The Crystal Child (13 page)

She flipped through the volume, sampling the stories.  No, they did not have the right feel.  Too coarse, too folksy.  Her dream had been alluring, permeated with an erotic vibrancy.  An x-rated fairy tale.  A few days later she visited Alex’s room where she might find other books from his childhood. Surveying the shelves that now held more computer manuals and science fiction than children’s books, she came upon a copy of
Bullfinch’s Illustrated Mythology
, another birthday gift from her mother. She could not recall the last time she had looked at it, but it reminded her of other books that had cast their spell over her childhood, tales of magic and enchantment.  Was there a difference between myths and fairy tales, she wondered idly?  She had no idea what it might be.  At school her literary studies had been minimal, required coursework she had always seen as beside the point. Once she began medical school, she came to regard everything that was not science as a waste of time in a doctor’s education.

Since then her life had been spent looking at blood counts and EKGs and CT scans, hard numbers, solid facts, things that mattered to a first-rate diagnostician.  Myths, legends, folklore had long since ceased to play a role in her life.  Why should they now? Who was it that said, “when I was a child, I thought as a child.  But when I became a man I put aside childish things”?  Still, she took Bullfinch away with her.

“Did you ever find the fairy tale?” Jake asked a few days later.

“Um?  Oh no.  Actually I think it was a myth rather than a fairy tale.”

“There’s a difference?”

“Yes, there is. Myths are, well, deeper.”

“Oh, are they? In what way?”

“They’re less childish.”

Jake gave her a quizzical look.  “Hercules, Atlas, Jupiter and Juno are less childish?”

“If you read them in the right way.”

But what was the right way?  She could not have put it in words.  She was letting her intuition guide her. 
Always trust your imagination. 

As she read over the old tales, a door was opening in the deeper recesses of her mind.  Beyond lay a great darkness.  If she passed through that door, she sensed she would suddenly feel like Alice on the other side of the looking glass, small, lost, and helpless.  Her medical expertise, all the knowledge of Dr. Julia Stein would be a tiny fire in the enveloping darkness, as feeble as a candle in a starless night.  Skimming through Bullfinch, her memory teemed with stories she had read in childhood.  Names, images she had long forgotten bubbled up from the cellars of her mind with remarkable clarity, as if they must once have meant more than she realized.  She was surprised to discover how many of the tales dealt with seduction, courtship, incest, rape.  Nymphs who lay waiting in wild groves for unsuspecting men, the lecherous incubus that came in the night to deflower sleeping maidens, lascivious nereids who lured seamen to their deaths.  As violent as these tales were, they told of an ecstasy far beyond the experience of ordinary life, an exhilaration that human passion only approximates.

Was this the original force behind the simpler feelings of men and women?  How many people find their way to a love so wild and yet sublime that they cannot tell if it is a beast or a god who has descended upon them?

One question especially teased her curiosity.  Why did the myths portray Eros as a child, a chubby little boy with wings and arrows, the distant origin of the cute little Valentine’s Day cartoon?  Why so benign an image for so fierce a feeling? Perhaps he, the child-god, is desire as we know it before reason assumes command, a volcanic heat that cools as we grow older.  She thought back over her own life.  Puppy love, high-school crushes, some hot dates with boys she could not remember.  Then a few love affairs in her college years, often hurtful or disappointing but none of them intoxicating.  Her fling with Kevin Forrester, a prized memory she now felt certain she greatly exaggerated.  Finally, a brief, unspectacular courtship with Jake, her marriage to him a surrender to his insistence.  After that, how many nights to remember?  Well, since she remembered none, there must have been none.  If that was what passion amounted to in the lives of most people, why did it take up so much room in human culture?  All the stories, operas, love poems.  All the love songs that filled the air waves wailing on about false promises and broken hearts.  What did this represent that people wanted or believed they wanted?  In reality, adults, even the young, are bound together in affairs of the heart by an intricate web of duties and courtesies, the rules of the game we do not expect children to understand.  Adults, even in the grip of a great love, submit to rituals, sign contracts, exchange vows.  Consummation is expected to wait while lovers lay plans and take care for the future.  Children have no patience for all that.  They live by impulse, creatures of elemental pleasure. They claim the privilege of joy, though grown-ups may take it from them.

Is Aaron what we are meant to be?
  In lifting away the liabilities of age that lay so heavily upon him, had she liberated a buried life that she did not know was there, something the legends remembered more frankly?  Shame had departed from him, along with the burden of premature aging.  He was that feral child who knew nothing of law or morality, only the reign of delight.  How little we know of childhood, she thought.  We forget our own early years and rush our children through theirs.  Infants live in another world, a strange reality still mingled with what we are before birth.

There was something tugging at the fringes of her memory, something she remembered from her university days.  In the attic she found boxes of old books and papers from medical school now covered with years of dust.  She dug through, looking for notes from a course she had taken outside her field of gerontology, a class in human sexual development.  By the medical assumptions of that period, the course was a waste of time for someone going into geriatric medicine.  Then, the elderly were assumed to have no sexual capacity or interest. Accordingly, the course spent most of its time on children in the Oedipal phase and got no further than mid-life.

Leafing through her notes, she happened upon a passage from Freud’s introduction to psychoanalysis, a series of lectures considered so racy — as of 1900 — that he felt he had to apologize for giving before a mixed audience.  His infamous thirteenth lecture did more to scandalize the public than any other aspect of psychoanalysis.  She found the notes and the book.

She had penciled a note in the margin, a thought long since forgotten.  “Eroticism: purest in infancy.”  She turned the page; there were more notes. “Infants live (or did it say “love”?) the life of the body before higher orders of mind intervene to censor.”  Were these her words or notes from a classroom lecture?  She could not tell.  But this might explain why the god of love is so often shown as a presexual boy.  In that form he embodies an innocence we lose with maturity.  That is why, in art, his penis is always so unobtrusive, as if Eros had no knowledge of its procreative use.  Innocent, not knowing, but also not guilty.  Innocence, as adults know it, is the innocence of not acting.  But there is another innocence: the innocence of acting without shame.  Before we slap their hands and tell them “no!” how do children experience the longing of the flesh?

***

Harder and harder to tell when I’m dreaming, when I’m awake.  I seem split between two worlds, one not yet born, the other unwilling to die.  I glide back and forth.  What I see is like a double exposure.  Two worlds interpenetrating.  The pit is like that.  It comes and goes, sometimes staying for hours while I talk to people, eat my meals, walk the streets.  I have to be careful not to let it alarm me.  But, oh God! the horror of it.

I see myself clinging to the side of a deep pit, slipping down, trying to pull myself out.  Useless, useless.  Down below I see this heap of writhing forms, every imaginable living thing, animal, plant, microbe, wildly struggling to survive, eating, being eaten.  Human forms too, madly fornicating with all the others, desperate to multiply their kind.  The pit and all it holds, that tormented and entangled cargo, is as wide and deep as the Earth.  The history of life is there, creatures living, dying, rotting away, rising again out of the rot, birth and putrefaction wedded to one another in a never-ending cycle.

There’s a word the biologists use:
biomass.
 Such an ugly word.  It lumps everything together into a vast parasitic burden, a crushing weight of creatures desperately lusting to live one more year, one more day, one more hour — if only long enough to reproduce their kind, long enough to thrust their genes a little further along in time.  Even when they drive their bodies to ruin, even when they lay doomed and half-decayed, they howl for more life, beg for more life, kill for more life. 
Life,
the disease of the cosmos.  Life everywhere, spores filling interstellar space with their longing.  Listen in the night and you can hear them filling space with their cry.  Life  — “time’s fool.”

I dread the pit, but cannot free myself from it.  I’m still one of them.  Part of me longs to know the life of these wretched creatures.  That’s why I keep slipping down and down.  But there, above me, is the shining boy who met me at the far end of the bridge, the boy who is me, my mirror image, myself waiting to meet myself. 
Not like these,
the boy is saying. 
Not by mere survival
.  Or is it my own voice speaking? 
Not like these
.  Though they live a billion years, they will still be living in the pit.

The boy reaches down, smiling, his gaze burning with love.  I give him my hand.  “Take me!” I plead.  “Please take me!” A light comes into his eyes, they shine with … what is it?  Triumph.  He draws me up.  Looking back, I can feel only pity for the dying things I will soon leave behind.  Oh, but if only I could bring them all with me, beyond death, beyond time.

Alex stood in the hall, swallowing his breath, afraid to be heard.  He could make no sense of the sound that came from behind the door.  He bent closer.  There was a whine — his mother’s voice, not speaking, but struggling to breathe.  He might have said panting, but the word seemed wrong for his mother.  Sobbing — yes, that was what he heard.  His mother was sobbing, he decided.  Perhaps he knew in some instinctive way that he must not admit to himself what the sound meant.  Sobbing — if it was sobbing — gave him license to enter and offer help.

The bedroom curtains were drawn, darkening the room from the afternoon sun, but not enough to obscure what was happening inside.  The door opened into a palpable wave of heat, as if the air had been used up by great physical effort.  There was an odor.  Across the room, Alex saw his mother on the bed, her back turned to him, bare, laboring sinuously.  His mother, but he saw her first as a woman, bending far enough forward to reveal the cleft of her buttocks, her breasts, uncovered and quivering, visible just beyond her rib cage.  The sight sent a shiver of alarm through him.  His embarrassment mounting, Alex knew at once, he should not be seeing this.  There was a brief spasm in his muscles as he sought to draw back. 
Don’t look!
  But he stood rooted to the spot, frozen in place by a ruthless curiosity.

He tried to reshape the image before him, to make it something else, not what he knew it was.  His eyes traced his mother’s moist back, the gleaming curve of her spine, her shoulders rocking back and forth, and on the bed gazing up at her … the other, flat out, thrusting rhythmically from beneath.  Alex wanted to believe the other was hurting her, but he knew the tiny moan she made was not born of pain.  At that moment, his mother, knowing someone was there, turned her head, tossing back the damp hair that had fallen around her cheeks.  This was a face he had never seen, staring drunkenly, deeply flushed, a sheen of sweat across her forehead and down her throat.  Her eyes met Alex’s and filled at once with panic.  She groped across the bed, searching for some way to hide her nakedness, but only revealing herself more — herself and that other.  Her sex, his sex.
Don’t look!
  But there were no bed-clothes within reach.  Instead, turning away, she fell forward to cover herself and to conceal the other who was there beneath her, pressed against her breasts.  “Alex!” she snapped with as much parental authority as the moment permitted, “Leave!”  Everything about the moment, her voice, her posture was awkward enough to be comic.  “Please! Go away!  Wait outside!” she cried.  But before Alex could obey, another face appeared in the bed, looking out over his mother’s shoulder.  The face stared at him, assuming an expression not of shame, but of annoyance.  The face — cold, arrogant — told him he was an intruder.  This was no place for Julia’s little boy.  But the face that implied this was that of a boy not even his age.

Alex, ablaze with anger and amazement, spun around and hastened away, not even closing the door behind him.  Where was he to go? 
Yes,
leave the house, never return.  He began down the stairs toward the hall below.  His mother’s voice called after him.  “Alex, wait!”  He stopped.  She was at the top of the stairs.  He turned slowly, saw her there, a robe pulled hastily around her, one breast not covered, her inner thigh exposed, a shaggy patch.  
Don’t look!
  “Alex …” she started to speak, then paused.  Her hair was mussed, a mass of wet tangles, her face still shining with sweat.  “Alex … please.”

He knew what the “please” meant. Not “please come back,” but “please don’t tell.”  The sort of thing naughty children say when they fear getting caught.  It was so crushingly pathetic.  Shouldn’t his mother know something better to say, something strong and certain and adult that made this acceptable?  Wasn’t there some rule he had never learned until now that would make this one of those grown-up things you were supposed to accept?  He remembered a dumb discussion he had had with his friends.  He had asked, “What would you do if your mother caught you jerking off?”  And a friend had answered with a question he could not imagine answering. “What would you do if you caught your mother jerking off?”

Well, what if he did?  He was sure his mother would know what to say.  She would be unashamed.  She would explain that even adults do such things and have the right to be as guiltless as she would expect him to be.  But
this
— this was something she could never explain or justify.  He stared at her above him on the stairs.  He looked her full in the face, a hard, unkind look.  A look that might have been a slap.  A moment, another moment.  Did she know he was silently pleading with her? 
Make this all right, make this all right!   Instead, he saw — he was sure he saw —
an expression of anger sweep across her face as if she might be on the brink of scolding him.  Then, with tears flooding from her eyes, she turned to run back into the bedroom.  Her departure struck Alex in the stomach like a blow.  She had nothing to say.  He turned and ran for the front door.

Julia heard his footsteps taking off, then the slam.  Her hand was on the knob of the bedroom door, but she could not turn it.  There was no way she could face what had happened behind that door.  Aaron would be there, the way Alex had seen him.  What would he have to say?  A word of comfort or of triumph?  She had no idea.  What did she know of this person whom she once thought she knew thoroughly?   Her patient, a dying child.

She backed away and rushed off to her study down the hall, closing the door behind her.  Once inside, she swayed with faintness.  She might feel this way if she had emerged from a car accident, a collision that was her fault and had left people injured.  She was stunned with grief and fierce regret.  She sank into a chair and held her head in her hands.  Now she realized her robe was open.  She could see her bare, sweating body.  That was what Alex had seen when she called him back.  She wondered if she would ever find the courage to leave this room. She wanted time to stand still.

***

Later, when she thought back, she realized she could recall nothing of what happened before she turned to see Alex standing in the door.  There was simply a blur of sensation, a profound euphoria that existed, not as a memory in her mind, but as a vibrancy she had felt running through her body.  She could remember nothing but gliding forward on a sensation of delicious anticipation.  It was the way a blind person might recall a ride on a roller coaster.  She was not sure what had happened after she and Aaron entered the bedroom.  She did not clearly remember how they got to the bedroom, though of course they must have gone from her study where she remembered being at work and along the upstairs corridor.  But there was no trace in her mind of that transition.  Not until they touched. Yes, she could remember that.  And after that … something happened, a moment that survived in her mind like a smeared point of light, a peripheral image that refused to come into sharp focus.  Gazed at, it seemed to shoot away into the darkness.

And then she recalled turning and seeing Alex, that poor, bewildered child standing there.  That moment was like a cloud lifting.  Only then did she realize she was naked, that Aaron was naked, that they were entwined.  But who was this she was holding against her body? Aaron, but not a boy. 
Julia, you above all the others know I’m not a child.

Days went by.  Several times she was on the edge of taking Alex aside and talking to him.  But what would she say?  Alex had watched her with Aaron — for how long she could not say.  Long enough.  Did he expect her to apologize as if for a guilty deed?   What right did he have — this intrusive boy — to expect guilt from her?  What could he understand about her relations with Aaron?  She could see it in his eyes every day now, an appeal — no, not an appeal, a demand for remorse.  By the light of all she had ever believed, it was wrong for her to feel as she did toward Alex.  But what had happened between her and Aaron was beyond right and wrong as a child understood these words.  The greater wrong was that he had stolen that moment from her, something of a value he could never know.  For that she could not forgive him.

***

Alex did not have to think twice about it.  As shocked and hurt as he might be, he was determined to say nothing about what he had seen.  He was old enough to know about secrets.  Adults had a right to keep secrets; they even had the right to lie.  Adults lied about a lot of things.  They covered up their true opinions about other people.  They acted as if they liked people they hated.  His mother need not have asked him to keep her secret; he knew it was his duty to her.  He felt almost chivalric about keeping her shame to himself.  He must let his mother explain herself.  But the days went by and she said nothing.  On the contrary, she began to act stiff and severe with him, as if she had reason to be displeased with him.  Was she trying to make
him
feel guilty?

Gradually, his bewilderment turned to an anger that mounted by the day.  Worse than his mother’s silence was the insouciance he saw in Aaron’s face every time they met.  Aaron never failed to wish him good morning or to ask for small favors at the table — pass the bread, pass the salt —  always as if nothing had occurred out of the ordinary.  But Alex could never forget the disdain he had seen in Aaron’s eyes that afternoon.  Aaron had made a claim upon his mother; he seemed to hold her in his power like some evil magician in a sword-and-sorcery tale.  He had turned his mother against him.  For all he knew, they had not stopped meeting together as lovers.  Whenever they were alone, what was to prevent them?

Alex wanted this person, this
kid
, out of the house.  Only his father could make that happen.  “There’s something about Aaron … Aaron and mother,” he started one day when he was alone with Jake.  He tried to be oblique, but he lacked the skill.  No sooner had he hinted at his meaning than his father jumped on the remark as if he knew what Alex might be about to tell him.

“Together? You saw them together?  What exactly do you mean?”

“They were upstairs.  Together.”

“Where?” he asked with aggressive impatience, as if he was not to be kept waiting a second longer.

“In the bedroom, you know, together.”

“Are you talking about sex?”

“Well, it was … it was … ”  In his mind, he was flailing like someone dropping from a great height.  There was no way to stop falling, no way to take back the words.

“Was
what
?  You saw them screwing?”

The question was as shocking as a slap.  How could his father be asking him a question like that?  How had he come to that conclusion so swiftly?  Alex wanted to retreat, wanted to dismiss the question as unkind and hurtful. He did not want to think of his mother this way.  But it was too late to undo what he had set in motion.  Like himself, his father wanted Aaron out of their lives.  Here was the chance. “Tell me!” Jake insisted, thrusting his face close to Alex and taking him by the shoulders.  “Is that what you saw?”

The tears came before the words.  “Yes.”

“You saw it, you actually saw it?”

“Yes.”

“I knew it!” Jake growled.  His face twisted in disgust. “Jesus!  What kind of pervert …”

“He is,” Alex blubbered.  “He’s a pervert.”

His father was brought up short.  “What?  I wasn’t thinking of him.”

“It’s not her fault,” Alex said, but with no idea why he said it.

“The hell it isn’t. What do you know about these things?  Listen, you keep this to yourself, understand?”

Alex promised he would, but he knew the damage was done.

***

“Are you out of your mind?” Jake’s voice was barely under control.  He was visibly trembling.  A man who was used to facing a court of law with studied calm, he had no well-prepared words for what Julia had told him.  His mind went blank, then ignited.  More than anything, he resented losing his sense of control.   “If you have no self-respect, couldn’t you think of us — Alex, me?”  Julia sat silent, her head bowed like someone waiting to be hit and hit again.  She was hiding her face, but not in shame.  She was hiding her lack of contrition. “Is there some explanation?”  Jake demanded.  “Have you nothing to say?”  Her silence was infuriating.  “When did this happen?”

“A few weeks ago,” she said.

“And since then?  How many times?  I have a right to know. Is that why you brought him here?”

“Jake, please.”  There was a weary calm to her tone that enraged him all the more.

“Oh?  Am I being indelicate?  Am I violating your precious privacy?  Do you realize what you’ve done?  You’ve ruined yourself — and probably me as well.”

“Nobody has to know,” she said.  Again her air of cool rationality irked him.  Was she asking him to be an accomplice to his own humiliation?

“Don’t be a fool.  The boy’s parents are out to make a lot of trouble.  If they even suspect there’s been sexual abuse … ”

“Abuse?  There’s been no abuse.”

Jake stared at her with an expression of anguished bewilderment.  “What are you saying?  Having sex with a minor is by definition abuse.  I’m a lawyer, remember?  I know a bit about these things.  The law doesn’t go by SAT scores.  Your wonder boy is under the age of consent, way under.  This amounts to statutory rape.”

“No, it’s not that.”  She lashed out at him indignantly.  Why was he saying things that had no relevance?  Turning away, she said, “He’s not a child.”

“What?” Jake asked.

She did not repeat the words. “Nothing,” she said.

“Suppose I was having it off with ten-year-old Debby Samuels next door?  You know Debby.  She’s very mature for her age.  What would the law call that?  An affectionate friendship?  It works the same way between a woman and a boy.  If you don’t know that, it’s because such things almost never happen.”

“Aaron won’t tell anyone.  I know he won’t.”

“How can you be so sure?  And what about Alex?  He told me.  And for that matter, what makes you so sure about me?”

She had no idea what he meant.  “Who would you tell?”

“My dear wife, you’re guilty of a serious felony.  I know it, your son knows it.  What are you proposing?  That we simply carry on and cooperate in a cover-up?  You don’t think I’m going to let him stay in this house, do you?  For all I know, the two of you could be fucking like bunnies.”  She flinched. She wanted to reprimand him for his vulgarity and harshness.  But then what right had she to do that?  In that instant she felt the full weight of her vulnerability.  She was in a moral pillory, unable to protest or hit back while Jake raved on.  “If I have to, I’ll tell his parents why I want him out. In any case, they have a right to know the danger he’s in.”