G.H.
We stand at the edge of a large lake, under a sky of shifting brightness, each of us weighted down with a suitcase. We know it is necessary to cross the lake to get where we want to go; we also know that, given the heavy case which must accompany us, and its fragile contents, a solo attempt to swim the lake is impossible. Our only practical alternative is to seek passage on whatever craft happens to have a berth. On Matthew’s opposite shore I stood—though he was gazing everywhere except at the promontory on which he could clearly see me. He was only trying to get to some knowledge of the Eyrie and its history, was all, and the only boat available was Mrs. Morel.
Who was seated at his dinner table, and possibly possessed of that same knowledge.
About which, therefore, Matthew enquired this evening. All in the line of work.
Mrs. Morel knew all about the Eyrie—hadn’t she been there countless times as a girl? “The Eyrie!” She was so excited by the mention of it that she waved her fork in the air and flung a moist glob of Welsh rarebit against the dining room wall. A little splat, out of her line of sight.
Sarah stared, bit her lip, mumbled an excuse, and fled the table. Matthew heard her sniggling in the kitchen, but his attention remained with Mrs. Morel, who was leaning toward him now, bringing closer her eloquence and faint stink of cat.
“But of course I know all about the Eyrie, Matthew,” she said as the rarebit slid slowly down the wall, leaving a lumpy golden trail behind it. “Poor dear Gardiner and I even talked about going there for our honeymoon, except that he said there were too many people there, so we went to Europe instead. There were even fewer people there then than later. At the hotel, I mean. Before they’d sold it again and made more and smaller rooms. Ralphie Firson still owned it then. All my friends used to go there, summers. But Ralphie got taken to the cleaners over that place, poor thing, quite like the Kestrels who built it, and Monsieur Calvados and the Barlie family who owned it before Ralphie. Yes. There may have been one more owner before Ralphie, and I get quite confused about exactly who came when, after him. But, oh, Matthew, you should have seen the delicious parties we did have there. Silk and perfume, and lovely music drifting over the ocean, and so many lights. We did know how to dance then—there’s nothing like that now. No romance at all, but then I suppose romance is only a matter of how fast you breathe rather than any particular air—I thought the air there perfectly winey, but poor Gardiner thought it smelled of money–he said it wasn’t romance but, um, excitement, dear, that made me giddy.
“Poor dear Gardiner never liked it there; to be perfectly honest, he never liked the people, my friends. He used to say that all those lovely young men walked around as if they had polo mallets up their—the backs of their jackets, I’m sure he meant. He was an artist, after all, dear, and bound to notice things like posture. And besides, coming from his background he really was most naturally uncomfortable and enraged. So we stopped going, and gradually lost track of what happened there soon after we married. Well.
“The people may have been petty, as he said, and the world spinning toward doomsday, as he said, but I always pointed out to him that there was nothing so very evil about a little innocent pleasure, that if the world really was headed toward doomsday and we couldn’t stop it, well, what was the harm, then, in dancing till the end?” Mrs. Morel leaned back in her chair and smiled.
“Yes.” His answer was impatient, the disappointed, meaningless agreement of someone understanding that what he seeks does not exist here. Further: that what he seeks may not exist at all. In the background of Mrs. Morel’s tripping patter he heard a distant, heavy-booted warning that she did not make, that was made by some taciturn soldier of his own honesty and devising: Can’t get there from here, sir, the place ain’t on the map. Due respect, sir, but where exactly d’ya wanta go?
Where, exactly? Had he really expected to march Mrs. Morel toward some bright peak of knowledge concerning the kind of windows that once glimmered in the Eyrie, or the moldings that once gleamed around them?
Architec’eral curiosity, sir? the solider snorted. Hell. Thought maybe we was goin’ to look for that big old guy, gave ya that cuppa tea.
Shut up, dammit! Fall back.
And as quickly as he’d trotted up, the soldier flipped him a grin and fell back. The whole exchange had taken no more than a moment—took place so rapidly, amid such muttered haste and with so much else going on that it was almost as if it never happened at all. He was just impatient. Nothing Mrs. Morel was saying was useful to him at all.
Then Sarah reentered the room, her lashes glistening with laughter, her eyes carefully averted from the rarebit hanging on the wall. A little innocent pleasure, Mrs. Morel had just said, and Matthew was shamed at his inability to share Sarah’s little pleasure, the silly innocence of her hilarity, shamed too that he should mourn the loss of whatever dry scrap of information it was he’d sought, when she in all her supple suppressed laughter passed before him. Dancing till the end. The words swooped around and around in his head as he looked at his wife, became a singsong mocking the difference between them, became, finally, a melody of desire.
“Feeling better?” he asked.
“Was something the matter, dear? Did you choke? How awful!” Mrs. Morel had been so transported by memories of the Eyrie that she was only now returning, to discover that Sarah’d been gone.
Sarah only nodded in response, looking down at her hands so she would not see the wall. “You finished with your dinner, Mrs. M? So why don’t we have coffee in the living room for a change? Matthew, why don’t you and Mrs. M. go in the living room and I’ll can clear by myself, and bring in the coffee in a minute.” He heard her begin snickering again as soon as they left the room.
Prodigious in memory for any sort of public quarrel, especially one involving litigation, by the time Mrs. Morel reached the living room sofa, she was well on her way through a detailed recollection of M. Calvados’ s assorted legal travails.
“Wow. Imagine that.” Matthew nodded blindly and tried to grope his way back to his long-lost point, “But do you remember anything in particular about the place, like the way the rooms were set up, or, or fixtures, layout, room sizes, did you ever go through the entire building?”
“Let me see. I believe all the guest rooms were about the same size, and the room that had been the Kestrels’ had been turned into a private party room. On the second floor, that was. And of course there were servants’ quarters on the fourth. I never went up there, though.” Mrs. Morel gave the young man a look of piercing intelligence. “I feel, dear, that I’m not telling you what you want to know. Do you know what it is you’d like to know, Matthew, or is your curiosity just rather general? Why do you want to know about the Eyrie? Are they going to open it again? What fun!”
“Yes, I don’t know. Just general curiosity, I guess. Tim and I are going to be working on it. Trying to find space for shops and restaurants, you know, take advantage of the tourist trade down there.” Shifting slightly in his chair, “I didn’t have any specific questions, I guess, just wondered what you knew about it.” He’d begun his response as if stumbling against some bulky, unrecognizable confusion that now seemed broken, whisked away, replaced by a sidling craftiness, and a vague fright. “I was down there this morning with Tim and the guy who bought the place.” Pause. “Fact, I got there before they did, wandered around to the ocean side and found some French doors that were open, so I just walked right on in.”
“You don’t mean the French doors off the old ballroom, not that center pair?”
Queasy now, he nodded.
“Well, thank goodness someone finally fixed those. They were forever stuck. I never walked through those doors once in all the years I used to go there. It used to be, only the side doors opened.”
Matthew said nothing. And Sarah, most mercifully, brought in coffee, most mercifully said, “Sorry to interrupt, but if I don’t ask now I’ll forget again. Mrs. M., I got a call today from a man up in Boston, an art historian who’s working on a piece about Gardiner’s paintings. He was asking about one in particular, an early one called Decomposition in Blue. It was in that first big show of Gardiner’s, in New York, but it’s been out of sight for almost fifty years now. You wouldn’t know who first bought it, or where it is now, would you?”
“I most certainly would, dear. My memory’s been of no use to Matthew, here, but I’d be a good bit more befuddled than I think l am if I couldn’t remember who’d bought that one. I did. Dear, yes, it’s in my basement right now.”
“Your basement?”
“Why, yes, dear, my basement. Although I’m quite fond of it—perhaps I’ll bring it up again one day. That painting has a rather interesting story, you know. At the time he did it, Gardiner was young and not yet known, and in great want of money. I had ample finances, and wanted Gardiner. So l bought the painting for an outrageous sum, received his undying gratitude and a signed bill of sale—and then poor dear Gardiner very nearly resold my painting at that show. My painting. Well, Sarah dear, we had a most remarkable tiff over that.” Mrs. Morel’s glasses and three silver chin hairs gleamed merrily in the lamplight, but it was Matthew’s distinct impression that the eyes behind the glasses shone with nothing at all like mirth.
“But it ended very tidily, I must say. I agreed to smooth things over with his would-be buyer, and he agreed to marry me. No, dear, no, no,” she continued to Sarah, who seemed to be wedged between amusement and dismay and struggling to toss out some small conventional denial that of course that wasn’t true, you exaggerate, it wasn’t that way at all. “Not at all necessary. It worked out quite handily, as I said. We each got exactly what we wanted, at the time, and we turned out to be rather convenient for one another. Of course, we didn’t truly like one another, but that just gave it all a certain amount of passion. Quite a bit, sometimes. Yes. I don’t think I’m shocking you? Could I have another cup of that lovely coffee, Sarah?”
Sarah, still wedged, and smiling uncomfortably, poured. It seemed to her that the evening with Mrs. Morel was becoming stranger than usual. Not only was her guest discussing the intimacies of her marriage, but she had also just broken her own (unvoiced) prohibition against staying for a second cup of coffee. “Thank you, dear.” Mrs. Morel, having delivered herself of this tale, leaned back with a contented sigh into the sofa, and glanced about the room—at the paintings and photographs hung against the walls, the books shelved and stacked about, at the faded golds of the old India carpet and the palette of yellows with which Sarah had covered the wildly mismatched furniture.
“I always did like this room. It’s a bit–how shall I say?–shabby, and yet it’s quite cozy. Quite pleasant. Gardiner, poor dear, must have hated it.” Mrs. Morel smiled with satisfaction. “I intend no offense, of course, but then you were never inside our house before he died. That naughty little man insisted I keep all the furniture in the basement, so he wouldn’t have to be bothered with it. Utterly naked, that poor house was. But Gardiner thought furniture terribly bourgeois, so there you are.
“All my wedding pieces, everything my mother gave me, all of it crammed in the basement. And then over the years I’d come across something I liked here and there. Over the course of fifty years one accumulates things, you know. So, after a time I began to rent storage space. And then he was gone, poor dear, and there was no reason for me to be without any longer. And so I had all my little treasures delivered–when was it? Two days after I put him in the ground. Oh, it was quite a project, I admit, and as you’ve seen, I still haven’t quite sorted it all out yet.”
Matthew scrubbed at the back of his head, as if to help his brain absorb the meaning of Mrs. Morel’s words. “You mean Gardiner never knew you had any of that stuff?”
“I don’t know, dear. I certainly didn’t tell him, and he certainly didn’t ask,” she snapped. “It would only have started an argument, and we had so many more interesting things to argue about.” At the recollection of which she smiled, and Matthew, retreating from further comment, continued scrubbing. He glanced at Sarah, who slid from the sofa onto the floor and began sharply readjusting pins in the black twist of her hair. Roll, tuck, jab. She looked up at Mrs. Morel as if she had finally found a small wisp of certainty to cling to. “But there were chairs in his studio.”
“Yes, dear,” Mrs. Morel was utterly unfazed by Sarah’s non sequitur, “Although he always maintained he only sat in them when someone else was around. Because people got so twitchy if he sat on the floor. I always suspected he sat in those chairs sometimes when he was alone, and just wouldn’t admit it.”
“But,” Sarah said, “but,” she lost a pin in her hair and was searching for it, “but where did you sleep, where did you keep your clothes, or, or eat?”
Mrs. Morel smiled and, lifting her teaspoon from her saucer, made a delicate downward gesture with it. A sugary drop of coffee splashed from the teaspoon onto the daffodil yellow of the sofa.
“You mean the floor, you slept and piled your clothes and ate on the floor?” Sarah’s long fingers darted furiously through her hair in search of the missing pin.
Mrs. Morel’s voice was gently chiding. “Gardiner wasn’t a savage, you know, Sarah. We had a bedroll and so forth, and we had a small table he made out of a piece of plywood he set on a few bricks at each corner. And of course, we used the closets.”
Sarah’s hands dropped from her hair; it fell loose down her back as she lowered and shook her head. She did not stand as Mrs. Morel rose to take her leave. Despite her protests that she could most certainly show herself out, Matthew followed her to the door, drove her home, and waited until she was in her house, as if to assure himself she was safely locked away from him.
He reentered the living room shaking his head, and mimicking Mrs. Morel.
“Gardiner wasn’t a savage, you know, dear, he was just run-of-the-mill insane.”
Sarah remained lumped on the floor. “It isn’t funny. I never really thought of them as couple of the year, but I didn’t realize they hated each other so much. To live in an empty house with furniture piled in the basement and junk stored all over the city, and she all the time waiting to put him in the ground so she could spread fifty years of crap all over the house. And he probably knew, too. He must’ve known. The little bastard probably got a big chuckle out of his rich wife being a champion bag lady, a big laugh about her having to squirrel it all away outside a house that belonged to her. And I’ll bet she knew he knew. People know things like that.”
“For God’s sake, sweetheart,” he said, exasperated by the knowledge that he should try to comfort her, but was too disappointed and irritated to try, “It’s only a little weirdness about furniture.” He threw himself down on the sofa, closed his eyes. He didn’t know what was bothering her, but he hoped it wouldn’t take too long. “Come on, honey,” he said as kindly as he could, and reached out for her.
She flinched and turned away. “It isn’t just ‘a little weirdness,’ and it has nothing to do with furniture. My God. To stay together all those years. No wonder he never let anybody in that house—it would’ve been like walking into some explosives factory with a lit match.”
Eyes yearning to close, Matthew shook his head. “Wait a second, Max–you heard her yourself, she said it worked out pretty well, considering everything. Why are you so upset? Because you didn’t know all this before? Because he died while we were out of town, all this happened when you weren’t here? That was almost a year ago, honey; what’s the point in getting upset about it now?”
“I couldn’t very well get upset about it then, could I? I’m upset because it still matters, because she’s living there now with all her junk and her sadness and her triumph, and probably no one can take that away. Oh, forget her.” She flung her arm in a wide arc, as if warding off encroaching despair. “It isn’t her at all, it’s us. I’m upset because you’ve been grouchy and moody ever since that raccoon came into the house, because you’re not sleeping– you can’t go on without sleeping, Matty, no one can, and I know you don’t want me to say anything about it, but I want us to do something, I don’t want us to turn out enemies, like Gardiner and Mrs. M.”
She pulled herself up onto the sofa beside him, fingered the coffee stain Mrs. Morel had left there. Sighed. “It’s everything. Things are miserable at work, everything. I don’t want us to be miserable, too.” And at this, she curled down on her side and her cheek met the coffee stain and she cried, her hair falling over her face so that the sound of her crying seemed to Matthew to come from some remote and hidden place. As if he were already losing her. He slid from the couch to the floor and knelt beside her, his heart pounding. He was lost from her face, couldn’t find any connection with her except the one she had refused before.
And so he ran his finger lightly down her arm; she shivered, but did not pull away. He promised he would get rid of the animal, promised to call animal control, the Humane Society, the nature center, the hardware store, anybody she wanted; he’d forgotten to call before, been so busy, but he would remember this time, he promised. Stroking her arm, “I’m sorry, baby, I’m so sorry.” And began lifting strands of hair from in front of her face, whispering, leaning closer. “There’s got to be a face in there, I was sure I saw a face in there– there it is; I knew it was in there somewhere.”
With her face uncovered, she rolled over on her back and wiped the heels of her hands against the sides of her face. “I don’t think people were meant to cry lying down,” she said, and began to giggle, the hysteria of the early evening making a fleeting encore. “You get tears in your ears.”
“Not a major problem;, you can do something about that.” He began gently to lick away the tears.
“Turn off the lamp. I look so stupid when I cry.”
He turned it off. “You’re not crying anymore, are you?”
“No.”
“Then I guess you don’t look stupid anymore.”
In the dark, she reached out her hand until she touched the pulse in his neck. She rested it there a moment, then let it slip down to the buttons on his shirt.
“That’s good,” she said.
So they solaced themselves on the bright yellow cover of the musty sofa, leaving their own golden stain perilously close to the darker stain left by Mrs. Morel. More solace afterwards in words of love, in apologies mutually offered and accepted with the clasp of salty fingers, in explanations sincerely given that explained nothing, only brushed further into the shadowed room the shadow of each being alone. Solace enough, as much as solace can do. I would little deny the virtue of comfort, only stress what each of them knew, as they gathered their clothes in their arms and went upstairs to bed—the sadness of distance between comfort and cure.
In the turnings of her sleep, in the night beside the crawl space, he heard her mutter, “Can’t walk, no room anywhere, goddamn flowers, can’t see.” A few minutes later she swiped a hand across her face, shook her head and said something that sounded to him like “scratching me.” He looked back at her from the bedroom doorway, wondering if, in her sleep, she heard the animal, knew Matthew was once more missing from their bed.
He wandered around the kitchen, opening and shutting cabinets and drawers as if seeking to discover in one of them the answer to his present dread: that the noise that woke him was not the animal in the crawl space but the scratching of some unidentified thing in his own mind.
Whatever it was, he’d heard it, and the little peace he’d made with Sarah, the little sleep he’d gained, had been broken–he’d heard it shatter when the scratching began. But here, downstairs, the noise and disappointment seemed less cruel, so that, after returning upstairs to feed the animal, after kneeling yet once more at that little door with bowls of food and clucking calls that were met only by darkness and draft, here, in his living room, he was going to stay.
He settled himself on the couch with a dish of strawberry ice cream, the newspaper, and a determination not to be distressed. He’d read, then, read and eat and make himself full and sleepy.
And it was quieter here and warm, and he was outside, on a soft-breezed spring day. He was playing tennis, concentrating on the ball, lobbing it high, back and forth. And somehow he can feel what the ball feels, swinging through the air, is somehow inside the ball, is the ball, the only one in play, the only one on the court. The players are old men with cloudy faces; they whack him back and forth, but their impact on him is without pain. He is sent smooth and high and alone, riding the air endlessly, in unique and perfect arcs: these glorious and good, and he solitary as God. But then other balls come into play–he sees one more game and then another, the air fills quickly now with more and more tennis balls and he is subsumed in a grand bouncing community, a boisterous but harmonious whole of wholes. And he enjoys this dizzy camaraderie, begins to forget he was ever alone. Back and forth, back through the fuzzy nations of the air, forth on the rackets’ gentle thwack. The motion goes on and on until one of the players, someone who’s been thumping him back and back so steadily, so pleasantly, suddenly whacks him hard—so hard that it hurts, so hard that he’s up high—too high, too far—so far that he’s shot right up through gravity, up and up and speedily away from all the others, far and farther so that he sees them dancing, swaying smaller, smaller and smaller.
Except that it’s he, Matthew, he himself who grows smaller and smaller, out there past the invisible shore of gravity and safe return. Now the air around him becomes harsh, uncertain, and he so bruised and buffeted by incomprehensible space winds that he feels himself raw and thinning. Thinning until at last what is left of his covering is rubbed off. And then he is nothing, nothing but the air that was inside of him, a mote of air in empty space.
And once he is only air, he begins to understand: that speck of interstellar dust, off there to his left, that speck is a tennis ball, is in fact the earth, and as it drifts slowly into focus he can see, more and more clearly, the tennis games. Everywhere on earth endless numbers of tennis balls arc, far off to the left there, far away. And he understands that he’s become somehow vast, encompassing all the tennis ball-earth and all of its games, has expanded so vastly that he has come, finally, not to exist at all. Infinite he is, and as inconsequential and alone as any tennis ball fallen lost and mud-covered behind an unpruned shrub.
When he tries to scream that he’s here, goddamn it, he’s still here, there is just enough left of him to understand he no longer has a voice.
He has to wake up, then: it is widely understood that no one can dream his own death.
He sat for some minutes, doing nothing more than trying to slow his breathing, to understand where he is, the time, the meaning of the newspaper spread across his knees and the empty bowl balanced on the arm of the couch. He noticed that he was dressed, and tried to piece together the fabric of the last few hours to discover when, exactly, he’d dressed himself.
So minutely was his attention absorbed in this task that he heard no sound at all issuing from the crawl space, and did not hear, for a moment or two, my timid rapping at the door. And when he did, and came to the door to answer it, he wore the scowl of a Beethoven whose rapture of composition is violated by a servant’s interrupting thump on the floor.
“Yes?” A moment passed before he recognized me.
I apologized for disturbing him, but I had just happened to notice a most interesting article in the newspaper, concerning the Park River project? “The burial of the Park River? I know it’s terribly late to pay a call, but since you live just on the river’s banks I thought you might be interested—”
“Yes, yes, certainly am, great of you to stop by, please, come on in.”
“Thank you, but no,” I said. “I was just out walking, happened to pass by, happened to see your light on. But would you care to join me?”
“Yeah, sure, half a minute, coat and shoes. Be right there.”
As we left, I remarked that one of the chairs I’d spied in his living room reminded me of my favorite chair in the library at Netherwoods, a small armchair in which I’d spent many happy hours reading. He wanted to know all about the library, he said as we reached the corner and the wind lifted a scattering of cool leaves about our ankles—then no, not the library, yet; I’d started on a chronology of Netherwoods, the other morning when we’d met at the Eyrie. The history should unfold in sequence, he said.
“Well, I’ve already told you about the chapel, the oldest part of Netherwoods, at least two walls of which are quite definitely late Norman?”
“Yes, yes, remember that.”
So I continued my description of my ancestral home as best I could, apologizing all the while for my lack of architectural sophistication. “Most of it was laid out in the fourteenth century,” I told him.
“Ah? Terrific,” he said. “You know exactly when?”
I wasn’t terribly sure.
“Never mind, that’s fine. Go on. Please.”
“Well, the Great Hall was the center of the fourteenth-century part of the house, of course, lovely tracery windows, but a horrid draft.”
And so it went, the night, talking about Netherwoods. His itch to know about the house itself was unsoothable, but I begin to think it might be only a symptom of something more serious: walking this clear, star-patterned October night with him, I began to wonder if he is contracting a mild fascination. In the flush of which he wants to know not merely about the house in England or the ancestors who built it but the complete true history of me.
Interesting, most interesting. And certainly rather a turnabout. I hadn’t at all anticipated this, the night I sent the raccoon.
Nor had I anticipated how much I would enjoy his conversation, his interest; so much so that when he invited me to come back to his house for a few minutes to warm myself, I agreed, although, not so very many hours before that, I’d decided that becoming a guest in his house was a dangerous thing to do. I compromised by having only a single cup of tea and a bit of ice cream, staying only long enough for him to finish his glass of beer. We agreed to meet on Monday at noon, and then I left him to return to his night.
Sarah entered the kitchen the next morning with the newspaper under her arm and carrying a tray in which rested the beer glass, the tea cup, and the ice cream bowls gathered from the living room. He looked up at her, then back to his bowl of yogurt and fruit.
“Must’ve been a really bad night,” she said after a slight hesitation, “for you to try drinking tea.”
He rose abruptly from the table to get himself more pineapple juice, moving with the exquisite selfconscious awkwardness of the unpracticed liar. “Stuff’s not as bad as I thought it was. Tea.”
He pulled his hand down the back of his neck, evading her eyes, urging on himself the notion that he hadn’t, exactly, just told his wife a lie.
As for the newspaper article I came to tell him about: it reported that the Park River (at various times and places also known as the Hog River and Little River), the Park River was subject, in certain portions of its length, to serious flooding, and that, in the twentieth century, after catastrophic flooding, several sections of it had already been channeled to control pollution as well as flooding. That the current work was expected be the last. Nothing in the article indicated that the part of the river that flowed behind Matthew and Sarah’s house would be changed in any way at all.
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The Nature of Things 