James is an enemy! He only pretended to take the acid—if indeed it was acid—so that she would take it and lose her mind; he is on the payroll of a Martian king who has ordered James to seduce her for diabolical purposes. “Give her the Black Chip, then bring her to me.”
Breathe, she commands. Breathe. She looks sideways at James, who lies gripping himself tightly, pretending to be silently freaked out. Oh, come off it, I’m on to you, James Bond.
Breathe. It’s only the LSD. It will wear off. Please let it wear off. The joint has somehow reactivated it, if it really was a joint ... breathe. Things settle down in her head, and she knows that everything is going to be fine, as soon as the acid wears off (if the acid wears off; if it really was acid).
The maniacal alien in bed next to her, a million miles away, the silver-irised saboteur, flails at the air above his rigid face, slaps at the top of his covers (what—spiders, leeches, snakes?) and then feigns peace and dignity, as if he has been solicitously fanning away cigarette smoke. No help there. She tries to pretend that everything is fine—aren’t drugs fun and all?—and that the worst is over, and becomes psychedelically deranged again for a moment. Rae comes to her and says, “Breathe into your belly, now into your heart, as if it has nostrils; breathe into your heart and open it up, over and over and over.” She can feel the nostrils in her heart flaring out as air fills them, her heart expands like a lung, the shell of concrete around it starts cracking. “And another thing, Elizabeth. Pretend that you’re a friend of yours, whom you’re taking care of and talking down from a few bad minutes on LSD. You cannot fake things now, if you want to help you guys get through it.”
James slaps at the side of the bed—something is evidently crawling up to get him—and she gets spooked again.
“It’ll wear off soon,” she says. “Pretty soon we’ll stop hallucinating.” She is scared and faking it, stiff and alien, her voice high in pitch, and he becomes even more dead to her—the James she knew is no longer in there; it is the scene in The Shining when Danny is pacing in the dark in his mother’s room saying REDRUM REDRUM REDRUM in his sinister conehead’s voice, and Shelley Duvall wakes up and starts shaking him and the hideous conehead voice says, “Danny isn’t here, Mrs. Torrance.”
Elizabeth looks at James.
“Everything’s just fine, Elizabeth.” Danny isn’t here, Mrs. Torrance. No, it’s just James, in almost unbelievably bad shape, but it is James and they love each other.
She breathes into the nostrils of her heart, and the roaring colors and sounds frighten her less. She stares at the stained-glass mirage above the dresser and tells the truth: “I’m extremely stoned again. I guess the dope reactivated it. And I think it’ll wear off soon. I’m glad we love each other so much, and that we’re alone. I don’t think I’ve ever been this stoned before. I keep almost freaking myself out, and then I remember having weathered other times on acid....”
“Everything’s just fine,” he says, forcing a smile.
Fakery. He breathes every couple of minutes, or so it seems to Elizabeth, who finds it contagious, like someone else’s limp.
“I’m too stoned,” he says. He is shivering. They lie with their arms stiffly at their sides, but Elizabeth forces herself to look at him, to remind herself that it is James.
You’ve been here before, she thinks. You’ve been stoned, and you’ve had crises coming down, where it feels like you’ll be stuck in this whirring roaring distorted madness for the rest of your life, and it’s always worn off eventually.
“Everything’s going to be all right,” he says, through clenched teeth, staring up as if at a burning ceiling. His terror terrifies her. Spiders and bees fly at her in brilliant clouds and she doesn’t scream, simply watches them, just as she watches the writhing pile of snakes near the door where James’s pants and socks had been before, because she pretty much knows they’re not real, and she makes herself keep breathing into her belly and into her heart. It’s just acid; it’s Hunter Thompson thinking he needs golf cleats for traction on the blood-sopped carpet of the hotel lobby in Las Vegas.
And it’s going to wear off soon.
But it doesn’t. James is hardly breathing, continues to slap from time to time at the bed, too cold and distant for her to touch.
“Don’t worry,” she says tenderly.
“Nothing to worry about,” he says in the tight nasal voice of Beldar Conehead: We’re from France.
“It’ll wear off soon.” He flinches when she touches his leg. “Now we’re two distinct bodies,” she says, “but earlier we made love, and we both experienced the two of us being one person, because we love each other so much. We had so much trust.”
Beldar Conehead says, through gritted teeth, “Everything’s just fine.”
Poor James. She is in better shape, not quite so far out on the edge. She is going to have to be the strong one. Fear and an enormous strain flood her. She can’t save them both, any more than she could save Rosie from falling out of a tree. She concentrates on slow, steady breathing, but her heart races, and she locates her inner voice in the space behind her eyes, down a bit, behind her sinus cavity, and it—her pain, the tears that she isn’t crying—feel like a red prickly rash.
But mushy Rae keeps coaching her: Breathe. Open up your heart. She sits up in bed, pulls the kimono tightly around her, puts her hand on James’s warm, taut stomach. He seems small and pathetic, Rosie after a nightmare; she thinks he needs her in the same way, and it takes away some of the blind fear.
She lies back down, but this time she draws him to her, so that he lies with his head on her breasts and she can put her arms around him like in Rosie’s poster where the giant panda Madonna cradles her baby; and only faking it a little, she breathes slowly and deeply into her heart, into its nostrils, and commands him telepathically to breathe along with her. I love you, I love you, she breathes: respiratory hypnosis. He takes a long, loud breath and blinks. He looks at her suspiciously and somewhat relaxes, even forces a small smile, and then turns away to flail at the blanket. She smiles, holding him again when he relaxes, tenderly, as if he were her child, for twenty minutes more.
“Jesus,” he said finally, sitting up, looking around, smiling sheepishly. They looked at each other. Elizabeth felt tears coming on. They grinned at each other. He shook his head with amazement. “No more maggots,” he said.
“We made it,” she said.
“Skin of our teeth. You saved the day.”
She nodded. Her eyes started filling up with tears, because of the way she had held him and because she had found a pocket in herself she could return to that was strong, calm, and maternal; and because she was so exhausted she felt made of thin glass.
“Skin of our teeth,” she said. Tears fell down her cheeks, and she wiped them away.
“It’s okay if you cry.” He wiped her cheeks with the backs of his fingers. Her bottom lip shot out and trembled; tears clotted her long black lashes. James was smiling. “I can see exactly how you looked at six years old.”
“I’m just so tired, James.”
“I know you are.” He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her down, so that her wet face lay on his sternum, and cradled her until she fell asleep.
CHAPTER 14
Rosie and James made her happy. Elizabeth, not used to the emotion of being happy for hours in a row, and days in a row, was wary. She felt an unconscious need, on occasion, for some recreational conflict-mongering, and so she nagged about trivial matters, or said no as a matter of principle—Elizabeth, whose mother’s most hateful expression had been “Because it’s a matter of principle.” The possibility of losing this happiness made her feel like the soldier in Vietnam who has a week left of combat before he goes home, a “short-timer” desperate with fear that, having survived so many battles, it, the chance to go home, will be snatched away at the very last minute.
One evening after dinner, the three of them sat on the bench above the cliffs overlooking the bay and watched the sun
go down. It hit the dark blue water at the horizon and blew to Kingdom Come in rose colors behind the Golden Gate. The fog to the left looked like a wave barreling sideways across the water, caught by a camera just before it crashed and flattened out.
“I have an idea,” said James, who had been scribbling in his spiral notebook. “Let’s go to the city tomorrow, on the ferry.”
“All right,” said Rosie.
“We’ll see,” said her mother.
“I know this great little restaurant, walking distance from the ferry building. Very elegant, little panties on the lamb chops and all that, but not too expensive.”
“And a movie too,” said Rosie.
“Maybe, yeah. Or we could take a taxi to the opera house and see the ballet. Now that would be great material. And there’s a wonderful program this week, sort of a mixed grill of stuff from their major performances.”
“You know how expensive that would be?” said Elizabeth, who could easily afford it.
James held out his palms. “It might be our last night on earth.”
“Don’t even say that, James,” said Rosie.
“Spare me the details,” Elizabeth said wearily.
“Look. We’ll just go to the restaurant then. We’ll split the bill.”
“It’s just a matter of principle. You don’t have that kind of money right now.”
“Hey, listen, that’s my business. If I want to spend twenty bucks in the city, I’m going to.”
“Mama, we can afford it.”
Elizabeth bristled. What did he plan to do when his savings ran out? Give up the book and go back to work? Or would he want to move in with her, so she’d pay the bulk of the bills?
“Come on, honey.” Elizabeth bristled again. “I have my heart set on taking the ferry with you and Rosie—it would be so much fun. It could be a great adventure.”
“I have my heart set on it too,” Rosie mourned. “Lamb chops with little panties.”
“Look, I said we’ll see.”
“We’ll see means no. Why don’t you just say no?”
“Okay. No, then.”
“Please, Mama?”
“You never want to go anywhere, Elizabeth.”
“Oh, good, now you’re both whining at me.”
“But it’s true.”
“No, it isn’t. In fact, I want to go home. Okay?” James and Rosie exchanged glances.
“I’m sorry,” she said wistfully as they trudged home.
“Oh, Mama.”
James put his arm around her waist. She was fighting back tears.
Their trip to the city was a rich, fine movie. She watched the extras on the bow of the ferry watch Rosie, stunning and sure of herself, formal in a blue plaid jumper and white knee socks; watched them watch James scribble away in his notebook, dressed in the rare cotton Oxford shirt and tweed jacket, his hair creatively mad. Engines, gulls, chatter, and the rustle of newsprint; Elizabeth smiled with a rueful awareness that she had spent her life under shadows of worry. All those fires and car accidents and humiliations that had never happened, all those hours spent in traffic jams, thinking that her lateness would result in bad fortune.... But now, from now on, things would be different.
On the way to the city, James and Rosie talked about W.C. Fields as Pharaoh, Buster Keaton in the lion’s den. At one point they had Elizabeth in hysterics. They were, that night, all in love.
And the lamb chops were perfectly rare. See, Elizabeth? All that needless worry? Everything is turning out fine. Okay?
Full of resolve and good intentions, not to worry, not to pick, she found an ad in the paper for a job in a bookstore not far from town. She called the bookstore, learned that it was half-time, noon to five, and made an appointment for several days later.
“Great!”
“God!”
“Don’t get your hopes up. All sorts of qualified people will apply.” Rosie and James didn’t care if she got it, that wasn’t the point.
“You’ll get it,” they said. What bookstore owner could resist this stately learned woman, kind and funny once you got to know her, if you got to know her?
James made sushi for dinner. Elizabeth watched him gravely, knowing now for certain that she was deeply in love. He held a sheet of nori—phosphorescent black seaweed, cut like papyrus—over the gas flame until it grew green, laid it down on the counter, put a line of rice and scallion and clean pink sashimi and wasabi at the bottom of the sheet, rolled it up, and then (waggling his eyebrows) licked the edge and sealed it, as if it were an enormous joint.
“Oh, James,” Rosie scolded. She revolved a Mobius strip on her fingers which her mother had just made for her. It was a strip of paper twisted and taped into a loop. Her mother’s father used to make them for her mother at the breakfast table. In photographs, her grandfather looked like God, tall, old, silver-haired, or like someone on Mount Rushmore. The paper didn’t have two sides anymore—she had drawn one continuous line without lifting her pencil at her mother’s request and, sure enough, she had covered “both sides” of the paper.
“Now,” said James, “get the scissors and cut it carefully in half down the middle.”
When cut into two strips, it sprang into being as one big twisted loop.
“Wow!”
“Neat, huh?”
“Do another thing, Mama.”
“We’re about to eat,” said James.
“I can’t think of anything right off, anyway.”
“What else did Grandpa do?”
“Well, once, at breakfast, he had a cup of soapy water, filled seemingly past the brim, with two pieces of string connected to each side and lying on the water: he pricked between the strings, and they parted.”
“Why did he do that?”
“To demonstrate surface tension.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s the molecular bonding on the surface of water, a cohesion that doesn’t want to be disrupted.”
“It’s like your mother when she’s in a bad mood. Right, Elizabeth? She has this boundary layer which cannot be broken through.”
“That’s surface tension: the tension on the surface.”
James had set a plate of sushi in the middle of the red table-cloth, whose corners draped triangularly against a second, bigger tablecloth, this one a deep salmon floral. Elizabeth’s tables were ephemeral art: the candlesticks, silver, and vases of flowers, wood hot pads, and linen napkins. He brought three enameled Chinese bowls of rice, and dipping sauces; and hot saki, in a Japanese vase, with two enameled vessels.
“Kampai,” Elizabeth toasted him.
“Kampai.” Empty the cup. The soft heat of the rice wine gave her a capacious strength: tonight she would tell him I love you without being asked. She watched the movie of the three of them eating by candlelight, listened more than talked.
The talk was of Babar and Celeste. Rosie, chattering away, was flourishing in James’s company.
They read, separately, in the living room. Elizabeth kept looking off into space, daydreaming. If she said I love you they would be stuck with each other: she couldn’t wait to tell him.
“Do you want a whiskey?” she said.
“No, thanks.”
“I’m going to have a short one.” She poured a larger shot than the one with which she appeared in the living room. “What is this, Science in Action?” she asked. James and Rosie were lying side by side over a piece of paper, and James was explaining relativity to her. A picky thought flickered, that he was trying too hard to please Elizabeth with how pleased he made Rosie. She stretched on the couch with the new Peter De Vries.
“One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second? God!”
You’re showing off now, James.
Rosie was stunned by yet another mind-boggling figure, like how many tons a dinosaur weighed, or how many children had died in the time it took to read this page. James’s motives, if any, never crossed her mind.
He had drawn a tram traveling on a beam of
light traveling away from a clock inset beneath the steeple of a building. “It’s gone one second, okay?” Rosie nodded. Elizabeth judged. “So how far has it gone?”
“How should I know?”
“Because I told you. Light travels one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second.”
“Oh, okay. So it’s gone a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles.”
“Good. Now, you’re on the tram, facing the clock, and you’ve been traveling for one second. You with me so far? Okay—now, it was twelve o’clock, according to the clock on the building, when you left. What time would you see now?”
“I couldn’t see that far.”
“Pretend. You couldn’t really travel on a beam of light, either. But pretend you can see the clock.”
“Does the clock have a second hand?” James nodded. “Then, twelve o’clock and one second.”
“No. Time would have stopped, you see, because the light beam which left your eye and traveled to the clock also took one second—to travel those hundred and eighty-six thousand miles. So they would have, in a sense, canceled each other out—”
“Wait a minute. So what would the clock say?”
“Twelve o’clock exactly.”
“But a second passed.”
“Relative to someone standing beneath the clock. But in relationship to the time and space you traveled, it hasn’t changed at all.”
“Oh, God. I don’t get it.”
“Sweetheart, I finally understood it when I was twenty.”
“I sort of get it. What if you were wearing a watch? Would it be twelve o’clock and one second?”
“It wouldn’t be that late. But it would be a fraction of a second later than twelve. I think. Good question.”
“Great question, doll.”
I don’t know, I don’t know, do I really love you, James? Yes, clumsily, but quite a lot. And for once, these last few days, I haven’t felt on the precipice: If you leave or betray me, I will fall over it. My mother did.