AEgypt (34 page)

Pierce, awake too early on an ashen December morning and reviewing his history with the torpid clarity of hangover, could not think of an important exception. It had happened so with every one.

It had happened so (Pierce shifted beneath the covers of his messy bed, which he could not seem to leave) with Penny Pound, the girl with the smoky eyes and the thin scars on her wrists with whom he had fled to sunny California just at the beginning of his sixth semester at Noate. She'd had to be back in her dorm at eleven that first night, and he had headed dutifully that way with her after a postmovie coffee shared in the communal kitchen of his rooming house in town; and on a street corner halfway between his place and the dorm they had stopped to kiss; and as though turning through a revolving door without going out (though ending in a new place nonetheless) had almost wordlessly turned back. Pierce next day had not felt noticeably different than he had the day before; he got her back into her dorm and saw nothing of her for a week. And then when they met again it was all as it would be; they were inseparable, her huge and unresolvable griefs were his, her young body and her old hands; if some wise elder (his own elder self, except that his own elder self had never learned it) had advised caution and circumspection, he wouldn't have understood the advice. True, the first time she said she loved him (at Sam's house, he had taken her there for a long weekend, they lay
en deshabille
in the old schoolroom while two doors away his mother placidly pasted trading stamps into a book) he had been unable to respond—but only because he was awed by the words, which it was his assumption could only ever truly be said once, and for good. Once they were said, running off with her was mere practical necessity; in those days of universities standing
in loco parentis
(nowadays they didn't even know that lingo) the two of them were barred from cohabiting, from coitus too if they could be caught at it, and she was the first woman he had both loved and lain with, so there was nothing for it but to cash in their just-paid-for class-admittance cards like chips—his had been paid for with a scholarship, no matter, by an oversight he was allowed to liquidate them anyway—and use the money to flee; and though when he staggered from the bus at a rest stop into the unreal sunshine of Albuquerque he did for an awful moment think What have I done, he didn't ever, then or later, certainly not on the long bus ride back east alone, back into winter and the string of lies he had left behind him, ever really think he had much choice in the matter.

Well, he had been very young, and so had she; it was hardly an unusual story, was it? He might be forgiven, he thought, considering; considering his upbringing, considering the tenderest part of his adolescence constrained within the halls and gyms and endless males of St. Guinefort's; might be forgiven his surprise and lack of cunning on finding himself loved and laid at once. Certainly he had suffered for it, atrociously, extravagantly, he had almost slit his own wrists, not out of romantic disillusion but simply because he couldn't bear to stand a moment longer in the storm of loss she had left him in, he bareheaded and unable to conceive how she could behave in such a way.

Yet he couldn't blame only that thoughtless child for the extravagance of his grief, as wholly surprising as the suddenness of love; nor could he blame on youth alone an obtuse innocence that had persisted long beyond youth.

What was it then? Was it growing up a single child with impossible, queer, chivalric Axel in Brooklyn, was it the isolation of the Oliphant compound in Kentucky? Who had taught him, who had shaped his heart in this strange way? Somehow, somewhen it had been communicated to him that there
was
a door you passed through, and rarely, only if potent stars conspired together; a door opening to a heart, a body, both made in heaven or in some fire just as refining. And then there you were; it was a
hortus conclusus
; he had no more been taught that there was a way back out again than he had been taught that the way in—which he had discovered all by himself with such astonishment, such horrid joy—was a beaten path. A beaten path.

He laughed shortly, and coughed on bitter spittle. He laced his hands together on his breast and looked up into the large and ornate mirror that hung above, cantilevered from the wall in such a way that it reflected the bed: reflected, just now, himself to himself.

Those who do not remember their own histories, he thought, are condemned to repeat them.

By the time he had met Julie Rosengarten, he had shed that ignorance, or rather had not shed it but at least had clothed it decently; he could well think of that one night with her (one really kind of strangely wonderful night) as no collision but a mere ding in the then-thickening sexual traffic of adulthood and swinging Manhattan. She hadn't heard from him for six weeks, but six weeks after their second date they were wearing each other's sweaters, they had a dog in common, and Pierce was thinking how to bring up the subject of a Mixed Marriage to his mother and Sam. A year later he was still hanging on, obtusely, innocently, for good and all, while Julie conducted a flamboyant affair with the upstairs neighbor, which she just couldn't get Pierce to notice. In the final division of property the dog, after a moment's hesitation, chose to go with Julie.

Farce plot. My wife. My best friend. My dog.

Women, he could only conclude, extrapolating from his own experience up to this December day, were naturally polygamous, whatever the common wisdom said to the contrary; able to love deeply and forever for a while, to go off suddenly and spectacularly in all directions like one of those immense fireworks that eject a globe of stars as solid as can be, which hangs in the colored night for an eternity, a brief eternity, the length of an awed exhalation from the spectators, and then goes out as though it had never been. And men (take himself, for a single example) were naturally monogamous, bound by the literal meaning of the promises they made and the actual endurance of the forever those promises contained.
En ciel un dieu, en terre une déesse,
as the old Provençal poets put it. How the stories had got around, so superficially convincing, so widespread, that matters were otherwise, he didn't know. He could suppose a cabal; or, what was more likely, that in an older world, a world he didn't live in, those stories had been true; and only now, now that the world was as it was and not as it had been, were women able to unmask and unfold and be as their natures dictated. The Pill and all that. Who the hell knew. In any case, should he not by now have learned that it was so, and learned to act on it, no matter what his history, no matter what dim antiquity his character had been forged in or out of what medieval materials? And if he found himself suddenly (all in a night, all in one snowy night) wandering in the pages of an erotic novel, a piece of pornography of the best modern kind, he with a heart and vitals shaped for some other age, some other book entirely, didn't it behoove him to learn the ropes there before he just leaped right out of his skin?

Just be a little careful, he had told himself that night, lying beside her sleepless and astonished; just for God's sake be a little careful this time. But it did no good. A whole winter intervened, and when she returned from Europe he was hers, had of course all along been hers; the high life they entered into only veneered his uxoriousness with a knowing air, while ravening lewdness intensified his monogamy, and gave it secret rein. Maybe, maybe, if he'd had to knock, and woo, finagle and cajole—but when all portals, all, all, were flung open to him, the rest was already as it would be, foregone, including his lying here now staring up at his mirrored self staring back down at him, hands folded on his breast, big feet protruding from the bedclothes, big face vacant. Foregone.

Like the Bourbons, he had forgotten nothing and learned nothing; and he was here again where he had been. His history repeated itself, and if the first time was tragedy, and the second time farce (as Marx said, in the other context, the context from which Pierce helplessly drew these bitter clichés), then what did that make the third time, and the fourth?

Day was full, as full as it would grow today, and the radiators hissed furiously. Pierce flung off the bedclothes, but didn't arise; he lay contemplating (he couldn't do otherwise, the ormolu mirror was carefully pitched so as to be unavoidable) his long nakedness. Big hands, big feet: in his case the common computation worked out correctly.

You know what?
she'd said to him that first night, said to him with her look both sly and frank.
You know what? You got a nice cock
.

A cold wave surged in his blood, memory of desire and certainty of loss; Pierce watched it come and pass, like some kind of attack, vertigo or angina.

This isn't funny, he thought. I'm not that young anymore. I can't take it. This time around was like a disease, a disease he couldn't shake off, one of those childhood diseases that the young and strong survive, a few days in bed, but that cripple the grownup.

Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love. Sick sick sick.

I will take vows, he thought, that's all; I will take fucking vows. If, after two marriages (of course they were marriages in fact only, just as some marriages are marriages in name only—but of course there exactly it was) and a sex life that seemed to him as varied and violently satisfying as any normal man's had any right to be, there was still in him this innocence he should long ago have shed but had not, an innocence that would just go on doing him this dreadful harm, then the best thing he could do would be to choose solitude.

"Take vows,” he said aloud to the man above him, pale lean and ready for autopsy (look nurse this man has no uh-oh valve on his heart, his penis is completely detached from his brain). Just give it up. Thanks but no thanks.

He didn't have to be about love; he was a man not a novel. He supposed there must be other pleasures life held, other goals beyond or different from the enormous blisses of encompassing sexual thralldom. They seemed to rise, far off, on an expanding horizon, though he couldn't concretely imagine them. Fame. Orderliness. Quietude. Money, goods, a connoisseurship of—well of the world and the self somehow; the pleasures of solitude, not solitude he fell into or was forced into as into a cell whose bars he could only shake in impotent grief, but solitude elected, embraced. He had a poignant vision of himself, a different person in another place: self-sufficient, a confirmed bachelor, a careful pleasant gent no one can quite figure out—an eccentric, keeps to himself, has that beautiful house full of nice things. And he an
objet de vertu
in his own right, seen walking into town for the Sunday papers, dressed dandily and peculiarly, plus-fours and a knobby walking-stick, a dog beside him. Salt moisture burned in Pierce's eyes. A faithful dog.

Something to wish for: something else to wish for, something different from what could be reflected in a mirror above a broad bed ... If he could wish now, he would wish for something to wish for.

A bell rang with tearing urgency just then, flinging Pierce out of bed and into a startled posture of defense, a ready crouch. The phone. No not the phone. The doorman. The doorbell. It was the doorbell, who on earth, he grabbed up a terrycloth robe and belted it around him. The doorbell burped again, a reminder, someone was still there.

"Yes?” He could see nothing through the foggy peephole.

"Pierce,” she said. “It's me. Can I come in?"

The adrenaline that had been pumped throughout him all in an instant by the bell was washed away in an instant by a new fluid, a cold stinging one that drowned his heart and was in the tips of his fingers and toes even before his hand had reached the lock to open it. Still he could marvel at how fast it went. Now how did flesh and nerves manage such speed.

She slipped in through the door as soon as there was a crack wide enough, as though she were pursued; she wore a fur coat he had never seen before, frosted on the shoulders with snow.

"Well hello,” he said, the last vowel swallowed with the thick spittle that had gathered in his mouth.

She went to the center of the room and stood gripping herself, chin thrust into her coat and her eyes not on him. Then she rooted in a deep pocket, drew out an envelope, and turning to him, held it out.

"There,” she said. “There."

He could almost hear her heart beating from where he stood. He took the envelope, fat and creased by what it contained.

"That's it,” she said, turning away, still hugging herself. “That's it, that's it, that's it."

The envelope was full of money. Large bills, fifties and hundreds, some twenties more worn and traveled.

"Do you have a cigarette?” she asked. She sat down on the bed, pressed her face into her hands and rubbed her forehead, eyes, and cheeks. Then she looked up at him and grinned. “You look pretty funny,” she said.

"What,” he said.

"It's all there,” she said. “Everything I owed you. Everything I said we'd earn. I told you. I told you I would."

"How,” he said.

"Pierce, don't ask, okay. That's it, that's all. I'm done, done for good and ever.” She shuddered hugely; then, patiently, as to a child one isn't sure will understand: “Pierce, honey, now do you have a cigarette?"

"Yes, sure.” He had bought a pack of factory-mades last night in his drunkenness. He searched among the clothes scattered squalidly over the floor. Here. Now a match. He tucked the envelope under his arm and went through his pants.

"You still hate me?” she said softly behind him.

"I never did.” His hands trembled so that he could hardly insert them into the pockets, the change and keys within tinkled. “Here."

She had begun to uncoil; she looked around the place slowly, he could see in her eyes her thoughts reassembling it for herself. She lit the cigarette. “So what have you been up to?” she said.

"You have to tell me,” he said. “A little something."

"No,” she said. “Listen. If we're going to be friends, I want to be friends, if we're going to be friends you can't ask. If you ask I won't answer. I just won't and I won't be friends.” She softened. “Maybe when it's an old story.” She looked up at him; he thought something gaunt, something old, had come into her face, maybe something that had been there before she fled but that he had forgotten, remembering mostly an older, that is a younger face. Or perhaps it was only the December morning. “Okay?” she said. “What's the matter?"