Trust (83 page)

"Right, me you don't catch at the papers," Tilbeck said. "What's somebody else's news to me? I'm my own Current Event, don't y'know." And amiably re-tilted his jaw for wine. When at last he brought his eyes down they came on me plain as marble. "
You
know how I lay off the papers, hah, girlie? Never go near 'em. Wouldn't swat a fly with 'em.
She
knows it. I keep out of the way of the papers, that's a fact."

"Two-faced," Stefanie flung out. "You just a
minute
ago said you use them to light fires with—"

"Sure, I use 'em to make things hot—right, girlie?"—Laughter of the usual sort.

A muffled male voice humbly requested tunafish.

"Ooh, pussyhead wants a
fish,
" Stefanie warbled. "Next thing he'll be wanting
mices
—and didn't I bet you we couldn't keep zooming back and forth for meals? See? I told you a great big pussyhead gets hungry in no time at all! And there's nothing in that ship but a quarter of a Hershey Almond Bar. Yum, yum, open
up
—" William's son obediently displayed his uvula, and toward it a laden toothpick came charging.

"I thought you society kids lived on canned pheasant," Tilbeck said.

Stefanie leered. "Watch it, because we really live on guts. The guts of roaches I mean."

Laughter not of the usual sort. Blooms proliferated from the marble. "You want to know what I light those fires for? To signal. A man on an island keeps a bonfire going day and night y'see, and when a ship finally turns up that's got a mind to take him off, you think he goes back with all those fancy captains and stewards and ship's bursars and big Hershey Almond Bars? No sirree. Not on your life. He sticks to where he was. He sticks to himself. You think he's been signalling all that time just to go and get stuffed like them, to get nice and dead and filthy like them? Not on your life. He took those newspapers and he made that fire, and it's just to show 'em what it is to own yourself. Show who you belong to. Me, I belong to me. Those captains who run the world, you know what they are to me? Valets. Believe everything they were brought up on. All those big lawyers, all those ambassadors i)

"Hilarious," Mrs. Purse commented bitterly, "lovely. Ask him how he gets to all those other islands he's supposed to be boss of if he's never rescued off this one. Rescued is right! He couldn't manage it on his own, hasn't got the hands for it. —Ask him if he could, just ask him! Voyager! A man who doesn't know a motor from a junk-heap. And feels it in his stomach if he turns an oar in an oarlock more than ninety degrees!—Rain," she finished wrathfully.

"Ouch, I'm hit, I
said
it would pour," Stefanie cried, the first to jump up. She slanted her head to show us all. There, violent in her dazzling cheek, a great clarity of a drop had broken. The ribbon of wetness fled upward into the puzzling caves of her nostrils, indistinguishable from the trail of a tear. "D'you always talk like that?" she challenged, wiping and wiping.

Purse darkly supplied the answer: "Always." But the question was not for him.

"Well I think it's dumb to talk like that It's really dumb. I don't go in for ghosts and dead people in trees and trees with bellybuttons and people belonging to themselves and ambassadors getting to be valets. All that's just stupid. Nothing but a silly bother. Hey, come on, let's get
out
of this mudbath—"

A force of winds pursued the early lone drops. Singly they knocked on leaves, then joined in companies, then made a streaming phalanx for descent. The Purselets tumbled cartons, seized the cereals, abandoned the cans, overturned the kings, and escaped ululating into Duneacres. But William's son followed cautiously after, hobbling in his unlaced shoes; saving his lit cigar in a fist inside his pocket; pecking tunafish from a stick; solitary.

In the dark house my father asked craftily, "She go in for anything at all, this kid?"

"Sports. She goes in for sports. Just give her a ball," I said.

"That's right. Just give me a ball," Stefanie affirmed.

They said they had no ball. They said they had lost it in the water.

"Well d'you know how to play Rumptag? You don't need a ball for Rumptag."

They did not know Rumptag.

"How about Castlemain? You can use practically any old thing for a ball in Castlemain. Anything that rolls."

They did not know Castlemain either.

She proposed to teach it. In seconds she had them organized. Cadres of Purselets drilled before her. Castlemain, it developed, was military. Its rules were deducible—it could not be undertaken without a missile—but its theory, if it had one, was arcane, probably irrational. No ordinary or extraordinary human satisfaction could be recognized as the object of the game. It was like a pessimist's philosophy: an energetic futility concluding in a vacuum.

Accordingly Mohandas K. Gandhi was drafted to be the ball.

"Just get all
round,
" she instructed, and bowled him furiously down a line of boys representing the collective mouth of a cannon. The Castle—this was Harriet Beecher—was immediately and suitably knocked down. The collective mouth of a cannon cheered.

"Stef," William's son called. "Come on. Come on, Stef. Let's go look at the upstairs."

A wing of lightning threw a tender, irregular white feather at the window. The Purses' flashlights surprised the ceiling seraphim. Celestial love turned the pallor of the smiles of these angels to silver: it was as though a fasces of old awarenesses had beaten them into ecstasy, or into a belief in the cognition of chandeliers. Under the black self-rubbings of the unlit chandeliers Purse and Mrs. Purse sat, not close, on my sofa, sunk into the heap of blanket, a mythological pair lost in the early vengeance of middle age. Where I had slept my virgin sleep their pressed and lowered thighs brooded on the principle of sensation. They felt themselves separate, already cooled, already inaccessible, shut away, unremarked, universalized into the unnecessary. They were burned out. In that decaying room the lovers were taking breath after breath in an anticipation of the lubricity of their act. The air was an envelope of secret waiting. And the Purses, flakes of ash, scraps of white soot, were no more than trifles of granules the lovers would find and flick from the inner corners of one another's kissed eyes when they woke from love's sopor: sand from the love-god's slipper. In this room of gathering love the Purses now seemed sacks of sand, sacks of ash; sand and ash weighted them where they leaned, their hands loose and self-forgetful, the white clay of their covered thighs inert. Meanwhile the skins of the lovers were divided by vastnesses, those skins that would grind fiercely, those skins that would seek and seek friction, those skins that would grow metaphysical and gardenlike, those patient ineluctable skins—how divergent they were now! The Purses, bags of sand, yet kept their consciousness of that divergence. They knew how love's confluence would flatten them. Let love connect, and these vessels of ash lose human shape and collapse. Yet love is destined for this place, and the lovers await their moment. The Purses await it too, resigned—they see how at the instant of connection it is all over with them, at the instant of connection they must vanish. A commonplace spell. Nothing remains of the man or the woman—two low uneven heaps perhaps, grainy underfoot, For first lovers, middle age is not. It refuses to be. It is not there. Hence, in the moment of convergence, the disappearance of the Purses. Let no one be astonished. And—God forbid!—let no one go and look for them.

Meanwhile they merely waited. Oblivion was not yet. Meanwhile the skins of the lovers were divided, and by vastnesses. Here was William's son in a soaked shirt, morose, on the piano-bench next to Tilbeck—where else in an absence of movables could he put himself down? And there, far, far over, an immensity away, under the high silent harps, there, all movement, was Stefanie, Stefanie seen in typical rapture of the chase: she was trying to prevent the ball from running back to its mother. The ball's frenum was bleeding.

"It won't happen if you keep your
mouth
closed. All you Lave to do—now look, you want to spoil the game for
everybody
?—sort of bunch up, that's right. See, I'll show you again. Get all round, didn't I tell you?—that's the way, do what I do. Stick your arms out and
punch
when you get there. All right now! Let's get going!—Hey you. Manny? Al? What's-your-name, you. You be the Castle. Not you.
You.
The rest of you be the cannon. O.K., everybody line up now. Fine. Here we go. Pow! Let 'er rip! Bunch
up!
There we are! Watch it now! That's it, that's it! Got 'er! Great, that's great!—¿Watch that cannonball, mister! Use your
foot,
stupid, give it a shove!—Well look, you can't be the ball if you bawl. Oh shut up, Sonny, I didn't say that to be funny. Always cackling. Just for that you have to be the Castle next time. Well / don't see what difference it makes if you've
got
a moat or you haven't. Pussyhead, you'll just die, they're so spooky, he wants to know if he's been de-moated. I swear you're all out of the molasses pot. Just line up now. Try it again."

The accents of Miss Jewett's won them. Strain and worship marked the slabs of their faces. She railed; they adored, turning tenderly black-and-blue, bruised, scraped, lacerated. The dust of decades drizzled and whitened their whiteness; the gumminess of inhabited cobwebs stopped up their noses. Through a respiratory racket, gluey, raspy, they celebrated her conquest. They took her in, they volunteered, for her they assumed everything, they were willing to be bats, mats, ladders, poles, goals, straps, burdens, carriers, walls, balls, subject, object, it, athletic equipment of the most complex and versatile powers. They were hers. (And me they would not have.) She bellowed, yelled, howled, moaned. Oh, her glorious gymnast moans! She moaned like a populous stadium in the bliss of agony, and in return they sacrificed one another to the muscle of her pleasure, and would have lopped off their sibling heads if the mistress of games (so Miss Jewett might have styled her) had commanded it. And she slapping her drenched, heavy, seal-like hair into the void, sent it streaking before and behind her, and followed it the way a hunter follows a trace, or a gleam, or a glimpse, or a stench, and was all the while innocent, and thought she was waiting for the rain to end, and whipped the blood in her innocently, and thought it was exercise and games. But she exercised in preparation for her moment, she waited for her moment to begin.

And then a vibration, not thunder, not the herd of feet, though minute as that delayed and glassy thunder, close as that stampede: a note, two notes, ten notes, fifteen tumbling grim chords.

"Stef! Come on. Come on, Stef. Quit that, cut it out, let's look around, come on," her lover wailed.

She fled the game.

"I didn't know you could play the piano."

"Sure," my father said.

"I mean that's
good.
You're good."

"Sure," my father said.

"You could even do it for a living, you're that good."

"You go in for music?"

She said doubtfully, responsibly, "We went to a concert last week. Bach and all."

A chord that laughed.

"You don't go in for that, hah?"

"My fiancé does, don't you, pussyhead?"

A chord that snickered.

"Dancing's what I'm crazy for. Dance music kills me.
She
had a party, nothing but marches. Like a funeral. Can you play Latin stuff?"

"Mm." He played a layer of Latin stuff.

"Come on, pussyhead, let's go round the floor. Terrific for dancing, all that space—"

"No," pussyhead said.

"Oh come on. He's
great.
"

"Fine, a minute ago you said he was a roach—"

"So what? I like a tango-playing roach."

"Then it's not me you like," Tilbeck said, turning the tango into London Bridge.

"Ooh! Aren't you a riot! Pussyhead, he's a riot."

"Look, do you want to take a look upstairs or not?" William's son said.

"Nothing up there," Mrs. Purse called in a voice like a bit of tissue behind the Zeppelin.

"A library," floated up vacantly from Purse.

"I don't care about any old library. I want to dance," Stefanie said, and stamped. But this was the signal for the Castle to take position. It did. "Oh go away! Fall out! Forget it! Nobody wants the whole pack of you hanging around like that.
I
want to dance."

Instantly the Purselets clamored to be taught to dance.

She capitulated, but not to them. "All right, let's go and
look
at the damn house, what's the difference?"

"If it's a favor never mind. You just go back to Physical Training. Go back to those kids, that's all," William's son said.

"Lovers' quarrel," said Tilbeck, and tinkled out a sigh from the Wedding March.

"Oh pooh, we never fight, spite isn't fight, don't think you're so smart. Cut out playing that. We
came
to look around, why not? This place might have been my fiance's inheritance if his father hadn't gotten divorced. That's all you know about things. C'mon, puss, let's go up. Just get rid of these godawful brats. Scat!" she told the ball. Rebuffed, it ascended its mother's lap. She took the Mahatma up coolly, her eyes on the stairs and the climbing lovers.

"So that's the lawyer's boy?" my father said. "Got himself a looker, hah?"

But I would not answer in that din of Purselets begging tunes. London Bridge rose and fell, and they all came swarming at the mystical sounds. He raised the bridge twice over, and then Three Blind Mice fluttered out, and then A Bicycle Built for Two, and then Home on the Range, and then Clementine—he was glad to be restored to their esteem, and rejoiced in their fickleness. "Defected from the lady athlete, see that?" he said into the disorder of their high-decibel cawing; none of the Purselets could sing.

"Do you need the B flat for any of those?" I asked. "The one that's broken?"

"I use the key of C," he said proudly, "the people's key. Any requests?"

I said: "Rhapsody in Blue."