A Garden of Earthly Delights (57 page)

“How strange you are now. Sometimes I don't know you.”

Yet Clara spoke half-admiringly. She knew to keep her distance. Swan laughed, his mother was so fanciful. Yet it was true, maybe. Even when shaving, he avoided seeing his face. Without knowing it he'd perfected a means of shaving that involved gazing only
at his jaws, through part-shut eyes. Seeing no more of himself than he needed.

It became a time then when Swan was intoxicated with all he'd inherited—he could sit at the window of the third-floor room he'd commandeered as his office, and stare at nothing; not even out the window at the land that had once so enthralled him, foothills, mountains, much of it Revere property. Figures, speculations danced in his head. They lived at the center of activity, and production: REVERE FARM had become a model farm of the New Era: barns rebuilt and humming with efficiency, like factories; dairy cows milked by machines and not fumbling human fingers; hundreds of acres of wheat ripening toward harvest. Swan could feel his heart the beating heart of the farm, and the range of his desire, scanning the horizon as far as he could see, was the measure of what they would someday attain. “They.” He liked to think that he was lifting them all with him, all the Reveres; those long-deceased men and women who'd loved and hated one another so fiercely, bound together by a single name and committed to living out the drama of that name. The lush, fertile countryside through which the Eden River coursed north to Lake Ontario had first been settled in the early 1700s, and by the time of the Revolution, the first Reveres had arrived. And now—

Then Swan would wake from his trance and think, What am I doing?

He was not one of them. He cared nothing for them.

He could leave it all, even now. Walk away.

But his mind flooded with figures, speculations, rumors, theories. Steven Revere was not the only young Revere with ambition and plans. There were others in his generation, and one of them the fat-faced cousin with the Harvard degree: Swan's rival, you could say.

They spoke by telephone, solely. They never met.

The telephone was Swan's instrument, sparing him face-to-face meetings with people he disliked. There was still a residue of shyness in him: Clara's towheaded son. Now he rarely read anything
except newspapers and financial news; if he listened to the radio, it was to financial news. Rarely did he walk out onto the farm as Revere still did, and yet more rarely did he enter the barns, the stables. He scarcely knew the horses' names, and which foals belonged to which mares. There was a farm manager, and the manager had assistants. Swan was spared, and would be spared. He'd long ago realized in himself an unnerving weakness—a mystical sort of love—for this inherited land, that was almost a terror in his blood. “The land”—a fine gauzelike scrim occluded his vision, the way the information packed into print, into books, had once threatened to invade his brain and leave him powerless. All knowledge is a drug, Swan believed. And all drugs can be addictive.

He would fight it. He knew how. He'd isolated it—this sensation, as of imminent helplessness—as the way in which a fetus grows in its mother's belly: tiny head taking form, tiny arms, legs, torso, fish-body becoming human; sucking its energy from the encasing flesh and growing, always growing. Mysteriously growing. If he knew where this demonic energy came from, he would know the secret to all things.

It was about this time that he bought a pistol and carried it with him when he drove into the city. When he walked about the city streets alone he liked to let his hand rest on it, in his pocket, knowing that it possessed a power that he did not. Thinking
I am armed now, I am ready.
Swan smiled at the strangeness of such comfort: his heart beat with less strain.

The only time Swan left the handgun in his car, locked in the glove compartment, was when he picked up a woman somewhere and took her back to his hotel: one of those young women sitting conspicuously alone in bars, positioned so that winking neon lights, reflected from the street outside, softened and made their faces alluring. They might have been salesclerks, office workers, nurse's aides and not prostitutes, or anyway not exclusively prostitutes, available without the intervention of a pimp. If Swan sensed a male presence, Swan retreated. He was filled with a moral repugnance for such a transaction, he could not bear it. The women he encountered were friendly-seeming, hopeful that he would “like” them. He knew, and
he paid them money in excess of anything they might have asked, because money was the means by which he kept them from him.

What he feared, if he'd been drinking: that, overcome with passion or anguish, exhausted as if he'd run a great distance to their anonymous and malleable bodies, he might confess to them that he did not know what his life was, what he was doing, where he'd come from, or why his brain pounded with desires he could not comprehend. Always he was
running-toward
, yet at the same time
running-away
as in a dream gone bad. “I hurt my brother once. One of my brothers. It was an accident. Yet I did it on purpose.” He was fearful of uttering such words in the lulling intimacy of sex; in the false intimacy of sex; in the brainless aftermath of sex. He was fearful of uttering words he could not retract. And of plunging onward saying he was a killer who had not completed his work and was waiting for his final deed to rise up within him.

He was frightened of these women yet returned repeatedly to them whenever he was in the city. Away from the valley, Steven Revere was not Curt Revere's son. Nor Clara Walpole's son: how furious Clara would be, to know of Swan's secret, sexual life! He smiled to think of the revenge he was taking, even if it was revenge upon himself, too. Saying, one night, to a girl he'd met in a Hamilton cocktail lounge and with whom he spent several hours: “How do you keep going with your life? I mean, how do you keep living?” It was a serious question and the girl considered it seriously yet finally she laughed and said, “It's how I am.”

He was astonished at this reply. At the simplicity and sincerity of this reply. He thought of the long afternoon in the Hamilton library, and of waiting for his mother outside on the stone steps in the wind. A bitch she was. A whore. Even a child knows. And recalling Clara later that evening as Swan lay listless on his bed, how his mother had spoken to him in her rapid soft dazed voice of how happy she was, and how she deserved happiness; and he had believed that this was so, Clara deserved happiness, yet at the same time he knew she must be punished, and he alone was the instrument of punishment.

“Is something wrong? Did I say something wrong?” the girl asked, seeing Swan's face.

Female pleading. You were meant to respond protectively, yet you wanted to lash out, to hit and to hurt.

He left her abruptly, shaking with an anger he did not understand. In his car unlocking the glove compartment and seeing, yes to his relief the pistol was there, that mute and not-heavy object that fitted with such ease and logic in the grip of a man's hand.

Explain to that girl what he'd done, and had not yet completed. What he and Clara had done. Explain, and she would not have cared.
It's how you are. We are.
How close he'd come to hurting her, she could not have known.

In Hamilton, in a hotel into which he'd checked under the name
Walpole
, he ran his finger idly along the listings of Physicians & Surgeons in the local directory. The name
Piggott
struck him. He called to make an appointment.

The Hamilton Reveres had their physicians and surgeons, you could be sure. Their favored hospital. When one of them was stricken by illness, they purchased the very best medical attention.

If
Piggott, E. H., practice limited to internal medicine
, had an opening late that afternoon, Swan guessed that
Piggott, E. H.
, was not likely to be one of the Reveres' physicians. He was grateful that, as the breathy receptionist informed him, she could “fit him into” the doctor's schedule.

An office on the eleventh floor of one of the older downtown buildings, a few blocks from the lake that was choppy and no-color beneath a glazed-looking sky. Swan had had one of his blanked-out nights, the previous day. Was it the weekend? He guessed not, since Piggott had office hours. And others in this building had office hours.

In Piggott's waiting room were several other patients. Swan was disconcerted: somehow, he hadn't imagined other people. He hadn't imagined waiting.

He gave his Walpole name to the receptionist. He was ten minutes early for his five-fifteen appointment. He sat, restless and edgy.
Picked up an old
Time
to leaf through, without interest. The financial news would be not new, and so without value. Other features— politics, films, books—were of no interest to him. “Mister?”—the child was perhaps four years old. His mother was a woman of about Swan's age, maybe older, with a sad, hardened face; she wore a dress of slovenly glamour, and oddly dressy high-heeled shoes. Swan had only glanced at her when he'd entered the waiting room, and he had not noticed her child at all. “Mister? Hiya.”

The greeting—“Hiya”—was uttered in a solemn tone. Swan smiled, and said, “Hiya” in return. He was surprised that the little boy was so soft-spoken, and so beautiful: his skin was pale and smooth as a doll's rubber skin, poreless, perfect; his lips reminded Swan of the lips of children in classical paintings, children who weren't meant to be human but of divine origin. Baby Christs, cherubs. “Want one?” The boy held out a roll of Life Savers to Swan, opened at one end. Across the room, seated uncomfortably in a plastic hard-backed chair, the boy's mother was smiling at Swan.

She's got her kid to pimp for her.

“No thanks,” Swan said.

The child backed away, disappointed.

“He's just like that, he's a friendly kid,” the mother called over, apologetically. Her voice was younger and softer than Swan might have anticipated. But Swan wanted nothing to do with them, with her. He would be seeing a woman that evening.

Others in the waiting room were observing him. Judging him as out of place in Piggott's office, maybe. His good clothes, his air of impatience, disdain. The way in which he flipped the pages of magazines, and tossed them down. As if none of the magazines could tell him anything he didn't already know.

At the Hamilton Statler, Swan was staying in a suite on the top, twenty-fifth floor; this was by far the tallest hotel in the city. He never drew the drapes. He believed he could feel the building sway, just perceptibly, in the wind off the lake. Scattered across a table were papers, most of them legal documents, he'd been going through with Revere lawyers earlier that day. In the other room, the bedroom, was the so-called king-sized bed in which he would lie
that night; he would lie with a woman, that night; and above the bureau was an ornate-framed mirror that would record indifferently whatever occurred in that room, in darkness or in light.

Swan had left his pistol in the room, of course. Hadn't wanted to carry it into Piggott's office. A small-caliber, twenty-two semiautomatic six-shot Remington; not an impressive firearm, made of ordinary stainless steel with plastic grips. It was secondor thirdhand, he'd paid less than two hundred dollars for it. If Revere knew that Swan had bought such a gun, and carried it on his person, the old man would have been astonished. Swan smiled to think of him stammering
There's only one use for a handgun
.…