Thirteen Phantasms (11 page)

She stopped. Her piano-playing fingers were still.

He half-sat up, starting to speak, abruptly horrified. She shoved against his chest with her left hand, shaking her head slowly, mouth half-open, her hand tugging softly at the chicken leg. He could feel it moving under his thigh. He flexed the muscle in his leg, pinning it there. What kind of horrible joke would she think he meant by it? What kind of psychotic …

She gave it a good yank, nearly going over backward—not with the force of the pull but with the shock of the gristly skin having come off in her hand. She jerked it up out of the water, gaping at it and throwing it at the same moment, rising half-out of the tub like a dripping Venus. She was incapable of speech, but her face was easy enough to read. This was like the apple core in the bathtub, only a million times worse. He tried to stand up himself to reason with her. But the act was beyond reason. Any further attempts at playing the dutiful, lustful husband were useless, a filthy charade. He waved the chicken leg bone, trying to think of something funny to say, trying to smile, but realizing at the same time that a smile would cement things in the worst way. He ditched the chicken bone in the water again.

“Honestly,” he said, thinking that he’d heard himself say that more than once tonight. “I didn’t mean. … It was working, damn it!”

“What was working? I don’t know what you had in mind—a childish joke or something worse. But it’s ruined now. The evening is ruined. Shut up for once. Don’t tell me what you meant. Not now.”

Then she was gone along with her bathrobe. He sat silently until the bathwater cooled down; then he got out and toweled off, trying to rub the stuck-on herbs away. He picked the chicken up off the tiles and then drained the bath until it clogged, cleaned out the mess of stuff that had jammed up the drain, and so on until the tub was empty. Then he sponged it out, piled up the dishes, ice bucket, and bottle and took the whole mess downstairs.

For fifteen minutes he lay on the couch, with dark unfocused thoughts washing through his mind in the usual pattern. First he cursed the whole notion of dinner in the bathtub, of advice out of magazines, of unnatural mushrooms, of Nona’s not giving him a chance to explain himself. He’d been misunderstood. She had jumped to conclusions, which was just like her.

Soon all of that faded. It occurred to him that senseless or not, her recipe had very nearly worked. It
had
worked. And it wasn’t so long out of his mind that he’d cooled off. Just thinking about it now was enough to fire him up. There must be something he could do to set things right. An apology was the first thing.

He tiptoed upstairs. She lay sleeping, completely relaxed. He stood still for a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the semidarkness. It was warm in the bedroom, and she was half out of the covers. Her breasts pushed at the thin fabric of her nightgown as she breathed, and he found himself sorting shadows from flesh, not thinking, filled with loss and desire.

She deserved more than that. She deserved more than him abandoning her and then staggering upstairs an hour later in order to paw her when what she wanted to do was sleep. He’d had his chance, and had screwed up.

He turned around and went quietly back downstairs, drifting into the kitchen. He passed the flower arrangement on the table. The flowers were fresh and smelled wonderful. Nona had probably loved them, and him for sending them. It was the sort of thing husbands and lovers did. He hadn’t given her much of a chance to say so, though.

The moon shone through the window in front of the house. He went out through the door, onto the porch, where the night was still and cool. His hand slipped and the screen door banged shut. He held his breath, listening. Crickets chirped. Two night birds called to each other from the trees across the street. He pulled his bathrobe tight, wishing he had worn his slippers. There was just the hint of a misty chill in the air, and he could smell damp concrete and vegetation.

A junebug thumped against the screen door, almost next to his ear, and he ducked away in surprise. It lay there on the ground, next to the welcome mat, kicking its spindly little legs and revolving topsy-turvy on its back. He expected it to fly off, but it didn’t, and he found himself thinking up and discarding names for it and wondering what kind of a creature it was that waited for good weather in order to fling itself futilely at window screens.

He knelt next to it. The beast made a frightful buzz, trying to scare him off, maybe. He poked at it with his index finger, and it grabbed his fingertip and clung there, quieting itself, seeming to sense that it was in a safe harbor at last. He picked it up and turned his hand over, and it crawled a couple of paces up toward his knuckle, holding on. He wondered idly what he’d do with the thing.

“What’s happening, Lyle?” he asked it, thinking up the name on the spot. The bug wouldn’t speak to him. “Do you need a house?” he said. “Someplace to live?” He looked around for an empty flowerpot.

The porch light blinked on just then, dim and yellow. Nona stood behind the screen. She was rumpled from sleep and she looked curiously at him standing there in his bare feet, apparently talking to a bug. The silent night lay like an ocean between them, as if each of them spoke in a tongue that the other couldn’t begin to understand.

Perhaps because she mistook his silence for sullenness, she turned around and walked away toward the stairs, and he was left alone, holding the junebug, for which he had found it so easy to feel compassion.

“Wait!” he shouted. He wouldn’t let her get away, not this time. He flicked his finger toward the lawn, and the bug flew off dizzily into the night. He hurried across the living room to where Nona waited for him at the foot of the stairs, holding the basket of purple flowers.

My wife and I were traveling along the Normandy coast when we met John Kendal in St. Malo. It was in a hotel café—the name of the place escapes me. He sat before a tremendous plate of periwinkles, all heaped into a little seashell monument. With a long needle he poked at the things, removing the gray lump inside each and piling it neatly on the opposite side of the plate. He worked at it for the space of half an hour, and in that time I had no idea it was my old childhood friend Kendal who sat there.

So intent and delicate were his movements that he gave the impression of someone suspicious that one of the periwinkles held a tremendous pearl, which would, at any moment, come rolling out of the mouth of a dark little shell on his plate.

It wasn’t until he paused for a moment to sip his wine that I looked at his face and knew who he was. People change a great deal over the years, but Kendal, somehow, hadn’t. His hair was longer and wilder, and he was twenty years older than I remembered him, but that’s all. His antics with the periwinkles made perfect sense.

Seeing him there laboring over the shells reminded me of our first meeting, forty years earlier when we were both boys. On the day after I’d moved into the neighborhood I came across him lying on the street, peering down through one of the nickel-sized holes in an iron manhole cover, watching the rippling water that ran along below the street and reflected a long cylinder of sunlight that shone through the opposite hole. He told me right off that he did most of his water gazing on partly cloudy and windy days when the passing shadows would suddenly darken and obscure the water below and he could see nothing at all. He’d wait there, gazing down into utter darkness, until without any warning the clouds would pass and the diamond glint of sunlight would reappear, sparkling on the running water.

It was all a very romantic notion, and I took to practicing the art myself, although not nearly as often as did Kendal, and always vaguely fearful that I’d be run down in the road by a passing car. He had no such fears. The sunlit waters implied vague and wonderful promise to him that I sometimes felt but never fully understood.

And here he was eating periwinkles in St. Malo. He was living there. I haven’t any idea how he paid his rent or bought his periwinkles and wine. It didn’t seem to matter. Nor did it surprise him that we’d met by wild coincidence, twenty years and six thousand miles distant from our last meeting in California. We hadn’t even communicated in the intervening years.

As we sat into the evening and talked, I was struck by the idea that he’d become eccentric. Then it occurred to me that he’d been eccentric at eight years old when he’d spent his free time peering through manhole covers. What he’d become, I can’t for the life of me say. My wife, who sees things more clearly than I do, understood immediately, even as she watched him manipulate his periwinkles, that he was slightly off center. Not the sort who goes raging about the streets with an axe, but the sort who doesn’t even acknowledge the street, who looks right through it, who inhabits some distant shifting world.

That isn’t to say that my wife disliked him. He won her sympathies at once by carrying on about the sunsets at St. Malo, sunsets which, for two days running, we had missed because I hadn’t had the energy to walk from the railway hotel to the old city. He could see them, he said, from his window, which overlooked the sea wall and the scores of rocky little islands and light towers that stretched out into the ocean along the coast there. It was spectacular, the sun sinking like a ball of wet fire into a sea turned orange. It seemed to set purely for the amusement of the city of St. Malo. He had the notion that if he could find just the right sort of rowboat—the wooden shoe of Winken, Blinken, and Nod or the pea-green boat of the Owl and the Pussycat—he could catch the sun as it set and follow it into the depths of the sea.

The next afternoon my wife and I drank a beer at a café above that same sea wall and watched the sunset ourselves. I’ll admit that Kendal was right—not a half-mile of green sea rolled between the rocky shore and the sun when it set. There are legends, or so we were told, that when the old gods fished from the rocks off St. Malo, one of them cast his golden net with such force that it encircled the sun. Thinking that he’d ensnared a great glowing fish, he hauled it almost into shore before realizing his error and setting it free. The sun had been so taken with the beauty of the coastline thereabouts that it has since followed that same path every evening when it sails from the sky.

It’s quite possible that Kendal had heard the same tale and that his nautical pursuit of the setting sun was suggested by it. All in all it doesn’t matter much, for it’s just as likely that if he had heard the myth, he half believed it. He had the uncanny ability to make others believe such tales too, just as he’d imbued me with a sense of the importance of watching that sunlit water beneath the street, for reasons that I can’t at all remember, reasons that have never been defined.

So we talked that first evening over wine and food, and I discovered that he’d never given up the business of watching, of peering through holes. He told us that he had taken for the summer the most amazing rooms, directly above the sea wall. They were in the oldest part of the city, all stone and hand-hewn timber. He’d been told by the landlady that at one time, hundreds of years ago perhaps, his room had attached to it a stone balcony, thrusting out over the ocean beyond a heavy, studded oak door. The stones had long since broken loose and fallen into the sea, and the old door had been nailed shut against the possibility of someone stumbling through it drunk or while sleepwalking, and dropping the thirty-odd feet into the tide pools below.

There was a keyhole in the door, however, encrusted with verdigris, through which one could peer out over the sea. Kendal, it seemed, spent a good deal of time doing just that. He could as easily have watched the sunsets through either of two long, mullioned windows in the same wall, but that, he quickly insisted, wouldn’t have been the same thing. There was something about keyholes—about this particular keyhole—something he couldn’t quite fathom.

My wife, not knowing him as I did, insisted that he explain himself, and his story, I’m afraid, went a ways toward overturning the romantic notion she’d formed of him after his eloquent description of the sunsets.

•

He had been in the rooms a week before he even saw the keyhole. He was engaged, he said, in certain studies. The view from the windows was such that his eyes were inevitably drawn to and through them toward the sea so that he paid little attention to the old door. One afternoon, however, he’d been sitting at his desk working at something when he noticed through the corner of his eye that a thin ray of sunlight slanted in through the keyhole and illuminated a little patch of carpet, evoking, he said, old memories and fresh anticipation. There was nothing for him to do but peer through the keyhole.

Shimmering beyond was an expanse of pale green ocean which joined, at the abrupt line of the horizon, an almost equal expanse of blue sky. It wasn’t at all an odd thing to find, quite what he’d expected, but the simple symmetry of the sea and sky with their delicate Easter egg colors kept him at the keyhole for a bit, waiting, perhaps for a gust of wind to toss the surface of the sea or for a cloud to drift into view. As it happened, a sailing ship appeared, just spars and rigging at first, then the tossing bowsprit as the ship arched up over the horizon. He hadn’t any idea what sort of ship it was; he knew nothing, he told us, of ships. But it was altogether a wonderful thing as it appeared there with its billowing sails and complexity of rigging and looking for all the world as if it had sailed from another age.

He leapt up and dug about in his wardrobe for a pair of opera glasses, then returned to the window to have a closer look at the antique ship. But there was, he insisted, no ship there. It must have swung around and sailed back out to sea—curious and unlikely behavior, it seemed to him.