Mysteries of Motion Page 17

  She stood up, hearing Lievering return. “Dinner’s ready,” he called up the stairs, and she shuddered. It had been the first thing he’d ever said to her that sounded too ordinary. “Put on your shirt for it,” she’d called back. A sense of what she meant to do rose in her, more in her blood than in her head. He’d come up the stairs, his thick hair slicked back in wet runnels, and had done as she said, buttoning himself up with his slender blue-white hands on which the shadows fell so well. There had been the glory about him of a fine instrument on which tragedy played; people must be excused for adding to it. But that insight came late. At that moment, she simply waited for him to finish, then took his arm with a new intimacy. “I smell,” she said joyously—and told him she would marry him.

  That night they retreated each to a side of the bed in a kind of truce, in which he drowsed. She couldn’t feel single that way, and found she wanted to. On a mat downstairs, she stretched out and slept soundlessly, creeping back before he awoke. Vivie had once said that except for after pregnancy, when all women’s bodies repaired themselves in sleep, most unions were divided into those where it was the woman who slept later, or it was the man. If it was the woman who got up earlier, then that was the time when all the marital poisons festered in her. “Even me with your daddy. Maybe we have such a time the night before, I want to kiss his feet. Maybe I’m up early to set his birthday cake. But when I see him sleeping up to heaven with his face so smug, I just want to press the pillow on him.” Asked what she supposed the men thought if the woman was the lazybones, she’d cackled, “Nothing, the thick creatures. They just go on out.”

  When he woke that morning, she was staring down at him, with his coffee in her hand.

  When he’d drunk it, he ruffled through his hair, which had dried in straight-up patches, said “Comb” to himself, and went to the flight bag. It struck her that he said that every morning. It struck her that he was speaking faster than usual these last days—maybe only to her, as stutterers were said to do with children or members of the family. If this didn’t make her feel closer to him, it must be because she’d been watching him for so long. When he opened the flight bag, the zipper tore all the way down its length.

  He smiled. He didn’t often. “Got this bag in the attic of the boarding-house. Somebody’d carried stones in it.”

  “Or—elephants?”

  She’d thought he would change color or even rant at her; kneeling there naked he’d merely retracted backward at the bent nape, the stomach, as if a force at his shoulder had tapped him, saying “Detained.” He dropped the bag. “You looked. Inside.”

  “That’s the way I am.” She straightened herself.

  He stood up to her, nodding slowly. She meant he ought to know that about her beforehand. He saw that. Oh, there was never any lack of understanding between them. “You needn’t have troubled. To say.”

  “Who tore the pages out?” She’d waited all night to ask. Still hoping it wasn’t him.

  “I was in hospital. After the book came out. I did. Under the influence of a drug.” He shrugged nakedly. “They thought it best.”

  She fought off an impulse to draw a shawl around those shoulders. They didn’t have a shawl between them, anyway. In a way both of them had wanted to be minimal, to live it. He giving away his tiny salary to people on the boardinghouse street who needed it more than he did. She always wanting to move on. Both of them needing the drama of it.

  “Who’d printed it?” she said sadly.

  “A fly-by-night printer in Cornwall. Friend of a girl in the hospital. He did it for free. Hipped on type, he was. Not on the material.” He brushed his palms together in that ridding motion. It would have been the last copy he’d had. No need to ask.

  “A wonderful idea. The poems must have been.” By now she thought she knew enough of his mind to apprehend in part what they might have been. She could hear the elephant, plodding down the fragile sonnet structure, thudding through that foliage. The behemoth, breaking down the words that held it up.

  “I wasn’t as young as you are.” He snarled it. “When I wrote them.”

  “Why’d you keep the cover?”

  “To remind me. Not to try again.”

  Her breath had indrawn itself in a s-f-f-f-f of horror. “A word is a wing. You taught us that yourself.” In those classes where he’d taught them to handle other men and women’s poetry the way children were taught to respect knives.

  But it was as she’d suspected. He didn’t believe that anymore. How could one—unless one believed in it also for oneself?

  He was watching her, sadly. “Good teachers get—such strict listeners.” He twisted her face toward him, her head still bent sick, shook her until her jaw clicked. “Listen, Veronica.” No more Ronchen then, grunted from the deeps of sexual energy, whispered lightly at its end. She saw where that long held-back energy—eruptive, ritual—must have come from. Brooding, she scarcely heard at first what she would hear forever. “We make nets of language. But the blood always comes through.”

  She went all shivering then, so that he had to sit her down on the bed, which sank beneath them, those knees of hers sticking up akimbo, so that she could almost glimpse between them their pink root. Perversely remembering when she had tried to stanch her first menses with spider web. Having heard that it worked on wounds.

  “What is it? Are you ill?” He was chafing her temples, her wrists.

  Her mouth wouldn’t work, but only because it was so full of him, the entire gist of him, though she hadn’t the scope yet to say. How she had all his reasons now. With such a fall from belief as his, who wouldn’t be beset by infinite discriminations? Given that head of his at birth, dragging it down to such a minimum, who wouldn’t own that pained beauty-medal of a face? He didn’t despise as he thought he did, not enough for action. He merely despaired. He was in despair over the language he had been committed to by temperament—since for him, no language could compete with his early events.

  She hadn’t been as wrenched for him then, though, as she was now, meanwhile crossing her fingers in holy spell against such a fall happening to her. He’d had language sufficient to the day, to his days. What he hadn’t dared was to push the language to meet the life, which meant pushing on the life—to meet and pass those early events.

  She’d taken his face in her hands then, kissing him for those as she hadn’t before; it wasn’t necessary to know them in detail before believing. How heavily it weighed, to know a person so; would she ever want to again? Even the knowing might infect.

  But she had a discrimination of her own, to keep her strong. To be hoarded, never told, except in its own fashion. No, Lievering. We net the language for the blood to come through. I will. She began to shiver again.

  “I made too much love to you,” he said anxiously. “You’re frailer than you look. No? What then?”

  She stared unfocused at the patch of white his shorts had shaped between the navel and thigh. You’re so white, yes. How we ever going to get to you? But who would ever believe that wasn’t the real contest between them?

  He was persisting. “Tell me what, then? Is it that I mention blood?”

  Poor wolf, she said under her breath. Poor wolf of the camp fringes, do these still shine so brilliant through your child-dusk? Let her fix his face in recollection, alive—and asleep. A man to remember, only. With him—because of the camp, or because of what he’d made of it—one could never know for sure which was character in him and which experience. Nor could he.

  She shook her head. “It’s the morning sickness,” she said.

  When she saw what he made of that, she began to laugh raucously.

  “So now you do what I wish,” he said. Meaning, marry him.

  They’d had no further talk, having to dress hurriedly. The tall, makeshift scarecrow of a boy who was the group’s only missionary had enthusiastically arrived. At night he recruited the love lanes; once she’d joked to Lievering that he could be their minister. “Jimmy Odgers here,
” he said to each couple approached. He called that up to them now, the two of them framed there in the crude window hole. “She made up her mind yet? I took me a chance.” Her head and Lievering’s, stuck there like Punch and Judy, had looked down on him. Hers wouldn’t turn to look at Lievering’s. So that’s where he’d walked to. So that’s the way he is, she thought. But he doesn’t say.

  Downstairs, lethargy took charge of her. No more talk. “They married to avoid talk,” a Bajan neighbor woman had once said to Vivie of a local pair. Mr. Jimmy Odgers chattered on, but that wasn’t talk.

  When they were in his truck, the woman who’d seen to their wants came from behind the house and stood by its vine. When the truck started up she yelled something at them, fluent if not melodious. “What’s she saying?” Lievering had said, through the engine racket. “I paid her.” As the car wheeled around, the woman, standing stolidly, yelled it again, shaking the vine. A scab on her lip made her look as if she had two mouths.

  “Good-bye—” Lievering called out. “If that’s what she’s saying.”

  Receding from them, the woman brushed her palms in riddance. Veronica, stashed in the open truck between the two men, leaned across Lievering and out the side, aping her. “Whore,” she said, leaning back. “That’s what she said. Didn’t she, Jimmy?” She glanced at Wolf Lievering beside her. “Don’t know what she called him.”

  Red-faced, their driver hadn’t answered. Born a Mormon, as he’d already told them, later serving with a Catholic mission in Africa and now a part-time faculty member of a Methodist seminary in Tennessee, his ear tips were always red anyway, as if constantly tweaked by God in three forms. Bumping along the road back to the mess hall, she’d learned where the wedding would be. What she’d thrown up as a tease Lievering had tentatively acted upon, speaking privately to the missionary who had then, he now confessed, “Blowed it up to a nice big ball. People here need somepin like that.”

  She saw from Lievering’s profile that he was appalled. Or maybe was pressing back what she was reassuring herself of—that Mr. Jimmy Odgers was still a minister in embryo. To be fair this was a fact that Jimmy himself had repressed. Still there’d been a specious uncertainty in that truck, rising from all three of them. When they had a flat tire Lievering didn’t help.

  By the time they reached the mess hall she’d decided to go through with it. If she was pregnant it was merely with a growing sense of herself and of the rhythm she meant to follow. She entered the hall, whose dirt floor and grub odor and general laissez-faire gave it the air of some zeppelin-sized, Eden-destined paper bag which had burst its sides, scattering garden-fresh youth, three-day-old opinions, and all this could lead to. Portals, visionary but apprehended, rose up ahead, mistily waiting for her and the others, sooner or later. She knew only that those categories one was expected to live by must have a thousand names ever freshly reincarnating—and that she would not comply.

  Lievering and she, they learned, were to be married out on the fields, and as arranged by Odgers and delighted mass sentiment, on the very patch she and Lievering had worked. The marriage was to take place in the presence of everybody, which here was felt to be presence indeed. When, left alone, she searched her straw bag and this time tore open Vivie’s star-papered going-away gift, her eyes smarted. Back home there was a woman on an island near theirs who made huge-sleeved blouses pieced of tiny, fluttering, leaf-sized parts, each attached at one point only. Brides queued up to buy them. Vivie had offered her two, each folded like a parachute, the one red-black, the other tawny and blue—vine and sky. She chose that one.

  From the crowd of watching girls dressed in a range of work outfits dramatizing what they were here as, one girl, in khaki and clogs but capless and with a crinkled waterfall of hair, tore open packets for her to blot the road dust from her face. Getting into the spirit, another in bandanna and thongs from which swollen toes protruded brought her a bucket for her feet. She wiped her sandals herself. She always had spare jeans; no one else’s ever fitted her. She let someone squirt perfume. Except in those cuddles of self-savoring which kids had, or for Lievering and the metaphor, she didn’t really want to smell. It was then that the plumpie girl had sneaked up and hot-whispered her advice—to be a giver. Three glee-club-trained sisters then opened their mouths wide as fledglings and serenaded her in one angelic voice. Through all this she wondered what the men might be doing to Lievering. When she was ready she was offered a wreath crown, but refused.

  When she saw him approaching her over the sharp stubble in the center of a ragtag wedding procession like her own, tenderness locked her throat. At that distance, away from his intensity and from her so recent enfoldment by it, she saw again how the beautiful head was too large for him, the rest of him a degree too small. He wore the shirt he had washed, open at the throat, and his town pants. The wreath they must have offered him was around the preacher Odgers’s neck. No one could make Lievering do what he didn’t want to—at least not in the small things. What he did want, that was another matter. He’d succumbed to this ritual somewhat as she had, because it coincided with rites of his own. But she would never have to pray to remember him with dignity. As he came to a halt beside her there was a tinge of irony on the near corner of his mouth. She could admit that there must be a number of categories he had escaped.

  After this wedding there’d be one more. She closed her eyes for it. Odgers, maybe from unease, married them—or made his pantomime—hurriedly. “Now, do you take—” he said suddenly, from a mixture of verse and admonition, saw that bride and groom, each sunk in reverie or willfulness, might never respond, and with a mutter went on without. “By the authority vested in you—” Odgers said, “I pronounce you man and wife.” Lievering had no ring but gave her the locket. She gave him nothing, as brides were allowed to do. And as in her heart prepared. For a minute there seemed to rise an awful brass admixture of song sadly falling off, and squawked instrument. Then much too many cheers. Someone snapping pictures, hands high. Oh Vivie, you won’t want those.

  Then she saw that the whole field had turned from her and Lievering toward a small cortege circling the fields—a soldier on motorcycle, followed by a soldier-driven jeep with a sole occupant, a bearded man in the same khaki cap as those the camp issued, backed up by a very small, monotonously tootling band. It was the Agenda, with Music.

  A wave of people melted past the two of them and toward it, like movie extras driven by a blow-horn. She was in luck. She reached out and gave the stunned Jimmy Odgers a push. “Time to pray. Why not to him? Castro. Looks like a good guy. Go on. Git.” He seemed guiltily glad to, not waiting to be thanked. “Why—” she quavered, watching him spring in a wide circle, dipping elbow on the turns before he took off straight, “he’s high on something. Don’t believe he is a preacher. Want to bet he’s not even ordained?” Then she was alone, with Lievering.

  “Good-bye,” she said. “I don’t ever want to stop,” she’d said. “Not like you imagine it. But we both got our wish.”

  Then she ran, hobbling and slithering her way across a field that was like a patchwork of good intentions, though in one corner a stand of cane was still uncut. Four of the students, one morning rising earlier than the rest to join their disgruntlement over “conditions,” had been found chanting “Stand-out, Sta-and-out,” against “bosses” who they couldn’t quite be persuaded were themselves, or their representatives. It had been a curious political fact that the four had been among the most physically conservative in the camp as well as among the richest—as one of the loose-smiling Bridgetown thugs had said, “People not used to wearing each other’s socks.” Credit-card radicals, who’d wished to keep the revolution as tidy as themselves, and as conventionally rich.

  “Save me from organized protest meeting, rump or any other kind,” Tom Gilpin would one day say. “If you can protest only by shooting off your mouth en masse or standing on some sort of regulation, you’re no use to us. We want people who are their own protest, in every cell. People
who’re surreal naturally—and I don’t mean freaks. Powerful mutants, who will never want to be the main drag. But who in spite of themselves may end up being it.” That’s what Tom’s ambition had been then, though ambition was a dirty word with him. It had been appropriate that back there, hacking her way across a field and away from her own false wedding, she’d been about to meet him for the first time. The man who, as he sometimes told her, was the asexual influence in her life. Who comported himself as if he meant to be that in everybody’s.

  When she reached the dirt road which led to the mess hall, she bent forward to a wind though there was none, stretching into a long, chopping stride; these legs of hers could run. They breezed her right into the middle of the hall before she could rein up at the sight of the two boys she thought of as thugs—punks wasn’t quite the word either—going through a row of people’s bags.

  “Just lookin’—” the tall one named Marcy had said lazily in the American rock-singer talk they both affected. “Like the ladies in mah brother’s shop.” On the island his brother ran a smart boutique. “We didn’t take nothin’,” the fatter one, the sidekick, said. The first one clicked his teeth. “Tuh—should have done. For the symmetry.” If they had, where would they put it, wearing those scroungy T-shirts and sharp, pocketless jeans? “You looking for dope?” she’d said. The sidekick had giggled, teetering. He opened his mouth wide and took out a bridge made of four or five teeth. “Got it in Amsterdam.” In places it was crudely hollow. “Leaks a little,” he said happily. “Look over here,” Marcy said, pointing to her bag. “Miss anything?”

  Against her will, she searched. “No. Yes.” Vivie’s other blouse. “Look down the line, missy.” She didn’t want to. The blouse, tucked well under, was in the third bag down, belonging to the plump girl so interested in her wedding night. “Imagine—” the other boy said, popping in his bridge. “Pinching your going-away outfit.” Marcy was rescattering all the duffel bags, backpacks and suitcases in canny disorder. Spies, were they? And for whom?