WAITING FOR YOU. His deep-set eyes were in shadow, unreadable. He had not moved from the table; the bottle of whiskey was by his elbow, the cheese, the bread, their shapes, tastes and textures recognizable and yet no longer reassuring. That at least was familiar, like the taste of metal in her mouth, the other world she knew. Maybe she could be at home here. The door had banged behind her and she had felt the wind on her back. It had been possible to imagine, though she could not have said why, that as that door shut another door opened. This small stone room bigger than it seemed, containing another universe, containing him.
Stephen’s voice, so calm. She thought of the astronauts, the weak beam fired through space, the last contact, and then the dark side of the moon. It was a choice to go there, to travel in this way.
Waiting for you. She looked hard at him. His voice was deep, and somehow—plain. It made a clear sound in her head, like a bell.
Her phone, small and light with its green, glittering single eye, was still in her hand. She bent down and set it carefully on the stone floor, and then she lifted her foot and put her heel against it. Her weight transferred: one clean crack and then the thing came apart under her sole.
Even in the half-light she could see his eyes widen, the tilt of his head, his open mouth. And then he laughed, his head right back, the jut of his Adam’s apple, the hollow at the base of his throat. He took the last dregs of the whiskey into his mouth and set the glass down on the table. Sitting staring at her, and she was standing still there, the link severed. Swung around by gravity into darkness and silence, into the absolute.
He got up. He didn’t take his eyes off her. His gaze, collecting her. He got the dustpan and brush again, with a shrug, as if it were funny, and it was, she was grinning, exhausted suddenly, her body soft but still upright, and he came toward her, kneeling down to sweep the crumbs of plastic away, to chase them over the stone, chips of it and metal and wire, glittering a little in the firelight. Hush, hush, went the brush over the stone, it was like the sound of the sea, and then he touched her calf to make her raise her leg so he could sweep beneath her foot. Standing on one leg. Her bad hand clutched to her chest still, throbbing, though the pain was almost pleasant now, a reminder she was alive.
The patter of the waste into the bin, softer than the sound of the glass had been, although she thought it should have been louder, loud as an alarm. She did not feel afraid.
How many words had she heard over the years? She wondered if it was possible to count. Every a, every of, every this. Pouring through her head, a river of language, listening, she was always listening, always attentive, always waiting for the single word, the chain of words, that would change things, solve the problem. What was the problem? She wouldn’t know until she heard the words. There was no such thing as the same old story. You went to meet the story and the story came to you. Stephen, Stephen. Stephen’s stories were told without words, she hardly understood them although they spoke to her all the same, and there had been nights when she would lie stretched naked on the bed and he would stand over her, his long body swaying like a tree in the wind, the violin under his chin and his eyes closed, playing for her. It was funny, of course it was funny, they laughed, the naked violinist! But it was more than funny too. It was real, this voice of his, complex, comprehensible, hidden. Stephen. His voice, the voice of his mouth in her ear. Everything’s all right? I’m fine. I’m fine.
She had been fine since she was three years old. Of course I’m fine. Your mother died so long ago.
She had closed her eyes. She opened them and there he was in the firelight. Not so much taller than she was. The thick wild hair, nearly white, such a queer color to find on a grown man.
Stephen’s gentle voice, persuasive. Wait for me. I’ll come with you. How she hated him then. It should have been strange to her, the violence of that emotion, but it had been the only word she could find. She was gone already. It was no good.
She had never been in such a place as this. Now she recalled the drive as something that had sucked her forward into a vortex, a maelstrom, a place on the other side. The calm and silence of the vacuum. There was nothing to be afraid of. She was shaking. She was afraid.
He was watching her. Suddenly she wondered if she had been speaking, all her thoughts let out in the air without her knowledge. His blueblack stare as if he heard something she could not. It would have been possible to believe it was her own voice. Why? In this place, this stone place, the sea outside, dropped off the edge of the world. The void. His hand on her calf, the certainty of that. He was just standing there. He did not move.
It was so cold that winter, my father says. He is sitting on the edge of my bed. It’s too late. I can’t sleep. I call him and he comes. His hand in my hair, pulling the comforter over me, holding my hand.
I know it gets cold here, he says. Probably colder. I’m sure it’s colder. But the thing was—that winter, there—well, you couldn’t get warm. Most of the time you couldn’t get warm, anyway, even before that winter came. It’s hard to say why. (When he talks like this, it’s almost like he’s talking to himself I don’t mind. I like it. It means he’ll go on, he’ll forget how late it is. He himself becomes the story, I decide.) You’d stand right by the fire in someone’s house and, sure enough, your front would be warm, your face would be boiling, but the back of you…
It could be the summer, that he’s telling me this story, a summer night and the city’s wet breath is pressing against the glass. The air-conditioning straining against it like sailors manning the pumps against a flood, the ratcheting whirr and hum. Sirens, there are always more sirens in the summer, more fires, more fights, more disturbances making blazes of every description. The river oily outside in the darkness, pouring back the day’s heat into the air. Almost impossible—yet so pleasurable—to imagine the freezing cold, the cold when you can’t get warm, just as he says. What’s that like? I think of stripping off snow boots, ski pants, parka, quick as I can, my cheeks already stained from the warmth off the big brass radiators in the school lobby. My cheeks flushing with the sudden heat as they’d flush with cold outside. The weather at bay. Warmth everywhere. Warmth was the truth, the cold was a lie, or at least, something temporary.
But in the story he tells, the cold is the truth. Your face would be boiling, but the back of you—well, you’d turn and turn like a pig on a spit, just hoping to get every bit of you warm at once! But it was impossible. You’d get dizzy! And we’d both laugh.
He’d found a cheap room at one end of the city, in the west. In a coffee bar he’d seen a little index card, pinned on a board: so much rent, evening meals included. There was an electric fire in the room, he says. I’d never seen one, it seemed like a funny old thing. There was electricity; there was fire; I could see how they were related, but they were not at all the same. So he describes the three glowing bars that threw off as much orange light as they did heat (maybe more light), and they stopped doing either unless you put a coin, and another and another, into the little slot at the side. He didn’t have that many coins.
I know the story so well. There are parts of it I know less well than others: the early parts, when the ship first left him at the dock and he got right on another, a ferry that took him across that crowded channel. Then in another country where, standing by the side of the road with the sour taste of strange bread in his mouth, he stuck out his thumb for a lift. Miles of road, months of travel, so many languages, so many strangers, nearly all of them smiling. Sometimes he says: I could have told them anything. I thought that again and again. Every person I met I could have told a different story about who I was and where I was going. I could have said, I’m from Texas. Or: I’m going to be a doctor. Or: I’m only telling you this, but really, I’m a spy.
I laugh, listening to this. What else could you have said?
Anything. What do you think?
You could have said: I’m a bullfighter. I have a book about bullfights. A book about a bull who won’t fight.
I saw some of those, he said. I don’t think they would have believed me.
What was it like? There is a first time for every question.
The bullfight? Hot. It was like—ancient times. Like gladiators. I tried to like it, but I felt sorry for the bull. That’s why I think they wouldn’t have believed me.
I wonder if I would feel sorry for the bull. I would like to find out.
An astronaut?
His laugh is everything, is the whole shape of him. There were hardly any astronauts then. There aren’t many now, you know that. And again, I’m not sure I would have convinced them.
So you told them the truth?
I guess I did, he says. I told them the truth.
But it is winter I like best, the story of that winter when they met. When he’d come back at last to the country where the ship had first set him ashore, this old place with its bad plumbing, gallons of milky tea and long green walls of ancient hedge. Its great city burned and rebuilt, not once but twice. The country where he’d find her, in the end, his one true love, his wife, my mother.
So, there was my room and there was my job, he says. I didn’t have any money left, so I had to get a job.
I see it all, as he tells her story: the pictures are vivid in my mind although I have never been to the places he speaks of. It doesn’t matter that—when I go there, much later, when I travel to the place he’d traveled to in order to make my own life for my own reasons, certainly they are my own reasons—it doesn’t matter that the pictures have little bearing on reality. The two don’t jar; they make a dialogue with each other, the dialogue between the story and the truth. The same and not the same. The story is always real. The story of his work, the wet cloth in his hand, one day, one winter afternoon, in the thick brown fug that drifts from the endless rolled cigarettes, hangs in the worn carpet, the shiny velvet of the barstools, the little heads of pickled eggs in a big jar, the slick damp surface of the bar.
All the conversations, heard and half heard. How’s it going, Yank? It’s what they called me, he says. A lot of them didn’t have teeth, you know, I noticed that, and then they would admire mine. I wore my scarf indoors. The soles of my shoes were too thin. (All this I can recall, his voice in fragments, the story threaded together like beads.)
It’s the cold I want. The ice piling up on the pavement, thick. No one has the right shoes; nails and leather sliding, sliding, the palm of your naked hand on the ice to break your fall. He is hunching over, he is walking through the ice, the snow, he’s wondering if the pipes have frozen (I’d pour a kettle of water down the toilet, I’d hope that would help, the pipes banging as if there were someone down there trying to get out, it would wake me in the night). He’s laughing now, always laughing about this cold, but then he had chilblains, he started to feel tired all the time, the shivering wore him out, the cold boring into him like dark blue light.
I was walking home, he says. Well, I’d got the bus, I always got the bus, and I never got over climbing to the top, even after weeks had passed, even though the windows were fogged with breath and the frozen city vanished under the mist of all that life, the inhale and exhale of the effort to go on. I was walking home from the bus, it was dark, it got dark so early, the lamplight was yellow and there wasn’t much of it and the place seemed so quiet, like all the city’s noise had frozen too. Funny what you remember. I remember seeing that a dog, I guess, had peed, or it could have been a person, and the pee had just frozen there, this yellow streak a little sunk into the ice. Why do I remember that? Seeing that before I heard her voice.
He is talking to himself. No, I never stop him.
She was standing on the steps. Her legs were blue with the cold. I could hear her. Damn and blast. Damn it all. Fuck.
He says that word. He doesn’t mean to. He realizes what he’s done. But he can’t stop talking to himself.
Sorry, he says. But that’s what she said. No one said it, in those days. They shouldn’t now, of course. His half-smile. A lost smile. Smoothing the comforter again, my hair, holding my hand. The heat outside. The sirens again, wailing another sad tale.
She’d lost her key, he says.
“I am tired,” she said to him. “Yes, I’m tired.” As if they had known each other for years and she had arrived here, the expected guest made to feel at home with whiskey, canned soup and a bandage for her palm, the traditional welcome in this brand-new country. What country? Where he belonged and where she found herself. If she could describe this place and the sensation of being here, it would be as good as describing those electrical storms in her head.
It occurred to her then that she might be having a seizure. Had she ever had one and not known? Not that she was aware of: but then, of course she would not have been aware. A paradox.
Could she have said the seizures were like being pressed against glass? Yes. A glass door. Imprisoned against it, held by a force, unable to step back or forward. Closed off from everything: the trick would be to step through to the glass, the terror was being alone, cut off, even from the familiar carpet beneath her heel, the dishes in the cabinets, the spoons in the sink, the familiar dragged away but left visible, tantalizing, just out of reach. If she could only—if she could only—that was the feeling, the fear, that she could never, never, get there, wherever there was. It was where she most wanted to go. It was where she was most afraid of. Where was it? The taste of it was always the same, the metal taste, no matter where she was, how it struck her.
The taste of this place. She could not express it. She had been pushed through the glass. Finally. She stood on the other side. This stone house, on the other side of the glass.
Or she’d had too much whiskey. Give him nothing. Not even, I’m tired. Too late now.
“Then you should sleep,” he said. “You’ve had a long journey. I have some painkillers, if you like. There’s the sink in the kitchen if you want to wash; the toilet’s round the back. Nothing very grand.”
“I didn’t know if there was a toilet at all,” she said. “Thanks.”
They smiled at the same time. His crooked face. As fair as she was dark; the pale creases at the corners of his eyes where the sunlight could not reach.
“I have a toothbrush in my bag,” she said, and did not move.
“Then you’d better get it,” he said. “Not that I insist you brush your teeth.”
The sense of something tearing, when she rose. Not tearing. Stretching. As if he had been touching her and she had pulled away, but he had not.
One-handed, she dug in her bag for her wash kit. He led her back into the little bare kitchen, hardly a room at all, a cramped stone shunt off the side of the house with another door leading out the back, facing the sea. “That way,” he said, pointing through it. “And there’s some pills over the sink.”
“Thanks,” she said.
By the light of the oil lamp she brushed her teeth. It was complicated. She wanted to keep her left hand still, but it was impossible not to use it at all. She held her tube of toothpaste down on the wooden draining rack by the big stone sink with the side of her hand, pressed and squeezed, hard enough to reawaken the cut. Her heart in her palm, beating. Hard to see in this light, but she thought it had stopped bleeding.
She looked up, out the dirty glass of the window. The day closing its eye, night opening, spreading itself, its rich blue staining the fields, the stones, turning the water into a steely sheet, rippled as chain mail. Night drew the distance between her and her home to even greater lengths. Her home, their home, the place they’d made together, Stephen standing on a chair to change a lightbulb or at long last in the garden, hacking at the rosebush with rusty secateurs and swearing. Then she was not grateful to him, though she should have been. Then he was on tour, then she was alone, then she was glad. Then it was home, only then, when she was there by herself. There was no moment when her acceptance of his love, their life, had become a seal, a closing-off, and yet it had happened. The high price of kindness, exchanging the gift of the self. There she had been, the night before this, a hundred years ago, standing at the clean white sink in her clean bright bathroom, whole, squeezing the tube, moving around the inside of her mouth with her brush, early to bed because of the long journey in the morning, Stephen going from room to room as if he couldn’t settle. He could not. She did not ask, What’s wrong? because she knew.
Love that lengthens, thins.
How many truces until the last truce is reached? If there is truce, has there been war?
She could see her reflection in the glass. The balance of light was changing; suddenly the tilt of the earth meant that the lamp’s flame lit her and gave her back to herself. There was no mirror here (she didn’t think there would be one in the toilet) and it was like looking down into the water to see herself in the window, there. She leaned closer. If she were a stranger looking at herself, what would she have read in her face?
Fear meant no forward movement. Fear was frozen. She was not frozen. She was in motion. Footsteps behind her, Tom in the stone room by the fire, in this house. Her own face told her nothing. She spat into the sink, rinsed her mouth with the water that splashed down hard from the tap, wiped with her sleeve at the window glass, but could see herself no more clearly.
The wind had risen. It batted at her when she opened the plain wooden door that led to another little door, which she opened too. The deep black, the smell of bleach. She went back for the oil lamp, leaving the latches on both doors lifted so she wouldn’t have to manage the lamp and the latches with one hand.
It was cold in this small room. The toilet had an old-fashioned high tank with a chain. She set the lamp on the floor and then began to manage the business of undoing her leather belt, the buttons on her trousers, with one hand, holding the fabric against herself with her left wrist, which didn’t help much. Suddenly she had to pee very badly, the soup, the whiskey, the water. Her jeans were stiff, her legs were trembling, the hairs on her thighs rising against the cloth. Christ. She could manage what had happened so far; she couldn’t manage explaining that she’d wet herself.
There, her jeans around her ankles: she dropped down onto the seat and leaned her forehead into her hand. The floor in here was cement, rough. She lifted her head; she could reach out and touch the wood of the door. A roll of toilet paper hung neatly on it. The toilet paper appeared to be pink, which for some reason amused her. The wood was soft, splintery. This was newer than the rest of the house, at least she thought so, not that she had any experience of thinking about such things. But it can’t have been too new. It must have been here, this toilet (it seemed important, it seemed practical, in stories no one had to use the toilet but real life—real life—was a trip from toilet to toilet), when her mother—
Or it wasn’t here. Her mother was never here. Just because the key came from her mother it didn’t mean—
The size of that particular joke was difficult to conceive of. Not my house. A house. Who cares? A collection of stones and glass, wooden planks and a half-antique john. No place was important. No place held a trace of the dead, not if you couldn’t pull the thread yourself, see the connection, make the link. But if Tom—
Tommy was a piper’s son
he learned to play when he was young
but all the tune that he could play
was over the hills and far away—
She had that song on a tape when she was a girl. The words were nothing, but the tune on the tape had always haunted her, the rise and fall that held the roll of the land in its music. Tommy who was not much use but could do one thing well. A single offering. Over the hills and far away—
Pink toilet paper. She stood up, pulled the chain, hauled up her jeans but gave up on redoing the buttons, letting her sweater hang over the front. The lamp and the dark, the wind outside sluicing around the lantern’s glass, the flame miraculously unperturbed, a little sucked and fluttering from the air that passed over the clear chimney, that’s all. Back in the kitchen, running her hand under the cold water from the tap, the rough bar of cracked white soap.
Exhaustion overcame her and her veins filled with lead. She would think about it in the morning, all of it: she would disappear into this night. She remembered how once, when she was a girl—thirteen—she had gone to France over the summer. It had been arranged she would stay with a family outside a small northern town that had little to recommend it other than that its inhabitants spoke French, and improving her French had been the point of the journey. The family were nice enough—a mother, a father, two children, a girl a year older and a boy a year younger. She was given a bicycle. She could pedal round the narrow, bleak lanes under a plain white sky by herself; she could go get bread in the morning. Sometimes she went with the boy, who would stare at her and rarely spoke. The mother was kind; she was an ambulance driver, and this made every trip in the family car something of an adventure. But what Janet recalled now was the anxiety that never really left her. None of the food (which she was certain was good) tasted of much; there were green beans with olive oil and garlic, there was chicken cooked in wine, but she was afraid, afraid of saying the wrong thing with the wrong words. She didn’t want to be here, she wanted to be home, even though she knew there was nothing to be afraid of.
The only solution she found was darkness. At home, at night, she loved the orange city light spilling through the blinds, the yellow incandescence from the bathroom, the living room, the hall. Her bedroom door wide open, Come in. In this house, in this strange country, her room had a thick wooden door and on the window there were tall wooden shutters that could be closed with an iron latch, they were like doors themselves. They were painted a dull brown and the iron was dull black. When they were closed, and when the door was closed, the room became almost completely dark. Cavernous black. No, not quite: the first night she took the towel they’d left her, rolled it into a terry cloth snake, shoved it down right at the base of the door where a space between the planks and the carpet let in a slice of hallway light. The towel was almost exactly the same width as the door, which was good. Now, black. Her hand in front of her face. Nothing. The relief of it, like being able to disappear. She could have been anywhere. The black could take her away from here, from the strangers, take her home.
Janet brought that black back to herself now as she passed from the kitchen into the single stone room of this place. The iron bed with its chipped white paint, the thin mattress, worn sheet and bedding. Not a single bed, but not a double bed either. All she wanted was to be horizontal.
The oil lamp in her hand, another on the table where Tom was sitting on one of the two chairs. She passed by him. The movement of the air between them. Whether he was watching her or not. No scent of him in the air. Woodsmoke, water, damp, the oil in the lamps.
“I’m going to sleep,” she said. Walking to the bed, sitting on its edge. He did not move. He must be watching her. The windows sheeted with the blue spill of the starlight. There was a wooden table by the bed; she set the lamp on it and sat down. She peered at the flame. “How does it—?” she asked. She touched the glass with her good hand, then drew back from the heat.
He rose and walked toward her and knelt at her feet. Without speaking he reached out for her left foot and swiftly undid the knot in her lace, loosening, loosening down the path of her ankle, the rise of her metatarsal, working off the boot. Her mouth was open and she closed it. She could see the double crown of his pale head as he bent and took off her other boot with the same exactness. His hand just below her calves to hold her still. Her socks were dark green wool.
He didn’t seem to mind the heat of the glass. He lifted the globe, blew the flame, and now the room was nearly in darkness. The light of the fire dying, shadows giving expression to his face, expression she could not really see or could not, at least, believe, as he looked up at her and she looked down at him, two strangers at the edge of the land, two strangers in the shadows of themselves.
He did not wish her goodnight. He simply lifted himself to his feet again and in the meager light began quietly to clear the things from the table and bring them into the kitchen. Janet swung her legs up into the bed, dug them under the covers and lay down on her back with her injured hand crossed over her chest. As soon as she closed her eyes, she slept.
In my dream she is standing now. The white gown that I have never seen before falls along the length of her body, the cloth almost sheer down from the close-worked neck. The grass over her grave is quite smooth, her rising has not disturbed it and now I can see—because she has moved away from where she had been resting—that there is no date on the headstone, no second date, that is. There is her name, and the date of her birth, and the dash. Nothing else. There is yellow lichen spreading into the grooves of the carved letters, over the M and the a of her first name, the t at its end. The lichen almost glows in the queer violet light here, beacons or eyes.
I hand her the baby. I didn’t know there was a baby until I held out my arms toward her and felt the weight of the little body there. The baby is wrapped tight in cloth, like a baby in an old painting. Its legs move in the binding, a maggoty wriggle. I don’t know how old the baby is, except that it is tiny; had I held it against my breast, comforted it, rocked it? I don’t think so. Even in the dream I think that feeling would be inside me, if I had. The baby has dark hair and dark eyes and the eyes are open wide, staring up at the veiled sky, through the shifting crowns of the trees that bow in the cooling wind.
The baby has no mouth. The baby won’t cry. We don’t mind.
When she takes the baby from me we don’t touch, or at least I don’t have the sensation of her skin against mine. Maybe I wouldn’t feel it even if we had. She is not quite smiling, my mother, I would say she looks resigned; everything she has seen since she left me is tied up inside her. She has the beauty of a statue, something prisoned behind the stone, and when I wake I won’t be able to imagine holding her close to me, just as I couldn’t truly have been holding the baby. She takes it, the baby, and holds it, though its curled shape seems no closer to her body. The baby’s mouthless face is turned away from me now, just the furred black crest of its head and her paper hands around its bound back as we begin to walk through the cemetery, but now there are no other stones. It is just a path through sparse trees, although the dead are all around us.
I don’t ask her anything. If I ask the wrong question, she may disappear. I have wanted an oracle, but now that I’m with her I know she’s not that.
Then she says: Here, poor thing. You’re hungry, darling. Darling. I think she must be talking to the baby, but then I realize she is speaking to me. No one has ever called me darling before, at least not so it sounds like this. And she is breaking off bread and handing it to me, white pulpy stuff I would never eat if I had the choice but here there is no choice and it has to be delicious, the hunks of it my mother is breaking off for me and I am swallowing dry. The taste is thinner than air. The loaf of bread is in her arms where the baby was a minute ago, but I am not worried about the baby because I want the bread. The bleached swaddling around the writhing tiny body, the bleached yeasted cloud of the bread turning to nothing inside me.
I turn to look at her. The land is all gone, the trees, the air, I can see nothing but her, nothing. She is so close to me, she is not looking at me, I am looking at her and still the powdery bread is in my mouth, what have I eaten, what has happened? She won’t look at me. She walks and walks and I walk beside her. I see she is weeping, not making any sound. I am thirsty. I stop, I take her shoulders in my hands and I try to lick the tears from her cheeks.