Part 54 (2/2)
I stated: ”ALL”
”Knowledge she means,” Stefanie said intelligently. ”Anyhow it looks as if your sorrow didn't increaseth. What's this Nick like?”
I said abstractedly, ”Young-”
But this made her scowl. ”I don't like 'em young. How young?”
I was reluctant. ”I guess around forty.”
”Forty! Jesus Christ, I bet you think Methuselah's still in diapers. D'you put yourself to sleep counting wrinkles? I mean aren't men absolutely dry by then?”
William's son said, ”Let it go, Stef.”
”Well why?”-belligerent.
He mused unhappily down at his long feet. ”You're in a gla.s.s house, that's why.”
”Well my goodness! You're not old, and not too young, or anything. You're just right” she crooned, and reached up to pull him to her.
”Not that particular gla.s.s house.”
She was genuinely baffled: ”Well what other one is there?”
He addressed not her but me. ”I know what you think,” he said.
”I think you're brave.”
”G.o.d, how I hate a satirist. G.o.d I hate 'em. Listen, you think I'm not like my father, right? Don't live up to the old family purity. You still think my father's got that old family purity.”
”What gla.s.s house?” Stefanie insisted.
”I told you I wasn't a Christian gentleman. I told you that.”
”Congratulations,” I said, ”on your fall among mortals,” and to the girl, ”Won't they miss you at home?”
”I'm out camping with old Beverly Reveille. Allegedly. (That's law again.) And p.u.s.s.yhead went and told William and his mama a regular b.i.t.c.h of a story. He's getting really good at stories. He's a beautiful liar,” she praised.
”I'm getting more like the old man every day,” he acknowledged.
It was true. Already he seemed domesticated. Obediently, familiarly, he laid his head on the sleek glissade of her lap. She had tamed the buffalo.
”I don't think you're like William at all, whatever anyone else around here says. -I bet your father never went away with your mother before they were married. -Oh.” She bethought herself. ”Is that what you mean by gla.s.s house?”
”Drop it, Stef,” he begged. ”Get your teeth out of it.”
”You and me and her and this Nick forty, fifty years old? I don't see any resemblance.”
”He's young,” I said distinctly. (Obscenity-no, constancy, of the past. The hideous threat of constancy!-A boy of seventeen had made me.) But she was looking wilfully around her. ”Don't apologize, p.u.s.s.yhead. You really don't have to. A secret's a secret. As far's the world's concerned, we might've come just because we're sh.e.l.l-fanciers or something. Or for the sc.r.a.p-metal. Or-I know!-because we're crazy about dense populations-” Her nostrils opened to challenge me. ”I don't care who knows what.”
”Me neither,” William's son grunted, and threw a narrow brown trouser-leg over her taut linen thighs. ”You dared me to it,” he told me. ”Cohabitation without benefit of the law. It has other benefits.”
”It's not as though we weren't engaged,” Stefanie said.
-He had lost the imperial mark.
”Look, while I'm on the subject-”
”I'm on the subject,” William's son interrupted: he pressed his warm weight down, and granules loosened beneath her, sifting, hissing.
”-of engagements I mean, remember that weird man, Governor or somebody, you know, the night we got engaged after your bon voyage thing-”
”McGovern? My mother's editor?”
”That's who. That weird man. Him, the one with all the bedtimes. Does she still keep'm around?”
”He defected to California,” I said.
”He was a weird one though.”-Her program of domestication included a certain playing-off of one bull against another. It was curiously effective. Her fiance seemed calmed, even comfortable. She had trans.m.u.ted rage to a coziness. ”William thinks California's a slum. Anyhow I adore weird men, don't you?”
”She's made an example of me,” William's son said accommodatingly. ”Talk about weird. Head of a cat-”
”Oh come on, p.u.s.s.yhead, it's just affection. Besides I don't care what your head is like”-she stroked it-” 'slong as your legs and stuff are all right. You have such nice legs.”
”You too.” He shut his eyes easefully. The sunlight beat a tune on their intertwinings. I felt, in their company, always obliged to play the part of voyeur. Such a part had I played on the terrace, watching the two of them kiss while the river darkled in ambush below. ”Head of a cat, legs of a human. Centaur in reverse, that's me,” William's son said.
As usual he compelled me to cheap philosophy. ”In the end everything reverses itself,” I vapidly announced, thinking how he had declined. Once she had called him halfway human: it was a clairvoyant celebration of her desire and her skill. -He had lost the imperial mark. He mewed. The tragedy of the halfway human: half power, half victim. The boy in the boat, force and gross potency of prow, bland boasting muscle of child. Or Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck crouching on the beach-the terror of the human head, the vital fork and member machined, made mechanistic. This island turned men from what they seemed to what they were. Plumed helmet shadowed little soft snout of a cat. My grandfather knew well how the place, on its own, would breed a museum: he had his will, though not according to the terms of the trust. I remembered how admirably the centurion had spurned his fiancee's arm, s.h.i.+ning ochroid arch of horn, as we walked forth to the terrace; and the masterfulness of his ”encore un peu” in the roseate circlet of her ear; and then, shutting me and all the universe out, his long peremptory kiss. Now his forehead was in the shade of her chin, and she twiddled in his rough dull hair; it was a weakness, and new in him. Head of a cat. He had abandoned the sneer of the helmeted centurion, keen and glorious, for sensuality. He mewed for her.
”Oh look, never mind reverse, not my p.u.s.s.yhead I hope! I mean I love cat's heads, the way they have their ears all velvety, but I could do without the crawly of their legs and their spooky tail and stuff, thank you,” Stefanie said stoutly, giving out one of those sprays of laughter, like so many flying florets, that had recalled broken-hearted youth to her father-in-law-to-be.
But something in my statement recalled William's son to himself. ”Speaking of reversal-” He flopped lazily erect, pulling torso from torso with exquisite reluctance, as though some fierce sticking plaster, with all their hairs embedded in it, hair of head and leg and p.u.b.erulent niche and cache of arm, had kept them close and dedicated. ”-You know why the Senate moved up the date of those hearings? Very interesting.”
”Interesting like a crutch,” Stefanie said, left alone with her bosom. ”Somebody's crown's loose over there, that's all. Not a real crown,” she explained. ”It's not as though they had a king or anything. If they had a king I could at least stand it. I'm crazy about royalty-”
”The regime needs bolstering,” William's son confirmed.
”-especially queen's clothes. Tiaras kill me.”
”What's that got to do with the hearings?” I asked.
”Government's suddenly in a terrific hurry to get an Amba.s.sador over. They figure a quick application of pomp and ceremony should do the trick. -That's according to a Senator pal of my father's. You know how my father's always crawling around horses' mouths. Trouble over there, dissident elements-”
”Communists,” Stefanie said positively. ”Bomb-throwers.”
”-so now we want to get someone over as' fast as we can.”
I wondered. ”Pomp and ceremony?”-and thought how my mother's l.u.s.t for these would be fulfilled at last.
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