The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (19 page)

Jason looked at his watch.

“Oh my god!” He leapt to his feet, began a frantic reassembling of clothing, paused. “I'll have to shower, they'll be home in fifteen minutes. Get yourself a taxi, quick! Oh god, smell this place! Ruth will know the second she walks in the door.” Clutching his clothes in one arm, he began darting around the room opening windows. “What do you do, bathe in musk, for god's sake?”

White-faced, Jessica sat with the back of one hand pressed against her lips. Then she picked up her clothes and went into the bathroom. I will not cry, she promised herself.

There was a box of Kleenex above the toilet and she hastily swabbed her sticky thighs. The wastepaper basket was empty, clean and deodorised as a hospital bathroom. Could Jason ever countenance detritus? she wondered. Would he permit vicious little signs of decay like soiled tissues, flattened toothpaste tubes, stubble-clotted Trac II razorblades? Perhaps he emptied the baskets every hour.

She was dressed. He was in the cramped room with her.

“Dear god,” he said. “Are you mad? What are you doing? Are you trying to gloat over Ruth? Are you into cheap triumphs?”

He picked up the balled wad of tissues and lubricant and sperm, holding it at arm's length between thumb and forefinger.

“I'll find a taxi somewhere down the street,” she said.

He was already showering as she clicked the front door behind her and when a taxi pulled up she could barely see. She got in and gave her address.

“Hell, kid!” The driver was concerned. “You're in lousy shape.”

“Don't mind me. I'm just stupid.” She dabbed at her swollen eyes and at the smudged rivers of mascara. “And to think I've always believed I'm not a masochist.”

“He's not worth it,” the driver said. “I tell my four daughters all the time. Men just aren't worth it, you know.”

“I know.”

At her door, he was fatherly. “Let me buy you a cup of coffee. Gonna worry all night otherwise. Can't stand to see a pretty kid cry like that.”

“Bless you,” she said. “Why not?”

XVI Edward

I have set something irreversible in motion.

In my mind there arises an image of a juggernaut seen in some documentary of India — a massively carved temple cart with ponderous wooden wheels like cask lids. Under its canopy bronze and sandalwood deities huddle in suspense while jasmine-chains and streamers of gaudy cloth whirl before their eyes, promising drama. Below the wagon, red sand slopes down to the ocean, and a frail little man, a priest, gives a push with his hand. Slowly, as though stirring from sleep, the gigantic wheels rock, lurch, lumber into wakefulness, greedy now, gobbling up sand, thirsty for sea water, rabid for baptism, hurling their titanic superstructure and divine cargo into spectacular collision with the plumed and inexorably advancing waves.

I also think of Caesar crossing the Rubicon and of Napoleon making his fateful decision to advance on the Russian winter and of Marlowe's
Faustus. Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!

Why should these all be images of destruction and damnation? Why not of hope?

In any case, nothing may come of it.

When Marta came through the moonlight that night, I could not speak. I forgot about Victoria, a pensive child in a white shift at an upstairs window. The night was full of Marta who seemed lighter than air, her gauzy dress an incandescence, her mane of black curls a fragrant snare. I wanted to tangle my fingers, to bury my face in that thicket. A disturbance of fragrance, of something compellingly tropical, filled the gazebo.

In Guam, sometimes, a shift of nightwinds would brush her against my senses and I would feel weak with longing and terror and confusion and a sense of grossly improper association. As though I had violated her with mud and death. And yet her presence was always fraught with impending cataclysm.

In the gazebo I could not move. The weight in my genitals anchored me, as surely as a ball and chain would have done, to the wooden bench. I feared, in fact, that I might faint and humiliate myself, such a painful throbbing downward-dragging agitation clawed at my flesh.

“Oh Edward, you and I,” she sighed, twining herself around the central upright like a bright ribbon around a maypole, “we had such foolish expectations of the proper marriage. The romanticism of the disadvantaged. And we re so hopelessly prim.”

I did not understand, but part of her hold over me was her unpredictability. I believed that a meaning would unfold itself.

Silence flowed between us, a palpable sensuous bond. She was contemplating, it seemed to me, the chaos of the inevitable, the fate that bound us. I decided I would do nothing, I would rely on her timing, initiative not being within my power. I simply waited, a cork on the floodtide of our destiny.

“They're different from us, Edward. They could slough us off like old skin. Should we simply capitulate and make it easy for them?”

We are going to flee tonight, I thought. We will leave them with a face-saving scandal, public sympathy all on their side. And we like smugglers, absconding with ill-gotten but fabulous gains.

“Almost everyone's gone. Joe thinks I've walked home. To pay the babysitter, I said. They'll be alone in there soon.”

I thought of her with her little girl and a vision came to me, beatific, of our love children, a shower of bright beings. And hard on its tail, like a storm cloud: the children! Must we lose the children? My delicate Tory, Marta's infant Sonia. I looked up at the window, but Tory had gone from the landing.

“I'm so generous, so noble,” Marta laughed. “Born to the tragic role.”

Her laughter was like that of a clown, a hard-won sobbing sound. It's because of the children, I thought, and my mind leaped to Tory shivering on the stairs in her bare feet. Or perhaps alone and frightened in her bedroom. Antony, I thought, lost a kingdom for Cleopatra. But how can one contemplate the loss of a child?

Marta's voice broke. “Oh Edward, what shall we do?” She turned to me, extending her milky arms.

Stricken, I lurched toward her. There could be no turning back now. Once I touched her we would ignite, the conflagration would be unquenchable.

And then, like conscience herself, like the spirit of innocence, I saw Victoria. Or rather, I saw a flutter of white in the garden.

Blindly I stumbled past Marta's outstretched arms and floundered into the night. I reeled about the garden like a drunken ship with shredded sails and splintered hull. When I collided with Bessie I felt like a pirate brought to retribution.

I will plead guilty, I thought. I will beg for forgiveness. I will throw myself on her mercy.

“Victoria,” she said frantically. “I can't find Victoria! She's not in the house.”

It was like a reprieve. Scope for atonement.

When we found her, damp and shivering in the honeysuckle, we outdid each other with concern, with self-reproach. It was my embrace that Tory reached for, I remember that, mine. In my arms she was light and precious as silk. She whimpered against my heart and I kissed her hair and carried her into the house. There was not a sound, the last car had left, the last guest gone. Marta, I suppose, had crept away. We carried Tory up the stairs and then knelt, one at each side of her bed, holding her white little hands until sleep quieted the rushes of breathing. Then I took my wife into my arms, my wife Elizabeth, my beautiful pale elegant aristocrat.

“Bessie,” I murmured, as though anchoring myself to all I had struggled for, all that was sane.

“Edward,” she whispered. And then she told me: “I'm going to have another baby.”

And I thought: entrapment! She knew all along; she has made all alternatives impossible.

I resented, then, the theft of choice. No hope of weighing costs, of second thoughts. Wedlock, childlock, all those shackles.

When Jason first drew air into his lungs I was surrounded by the death cries of men in agony. It seemed an accompaniment not altogether unfitting.

I feel I have moved the rock that was stemming an avalanche. There will be seismic repercussions.

And yet it could come to nothing.

This is what I have done: When Bessie was out this morning I called the school board and asked to speak to Miss Perkins, an efficient soul permitted by a special dispensation to stay on past retirement age. A leftover from my adininistration, married to the job, a willing slave, out to pasture now in the records division.

“Oh, Mr Carpenter!” she gushed, eager to help.

Before the war, I told her, there was a Joseph Wilson, my deputy principal. He was killed in action. His wife's name … But I could not say it. He had a wife, I said. I believe she still lives in New York, though of course she may have remarried. Can you trace her at such short notice?

Miss Perkins does that sort of thing. She will phone registry offices and postal departments around the country if necessary, she will tap electronic memories, an adaptation on her part that astonishes me.

If you could send an official school board invitation for Sunday, I said. By telephone or telegram. Without mentioning I suggested it.

“It's
Friday
, Mr Carpenter,” she said doubtfully, “but Til do my best.”

Only two days' notice. But Marta was always a creature of impulse.

Miss Perkins, I said, this is my little secret for the celebrations. If my wife answers, you understand …

“Oh absolutely, Mr Carpenter. The soul of discretion.”

By mid-afternoon she called back. Luckily Bessie had gone off to the post office or somewhere. A Mrs Marta Wilson, Miss Perkins said — and I stopped breathing for several seconds — had been located in New York City. She had never remarried, her identity had been confirmed by a telephone call. A formal telegram of invitation had been sent.

It must be rather like this — a vibrant palpitation of nerves, of wings stretched — when the butterfly senses the dissolving of cocoon walls, smells the life discarded and the coming birth.

I am young with excitement.

XVII Elizabeth

Elizabeth forgets to hang up. She cradles the receiver between her breasts and fondles it absent-mindedly as though it were a kitten.

They are here!

They are all in New York. She has spoken to them on the telephone. A neatly arranged score: it is all going to happen now exactly as she has written it. A final scherzo of celebration.

It is Friday. By tomorrow evening they will be in the house.

Elizabeth stands at the French windows, lifting her arms to the sun. She decides she will say nothing to Edward. He will only blunder into irritation, say things he regrets, back himself into a corner, forbid Adam to enter the house,

Elizabeth has double-checked her list. Weeks ago she sent out the local invitations and the ones to Boston. The acceptances are in neat piles on the hallway stand. The food has been ordered, and the wine. Probably she will forget something crucial, nevertheless. She laughs.

There has been a telegram from Dave:
Love to Emily and Adam. Waiting with fingers crossed
.
Dave.

She decides to walk down to the post office in case something new has come in, but mainly because she wants to be part of summer. To stretch with all growing things towards the sun, to ease her restlessness. The house is infected with hope.

When she comes back, even Edward has caught it like a virus. He is unusually animated. She bends over him with pleasure and kisses him and he does not object. She has the neighbour's son carry him downstairs and she plays for him in the living room.

He drowses and smiles.

XVIII In Central Park

In Central Park the summer smell of Saturday morning is sharp with cut grass and the virtuous tang of sweat: joggers in an urban minuet, lawyers nodding at salesgirls from Bloomingdale's, couples furthering plans and quarrels between gasps. Ruth and Emily, with nothing at stake, jogged companionably, an easy rhythmic pleasure.

“Are you sure it's all right?” Emily had asked, leaving her son with Tory by the pond.

“Were you mugged when you lived here?” Jason demanded dryly.

“But it's supposed to be so much worse now.”

“it's not as bad as they'd have you believe in London. Safer than Hyde Park probably.”

Jason ran with discipline, a purgatorial exercise: in this extending of limits may I prove myself stronger than the collective anomie of my patients.

Once you got used to her, Adam decided, his Aunt Tory was not so alarming. Yesterday she had been afraid to go up inside the Statue of Liberty with him, but had hummed songs to herself all day. Besides it was perfectly acceptable to have a crazy aunt. Snelby had one who rode to hounds in her fifties and smoked a pipe and kept an assortment of bone corsets — not to wear, but as collectors' items.

My Aunt Victoria, Adam would say casually, sails toy boats in a park in New York City. She sits with her dress pulled up over her knees and her feet in the water and when one of the boats comes near she pulls it in with her toes.

Hey! children would call out. That's mine!

And Aunt Tory would look upset and put the boat back.

“Nobody shares,” she whispered mournfully to Adam.

Smiling a little, though mindful of her sadness, Adam put his hand suddenly in hers. He felt rich with family.

“Jason,” she said, hugging him. “It's so nice you've come back.”

She often called him Jason, though at other times she seemed to know exactly who he was.

“When your mother was little, I used to give her rides in a wheelbarrow. But the young men were not allowed to touch me. Your mother went away so that the young men could touch her. You have his eyes, Adam. The young man in Montreal, you have his eyes.”

Staring into the water, Adam saw the shadowy underside of his aunt's bare thighs, large whitish floats with a dark slash between, and he thought that she was full of secrets he did not want to know.

She leaned forward to see what he was looking at and they stared at each other's reflections. A tiny schooner cut cleanly across Adam's cheeks and sailed into the lapping cave of his aunt's mouth. She gasped and lunged at it with her toes and it scudded away, flakes of their disintegrating faces chasing it like spume.

“It's because I looked,” she said. “I have to be careful not to look at people. Terrible things happen.”

In spite of himself he was curious. “What terrible things?”

“I can't tell you. I came down the stairs … And then the war happened. Father went to the war and he never came back. Someone else came back inside him. And then I lost Jason, he went away to school. And then I lost my young man.”

Her sadness dragged at Adam's heart.

“Don't cry, Aunt Tory.” He put his arms around her neck and kissed her. “Everyone comes back, I know they do. I thought I lost Grandma and Uncle Jason but I was wrong. I lost Dave but he'll come back.”

The large soft breasts against which she pressed him were warm as Australian sand dunes.

“Jason,” she sighed. “You've come back.”

(My crazy Aunt Tory he would say to Snelby thinks I'm her little brother.)

And then quite lucidly she said: “Please don't get lost, Adam.”

Perhaps he would not after all discuss her with Snelby. In his pocket he felt the unfamiliar American coins his Uncle Jason had given him.

“Come on, Aunt Tory” — pulling her by the hand — “I'll buy you an ice cream.”

From under his drenched headband, jogging by on his second circuit, Jason saw them standing hand in hand at the ice cream cart and thought: Tory loves the sound of “aunt”. It does more for her than neuroleptics and tranquillisers. And when the child puts his hand in mine and says “Uncle Jason” … New life on our dead branches.

As the muscles in his calves and thighs rebelled, he ran faster. He was running from last night's dream. In the dream he had been trapped in the crawl space under an old house, hemmed in by boxes and a furnace that shuddered like a heart. It was impossible to move. From the sub-flooring above, postcards fell like goose-down from a slit pillow; stamped and addressed and unanswered postcards. And then, inexplicably, he and Stephen were sorting through a pile of mutilated bodies, their dead eyes open and staring: Sister Concepción's, Tory's, Nina's, Ruth's, Jessica's.

You have to close the eyes, Stephen said. That's required. You have to stop people from seeing their memories.

In Central Park Jason ran from the memory of those eyes. The pain in his legs and chest was acute, he ran into its embrace. I am in training, he thought, to withstand everyone else's despair. A stitch daggered his side and he gritted his teeth and drove himself on. But without his volition a cry for comfort shaped itself in his mind: Jessica. He could smell her in the sweet grass he smashed with his feet.

Pain seemed to inhabit his body like a tumour.

I could not, he gasped inwardly, countenance even the suggestion of torture. I could not live with what Stephen has seen.

Jessica, he called silently. Jessica, hold me!

He kept running until he had outdistanced the stitch. He had a disquieting feeling that he had behaved shoddily the day before yesterday, but Jessica would understand. He could not quite remember … there had been pressures, time constraints. It was possible he had been something of a bastard, but considering Stephen, considering Ruth, considering Tory …

And Jessica would understand.

“I heard you play the Sibelius … three years ago,” Ruth said. “I feel … a kind of awe …jogging along like this … beside you. One realises … the years of discipline.”

“Why didn't you come backstage … with Jason?”

Their syncopated voices slid between the percussion of their feet.

“I wanted to … You're off limits to me … The family … is his private possession.”

“He first told me … about you … years ago. In Montreal, eight … more than eight years. And none of us … ever met you.”

“Not true … We took your parents … to dinner once … Not a comfortable occasion. Though your mother … is hard to forget.”

Thud, thud, the punctuation of Adidas.

“I'd practically decided … he invented you. You understand … I adore Jason … my big brother, idealised … But still … I'm amazed … you put up with him.”

His other women, unmentioned, jostled them in ghostly clamour. Ruth and Emily jogged silently on. Their footfalls shussed over grass; cars passed distantly like meteors across the background of their silence; an occasional horse and carriage bearing tourists, a child with a kite, lurched into view.

“I've been married,” Ruth said. “And I've lived alone … This is better … We suit each other.”

“You should be coming … to Ashville with us … this afternoon.”

“It would be an intrusion … It's all right, you know … We both have 'no entry' signs strewn all over our lives.”

Two boys on bicycles, riding full tilt at the women, parted at the last minute and made an ellipse around them.

“My first husband —”Ruth corrected herself— “My husband … he was an actor … which can be euphoric or harrowing … That's why I'm in awe of you … the perseverance. One day I came home from work … and the bathroom door was locked … I knew right away. One doesn't … encourage connections … after something like that.”

“Oh Ruth!” Instinctively Emily touched her but Ruth flinched and veered aside to scoop up a dandelion flower. She slackened to a walk.

“We're bred for outer space, I suppose, our generation.” She shredded the dandelion stem with her thumbnail. “Isolated atoms. But we want to stave off desolation. We want someone in the room when we wake at night. And you see, it works. Here we are. A social network.”

Emily had a bleak vision of wraiths moving through twilight in patterns, of solitary figures hunched in a circle of chill caves, assuring themselves of community.

“Do you feel so desolate?” she cried involuntarily. “Does Jason?”

Ruth's eyebrows registered surprise.

“Doesn't everyone? Don't you? You live alone.”

Ruth might as well have said: “You're grossly overweight,” so astonishing was the perspective. Emily had thought of herself as backing away from the overheated blaze of family and lovers, but never as alone.

“I have Adam.” A shorthand form of contradiction.

“An additional cause for terror, I should have thought.”

“Oh no!”

“I am always amazed when anyone has the courage.”

“You and Jason don't intend …?”

“Never. In any case, how can a child fill the void? What can you say to your son? You're still alone.”

“No. There's the family …”

“Which you're very anxious to avoid.”

“But that's the point. I can't. it's impossible. They're always with me, woven into me. And audiences. I have my audiences. And other musicians.”

“And I my career. Power. Influence. People and finances at my beck and call.” Indicating that these things did not count, “It doesn't hold back the night, does it?”

“It's because of the suicide you feel this way. We are quite different. I feel … connected to the sun.”

“And yet you impress me as solitary. Always keeping a distance, a sort of nun. Why did you leave Montreal so suddenly? And Australia?”

“There they are!” As though fleeing from contamination, Emily ran down the slope toward the ice cream cart where Adam and Tory stood hand in hand with the sun between them.

“He has the young man's eyes” Tory said. “The young man from Montreal.”

And Sasha, slighted, stared at Emily from Adam's huge brown and wary irises.

“She's mistaken,” Emily said softly. “She has never met your father.”

“He has the young man's eyes,” Tory persisted.

Emily did not wish to say: It is your half-brother, Sasha, she has met.

“Dave was there when I was born,” Adam said staunchly, urging a different paternity.

“Yes, he was. That's true.”

“He held me when I was just a few hours old. He told me so.”

“Yes.”

He wanted to ask: Why isn't he with us now? It seemed to him a criminal breach, at a season of family. His Sasha-eyes pleaded mutely and he saw the nerve in her cheek begin to flutter.

“Will you run with me, Adam?” she asked.

“Who will stay with Aunt Tory?” he countered.

“We won't be long. Aunt Tory won't mind, will you, Tory?”

“Emily always runs away from me. Whenever I look at her.”

“She's not running away, Aunt Tory, she's just jogging. She goes around in a circle. But I'll stay with you. Do you mind, Mummy?”

“Of course not.” She kissed the top of his head. “He loves you, Tory.” And she was genuinely, profoundly glad to care so lavishly by proxy.

Adam, it seemed to her, was extraordinarily more than the reciprocal preoccupation of Sergei and herself; he was definitely Dave's child also, a child of earth and sea and sky, of natural immutable loves.

“See you shortly,” she called, jogging south, sprinting into the sun which even in summer was not at all like the sun in Australia.

Australia.

When she stood on the deserted strip of beach below Dave's house and looked out across the Pacific, or when she stared west from his sheep station beyond Forbes, across the never-never of cracked brown earth and ghost gums, she thought: This is freedom. Now I could write to Father: sprightly letters full of historical and botanical and geological fascination that he will love to read. I could write to Mother and Jason and Tory (as I promised) and sound tranquil.

Perhaps, at this distance, even friendship with the stern old man would be possible. There would be no point in disturbing him with unnecessary news, with any hint of a grandchild he had no reason to expect.

Just as there had been no point in telling anyone in Montreal, before her hasty departure. She wanted no sympathy. She could certainly live without Sergei. That was all behind her now.

Nevertheless when the telephone rang, she would catch her breath. It would be Denny or Ian or Dave. Not that it mattered. She would tense herself against the spasm of want. She would agree to go to another party.

On the beach below Dave's house, on the harbour ferry, she was self-sufficient. Warmed. Unscathed. But at night she would calculate the time difference from Montreal and lie awake thinking: If Sergei calls, I will be nonchalant. I will tell him nothing. Perhaps he would say: “I want to know about my child .” Because surely he must have some inkling. Surely he must wonder. Not that she wanted him to know, ever. Sometimes the strain of not minding that he did not know would keep her awake all night.

Ridiculous, she could say as soon as dawn spilled in from the east. An emotional tic, merely. Like feeling the rocking of a boat when the voyage is over and done with.

Tory's first letter arrived late in August when Emily was four months pregnant but not, she was confident, visibly so to anyone.

Dear Emily:

There are lawns and trees but there is also chain-link and I am not allowed outside. Australia is much larger but if they put a high fence around it you would want to escape. Something there is that doesn't love a wall.

A fence is a fence is a

fence.

When I feel the screams coming

like hurricane warnings

I go swimming.

Honeysuckle is everywhere