And she had thought: But at least you’d know that. You’d know you had no more than ten years to get through. Not so long. You’d know that.
An astonishing peace had stolen over her in her sagging marriage bed in Vetville. Not so long. She had felt certain that if she could know for sure she would be dead in five years or ten, she could easily be brave and cheerful, happy even. She could love Mike as he needed to be loved, as he deserved to be loved (warm and unaware beside her, his presence suddenly sweet too for the first time in weeks, how strange). She had even been able for the first time to imagine having a child with him: like a smile all through her she could imagine it, which had seemed so terrifying, an abyss. It would be easy, easy, to love them both and be glad, sure. Because. Because why? Why could she face what needed to be done with equanimity, joy even, if it wasn’t going to last forever? It wouldn’t last forever anyway. Why this peace?
She hadn’t known why. She had only lain and tasted it, watching that faintly beckoning pine branch, wishing for death, death and certainty, and good cheer. It didn’t matter why. Soon she’d slept.
Oh strange, she thought at Arcady, remembering. And Sam beside her now.
She lifted the book again:
Or wouldst thou have no single She,
But Spouses in Plurality?
The Sultan’s, in his Hareem strait,
A Blackamoor before the Gate?
Or base Arabian’s, kept in Tents?
Thou hast their Choice, but not th’Expense.
No she was wrong, he was a tight, mean, sneering smug old bastard, Rosie thought, must have been. She flipped the pages, not quite as delicately maybe as Pierce might have wished, feeling a kind of annoyance, at the thing and at its supposed great worth, thinking of the men she saw at the newsstand going so intently through the skin magazines, one woman after another, their eyes sucking them in, why did they need so many.
‘Tis said that Men who waste their Seed
Toward their Coffins quickly speed;
I say the thing that shortens Life
Is an unsympathetic Wife.
Well go on then, she said or thought; go go, smartie.
So to our Couch let us Retire;
A Cup of Wine we may require;
To take the Air our Friend we bid
Who in the Dark all day has hid!
Then gently, as with Bird in Hand
Or Babe in Arms, we help him stand—
See how he leaps, a Lapdog he,
Eager for a Sport with thee!
Must be permanent, she thought, or at least real old, the way men regard their p’s (as Sam had somewhere learned to call them): you had to be careful about it, not hurt its feelings, the little man who accompanies your man (oops, “little,” see right there); the man your man waits on and looks on fondly and indulges, or tries to. Rosie laughed, visited by another scene from her own married life, seen through this antique writing as though from a great distance, and felt a twinge of unreasoning grief, and at that laughed again.
“Greetings from the big city,” Rose Ryder’s letter to Pierce Moffett began, the first he had received from her. She had warned him he should not expect much in what she called the “initial period,” by which he supposed she meant the period of her training by the Powerhouse in whatever exactly they were going to train her in, “brainwashing” was the term that came to his mind. “I’m amazed how good I’m doing in the test-prep course. Pierce I was always terrified of tests, I had testophobia bad, and now—now not. I just do it.” Something crossed out here that looked like I wish you could, wish withdrawn or left unsaid. “My little apartment is so cute, on an OK street in a safe neighborhood, it’s amazing I got it. The class is interesting and Mike has been so supportive about everything here, a lot of hard things—Oh there are things I just can’t write to you, Pierce, or even say.”
Things she couldn’t write or even say: well he had stood before shut doors of that kind before, and what was behind them often enough, as behind the doors of bedroom closets in a thousand dirty jokes, was actually quite easily named.
Old Mike. Still in the picture. Okay, all right.
“Here the great drought continues,” Pierce wrote back, his yellow pad, the same he used for his work, balanced on his raised knees where he reclined in bed. “It’s unusual, says the paper, but not unheard of. No rain now in a month almost. It has its beauties, it’s sort of Edenic in its way, so changeless, but of course changing fast: suspended in the moment of change, how’s that? There’s a (Chinese?) proverb, I’m told, about how women fall in love with men in the spring and men with women in the autumn. Seems right to me, I mean experience can be said to confirm. There’s the other proverb too, about absence and the heart. I think about hearts lately, how they do seem like repositories or containers, they feel like it, and I wonder why they do, what the reason is in physiology, that they can be heavy or light. When all they contain is blood, on the move. Hydraulics. Anyway. This is a love letter, if that has not become apparent yet.”
Cross that out, burn it, crush it, feed it to the fire. Instead he turned the yellow sheet, which, like all its kind and no others, had its head at the bottom of the verso side; and continued.
“Rose,” he wrote. “I now have some instructions for you. I’ll want you to follow these very exactly and when you call me next I’ll want to know just how it went; you’ll be asked to describe it all in detail, in detail.”
He lifted his eyes. “First of all,” he wrote. “If you are in a public place while reading this, I want you to continue reading all the way to the end. Those around you will observe you reading, and certainly some of them will even study you, my dear, men will, because they do, don’t they? And think about you, so absorbed in your reading; maybe, maybe they’ll notice something about you, something about your absorption, but they won’t know what it is, what it is that draws their eyes to you; but of course you’ll know, won’t you?
“And if you are out and about, Rose, you can think about these things through the day, until you’re alone, and you can begin to do what I will tell you, and say aloud what I will tell you to say.”
He pondered. There had already come to be a fullness in his breast. What he had planned for her had taken some thought; but actually writing it down, even the prospect of actually writing it down, of her actually reading it, had an unexpected force. A topic not covered in the Ars Auto-amatoria: the sequential or chain-letter form of the art. Universal and ancient, though, Pierce bet. He moved, on the bed, to a less constricting position.
What wonder’s this, and Magick too,
His Transformation at thy Cue!
His Helmet lifted, and his Sword—
Th’appendage now becomes the Lord!
The Turkey-wattle now an Arm!
What Pow’r! What Strength, for Good or Harm!
Rosie Palm and her five daughters was how they used to say it in Kentucky, Pierce wondered how the joke had travelled, carried with lonely huntsmen into the Cumberlands with Boone, or reinvented every generation, obvious enough after all. Without a Purse spend freely here. Clever of old Anon or Onan, he’d told Rosie Rasmussen, “purse” being common slang at that time for. And “spend” for come.
And if he droop or if he flag,
Weaken or tire, fail or sag,
Feed him on thy Fancy’s food,
Victuals rich as thou think’st good!
Haste thee, Thought, and bring with thee
Emblems of Lubricity:
Bums and Quims and wanton Wiles
Beds and Cocks and nether Smiles!
The unfinished letter, and some change fallen from his pocket, crept to the edge of the bed and slid to the floor; the emblem on the wall grew larger, passing directly into his heart through the windows of the imagination, for of course it was in him and not in wary Rose that those windows were open, open wide. As though his right hand worked the handle of a pump, Imagination now began to draw up from the dark well a nice steady stream. He h
ad Rose describe to him what he had said she should do and how she did it, and other things he and she had done or would have or might have done; he described to her what he might have once done, but had hot done, with a former lover he invented, or to the lovers he had really had but had not thought of in weeks or months; he even, at a turning, glimpsed Robbie, just arriving at his front door, shy golden kid, his mandrake, his fruit. Do you see what powers, what speed you have? (That’s Hermes Thrice-great, egging on the straining adept to wonder-working by Thought alone.) Make yourself huge, beyond measuring; climb higher than the highest height; sink lower than the lowest depth. Imagine that you are everywhere, on earth, at sea, in the deep dens of beasts, that you aren’t yet born, are in your mother’s womb, adolescent, old, dead, past death.
The desire is boundless, the act a slave to limit: not here though, where Memory endlessly extends or repeats what their combining flesh could do only once, or only every once in a while, and not for any great length of time. A Moment in Eternity: what that old ad promised, that ad appearing in the back pages of the timid men’s magazines of his youth, for the Rosicrucians wasn’t it. He had wondered then what it could mean. Not this that he was up to, certainly. “All right Rose,” he said aloud in the empty room, the Soft Voice. “All right. Yes Rose. Yes.”
Now shake him well! Now grind the Mill!
Punish the boy and make him spill!
Thy Teeth are grit, thy Shanks a-tremble,
A snarling Beast thou may’st resemble,
Yet mak’st Thanksgiving in thy Moan
And Gratulation in thy Groan
As from the Fundament arises
At last the Bliss that still surprizes!
Ah lovely is the Fruit thereof,
The Foment and the Gum of Love:
Do not despise nor in Disgust
Turn from the Product of thy Lust,
But stop t’admire. This is the Stuff
The Ballocks brewed, one Drop enough
A Man to make, if baked inside
The Oven of a Fleshly Bride,
Nine months’ thence t’emerge a Child,
Puking, shrieking, red and wild.
He will grow up to cut a Purse,
To die of Drink or something worse—
A Gibbet, or a Pauper’s Grave.
What Griefs, what Troubles thou dost save!
Wash but thy Hand, and go thy Way,
Free to conceive another Day.
The worst part, Rosie thought, the part this guy feared the most, worse than the pox or the grasping in-laws or the whiny real wife growing old and sour: the making or leaving of kids. This thing she had in her hands was so old you couldn’t tell, people then might have been entirely different, but he seemed to know what most men now didn’t really grasp, what maybe most people she knew had forgotten, with the Pill and stuff: that sex between living men and women was for making babies, and you had to get to work if you wanted it to be for something else, because those babies will fight to get made, no power greater. He knew it and he opted out.
Well there were good reasons for that. Like the reason she lay still at Arcady, unable to fly; why she had slept with Sam in her bed almost every night that Brent Spofford had not been in it with her, Sam’s room at the end of the corridor being too far away, too far—Rosie without company tended to lie in bed imagining Sam, asleep alone, visited by a seizure of some new kind, some ultimate kind, and just exiting, like stepping out the window into the night air. They often happen when we sleep, Dr. Marlborough had said, as though they were his too.
Go all to Altar and to Woe
I shall to the Greenwood go.
My Fancy free I’ll ever keep
I have not sown, I shall not Reap.
Babies, crying at the margins of the world, trying to get in, no matter the dangers, no matter what awaits them. If you open a way for one or some, there’s no getting out of it later, and maybe this guy had known that too, that you will not even want to get out of it or turn away, that nothing matters more than seeing this through. You can’t even die, have no right to: tied to life by the choices you make, that you’ve tried so hard to talk yourself into. She remembered how she used to charge herself with selfishness in those days when she had lain awake in the grip of regret or whatever the name of the feeling had been: selfish, selfish, can’t you ever think of anyone else’s happiness for five minutes, if you could look out not in you’d see a good life there just waiting to be lived.
The Devil and the World enmesh
The Anchorite who hates the Flesh.
The Flesh is we and we are it,
Its Hungers, Fevers and its Shite.
Then let’s be glad we perpetrate
The little Sins and not the great:
Better than Pride, or Anger pure,
Better than Envy green for sure,
Better than all the Sins of Mind,
Is Lust of the unproductive kind:
Blameless, fruitless, bland and free,
A Rose without a Thorn for thee.
“Speaking of which,” Rosie said aloud.
She pushed aside her bedclothes and the musty book, and went out and down past Boney’s old room, now kept closed, to the bathroom; found the pink plastic wheel that Sam had lusted to play with ever since she had seen Rosie using it, and dialed it carefully to this day, where yes her forgotten pill still remained. She pressed it into her hand. Weirdly minute considering its power. Lust of the unproductive kind. With a sip of water from the still-minty tooth glass she swallowed it; and immediately it began forestalling for another day those processes that Rosie had already, head to toe, felt attempting to begin.
Spofford and Cliff left for the West in the last week of October. They were driving Spofford’s truck, and had Cliff’s motorcycle strapped down in the bed, covered with a blue tarp. Spofford brought his tools. They came last of all to Arcady so that Spofford could say goodbye to Sam and Rosie.
“It’s okay,” she said to Spofford. “Really. It’s really a small thing, a test. It’s not like she’s going in for an operation.”
He looked down at her, saying nothing. She knew he would stay if she asked, and therefore she couldn’t ask. And since she couldn’t ask she had to say it didn’t matter. And the more she smiled and said it didn’t matter the angrier she got.
“So how come you didn’t tell me about,” she said, and made a subtle gesture toward where Cliff was dandling Sam, just out of earshot.
“Tell you about him? I’ve told you all about him. Took you to see him.”
“You didn’t tell me what he looked like.”
He had brought her to visit Cliff on a summer day, to see if Cliff could alter or intervene in the sadness that had seemed to possess her (only she didn’t call it sadness, there was nothing that made her sad, or happy either, nothing: nothing was the problem). But Rosie had never got to see him, he had been gone the one day they went to his place in the woods, she and Spofford, and then too many things had happened too fast: for that was the night that Boney died. She had never gone back.
What would she have thought of him if he had come for her out of his handmade house that day. Not scary exactly but imposing, thin and tall like a wading bird, a heron, no an egret, for his hair, that fell well below his shoulders, was pure white: so were his shaggy brows. His colorless eyes were like moonstones, almost without pupils in the whites.
“Amazing,” Rosie said. Sam thought so too, gazing up at his pink clean-shaven face, reaching for the long hair that he pushed away from his face.
“He is,” Spofford said. “He is.”
“What does he think you guys will find?” Rosie asked.
“He doesn’t even say. But.” He sighed, as though having come up to something hard to say. “He did say he thought this might take a while.”
“You said a couple of weeks.”
“Longer than that.”
Rosie thought: Who is on my side then? Who?
“Well listen,” she said
. “I think you better get going then. Soonest started soonest done.” She rose abruptly and left him sitting there; went to Cliff and took Sam from him. The two of them were best friends already. Men.
“I hope you find what you’re looking for,” she said.
Cliff regarded her smiling, his long pink hand still on Sam’s boot. “I sort of hope we don’t,” he said. “That would be best. But thanks. I hope you do too.”
Oh stupid tears, Rosie felt them gather hotly in her eyes even as she grinned the snide grin she had decided on, it had been easier when Nothing was her only friend and kept between her and everything else. A few months ago. The woods were getting deeper.
“Kiss,” she said to Sam, and held her up to Spofford. As Sam clung to his neck the phone rang in the house behind them; so weirdly warm it was that the door stood open.
“I’m gonna get that,” she said. “Come on, Sam.” She patted Spofford’s nose and said: “See you when I see you.”
With Sam waving bye-bye, bye-bye over her shoulder, she went quickly into the house. The old phone in the hall, an ancient model that must have been there unchanged for decades (the little number on the typed card beneath a celluloid window on the dial plate bore a letter exchange no one ever used any longer) was as loud as a fire bell; it always sounded like bad news.
It was Allan Butterman. Rosie had that been-here-before feeling of almost, but not quite, knowing what he would say before he said it. “I think there are some developments,” he said.
“Yes,” Rosie said. Beyond the open door Spofford’s truck could just be seen, going away. “What.”
“I ran into Mike’s old lawyer at the courthouse in Cascadia. You remember her.”
Rosie would never forget her, and could not forgive her either, though nothing that had been done had been her fault. Like a dog who once bit you.