Voices in the Night (11 page)

Invigorated by his rest, Levinson set off on his Saturday stroll along Main, determined to let nothing escape him. He examined the displays in the windows of new stores, observed the redesigned facades of half-familiar buildings. He passed the granite steps and broad glass doors of something called XQuisiCo Enterprises, where he remembered a jeweler’s and a cigar store. At the end of Main he turned onto West Broad and walked to the corner of Maplewood, to see how his construction site was coming along.

It was no longer there. Along the entire length of Maplewood, on both sides, five-story brick apartment complexes with broad balconies rose above new stores shaded by ornamental pear trees. Levinson tried to recall the earlier street—the wooden fence with the opening, an office supply store, Nagel’s Dry Cleaning—but he became uncertain, maybe he was leaving out a building or two, it
wasn’t a street he knew particularly well. He walked along the new Maplewood, checking the shop windows, looking up at a family having lunch on a fourth-floor balcony hung with baskets of flowers; he passed an opening between buildings, which gave a glimpse of a wide courtyard where a clown with painted tears on his white face stood juggling dinner plates in a circle of seated children holding balloons.

At the next street he turned left toward Main. He had a clear view of the new sidewalk café, with its red-fabric railing; next door, workmen were replacing brick with stone, under a sign that read
COMING SOON
. He had a confused sense, as he crossed Main Street, that the stores were no longer the same, that everything had changed again, but surely he was mistaken, an effect of overexcitement in the oppressive afternoon heat.

Tired now, Levinson began to make his way home. When he reached the tree-lined streets at the outskirts of his neighborhood, he realized that he must have made a wrong turn somewhere, for he was passing houses he had never seen before, though some seemed dimly familiar. Maybe it was a street he knew, whose houses had all received new breezeways, gables, porches, add-ons. Or maybe the old houses had all been torn down and replaced with new ones.

He hadn’t gone far when a row of orange-and-white-striped barrels blocked his way. Beyond the barrels, people stood watching something in a yard. It seemed to Levinson that between two houses with adjoining lawns, a paver fed by a dump truck was laying asphalt on a new street, leaving only narrow strips of grass on both sides. Levinson turned back. He found another street, where he spotted a porch that he thought he recognized, though he could no longer be sure. He turned right, passed a half-finished house with walls wrapped in pink insulation, and came to a line of sawhorses stretching across the road. He turned onto another street. From a porch, someone waved. It was old Mr. Gillon, who lived on Levinson’s street, a block from his house.

The heat had exhausted Levinson. His temples throbbed; his forearms glistened. Under familiar branches, unknown housefronts shimmered in the sun. A bike helmet lay sideways on a front lawn, like a gaping mouth. Suddenly his house rose up. Levinson climbed onto the porch, gripping the iron rail. He sank into one of the chairs. His head was hot. Across the street, a large backhoe stood on the front lawn, blocking half of the Mazowskis’ house. In the warm shade, Levinson closed his eyes.

When he opened his eyes, a light rain was falling. Under the dark gray sky, porch lights were on, windows glowed yellow. On the strip of lawn between his sidewalk and the street, a sawhorse sat next to a safety cone. He imagined them coming closer, advancing along his front walk. In the dusky air, the houses across the way reminded him of a childhood trip he’d taken with his parents, to someplace in Arizona or New Mexico. Through the window of his hotel room he had stared out anxiously at the wrong-looking houses, with their strange chimneys, their make-believe doors. Levinson stiffened: the dinner. It was already 7:25. He wouldn’t have time for a shower—just enough time to towel himself down, change his clothes.

Ten minutes later, when Levinson stepped out his front door, the rain had stopped; a crack of pale sky showed through the somber clouds. The streetlights had come on. On his front lawn he saw a length of gleaming steel pipe. Across the street a wire fence ran along the curb, enclosing the front yard and the backhoe. Three men, dark against the evening sky, stood on the roof of the Mazowskis’ house. On the side of the Sandlers’ house rose a two-story scaffold tower that Levinson hadn’t noticed before. A man in a hard hat stood next to it, with his fists on his hips, looking over at him.

Levinson backed his car out of the drive and headed down his block in the direction of Main. The restaurant where he was meeting his friends was on the far side of town, out by the new mall.

At the end of the second block, Levinson’s street was closed off.
Men in hard hats stood bent over jackhammers as they tore up the road. Levinson turned right. Halfway down the street a large truck with two safety cones on its front bumper stood in the way. A man with an orange stripe across his jacket was waving him to the right, where a narrow lane ran between backyards. At the end of the lane, Levinson turned onto a street that felt unfamiliar, though it couldn’t have been far from his house. The sun had dropped beneath the rooflines; against the darkening sky, a crane was lowering something onto a roof.

At the next corner he turned again, but he was no longer certain whether he was heading toward Main or away from it. He passed a large house where a crowd of people were laughing on a wraparound porch. Someone raised a glass, as if to him. In an orange glow of sodium vapor lamps, Levinson kept looking for a street that would lead him to the center of town, but he found himself in an unknown neighborhood, where a stretch of half-built houses gave way to a dark field. Behind a chain-link fence, a tower crane rose up beside an immense frame of steel beams.

Levinson turned around and headed back. It was 7:55. He came to a street of two-story houses with front porches. It seemed to be his own street, though it was hard to tell. At the end of the block, men with lights in their hats were excavating a front yard. Levinson lowered his window. “How do I get to Main?” he shouted. “That way!” one of the men called, waving him to the left. Levinson turned left; in the light of a flickering streetlamp he saw a half-constructed house with roof trusses in place. In the blackness of the next yard he made out a dim foundation covered by floor joists. The street came to an end; an unpaved path led into what appeared to be a forest. A metal sign leaning against a tree read
MEN AT WORK
. As Levinson followed the path, branches scraped sharply against the side of his car. The path widened, began to rise; guardrails appeared; he was on a ramp; all at once Levinson found himself on a six-lane highway,
where ruby taillights rushed away into the distance. On the other side of the divider, yellow headlights came streaming toward him. Under a blue-black sky, Levinson entered the second lane, passed below a sign with a name and exit number he did not recognize, and rode off into the night.

H
and over hand, each foot lifting above the other and pressing against the rough stone, his back tense, his neck arched, the braided hair tightening in his fists: the Prince is strong, but it’s no easy task to make his way up the face of the tower. The adventure excites him. He thrives on obstacles, perils, impediments of every kind. He is filled with such exhilaration that he would cry out for joy, except that his teeth are clenched and his lips stretched wide in a grimace of exertion. He remembers his first glimpse of her: the window high above, the dark figure below, the hair coming down like a shower of fire. Now he’s climbing that burning hair, which, in the summer dusk, in the shadows of the high pines and firs, is not golden, as he always remembers it, but the color of a bale of hay in the shade of a stable. There is danger in the climb, since at any moment he might fall and crack his neck, break his back. And even if his hold is sure, a second danger threatens from the forest: the sudden return of the sorceress, who will see him trying to reach the forbidden place. The Prince welcomes danger, exults in it, for it’s danger that makes him feel his life. In the late dusk the tower lies in darkness, but up above,
where the sky is still pale, the casement window catches the last light. The Prince thinks: If only it could be this way forever!—the pull in his arms, the thrill of the ascent, the scrape of branches against his neck. An owl calls in the forest. The Prince pauses, slaps at an insect, continues climbing. From his upthrust hip, his sword hangs straight down, as if it has stopped suddenly in the act of falling.

As the Prince climbs the tower, the sorceress returns through the forest to her cottage at the edge of the darkening village. The cottage is surrounded by a high wall; the sorceress has no use for neighbors. Inside, she walks past the table and the cupboard and goes at once to her dressing table, where she picks up an oval mirror with an ivory handle. It is always like that: after the tower, the mirror. In the glass she sees her reflection staring at her with a familiar look of revulsion. She glares back with fascinated loathing, with a kind of eager bitterness. She detests the thick eyebrows, the small eyes set too close together, the thrusting ridge of the nose, as if drawn by a village caricaturist sketching a witch. Her lips are a knife-slash, her chin juts out like a knuckle. From a wart in her chin-cleft, three hairs stick out like tubers sprouting from an old potato. Her skin is yellow. Her black hair hangs in her face like bush-branches over a fence. Her herbs, her roots, her medicinal salves, even her spells, which can raise towers out of thin air—all useless. She thrusts the mirror aside. The cruelty is that she has always loved beautiful things. At once she thinks of Rapunzel. And her heart lifts: the golden hair, skin like the down of a swan, the graceful slope of the nose. Rapunzel is safe in the tower, asleep under her coverlet. She will visit her darling when night is done.

In the tower chamber, Rapunzel lies waiting for the Prince. Sometimes she waits by the window, but this evening she is lying on her bed, on the other side of the small room. Her braided hair stretches across the coverlet and over the wooden table to the hook in the ledge. She’s proud of her hair, which is much longer than she is, and comes pouring out of her like rain from the sky, though it takes up a lot of room and can be a nuisance as it drags around the floor picking up dust. Sometimes she wishes she could cut it all off with a sharp snip-snip and watch it lie there nice and dead without it slithering along after her all the time. At sunset, as soon as the sorceress let herself down, Rapunzel drew up the thick braid, waved good night from the window, and stood watching as the sorceress disappeared into the dark trees. Not long after, the Prince appeared in the small clearing at the base of the tower. Rapunzel tied her braid again around the hook in the ledge, then let down her hair hand over hand, as if she were lowering a bucket into a well. When the last handful was over the sill, she returned to the bed and lay down. Even though her braid is tied to a hook, she can feel the tug of the Prince as he climbs. He’s like a boy, her Prince, teasing her by pulling her hair. Through the window she sees the darkening sky. She knows that he loves the difficult climb, but she herself does not love it; she worries every second about the return of the sorceress, she’s afraid that even the slightest movement on her part will cause him to lose his grip and plunge to his death, and she dislikes the perpetual tugging at her scalp. She wishes they could find another way. But the tower has no door, there is no stairway, even the sorceress can’t reach the top without climbing the rope of hair. Of course, there’s the half-finished silk ladder hidden under the mattress, but the thought of it fills her with anxiety. Rapunzel turns her mind to more pleasant things: the moment the Prince
will appear in the window, the leap of her heart, his hand on her face. She can hear the squeak of her hair on the hook, the sound of his foot, far down, scraping against stone.

As the Prince climbs toward the top of the tower, he thinks suddenly of the palace, which lies on the other side of the forest. Rapunzel is so unlike the ladies of the court that he sometimes finds it difficult to account for what draws him to her, night after night. The ladies of the court are so beautiful that they are dangerous to behold. Sometimes a courtier, catching a stray glance, is stricken as by a bite in the throat; such a man sickens with love as with a wasting disease. The Prince, who has never been sick in his life, admires the ladies of the court and is by no means indifferent to their amorous glances. He has had many opportunities for clandestine adventure and, for so young a man, is already an experienced lover. But although there are many varieties of physical loveliness at court, he’s aware of a note of sameness, for the ladies who surround him are remarkable above all for something high and severe in their beauty: the tightness of their pulled-back hair reveals the fine lines of their cheeks and foreheads, the narrowness of their nostrils, the exquisite modeling of their lips. Sometimes a courtier, bored by such abundance of perfection, seeks out the opposite: a coarse-featured peasant girl, a plump merchant’s wife with a crooked tooth. The Prince, too, has had adventures in the country villages and farms, though he looks not for coarseness but for the unexpected burst of beauty in a gesture or a look. Always, in his love adventures, he has felt pleasure and something else: a remoteness, a lack of conviction, as though he were sitting nearby, observing the antics of the young Prince performing a seduction. It is never that way with Rapunzel. It’s as though she has slipped inside him and
moves when he moves. What he sees, when he looks at her, is harder to say. The court ladies would find her wanting in beauty. There is nothing proud and haughty in her face, nothing lofty in the cut of her bones. Sometimes, turning to look at her as she lies beside him, he is startled by something childish and unformed in her features; it’s as if he has never seen her before, doesn’t know what she looks like. At other times, when the Prince is alone and tries to summon her to mind, he can’t see her with any certainty; he sees only what she is not. What he remembers, always, is the first sight of her hair, falling from the tower like fire. She seems to exist only in the realm of dream. Is that why he returns to her, night after night? To assure himself that he isn’t dreaming? And suppose she finds the courage to leave the dream-tower, as he wants her to do. Will she dissolve in the hard light of the sun? The Prince’s thoughts irritate him like gnats; he shakes them away. Reaching up, he grips the hair, lifts a foot and slaps it higher on the wall. He looks up at the evening sky. Somewhere up there, an invisible woman is waiting.

The sorceress, too, is waiting. She is waiting for the long night to begin, so that it can come to an end. In the first light of dawn, she will return to her Rapunzel. She can, at any moment, leave her cottage and make her way through the forest to the tower, but she resists what she recognizes to be no longer a real temptation. After all, she spends the entire day with Rapunzel; the night is for herself. It is better that way. She doesn’t want Rapunzel to tire of her—lately there have been troubling signs—and besides, there are things that need to be done at home. Because she hates the sharp light of the sun, which draws attention to her witch’s face, her demon’s hair, she works in the dark. As soon as the moon is up, she will step outside and tend her
vegetable garden, cut dead twigs from her pear and plum trees, water her shrubs and flowers. Then she will carry her clothes in a basket to the stream that runs along the edge of the village. She will wash her clothes under the moon and carry them home to hang on a line to dry. She will bake bread in the oven for Rapunzel, she will fetch water from the well. Only then will she prepare for bed. In the dark she’ll remove her long black dress and slip on her nightdress, which no one has ever seen. She will lie down in her bitter bed and think of Rapunzel, white and gold in her tower. Standing at her dressing table, the sorceress glances again at the mirror. She reaches for it, snatches away her hand. She begins to pace up and down with her hands behind her back, the top of her body leaning forward, as if she is walking uphill.

As she waits for the Prince to reach the window, Rapunzel feels the sensation she always feels when he’s partway up the tower: she is trapped, she can’t move, she wants to cry out in anguish. She understands that her feeling of helplessness is provoked by the long climb, by her refusal to stir for fear that she’ll cause the Prince to lose his grip, by the continual tugging at her scalp. What’s taking so long? She reminds herself that only during the climb itself does she feel this way. The Prince’s descent takes place swiftly, nothing could be easier, no sooner has he dropped below the sill than he’s standing at the foot of the tower far below, looking up. The sorceress herself climbs the tower as if she’s walking across a room, even though she carries a sack on her back filled with vegetables and bread. Why oh why does the Prince take so long? He must enjoy making her miserable. Or is it possible that he isn’t taking as long as she imagines, that he’s actually rushing up to her like a great wind, and that only the eagerness of her
desire makes his progress seem so slow? Through the open window Rapunzel can see the top of the hook, the little jumps of yanked hair. Will he never arrive?

The window is just above his head, with another pull his face will rise over the sill, but as the Prince grips the window ledge he feels the familiar burst of disappointment. He is disappointed because the climb is about to end, the victory is within reach, already he longs for a new difficulty, a stronger danger—a beast in the forest, an assassin in the chamber. He would like to battle a dragon at the mouth of a cave night after night, as he fights his way to Rapunzel. He is happy of course at the thought that he’ll soon be reunited with his beloved, whom he has imagined exhaustively during the long hours of the tedious day, but he knows that, in the instant of seeing her, he will be startled by the many small ways in which she fails to resemble his memory of her, before the living Rapunzel replaces the imaginary one. As he pulls himself up to the window ledge, he wishes that he were at the bottom of the tower, climbing fiercely toward his beloved.

As the Prince rises above the window ledge, the sorceress pauses in the act of pacing in the dark cottage. Rapunzel has seemed changed lately—or is she only imagining things? Sometimes, when the sorceress looks up from the table in the tower to watch Rapunzel sitting across from her, bent over her needlework, she sees the girl staring off with parted lips. If she asks her what she’s thinking, Rapunzel laughs gaily and replies that she isn’t thinking anything at all. Sometimes the
girl sighs, in the manner of someone releasing an inward pressure. The sorceress, whose unhappiness has sharpened her alertness to signs of discontent, is alarmed by these evidences of a secret life. She speaks gently to Rapunzel, asks her if she is feeling tired, reaches into the pocket of her dress and draws forth a piece of marzipan. The sorceress is well aware that she has placed Rapunzel at the top of an inaccessible tower in the middle of a dark forest, but she also knows that her sole desire is to shield the beautiful girl from the world’s harm. If Rapunzel should become dissatisfied, if she should ever grow restless and unhappy, she would begin to imagine a different life. She would ask questions, open herself up to impossible desires, dream of walking on the ground below. The tower would begin to seem a prison. It is not a prison. It is a refuge, a place of peace. The world, as the sorceress knows deep in her blood, is full of pain. She vows to be more attentive to her daughter, to satisfy Rapunzel’s slightest desire, to watch for the faintest signs of unrest.

Rapunzel watches as the Prince swings gracefully into the chamber, stares at her as if spellbound, and at once turns to unfasten her hair from the hook in the ledge. Everything about the Prince moves her heart, but she is always disappointed by the way he looks at her at the moment when he arrives. He seems bewildered in some way, as if he’s surprised to find her there, at the top of the tower, or as if he can’t quite figure out who exactly she is, this stranger whose hair he has just been climbing. With his back to her he begins pulling up her hair from below, setting the coils of her braid on the table, pulling faster and faster as the slippery heap of hair slides from the table and drops to the floor, where it quivers and shakes like a long animal. When the Prince turns toward her with his hands still holding her braid, as if he
has come to her bearing a gift of her own hair, he no longer wears a look of bafflement but one of tender recognition, and as she rises to meet him she feels her release flowing through her like desire.