Samedi the Deafness (15 page)

Grieve said nothing, but looked down at her feet. Her face had gone blank. She had been trying to play a game, but the gravity of it had gotten the better of her. James was sure now. She knew. She knew what her father was going to do. Now if only she would tell him.

He started to say something.

She tossed the paper on the floor and slid up on top of him. He started to kiss her, and he could feel the length of her against him. He thought of days then in October when he was a boy and he had seen in the windows of houses candles lit at night, and how happy it had made him. There were waters in the middle of the ocean that met having come great distances, dispersing through great distances but keeping still some character, some inimitable character of water, and then, to have that, and meet, in the midst of a great ocean, water from a far place, and mingle with it in the midst of the ocean's lapsing. He felt her tongue along his chest, her legs wrapped tight around his legs. She tightened and he could feel himself like the sound in a room when a door is opened, rushed out into intervening space, unable to counter anything, accepting all, expanding, meeting, taking upon itself all space, all motion, trembling, entering other rooms, other bodies. Grieve was trembling, and her face was hot against his. She kissed and kissed him.

—I was lying, she whispered. What can I tell you?

And then he was inside of her and they were together in the lost deep ground where no one had gone until they, and where no one could go, where everyone had gone, of course, and did go, but not at once, just one pair and then another, never passing one another on the way, each taking of its own accord a seldom path that cannot be found by the eye, but is traced irrevocably in pageants of color and light. She was saying something, talking and talking. He could hear her but he could not.

And then they slept.

And afterwards it was late morning, and the light had not left or been made less by clouds. His arms about her, James wondered again if someone was watching. He wondered if someone had been watching the whole time.

It would have been quite a show, he thought, and pictured Sermon and Leonora Loft kneeling in the small room and winking to each other.

And also, he wondered, in the broad vagueness of his thought, what did Grieve know? What could she tell him?

A note beyond the door:

Meeting canceled.

James rubbed his eyes—it was a good thing the meeting was canceled. He'd forgotten to go in the first place.

What was the origin, James wondered, of Grieve's lying? He remembered she had said something about the matter. What had it been? He thought back. They had been standing on the roof of the house. First they had gone up the stairs into the upstairs bathroom. Grieve had gone in. She had waved to him. He had gone in. She had locked the door with a key from the inside.

—Here we are, he said, in the bathroom.

It was very small. Just a porcelain sink recessed in the wall, a porcelain toilet with a chain pull, and a window in a roof that slanted down, halving the room. Grieve opened the window with a practiced gesture.

—This is the way.

Out then the window onto the roof that proved to be only an initial roof. Many roofs stretched in all directions, some up, some down, most across, all away.

—I want to have sex with you right now, said James, for Grieve's dress was being blown very tightly against her by the wind.

—You shall not, she said. At least, not while he's watching.

James looked over his shoulder. The cat had come up with them, had entered the bathroom unseen, and now was limping across the roof, dragging its hind leg.

—Oh, Mephisto, she said. What a darling you are.

She scooped up the cat.

—I thought its name was something else, said James.

—Around here, said Grieve, we think about naming a little differently than you do. As you understand it, people have names; things have names. But the weather . . . if it is sunny you call it a
clear day
, and if it rains you complain of a
storm
. But it's the weather; it's one thing. Around here we have names for people, and for Mephisto, for instance, that, like the names for the weather, change along with the object's behavior. When Mephisto is being bad, or at the very least, daring, acting without compunction in preposterous affairs like the one in which we are now involved, he is called
Mephisto
. When he is good, sitting quietly in the sun in a window seat or sill, he is called
Xerxes
. When he is terrified of someone new, hiding under chairs, scurrying in shadow, then he is
Benvolio
.

—But he was never scared of me, said James.

—No, said Grieve, not in the least. But that's because he could tell that I liked you so much. It's really all that matters to him.

—How did he break his leg?

—It was terrible, said Grieve. He was my one real friend when I was a girl. Back then he used to talk to me. You wouldn't believe the things he'd say.

—I daresay not, said James.

Mephisto jumped then out of Grieve's arms and made his way in a half trot, half drag across the shingled roof.

—One day, said Grieve, Mephisto went into the egg room by mistake. My father was furious. No one is to go there, no one at all.

James said nothing about the egg room.

—So, he took Mephisto in his arms, at that time we called Mephisto Cavendish, and held Cavendish's paw up. Cavendish, said my father. Never in the egg room, Cavendish. And he broke the cat's leg by bending it back and forth quickly. During all this Cavendish neither cried out nor tried to escape, but sat watching my father with a still sort of patience. When he had broken the cat's arm to his satisfaction, he dropped him to the ground and the cat ran off, dragging its broken leg. He is no longer Cavendish, said my father. Now he is Benvolio. And from then on, Benvolio would not speak to me or tell me things. He stayed out of the egg room, though, and was mostly close by my side as before.

She kicked at the shingles of the roof.

—It seems that talking was a part of Cavendish, not a part of Benvolio or Mephisto or Xerxes. As soon as Cavendish went away, the cat became dumb. I felt I had to speak for him.

She smiled, a delicate smile like a bookish otter.

—You know, he used to say the most ingenious things. Anyway, I felt that if he was no longer going to be saying them, then someone should. So I began. I talk for both of us. I got so used to making things up for Gone-Away-Cavendish to say that I have never been able to change the habit. Besides, I don't see why I should.

—That is not, said James, why you really lie.

—No, she agreed. That's not why at all.

They walked along the roof to a place where the next roof began. Up it they went to another roof, and another after that. Slowly they ascended the house until they reached a sort of gazebo set at the highest point. There was a fine wooden rail about it, a lovely cupola above, and benches within. Yes, benches and a table.

—Is this the only way up here? James asked.

—Yes, everyone who comes up comes out that bathroom window.

—It's nice, said James, to discover this upper world, a place complete in itself. Yet the window to the bathroom has been left open and there, our little foothold in the old world is preserved. The door to the bathroom is locked. Someone might even now be standing there waiting. They think we are in there, and we are! It's as though all of this, everything that takes place up here, all these roofs, all these vantages, are all shuttered together in that tiny bathroom. We'll go back inside, unlock the door, and present ourselves to the person just beyond. My, we'll say, how the time passes.

—But if that's true, said Grieve, then when a fellow sneaks out his bedroom window at night in order to go wandering in the country and meet his girl on a covered bridge beneath which some slow water passes and passes again, when he leaves and returns before daybreak back through the window, shutting it tight and climbing neatly into bed, before dressing and going back out the bedroom door into the actual world when the cock crows, then, then the countryside, the whole countryside, the covered bridge, the slow river, the girl, the running through the night, all of it, is within that room, as if it all climbed back in the window with him, to sit there as dawn returned in morning's clothes, with an old stick and a stone it keeps rubbing for a reason no one will ever know.

—Well, said James. I don't see what you're getting at. I would agree with that. That doesn't contradict anything.

Grieve moved her face close to his, then lunged down and bit him quite hard on the shoulder.

—Ay! he cried out, and fell from the bench onto the wooden slats of the gazebo.

Then she was upon him and bit him again.

But why had she begun to lie in the first place?

As James went about the house, he noticed that all the maids were crying. One maid crying. Another maid crying. All the maids, crying. He rang his bell. The maid at the end of the hall froze. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. He approached her.

—What are you crying about?

—It's Grieve, she said, turning. She's killed herself.

James felt a cold shock over him. Had she killed herself?

—Grieve, he said slowly. She's killed herself?