Girl in Landscape (16 page)

Finding Diana Eastling was better than finding Clement. Pella would make her listen, tell her everything, Pella’s whole strange new life. Diana Eastling knew about the people here, no matter how much she tried to play dumb. She’d explain what Efram wanted, and Pella would use that knowledge to protect Clement. And Diana Eastling knew about the planet, too. She’d help Pella decide whether to take the pills Bruce had stolen for her.

Diana Eastling was who she’d been looking for, she decided. She half-ran, half-tumbled down the column and started over the ridge. She’d only make sure Diana was there, then dash back to the hiding place and reclaim her human body. Then come back and knock on the door—

She stopped short. On the porch was Clement’s bicycle.

Enthusiasm suspended, she made her way inside, through an open back window.

Clement and Diana Eastling sat together on the couch in the living room, and even if Diana Eastling hadn’t had her left leg across Clement’s right leg, Pella would have understood instantly from the dreamy, self-congratulatory smiles they both wore. But anyway, there
was
her leg, over his. Pella snuck up under the kitchen table and stared, and the crossed legs, the point where Clement’s and Diana’s bodies intersected, seemed to burn itself into her vision. It was so simple, one limb piled on another, two dumb slabs of meat, yet it was like an optical illusion too, some impossible four-dimensional figure whose existence warped the rest of the world out of shape.

“That’s part of why I left,” Diana Eastling was saying. “I didn’t know what to do, it was ridiculous.”

“I wondered,” said Clement.

“You were being such a dolt,” she continued. “I couldn’t stand watching you fumbling around, getting your sea legs here. It was going to keep me from liking you. And I was beginning to like you.”

“That’s unfair.”

Pella was holding her breath, trying not to make a sound. But she couldn’t have made a sound if she’d wanted to, not in this body.

“I think it was very fair,” said Diana Eastling. “You were full of stupid questions, bad guesses. You hadn’t even met Efram yet. I wasn’t going to walk you through that. I’m not fond of that sort of thing.”

“You wanted me to meet Efram first? Why was that important?”

“He was worked up about your coming. The two of you were obviously headed toward some tedious male thing. And God, if you haven’t worked it out yet, please don’t tell me about it.”

“So I seem different now.”

“You learned to lead with something other than your stupid questions, with me, anyway. That’s different enough.”

“Just because I’m not leading with my questions doesn’t mean I’ve gotten answers for them,” said Clement carefully.

“I shouldn’t have mentioned Efram. Now you sound like you think you’re talking to him.”

“Efram’s tedious male thing is hounding Hugh Merrow out of this town, Diana.”

“I credit both of you with the tedious male thing. Not just Efram. That’s the first thing.” She swung her leg away, then abruptly rose from the couch and went to the table. As she loomed up Pella shrank back into the tumbleweeds of dust along the floor, and the upper half of Diana Eastling’s body disappeared above the table’s edge. Clement remained on the couch, in the same position. Pella watched him through Diana Eastling’s knees.

Then Diana Eastling turned and walked back to him, lighting a cigarette while she spoke. “The second is that what’s happened, what’s happening, between us here—it has nothing to do with Efram, or Hugh Merrow, or anything else outside this room. It isn’t an alliance.”

“What is it?”

“A
liaison
.” She blew out smoke. Pella couldn’t see her face.

Clement smiled.

A blackened match-head bounced to the floor under the table, still issuing a thread of smoke.

“Hugh Merrow made things difficult for himself around here from the moment he arrived,” said Diana Eastling wearily. “That’s not Efram’s fault. But I’m getting drawn into justifying Efram’s behavior, and I don’t want to do that. Maybe whatever’s being done to Hugh Merrow is blatantly unfair, Clement. But don’t bring it into this.”

“That’s clear enough.”

“Is it? Good.” She paused. “I came here to make my own space, Clement. Most of us did.”

“I’m learning.”

“Yes, you are.”

Diana Eastling still had the edge in her voice that Pella had admired, but it was too late for it to mean anything anymore. Her leg across Clement’s had ruined everything.

Diana Eastling reached out, cigarette between her fingers, and touched Clement’s hair.

Set him on fire, Pella thought.

“Kiss me now,” said Diana Eastling. “You’re letting me talk too much. I don’t like that any better than your questions.”

He got up from the couch and pulled her to him. She held the cigarette away as they kissed, then drew on it when they finished.

“Mmmm.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“Shhh.”

Through her anger at them both, Pella felt pity for Clement. He was alone, and being in Diana Eastling’s arms only made it less noble, more pathetic. Didn’t he hear her cynicism? Couldn’t he see how little use she had for him? They didn’t understand each other, had nothing in common. Pella was certain she knew them both better than they knew each other, Clement better than he knew himself. Clement on Diana Eastling’s couch was like Raymond at his shrine. Pitiful.

Then Pella’s anger overtook her pity. Clement and Diana had betrayed her. It was Pella who was most alone in the end, knowing all she knew. She was in charge of Clement’s aloneness, but he’d abandoned Pella to hers.

Pella was off-balance from the start. She woke back into herself and left her warren, almost stumbling across the plastic bag of pills. She detached Bruce’s note and let it flutter away. The wind died, then rose again, the note tipping corner over corner across the cracked gully, a square wheel, until it vanished in the glare. Then she took the bag and clambered up the grade, and that was when she saw Efram, at the top of the ridge, hand on his hip, eyes narrowed. He might have paused in midstep as he passed or been waiting there for hours, she couldn’t know. After that she never caught her breath.

He fell into step beside her, one of his strides for two of hers.

“Pella Marsh,” he said. His voice was far-away engines rumbling, the subway rushing underfoot. “What do you know.”

She ignored the words, but walked with him, not veering away. For days she’d avoided his house, frightened
to approach him even invisible, as a deer. Now her fear had been replaced by a furious compulsion to match his pace, to walk unafraid.

“I said
Pella Marsh
,” said Efram. “What do you know.”

“What do I know?” said Pella. She thought of Clement and Diana Eastling. I know too much, she thought.

Efram laughed. “That’s right, Pella Marsh. What do you know?”

“More than you,” she said. “I’ll say one thing, though—you say my name as much as an Archbuilder.”

“Which Archbuilder?”

“I didn’t mean a particular one.”

She clutched the bag of pills, refusing to try and hide it. The plastic was transparent, plain what was inside. But Efram didn’t comment on it. Without seeming to change his stride he increased his pace, and Pella fell behind. He didn’t look back at her.

She hurried to catch up, not knowing why she did. He’d sought her out, hadn’t he? Why didn’t he speak? But maybe she was wrong, maybe he’d just happened to be there.

A household deer curled around the side of a craggy shelf in the rock and skittered into their path. Efram leaned down and in one huge, smooth motion swept the back of his hand across the tops of his shoes. He’d calculated the deer’s path perfectly. His knuckles collided with the frail body at the lowest point in the arc of his swing, and the deer flew up over the top of the rocks.

The deer skidded in the dust, feet scrabbling as it
righted itself, then dashed away. The violence was so effortless that it had a kind of poetry, so fast that it seemed possible it hadn’t happened at all. Efram held his hand in front of him, palm facing the ground, and glanced at his knuckles for just a moment, as if he were checking to see that nail polish had dried. His vast, lazy stride never faltered.

“This isn’t your house!” said Pella.

“You’re still here?” he said, turning to grin at her.

This absurdity made her feel again that she was the audience for something staged. But all she could say was “What are you afraid of, anyway?”

“From the deer?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me put it this way, Pella Marsh.” He pointed at her, his finger descending from the air. “When I see you up and on your feet the deer don’t worry me all that much. But I still don’t want them around.”

He handled her secrets so casually, like they and she were features of the landscape now.

She
was
a feature of the landscape.

She and Efram had that in common, she because she ran over it, hid in it, and he because he was like a chunk of it, broken off and ambulatory. The last intact tower.

They belonged together, out here walking in the sun. She skipped to keep up with him. The bag of pills swung at her side, the bunched plastic sweaty in her grasp.

Her objection to his swipe at the deer suddenly seemed hopelessly naive, something Clement would say.
As if a human in a diving suit had tried to dictate that some ancient monumental whale not brush away a pilot fish, or gobble up the plankton in its path.

That was why she had to be her Pella-self with him, why she couldn’t slip through doorways at his feet to spy on him. She had to be more than plankton to him, more than a buzzing gnat. She wanted his notice.

“Where are … you going?” said Pella. She’d almost said
we
.

“My house,” said Efram. “You coming?”

“Is Doug Grant there?”

“You want to see Doug Grant?”

“Nope.”

“Well he’s not there. He doesn’t live at my place, he lives with his parents. Nobody’s there.”

“Where’s Ben Barth?”

“You taking a census? Ben Barth’s out, he’s helping Hugh Merrow.”

“Helping him with what?”

“How should I know? Something he needed help with.”

“I thought you didn’t like Hugh Merrow.”

“What’s that got to do with it?” His exasperation made her childishly pleased. “Ben helps everybody with everything. He doesn’t have to like them. And I don’t tell him what to do. You coming?”

“Sure.”

The reason went unspoken, like it was obvious. But in fact the only reasons she could conceive were ridiculous, so thrilling and objectionable that she had to think
instead that they were walking together to his house for no reason at all.

They finished the trek in silence. The household deer kept away. Indeed, the closer they got to his house the fewer Pella saw. She wondered if over time the deer had learned to avoid his place.

As they came into Efram’s potted garden, the sprawl of wire-mesh-covered planters, scattered tools and refuse that surrounded his house, Pella felt that they were crossing into an enchanted circle, a zone of meaning. His house wasn’t like the others. It was older, finer. She’d arrived on the Planet of the Archbuilders at last. The rest had been a facade. But she barely had time to measure her response, to place herself, before they stepped inside. And inside, it was another world.

Efram’s main room was a reconstruction of an Archbuilder interior, like the fallen fragment that Pella used as her hideaway, but larger. Efram-sized. The surface was scraped clean, shattered shelves and ornaments painstakingly glued together, whorls of stone and knobs of translucent glass restored, polished until they gleamed. Lit by tiny colored bulbs hidden everywhere in the crevices, the room glinted like a jewel box as she stepped inside. Hung on the walls and piled on the shelves were Archbuilder medicine bottles, tools, appliances, other objects she couldn’t identify, some corroded, fragmented like the towers, others glistening. The reconstruction made up the four walls of the room,
blocking the windows, narrowing the space by half. As Efram closed the door behind her, squeezing away the last margin of sunlight, the effect was that of stepping from the day into the inner chamber of a star-lost spaceship, or an ancient tomb.

He waved his hand at a small couch tucked inside the convex Archbuilder wall, and she went to it, stumbling a little. She sat, dropping the bag of pills to the left of the couch. Efram still hadn’t taken notice of them.

“I thought you didn’t like Archbuilders,” she said.

“You said the same thing about me and Hugh Merrow,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “You’re awfully concerned with what I don’t like.”

“Well, isn’t it true?”

“The Archbuilders I don’t like aren’t the ones that built these walls,” he said. “They’re the ones that didn’t bother to keep the walls from falling apart. You want something to drink?”

She nodded.

He pushed open a door to what looked, from her vantage on the couch, like a normal kitchen, illuminated by a sunlit window. It was then, in the light from the kitchen, that she saw the rifle mounted on a ledge inside the Archbuilder wall. It was one thing that had nothing to do with Archbuilders, she knew.

In a moment he returned with glasses for both of them, and closed the kitchen door. Pella sipped her drink. It was some kind of soda. Root beer, but pale, almost clear.

She swallowed a mouthful and said, “I have a place
like this.” She surprised herself with the words, the boastful way they sounded.

He stood over her, watching. All he said was, “Good.”

“Sit down,” she said. “You’re too tall.” She felt afraid, but again her words came out manic, assertive. Her cheeks were glowing with heat. She imagined they shone like beacons in this room, that they glowed like the colored lights. She wanted to dip her fingers in the soda and wet her cheeks with it, feel the cool bubbles on the heat of her skin. But Efram was staring at her.

He laughed again and sat on the couch beside her. He took a long drink from his glass, closing his eyes while he tipped his head back and swallowed, another little performance for her to watch. The color of his soda was different from hers. It looked darker, like whiskey. She wanted to be drinking what he was drinking, and to close her eyes while she swallowed.