The Moon Pinnace Page 12

  “I’ll tell you all about it,” Dory said, knowing that she couldn’t tell Cynthia all about it, that she was lying. There were no words she would know how to use in telling Cynthia, and Cynthia might not want to know all of it anyway. She might think she did, but the real truth would only separate them. She didn’t think Cynthia would like to have to take the part of the less experienced, the less engaged.

  “Not over the phone, of course,” Cynthia said, going into her “contralto” voice to try to make a joke of her curiosity. “But to get back to your immediate problems, I have a rather doubtful idea and I thought I’d better ask you before I asked him. ‘Him’ being Dibbles. The child is fifteen and rather strong in body if not in mind, and he’s not going to his canoe-paddling and boondoggle-braiding camp this summer. What do you think? Could you use him?”

  This was complicated. If she hired Dibley she would have to hire Debbie, who had asked her if there was a chance for a job. She’d tried to tell Debbie how much work was involved, but of course that didn’t work. “Then I’ll have to ask Debbie, too,” she said.

  “I didn’t think of that,” Cynthia said.

  They were both silent, thinking, and then Dory, with the delinquent feeling, almost like an unexpected yawn, that meant she was trading bother now for trouble later, said, “All right. Maybe it’ll work out. I’ll come and pick you up tomorrow morning.”

  “We can handle it,” Cynthia said. “I’ll let our motley crew know. But are you utterly certain you want to take on Dibbles and Debbie?”

  “Dibley’s all right.” Dibley was tall, bit his fingernails to the moons and was quiet to the point of soundlessness. The word he used most was a sort of “um,” or “ahm,” which could mean many things. It was one of the few words he ever said directly to her, but she felt that he would slowly and steadily do any task he was asked to do. Debbie, for all her protestations of industry and promptitude, was another matter.

  “And Debbie?” Cynthia said.

  “Yes. Oh, well…Lord, I’m too young for all this responsibility. How did I get into this?”

  “The same way you get into everything,” Cynthia said. “Instead of just talking about things, like the rest of us, you roll up your little sleeves and do them. You’re condemned to be busy. All your life you’re going to be busy-busy-busy taking care of slobs.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t blame me. I cannot alter the future, I merely predict it.”

  “Well, if you know what’s going to happen this summer, don’t tell me.

  “Oh, Dory. We all love you and we’ll do the best we can. We’ll have some good times. You’ll see.”

  When they said goodbye, Cynthia’s reassuring voice suddenly gone, she was alone in the old house. She went back to the living room and put the screen in front of the embering fire—red eyes on a pillow of soft ash. Behind her was the wing chair, a presence with its wings like shoulders and its other human parts. From its thronelike hollow something might be looking at her back. When she’d come into the room she hadn’t looked at the chair closely enough, and now it was too late to give that first easy look. She would have to turn.

  There had been a suicide in the house; in 1915 a young girl had drunk lye and died two long weeks later. No one knew why she’d done it. That was what The Leah Free Press said, the yellow clipping in an old ledger in the library. Her name was Betty Salmon, from Cascom, and she’d been a maid. A strange word, “maid.” Maybe the presence behind her was Betty Salmon, haunting the place of her agony. A chill of goose bumps passed over her arms and she turned, because she had to. The chair was empty of all but shadow, but in the shadow, vivid to some sense other than her eyes, was a form she could create in bone, fragmented garments and decay. Why had she always known that in life Betty Salmon was large and somewhat awkward, flushed with faint blue dapplings, those round watermarks that appear and disappear on too pale skin? Had she been seduced and betrayed, and died of shame, no longer a maiden, any death better than life? How horrible her life must have been to her, to drink lye! How stupid to drink lye, she thought, and her breath caught. She mustn’t think that. The ghost girl, if angered, might open her ragged throat and screech at her. Who was she to judge that magnitude of despair?

  She could go home tonight, but she didn’t belong there now. If she were chased home by her own mind it would be a small but permanent shame, never forgotten. She would not live with that. She would have other, more tender visions of poor Betty Salmon, who had been so unhappy and was now all but forgotten, no more a force in this palpable world than a dead mouse or bird.

  14

  John Hearne, in bed in a place called Parthenon Cabins, in Tiresias, New York, has just created Dory, made her up of inner light and shadow, shaded in her pale thighs, changing his creation only toward a greater exactitude. He will make her as complete as he can stand. Her close-together eyes watch him, brown and amber, all of her independent judgments intact in them, except now he makes them change toward an avidity as simple as his own. He doesn’t want to hurry, to waste this commanding pain. He could be with her but he is hundreds of miles away, making her small nipples grow and her arms reach out. As she becomes too complete she narrows to a use and he holds back, hoarding the pain he can lose any moment he chooses. She wants him now, but he waits, having her move and sigh. He will just enter her and then hold back. Against his will her fingers hook in his skin, his creation not obeying at all. She is ivory, and slippery silk, and he plunges and gushes, burning, then slowly cools. He is in New York State, alone in the small cabin, his semen like ice on his chest, and he has used her up. Whatever else is she now? A mist, an address far away, a separate female seen through old glass, doing sad and neutral things.

  15

  Poor Betty Salmon, she thinks, placating a ghost, or in a cowardly way trying to. She can’t really enter Betty’s despair because she has never felt anything like it. She is too practical. She can only come to a place where she can go no farther and has to think: How dumb. Even as she sympathizes she judges. She says out loud in the shadowy vacancy of rooms, “I do feel sorry for you,” and the words hang madly in the silence, no answer seeming the most positive terrible answer.

  Though she has a flashlight she goes by the safety of light switches upstairs to the small room that will be hers this summer, afraid all the way but afraid of the unreal, of nothing, so she goes anyway. “Nothing” has never had the power to stop her from what must be done, only to make her chilly and apprehensive.

  Again she is a mess, so she gathers towels and tack and goes to the bathroom down the hall to take a shower, where she will be deaf and blind for a pseudo-dangerous time in the hissing water. Afterwards, as she washes out her things, she thinks that he wasn’t overrelieved when she told him, but then in what feather-splitting ways does she want to judge his relief? And just how willing is she to think herself the sad used maiden? Not very, though she is sad, and used, and a little frightened.

  16

  He lay in bed in a small enclosure, the moving road still haunting his perspectives; where it had come toward him all day it now wanted to unwind, like a reel of film, so that the gloomy panes of the window moved away from him, as if he were hurtling blindly backwards in space and time. He shut his eyes on the gray lights of the window. The texture of the sheets informed him that he was alive and taut in his skin.

  That day Vermont had flown past him, wooded hills and slants of velvet pasture, houses here and there companionably together in small hollows, then small towns under elms—Vermont in its deprived, conventional beauty. Motion, which always became more insistent than place, bore him on. In New York State he’d crossed the Hudson at Troy, a grimy and energetic city dangerous to him, where he felt invisible to cars, and searched for the eyes of drivers, trying to find recognition or intelligence. But all eyes seemed distracted, as if once removed by the prisms of periscopes, like the eyes of tank commanders.

  Then had come U.S. 20, with its simpler mathematics of spee
d, and long hours to the west until the sun was low and directly in his eyes. The choices and complications of the night had come upon him, and he’d felt shy of ending his speed, as if stopping were to be truly in a foreign place, subject to its rules and silences.

  It seemed that all his life he had played games whose rules were vague to him, like baseball, in which he was never quite certain when a play began and ended, when a base runner could take a lead, tag up, steal a base. So he had always waited and then run faster, right on past those rules that might have helped him, and because of some fatal laziness never did ask, or look them up. There were so many little things, little ignorances born of avoidance.

  The land had begun to roll again, long farmed hills with wooded tops and wide valleys. There had been a glimpse of a lake, silver speckles far away in the glancing sunlight. TIRESIAS, NEW YORK—a small black- and-white sign came by him and soon he was on the main street of a little town, Victorian houses and high elms, a red brick church, ornate high storefronts, two gas stations and a streamlined diner, where he stopped, stiff and tingling in the ankles. He wasn’t hungry, though he felt empty. He thought of treats, food supposedly bad for you, but even that echo of childhood couldn’t cause hunger. He stood next to his motorcycle for a moment, looking up and down the street. The setting sun was dark orange on the old buildings. Soon he felt that he was balanced again in the steadiness of gravity. Lights came on in houses, and the diner was full of white light.

  The Indian Pony creaked as it cooled, and gave off the odors of gasoline and scorched grease. The moving air of the town was fresh from the spring farmland. In the diner he went to the counter and sat on a high stool in the atmosphere of frying that he remembered to have been appetizing, the starved pale short-order cook all elbows and wrists as he scraped and slapped his grill, then brushed a little finger broom of oil over two frankfurters, their sweet-sour odor rising as suddenly as the hiss. The waitress was a thin blond girl wearing an apron as red as her lips, whose sullen face suggested possible beauty if she would ever smile. She must smile sometime, for someone, but not here. The three other diners ate in silence above fading smears of ketchup on white plates.

  When he’d eaten and paid, leaving a tip for the unhappy waitress, he went outside, where it was night and the air was chill. He rode down the main street until the houses were farther apart and the black spaces of country came to the road. On his right a small red neon sign said PARTHENON CABINS. He stopped and put his feet down while he considered this incongruous name. Up a steep driveway was another flickering sign that said OFFICE, and then, as if it had just been placed on the small rise of land by magic, was a pale white edifice that was indeed a tiny Parthenon, set here among cedar trees on its own small Acropolis in Tiresias, New York. Tiresias was a person, though, not a place like Troy or Ithaca or Syracuse. Soon he would remember who Tiresias was, and what he had to do with Athena. It would come back to him. The fragmentary knowledge gave him confidence, so he rode up the steep driveway and stopped next to the red sign. As he dismounted a light came on between the wooden columns of the office portico, and a woman watched him through the window, her face framed exactly in one of the panes. He couldn’t see her face very well, with the inner light at her back, but in her hand she held a stemmed wineglass. Around him, circling into the darkness, were other Parthenons, each with its wooden columns. The woman moved away from the window and opened an ordinary door.

  “Come in,” she said. She was at least in her forties, tall and slim, and wore a white dress that seemed formal, and gold bracelets on her arms. Over the dress was a dark apron, as if she had just left a party to prepare something in her kitchen. Her blond hair was dulled by white, and the flush in her cheeks seemed temporary. Her wineglass was now on a sideboard next to a gallon bottle of sherry.

  “I’d like a cabin for the night,” he said.

  “That you will have, young man,” she said. There was a practiced quality to her voice, as if it had been used much in public, and must charm, but it was a little out of control, a little contralto, as though she had just passed the degree of drunkenness which could be concealed. Formally, with both hands, she motioned him to a chair at a desk and gave him a pen and a registration form. When he had filled out the form and put six dollars on the desk, he stood up to find himself too close to her, just for a moment, before he moved toward the door. He’d had time to look straight into her blue-gray eyes, which seemed crushed, as if they’d lost clarity but not luster. She was nearly his height, and he thought she must have been striking as a girl, before age and perhaps wine had soiled her. No doubt she had fallen upon hard times.

  “Take cabin number one,” she said, handing him a key on a large ring.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “You appeared at my window like a centaur,” she said, smiling and looking down with a youthful shyness that didn’t go with her voice. She was a little surprised, he thought, when she found that her hand held no wineglass. She glanced at the sideboard, where her glass really was, and then knew that he had seen all of this. He hoped that his expression wasn’t in any way judgmental, and then guessed that it wasn’t in any way much of anything, because she decided to let it go. He saw the choices flickering across her attitudes of posture and expression, and then nothing, and with a familiar sense of inadequacy he moved to the door.

  “Good night,” she said. “Sleep well.”

  “Good night,” he answered.

  He pushed his Indian Pony over to Parthenon number one, a centaur unhorsed, feeling that there had been a response he should have made, that he was the drab prisoner of callow apprehension, and that her pride still fluttered indecisively.

  It was after he had taken a shower in the small metal booth, brushed his teeth like a good boy, breathed the blue dust of a cigarette and squashed it out, that Dory appeared asking to be made vivid and more vivid. He slid his body into the clean coarse sheets with her.

  He dreamed that night, fragment after fragment of dream. A car turned directly in front of him and he would have to hit it. He woke up with his hands and legs jumping at the controls—foot brake, hand brake, clutch, but too late. The lady of the Parthenon came to him and she was no longer old, but young and smooth as alabaster. She let her white robe fall from her shoulders and her breasts were full, her nipples red as lipstick, but below her belly she wore the small, tightly carved genitals of a male Greek statue, so it was wrong.

  In the morning he remembered these two dreams, others fading into little pricks of color and feeling, then into the stream of the mostly forgotten. The first seemed obvious enough, but the second was somewhat startling. Was he slightly queer or something? This mama’s boy who’d had no father since he was five? Those neat little balls and the boy penis had been clearly there, and at first hadn’t seemed at all freakish or even unusual. A dream, after all, was clearly a fact. He’d never thought himself queer, and had always tried to put queers off without damaging them or their feelings too much. He decided, finally, that the lady’s age was the taboo that the male genitals signified. Or else she was a god-goddess, willful and vengeful, accusing him of this coded shame. If he could play with Dory Perkins, power containing its inevitable measure of cruelty, perhaps the gods could play with him.

  Tiresias, he now remembered, was blinded by Athena because he came upon her naked at the bath. What we do and what others do to us.

  The morning was heavy with mist, the dark cedars and his motorcycle wet with dew, but the mist would soon burn off. He rode the few blocks back to the center of Tiresias, filled up with gasoline, checked his machine and went to the diner for breakfast. The pretty, sullen young waitress was there again, and though she didn’t smile she recognized him. “You working around here?” she asked.

  “No, just passing through,” he said.

  She shrugged and nodded, resigned to it all.

  Later that day he came to the gray city of Buffalo and rode through busy, dangerously hazy streets with a glimpse of the blue l
ake to the west, a lake so vast it looked like an ocean. He was surprised to find himself surprised that his maps had told the truth, that the blue ink of the map approximated the blue curve of the great lake.

  He traveled the long reaches of the Midwest, lucky in the weather, and made his way safely, though not without an edge of anxiety he would always recall when in the thick unhealthy richness of automobile and diesel exhaust fumes, through the cities of Erie and Cleveland. Out in the country again he took another highway, Route 6, which would let him avoid Toledo and South Bend, and instead pass through less complicated smaller towns with names like Bowling Green, Napoleon, Waterloo and Nappanee. Strange mixtures of history in the heads of founding fathers.

  As he traveled west the sky grew larger and the land stretched. Farmhouses and barns were in the middle of vast fields, unlike New England, where the main road often led between house and barn. The distant farmhouses seemed unfriendly or even imperious in their isolation, like forts.

  But then he would approach a river valley and hills would form again. Maples and oaks would cross the rounded elevations and he might have been in New Hampshire for several miles until the flatness came again. He had the feeling that he had come from a place ancestral to this and was moving forward in time, yet back toward his own past. The soil turned darker and deeper, more alluvial and unstable, as if the houses and barns, and even the business blocks of towns, might sink into the deep earth and have to be built again. Silos, already warped, twisted down into the rich soil.

  He spent a night in Ohio, in a cabin made of painted cement blocks. Above the washbasin was a typed poem.

  Patience Rewarded

  There’s plenty of hot H2O

  The boiler’s in the main house, though,

  So it’s got miles and miles to go!