Trust (77 page)

"You wanted me," I said.

He made a little noise, through his saliva, like the scratch of a match. "A second one way or the other and you might have gone the road of all the other dead cells on the planet. Is that what you call wanting?"

"I mean now. You wanted me now," I said with a hardness.

"Now?"

"In exchange for leaving Enoch alone."

"I didn't want you," he said distinctly.

"But I'm here. I'm here!" I wailed to the twelve kings' heads on the chairs. Some were in silhouette, like elves, with open mouths in profile, ready to quarrel. With my outrage they did not quarrel. It was incontrovertible: I was there. "It wasn't magic that brought me," I mocked, "was it?"

"Depends what you mean by magic."

I said: "Blackmail."

"Ah, you're a roughneck to use a word like that on a fellow like myself," he said softly. "Black magic maybe. Not that the laws of human nature get suspended. They get applied deeper than ever. A bit of pressure makes people become themselves all the more, haven't you noticed?—A piece of psychological poetry—that's all it is, and interesting you'll admit—and look at the bad name you pick for it, hah?"

"You didn't write to my mother?" I pressed. "You didn't scare her half to death to make her send me?"

"I wrote her. It doesn't mean I wanted you."

"You were ready to take everything from her—"

"Look, girlie," he broke in reasonably, "what d'you think I could want you
for?
"

I had no answer. "But she sent me," I murmured, "all the same. You made her send me."

"If she sent you it's
her
doing, isn't it? Don't try to shove it off on me. Besides, you know why she sent you. don't you?"

"So you wouldn't ruin things for Enoch," I said promptly.

His laughter turned along the shape of a boat: it began flat, and ended pointed.

"Girlie, she doesn't give a damn for Mr. Vand. It's plain as God and always was. Would she come herself? Could she? Oh no, it wouldn't do. The high and mighty don't ‹come themselves. They wouldn't dare—it's too honest. It's too close to the truth to come yourself, so you send someone else. Be indirect, that's the whole principle behind an ambassador, ask any authority on the subject." He stated: "She wants to get the taste of things."

"What do you mean, the taste?"

"The taste of me!" he finished gloriously.

"You think all she cares about is you?" I shot out.

He waved this away, and at that moment the moon entered him. It poured into his eyes and tried to seep out again under his fingernails. On the hand that looped upwards five glinting hoof-shapes battled. "And you know why you're not in London and Paris and Copenhagen and Rome? You know why you came? For the same taste. Coercion's only a pretense—a trick of pride. You came and she didn't make you come. She sent you and I didn't make her send you. You wanted to. She wanted to."

Anger slid in me. "None of that's true."

"True as heaven, plain as God.
I
didn't want a thing. I never do. I've explained."

"If I tell her that—"

"Tell her. Tell her everything you see. I know she's relying on you exactly."

"—you'll never get any money out of her again."

"Won't I though?" he sang at me.

"If she takes you at your word."

"But she never takes me at my word; I wonder why," he said slyly. "Not wanting, by the way, isn't the same as not needing. I don't want her cash. Never did. Why should I want her cash? But I need it. It's my needs she's been supplying, not my wants. You tell her that. Make it clear." He stood, unexpectedly yet not suddenly—the whole of him rose, but without simultaneity, as though he were arranging himself, as he stretched upward, in alphabetical order. He was a taU bellyless man. His silver thumbs hung from the pockets of his shorts. His eyes seemed silver, rooted deeply into his face like a startling pair of flowers: the thick lids an inch of leaf, and the effect of this was to give the bridge of his nose a vividness of solitude. Under the ascending moonlight I saw atlast his undistinguished teeth—the ordinary human article, and he meanwhile must have felt my investigations, because he lowered himself to the ground and sat, looking up at me with a simplicity. He had changed the level of our two seeings, and it changed somehow the level of his tone. It came straight to me. It intimated an alliance. It invited me to his side of the argument "Tell her," he picked up amiably, "it makes no difference to me if she's the high and mighty Mrs. Vand
in
the Embassy or out of it. No difference at all. Tell her I don't envy her husband if he's looking to get more of the world on his back. I don't envy anyone with the world on his back—not that esteemed lawyer fellow either, who I put the horns on twenty-odd years ago. Not if they steer the universe. So what if she's rolling in it tell her—I live in her house when I like it I drop her cash when I like it in fact I'm quite a squire around the old place by now, I've got it humming, tell her, nearly like the old Bolshie days. Import kids to tickle me—kids tickle me, the way they're all phonies—and coolies in a pinch to do what's over my head, in this case a bum outboard. I've had all kinds though. Shell want to know such items, your mother. How I'm getting on and such. Now watch it while I spit." He did spit "No apology, when my stomach's roiled I spit."

"You think that sort of thing'll bother her?" I said. "What you do around here? It's nothing to her what you do."

"Well, you tell her. Tell her and see. Tell her how surprised you were."

"Surprised at what?"

"Well? Say it yourself. You say it What were you surprised at, hah?"

Expecting the infernal Dante, I had found the Virgil of the Eclogues—a green land with a shepherd in it: this was not my answer. "Nothing," I answered, but without sullenness. I moved into the sense of being subdued. He was slow, and spoke inefficiently; this pleased me. He was leisurely, he did not mean to overrun. He had the wastefulness of a natural force. He was mediaeval, but not like a knight; he was like the horse the knight rode, and that at once made him modern, not a social factor, but a factor of earth. It struck at me: I had feared him always; it was against the facts to feel this invasion of spirit and delight. I was afraid of his three dread names, I was afraid of the globe of his forehead not far from my knees, with its cold flat blades of light sunk in the hair. The fire was crowing with cinders, grainy and ending. Hints of terror rambled like a faint familiar fever. We did not stir in that plain summer heat, but from the buttonhole of his static lips laughter opened out like a magician's trick bunch of flowers: a great flossy abundant head. It made me laugh with him. "Surprised at youth," he called out to me, though he was not two feet away—it was nearly a shout, and set off a sort of reverberation, a little moan among the tents. Some of the smaller Purses were rustling in their sleep. "What a very young man he turned out to be! No one told. They didn't tell, hah? A surprise, hah? Vestiges. Your mother'll like to hear it, it'll interest her that I've still got a face. —Fact is I'm a ruin, a bagful of wrinkles, but never mind. She's not here to see for herself, she's got you to rely on, isn't that nice? You tell her all that."

"Man without Ego," I announced to the flashlight.

"It's nothing to her what I do?" he repeated, a speculative finger on his nose. "You go ahead and tell her everything all the same."

"All the same," I took up, rocking, "She doesn't care."

"I'm an enemy?" he said pleasurably. "An enemy. So be it. Tell her I'm free. Want nothing."

"Want what you need."

"Get what I need. A distinction. Tell—no, mention. Mention Mrs. Purse. Right into the inner flap so to speak. Not of the tent. Sand's where she does her work. Every night but one. This one."

It flew from me—"Mrs. Purse!"

Laughter: long, long, long; until I bent my body away from it. "I get what I need," he said. Was it fantasy and lie? The mother of seven asleep beside the nuptial pole, under the nuptial canvas tongue? Or was it Circe wandering nighttimes among her motors, her toes straining sand, her pale neck gleaming? "Not," he said, "that I don't have a settled life, that's what they call it y'know, and proof of it. Evidence! Full-fledged family man. Have that in common with Purse. A father. The time comes when you need to express that. Show what you have to show, if only to yourself—claim what you have to claim. The descendant of Vikings and Greeks, and it doesn't stop, it sits in the genes, the time comes to look into the mirror of the future. Young, young, young—you I mean: like a warrior's girl on an amphora—" He put forth a hand slow as water and gripped my ankle. "Hers was thinner. Nice foot she had. Ankle like an arrow, not this blunt thing all bristles. Don't you shave your legs?"

"Yes—" A whip of throb danced in me. "Why do you compare me to my mother?"

"It's natural, I only do what's natural. Lend you my razor if you like. How long're you staying?"

"Until after the Senate hearings," I said firmly.

"That's trust!"

But I hesitated. "I thought how long was up to you. We all thought it was."

"All right. Let's say it is. Throw the Senate to the sharks for all I care. Up to me, all right? Want to go beddy-bye like the rest?"

The parallel knuckle encircling my ankle climbed like a ladder of bone: Laocoon seizing a live column. He withdrew the clamp of his power. It was as though he had willed himself back into the mere myth of being Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck. I scorned his Vikings and his Greeks. They were severances and pastiches. They had no whole existence. But his hand was the hand of a man.

"I'm wide awake though—"

"Good. So am I, and so's the moon. A boat-ride, how about it? She got the motor to work, they all say, so how about it? Try it out. When the going's good motor feels like a heartbeat. Prime it for tomorrow, what d' you say?"

"Now?"

"That's the word to live by."

We stumbled downward toward the beach. But it was only I who did the stumbling, caught here and there in a trench, or bang against a stubborn tuft of weed, which grew black as hair in the dark—he walking plainly down, taking his time, in lucid progressions of logical movement without complexity, like a chromatic scale rather than a chord: His walk was as real as his hand. "Damn—the flashlight," he said when he saw me baffled by what might have been a crater or a mound, uncertain how to spring it; the moon killed perspective. "I forgot the damn flashlight. —Did you get one for yourself?" I had not. I looked behind: there was the shining silver stick upside down on the table where he left it, a miniature Doric column far off, a tourist's souvenir of the Parthenon.

But without a beam he could not distinguish among the motors. Shadows of shadows confused their shapes.

On the sand I found a rectangle of clear polished light. It was a little pocket mirror. I held it up to let it flash; instead it blackened into invisibility. A thread of hair clung to it. "Mrs. Purse's," Tilbeck said. —I brushed it clean of granules. Circe on the beach, combing before she lay down with her lover. —But he said: "Clever woman. She was using it to get a back view of some cramped area in one of these machines. Like a dentist's mirror. —I'll be damned if I can tell in the dark which is the one she fixed. Bunch of cripples is all I can see."

He went from object to object, puzzled. Machine parts sprawled as in the aftermath of a massacre—members and torsos. Among the mutilated bodies of motors a white fog of moon crept, and going down on his knees Tilbeck crept. His waist and legs disappeared behind the curious form of a machine. He looked like a faun—half man, half motor, the sort of faun a modern imagination might invent. And for a moment I pondered the bright image of the boy coming in the boat, his lower half magicked into keel, meandering toward me through dark swamp pools.

"Should we row instead?" I called.

"With the motor ready? What's the point? Anyhow you've had your fill of it today." And his hands reached from turret to turret, like a blind man's.

"—Throw said rowing makes you sick."

"No, only a little vertigo." He spat toward the sea. "I give up."

"Can't you find it?"

"There's the material for fifteen, sixteen motors here. Only one of 'em's whole. Don't ask me which."

"This one? How about this? This one right here." I tapped with the corner of the mirror on a squat collection of crenelated bars and ridged planes and deep jagged iron mysteries, and in the tilt of the glass accidentally happened on my face. There in its tiny window I saw my sudden mouth. The milky drizzle of moonlight spattered it. The skin of my lips shone.

"You're only guessing. She's disguised it," he said wrathfully.

I wore the gleaming membrane of my mouth, and turned the mirror to conceal the dazzle. My mouth was a shield; idiot words battered it. "But couldn't this be the part—" it was necessary to speak as if I had seen nothing of myself, and did not know—"it could be the part that attaches to the back of the boat—"

"Stern," he said.

"Stern," I acquiesced. He was crawling toward me. Crystals of sand sheathed his moving haunches like a moon-dappled mail. "This hooked shape here. This sort of halberd-thing. You see it, Nick?"—and tapped again. I had never said his name to him before. A brief hollow music stood in the air; something stiff let out the thin clean line of a ghost—the mirror cracked along the line, and came away in my hands like broken bread, or like the two remembered halves of the vernal ENCHIRIDION.

"Nick?" he said. "Why not Thor? Why not Loki? Why not Apollo?—No, that's not the one. It's got its crotch missing. That other pile two yards down is short a nose. Can't spot Lazarus among cadavers by night. —Sit down yourself, and I'll tell how they named me wrong. I was named all wrong. More's the pity. Well, in my time they didn't call babies Zeus—"

"Or Pan." A hot wetness fled quickly out of my finger. "Stupid—"

"What is it?"

"I cut my hand, it's bleeding—"

"Let me see." He strained close and touched my palm in its crucial center to support the hand. "Bend down, I have to see." I bent, and smelled the floweriness of wine in his shoulder—swiftly he licked the long shining narrow stream. "It's what they do in Sicily for first aid, the country people—to stop a virgin's bleeding, obtain the fresh-sucked saliva of the head of a family—" Another wetness wet my finger. Instantly the air dried it. The same wetness came on my lip. I tasted his saliva on my lip. The taste of the blood from my finger mingled faintly on the inner skin of my lip. Carelessly and silently he entered my mouth. His eye giantly near my eye was a great lily. His hand massing at my ankle was a tower. The faculty of taste altered and became skill. Carelessly and silently an evanescent tissue of the wine's floweriness opened a deep secret room. Unseeingness unlocks. Strange and new, I breathed the minotaur.