Marianne, the Magus & the Manticore (6 page)

She leaned against the door, digging her nails into her palms.

"I'm not like that!" she screamed at herself silently. "I'm not like that at all." Demon voices in her mind hissed, "Soft, usable, bitch!" An obscene heat enveloped her, and she was back in the old house, returned to Harvey's holding her, touch-ing her, starting to undress her with fingers busy under her clothes, and herself responding to him in a kind of dazed frenzy which had no thought in it, no perception except of a hoped-for forgetfulness, a much desired unconsciousness. And then he had been interrupted, and the shame had come, the shame of his using Mama's name, defiling her death, defiling her child—

and Mama's child involved in the defilement, cooperating in it.

"No, no, no," she screamed now as she had then. "I am not like that. Mama wasn't like that. I won't, won't, won't!"

Somewhere inside herself she found the calmer voices. "This man is not Harvey. This man is someone else. He has Harvey's face, but he has not Harvey's sins. He is attractive, you are attracted, but this hot shame is only memory, Marianne. It is not now, not real, only memory. And you, Marianne, you are well enough alone. So. Stay alone, Marianne, and do not remember that time. And perhaps, someday, you will find it is forgotten."

She took her chastened self into the shower and then out for a long, exhausting walk to weary even her tireless brain, a brain which kept trying by an exercise of pure persistence to make her wounds heal by cutting them deeper. For, of course, among all the other monsters was the monster of guilt, guilt which said that she herself had been responsible, not the grown man but herself, the child, the woman who should have known better, for are not women supposed to know better? And if the twelve-year-old Marianne did not know better, then best for the twenty-five-year-old Marianne to work in the quiet library and attend the endless classes and have no male friends at all, for she, too, might not know better if put to the test. She would not go for the weekend, would not allow this feeling to take hold of her, would not allow her calm to be destroyed.

"Of course," her internal self reminded her, "you are not always so calm, Marianne. Sometimes in the deep night, you waken. Sometimes when the sheets are sensuously soft against your newly bathed skin. Sometimes in the midst of a TV show, when the young man and the young woman look at each other in that way—that way—then you are not so calm."

"Begone," she said wearily. "Burned, buried, begone." Usually the litany or the long walk let her sleep, but tonight she lay wakeful, dozing from time to time only to start awake again, until she gave up at last and took two of the little red pills Dr.

Brown had given her. Her sleep was dark, dreamless, empty, and when morning came she was able to convince herself that the night's turmoil had been unreal and that she had not been mired in it at all.

She could not feel anticipation for the evening. Each time she thought of it, it loomed at the end of her day like a road marker, pointing to some unknown destination, evoking an apprehension not so much for the destination itself as for the unfamiliar and possibly tedious journey it would take to reach it. She was familiar with the feeling, one which had served in the past to limit her society to the few, the necessary, and she felt ashamed of it without in any way being able to defeat it.

Only when she came into her apartment at the end of the day to see the pot of crocuses on the window seat and feel the absence of the Box did she begin to feel a slight warming, a willingness to be graceful within the confines of her appre-tension—perhaps even a willingness to move outside it toward pleasure if she could find a way.

"So, Marianne," she instructed herself, "you will not give him a dinner partner to shame him. He has done nothing at all to deserve that." It was a sense of pride which took her through the routines of bam and makeup, hairdress and clothing, and finally to the examination of self in the mirror. The dress had belonged to her mother, a simple, timeless gather of flowing silk, jade green in one light, twilight blue in another, utterly plain. The only dressy clothes she had were things salvaged from among Cloud-haired mama's things, trunks Papa had put in storage in her name, "Because you may want them someday, or may simply want to have them to remember her by." Some had been too fashionable then to be useful now, but there were a few things like this—blouses and shirts, ageless skirts, a topcoat which might have been illustrated in the morning paper, a wonderful sweep of lacy wool stole which would serve as a wrap. The only clothes Marianne had purchased in the last four years had been underwear and two pairs of shoes. Everything else was left over from undergraduate days or made over from Mama's trunks. If it came to a choice between clothing and the tiles for the kitchen.... She smiled. There was no choice.

She looked good, she decided. Not marvelous or glorious or glamorous, but good. Clean, neat, attractive, and by no means shabby. So.

Turning then from the mirror, she saw the line of light run down the silk from the curve of her breast, the flush of red mounting to her cheeks. Her hands trembled as she tugged the softly rounded neckline a little higher on her shoulders. She hadn't chosen this dress to be... hadn't... had. "Didn't," she said defiantly. "Did not." She reached for the closet door to pick something thicker, less clinging, less...

Too late. She heard him coming up the stairs, the firm knock on the door. Put the best face on it possible.

He made it no easier for her. He stood back, obviously admiring her, his eyes lighting up. "You look wonderful, a water nymph—what is it? A naiad. The color suits you. It makes you glow as though you had candles lit inside." He smiled, not knowing that the emotion he had roused in her was a quiet anger, at him, at herself. "I've brought your box back."

Her mood of acceptance was waning, but he gave her no time to fret, placing the box on the table and opening it as he talked. "One Escher print," he said, busy unpacking. "One print of a Delvaux painting. One Eskimo carving, one Bantu carving, one bit of oriental charmery. One medicine pouch."

He set them out for her as she stared.

The Escher print was of a fish rising to the top of still water where leaves rested on the ripples and bare trees laid their shattered reflections. The Delvaux painting was of two young women walking in a well-lit street, clothed in high-necked white dresses, lamps all about, a nearby house streaming with light from windows and doors. The Eskimo carving was of a bird, a confluence of curving lines which said nest, rest, peace.

The ebony carving was of a happy frog, and the oriental bit was of two mice chewing their way through a nut. He laid a medicine pouch beside the pot of crocuses, a bit of fluffy ermine skin, eagle feathers tied to it with turquoise beads and bits of coral. "American Indian," he said. "How does this collection of things suit you?"

She considered them. Each of them separately was pleasant, unremarkable. Together—together they seemed to reach toward her with welcoming arms. "Safe," she offered at last.

"Everything seems very natural and contented."

"I like the young women in the Delvaux painting." He made a vast, smoothing gesture, as though wiping away the darkness.

"Busy at lighting up their world. Light is a very powerful symbol in our religion, of course." He stood back from the picture and admired it. "Ah! I meant to hang them for you, but it will have to be when we return. Our reservation is for eight o'clock, and if we make a careful hurry, we will get there on time. The maitre d' to whom I spoke was most forthright.

We must be on time or our table will be given away to those less foresighted but more prompt. Nothing would sway him, not even appeals to justice and the American Way. So. Your wrap? Lovely. Your purse? That is all you are carrying? Well, the young are the only ones who may travel so unencumbered.

We go."

She had no opportunity to tell him he need not hang the pictures, no opportunity to change her dress, no time to remember she had wanted to change it. She was swept down the stairs—past Mrs. Winesap in the entryway, pretending to be much involved with her mailbox—and into the car before she could think of anything, already laughing somewhat helplessly at his nonsense.

"Most cars available for rent," he announced, shutting her door, "are too large to be amusing or too small to be safe. I will not, however, join nine-tenths of your countrymen in the daily game they play with their lives. To meet my sense of prudence, you are required to ride in some ostentatious luxury, though I know you would prefer simplicity, being the kind of person you obviously are."

She sank back into the seat, surrounded by velvet surfaces and leather smell. "I didn't know one could rent cars like this."

"One cannot," he said with some satisfaction. "However, one can appear to be a potential buyer, with unimpeachable references, of course, thus gaining the temporary ownership of such a vehicle. One may even
be
a potential buyer, though I am uncertain whether the roads of Alphenlicht are wide enough for such extravagance."

"You do
have
roads?" she asked in wide-eyed innocence.

"You mock. Quite rightly. You will remember, however, that I told you we are beginning to build such things. We have even recently completed a hydroelectric plant, and there is an Alphenlicht radio station by which means the people may be informed of matters of mutual interest. Avalanche warnings.

Things of that kind." He negotiated a tricky turn at the avenue with casual mastery, darting up the entrance ramp to fit them between two hurtling truck behemoths without seeming to notice he had done so. Marianne, who had braked in reflex, leaned back and relaxed. He was not going to kill them both. So much was obvious. "I rather like it," he purred, patting the dashboard with proprietary interest. "Do you think it appropriate for a Prime Minister?"

She considered this judiciously. "Well, it is a little ostentatious. But a Prime Minister should be, at least a little."

"It will acquire importance when Aghrehond drives it. Aghrehond does my driving; he is also my friend, first factotum of the republic, and the guardian Nestor of my youth. He will be enormously pleased with this machine. It will contribute to his already overpowering dignity."

"You're going to buy it, then?"

He cocked his head, considering. "If it continues to behave well. Have you noticed the tendency of some things to behave well at first, as though knowing they are on trial, only to turn recalcitrant and balky when they believe they have been accepted?"

Marianne flushed in the darkness. He had not been speaking of her, but she applied his words to her own case. She had behaved well when they had first met, an interesting experience, a previously unknown relative, no troubling overtones, and she had felt free to be herself. Now she knew she was turning balky, for good reason, but he would not know that.

Well, one could be balky without letting it appear on the surface. She commanded herself to be charming. He would find her charming. Her citadel might keep its portcullis down, but she would not be obvious about it. So she seduced herself with promises and turned her attention back to him with a newly kindled radiance.

"I had a typewriter like that once," she said. "The only time it ever worked was in the repair shop where I bought it, and in the repair shop when I took it back—every time I took it back."

He laughed. "I had a Jaguar XKE—you know the one? It has twelve cylinders and a complexity of electrical system beside which the space probes are models of simplicity. Whenever it went more than fifty kilometers from the garage where its mechanic waited, it had an electrical tantrum and stopped running. It was so very pretty, even standing still—which is what it mostly did—that I left it for a very long time in the garage, simply to look at it now and then. However, since it had not been purchased as sculpture, it seemed unwise to continue giving it house room. I then put a curse upon the engineers who had designed it, and British Leyland went bankrupt soon thereafter."

"You claim responsibility for that?" she asked, uncertain whether he was serious or not.

"Absolutely." His voice was utterly serious. Then he turned and she saw his eyes. "Marianne, you are a good audience for my silliness. You are young enough almost to believe me."

"No," she protested. "I didn't, really."

"No," he echoed, "you almost did." Then his voice changed.

"I could have done it, Marianne. A Magus could do such a thing. But it would be self-indulgent, and a Magus does not build his powers—or even retain them—by being self-indulgent. Those who do so go by other names."

She was surprised at this abrupt change of tone, evidence that something was on his mind other than the evening. However, he gave her no time to brood over it, but reached across to the glove compartment to tug out a map which he dropped into her lap, stroking her knee with his hand. "Here, see if you can find where we are, and then tell me the exit number. I looked it up this afternoon, but I have forgotten it." His voice was a caress, as his touch had been, and she drew her stole around her, over her knees and thighs, all too aware of the place his hand had touched. Face flaming, she bent over the map, not noticing he had leaned to one side to see her face in the rear view mirror. He smiled, a smile of pleasure, but with something hungry and predatory in it.

She searched the map for some time, calming herself with it. When she could trace their route, she found the exit number for him. "I've only been there once before," she said. "An old friend of my father's invited me to dinner there with his wife and daughter."

"Were they good people? Did you enjoy it?"

"I did. Yes. They had known my parents, and that was nice.

My parents were wonderful people, and I like to remember them..."

"Happily," he suggested. "You like to remember them happily."

"That's it. I usually have to remember them in some context of money or property because of Harvey, you know. And that isn't the same. It's certainly not happy."