The Bubble Reputation (8 page)

When Rosemary awoke at eleven the next morning, there were voices from the front yard seeping in through the screen under her window. And so was the approaching noon heat of a summery day. She thumped her leg beneath the sheet covering. Her left shin was sore. She had pushed too hard on her run the night before. A panicky kind of running. Once, she thought she'd heard the voices of a milling crowd behind her as she left the town limits of Bixley to begin the run back up Old Airport Road and home. But she knew what distant sounds were creeping up on her. They were the voices of the dead, Bixley's old guard, wafting faintly from around the ghostly architecture.

The living voices were now in the kitchen, Lizzie's excited and hovering above the other, a quiet, manly bass. No doubt Philip had arrived. Rosemary chose to lie in bed and watch the cluster of white-throated sparrows that had gathered in the top of the maple tree. Something had disturbed them on the ground, perhaps Winston, the outdoor cat, who occasionally crawled up into the waist-high feeder and fell asleep.

She wished she had a cup of tea without having to go down to the kitchen for it. She was not ready to meet Lizzie's new paramour. Another car sped down Old Airport Road, much too fast. Rosemary could see the wake of dust as a brownish cloud rose up to her window and then drifted off over the fields. Maybe she could find a sign that said RADAR CHECK! and pound it into the earth near the CAT CROSSING sign. The latter had been Rosemary's idea, but William had painted the perfect letters on it. It stood by the road, near the culvert, where Mugs occasionally crossed over to get to the wide open fields.

Rosemary heard Lizzie on the steep stairs, with Philip, the bang of luggage as it caught each step, and shopping sacks crinkling. The rustling and whispering went on down the hall to the spare bedroom across from Lizzie's room. There were five bedrooms, counting Rosemary's, in the big upstairs. Only her room and two others were fully furnished with antiques and odds and ends that William was forever finding at auctions. The last two bedrooms had only beds, which Rosemary kept neatly made, although she never expected to entertain that much company at once. William's having no family, other than a sister who lived downstate, precluded an onslaught of relatives arriving from his side of the genetic tree. Because Rosemary's family lived nearby in their own homes, it was only on special occasions or if Uncle Bishop had too much to drink that they slept over in one of the more furnished bedrooms.

Rosemary assumed Lizzie was putting Philip in his own room for appearances only.

The phone rang but she ignored it. On the third bleat it stopped.

“Hey!” Lizzie said, and rapped on the bedroom door. “You awake?” Rosemary said nothing. Instead, she watched a robin bounce along the top branch of the maple, causing an uprising of discouragement from the sparrows. “Uncle Bishop wants to know if you'll go swimming with him,” Lizzie added, her voice full of the excitement of Philip's arrival. “He's on the phone, waiting for an answer.” Rosemary thought about this.
The
primordial
sea.
That's what Uncle Bishop called the Bixley swimming pool, insisting that it held beneath its murky waters angry crustaceans and all sorts of slithering missing links.

“She must still be asleep,” Rosemary heard Lizzie, whispering now, outside the door. Footfalls crept softly down the hallway, and then disappeared downstairs. Rosemary thought of Uncle Bishop's huge, white belly cascading like bread dough down over his purple-and-yellow swimming trunks, which said
Prince Edward Island Lobster Carnival
, an eyesore. Small children at the Bixley Pool considered him the bogeyman.

“Uncle Bishop says this is your last chance,” Lizzie announced. She was back at the bedroom door. “I told him you were still asleep, but he says he knows better. He says you're lying in bed, wide-awake, watching the birds.”

Rosemary said nothing. She kicked her toes beneath the sheet and waited for Lizzie's footfalls to disappear again. But the heat of the day was bombarding the house, with its high old-fashioned ceilings. It was rising up to the bedrooms and prompting her to consider a swim, not at the Bixley Pool but at the Bixley River, a half mile from her house, where it teetered in pools above a buildup of immense boulders, and where crayfish and inch-long trout darted into shadows and behind rocks.

Rosemary flicked on the yellow aluminum fan that sat near her bed on the floor. She turned its face upward, as though it were a beaming sunflower, and felt the cool spray of breeze spiral over her. She heard the mailman's car pull away from the box outside in a flurry of pebbles. The flag on the mailbox would now be down, her letter to Michael, William's friend, would be gone, on its way to Portland on such a hot June day. Rosemary had some questions for him, finally, about those last days in London. She heard a small whine coming up Old Airport Road and thought about her ultralight man.

“Pterodactyl,” she said aloud. Primitive bird-watching. But the whine turned into an automobile as it got closer, and finally, the sound of pebbles once more against tires, it pulled noisily into Rosemary's yard. Uncle Bishop, no doubt about it. He'd had just enough time, ten minutes, to drive over. She heard a door slam and wondered what expression the Datsun had on its face. Sighing, she pulled on her jeans and then found her favorite denim shirt, worn thin by many washings. She tied the tail ends up in a knot, a sturdy blue rose. Mugs waited patiently at the bedroom door for it to open and then bounded down the fifteen steps and out into the kitchen. Rosemary knew this was the exact number of steps because one quiet autumn evening, when the fireplace was bursting and snapping with seasoned hardwood, and a cold rain was fingering its way across the big church windows, she had turned to William, who lay next to her, his head sharing her pillow in front of the fire, and she had asked him. For no reason. “How many steps are there going upstairs, William?” And he had answered easily. “Fifteen.” As far as Rosemary knew, there could've been forty. Or six. She paid no attention to the obvious. “How many steps, William?” It was so like him to know the correct answer. “I counted them, once, so I'd know, Rosie, how many to expect when I get up at night and come downstairs without turning on a light. I'm never afraid of falling that way.”

Fear of falling was Rosemary's personal fear. She was always terrified of tumbling down the steep stairs at night, its hardwood, shiny steps little terraces of ice. Dangerous. And she was afraid of falling out of an airplane. Perhaps a stewardess, fixing a false eyelash, would lean unknowingly on the handle to the emergency door, and it would burst open, sucking up all the passengers close enough to be caught in its vorticose mouth. A rainy autumn night, earthbound, with an orange fire and a fiery wine, and William, and a fear of falling. Where? Down to China?

“Do you think Icarus was afraid?” Rosemary had asked William. There was a print of Brueghel's
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
hanging in a do-it-yourself frame on the wall. A print among dozens of prints. Their favorite paintings. “Was Icarus afraid when he fell? Did he cry out?” And William, as he began to undo the buttons on her flannel shirt so he could slip a hand inside to hold her warm, braless breast, had said, “Icarus knew his limitations. He knew he could only go so high. He chose his own death, Rosemary, and that's what is so acceptable about it. Like a mountain climber. No one forces him to climb. He goes of his own free will. He knows one day the rope might saw across a sharp rock. Or his footing will be a fraction off. And then the fall, with plenty of time to think about his life. And of how his body will look at the bottom, spread-eagle and bloody on the rocks. No, Icarus wasn't afraid. He was enchanted by the blue swirl of the sea beneath him and the warm yellow of the sun above. It was all color, and then it was over.”

Fifteen steps. Every night since William had died and she'd gotten up in the dark to let Mugs in or out, she had counted them.
One, two, three.
If she fell and died, how long would it be before they found her? How long before all the plants turned sere and brown in the windows, and the birds abandoned the empty feeders? How long before the cat, wan and weak, could no longer jump upon the sill and press his face against the glass?
Four, five, six.
Nights when she'd had too much wine, she made sure she was counting accurately by counting slowly.
Seven, eight.
Had William flown too high? What was it that threw him out of the sky and onto the bespattered floor of his London flat? “Icarus chose his own fate, Rosie, and that's what was so acceptable about it.”
Nine, ten, eleven.

That night with William in front of the fire, Rosemary had thought
about
fire
, that gift given to man by the sky, by the heavens, by the gods who let a frenzied finger of lightning bolt down four hundred thousand years ago, so that a frightened then delighted Peking Man could take it with him, back into his icy cave. William had put his glass of wine aside and rolled over onto his stomach beside her, a hand undoing the zipper on her jeans while Rosemary stared at the painting on the wall. Icarus's visual obituary. His death, framed. And the rain had beat steadily against the house, run like rivers out of the roof gutters and downspouts, and lightning had lit up the backyard, illuminated the feeders full of swollen millet and bloated corn. “Was Icarus afraid, William?” she asked again, as she stared at the print of Icarus trying to marry the cosmos. “Did he cry out?” as William eased her jeans down over her hips and pulled them off.
Twelve, thirteen, fourteen.
And the old house had rattled as if a mythical storm were passing overhead, a parade of centaurs and gorgons, griffins and minotaurs, in a frenzy of wings and snorts and bellows, while far below in the black, labyrinthine house, William and Rosemary made love, in front of the ancient notion of fire, in front of Icarus, frightened and plummeting into the sea, in front of Mugs, who licked his paws and watched the goings-on with detached amusement.
Fifteen.
At the bottom of the stairs, Rosemary came face-to-face with a dark-haired, pleasant-looking man.

“There's a large gentleman sitting out on your swing,” Philip said, extending his hand in greeting. “He's wearing very unusual shorts, and he seems to be crying.”

As Lizzie and Philip drove off to do some minor shopping in Bixley, Rosemary brought two glasses of cabernet out to the backyard and handed one to Uncle Bishop. She noticed the sky-blue Datsun pulled sadly up to the porch steps. It looked as if it were about to weep. She sat next to him on the wooden swing and they pushed off a few times with their feet to set them in motion. He had stopped crying, but his eyes were reddish, puffy. To top off his Prince Edward Island Lobster Carnival swimming trunks, he was wearing an extra-large, navy sweatshirt, sans arms and torn a bit about the neck.

“So you didn't go swimming at the Bixley Pool,” she said. On Uncle Bishop's feet were brown sandals with red toenails painted onto the ends, beneath Uncle Bishop's own pale-pink toenails. Where did he find such things?

“Pee sea,” said Uncle Bishop. “Twenty-five percent chlorine and seventy-five percent kid urine.”

Rosemary watched as two baby robins, the spots on their chests like brown freckles, flapped away in the birdbath she'd put under the wild cherry. The silvery grasses, growing back at the edges of the yard, rippled in a soft breeze that crept up Old Airport Road. She waited. Sometimes Uncle Bishop wanted to talk. Sometimes he wanted to rant. It was anybody's guess.

“I hate the Bixley Pool,” Uncle Bishop said. “No one under thirty should be allowed in it. It's just like Loch Ness anyway. A few inches down is all you can see. And it's choppy as hell. It should be condemned.” He picked at a mosquito bite.

It was a ranting kind of day. Between the posts of the arbor, Rosemary saw the remains of a spider's web, an orb weaver's, the strands now torn and dangling softly, the art destroyed. Rosemary had read about spiders. One in twenty, five percent, tend to be geniuses, working out problems about the web, remodifying, bettering, excelling. Many late evenings, she had watched the orb weaver at his job and had wondered if it was the work of a genius unfolding before her eyes. Funny, but in the sharp light of day the web was nothing more than broken strings, no longer a dangerous, shimmering trap for the helpless fly, the fluttering moth. “Levels of consciousness depend upon the light,” William had always said. That must apply to spiderwebs as well.

“Do you think we got the idea for lace and doilies and stuff like that from spiders?” Rosemary asked Uncle Bishop, who simply stared at her with his puffy little eyes.

“I'm sitting here with my heart on my sleeve,” Uncle Bishop said, “and you're talking about doilies. Does the word
suicidal
strike a maternal chord in you?”

“You
have
no sleeves,” Rosemary reminded him.

“All right, I'm sitting here with my heart on my
arm
,” he said.

“Well, you weren't talking about your heart,” said Rosemary. “You were ranting about the Bixley Pool.”

“I don't
rant
,” Uncle Bishop protested. “Miriam rants.”

“You both rant,” Rosemary said.

Uncle Bishop pushed them off again on the swing and they swayed nicely. Rosemary hoped the chains would hold. It was like swinging with Orson Welles. Someone would mutter “Rosebud,” and they would crash to the patio below.

“Do you know that Mrs. Abernathy puts cookies in her bird feeders?” Uncle Bishop asked. The swing creaked as he shifted his weight, lifted the right leg up, and crossed it heavily over the left one. “And yesterday she put
ice
cream
out there. If those goddamn birds had teeth, they would've fallen out by now.”