Part 10 (2/2)

Then, around four this afternoon, when the sun was angled just right, I wandered into the seaward guest room- not the one I sleep in, overlooking the driveway circle-and was stunned by a window uniformly loaded, like a fabric pattern, with sunstruck b.u.t.ter-yellow hickory leaves. A window like an upright case of pure unfettered brightness.

I see now too late that I have not paid the world enough attention-not given it enough credit credit. The radio, between the weather and the stock report, releases a strain from Schubert's Drei Klavierstucke Drei Klavierstucke, a melody that keeps repeating, caressing itself in sheer serene joy, and I think of him and Mozart, dying young and yet each pouring out masterpieces to the last, rising higher and higher as their lives fall from them, blessing with their angelic ease the world that has reduced them to misery, to poverty, to the filth and fever and the final bed. My eyes cannot help watering, a sure sign of senility.

Gloria has found herself, through the agency of FedEx and its omnivorous networks, a deerslayer. He comes to the house in a dusty green truck, splotched camouflage-style, and parks in the driveway or else down at the entrance to the dirt road, beyond the mailbox. I shuffled downstairs to meet him. He stood just inside the front door, on the Qum rug. He is a man about my age, a bit smaller and more wiry, but with that same dry flattened gray thinning hair and those same h.o.r.n.y splotchy backs to his hands. His hands tremble from a history of drink or the beginning of Parkinson's. Ht Ht has crowded-together, brownish lower teeth and a lovely gentle voice. There is something holy about him. He talked to me of ”signs,” meaning t.u.r.ds, in the woods, and of laying gossamer-thin blue threads across likely trails in the woods He described to me how a deer, once struck by an arrow, with bed down immediately in a nest of brambles and let itself be approached for the kill, since it does not a.s.sociate the stunning, unhinging thing that has happened to it with human beings; it doesn't have the circuitry to make the connection. This holy man is of the opinion that animals don't feel pain at all as we do. They are of another, virtually pain-free order. He hunts them with a bow and arrow because of the sport-he is, like me, retired; more happily, it would seem: he once climbed poles and read electric meters for a living, which may have encouraged habits of stealth and quick observation-and because he and his wife love venison. I had never heard before of a woman liking venison, but, then, in many ways I am still innocent, especially about women. The two of them carve up the carca.s.s and keep it in their freezer for years, like a couple in a fairytale hut. The archery season begins soon, in early November. He will set up a blind, in a likely spot, and stand motionless in it for hours, beginning at 5:00 a.m. What monk in a cold stone cell could do more to punish himself? He is another of Gloria's saints. Her father was a saint of propriety; this man-named, like her father, John-a nature saint, blending selflessly with the trees, and brush, and rocks. has crowded-together, brownish lower teeth and a lovely gentle voice. There is something holy about him. He talked to me of ”signs,” meaning t.u.r.ds, in the woods, and of laying gossamer-thin blue threads across likely trails in the woods He described to me how a deer, once struck by an arrow, with bed down immediately in a nest of brambles and let itself be approached for the kill, since it does not a.s.sociate the stunning, unhinging thing that has happened to it with human beings; it doesn't have the circuitry to make the connection. This holy man is of the opinion that animals don't feel pain at all as we do. They are of another, virtually pain-free order. He hunts them with a bow and arrow because of the sport-he is, like me, retired; more happily, it would seem: he once climbed poles and read electric meters for a living, which may have encouraged habits of stealth and quick observation-and because he and his wife love venison. I had never heard before of a woman liking venison, but, then, in many ways I am still innocent, especially about women. The two of them carve up the carca.s.s and keep it in their freezer for years, like a couple in a fairytale hut. The archery season begins soon, in early November. He will set up a blind, in a likely spot, and stand motionless in it for hours, beginning at 5:00 a.m. What monk in a cold stone cell could do more to punish himself? He is another of Gloria's saints. Her father was a saint of propriety; this man-named, like her father, John-a nature saint, blending selflessly with the trees, and brush, and rocks.

His existence crowds my universe, diminishes it and me, yet I am curious to see what will forthcome.

Speaking of masculinity, Red and Ken came to visit me, looking sheepish that they have not visited before. But the golf season had been active until a week or so ago, and they filled me in on the results of the Labor Day Weekend Four-Ball, the Fall Mixed Gambol (you had to play with somebody else's wife, a source of endless t.i.tillation), the Senior Men's Champions.h.i.+p (over fifty-five), the Plimpton Super-Seniors (over seventy, named after Ed Plimpton, a Ma.s.s. Amateur Champions.h.i.+p runner-up who had been a member of the club), the Columbus Day Best-Ball, and a new tournament scored by the Stableford system and named in honor of an a.s.sistant pro, Dale MacPhail, who had been killed in the war, obliterated in an Aleutian missile silo.

I sat uneasily in the library with my visitors. Gloria hates it when I leak urine onto the silk-damask-covered seat cus.h.i.+on of my favorite wing chair; she keeps telling me how much the reupholstering will cost. I tried to strike the correct, hostly, jocular note, but Ken, with his silver hair and bristling black eyebrows, kept looking like an airline logo, a kind of human eagle, and falling into a silent stare, just the way on the golf course he will exasperatingly freeze over a putt or short chip. Red had brought his flip phone in his pocket and it kept ringing, so he would withdraw into the hall and murmur about a fish haul in some remote corner of the world-the Seych.e.l.les, say. It was hard for me to believe that I had ever experienced ecstasy in the company of these men.

Yet, after they left, I was moved to walk through the kitchen to the back-hall closet, where I keep my golf clubs, and to open the door. The masculine pungence of sweat-impregnated grips and often-worn leather shoes swept out at me; hundreds of hours of my life had left their redolent film on this equipment. I could smell the rubber inside the b.a.l.l.s and the tough compressed wood of the tees and the marshy rankness of the wet turf I had trod through, especially the turf of the sixth fairway, where the geese all deposit their tubular green s.h.i.+t and the black-sh.e.l.led turtles bask on the rocks among which a sliced drive raises a supple splash. I longed to be back inside the body of the robust ogre whc had left behind these smells.

”So, when do you think?” Ken had said to me at last.

”When what?”

”When will you be back on the links?”

”There's a lotta good golf left in November, Benny boy,” Red contributed.

”December, even, if there's no snow,” said Ken, his aquiline stare softening to a teddy bear's at the childish thought of snow.

”Come on, use your heads,” I said. ”I can just barely walk. Pee keeps bubbling out of me.”

”You don't need to walk,” said Ken. ”We'll all rent carts. All you need to do is swing the club. You tended to swing too hard anyway. Too hard, and too quick. Swing slow, like I do.”

”I always said,” I said, ”the day I can't walk the course is the day I give up the game.”

Red snorted impatiently. ”You can walk next year. Ride the rest of this. Get off your a.s.s, for Chrissake. You look like a dead mackerel.” His phone rang, or rattled, in his s.h.i.+rt pocket. He went out into the hall.” ”Saludos, mi amigo muy caro!” ”Saludos, mi amigo muy caro!” we could hear him shout. we could hear him shout.

It was hard for me to imagine my playing golf next summer. Another year, all those seasonal gears to turn, those heavy heavenly bodies to push into place. ”Who've you been playing with?” I asked Ken.

He blinked and stared straight ahead, as if looking for a vision of those other players on the backs of my uniform Winston Churchill. ”Oh, we've had some nice games with Fred, his pacemaker seems to be getting less loud, and we had Les out for the Columbus Day Best-Ball, he hit the ball real well, he has a new driver with a magnesium head and a gla.s.s shaft, would you believe? Also, some of the younger members-Glenn Caniff and his buddies, you should see Glenn powder that pellet these days, and little Mel Spiegel-man, he doesn't look like he has a muscle in his body, but, wow, when he winds up...”

He trailed off, perhaps noticing the jealousy, the sadness his recital was inflicting upon me. I would be replaced, was was being replaced, and would not even have a tournament named after me. being replaced, and would not even have a tournament named after me.

So when they had disappeared down the driveway in Red's Caravan I paid a memorial visit to my golf closet, and even took out the putter and thought of trying a few strokes on the big blue Tabriz in the living room. But it seemed too much trouble, and to refer to a self I had been quantum-jumped out of, into a new orbit.

When his green truck appears in the driveway-he is scouting the territory, drawing up mental maps-I try to go out and greet the deerslayer. He tells me things about nature I didn't know. One day he pointed out to me the ugly fungi that grow like monstrous tan brains on the lawn. He said, ”Those are called hen-of-the-woods. They grow only in a.s.sociation with oak trees. Very delicious, cut and sliced and sauteed, or put into a spaghetti sauce. Soak it in salt water to get the dirt and insects out. Sometimes you find a salamander or two in there; they don't do any harm. Here.” And with a black-handled pen-knife, the kind that men used to carry in their overall pockets back in Hammond Falls, John cut a tidy cube of white flesh out of the rumpled brown ma.s.s and handed it to me. It was heavier than I had expected, with a pleasant rubbery moisture, like a big art eraser. ”Hen-of-the-woods. Not easy to find, and with all these oaks up here you're surrounded. Tell your missus what I showed you, and she'll be thrilled, I guarantee.”

Is it my impotent hypersensitivity, or do men keep making overtures to my wife? Am I dead already?

But in truth Gloria was disgusted by the idea, and didn't even want the pieces I had nicely sliced, washed, and placed in a bowl, covered by Saran Wrap, in the refrigerator. To her, this piece of nature, grown beyond the realm of her garden, was impudent if not poisonous. I tasted a raw piece-it was bland at first, like a firmer tofu or a coconut meat less sweet and crisp, but then the aftertaste had a caustic kick that stayed with me, even after I washed it down with a gla.s.s of orange juice. ”John says to saute them in a little b.u.t.ter,” I said, but Gloria forbade it; she didn't want her kitchen stunk up. Forbidding comes easier and easier to her. It is becoming her metier.

When I venture outside, the sky rushes down at me through the oaks, which have blanketed the lawn and driveway with their leaves. In the woods and along 128, entirely bare trees are appearing: silvery sea-fans-dead or merely asleep, it is not easy to tell. Naked, they reveal their beseeching, striving shapes. The oak trees reach sideways, and the hickories up and down. The ashes are especially tragic in their cl.u.s.tered end-twigs, like s.n.a.t.c.hing, clutching fingers, and the birches in their windswept huddled curves. The leaves were just a cover-up; these colorless warped skeletons are the truth.

In my seaward view, as the sun nears noon, it transforms the sea into a sheet of unalloyed light, cruel to see. The line of the beach is visible through the trees. The autumn's polychrome sinks toward a brittle rust, broken into a thousand dry facets of reflected sun. My eyes keep going to the charred scar where Mrs. Lubbetts' beach house had been, like a tongue to a missing tooth. In the other direction, at night, the lights of Haskells Crossing come closer through the stripped trees, like the flashlights of a hunting party. The poor Lynn boys, if the metallobioforms had not shredded them, would have been exposed by this time of year like wood lice when a rotten log is overturned.

On Halloween night, a new intensity of cold has swollen the stars overhead. No child comes to the house. It is too far off the beaten track; the driveway is too forbiddingly long. Gloria and I, faintly disconsolate, make ourselves sick by eating the candy corn and Reese's Peanut b.u.t.ter Cups we had laid in. Side by side on the green sofa, we watch a television doc.u.mentary on the Old West. Still photos of vast stony vistas and of impa.s.sive bronze faces: Indian chiefs hounded to a humiliating surrender, after creekside ma.s.sacres and epic marches through Dakota blizzards to a Canadian sanctuary where the distant queen's providence declines to forestall starvation; they are driven back to a bitter treaty with the bearded Great White Father in Was.h.i.+ngton and the barren haven of the reservation. A heap of broken promises, and a pyramidal mountain of the skulls of bison spitefully slaughtered to cut the red man's ground out from under him. Modern descendants of these routed Native Americans are interviewed in living color. With their ethnically correct long black hair and slow professorial voices, they expound their historical grievances expertly but less affectingly than the witness borne by the silent bronze faces which the triumphant republic, in token apology, placed on its coinage and postage stamps. The Sino-American Conflict, it came to me, could be seen as revenge administered by the Mongolian superpower of that Asian continent from which the North American aborigines had crossed the Bering land-bridge.

We went to bed sickeningly awash with candy and guilt. I followed Gloria into the bedroom that was ours and has become hers. Shyly I watched her make her methodical way through the rites of flossing, toothbrus.h.i.+ng, mouthwas.h.i.+ng, and applying face cream. She inserted the gel-loaded plastic cooth-guards with which she keeps her teeth the valuable white that my mother had once, not insincerely, appraised as worth investing in. These plastic insertions, though transparent, push her lips out and give her a speech impediment that arouses me, the fraction of me that can still be aroused. A desolate helpless love, as for a child, came over me as she tidily inserted herself into the bed, preparing, with the uncapping of a small bottle smelling powerfully of banana, to replace the paint on her nails. All these rites, I see, are her way of trying to freeze and defeat time, as mine is the writing of these scattered sad paragraphs. Futile, both exercises, but only in the long run. ”Shall I stay?” I asked.

”Why?”

”Oh, for coziness. Because we both feel bad and embarra.s.sed about the Indians.”

”I do,” she conceded, ”but realistically we just couldn't let them have the entire country to run around in with their bows and arrows.”

”They had learned to use guns. They were trying to learn our ways. Farming, going to church.” I was stalling, saying anything to postpone the moment of our parting.

She had become intent upon her nails. She is her own innermost garden, needing incessant tending. I was intruding upon a precious moment of peaceful concentration; her pale eyebrows were knit in a small frown of unvoiced irritation.

”I need a hug,” I said.

”Ben. I am doing my nails. You're making me make mistakes.”

”I miss us” us” I told her. I told her.

She knew what I meant, but did not look or speak. The tiny brush of chemical solvent made its way around the oval nail of her lefthand ring finger with its slim gold band. What would an interplanetary voyager understand of our little symbolic shackles and their invisible chains?

”I can't do the main thing,” I apologized, ”but-”

”You'll get me and the bed all wet,” she said.

Blus.h.i.+ng, I finished, ”I need to be touched. Somehow that show frightened me. That whole dreadful century, all that imperialism, and now everybody dead-the winners and losers, the cowboys and Indians, North, South, everybody. And no children in costume coming to the house. I was talking to Roberta today; Jennifer was going out trick-or-treating with Keith dressed as a bug, with those caps with bouncy antennae on springs. Irene told me that Olympe and Etienne got the idea of painting their faces white, that was their only disguise. A sort of portent in that, no? A few more years, they'll hate me. The white grandfather.”

”n.o.body hates you,” Gloria said, concentrating downward on her hands. ”Everybody knows you can't help what you are.”

Hands-how I used to love my own hands. At the ages of twelve or thirteen, s.e.xuality just beginning, and narcissism. Lying on my bed in my tiny dormered room in Hammond Falls, with its slant ceiling and Joe Namath poster, I would stare at my hands and flutter my fingers, and slowly twirl them in the dust-spangled air, the creased palms and freckled backs, and dive-bomb with them and soar, flaring one upward like a s.p.a.ce rocket flattening into the stratosphere for its toss to the moon. I would ponder their articulation, their involuntary grace, their jointed sensitivity and prehensile strength. My fingerprints, unique in the world, in all those billions living and dying. When I asked-when that imperious voice enthroned at the back of my skull asked- my hands obediently became little dancing men, or firing pistols, or b.u.t.terflies, or fists. They were always with me, the closest me I could see at will, without a mirror-emissaries my inner monarch would some day send out to grip and mold the world.

”You won't get wet,” I promised Gloria. ”I'll put on a fresh Depends-they're quite well designed, actually. I've been doing the Kegel exercises, I can feel a difference, and sometime soon-”

”Exactly,” Gloria said. ”Sometime soon.” She held her face-s.h.i.+ning with unabsorbed grease and protruding around the mouth like that of a beautiful buck-toothed ape-up to be kissed. Her eyes were shut; a little smile of expectancy on her pale lips antic.i.p.ated my kiss, which descended upon her mouth like a hawk gliding down to take up a songbird or vole in its claws. Her face was a cold lake of grease, smelling medicinal.

”Sometime soon,” she promised, ”we'll do something. It's good you want to; you're getting better. But now go to your room, please. Take a pill if you don't think you can sleep.”

I obeyed. It was pleasant enough in the guest room. The bed sheets were clean and cool, and the odd-angled shape in the far corner of the ceiling had acquired by now a guardian-angel quality, a boxed numen. I fell asleep upon the rumble of the eleven-ten train making the whole house quiver, woke once wet, and woke for good when the Times Times man swerved around the driveway. Dawn had yet to break, but a plump moon in the west bleached the bare November earth the white of a saint's bone, a knuckle or splinter of scapula in its reliquary of chased electrum, burnished at the base by the hungry kisses of the wors.h.i.+pful. man swerved around the driveway. Dawn had yet to break, but a plump moon in the west bleached the bare November earth the white of a saint's bone, a knuckle or splinter of scapula in its reliquary of chased electrum, burnished at the base by the hungry kisses of the wors.h.i.+pful.

v.The Dahlia

THIS PLANET supports but two life-forms- myself, and an immense fungus that has covered all but the stoniest of available land. The brownish, writhing, mounting formations aboveground are but a fraction of its ma.s.s, made up of microscopic hyphae that extend their network in all directions, knotting and interweaving into the mycelium that makes up the thallus, or undifferentiated body, of my immense companion in vitality. It does not speak, or visibly move, but it does undergo change, the telltale mark of an organism. Its protoplasm is in constant motion, streaming into the tips of the newer hyphae, draining from the older, which become vacuolated and turn pulpy and a darker, more velvety brown. Though the fungus is ultimately one substance, consistent and immortal, its hyphae do organize at times into compact ma.s.ses that perform various functions-stromata, for instance, cus.h.i.+onlike forms that bear spores, and rhizoids, anchoring the thallus to the substrate, and septa, which more or less elaborately functior as valves controlling the flow of enzyme-liquefied starches sugars, celluloses, and lignins. Since the fungus possesses no chlorophyll, it depends for nutrition entirely upon the rotting organic matter in the substrate. Whence came this matter? Its particulars are a mystery, but one that certainly testifies to a deep prehistory upon the planet, deeper than the imagination can grasp. The ground beneath my feet is an abysmal well of time.

I move about and eat of the fungus, tearing it with my hands. Its white, tan-skinned, at places freckled flesh is generally bland, sometimes sweet, rarely bitter. When it is bitter, or sour, I spit it out, and rinse my mouth with a cupped handful of the H2O that is mercifully abundant. Thank G.o.d for pure water Thank G.o.d for pure water, I think; but are such thanks tautological, since without water I would not be here to offer them? Life exists amid benign conditions, inevitably, since conditions elsewhere, malign, would never have sp.a.w.ned it.

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