October Light (15 page)

It flickered dimly through Peter Wagner's mind that in German “Fist” was “Faust.” Very interesting. Then he forgot again.

“I believe,” Mr. Goodman said apologetically, as if slightly alarmed, “we should do unto others as we would have others do unto us. That's the only true law, I feel.”

The Captain chuckled wickedly. “And Jane here—” he began. He paused, seemingly at a loss, and leaned forward until his snaky eyes emerged from the murky smoke. “What was Guinevere to King Arthur's court, or the Virgin Mary to the Christian religion? The coronet! The jewel that gives it all meaning!” He laughed till he coughed.

“I see,” Peter Wagner said. It was fascinating, astounding, like an insight into modern physics. He was stoned. When he closed his eyes he saw brightly lit clouds with globes where wide beams of sunlight burst through, and standing on the sunbeams, waving to him like people in home movies, angels. Now there was music, some patriotic hymn, and the Statue of Liberty strode into the picture, carrying not a torch but the American flag, which was flapping grandly in the Technicolor wind. He was standing on the wide, gleaming deck of some ship—he saw the name in red and gold on a snow-white life-saver:
The New Jerusalem.
He opened his eyes. The room was dark and distorted and filled with smoke. Jane was sitting now on half of Peter Wagner's chair, looking slightly cross-eyed down her pipe. She had her arm around his shoulder.

“And you, sailor—” The Captain's eyes were now inches from his own. His tone became ominous, as if brought from the midnight depths of the sea where unimaginable fish preyed on whales. “All is not well with the
Indomitable.”
He slid his eyes sideways, as if watching for ghostly spies. The others' eyes slid sideways too, all inches away from Peter Wagner's …

Other things happened at the Captain's party, but nothing Peter Wagner would remember.

He dreamed that night that he slept with his wife, with whom he hadn't slept in a year or more—except that, as sometimes happens in dreams, it seemed she both was and was not his wife. She stood naked in front of him, radiating light like Tinkerbell, as dream-women will, her breasts erect and pinkish with desire. He put his hands on her hips and pressed the side of his face against her belly. He had forgotten how it felt. Her lower hair was silky and, surprisingly, black.

“It's been so long,” he said. She tipped his face up and kissed him, then straightened up slightly and guided his lips to her nipple. The next moment (something had happened to time) he was between her legs, plunged deep inside her, his open mouth locked, laboring, on hers. The moment after that, as if it were the same moment, she was talking to him, murmuring gently in his ear as she had done when he'd first known her.

“Why the bridge?” she seemed to say. “You're so beautiful, so gentle. What made you feel you had to? Are you a Pisces?”

“I don't know,” he said; “it's not the first time. Maybe it's a habit.” He pretended to laugh. Groan, groan, groan. She laughed too, but lovingly, as if completely unafraid of him. She had changed. She was like a living
Playboy
foldout. “Tell me about it,” she said.

It was as if they had met in some neutral place—a medieval garden with grass and flowers like a featherbed, and, over their heads, interlocked limbs drooping hazel and oakmoss. It was a place where they might try, for once, for an honest truce, a new beginning. “Rapist,” she had called him. “All men are rapists.” It wasn't, he felt, true. Certainly he was more often the seduced than the seducer. Nor was her general thesis true. The Indian brave raping the wife of the soon-to-be scalped white settler, the settler raping the wife of the soon-to-be-massacred Indian, that was no proof, as she claimed—pompous and professorial and mired deep in facts—that womanhood was always the ultimate victim, the final enemy of Everyman. It made the woman the enemy's chief revenge, his ultimate insult to the husband. With the same mad leap of the pervert heart, the Vikings had torn down cathedrals. She, his wife, had been thoroughly unpersuaded. Men beat their women, she pointed out, echoing, he knew, some women's-center dyke; and men's laws, for five thousand years, had forgiven it. “In Russia, peasants beat their ikons,” he'd said.

“I want all the lives that are possible,” he said. “Not only for me. For everybody. I want to live everything that's possible to live, a hundred thousand novels. I want everybody to. It's—” He tried to focus her, but the dream-woman wouldn't come clear. She was not, it seemed to him now, his wife. Her fingers moved, infinitely gentle, over his testicles and penis. It felt, as dreams will, too real to be a dream. He moved his hands on her breasts. She moaned with pleasure and again, little by little, he grew hard.

“And what happened?” she murmured in his ear.

“Long drunken talks late at night,” he said, “each of us trying to explain to the other, both of us feeling imprisoned and betrayed. Arguments; fights. I'd come to myself and she'd be lying on the floor, out cold, and I'd think she was dead. It was horrible; stupid. I never wanted to hurt her. I just wanted to live, wanted everybody to live—free, trying to find happiness, as innocent and simple as Dick meets Jane—live like crazy, like squirrels or deer or lyric poets, because everything around us was retreating.” The phrase gave him a subtle thrill, the rushing sensation in the plumbing of the chest that would lead, in a child, to tears. “But I couldn't explain it, even at the moments when I believed it was true, because the possibility was always so obvious that maybe it was a lie, mere childish selfishness. ‘Do you love me?' she was always asking, sometimes angrily crying, and I honestly didn't know. She was always talking, disagreeing, quoting articles. I would storm off and leave her sometimes, late at night, when I'd drunk myself stupid and I knew there was bound to be a fight, or else we'd already have had the fight, I'd kicked her black and blue in some neighbor's yard. I remember waking up in an old friend's house once, staring at an unfamiliar ceiling as you do when you're a child and don't know where you are. The ceiling was papered, a rented house, and the design was busy, vulgar, faded—gray and silver, I think it was—and directly above my head there was a light fixture, harsh black metal. I started, and then suddenly I remembered where I was, and I felt free. Free enough to soar. I thought of friends I could visit that she hated. Thought of riding the motorcycle I'd just bought maybe a month ago, over her dead body—almost literally. Thought of living the way I was born to live, loose as a tramp, independent as a hermit, fornicating—like a rapist, you may say. The phone rang, and I heard the friend I was staying with talking in his bedroom. He told me that morning that it was my wife who'd called. She was crying, he said, and he dropped it. But I remembered—oh, bitterly!—all the times she'd cried, all the times it seemed to me that I was all she lived for—and all she lived
on,
like beetles on an elm—despite the other times … So I went out and took some sleeping pills—don't laugh, though I admit it's somewhat funny—and I laid myself down on the railroad tracks, and when I woke up the train was roaring by and some whiskered old drunks were leaning down over me, tisking, pouring water on my face.”

She rolled over on top of him and lay kissing his eyes and nose and lips. She became still.

“I used to be religious,” she said. “I'm still religious, some of the time, some ways. Anyway, I worry about it. Sometimes. Have you ever been to a party of freaks?”

“That too,” he sighed.

She said, “The first freak party I went to, the people all got undressed. Or some of them. They sat and lay around the floor smelling incense and playing strange instruments, a lot of them things they'd invented themselves. Two girls made love to one man, right there in front of us all, including this bearded Arabian with a turban. I went into another room—I still had my clothes on—and a boy named Berner and some girl whose name I didn't hear were looking through this telescope at the stars. They told me they had his sperm on the lens, and they wanted for me to come look. I felt strange—horrified and disgusted—and yet I looked. It was ugly, grotesque, I thought. And yet I also thought it wasn't. It was … strange. There were colors. I went back inside, and everything was crazy. There were people on the floor, doing things, you know, but also there were people sitting up in chairs, smoking and talking, ignoring the others—or not even that, dismissing all they did in what seemed a friendly, indifferent way. It blew my mind. There was a woman reading palms. I wanted to get out of there and I was ashamed to leave. A man in a suit with a lacy white shirt out of some other century came over and said, ‘My friend, you seem tense. Can I get you something?' I shook my head. He looked at me, sort of friendly, harmless, for a long time. All at once he smiled and said, ‘Are you afraid the police will come?' I hadn't realized it was mainly that, but it was. I wanted to have a good record, you know? I nodded. ‘I don't think they will,' he said. He touched my hand. ‘But don't stay if you're afraid. Nobody here will be insulted if you leave. Nobody's going to judge you.' I laughed, because I believed him. It wasn't true, actually. There were people there who were judging every second, but he wasn't one of them. ‘Does this embarrass you?' he said. I said, ‘No. I like it. I just don't want to do it.' He started talking about the public schools, about busing girls to schools when there were only boys. He had three children. We talked until the sun came up and it was, you know, nice. Part of the time he held my hand. Then his wife came—she'd been in one of the bedrooms and still had her clothes off—and the three of us talked. After a while they left, and then I left. I knew it was wrong, or something. I mean, it wasn't
normal.
My mother would have died if I'd written her about it. She thinks if you smoke pot you'll inevitably jump out of a speeding car. She hates the modern world. Filth and violence in the movies, dirty books, the pill … But I liked that party, when I thought back to it. I wished somebody would invite me again. It was like learning to swim, or flying—only scary in the beginning.”

There were tears in her eyes, he dreamed. He felt guilty again that he'd abandoned her, for now it seemed to him again that she was the wife he'd loved, as sometimes it had seemed to him that his wife, when he was falling-down drunk and they were making fierce love, had been somebody else; such was life's fidelity. “No secrets between us anymore,” he said “no anger, no hitting.”

He heard her laughter, too real for a dream. The dream had turned nightmare. “I'm not your wife, silly,” she said. “I mean,
J
e-sus!”

He clung to her, struggled to focus her face, and now it seemed that she wasn't his wife but some man, big-shouldered, with eyes like steel. The huge man, sharp-nosed, wearing steel-rinimed glasses, lifted Peter Wagner in his arms and, like a wrestler, hurled him down. He saw the wrestling mat coming toward him as if from hundreds of miles below, and there was fire-green grass at the edges. It was a grave, an angel sitting at the head of it with folded wings. The moment before he hit he awakened, staring out into some pitch-dark room. He was alone, his body bathed in sweat. “Margaret,” he whispered. She stood, in his memory, erect as a steeple, tits like Akhaian breastplates. He clenched his eyes shut. All his fantasies, the best and the worst, were trash. He reached out suddenly, angrily, for the eels. The table was gone. His hand came down on the soft, warm flesh of some woman.

He labored, full of panic now, to rise out of the dream. A black, furry hand came toward him, extending a red-glowing pipe.

~ ~ ~

Sally Abbott set the page number in her mind, closed the book and laid it on the blanket beside her. She'd reached a chapter end; she needed to relax her eyes.

The room was bright and cheerful with early afternoon, yellow glints in the faded wallpaper, the leaves outside her window colorful and gently fluttering, stirred by a faint breeze; yet for all the light and warmth, she discovered she was being drawn down, for no reason she could pinpoint, by an undertow of anxiety. She closed her eyes for a minute—the brightness still came through—and for a time, perhaps half an hour, she rested. If she dreamed, she was not aware of it.

When her mind rose toward thought again, she found herself brooding, eyes still closed, on Peter Wagner's marijuana dream. She could have no idea, of course, whether or not the description was true to life, never having smoked or even seen marijuana, so far as she knew. She had never even been drunk, in fact, though sometimes she and Horace had had a drink or two, Canadian Club, or sherry with Estelle and Ferris Parks. She felt the draw of anxiety building in her, an emotion that seemed to be groundless, yet increasing rapidly; and then, abruptly, as if the emotion had summoned the image instead of the reverse, she saw the open door the night of Horace's death. She saw, in sharper detail than in any photograph, the red and yellow leaves, the crooked sidewalk, the streetlamp, the lighted jack-o'-lanterns on the porch across the street, and in memory she heard again the stuck needle on the gramophone, a phrase like an ironic question. The whole scene was caught in her brain as if snatched out of time. She knew that in a moment she would turn and see Horace in his chair, his mouth forming an O as if of slight surprise, and she would cry out and run to him. But she didn't turn yet, perhaps knowing already that Horace would be there, unless the prescience had crept into the memory later, after she knew. Every line in the room was as sharp as a razor cut—books, glass-topped table, hat-rack by the door—and for an instant it seemed there was a smell, exaggerated by memory but elusive as ever. Someone had been there, someone from her past, perhaps her childhood. All this she had told the police, later, going over it and over it in meticulous detail. “What did it smell like?” “I don't know. The woods,” she said. “Decaying leaves. Like a zoo.” In the end they had concluded, and she had agreed, that he'd died of natural causes. She believed it still. But she was filled, again now, with anxiety, and she suddenly believed she knew what, all along, she'd been afraid of.