A Garden of Earthly Delights (26 page)

When she went back inside, Mr. Mulch was waiting for her. He sat most of the day in the back room, drinking, and came out into the alley to watch the Negro boys unload things from trucks that stopped a few times a month. He wore a white shirt and a tie and showed by his dress that he was different from other Tintern people; he had a malleable reddened face. “How much did he spend?” he said. Clara smelled about him the odor of the store itself— something sour and unused. “Five cents,” Clara said, smirking. “Five cents,” he repeated. He almost smiled. “That goddamn cheap bastard. That dirty son of a bitch of a cheap bastard. Five cents.” “Maybe he never came in to buy anything,” Clara said. He seemed to catch her words as if they were a trifling little blow directed at him, and he jerked back his head in a gesture of mock surprise and mock humor. “Then what did he come in here for?” he said.

“I'm thinking of how quiet it is.”

“That isn't anything to think about.”

“I can hear it, all this quiet. I think about it a lot.”

They were standing on a bridge, looking down at the river. It was July now and the river had begun to sink. Clara leaned against the rust-flecked railing and stretched out her arms as if appealing to something—the river disappointed her with its slow-moving water, its film of sleek opaque filth. Its banks were far apart but the river itself had dwindled to a low, flat channel in the center of rocks that looked made of some white, startling substance that would flake off at the touch, like chalk.

“It's real quiet here,” Clara said. “It's like this all over but you don't hear it.”

Lowry kicked some pebbles off the bridge. Not much of a splash: the pebbles just disappeared into the water. Clara waited for him to speak. But it was like waiting for that splash—the more you listened for it, the less you heard.

On both sides of the river the banks lifted to a twisted jumble of trees and bushes. These banks eased in to obscure the river's path, twisting and writhing out of sight. “Rivers go like this,” Lowry explained, making a line in the dust with a stick. “First they go straight like this; they run fast. Then they get slow and go like a snake. They pick up dirt and junk on the corners then and slow down. So they meander more. They meander bigger and fatter until this happens.” And he surprised her by running a straight line through the very center of the curves, jabbing the stick in the dust hard to show the first river back again—the straight line.

“Is that the truth, honest?” Clara said lazily.

Lowry tossed the stick over the side of the bridge. It seemed to fall slowly and hit the surface of the water without a sound. They watched it float under the bridge and away.

“This river is dirty,” Clara said. “By the other side, there, it's awful dirty. People let all kinds of junk drain into it, sewer junk, Sonya told me. That makes me sick.”

The heat seemed to flatten out against them. Clara shook her hair out of her eyes. This silence of Lowry's was just like the silence she always listened to and so it did not surprise her. She pressed her fingers against her eyes and made the sunlight do tricks for her; she'd done that on the buses and trucks they had taken, years ago. If a person wanted something bad enough, Clara thought, he should get it. If he wished for something hard enough, he should get it. She took away her hands and the placid river returned, unchanged. She looked up at Lowry, who was leaning back against the railing; he smiled. His hair had bleached even lighter in the summer sun. His face was tanned and his eyes were a mild thoughtful blue; he looked as if he had two parts to him, the outside part and the inside part that wanted to get out. She supposed that when he was anywhere his eyes showed he was thinking of another place, and when he was with anyone he would be thinking of someone else. His trouble was never to be where he wanted to be.

“You don't have much to say, do you?” she said.

“Might be I don't.”

“What did you do with yourself since you came out here last?”

“Oh, one thing or another.”

“You're awful secret.”

“You're awful nosy, little girl,” he said. His smile showed that he was using only the top part of himself with her. Clara would have liked to seize him and stare into his eyes, deep into his eyes, to locate the kernel at the very center that was Lowry—why was he such a mystery? Or was he an ordinary man, the way all men would be if they were free and weren't held down? She could half close her eyes and imagine herself moving toward him invisibly, trying to embrace him in an invisible embrace, and Lowry dancing forever out of her grasp.

“Do me a favor?” Clara said.

“What?”

“Look at me serious. Say my name serious.”

He was lighting a cigarette. He stopped sucking at it and said, “O.K. Clara.”

“Is that serious as you can get?”

“Clara. Clara,” he said, the end of his breath making the word droop suddenly into a seriousness that was dismal. It struck Clara that her name, which was the sound for her in people's minds, had nothing to do with her at all and was really a stupid name.

“I wish I was someone else. I mean, had another name,” Clara said. “Like Marguerite.”

“Why that?”

“I heard that name … somewhere.”

Each time Lowry came to visit she had to worry about his leaving too soon. It was a tugging thing, the way he would get restless and be ready to leave even before he had thought of it. Clara always thought of it, dreading it, and ideas came to her of ways to put off that time as long as possible. She might have been in a contest only with herself. “Let's go walk down there,” she said. He was agreeable. His car was parked off the bridge and up on the side of the road, a new car. They passed it without comment and climbed down the embankment. A few feet from the bottom, Clara jumped. A shock went through her when she landed flat on her feet. It did not hurt: the shock was that she had so solid, so responsive a body and that the earth had pressed back so hard against it, yielding up nothing. Lowry came slipping and sliding down, holding the burning
cigarette in his hand as if he were a city person awkward in this business but not giving in to it.

They headed for the riverbank. In July there were many kinds of insects, so Clara stepped carefully through the weeds. “It's real pretty here,” she said shyly. “Nicer than up on the bridge.” She looked over to where they had been standing and could not imagine herself and Lowry up there together. “Don't you like how peaceful the river is, Lowry?”

“It's nice.”

As if to ruin its peacefulness, he picked up a flat stone and threw it sideways. The stone skipped three, four times, then sank.

“Did you do that when you were a little boy?”

“Sure.”

She smiled to think of it, even though she could not quite believe he had ever been a little boy. She picked up a flat stone and tried to throw it as he did, slanting her wrist sideways, but it sank with a gulping splash. “Girls can't do that,” Lowry said. He walked on and she followed him. Down by the riverbank there was a path fishermen used. They followed it along and walked away from the bridge. Clara heard, past the noises of the insects, the silence that covered this whole countryside. She felt as if she were walking through it and disturbing it.

“Don't you ever get lonely, Lowry?”

“Nope.”

“Do you do a lot of thinking?”

“Nope.”

She laughed and slid her arm through his. “Can't you say anything but nope?”

“I don't think much,” Lowry said seriously, “but there are pieces of things in my mind. Broken pieces. They buzz around like wasps and bother me.”

Clara glanced up at him as if he'd admitted something too intimate.

“But I don't worry.”

“I don't either,” said Clara.

He laughed and she pressed herself against him. “Look,” she said, “can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“How come you're here with me right now?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

Clara ran from him. She jumped down into the creek bed, where it was dry. “Look at this, Lowry,” she said. It was part of an old barbed-wire fence, lying frigid and coated over with bleached grass. Lowry's look said clearly, So what? Clara said, “You would wonder how things get where they are. This thing here—think where it used to be. Over there's a bicycle tire somebody owned. Wouldn't you like to know how things end up where they do?”

“Maybe.”

“They get in the water, then drift down here.… I'm so happy,” Clara said exuberantly, hugging herself, “but I don't know why. I love everything the way it is. I love how things look.” She actually felt her eyes sting with tears. Up on the bank Lowry sat down heavily and smoked his cigarette. He wore the faded brown trousers he had been wearing all summer and a tan shirt with rolled-up sleeves; he brought his knees up to lean on them and his ankles collapsed themselves in the grass, so that the outside of his feet were pressed flat against the ground. He looked as if he would never get up again and never care to. “You don't listen to me!” Clara said angrily. “Goddamn you anyway!”

His gaze was mildly blue. She saw his teeth flash in a brief smile.

“You think I'm just something you picked up on the road, and when you can't find some bitch to lay around with you come around here and visit!— Oh, Christ,” Clara said, heaving a large stone out into the water. She laughed and her shoulders rose in a long lazy shrug. “What do you think about when you're with them, then?”

“Clara, I don't think about anything.”

“When you're with them?”

“Sometimes I don't remember who they are.”

She liked that, but she did not let on. Instead she picked up another stone and threw it out into the water. It sank at once. “But I'm happy anyway,” she said. “That's because I'm stupid. If I was smart I wouldn't be happy when everything is so rotten.”

“What's rotten?” he said at once.

“Oh, nothing, nothing,” she said, waving to dismiss him. She flicked her long hair out of her eyes. It fell far down her back and she'd washed it the day before, somehow expecting him to come, so she knew it must shine in the sunlight. She knew she was pretty and now she wanted to be beautiful. “When things get better I will be beautiful,” she promised herself. If Lowry would stand still long enough and she could climb up into his arms and sleep there forever, the two of them entwined and not needing to look anywhere else, then she could relax: then she would grow up, she would become beautiful. She was standing now on a large flat rock near the water, which flowed in a fairly rapid stream in the center of the riverbed. She leaned over to see herself. There was a trembling vague image, not hers. She felt as if love were a condition she would move into the way you moved into a new house or crossed the boundary into a new country. And not just this one-sided love, either; she had enough of that right now. But the kind of love held out to her in the comic books and romance magazines she was able now to read for herself, which she and Sonya traded back and forth wistfully: love that would transform her and change her forever. It had nothing to do with the way other girls got pregnant and fat as cheap balloons—that wasn't the kind of love she meant. The only real love could be between her and Lowry. You couldn't imagine any real love between Sonya, for instance, and her boyfriend who was married. They never felt about each other the way she and Lowry would.…

“I remember you that night way back in Florida,” Clara said. “I think about that a lot. Who were you with then?”

Lowry shrugged.

She had thought of it to get her mind rid of that memory of Lowry and everything that came with it: going back to his room with him. If she got her mind stuck on that she would be miserable to him, and maybe he was casting his mind around for some excuse to get away from her earlier—here it was about six o'clock and they would have to get some supper. Clara had told him she would make it herself. A tiny churning sensation began in her stomach and subsided at once, at the thought of the food she had bought that might still be there the next morning. She said, “I'm going to walk in here.
It's cool.” The stream of water was deep on her side. She could look right through to its stony bottom.

“You're going to wade in that?”

She kicked off her shoes. Her feet were tough from going barefoot so much in the summer. Clara stepped into the water and was surprised at how warm it was on top. “I like to wade,” she said. “I used to do it when I was a kid.” It was the kind of remark other girls probably said; Clara did not really think of herself as lying. The edginess in her voice must have made Lowry conscious of this, because when she glanced around he was looking at her. “What about you, did you play in cricks when you were a kid?”

“I grew up too fast,” Lowry said.

She moved slowly through the water, staring down at her pale feet. Her legs were wet up past the knee. She pulled the skirt of her dress up higher. At first her legs were cool where they were wet, then the sun got to them and made them burn. She had to keep flicking her hair out of her eyes when she turned back to speak to Lowry. “I grew up fast, too. I'm just as old as you are if you look at it right.”

He made a snorting sound.

“Damn you, don't laugh at me,” she said. She bent to pull something out of the water—a barrel stave encrusted with scum and tiny snail-like things. She dropped it at once.

“Lowry,” Clara said, “did you love your family?”

“I don't know. No.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know.”

Clara lifted one foot out of the water, gingerly. “I loved my family. I couldn't help it.”

“Well, I was born able to help such things,” he said. He shifted around, straightening out one leg. She thought there was something uneasy in his voice but she did not want to be so conscious, so meticulous with him. She walked farther out, gathering her skirt up around her thighs. Lowry flicked his cigarette out from him and it landed on the dry riverbed. “I never could see what it was—things between other people,” he said seriously. “I mean invisible things. Ties that held them together no matter what, like getting flung up
on the beach and dragged out again and flung up again, always together. —Don't walk any farther out, you want to fall in? I'm not coming in after you.”