The Secrets of a Fire King (33 page)

The Secrets of a Fire King

so secret and exhilarating. She missed even Andrew and her father, for without their orderly views of the world to work against, to define her, the freedom she had gained had fallen fl at. The room beyond the glass doors swayed and pulsed. Beatrice threw her cigarette, still smoldering, into the wet grass, and walked alone to the lake.

It was dark. Waves lapped at the shore. She slid her shoes off and waded to her ankles in the frigid water, so recently ice. In recent weeks the sensations of light had slowly left her, replaced now and then with mysterious shooting pains that came and went and finally came and stayed. In motion, she did not feel them, which was one reason she lived as she had. She squatted down and cupped the icy water in her hands, listening to the distant call of loons. A fl ash of white on the opposite shore caught her attention. She looked up, then held herself as still as the water, searching the line of trees.

Maybe it was nothing, or maybe nothing stranger than nasturtiums glinting sparks in the dusk of Andrew’s garden. But it seemed to Beatrice that she glimpsed her brother, standing as naturally amid the trees as a deer, one hand in his pocket and his head tilted at an angle, the forest at his back. For a long time, until her legs ached and began to tremble with the exertion of stillness, she did not move. When she stood, he was gone. But she was convinced that he had been there, that she had glimpsed something vital through these trees. Barefoot, still, she left the lake and followed him.

It was a near-wilderness, and night. In the house, people laughed and sang and fell asleep on sofas even as the music played, ices slipping from their hands. Days passed before her disappearance was discovered. Two weeks before search parties were dispatched, and yet another ten days before Beatrice was found, not by anyone looking, but by a group of boys attempting to become Eagle Scouts. Thin as a leaf, her clothes torn and dirty, she was sitting on a rock by a stream. She did not seem at all surprised to see them. “Oh, hello,” she said, standing and brushing dirt from her hands. “I’ve been wondering when somebody would come.”

In the Garden

219

The boys clustered around her, astounded. To them she seemed like an enchanted creature, a deer that spoke, a shaft of light assuming human form. They were afraid at first, hesitant to offer her their arms. The unplanned hike back took most of a day, for the boys, inexperienced, were forced to stop often and consult their compasses. Also, Beatrice was weak. She walked slowly, and at first she walked in silence. After a few hours, though, she began to tell them stories, fantastic stories, of her weeks alone in the woods. Later they would argue over them, agreeing on the details but never the whole. She had eaten the earth, she claimed, she had broken open maple trees no bigger than her finger and drunk the rising sap. She had stood in a shockingly hard rain, water dripping from her fi ngertips, from her hair, and watched a herd of elk move across a clearing. She had been following her brother at first, sighting the glint of his hair one moment and the flash of a limb another, but in the end he had disappeared, and she had been left alone. This she did not tell the boys, fearing it would frighten them, as it had frightened her, to hear of the dark nights she’d spent, sleeping on moss or pine boughs, the nights so pure black that she couldn’t tell, fi -

nally, if the darkness was coming from within her or without. As it was, she frightened them anyway. Her arm was no more than a living bone beneath their hands as they helped her across streams and over fallen logs. They imagined a dark forest of the heart, the pulse of blood and weave of branches, and they let her go as soon as possible.

Beatrice saw the fear in their eyes; she heard them saying, later, that she had lost her mind. In the wake of this derision she grew silent, aware that she could never explain how solitude, so unfamiliar and so perilous, had altered her forever.

In his great house on the bluffs, Andrew read of her rescue.

No longer well himself, he spent most days in his sunny offi ce, going through his papers, or sitting in the solarium with his wife.

He studied the brief story on the back page, which chronicled Beatrice’s emergence from the forest, leaves woven in her hair, dirt ground into her dress.

When she returned to Pittsburgh, he went to meet her at the
220

The Secrets of a Fire King

station. She stepped from the train, dressed simply in a white silk skirt and a gray cashmere sweater. She was very thin.
She is dying,
he thought, which is what Beatrice thought, too, when she saw Andrew standing on the platform, as hunched and gray as a comma. Her heart swelled up with sadness, as well as with a sudden, inexplicable love. She knew as vividly as if she had seen it herself that the orchid was withered in the greenhouse, its fl owers gone, its very leaves and stems marked with burns. She was twenty-one years old.

“I loved you,” Andrew whispered as she passed him. “You must believe me, Beatrice, I chose you out of love.”

“No,” she said. She spoke evenly, for her fear and bitterness had faded during her weeks in the forest. “It was not love between us then, never enough love from either you or me. I was your experiment. And you were part of mine.”

They did not speak again, though within months they were living in the same sanatorium. What they had observed in one another was terribly true: they were dying. Geiger counters clicked and chattered on their breath, voicing the disintegration of their cells. The slightest touch raised bruises, the color of pale lilacs against thunderclouds, on their arms. The families came, bearing fl owers, wine, books, news, the small comforts of the day-to-day, and if they passed one another in the halls they averted their eyes: whatever connection had existed between Andrew and Beatrice was ignored, as if ignoring might erase it.

One afternoon, when everyone had left, Beatrice stood, fi lled with an insatiable restlessness. She must move. The staircase was grand, built of hickory and curving down to the main fl oor, where French doors opened onto the gardens. It took her half an hour to descend. Outside, the grass was warm, thick, springing up beneath her bare feet. She felt a wave of pure astonishment at its texture, as if each blade pressed separately and softly against her fl esh.

No one was in sight; the sunlight was a warm hand, moving and returning. She thought of Andrew, how solemn he had been as he put the drops into their glasses, how deeply he had believed in—

had depended on—the certainties of science. She had never shared
In the Garden

221

his belief, but she had no regrets. It was not, as some argued, misguided love or self-sacrifice or the whimsical nature of a young girl’s heart that had brought her to this moment. She had been no vessel for another’s dreams, no casualty in Andrew’s single-minded pursuit of scientific knowledge. It had been life she wanted, life she had embraced, no moment lost or left unexplored, no light or darkness left unseen.

Beatrice paused to rest on a ledge of stone. High up in the brick building, a curtain fl ickered in a window, lifting for an instant like a veil.
I create the universe,
she murmured, knowing it was in some strange sense true, for she understood now that the world was a shimmering place, shaped anew in every instant by the mystery of perception, each atom in constant if invisible motion. Except that suddenly for Beatrice the motion
was
visible. The earth beneath her feet felt as volatile as ocean waves, and the tran-sitory beauty of the garden, the subtle shifts and alterations of even the boulders, left her breathless.

The wind lifted. Branches hummed, and then the stones began to groan, resonant and strange. All around her borders dissolved, spilling trees and flowers from their shapes; the air was stained with color. Within herself, beyond herself, there was this swirl and glitter: this was the wondrous and terrifying knowledge she had gained. Beauty, too, and even a coherence in the way her thoughts themselves were splintered, coming to her in layers and rushes: her brother’s bright hair and the feel of a horse about to leap beneath her, her father’s reddened neck and the scent of baking biscuits floating through the house on a rainy day. And Andrew’s face in his luminous garden, so solemn and so full of hope.

The elixir of life,
he was saying, and now the stones were speaking, too, a chant reverberating through every cell of everything, living and inert, a sound so powerful that even her own body began to blur and lose its form, cascading into the unstill world like petals falling, like water shattering, like every minute particle of light.

Rat Stories

When Claire stepped out onto the veranda, carrying a tray of drinks to her guests, the rat that had been crouched behind the fern ran up the wall and scurried across the iron railing. Claire noted it calmly from the corner of her eye, the humped gray body and trailing tail, and it was only the sudden scream from Inez, who leaped up and stood quivering on her rattan chair, that caused Claire to drop her tray.

Steve hurried to console their frightened guest, placing a fi rm and steady hand on the small of her back. Raoul and Paul both lunged to catch the falling drinks, but missed. Glass shattered, gin and whiskey spread out in pools, ice cubes skidded to all four corners of the intricate tile fl oor.

“Shit,” Claire said, first in English and then in French. She had been a diplomatic hostess, switching back and forth between languages all day. “Shit shit shit.”

“Claire,” Steve warned. He had helped Inez down from the chair and stood with a hand protectively on her arm. Steve di-Rat Stories

223

rected agricultural projects in the Third World, and Inez had arrived from the main office last week in order to assess his work.

She had come several times in the past year, visits that threw the offi ce into an uproar. After so many nights of listening to Steve rant about Inez, her imperial demeanor, her outrageous demands, her lack of understanding of the practical constraints of this or that, it was very odd for Claire to see him standing next to her, solicitous and gracious, the perfect host. But this visit was important. Inez was here to renew Steve’s funding, or not. The stress of these last weeks had left Steve paler than usual beneath his dark beard, his forehead creased with worry lines. Since the day Inez had arrived, stepping onto the shimmering tarmac in a peach-colored suit and wide-brimmed straw hat, Claire had hardly seen him. “That’ll be enough, Claire,” Steve said now.

They had been fighting all day—all week, for that matter—

and if they had been alone she would have crossed the room, slapped his face, maybe, and asked him what did he think she was, the bloody maid? These were his guests, after all, not hers, and it was also not her fault about the rats in the house, or about foolish, powerful Inez leaping onto a chair, her knees locked together in fright. But they were not alone and would not be for hours, so instead Claire gazed down at the pool of spreading liquor, at Raoul leaning over to pluck sparkling shards of glass from the fl oor.

Raoul was an educational consultant, the only person at the agency, aside from Steve, Claire could say she truly liked.

“No, no, that’s fine, Raoul,” she said, touching his arm. “Leave the glass. The maid will see to it. I’ll fetch us a fresh round, in the meantime.”

By the time she came back with the second tray, the mess was gone and everyone was seated again. Inez, her long legs curled beneath her, accepted the gin with a feeble smile. “Thank you,” she murmured, taking a deep drink. “I feel so silly, but I have a deep terror of rats.”

Raoul took a gin for himself and handed a whiskey to Paul, a young man who had been introduced as an assistant to Inez. Always before, Inez had traveled alone, and so tonight Claire was very curious about Paul, who, though at least twenty years
224

The Secrets of a Fire King

younger than Inez, had hair that was already a striking, lustrous gray. Claire suspected an affair between them, and she was longing to ask Raoul, who was short, slender, witty, and who whispered sly jokes and gossip to her at agency parties. But she had not had a moment alone with him all evening, and he was fl ying out again tomorrow. She tossed her long braid back over her shoulder and sat down. Raoul took a long swallow of his drink and nodded at her, pleased.

“Just the thing,” he said. “Nothing like gin in the tropics.” He smiled at Claire. “Now,” he went on, “you mustn’t mind Inez, who is still suffering from jet lag. Ordinarily she’s the perfect guest.”

“Inez is a
wonderful
guest,” Steve protested.

Raoul waved his hand dismissively.

“No, she’s not herself tonight. But you mustn’t feel embarrassed, Inez,” he went on. “They’re dreadful creatures, rats. When I was in Africa, the place I stayed was an old mission that was in-fested with them. When the first missionaries came, you see, the natives had given this particular hillside to them gladly, because it was supposed to be haunted. No one would live there. People had always used it as a kind of dump, and over the years the rats had taken hold. Well, they built the mission anyway, but they couldn’t get rid of the rats. There was no eradicating them. Some of them were huge, too, as big as possums. I got used to it, but even so I used to carry a club with me whenever I went out at night. They were
that
big. My assistant was more courageous. He used to squash the smaller ones with his bare feet and think nothing of it.

It was just like swatting flies, to him.”

“Oh, Raoul, really, how disgusting,” Inez said. She shook her head and sipped her gin and gazed moodily over the dusty street where a group of naked children was playing. Everything about her was long, Claire noted, her hair, her limbs, the bones in her face. “I couldn’t bear to see that, I’m absolutely sure.” Raoul shrugged, winked surreptitiously at Claire. He smelled faintly of cloves. “You get used to it,” he repeated. “Good grief, Inez, after the places you’ve lived, I would expect you to be completely immune.”