, and people have worked hard to help."

"Yes."

"To just lose interest.” She looked directly into Pierce's eyes. “I know how to do what I need to do. But I need some guidance."

"Sure,” he said. “And this person..."

"A psychotherapist. The Woods Center.” She sipped her coffee thirstily and brushed back the thick hair that fell forward when she drank.

"So,” Pierce said. He thought he knew anyway what name she would not say. “What exactly does your part consist of?"

"Research,” she said. “Compiling data, sort of, for a statistical model."

"Research on..."

She looked out the window, a curious twist to her mouth.

"I mean if you don't want to say,” Pierce said; he well knew how fraught research can be, non-scholars would be surprised.

She considered a moment, and then took from her bag a clutch of duplicated sheets, graph paper, annotated in peacock ink.

"Lives,” she said, and showed him.

Lives, beginning at zero, mount up a steady curve of learning and experience, meeting challenges, facing obstacles. At seven years children have achieved a sort of mastery; they stand on a plateau; they know what the world is and they know what they are within it, like it or not.

"Then comes a turn,” said Rose, her explaining pencil taking the top of the curve.

Then comes a turn, not down so much as out (undrawable on graph paper) and new experience begins to threaten the early synthesis. Confusions and difficulties. “The Down Passage Year, here, where you cross the midline heading downward. A dangerous time.” The wave overwhelms the little boat; the young life is tossed out to flounder. A nadir is reached. Rose's pencil tapped the bottom of the curve.

"Then you start up again,” she said. “Slowly at first. You find out you've bottomed out."

"No place to go but up."

"Up,” she said, and her pencil went up the next hill or wave. “Right
here
you cross the midline, and for the next year you are putting together this new hard stuff, working toward a new synthesis. An Up Passage Year. Kind of exciting. Until you reach a new Plateau Period, and now you know what's what again, you know who you are and what the rules are for being in the world."

"And then."

Her finger traced the way down again. “Down Passage Year.” Then up to twenty-one. “Plateau Period.” She looked up at him then, satisfied.

"That,” Pierce said, “is absolutely remarkable."

"Now it's really just a beginning, but."

"No but I can see."

"And there is a certain, I mean. This is all supposed to be very..."

"My lips are sealed,” Pierce said. “Absolutely. Not my field anyway,” he added, looking down on her charts, which would not have puzzled any seventeenth-century doctor, though he might have envied them. “And this method is called..."

"Climacterics."

He laughed aloud, threw back his head and laughed. Whenever he thought that the world really had no use any longer for the sort of practices he had promised his agent Julie Rosengarten that he could retail by the dozen, whenever he felt embarrassment or shame at his enterprise of magic, in his ashen midnight wakings, somebody would unfold to him a system for finding hidden treasure, or invite him to have his aura balanced, or define his life in mystic numbers. Climacterics!

"The Grand Climacteric...” she said.

"Is sixty-three. Seven years later..."

"You could go farther."

"You could,” he said, still laughing.

She took no umbrage at his laughter, in fact she smiled too, and returned to her coffee. He looked at her, she at him. She put away her papers, and shook her long hair free of some tug somewhere.

"So,” she said. “What is it that
you
do there?"

"Oh. Ah. Research too."

"Oh?"

"Well,” he said. “Shouldn't I be circumspect? No, fair's fair; you told me. Actually my project is a little hard to describe. A little shocking."

"Oh come on."

"Intimate. Of course you're a professional. In a sort of allied field. So."

"So?"

"I'm doing work on magic,” he said.

She lowered her cup to its saucer. “Magic,” she said. “Not like, card tricks and stuff. Houdini."

"No. Not like.” He said nothing more, smiling and open but not accommodating, allowing her to regard him in puzzlement. A kind of wonderful calm was in him, and an access to power in speech that he only rarely felt; he knew it was because Robbie was near, only a spiritual block away.

"Actually,” he said, “'magic’ is sort of a hard word to say out loud, I think."

"Yes?"

"It is if you mean it. A little shaming to say. Like ‘sex.’”

"Like sex?” She laughed.

"I mean it's a thing you want to keep at a distance. Even though it means a great deal to you, even
because
it does. It's just agreed on, under the rules of politeness. It won't be seriously discussed."

"You sound like you think it works,” she said.

He leaned toward her and began to speak a little more urgently. “Magic comes in more than one kind,” he said. “There's illusion, like you said; Houdini. And wonder-working, wave a wand, get what you want—that kind is restricted to stories. But there are other kinds, that were really practiced. For centuries. It doesn't seem likely that people would have gone to so much trouble for so long if what they did didn't work at all."

"Like pacts with the devil? Witchcraft?"

"No,” Pierce said. “That kind wouldn't work unless there really is a devil, or was, who could help. You believe that?"

"I just got here,” she said, and laughed again. “Spells?"

"Ah,” Pierce said. “Ah.” He brought out tobacco, and papers, and began making a cigarette. Magic was a hard word to say, he had always thought so, shaming by its power, its power among other things to make us look ridiculous when we take it seriously. Like sex. “Spells at least only require people. One to cast, one to receive. What's called
intersubjective
magic."

"You can resist,” she said.

"Right. There are lots easier ways than magic to make you do something you don't want to do. You can refuse to be entranced; you can resist, you can deny the magician's claim to power. And if you do resist, everybody agrees the magician can't do a thing. What he can do is—knowing the secret springs of your nature, by means of his powers—he can make it very hard for you to resist."

"Yes?"

"He'd have to know first what kind of spirit yours was, and whether it was subject to magic at all. Not everyone's is."

"How would he know?"

"He'd know. He'd see,” Pierce said. “In fact"—vamping now, he had never thought of these things before—"a danger for the great magician would have been that he was so sensitive himself to the projections of others. Which made his control even more heroic."

"Hm.” She was paying close attention, it seemed, though perhaps not to him.

"Of course it's impossible to have perfect knowledge of somebody else's spirit. So he has to
convince
the person whose spirit he wants to bind that he does in fact have such perfect knowledge."

"Illusion? I thought you said."

"Well all magic partakes of illusion. Shared illusion.” He drew the bill to his side of the table. “You have to have faith,” he said. “I said so."

She seemed to ponder this silently, or maybe something else entirely, her own spell over herself; her hand, idly touching her neck and shirt, found a button that had come open, one top button too many, and her other hand moved to help button it.

"Don't,” Pierce said. “Leave it."

Her hands paused in mid-task, and her eyes, into which Pierce was projecting this little command, seemed to fill with something that made them no less transparent but also somehow sightless.

Then she put her hands down on the table, looking away from him and from them, head erect though; and neither spoke for a moment.

"So tell me,” Pierce said, but then only cleared his throat, having really nothing to say, speaking only to mask his awe, at his own daring, at its result. Good Lord it's true.

A rattle and bang of firecrackers, this one loud, lifting them both a millimeter. They laughed together. Moment passed. And yet the little varnished pine stall they sat in remained levitated, not much but a little, and was now turning, like a rising airship, into some sort of wind, toward somewhere; its movement too gentle even to be vertiginous, and yet definite.

Out on River Street. The Library was to the left; down to the right was another street upward, a long way round to his apartment. “So is he, are you, planning a book?"

"What?"

"Climacterics."

"Oh. Well. It's not been discussed. I mean we haven't even talked about this process
I'm
doing for
weeks."

"It seems like a natural,” he said, not missing the rancor in her voice. “Really.” He could, in fact, see it on the paperback rack at the Variety Store already, in grabber colors.
Climacterics: Your New Ancient Guide to Life's Cycles.

She turned to look at him, lips apart but not sure if she should smile or laugh, waiting for more.

"I happen,” he said, “to be represented by an agent, who. This would be precisely up her alley. More than anything I."

"But it's not a book,” Rose said, following him rightward. “It's a, well. A
practic.
He calls it."

"Not a book
yet
,” Pierce said. “They're easily made. Listen. If you would like any help, on the historical part I mean, advice. Some books to look at. I mean it."

"Well,” she said, laughing at his insistence.

"Hey,” he said, guiding her toward his street with a touch on her elbow. “Research is where you find it."

Soon she stood at the door of his peculiar apartment, a string of three rooms: kitchen, little parlor, and (largest by far) the room that was both bedroom and study, where he worked: a piled messy desk, the powder-blue electric typewriter on its stand, and many books.

"You work in bed?” she asked, hands in her pockets, at the door of this room. Pierce laughed, thinking of answers to this. The bed was overlarge, brass, mounded with pillows, and clothed just now in dark Turkish-looking stuff.

"You have a sun-porch too,” she noted. She pointed to the door, beyond which was Robbie's daybed, still unmade, where Pierce had spent the morning. “Nice."

"Yes,” he said. “Everything I need.” Was Robbie cross with him? He checked to see. No not cross. Interested, actually; even eager. Pierce felt the warmth of his interest, his wide eyes and the curve of his mouth, and he nearly laughed aloud, made of glee by now and the effervescence of certain power. Why you little.

"Books,” she said.

"Books."

He watched as she passed slowly into the bedroom, her hand moving over a case of them, touching their spines with her fingertips, making him think of a diver examining a coral reef or sunken ship. A small cloud crossed the sun; the undersea wavered, and then restored itself.

"You know,” he said. “I've never forgotten that river party. Last summer."

"Uh huh,” she said.

"It's a funny story, actually,” he said. “What I thought then. I'll tell you sometime."

She turned to face him, a look of perfect incomprehension and a dreamy lack of interest, as though it had nothing to do with her.

"Anyway I think of it often. The little cabin. Breaking in."

"Cabin?” she asked.

He studied her, as coolly as he could amid the currents already flowing between them, and an odd certainty was handed him. “You don't remember, do you?” he asked, smiling.

"Remember what?” she asked.

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On that morning Rosie Rasmussen had awakened smiling, pleased, without at first knowing the reason. When Sam (who had maybe awakened her, stirring in the next room) saw that her mother was awake, she came to stand grinning up at her in her tall bed: and Rosie remembered the dream she had had, a ridiculous pornographic dream, impossible and gratifying.

"How come you're up, Mom?"

"How come
I'm
up! You just woke me up. How come you're up."

"That's what I
mean
."

"Oh."

She had dreamed that she lived in some mild paradisal island or planet, warm sunshot forests populated by men, well by enormous creatures who looked like men; in her memory they almost seemed more like fruit, sun-warmed and smooth-skinned, pink as babies. She herself was one of another species, female, tiny and quick and cunning, who lived with and from the men; she and her kind spent their time trying to rouse the great big baby-like males, to get them hard so they could be sucked, which was somehow not only sex and procreation for the females but nourishment as well. So slow and bland were the men, though, that it took all kinds of cosseting and teasing to get them up, they hardly noticed the little females at work on them.

She did get hers, though; she remembered his sweet sleepy smile as he watched her clamber over him and work, not minding her but not real attentive, like a cow being milked (how it was even possible for her to fit him in her hand and mouth given the disparity in their sizes the dream didn't bother explaining, it just was possible, even easy). And she remembered how at last the big thing gave up to her at last its flood, like a primed pump gushing: and the keen delight that had filled her in the dream filled her again, astonishment, accomplishment, gratification, nourishment all together. Crazy, crazy, crazy.