Love and Sleep (52 page)

"Val,” he said at last, as though the name had surprised him, turning up on his tongue. “Valerie."

O Christ let her not cry.

"I wanted to visit,” she said. “I've wanted to for a long time."

He tried to lift himself from the chaise on an elbow, found he could not, and lowered himself again. “I'm afraid,” he said, “I haven't been well."

"I know,” she said. “I know.” O why couldn't she have come earlier, why hadn't she been braver, why hadn't she listened to herself. “It's awful to put things off, put them off and off, until. But you."

He said nothing. Where had he got that silk dressing gown, like a fairy-tale emperor, it appeared actually to be empty, like a puppet's clothes. What if. No his breast just then rose and fell.

"I wanted,” she said, “to ask you something, about something Rosie said to me, Rosie Mucho."

He opened his mouth, but said nothing.

"She didn't know, but I bet you can tell me. Who is Una Knox?"

She smiled when she said it, you gay dog, tell me your secrets. Boney made no sign he had heard.

"It doesn't really matter,” she said. “I just wondered. Honest to Christ it is not something I wanted to plumb.” O stupid stupid tears, how irrelevant can you be, she had not meant to begin, she had
not
begun, and she would not.

"I don't,” she said, “I don't
want
anything from you. It's just."

"I'm sorry,” he said.

Val's heart rose into her throat, forgiveness and love ready to be poured out even before they were asked for. She stepped closer. There were tears in his eyes, unfallen.

"I'm sorry,” he said again. And this time raised his hand to his ear, to cup it. “You said?"

I'm sorry, scuse me, come again: that's all he had meant. Of course. Val swallowed, trying to dislodge her unpoured heart, which was stuck painfully in her throat. “No,” she said. “Nothing."

"I'm afraid,” he said again. “I can't offer you anything. Mrs. Pisky."

"Well,” she said. “Well listen."

Listen. But she said nothing more. He lifted himself again on his elbow, as though he had already forgotten that he couldn't do it, and settled again, a fragile thing too heavy to be lifted and so put back carefully.

"Bad day,” he said.

"Yes."

She sat down on the hard chair near him. He turned his head toward her, weird object, brown-spotted and damp and absurdly small, like a doll's left out lost for years. She herself felt horribly enormous, weighty, filled up with all that she was not going to say.

Not going to say: for she had understood almost as soon as she entered here that she was not going to charge him with all that he had done, or make him acknowledge her, or ask any of the questions she had asked him in so many imaginary interviews in so many imaginary movie versions of this room. It was just too late. He had not done it and she had not been able to make him do it and now it was too late. He was only a sick old man who could think of nothing but himself and his death: as she would think of nothing else when her turn came.

"I'm sorry?” he said again.

"It's okay,” she said. Even if she had demanded he listen to her, the story would still be hers to carry, no lighter. “It's nothing. Rest."

She sat by him a long time. Once she got up and with the corner of the sheet she wiped away the tear that trickled down the crevasses of his cheek, not shed for her or for any of his other sins, only another gland malfunctioning, he hardly noticed. Mrs. Pisky gasped to find her there bent over him, intruder, thief, Angel of Death in a sundress.

"So,” Val said to Rosie. “I've been here helping. Cheering him up.” A sort of antic cheer had entered Val herself by then, the resolution of no resolution, she was to be left with the self she had brought here, but by Christ she would not imagine this room and this moment and this man again.

"Oh, Val,” said Rosie. “O god how strange."

Had he heard Val tell Rosie her story? He gave no sign. Rosie looked on him in awe. In her eyes he had shape-shifted into something not entirely human.

She stood. Mrs. Pisky now returned from the phone, cried out with relief to see that Rosie had come home. Boney on his sheeted couch looked up at the three women standing over him.

"I'm afraid,” he said. “I have to go."

"Well sure,” Mrs. Pisky said. “When we have to go, we have to go.” Her own cheer was all worn away, transparent, seen to be the artificial kind, no longer any mistake about it. Not at heart a cheerful woman, stubby, strong, and loud, she had always scared Rosie, who thought Boney was afraid of her too.

They got him to his feet, at which he looked, as though uncertain where they were placed.

"So you were just going to sneak away, I guess,” Val said. “Huh? Not a word to anybody. Well hell. Hell of a note."

Boney got to the study door, taking small uncertain steps. The doorway was not wide enough for all of them to help Boney through it, yet it seemed certain that he would fall over if any of them let go.

"You take his left hand,” Val said to Rosie. “I'll get past and."

Maneuvering carefully, movers with an antique, they got him out and into the hall; his throat was full, and his short breaths rattled the phlegm.

"Sorry,” he said. “I'm sorry."

"Sure,” Val said. “Sure you are."

The bathroom door was not far now. Each of them was thinking the same thought, what exactly they would do when they got him standing before the toilet (which could be seen now through the open door, aloof and patient), when Boney all at once loosened his grip on them. The urgent tension that alone had held him upright went out of him, his wires cut. He settled backward into their arms with a grateful small exhalation.

Mrs. Pisky, who alone of them had experience of this big moment, this passage, who had experienced several in fact, made an awed moan that Boney Rasmussen didn't hear. He had not heard much of what had been said to him or in his presence during the interminable length of this day, had not always been sure that the person being talked about so gravely was himself. Anyway he had long forgotten what little he had heard.

Sorry. Sorry. It was because he had had so little time: because his time had been so short. An eyewink between the unrememberable beginning and the oblivion. How could you do anything but begin? How?

Gently he extricated himself from the women, and stood on his own. That had been a mistake, apparently, about needing to go to the bathroom. He didn't need to after all. He had thought he felt a great need, but he had been wrong.

No, no need.

He looked back once at the three women standing at the study door, puzzled and still, as though they had dropped something and hadn't yet realized it. Well he would go on. Clearly he was on his own. There was no one who could do this for him, he would have to do it himself, it had been a mistake and an injustice for him to ask and pester others so long and so fruitlessly. Not even Sandy Kraft could acquire it for him, for it was his alone, and therefore his to find.

He saw now (why had it taken him so long to see it?) that the way to proceed was simply to trace the path backward, step by step, just as you must do when you have lost anything; trace the way back until you find it. He would start from the end and go on toward the beginning, and at a turn he would come upon it, just where it ought to be, where he alone could recognize it.

First he would go to Kraft's house; he would pick up the trail within the book Kraft had left for him (yes, for him, it was quite clear, though he had not wanted to say it aloud, not even in the spaces of his heart); he would trace it backward, to Europe certainly probably, to London, Rome, Vienna. Then to Prague, too.

But Kraft's first. He knew the way well, had walked there more than once on summer nights like this one, the way illuminated by the moon. He could imagine the lights lit in the windows there, at the end of the drive, near the dark pines; could even see Sandy there within, in his armchair in the lamplight, his sweet trickster's eyes and smile. O Friend.

He took cap and stick from the hall-tree. The hall was long and strangely huge, and at its end the great door out. He would have to have strength for that. And then the night and the path. But had he forgotten something? Left something behind? It began to seem that indeed there was something left behind forgotten, that tugged at him, retarding his progress, a child ignored tugging at her father's pants-leg. What? Something done or undone, which if it weren't remembered made the whole journey pointless, the reason for setting out, the wallet, the car keys, the ticket, the something.

Though he had ceased to make any progress toward it, the door had grown larger. He
had
forgotten something back there, he had O God he had: he decided that he had to go back, he had to go back immediately. When he tried to do so, however, he found that he could not turn himself around. He could not even turn his head, not because he lacked the strength but because there was not anything, anything at all, behind him to turn to.

"Once when I was young,” Pierce said to Rose Ryder, “I started a forest fire."

Below where they were parked, the surface of Nickel Lake was dashed with starlight; many cars were parked around its margins in twos and threes, and families moved down the steep banks through stands of dark fir to reach the shore, passing the little car where Pierce and Rose sat.

"It wasn't a very big one, but it was a real forest fire. I wasn't playing with matches or anything like that; I'd been doing my chores, actually. Burning trash. And it started a little brush fire."

"Yes,” she said.

"I watched it for a long time, and then watched it from the roof of my uncle's house when it got dark, and watched it turn into a real fire."

"Yes."

"They didn't have the means to fight it, I guess,” Pierce said. “So it just burned out of control."

"Yes,” she said again. “I know."

Now and then there came a crackle of class-B fireworks, and distant laughter. Imps moved about the barge on the middle of the lake, you could see the glowing points of the punk they carried. The sheriff, the Sportsmen's Club. Catcalls for their dilatoriness.

And now at last the first rocket arose from the barge out on the lake, and burst: brilliant dandelion-moon of fire appearing full-blown, then gone, and the big whack of sound reaching them an instant after. “Oooh,” she said.

The next one rose—they didn't have many, and sent them up at first singly—and they all tilted their heads back to follow its wavering trail upward. Oh! It was one of those that was all noise, the sound reflected back from the surrounding hills shaking the heart.

"Oh,” she said, chuckling with deep delight and wiggling in her seat. “Oh I love those.” She lifted her foot to prop it on the dashboard. “So yes?"

"That's all,” Pierce said. “I just remembered. Feeling the power of it. On the roof with my cousins.” Discovering how much destructive force there was in the world, pure power, neither good nor bad but only potential, and how easily it could be released.

Another bomb-burst, more complex: a fire-flower first, then sharp reports that generated whizzing devils, then the big bang at the end. Its instant of light revealed the folk in their beach chairs, kids under blankets, girls and boys on the hoods of cars, arms around one another.

"So who were all these cousins?” she asked him.

"My uncle's children. I was raised by an uncle."

"Oh.” She waited to see what would become of the next one: it sent a mild scatter of blossoms in many colors. Hiss of the detritus falling into the water. “Aw,” she said tenderly. “No parents?"

"Parents, sure. My mother left my father at one point and went to live with her brother."

"Sisters? Brothers?"

"No. My cousins were like brothers and sisters. Sort of."

She sipped beer, they had brought some, but her elation was not due to it. “And what about you?” she said. “Not married. No kids?"

Whack.
Double globes, one inside the other, how is it done, gone before you can ponder it.
Magia naturalis.

"I have a son,” he said.

She turned to regard him.

"Twelve years old, no thirteen.” Hard to fix an exact birthday, boys varied a lot; he knew just how grown-up he was, but not what age he might have attained. “Robbie,” he said. Small bomb-burst in his own breast to say his name aloud; and he had said it aloud just for that purpose, just to feel it: as they both sat here now to startle and gratify themselves with the release of energy.

"Well how,” she said, but another thud came from the barge; a little reaching missile arose, shedding sparks, and blossomed huge and gay, and died. Rose's hand—Pierce noticed it when he looked over at her to share delight with her—was pressed tight between her legs. Loud noises, he thought, some people can't help peeing.

Smoke from the fireworks made little thunderheads over the lake, only revealed as new bombs went off and stained them with their colors. Laughter across the dark water, and soft moans of awe from the population; all you could see of them now were the points of their cigarettes, ruddy cookfires, the flare of sparklers. Beyond, on the horizon, the real, cold clouds were still white.

"They're running out,” Rose said. But then the sheriff and his merry men put out their best effort, and a half-dozen rockets arose at once, then a further triplet,
coup de théâtre
, impossible not to cry aloud at it and its foolish beauty. Then that was all. Silence and odorous smoke drifted over the lake. Already trucks were starting their engines, and the families who had passed them going down to the water passed them departing, carrying their chairs, their sleepy children.

"All over,” he heard a woman near them say to her child. “All over now."

All over. And perfectly concluded, too, Pierce thought: if what they had really set out to express by gathering the townsfolk and the summer people here in the serene night and firing their lights was not splendor, or exaltation, or American glory, but the opposite, whatever that might be. Transience, maybe; the sweet brevity of life; the poignancy of things that pass away. The Triumph of Time.