The Spectator Bird (29 page)

“Doesn't he deserve to be?”

“Deserving your punishment does not make you less miserable.”

“But think what it would do to you!”

Her face, which she had turned away, turned back. “I said you were not one to shirk,” she said. “Would you tell me to shirk?”

“But, my God, you don't owe him any dutyl You don't owe anybody any duty except yourself. They've all lost any claim on you, your husband and all the rest of them. Why haven't any of them helped you during all the years you've been in trouble?”

I could feel her resistance, or reluctance, in her fingers. There I stood holding her cold hand, running my thumb over the smooth knuckles as if I had rights in her skin, and yet feeling how remote she was, lost in some medieval curse or spell, hypnotized by duty or obedience or noblesse oblige or whatever it was. I smelled the faint mildewed odor of her sweater, and it made me angry that she should have to wear such things, worn out, left over.

All at once I couldn't stand any more. I couldn't stand to see her go back into the moldy cellar of her life, I couldn't stand to have her at once so warm and so cold, so sympathetic and so without initiative or hope. I dropped her hand, I took her by both shoulders, I brought her face close to mine. Her eyes had no more light in them than her pale skin.

“Listen!” I said.
“Listen!
You don't deserve any more punishment. You've paid your debt, ten times over. You can't stay here, scratching out just enough for yoghurt and cheese. You can't go on sharing the only things you have left with strangers. You shouldn't have to take in lodgers! You can't let it all settle back on you, it'll smother you. You can't let that man work on you. He made his bed, let him lie in it. You're coming with us, you understand that? I can make a job for you, or find you one somewhere else if you'd rather. There aren't ten people in New York with your capacity in German, French, English, the Scandinavian languages, art, the whole business. You don't have to grind out wallpaper designs for Illums. You can be an illustrator, or a translator, or an agent, or anything you want You can't stay here and mold. You're too special.”

Utterly unresponsive, she hung in my hands. I turned her so that the moon, almost blurred out in the ground mist, would fall on her face and in her eyes. Her face was pale and sad, her eyes without brightness, her body without elasticity or response, without even resistance.

“Do you think I have not dreamed of such a thing?” she said. “It is not so easy as it was for your mother, even. It must be very wonderful to have the freedom of the poor.”

“You think you're not poor enough?”

“Not free enough.”

“Why not? I'll pay your fare. I'll get you a work permit Well be your sponsors. You can live with us.”

She twisted and then faced me again, ten inches away. “You say ‘we,' ” she said. “You say ‘us.' Have you talked about this with Ruth?”

“I don't have to. She's very fond of you, she hates as much as I do to see you trapped here.”

“I think she is fond of me,” the countess said. “As for me, I love her, she is generous and warm. She is my dear friend, and she is your wife, and she wants to get you away from here and away from me, and she is right.”

“Astrid ...”

“You have said my name, finally. I wondered if you ever would.”

“Astrid, Astrid, Astrid,” I said. “I'll say it ten thousand times a day, in penance or prayer or praise or however you want it. But you can't stay here. I can't go away and leave you here!”

“Oh, my dear Joseph,” she said. She put up her face, and I kissed it. Her hands came up around my neck. For a second or two we were molded, fused, vulcanized together. Then she was pushing at my chest, wanting away.

I didn't try to hold her. I couldn't look at her. I turned and looked instead at the spread of still water. My eyes were hot. Blinking, grinding my teeth, I concentrated on the lake, the dim rushes, the dreary almost-light. Day had sneaked up on us. I could see the tangled grass, the running blackberry vines. If anything had been watching our ridiculous, scalding, hopeless embrace in that suicide's clearing, it had withdrawn into the woods.

Without looking back, giving her the same chance I needed myself, I went down to the boat and pulled it around until I had it pointed out. Then I did look back. She stood where I had left her. I think she had been watching me all the time I had my back to her. In the imperceptibly lightening grayness of dawn she looked as forlorn as a beggar woman.

“We should go,” I said.

“Yes.”

I stooped and pulled the stem of the boat farther up on the shelving mud so that she could get in without sinking in the slime. As I turned again, I caught her just straightening from the curtsy she had dropped toward her father's gravestone.

I said nothing. She came down to the water and I helped her in and rowed her across to the dock, which reached toward us out of the rushes like charcoal lines in a Japanese drawing. Walking back to the cottage, we hardly spoke. In the shadow under the cypresses, gray now instead of black, and filled with a sad visibility, we looked at one another. We did not touch.

“You first,” she said.

I went across the drenched grass to the door. There I stopped. Obscure under the dark spiral trees, she watched me. I opened the door to go in. At the last second, as the door was closing, I saw her put her hands to her head and bend over from the waist in a wild, abandoned movement as purely physical as if she were vomiting.

She straightened, and I closed the door.

From our front walk to where the drive turns down the hill is two hundred feet. Thirteen round trips make just about a mile. Many times, especially in winter when it is too muddy to walk across country, Ruth and I have carried the carcass up and down that thirteen-lap course before going to bed. It is rather like walking the deck of a ship, for the hilltop is level and high and exposed to the stars. It is one of those places where the condition of being human is inescapably sad. The lights along the dark hills are scattered and without confidence, conurbia down in the valley is only a glow on the sky. The hazed moonlight is deceptive, there are somber pools of shadow under the oaks. From up on that chilly platform you can look back down your life and see it like a Kafka road dwindling out across the Siberian waste. You can raise your head and look into the infinite spaces whose eternal silence terrified Pascal.

My absurd tears were dry after a lap or two, but I did not feel like going back in. I didn't know what I would say to Ruth, or how I would act. The performance I had just put on had left me alarmed about my own unacknowledged possibilities. If the truth were told, and I suppose it had better be, I wanted to be alone for a while with that possibility I had renounced, or been made to renounce, twenty years before and carried around with me like a cyst ever since.

What was it? Did I feel cheated? Did I look back and feel that I had given up my chance for what they call fulfillment? Did I count the mountain peaks of my life and find every one a knoll? Was I that fellow whose mother loved him, but she died; whose son had been a tragedy to both his parents and himself; whose wife up to the age of twenty had been a nice girl and since the age of twenty a nice woman? Whose profession was something he did not choose, but fell into, and which he practiced with intelligence but without joy? Had I gone through my adult life glancing desperately sidelong in hope of diversion, rescue, transfiguration?

That is the way the modern temper would read me. Babbitt, the man who in all his life never did one thing he really wanted to. One of those Blake was scornful of, who controlled their passions because their passions are feeble enough to be controlled. One of those Genteel Tradition characters whose whole pale ethos is subsumed in an act of renunciation. One who would grasp the handle but not the blade. Milquetoast. Homo castratus.

I could imagine how the Danish adventures of Joseph Allston would be written up by Césare Rulli, or by any of the machismo brigade, or by the Pleasure Principle seminar, or by any of those romantics, male and female, who live by the twitch, whose emotional shutter speed is set to catch the moment of orgasm, whose vision of the highest reach of human conduct is expressed by the consenting adult.

Well, the hell with it, I do not choose to be a consenting adult, not just to be in fashion. I have no impulse to join those the Buddha describes, those who strain always after fulfillment and in fulfillment strive to feel desire. It has seemed to me that my commitments are often more important than my impulses or my pleasures, and that even when my pleasures or desires are the principal issue, there are choices to be made between better and worse, bad and better, good and good.

Then why cry over it, twenty years later? Because in every choice there is a component, maybe a big component, of pain.

I would hate to have a recording of that conversation I held with myself, lurching up and down the moonlit drive. It would sound like the lecture of a scared graduate assistant, taking over the philosophy class in the professor's absence. The walking did me more good than the thinking, even though my toe joints had me wincing, and my hips felt as if I had jumped off a ten-foot wall.

There are two big live oaks along that two-hundred-foot stretch, one in the corner above the turn and the other where the drive widens into the parking area. Between them is open meadow in which, last fall, I sowed two hundred daffodils by throwing the bulbs broadcast and digging them in where they fell. Every time I turned at the top of the hill and started back toward the house, I was looking across them toward the moon. There was not enough light for them to show yellow; their bowing heads gleamed palest silver-gilt above the pale grass. When I came back, moving out of the shadow of the oak, individual blossoms grew luminous, like big exhausted fireflies.

I kept on walking, lap after lap, leaving my shadow behind me as I turned at one end, finding it still with me when I turned at the other. My feet hurt me so that I hobbled, on my head fell dew as insubstantial and chilly as moonlight. I must have been on at least my fortieth lap when, turning at the far end, I heard heels on the asphalt back by the house, and saw Ruth's shadow coming toward me as if through silvery, settling dust.

When we were fifty feet apart, she stopped. I came on. “Hi, darling,” I said, as casually as I could.

We met at the edge of the live oak's shadow. In a voice that had difficulty being loud enough, she said, “You'll get all cold.”

“I've got a sweater and jacket on.”

“But your head!”

“I haven't got arthritis in my head. At least I don't think so.”

A jet coming in from Hawaii winked over the ridge beyond Woodside. Down on the county road some hot shot in a sports car
vroom
-ed his engine through three gears and howled off into the muffling canyon. Ruth said, “I thought maybe I'd better... I didn't know where you were.”

“Just walking. Want to?”

I thought there was gratitude in the way she took my arm. We walked in to the edge of the patio and turned and came out again. Orion was coming to meet us, then he was entangled in the oak, then as we came into the open again he was free. The daffodils in the meadow were touched with pale nocturnal gold.

“I'm sorry,” Ruth said.

“I'm the one to be sorry.”

“I brought it on. I was determined to force it out of you. I don't know why.”

“You wanted the pebble out of the shoe.”

“I suppose.” We walked twenty steps in silence. “No, I know why I did it,” she said. “Why I could never quite forget it. It was my vanity. My goodness, after all this time! I could see it happening, there at the end, and I knew I couldn't compete with her.”

“You compete all right.”

“No. She was remarkable. I'm not. If you hadn't fallen at least a little bit in love with her I'd have thought there was something wrong with you.” She laughed, a little breathy puff of sound. “Then when I saw you were doing it I couldn't stand it.”

Another twenty steps. “I always thought you must hold a grudge against me for insisting we come home. I was sort of surprised you came.”

“You shouldn't have been surprised.”

We turned at the hilltop. This way, Orion walked with us. “No,” she said. “I should have known you wouldn't shirk your obligations.”

She made me mad. “It was not obligations that made me come! I simply made a choice, and it wasn't all that difficult, either.”

Still another of those spells of silence, broken only by the sound of our steps. The St. Bernard that lives on the lane beyond LoPresti's barked at something in the voice of a lion, and a chorus of yapping and woofing broke out from all around the hills. “Wasn't it?” Ruth said, almost as if she wished it had been. “Then why, in there ... a little while ago ... ?”