He lay in bed, quietly reading. Striving to turn the pages quietly, as though Isabel might hear a page turn upstairs. He'd been hearing her moving around upstairs for some time. He knew she wouldn't stay home long. He'd stay in bed until after she'd gone.
He could place every creak of the floorboards overhead. He could easily track her progress from room to room as she moved about the house as quickly and as light-footedly as she could, hoping not to wake him.
He smiled at the thought, since he'd been awake for almost three hours already.
Eventually she would sneak out of the house and go away somewhere to one of the places where she passed the monotonous hours of her life.
She would be gone until about five o'clock, he knew, when she would suddenly reappear with her arms full of groceries. A riotous rush would ensue as she set about cooking the evening meal.
About an hour and a half later his father would come home. Not too long afterwards, they would all sit down together for dinner, not exactly as a family, but at least as adults together. Civil.
She would have very little to say about her day, speaking in only the most noncommittal of generalities. His father, too, would have very little to say about his day. Isabel, Bill knew, neither understood nor cared what it was that her husband did at work, other than teaching and dealing with boring departmental politics.
Isabel was tediously predictable.
They would all be pleasant and hushed together while they ate. She was a good cook, but the tensions were obvious enough to everyone present, arising from her secretive ways and obvious dissatisfaction with her life and with her husband's life. And Bill felt that his father must feel terminally cut off and isolated from his wife. By now the old man must be well accustomed to living whatever life he retained when he was at the university.
In addition, Bill knew very well that he had added a new element of complication to the strained truce that was their domestic life together. He didn't really care. He hadn't moved in permanently. He was only visiting for a brief time. Anyway, he had a right to be in his father's house. Isabel would just have to tolerate his presence for a little while.
Just as I have to tolerate her.
It had been harder the first few days. His father was out of town on business when he arrived. At first Isabel had put on a show of being an accommodating hostess, but that didn't last long into the second day. Bill didn't mind at all; in fact, he preferred being alone. Solitude was why he'd come here anyway. He needed time to not have to deal with anyone.
But Simon and Gabe found me, he thought. Well, they're just passing through on the way to
Truthfully, though, he was looking forward to seeing them this morning. It was just blind luck that they were making this trip when he happened to be in
I'll have to be ready when they call, he thought. I'll get up as soon as Isabel leaves the house.
He had the lamp on that swung out from the corner and was reading in bed. It was Ulysses. He was not quite half way through the massive tome. He was in the episode identified with the Cyclops, a complex and seemingly discursive, almost surreal scene in a pub with J.J., presumably an avatar of John Joyce, and the all-seeing narrator, all "says I" this and "says I" that, and the bigoted citizen, opinionated, all-knowing, caustically, chronically, toxically anti-Semitic, and poor lost Bloom himself, forever slightly out of place, out of focus, miscast, the partial outsider never fully trusted, always somewhat mocked, dubiously effeminate, flowery bloom, bloomers, his exuberant runaway focused fascination with more cryptical particulars forever mistaken for pedantry, never exactly connecting with the subject under discussion, not exactly, slightly disconnected, slightly tangential, never adhering to strictly superficial social niceties, always scraping off the foam as it were and looking just a little bit deeper into the dark amber tides of Guinness than was socially acceptable. Poor Leopold Bloom, empathic to a fault not tolerated by his society or any, more intimately connected with the problems of day-to-day Sturm und Drang than any of the cast of thousands of the better adjusted and less conscious Dubliners ever could hope to be. A man like Bloom could never identify with the brutal, self-deceiving monochromatic modality, the terminal tunnel vision of the xenophobic citizenry. The Fenian. All of it puzzling. As complex as true-to-life life itself. Polymorphic and mutating. Shape-shifting Proteus. Difficult stuff to read.
He looked up at the clock-radio where it was situated on the corner shelves. It was just turning to eight o'clock. She should be about ready to go, he thought, just a little bit testy. She'd been moving about in the kitchen for a few minutes. Her actions were so predictable, and probably she didn't even know this about herself. Almost certainly not, because it was one of the things she sniped at his father about.
Effective, technical people are always very structured. They have to be. That's the only way they can be effective in technical endeavors. Extreme attention to detail.
Not like Leopold Bloom. With Bloom it's an artistic, emotional thing. With Dad it's an anal-retentive, technical, scientific thing. With Isabel, it's mostly a matter of self-esteem, and a fragile ego. Surely she has no idea of that.
He finished the right-hand page, turned it over, inserted his book mark, and lay the book down. Three hours of James Joyce was plenty.
He lay still, looking around the room at the crystalizing glow that filtered in through the curtains on the high window at ground level. Joyce's language and images and characters and voices rang on in sing-song in his head. His thoughts slid backwards abruptly and he was back in the castle with Estella looking up at him, her blue eyes shining, with dreaded dirty blonde hair in kinky strands tumbling out of her green and red and yellow knit cap, holding up the little Tupperware bowl like some kind of sacred religious chalice. Verily, like the Holy Grail, and offering him. . . .
No. I must not remember that. I must not think of it.
Deliberately he dialed further back in his head, back along the weeks, the months, to the last day of finals. Those were memories he liked, that he much preferred remembering now.
He had come out of his last final, his last semester of calculus. He remembered the washed-out sky and how quiet it was outside, like a strange anticlimax to the drama that was finally concluding. He could feel all the formulae he had forced himself to memorize, or almost to memorize, spilling out of his ears, and good riddance to them, because he was never, never going to use them, never again.
Another sunny afternoon in
Everything Bill owned, which wasn't much, he'd moved out of the dorm this morning and into his prehistoric 1988 Yugo. Now that school was over, really over, it was time to relocate to an apartment. The Castle Arms was a cheap, run-down apartment complex probably built during the 1950s. It took the unpromising shape of a three-story white stucco castle, complete with rounded corner towers and turrets and a permanently lowered drawbridge over an empty moat that collected trash and rainwater and would doubtles prove infamous for breeding mosquitoes.
He was feeling morose in about six different ways. He hated calculus, and he knew he hadn't done well on the test, but at least he would never have to integrate a formula again. He hated most of his classes generally, and he could not see a future ahead toward which they were guiding him. He had serious doubts about the biology major he was pursuing. He was depressed because all his friends were gone, and he was dreading living in a castle and working at a musty old bookstore this summer. And so on.
His thoughts were dark and gloomy, like a character out of Dostoyevsky, he imagined. It was so lonely suddenly, and he resented having to play the role of the last man standing. He was tramping across the quad with his hands in his dark, torn jeans, his eyes downcast, and he almost stamped blindly right across a girl who was sitting there by herself on a little woolen Mexican blanket. He checked himself abruptly and stared down at her or, rather, he found himself glaring at her, because he was in so foul a mood, and when she looked up at him, surprised by the near-collision, and saw the strange look on his face, her mouth broke into a bright smile and she laughed up at him. Her laughter instantly dispelled his gloom, and he, realizing how foolish he must look, laughed too.
He'd seen her many times over the last few years; maybe they'd even been in a class or two together, he couldn't remember. Certainly he'd never talked to her before. She was a very small girl, probably just under five feet tall, a hippy, a flower-power girl, an Earth mother child, the kind he would never have paid any attention to, with her cloggies and her plastic beads and her strange yellow-blonde dreads under the Rastafarian yarn hat, with her freckly face impossibly white, with her transparent skin and her wide smile bespeaking openness and warmth and vulnerability, just like Janis Joplin, he thought. In that very moment, in the slanting afternoon light and heat and damp closeness of the rising humidity, he knew. He knew. And although he was dressed all in black and imagined he must look something like the dismal, world-weary figure painted by Caspar David Friedrich at the sea of fog, it seemed to him that in the brightness emanating from her smile all fog must dissipate, and the heavy dread of a dull, poisionous summer began to lift.
She laughed at him again. "Are you just going to stand there staring, or are you going to go ahead and trample me flat?"
He smiled. "I'm sorry. I didn't see you there."
She looked around at the empty grass sea surrounding them in the quad, and then she looked back up into his eyes. "Really?"
He was grinning foolishly, he knew. "Do you. . . .I wonder. . . ." He wasn't quite sure what to say, and he wasn't sure he could find any words that he needed. "Would you mind if I sat down for a moment? I haven't been having a very good day."
She moved over a little on the blanket.
"Of course. But you'll have to introduce yourself. What kind of a girl do you think I am?"
That's how it began.
They were a strange pairing. Obviously. He was the mystical, metaphysical, dark philosopher, and she was the easy, light spirit, drifting along, happily superficial. He quickly learned that her name was Estella Thompson. "Estella, like The Star. You know, in the Tarot."
He wasn't familiar with the Tarot.
She fished around in the big orange bag that she toted around. It was decorated with microscopic plastic beads and tiny reflecting bangles portraying three cats with extremely long necks and giant, searching, saucer-shaped eyes. Out came her Rider-Waite deck. She pulled back the lid and tapped the cards out in her open palm, cheap plastic bracelets jangling around her wrists. For a long moment she looked directly into his eyes where he sat next to her, her gaze not flinching. He noticed how light blue her irises were, like a glassy kind of frosting, the kind of frosted light blue color that you saw, for example, in the eyes of Siberian huskies, only hers were surrounded by perfect circles of extremely dark, penetrating navy-sapphire. She continued to look at his eyes, and then she studied his hair, which was too long at the time because he seldom bothered to cut it when he was in school. It was hanging almost to his shoulders. His hair was silky-black almost to the point of being dark blue. She reached over to stroke it between thumb and finger and pushed it back over his shoulder.
"Hm. Your Significator must be the Knight of Swords, I think, although maybe we'll change that later. But that will do for now."
She looked down into the deck of cards and began fanning through it. He continued to stare at her face as she did this. He couldn't help staring. He had never seen someone so pretty as she was. He wondered how he could never have noticed this about her before. The sun was behind him and falling over his right shoulder on her face, and he could see how long her lashes were, blonde lashes, almost transparent. Tiny, faint reddish freckles all over her forehead and eyelids, spilling down her cheeks and across her little button nose. His thinking by now was not clear, not at all coherent, but somewhere the thought formed that he could not believe that he was here, and that some improbable lucky thing was happening to him. He could not really follow anything that she was saying or doing with the cards. What she did though was to locate the card which she'd called his Significator: the Knight of Swords. The card showed a knight armored in plate mail on a charging horse. The horse's eyes appeared to be rolled back in its head, and they were dashing across a high, windy plain, the grim-faced knight with his sword drawn and held aloft as though charging into battle, or coming to the aide of some unseen person in dire need of rescue or relief.
My Significator?
She lay the card down on the blanket between them and looked up. He was still staring at her face. She blushed and looked down quickly, handing the deck of cards to him.
"Now shuffle them. Not like a hand of poker! Divide the deck and lightly recombine them in clumps."
"Like this?"
"Yes. That's fine. Do it as many times as you like. But it's a little different from shuffling a regular deck of cards, because it makes a difference if the cards fall right side up or upside down. So every time you cut the deck, make sure you turn one of the halves around, like so. This will get them shuffled while altering the vertical orientation. Upright, or reversed."
He got the hang of it, squatting on his knees on the blanket, mixing the cards as she instructed him.
"Are you going to tell my future?"
"It's not like that. Well, not necessarily. Not exactly. Some people use them in fortunetelling. They can be used that way, but it's more interesting to let them tell you their own story. Try not to have any expectations in mind. Be open. The cards may speak to you about the future, or about the past, or about the present, or about other futures or pasts or presents other than the ones you're living in."
He frowned with his eyes.
"You'll see," she said. "Some people compare it to Jungian psychology, treating the cards like they represent archetypes embedded within the psyche. In that case, casting the cards is more a form of psychological analysis, or assessment, than fortunetelling."
"Is that how you see it?"
She shrugged.
"Sometimes. It could be. There's not a single answer to the question, though. The world's more complex and interconnected than most people think." She held out her hand and he passed the thick stack of cards back to her. "Now cut the deck."
He did, and she placed the top half on bottom. She set the deck down to the left of the Knight of Swords on the blanket, picked up the top card from the deck, and turned it over, placing it directly over his Significator. "This is what covers you. This. . . ."
He looked at the card. It showed a nude woman kneeling at the edge of a pool, her bended knee on dry land, her other foot seeming to be standing on the surface of the water of the pool itself. She held a pitcher in either hand and was pouring water from them onto the ground and into the pool. Although a sunny blue sky was behind her, she was surrounded by a cluster of large stars, including a big, bright golden star just above her head. At the bottom of the card was printed: THE STAR.
"Is that you, Estella?"
"As a matter of fact, yes. I use the Star as my Significator."
"So you're on top of me."
"Yes." She looked up at him, beaming. "Or maybe. The Star is the central issue affecting you. Your. . . .primary focus, or what's going on inside you right now."
"Maybe?"
She shrugged, and laughed.
"The Star indicates the power of positive thinking," she said, pressing on. "Optimism. Are you feeling optimistic?"
"I wasn't when I came out of my calculus final."
"But are you now?"
"More than you can possibly know," he said, and it was like letting out a long breath.
It was true. Absolutely true. His black spirits that had dogged him were simply gone. It was remarkable that it could happen so quickly and with such utter totality. He was feeling something that he had not felt in a long, long time. He felt good.
That was how he came to meet Stel on the last day of finals at
He heard the side door off the kitchen being pulled closed upstairs. It pulled him out of his reverie. Isabel was finally leaving. His eyes immediately went back to the clock. It was 8:37. He lay motionless in bed, his ears straining to hear the confirmatory signals. A few minutes later he did: the grumbling whirring and the big louvered steel panels curving up against the ceiling of the garage, and then the ignition of her car revving to life. He heard the car backing out of the garage just as he had heard his father's car leave the house almost exactly two hours earlier. Shortly the garage door closed again. Faintly and far removed, the Doppler-distorted departure of Isabel into an unknown world of foggy potentiality well out beyond this cave.
* * *
This time it started with memories of all the books that Stel had brought into the castle with her. That was a little ironic, he saw in hindsight. Stel was bright, but she was not a bonafide intellectual. She was one of those people who found more comfort, and a certain amount of security or estimation of self-worth, in owning and surrounding herself with books than in actually reading them, and although she was familiar with the authors of the books she owned and hauled around through life, she seemed less versed in the contents of the works themselves.
Their lives together in the summer had quickly settled down into a. . . .pattern. He was still reluctant to call it a routine. Whenever they were sequestered together behind the bulwarks of the castle walls they were almost always engaged in passionate love-making. That was what was so brilliant about their chemistry. Their souls each seemed to dissolve mutually, naturally and completely, into one another. The sex was effortless and of unending possibility. Acts of elegantly insouciant imagination, their entwined bodies far, far ahead of the mind, so that whatever remained of individual consciousness was simply drawn forward, magnetically, or through a strange gravity, like the way a comet's tail unfolds inevitably behind the solar plunge of its icy nucleus. It was an unstoppable energy, insurmountable, overwhelming, until both Stel and he were reduced to fortunate passengers only along for the ride, gone in a profound, ineluctable chemical reaction. It was not ribald or raunchy in any way. Their love-making was always a profound and strange and mystical experience. It felt sacred, connected with the numinous in a way that was all too familiar to him, although he could never explain it to her. It was territory he'd explored before, plenty. After they were together for only a few weeks it was already nearly impossible for him to remember a time when they could ever have been apart. Those earlier years felt to him like a dream dreamt by some other person. Numinous. Yes. They were together in a realm of filmy veils ballooning in secret summer breezes, peeking though to arcane realms were regular people ordinarily did not venture. He'd seen glimpses of it before, but only from the distorted vantage of a hyperacute neurological storm. This, though, was something holy transpiring in the real world, and there was nothing for it but to let go of all natural, reflexive hesitancy and restraint and dip in, dip in, dive down deep in. Swim down in it. Submerge and go with the flow.
The other part of the summer's unroutine routine was more conventional or orthodox, but no less a matter of transcendence as far as he was concerned. This aspect of his life took place during the times when Stel was not present. Times when he was at his job at the bookstore, or back in their regal apartment alone. Then, in every possible instant, he was voraciously devouring books, either the ones she'd brought with her, or others that he'd rooted out in the dim, musky-murky bookstore. And, similar in a strange way to their hours of intense love-making, during these times he was still not in charge of his own intellect, but an eavesdropper on the inspired brillance of masters. Most of the time he felt ego-absent, gulping down the intoxicating and imaginative lifestories of others. . . .Shakespeare, Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, Pynchon, Whitman, Eliot, Conrad, on and on it went, on and on, from Moby-Dick to Edgar Allan Poe to Allen Ginsberg to On the Road and William Burroughs and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (one of the ones that Stel had made it through completely, and several times at that), and from Stephen Crane to The Death of Ivan Ilych. He read Kafka late into the night, and The Sound and the Fury over the course of three very vivid days that reminded him somehow more of immersing himself in Apocalypse Now than in "Heart of Darkness." For a few weeks he dipped down into Roger Zelazny, and he savvied and grokked the Amber books as well as the claustrophobic, benighted jewel that was Creatures of Light and Darkness. He was, he thought, assembling a database from which a craft might one day emerge. While at work he read a good deal of Shelby Foote, picking and choosing his way across the years of American self-destruction, and he learned how economics always trumps morality. He dipped down into Frankenstein,
That was his summer, a season submerged in sex, in which two souls devoured one another with a sweetness of inexpressably heartbreaking tenderness and human-to-human connection, and in literature, in words and ideas, a summer of absolute, high-energy expression flooding in from the outside so fast and so completely and continuously that he never found himself alone and unbeguiled for any more than the briefest moment here and there when he might contemplate how to put into words of his own this experience of sinking down selfless into all these virtual lives of others.
The books. . . .the books. . . .those heavy, heavy books, deeply moving, pulsing between the covers with life, vibrant, human life. . . .the heady concepts. . . .their exalted authors, literary immortals, towering giants. . . .it was all too much, almost. . . .All those writers laboring to produce their indelible images and situations, to touch some raw nerve in the human condition. . . .Was that what it was about? He didn't think so, no; at least, not completely. He thought it closer to the truth to say that many of those novels wrote their authors. They had this hungry thing growing inside and they had to release it in a torrent of words lest it devour them. And now, standing in the shower, washing his hair, his thoughts lightyears removed from his body, he mixed it up; he felt something slipping, and his mind merged those books and their authors and the boundless flood tide of words and ideas with what he'd learned in school when he thought he was learning nothing, when he was trying to find a way to please and appease the father he'd never known adequately when he was a boy. . . .Improbably, impossibly, his mind began mixing it all up with ideas from. . . .from genetics, of all things. . . .
* * *
No comments:
Post a Comment