Aegypt Page 6

  ‘Your Up Passage Year.’ Rosie stopped pacing. ‘We agreed about Rose, too.’

  His head sank at that, as though it were unfair. His fork counted four in the air. ‘We can’t talk about this here, we can talk if you want to talk about it . . .’

  ‘It’s not to talk about,’ Rosie said. ‘It’s an announcement.’

  ‘And Sam?’ he said, looking up again.

  ‘Sam’s coming with me.’

  Mike began to nod slowly, saddened but not surprised. ‘Just like that,’ he said.

  She flushed. This was the hard part. She had arguments for this part too, but they hadn’t ever completely convinced her, and she didn’t dare embark on them. ‘For a while,’ she said tersely.

  ‘And be brought up,’ he said, ‘by Beau Brachman.’

  Quick as a cat attacked, Rosie shot back: ‘And who would you leave her with? Rose?’

  Again Mike’s head sank. Then he smiled, shook his head, chuckled, taking another tack. ‘Rosie,’ he said. ‘Rosie, Rosie, Rosie. Are you really jealous of her?’ A grin began to spread across his face. ‘Really? Or is it something else? Something else about Rose, I mean.’

  She only stared, arms uncrossing.

  ‘No, really, you and she being good buddies there for a while. That could be tense-making. Gee, we were all good buddies, you know, weren’t we, one time there, one night.’ His voice had sunk again to a murmur, which the broad grin made horrible. ‘I thought maybe you had a little thing for her.’

  She couldn’t throw the pie of grains, it wouldn’t hold together, but she swept it up with both hands and pressed it into his grin so suddenly that he couldn’t prevent it.

  ‘There,’ she said, ‘there,’ more to herself than to anyone else, and turned away as Mike leaped up knocking over his chair and wiping bran from his face furiously. The others there had stood too and were hurrying over, but Rosie was gone, walking the wooden corridor steadily, quickly, in time with her steady hard heartbeats, and dusting bits of sticky meal from her fingers.

  There, she said to herself again when she was seated in the suffocating car. There. There there there. The dogs sniffed and panted at her impatiently as she sat waiting for her heartbeat to slow.

  Stupid. Stupid thing to do.

  But what an awful, what an awful impossible man. She put the key in, turned it, nothing happened, she had a swift dreadful vision of a whole chain of events including return to The Woods, telephone calls, a wrecker, apologies, a ride home with Mike, and then saw that she had the car in the wrong gear. She fixed that, and the car started with a roar.

  Almost as though he chose to be awful. Didn’t have to be and chose to be. That couldn’t be so, but it was just as though. It made it hard to forgive him. It always had, always. She reached up, tears beginning to burn and sparkle in the orbits of her eyes, to adjust the rear-view mirror. It came away in her hand.

  THREE

  ‘What I’d like to do,’ Spofford said to Pierce, ‘is to get married.’

  They sat together on the porch of the little cabin that was Spofford’s present home, catching up on each other’s news. Out in the rocky meadow the sheep fed, raising their heads now and then as though to admire the view.

  ‘Well,’ said Pierce. ‘You got somebody in mind?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘And when?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. Maybe not soon. She’s sort of taken just at the moment.’

  ‘Married.’

  Spofford nodded. ‘To a Mucho person. Mike Mucho.’ As they talked Spofford shaped, with only a hatchet, a piece of stove wood into a maul, turning it this way and that to work it, chipping delicately. ‘So she’s lying low now, being good. You can understand. But that’s what the sheep are about, in a way. She likes sheep too. She’d like to keep some. So. We’d have that in common. Sheep used to be big around here, I mean it used to be a big enterprise. These hill pastures are perfect for sheep. I don’t know why it went out. It could be big again.’

  The present spread Spofford had inherited from his parents when they moved recently to Florida: acres that the family had held for years, good for nothing but held anyway. Florida: Spofford spat. Talk about good for nothing. Pierce nodded; his own mother had recently drifted with the aged to that land.

  ‘So anyway,’ Spofford said. ‘I’ve got this place, good for sheep, and I’m building a house. Or I’m going to start building it. I’ve got ideas about what kind of house I want. I’m going to build it up on that crest, above the old orchard. It’ll look both ways – see? There’s an old foundation there, and a hearthstone. I like that. I could build on that. I’ve cut a lot of wood up there, it’s curing now. I’ll use that to build with. That’s what this is for.’ He weighed the unfinished maul in his big brown hand. There was a tattoo on the back of the hand, a flying fish, faint, blue, like the veins there. ‘For splitting off shakes, pine shakes, for the roof.’

  ‘Don’t they sell shingles?’ Pierce asked. ‘I mean I would have thought shingles, roofing materials you know, would be for sale these days.’

  ‘Sure,’ Spofford said placidly. ‘I’d rather do it myself. It’s sort of a gift, I guess – this house I mean. My own place. My own trees. Cut the trees, trees to make boards, boards to build the house; cut the maul, maul to cut shingles, shingles for the roof, roof to keep the rain out, if you see what I mean . . .’

  Pierce, hypnotized by Spofford’s careful hands working and careful voice making plans, only nodded. The maul, no crude bludgeon but a true tool, beveled and shaped with an offhand grace, entranced him.

  ‘A gift,’ Spofford said again, trying the maul’s balance. ‘You’ll meet her. There’s a party tomorrow. A Full Moon party. Lots of people. She’ll be there.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Pierce. ‘What do people do at a Full Moon party?’

  ‘The usual,’ Spofford said. ‘Swim. Eat. Drink. Take drugs.’

  ‘And what’s this lady’s name?’

  ‘Rosalind.’

  Pierce laughed aloud. Spofford eyed him sidewise and said, ‘You never tumbled, right?’

  ‘If you mean by that,’ Pierce said, ‘have I ever spoken vows, the answer is no.’

  ‘Aha,’ Spofford said.

  ‘Tumbled, though,’ he said, ‘yes. Not once. More than once.’

  He laced his hands behind his head. Spofford went on working, and did not inquire further. The afternoon was strangely loud, cicadas in competition and a thousand other lesser insects filling up the air with a changeful hum. The sun crept toward concealment in the mountains behind them. ‘I quit my job,’ Pierce said at last, ‘because of a tumble.’

  ‘I thought you were fired.’

  ‘Quit, fired,’ Pierce said. ‘Let’s not put too fine a point on it.’

  ‘And love was the reason.’

  ‘Love and money.’ Chalkokrotos. ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘And that’s why the trip to Whatsits College, in Conurbana. Job hunting.’.

  ‘Peter Ramus.’

  ‘I don’t know if you’d like Conurbana so much,’ Spofford said. ‘Who the hell is Peter Amos?’

  ‘I tell you what,’ Pierce said. ‘Just for the time being, as long as I’ve run off, let’s not talk about Conurbana. Or Peter Ramus either. He invented, among other things, the outline.’

  Spofford laughed, and turned the smoothness of his maul against his palm. Pierce took off his brown spectacles: a darkness had come down suddenly as the sun reached the mountain’s edge, and long shadows sprang out across the yellow grass.

  She had led Pierce a pretty wild ride, and in fast company too. The danger she had always been a little bit in had excited him – it had excited her as well – and the excitement was magnified by the champagne she wanted and got, by the long nights on the town and the intense dawns alone together: all that was fueled by the coke, which in turn paid for it all or most of it – the remainder being the difficulty Pierce had at last come to. She thought of him as shelter; he had always, big-boned and ham-hande
d as he was, given the impression of great strength, not entirely an illusion; she thought of him as level-headed also, which was an error.

  He had bought into her deals in a small way right from the start. He couldn’t be sniffing up her capital for free, and it seemed sordid to buy from her in nickels and dimes; certainly he couldn’t refrain, not if he was going to be with her through those long icy nights, and he didn’t want to refrain even if he could have: the stuff she got was good, it was very good, Pierce red-eyed and jittery in class next day trying to explain the Enlightenment had no complaints.

  ‘What was that,’ she asked him, ‘that she said, old lady Moldy Hairy Whatshername . . .’

  ‘Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,’ Pierce said, classes done and his tongue untied again by coke and champagne. ‘“Never complain, never explain.”’

  ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘That’s my motto. Never complain, never explain.’

  She kept to it. Business got better, and more dangerous. She got Pierce out of his old slum apartment, to which he had held on through thick and thin, and into a wide glassy concrete-floored place with a view over the fairy towers of the black bridge to Brooklyn. More central. He went deeply into debt to the Barnabas credit union over this deal, his never-large salary was going out those wide windows, she was snowballing her share of the rent into some big bucks.

  ‘Snowballing,’ she said, and laughed.

  He knew he was teetering, but teetering didn’t mean falling. He knew himself to be afraid, though, and a man afraid and teetering could not help showing he might fall. He tried not to show it: he wanted above all that she not think he was not up to her. The sudden decisions she needed ratified – the apartment, money in huge wads and what to do with it, indulgences proposed that he had never even heard of – coke helped him with those, coke was decisive, but coke was funny: it made your reach seem swift and sure, but often it made you lurch and grab; the floor of the apartment was littered here and there with unswept crumbs of glass from wineglasses he had reached for too boldly, too coke-boldly. The bed was the only safe place. They clothed it in eiderdown and sunburst sheets and mirrored it and pillowed it. By the time it was full-rigged she had begun to spend nights elsewhere.

  The telephone was a dreadful noise in that stone place at four in the morning. Pierce was alone, curled fetally on one edge of the big bed, it took what seemed hours to claw his way through the foamy bedclothes to the phone’s cry.

  It was the biggest deal, of course, the one that was to make him all his money back and double, that had gone wrong. In the ladies’ john of the clubhouse of a baseball stadium, opening night of the season, and some really dreadful characters.

  ‘Baseball stadium? What baseball stadium?’

  ‘How do I know? I don’t know anything about baseball.’

  It was all gone, money gone, stash gone, Pierce would never get the whole story.

  ‘Just so you’re safe, just so you’re safe,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I’m safe. It isn’t that. I owe you a lot of money.’

  ‘Forget it. Come home.’

  ‘I can’t. I won’t be coming over there for . . . a while. Change the phone. Change the locks. Really. But listen, listen. I’ll pay it all back, like I said. And more. Just wait.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Where are you? Where are you going?’

  ‘I’ll be all right.’

  ‘You can’t just hide out alone . . .’

  ‘I won’t be alone.’ There was a pause, a pause long enough to be filled with a story, or an apology, or an excuse. Then: ‘Goodbye, Pierce,’ she said.

  When he first met her she was masked and naked, and he was being paid by her mother to caress her.

  She was part Jew, part Gypsy on her mother’s side, and mostly Romanian, or perhaps a full half something entirely different, on her father’s side; she doubted her parentage. She thought her mother’s marriage was white; her father, an old-fashioned Broadway boulevardier, gentle and gay, had a secret hurt or weakness, never talked of much, which sent him early to bed and made him often vague, though always spiffy in a silk ascot and a neat white beard. He was ‘semiretired,’ a successful writer of sentimental songs and TV jingles once, and a violin virtuoso too. He was a good host, offering Christmas champagne and black Balkan cigarettes to Pierce even before he was introduced, questioning him closely and then striking an attentive pose (he was an exquisite striker of antique poses) though seeming not to hear the answers Pierce made.

  It was her mother’s cicisbeo, Sid, who was also Pierce’s friend and landlord, who first brought her and Pierce together; and Sid who also later brought Pierce to her parents’ apartment on a sleety Christmas night. Pierce’s father, Axel, with whom Pierce usually spent Christmas, was in the hospital, and Sid, deeply sentimental about Christmas for reasons Pierce couldn’t fathom, had insisted that after the grim visiting hours were over, Pierce accompany him to this little party rather than (as he had intended) go back to his empty apartment and read.

  He recognized right off the ring on her left ring finger. She wore several rings, delicate silver ones, but the one on her left ring finger was an imitation Florentine one with a great glassy stone. When, at their first meeting, he had spent hours naked with her, he had had time to study it, among other marks now hidden from him. She took his hand with a smile of recognition, for she had seen his face. He had arrived late that day a month before, at that huge and overheated loft somewhere in the West Forties (he would never come upon the place again); the others had already doffed their winter things and were masked; Pierce remembered the oddity of coming in among them clothed but naked-faced when they were the opposite.

  ‘We’ve met,’ she said, when her father tried to make an introduction, forgetful of Pierce’s name. ‘Hi. ’Scuse me, Daddy, Effie wants to see you, everybody, she woke up.’

  Her mother – she called her putative father Daddy but her undeniable mother Effie, perhaps out of some desire to restrike a balance – was bedridden with flu, but wanted not to miss anything. Pierce brought in the box of chocolates which was all the cheer he had been able to acquire on a Christmas afternoon in Brooklyn, and these were opened and offered by Effie to the gathering around her bed.

  ‘Is Olga here?’ she asked. ‘Oh I hope she can come. You never know with Olga, but she promised.’

  Effie wore pearls with her ecru satin bedjacket, an attractive woman much younger and seeming also to belong to a later decade than her husband, fifties to his twenties, or maybe twenties to his nineties.

  Her daughter sat on the bed. ‘You know Pierce,’ she told Effie. ‘He’s an actor. You’ve seen him.’ Effie ate a chocolate, smiling just the sly smile her daughter smiled.

  ‘Oh,’ her father said (standing a little apart in the doorway, one hand except for the thumb inserted in his blazer pocket, the other holding champagne), ‘that’s how you know Sid? The movies?’

  ‘Sort of,’ Pierce said, no actor at all in fact, though when Sid had recruited him for a day’s work, he’d assured Pierce that didn’t matter a bit. Sid himself, though he could convincingly, even with a certain air, describe himself as being ‘in films,’ was in actuality a landlord, a born landlord in every sense, which is how Pierce had come to know him, Pierce’s building required minute and constant attention from Sid, who would far rather have been at work on his other enterprises, in films.

  ‘A dream sequence,’ Sid had explained to him as he tried to conjure heat from Pierce’s stricken furnace that November. ‘A day’s work is all. Less. And twenty dollars in it for you too, not that you need the money.’ Sid had just acquired the rights to a Japanese film, a piece of mild erotica that he thought might appeal to a certain audience, only it included no male nudity; a high court had recently allowed as how male nudity was not in itself grounds for prosecution, and Sid was sure his film could make money if it went to the absolute limit and could be so advertised. Noticing a scene where his much-tried heroine collapses into a deep sleep, Sid had thought of inser
ting a dream sequence just at that point, as full of naked men (and women) as he could make it, an Orgy Scene in fact, though ‘all simulated, all simulated,’ as Sid said, gesturing No with the wrench in his hand. And masked: the masks disguising the fact that the dream-revelers Sid had hired were neither Oriental nor appeared anywhere else in the film – as well as giving the proper surrealistic touch.

  She was masked, then, when he was paired with her, and abstracted further by harsh lights that paled her tawny skin almost to transparency, unreal as a doll. Her mother, an amateur of several arts, had made the masks, and they were clever: just scarves of thin, silky stuff, almost transparent, on which Effie had painted Kabuki faces, beetling brows and outthrust chins. When the scarf was tied over the face, the features beneath gave some life and movement to the painted features – spooky and dreamlike indeed. Her mother had also, out of some fund at her disposal, paid for the shooting. Her husband knew nothing of it.

  Pierce understood nothing of this at the time, they were all strangers to him then but Sid, it was only explained to him by Sid in a hurried whisper as they mounted the stairs together to her apartment at Christmas. Sid didn’t whisper, though – Pierce couldn’t remember him ever mentioning it – that Effie’s own daughter had been among the dream-revelers. Or perhaps he had mentioned it, at some point, only it had not struck Pierce as it did now, among the family, at Christmas, drinking her father’s champagne.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘there’s the bell.’ She got up from her mother’s bed with a bounce and went to answer it.

  ‘Are you going to play later?’ Effie asked her husband, who struck a new pose, shy, coy.

  ‘Oh sure,’ Sid said.

  ‘You must, must. It wouldn’t be Christmas.’