The Theoretical Foot (14 page)

ix

On the darkening stairs Nan then heard music from the living room, but faintly. She hurried up them and it seemed natural that her feet should make no sound at all upon the stone. In her head and quite without sacrilege ran the first measures of “Es ist vollbracht.” It is
consummated,
she told herself. I must tell Timothy as soon as I can. I must tell him that I've cast him out, that I am free now to live and love without asking for return.

She sped silently down the hall toward her door.

Honor Tennant stood beside it, her hand raised. To Nan, who in her present state had forgotten the actuality of people and how they looked and sounded, and how they took up space, Honor looked like a creature from some other world. She loomed in the dim light larger than possible, her face seemed white as eggshell, her eye sockets deep as symmetrical caverns out of which she peered. Honor's hand, still and shapely, had a momentous quality about it as it hovered, ready to knock for Nan.

“Oh, Nan,” she murmured, “I wanted to ask you . . . but you're out of breath.”

“Am I?”

They stood for a moment without bothering to speak or to wonder much, looking at each other. Nan knew that Honor would now keep her from seeing Timothy before dinner but that did not seem to matter. She could tell him what happened later—even tomorrow would do. Perhaps, perhaps he knew anyway. But no she must tell him. In the meantime she felt kindly and rather drunk.

Nan smiled meaninglessly.

“But come in and tell me,” she begged earnestly. “What do you want? Tell me what I can do.” She grasped Honor's warm smooth arm. “Please do.”

It seem very important to Nan, suddenly, to do something to test out her new freedom.

Honor was looking at her the way all the Tennants could. Sometimes Nan thought it was because they were so tall that their faces often wore an expression of almost haughty amusement and sometimes she wondered crossly if they were mocking her. But now she knew that the quiet smile in Honor's sad dark eyes was full of compassion and instead of resenting it she felt pleased to realize at last they were friends, loving each other without qualification.

“Come in,” she said again. When they were in the room she turned on one of the lights and held out a box of cigarettes with a trembling hand that was vibrating like the wings of a moth.

“No, I can't stay. It's late. But Nan . . . what can we do about Susan?”

“Susan?”

For several seconds now Nan could not remember who bore that name nor why Honor should ask her what to do. What did it matter what they did, and for whom? Then she saw again the strange tiny blonde woman with her hair in a knot on her proud head and the large gray eyes watching over the rim of the beer glass at lunch, and suddenly Nan heard with a rush of warm amusement the blissful squeak in Susan's voice when she had cried out, “Why, it's
Nan Garton Temple
!” It seemed so long ago but so pleasant.

“Oh, Susan,” she cried. “Of course! Why, is she ill? She looked rather dauncy at lunch, I thought.”

Honor laughed softly. “
Dauncy
! That's a nice word. I've never heard it before, but I know what it means. Like
loppy.
My mother says
loppy.
No, it's about supper.”

Honor then sat down on the edge of the wide dark bed. She moved like many people who are large, with deliberation and in flowing sections. Her white robe fell open and now she was left with
this passion to look at the long sweep of her legs, brown and slender, and the flat softness of her girl's belly.

“It seems sort of a party, kind of. Nice, I think. Sara figures it will keep Lucy amused, probably, and it's fun. And do you know . . .?” And Honor looked soberly at Nan, her voice suddenly vehemant.

“Do you know that Susan Harper, that poor little kid, has walked clear from Munich and hasn't a dress to her name? Tim and Dan and that fine conceited young man of hers are all right in slacks and coats but after all, we all planned vaguely to wear long dresses and I don't know . . . I just don't know . . .”

As her voice trailed off into silence, she sighed. Nan looked curiously at her. Honor's face was composed, her eyes were watching something more interesting than life, something up near the corner of the ceiling but beyond it.

I feel passive, Nan thought. I don't care. I am through worrying about being good or thoughtful or generous or making people admire me. Let Honor tell me what she wants. I may listen or I may not as I am free now from caring about her caring what I think.

Again they did not speak for what seemed like several minutes, a silence in which they were strangely easy. Honor lay on her side once again and said as if they hadn't stopped talking at all, “So I wondered if you'd let her wear something of yours. I don't like to ask you, I'd hate to have someone ask me to lend a dress to a stranger . . . but she seems awfully clean and everything . . . Maybe that blue and green housecoat sort of business that you've been wearing . . .?”

Nan knew that she must answer but for a moment she was too peaceful to speak. It did not matter if she was rude or if Honor thought she'd gone daffy. She was so filled with ease and contentment, now that at last she was free of all the years of hunger and vain longings, she could not bear to speak.

“Of course
I
could lend her something or I could ask Lucy.” Honor was apparently not entirely conscious of Nan's silence. “But I think we're either a little long up and down or a
leeeeetle, leeeeetle
big around and Sara says you have simply the most beautiful nighties. Why not a nightie for Sue?”

Nan jumped up as if she'd been stung or started up from a dream and left with what sounded to her own ears like that of foolishness and said energetically, “But of course, Honor darling! She's a sweet child. I
want
her to wear a dress of mine. She's so young and lovely and . . .”

And now she hurried across the room to the great dark armoire and pulled its door open dramatically.

“Here,” Nan cried and thrust into Honor's arms a cloud of fragile yellow, all shot through with golden threads. “Take it,” she cried again. “I want Susan to wear it. She will be beautiful in it.”

Honor looked at the pile of stuff she held, then smiled. “No,” she said slowly, “you've never worn this, Nan. I know, because I know everything you've worn this summer. You have such beautiful clothes . . . I like to look at them. And you've been saving this. No, it's too lovely.”

“But I want Susan to wear it. I think it . . . Well, it's too young for me. She should wear it. Take it to her, Honor. Please. This is a
wonderful
idea.”

Nan laughed excitedly. She did not feel empty and exhausted anymore but strong with delight instead. Part of it made her want almost violently to see Susan in the dress that she had saved all summer for Timothy's surprise. It seemed essential to her somehow to look at that billowy gleaming dress on another woman. It was right that Susan, Joe Kelly's light-o'-love, should be the entrancing one.

Honor rose slowly and stood in her stately way. Above the glimmer of the beautiful dress her eyes glowed as she looked down at Nan, then she moved toward the door.

“Let me!” Nan cried. “I'll open it!” She brushed against the tall girl and was conscious of the sharp smoothness of her hip bone.

Honor turned suddenly toward her. The girl's face was honey colored in the soft light from Nan's room against the darkness of the hallway; her mouth looked infinitely sweet.

“
Permettez-moi, chere Madame, de vous embraser
,” she murmurred laughingly.

Honor leaned down and in the most intimate gesture that Nan had ever received from another woman, kissed her delicately on either cheek.

“Nan,” she said. “You are beautiful.” Then Honor hurried down the long hall.

Nan, still feeling the moth-like touch of the girl's lips and hearing again the tiny crackle of the pile of gold-shot cloth between their bodies, stood looking after her.

“Me?” Nan wondered. “I am beautiful?” She spoke aloud, incredulously. She had often been told so but now it seemed as if she had never really heard this being said until the present moment. She knew that Honor had not said it only in gratitude over Susan's present.

Am I? Nan thought.

She went into her room and closed the door softly. I must tell Timothy, she thought. Not ask him:
tell
him.

She pulled off her clothes swiftly and got out the blue and green housecoat and laid it on the bed. It was not until she was brushing her hair, still damp from her quick bath, that she saw that someone had put a vase of flowers on her mantelpiece. It was the vase she'd meant for Honor's room and she laughed to see it there before her. It was a tall square hollow crystal, an old battery glass with a partition down the middle and she'd put a little ring of late field daisies stuck in pebbles in the bottom of one side. In the other was a tiny naked pink china Kewpie doll with “Made in Japan” marked across its buttocks. Then she'd filled the vase with clear water from the fountain knowing it was silly and maybe a little bit malicious.

Someone is playing jokes on me, she thought contentedly. I must tell all this to Timothy. I have so much to tell him.

I am beautiful, she thought. She said this seriously to the woman she saw looking at her in the mirror. Aloud she said, “Yes.”

4

As soon as the anesthetic wore off, the wolves and the wires and the frozen colors came back, more intense, more intolerable. Ah, my foot, my foot! And the toes . . . Christ! My big toe, and all the others! How many toes? Six? Of course.

He looked down, the third day. His head pulled up from the pillows as if it were a sick tooth lifting itself, root and all, from its bleeding jaw-bed. He saw that he had no foot, no knee, never more a loin to ache with passion, and his great eyes widened with the secret laugh: The foot was still there, and all his leg, and only he to know it? He lay back, listening with sly amusement to the cries that were torn out of him by the flaming wires and the cold nails that wrapped around and pounded into his lost foot.

The fourth day he waited until the doctors had finished and the nurse and his woman. Then he lifted off the cover and looked down at the white turban that lay beside his visible leg, and with a clean ferocity he cut the air, once, sharply just below it. For a second, a second as sweet as death and as long as God, his lost foot was without pain. Then it rushed back. He heard his cries again, and his eyes grew cynical.

He tried it once more, the next day, and once he got the woman with her own long cold hand to cross the air above his invisible knee, but it never worked again.

Soon the mice began. They nibbled hungrily, bloodily, at the little pads of flesh under six toes, and occasionally rats came and tore at the whole foot. The bed was always tidy afterword: theoretical flesh does not make messes.

There was the leather shoe, like a doll's shoe, that was put on wet, and as it dried it twisted, twisted, twisted, until the foot curled under like a Chinese lady's, and the whole leg was pulled into a corkscrew-shape. Then when he would feel a scream bubbling behind his teeth, and ready to burst, the dried doll's shoe and all the flesh under it would be torn off, and mice, hundreds of mice, would rush in from all the cracks and creases of the bed and suck and nibble at the raw meat and the twanging, string-like muscle.

About two weeks after the amputation, he awoke from a nightmare of running, to find the white turban bobbing and flapping against the mattress, and suddenly he found that his poor foot had only five toes now, and that it was up almost under his knee. He sighed with relief, for he believed that if all that calf had finally gone, there would be much less to hurt. He was wrong, though. His leg only folded like an accordion and in every pleat red ants now scurried and stung, at least ten thousand of them burrowing and laying eggs and feeding themselves in the succulent creases.

He grew used to not seeing his leg anymore except in his dreams, but the ants never left him, nor the boot, nor various other things like having his nails pulled out slowly, nor especially the mice, and although he grew able, finally, to lie without noises most of the time, the presence of his theoretical foot was more real now than food or sleep or his love, and he would never lose it.