“Well. What if they could.”
She watched him sip his shake. “Most people stop believing that,” she said. “When they grow up.”
“Most people,” Mike said.
“My friend Cliff …”
“O God that guy,” Mike said.
“You know Cliff?”
“I know of him,” Mike said.
“Cliff says reality is dreams checked by physics.”
Mike turned on her, as though handed the key to open a mystery to her. “But what if that’s not it? What if the physics aren’t the last thing, the checking thing? What if dreams really come last, or first, what if they’re primary?”
“Well but Mike …”
“What if? What if they were and we just didn’t know it? If they were, wouldn’t it be awful to just live not knowing it? Live and die not knowing it was so, that you could have your happiness? That would be hell.” He caught fire, and laughed. “That is hell!”
She watched him draw in again then, turn away from her and back to Sam; he put his chin in both hands and grinned at her, and she giggled back.
“So how’ve we been, anyway?” he said.
“Fine,” said Rosie. “She had a little thing the other day.”
“A little thing?”
Suddenly Rosie wanted to be out of here, and right away; out of this room, out of The Woods. “An ear infection,” she said. “It turned out to be. She’s better already, actually.” They were both touching Sam, Mike’s hand on her shoulder, Rosie’s on her hair. “She’s got the pink medicine, the stuff that smells like bubble gum. It’s in the bag.” She bent to kiss Sam’s cool sticky cheek. “Bye, hon. Gotta go.”
Sam gave her, for some reason, you could never tell when one was coming, a long hungry hug, and told Rosie she loved her. Rosie left quickly then, feeling shorn or shriven, as she always did when she left Sam. When she got to the parking lot again and was climbing into the ovenlike Bison, the plump van with The Woods Center for Psychotherapy lettered discreetly on it was unloading a bunch of young people like those who had come with Mike to pick up Sam last month, that day, the day Boney died.
She knew now who they reminded her of, cheerful open faces and neat haircuts, short-sleeved white shirts and ties. They were the scary good kids of the Bible club in high school, the kids on the church-camp bus, the kids discharged from cars on Saturday afternoons to spread out in suburban neighborhoods and knock on doors, real nice day isn’t it, can I speak to you for just a few moments about something very, very important.
She started the car with a roar, and looked away as they looked toward her.
SIX
In that August Pierce won his driver’s license, and bought a car. In doing so he entered onto a plateau of citizenship and maturity that was at once sobering and elating, and he could imagine how the young must feel, who pass that gateway just at the same time they are going through the big others too, out onto the uplands of adulthood: here is your spear, here are your spurs, your shield.
Pierce’s initiation came not only thus absurdly late in life, it was unusual in another way too, having been conducted almost solely by women. Women had given him his rides here and there in his postulant period (the plain paper learner’s permit growing limp and tattered in his pocket); women taught him the basics, let him take the wheel under their supervision. He drove Rosie’s wagon and Val’s Beetle and Beau’s family sedan with one or another of the women of that house beside him, who might tramp on a nonexistent brake with an onomatopoeic squeal as Pierce clumsily took a corner. He dinged the Bison on the gatepost at Arcady, having pressed by mistake, he told Rosie, the accelerator instead of the brake pedal. “Gee,” Rosie said, “I’d forgotten that was possible.”
Women guided him through the license-getting process too. Rose Ryder sat behind him with fingers crossed while a noncommittal policeman put him through his paces. Of course he passed, he had worn a tie, he was a man and a citizen, how could he not be able to drive? And yet he had barely made his way through the three-point turn, and bounced over the curb corner turning into the Registry’s parking lot.
Then it was time for him to acquire a car of his own, his first, and it was a woman who offered it, his hatchet-faced neighbor opposite whose glasses-chain swung like chain mail before her cheeks. It was a Steed, simple sturdy car for widows and priests, in two shades of delicate green, sage and celery, with sofa seats and a great agate steering wheel, like a bus. Her sons (she was careful to tell him) had bought her something far better. He had been looking in the papers, and he could have had instead a little acid-green Piranha, like a dodgem car, or a businessman’s low-slung black Myrmidon, now spavined and asthmatic. He took the Steed, after getting Spofford (his sole male adviser in the matter) to look under the hood. Not since childhood, not since his old Remington .22, his first chess set, had he felt so rich in a possession.
In it he entered onto the sign-system of driverhood, which had been transparent to his sight before, but which arose around him now, a guide and a puzzle. How had he never noticed before that at every bend in the road there stood a yellow diamond sign, bearing a black arrow pointing in the direction of the turn, and with an appropriate speed posted below? Guided by these he swung his car featly left and right. Other drivers, real drivers as he considered them, seemed to need less help; and at his back he always felt them, impatient, hurrying near.
“Aren’t you sort of dawdling?” Rose asked him. “There’s a line behind you.”
“I’m driving at the speed limit,” Pierce said. “That can’t be dawdling.”
“Oh the speed limit,” said Rose. “That’s really just a suggestion.”
He would not drive her little Asp, down inside which they hunkered together, their bottoms inches from the road (he felt the distance imaginatively) and the mystery of the gearshift between them. Mystery: he meant an old special sense of the word, the secrets of a trade or business, the grammar of a skill kept from those outside the guild. For Pierce, as for few others, maybe no others he thought, driving and cars were a female mystery.
“It’s easy, really,” Rose said, her hand at a stoplight resting lightly on the little trembling herm. “It gives you a lot more control, actually; it’s fun. And if you have trouble at first, don’t worry. After a while it becomes automatic.”
Even as Pierce drove it (rarely on roads more than two lanes wide, never to the city) his car expressed possibility and scope; he rolled the windows down, found a radio station that played music of the Steed’s own vintage, and put his elbow into the sun, driving daringly with one hand. Only occasionally did a weird fear come over him, that he should be sitting alone in a car, in its driver’s place, moving it himself.
Over the mountain, out of town, along the river road, in September; the plastic plaid of the upholstery hot, and the air cool that blew unhindered through the four big windows.
“Read what it said again,” he asked Rose beside him.
“Littleville,” Rose said, not consulting the note in her lap. “First left after the gas station. It’s miles yet.”
Driving hadn’t affected Pierce’s sense or lack of sense of direction and spatial location. But it had coincided with a crisis that only modern means of locomotion could resolve: Pierce had to find someplace new to live.
“Keep your eyes peeled,” he said.
“Ooh yuck,” she said. “I hate that expression.”
The owner of the Blackbury Jambs building where he lived had decided to turn it into a cafe and crafts shop. Soon, Pierce supposed, there would be no actual people living in that town, it would be merely facades, all inside would be for sale. In a month Pierce had to be elsewhere, and he had found nothing in town at all suitable. One horrid plastic-pine-paneled suite above the smelly kitchen of the Donut Hole. Nice place for a suicide, he’d said to Rose. Why not look farther out, she’d replied, and Rosie said the same. Now that he had the car, he could live anywhere.
“First left,” Pierce said, pointing.
“Pierce, that way is right.”
“Oh yes.”
There was a species of dream he knew, the Finding an Apartment dream, in which he relocated to places more or less satisfactory: dreams filled at once with a sense of settling and of beginning. The new apartment (shifting shape and nature as he inhabited it) always proved to have odd features: free and lavish meals, something loathsome in a drawer, dozens of detached commodes.
“There,” Rose said. “Littleville, first left.”
Littleville lay along the Blackbury a few miles north of the Jambs, a centerless town really except for an unusual pudding-stone post office and a Baptist church from a model-train village. The cottage that Pierce had found advertised in the Faraway Crier lay it seemed on the grounds of a larger estate. This one apparently. Pierce turned carefully in between two stone gateposts of the Arcady type.
“Wow,” said Rose.
They followed the drive upward, past fields of unmown grasses tall and heavy-headed as grain, to a big lemony stucco house, somehow soft-looking: the rounded eaves of the roof, maybe, or the plastered chimney-pots, or the arched and heavily molded windows.
“Now this,” Pierce said.
“Winterhalter,” Rose read from a plaque in the form of two symmetrical Scottie dogs. Pierce parked his car next to a yacht-like gold sedan, and they went to the nearest door, which was opened as they approached by a very old man, much shorter than either of them, with a silver pistol in his hand. No in a moment it had become the pistol-shaped nozzle of a garden hose, detached.
“Yes,” he said. “Still available. Come in for a minute.”
They followed him in. He put down the nozzle on the radiator just inside the door (Pierce would think of it, later, that nozzle, a sign pointing to the trials he was to undergo, which had already been stored up for him even then: but by then there would be hardly anything that did not seem to him such a sign, his mind could not avoid them). And into the big sour-smelling kitchen.
Mr. Winterhalter spoke his part in the plural, so there was undoubtedly a Mrs. Winterhalter somewhere, who used these innumerable pots and pans hanging from hooks, these wooden utensils sprouting from urns. “We rent the place down there for not a lot,” he said, “and here’s the reason. We go away to Florida in the winter. Who needs the cold. And there are a couple of small things we need done at this place, nothing much, but we like to know there’s someone around.”
He opened a cupboard door. On hooks inside the door a dozen bunches of keys jangled. Mr. Winterhalter selected a ring that bore an old skeleton and a dull brass Yale key. “We’ll need some references,” he said to these.
“Oh yes.”
“Come on out this way.”
He led them out the kitchen door and around to where his car was parked next to Pierce’s. “It’s small for two,” he said, stopping and turning to them.
“Oh I’m not,” Rose said.
“Just along for the ride,” Pierce said. Mr. Winterhalter seemed to study them for a moment, censoriously maybe; but it was probably only delayed reaction time, information shunting slowly along aged channels into consciousness.
He shepherded them into his car and took the wheel, one of those oldsters Pierce had come to know on the road, sunk inside their enormous cars, heads barely protruding above their dashboards, proceeding at dinosaur pace. “There’s some details to explain,” he said.
He drove down the drive up which they had come, and then left, along another, humbler drive through the meadows toward a line of trees.
“We’re real near the river,” Rose said.
“Oh yes.”
It was a low, broad little house, the same yellow stucco as the main house, set against the dark line of the trees; obviously it had at one time housed the help. Mr. Winterhalter rolled to a stop before it, and Pierce got out.
He knew this place.
“Listen,” said Rose beside him. The river gurgled and plopped, very near. It could be seen through the trees and riparian growth, spreading broadly. Pierce turned to look back up the sloping lawns; past the overgrown lilacs, the house’s chimneys and roofs could be seen. And around back of the cottage, he knew, there was a screened porch; and a little path down through the pines to a dock, a dock where he had tied up a rowboat. Good lord.
Mr. Winterhalter, after a lot of fussing with the lock, now turned the skeleton key in the door and opened it. “Last year,” he said, “there was no one here. So it’s a little.” He stood aside, showing them in with a clawlike hand.
Reversals—day for night, invitation for trespass—only heightened Pierce’s memory of entering this space, of looking upward over the night lawns from here to that big house. Inside this room on that night, moonlight lay in rhomboids on the floor; sunlight now. He looked at Rose, who also stood transfixed, her mouth open a little, eyes seeming to see at once what she looked at and the inward sight of something else: but she habitually looked like that, and she exchanged no glance of complicity with him. Could it be she still didn’t remember?
“Living room,” said his guide. “This furniture you’d be free to use.”
Rug rolled in a corner, its head bent up against a wall, a cadaver. This of all places.
“The kitchen.”
“Yes.”
“You cook? My brother is a chef. Dining room.”
“Cook, yes, sometimes.” It was in several ways a dreary and damp-spirited little place, inconvenient too. The bathroom was beyond the dining room, and Rose had gone that way, leaving the doors open behind her. Now she opened a door on the far side of the bathroom.
“Oh look,” she said. “Secret.”
In that age—it would only be clear in looking back on it, from farther on, when nothing was the same, when only in dreams and brief ecstasies could it be remembered as it was—in that age consequences, instead of lying implicit and potential in actions, could sometimes dictate the circumstances which would produce just themselves and not others, like the plot of an old farce. On a summer night last year, before Pierce had moved from the city to the country, he and Rose had come by boat down the moon-barred river, both thinking the other was someone he, she was not. As they still did now today. They had tied up the little rowboat to the dock, and had broken into this little house, it had taken little breaking; and they had explored, smelling mice and mothballs, bumping into things. And had come at length to this odd bedroom, only enterable through a door knocked into the bathroom wall. Secret she had said.
“There’s an outside door in that room,” they heard Mr. Winterhalter call, who had not followed them here for some reason of propriety or the conservation of energy. “A door out. You’ll want to keep that locked.”
It was nearly the largest room in the house. Pierce circled Rose’s shoulder with his arm, and guided her into it and out of sight of the view through the door.
“You remember,” he whispered, embracing her from behind.
“What. What.”
They were both looking at an old iron bedstead with brass finials, narrow, penitential, its thin stained mattress still asprawl naked over it. He took her more tightly, his hand lifting her skirt from in front of her though her hands tried to keep it down.
“Don’t,” he said.
Her resisting hands relaxed; his went inside her pants, searching, while he still held her, his mouth against her neck where the pulse beat. “You remember,” he said. “You must.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
“So it’s nice,” called Mr. Winterhalter. “There’s some things to explain.”
With an effort Pierce turned away, left Rose to compose herself; hands in his pockets he came from the bathroom. “Yes?”
“The water,” he said. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
He took Pierce to the last door left unopened. It led to a dank earth-smelling basement. In the haloed light of a dim bulb, Mr. Winterhalter showed Pierce a squat machine, from which black plastic pipes ran in several directions. “The pump,”
he said. “The water of this house comes from a well. You understand, a well?”
“Yes.”
“It’s off now. Nobody’s here, why run it? But it brings water from the well, and… Look here.”
He showed Pierce where one of the pipes from the pump ran to a cobwebby window, out through a pane replaced with plywood.
“The overflow. This is very important.”
Why was he here? How could he have come to be here? He was not able to pay his full attention to Mr. Winterhalter’s anyway weirdly minatory description of the pump’s workings. Just because a world-age is governed by certain laws—the iron laws of tragic necessity, or the wooden ones of melodrama, or outlandish, constant Coincidence—does not mean we do not marvel to find ourselves subject to them.
“We’ll go up,” Mr. Winterhalter said. “I’ll show you the rest. The way it works.”
Rose stood at the top of the cellar stairs, arms crossed before her, silhouetted by the window light behind her. Pierce climbed stumbling up the ladderlike stairs to where she stood.
“Outside,” said the old man.
He took them around to the side of the house and pointed to the ground near the stone foundation. In the yellow grass Pierce perceived a thick black hose, a python disappearing into its hole; it went down into the ground here and then presumably through the wall and into the pump.
“See?” said Mr. Winterhalter. He pointed out the just-discernible line of black piping running through the grass, upward toward his house, into the woods. “Come along. We’ll climb up.”
Rose didn’t follow them as they went up along the plastic pipe, into a little yellow wood, up mossy rocks, the old man breathing hard but not slowing, and Pierce stumbling behind. They came then at length to a beautiful small well-house, its slate roof mossy and its stone sides patched with pebbly concrete.
“Now you see,” said Mr. Winterhalter. “Here’s your water.”
With a hand he invited Pierce to look inside.
“In the winter you let it run,” Mr. Winterhalter told him. “You let it run just a little. Flowing water doesn’t freeze. It’s physics. But just a little. Let it flow too fast, it empties the cistern, the water stops flowing, freezes in the pipe. Not too fast. Not too slow. You’ll get used to it.”