Little, Big

III.

She heard a note in Elmond's wood

And wished she had been there.

—Buchan, Hynde Etin

Hawksquill could not at first determine whether by the operations of her Art she had cast herself into the bowels of the earth, the bottom of the sea, the heart of the fire or the middle of the air. Russell Eigenblick would later tell her that he had often suffered from the same confusion in his long sleep, and that perhaps it was in all four places that he had been hidden, in all four corners of the earth. The old legend always put him in the mountain, of course, but Godfrey of Viterbo said no, the sea; the Sicilians had him ensconced in the fires of Etna, and Dante put him in Paradise or its environs though he might just as well (if he had been feeling vindictive) have stuck him in the Inferno with his grandson.


The Top of a Stair

Since taking this assignment, Hawksquill had gone far, though never quite this far, and little of what she had begun to suspect about Russell Eigenblick could be put into a form understandable to the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club, which almost daily now importuned her for a decision concerning the Lecturer. His power and appeal had grown enormously, and soon it would be impossible for them to dispose of Eigenblick tidily, if dispose of him they must; not much longer and it would be impossible to dispose of him at all. They raised Hawksquill's fees, and spoke in veiled terms of perhaps seeking other sources of advice. Hawksquill ignored all this. So far from malingering, she now spent nearly every waking and many sleeping hours in pursuit of whoever or whatever it was that claimed to be Russell Eigenblick, haunting her own memory mansions like an unlaid ghost, and following flying scraps of evidence farther than she had ever gone before, pulling up at times before powers she would rather not have started into wakefulness, and finding herself in places that she had not before known she knew existed.

Where she found herself just now was at the top of a stair.

Whether she mounted or descended these stairs she wouldn't afterwards be able to determine; but they were long. At the end of them was a chamber. The broad studded door stood flung open. A great stone, by its track in the dust, had not long ago been rolled away from barring shut the door. Dimly within she could see a long feast-table, spilled cups and scattered chairs iced with ancient dust; from the chamber came an odor as of a messy bedroom just opened. But there was no one within.

She made to pass the broken door to investigate, but noticed then seated on the stone a figure in white, small, pretty, head bound in a golden fillet, paring its nails with a small knife. Not knowing what language to speak to this person, Hawksquill raised her brows and pointed within.

"He is not here," the person said. "He is risen."

Hawksquill considered a question or two, but understood before she asked that this personage would not answer them, that he (or she) was an embodiment only of that one remark: He is not here, he is risen. She turned away (the stair and the door and the message and the messenger fading from her attention like a shape momentarily perceived in changeful clouds) and set off further, bethinking herself where she might go for answers to many new questions, or questions to fit the many new answers she was quickly garnering.


Daughter of Time

"The difference," Hawksquill had long ago written in one of the tall marbled folios filled with her left-handed script which stood or lay on the long lamplit study table far behind her now, "the difference between the Ancient concept of the nature of the world and the New concept is, in the Ancient concept the world has a framework of Time, and in the New concept, a framework of Space.

"To look at the Ancient concept through the spectacles of the New concept is to see absurdity: seas that never were, worlds claimed to have fallen to pieces and been created newly, a congeries of unlocatable Trees, Islands, Mountains and Maelstroms. But the Ancients were not fools with a poor sense of direction; it was only not Orbis Terrae that they were looking at. When they spoke of the four corners of the earth, they meant of course no four physical places; they meant four repeated situations of the world, equidistant in time from one another: they meant the solstices and the equinoxes. When they spoke of seven spheres, they did not mean (until Ptolemy foolishly tried to take their portrait) seven spheres in space; they meant those circles described in Time by the motions of the stars: Time, that roomy seven-storey mountain where Dante's sinners wait for Eternity. When Plato tells of a river girdling the earth, which is somewhere (so the New concept would have it) up in the air and somewhere also in the middle of the earth, he means by that river the same river Hera*us could never step in twice. Just as a lamp waved in darkness creates a figure of light in the air, which remains for as long as the lamp repeats its motion exactly, so the universe retains its shape by repetition: the universe is Time's body. And how will we perceive this body, and how operate on it? Not by the means we perceive extension, relation, color, form—the qualities of Space. Not by measurement and exploration. No: but by the means we perceive duration and repetition and change: by Memory."

Knowing this to be so, it could not matter to Hawksquill that on her travels her gray-bunned head and nerveless limbs did not probably change place, remained (she supposed) in the plush chair in the middle of the Cosmo-Opticon at the top of her house which stood in a hexagram of lower City streets. The winged horse she had summoned to bear her away was not a winged horse but that Great Square of stars pictured above her, and "away" was not where she was borne; but the greatest skill (perhaps the only skill) of the true mage is to apprehend these distinctions without making them, and to translate time into space without an error. It's all, said the old alchemists quite truthfully, so simple.

"Away!" said the voice of her Memory when the hand of her Memory was on the reins again and her seat was sure, and away they went, vast wings beating through Time. They traversed oceans of it while Hawksquill thought; and then her steed plunged, at her command, unhesitatingly, without a blink, which took the breath of her Memory away, into either the southern sky below the world or into the limpid-dark austral waters, in any case making for there where all past ages lie, Ogygia the Fair.

Her Steed's silver-shod feet touched that shore, and his great head sank; his strong wings, billowing like draperies, now emptied of the air of time, sank too with a whisper and trailed along the eternal grass, which he cropped for strength. Hawksquill dismounted, patted her steed's enormous neck, whispered that she would return, and started off, following the footprints, each longer than herself, pressed on these shores at the end of the Golden Age and petrified long since. The air was windless, yet the gigantic forest under whose eaves she entered soughed with a breath of its own, or perhaps with His breath, expelled and drawn with the long regularity of immemorial sleep.

She came no closer than the entrance of the vale he filled. "Father," she said, and her voice startled the silence; aged eagles with heavy wings rose up and settled sleepily again. "Father," she said again, and the vale stirred. The great gray boulders were his knees, the long gray ivy his hair, the precipice-gripping rnassy roots his fingers; the eye he opened to her was milky-gray, a dim-glowing stone, the Saturn of her Cosmo-Opticon. He yawned: the inhalation turned the leaves of trees like storm-wind and stirred her hair, and when he exhaled his breath was the cold black breath of a bottomless cave.

"Daughter," he said, in a voice like earth's.

"I'm sorry to disturb your sleep, Father," she said, "but I have a question only you can answer."

"Ask it then."

"Does a new world now begin? I see no reason why it should, and yet it seems it does."

Everyone knows that when his sons overthrew their ancient Father, and cast him here, the endless Age of Gold ended, and Time was invented with all its labors. Less well known is how the young, unruly Gods, frightened or ashamed at what they had done, gave the ruling of this new entity into the hands of their Father. He was asleep in Ogygia then and didn't care, so ever since it has been here in this isle, where the five rivers have their common wellspring, that all the used years accumulate like fallen leaves; and when the Ancientest One, troubled by a dream of overthrow or change, shifts his massy limbs and smacks his lips, scratching at the rock-ribbed muscles of his hams, a new age issues, the measures alter which he gives to the dance of the universe, the sun is born in a new sign.

Thus the airy scheming Gods contrived to put the blame for the calamity on their old Father. In time, Kronos, king of the happy Timeless Age, became old busybody Chronos with his sickle and hourglass, father of chronicles and chronometers. Only his true sons and daughters know better—and some adopted ones, Ariel Hawksquill among them.

"Does a new age now begin?" she asked again. "It's beforehand if it does."

"A New Age," said Father Time in a voice that could create one. "No. Not for years and years." He brushed away a few of these that had gathered in withered piles on his shoulders.

"Then," Hawksquill said, "who is Russell Eigenblick, if he isn't King of a new age?"

"Russell Eigenblick?"

"The man with the red beard. The Lecturer. The Geography."

He lay back again, his rocky couch groaning beneath him. "No King of a new age," he said. "An upstart. An invader."

"Invader?"

"He is their champion. That's why they waked him." His milky-gray eye was drifting closed. "Asleep for a thousand years, lucky man. And now awakened for the conflict."

"Conflict? Champion?"

"Daughter," he said. "Don't you know there's a war on?"

War . . . There had been, all along, one word she had sought for, one word under which all the disorderly facts, all the oddities she had gathered up concerning Russell Eigenblick and the random disturbances he seemed to cause in the world might be subsumed. She had that word now: it blew through her consciousness like a wind, uprooting structures and harrying birds, tearing leaves from trees and laundry from lines, but at least, at last, blowing from one direction only. War: universal, millennial, unconditional War. For God's sake, she thought, he'd said as much himself in every recent Lecture; she'd always thought it was merely a metaphor. Merely! "I didn't know, Father," she said, "until this moment."

"Nothing to do with me," said the Ancientest One, his words muffled in a yawn. "They applied to me once for his sleep, and I granted it. A thousand years ago, give or take a century . . . They are after all children of my children, related by marriage. . . . I do them a favor once and again. No harm in that. Little enough to do here anyway."

"Who are they, Father?"

"Mm." His enormous vacant eye was shut.

"Who are they whose champion he is?"

But the vast head was bent backward on its bouldered pillow, the vast throat swallowed a snore. The hoary-headed eagles who had risen shrieking when he woke settled again on their crags. The windless forest soughed. Hawksquill, reluctantly, turned her steps toward the shore again. Her steed (sleepy himself, even he) raised his head at her approach. Well! No help for it. Thought must conquer this, Thought could! "No rest for the weary," she said, and leapt smartly onto his broad back. "On! And quickly! Don't you know there's a war on?"

She thought as they ascended, or descended: who slept for a thousand years? What children of the children of Time would make war on men, to what end, with what hope of success?

And who (by the way) was that golden-haired child she had glimpsed curled up asleep in the lap of Father Time?


The Child Turned

The child turned, dreaming; dreaming of what had come of all she had seen on her last day awake, dreaming it all and altering it in her dreaming even as, elsewhere, it came to pass; plucking apart her bright and dark dream-tapestry and knitting it up again with the same threads in a way she liked better. She dreamt of her mother awaking and saying "What?", of one of her fathers on a path at Edgewood; she dreamt of Auberon, in love somewhere with a dream-Lilac of his own invention; she dreamt of armies made of cloud, led by a red-bearded man who startled her nearly awake. She dreamt, turning, lips parted, heart beating slowly, that at the end of her tour she came riding down from the air, came coursing with vertiginous speed along an iron-gray and oily river.

The ghastly red round sun was sinking vaporously amid the elaborate smokes and scorings of jets that had made the false armies in the west. Lilac could only hold her tongue: the brutal esplanades, the stained blocks of buildings, the clamor brought to her ears, silenced her. The stork turned inward; Mrs. Underhill's stick seemed uncertain in the rectangular valleys; they went east, then south. A thousand people seen from above are not as one or two: a heaving queasy sea of hair and hats, the odd bright muffler blown back. Hell-holes in the street shot up steam; crowds were swallowed up in clouds of it, and (so it seemed to Lilac) didn't emerge, but there were countless others to replace them.

"Remember these markers, child," Mrs. Underhill shouted back at Lilac over the keening sirens and the turmoil. "That burned church. Those railings, like arrows. That fine house. You'll pass this way again, alone." A caped figure just then detached itself from the crowd and made to enter the fine house, which didn't seem fine to Lilac. The stork, at Mrs. Underhill's direction, topped the house, cupped her wings to stop, and with a grunt of relief put her red feet down amid the weather-obscured detritus of the rooftop. The three of them looked down into the middle of the block just as the caped figure came out the back door.

"Now mark him, dear," Mrs. Underhill said. "Who do you suppose he is?"

With arms akimbo beneath the cloak, and a wide hat on his head, he was a dark lump to Lilac. Then he took off the hat, and shook out long black hair. He turned clockwise in a circle, nodding, and looked around at the rooftops, a white grin on his dark face. "Another cousin," Lilac said.

"Well, yes, and who else?"

He put his finger thoughtfully to his lips, and scuffed the dirt of the untidy garden. "I give up," Lilac said.

"Why, your other father!"

"Oh."

"The one who engendered you. Who'll need your help, as much as the other."

"Oh."

"Planning improvements," Mrs. Underhill said with satisfaction, "just now."

George paced out his garden. He went and chinned himself on the board fence which separated his yard from the next building's, and looked over like Kilroy into the even less well-kept garden there. He said aloud, "God damn! All right!" He let himself down, and rubbed his hands together.

Lilac laughed as the stork stepped to the roof's ledge to take off. Like the stork's white wings opening, George's black cape flew outward and then closed more tightly around him as he laughed too. This, Lilac decided, delighted by something about him which she couldn't name, was the father which, of the two of them, she would have chosen to have: and with the instant certainty of a solitary child about who is and who is not on its side, she chose him now.

"There's no choosing, though," said Mrs. Underhill as they ascended. "Only Duty."

"A present for him!" she cried to Mrs. Underhill. "A present!"

Mrs. Underhill said nothing—the child had been indulged quite enough—but as they coursed down the shabby street, in their wake there sprang up from the sidewalk at even intervals a row of skinny and winter-naked saplings, one by one. This street is ours, anyway, thought Mrs. Underhill, or as good as; and what's a farm without a row of guardian trees along the road that passes it?

"Now for the door!" she said, and the cold city tumbled beneath them as they fled uptown. "It's long past your bedtime— there!" She pointed ahead to an aged building that must once have been tall, overweening even, but no more. It had been built of white stone, white no longer, carved into a myriad of faces, caryatids, birds and beasts, all coal-miners now and weeping filthily. The central part of it was set back from the street; wings on either side framed a dark dank courtyard into which taxis and people disappeared. The wings were linked, high up at the top, by an archlike course of masonry, an arch for a giant to pass under: and they three did pass under it, the stork ceasing to beat its wings, coasting, wing-tipping slightly to arrow accurately into the darkness of the courtyard. Mrs. Underhill cried "'Ware heads! Duck, duck!" and Lilac, feeling a whoosh of stale air rush up at her from the interior, ducked. She closed her eyes. She heard Mrs. Underhill say, "Nearly done now, old girl, nearly done; you know the door," and the darkness behind her lids grew brighter, and the noise of the City vanished, and they were elsewhere again.

So she dreamed; so it came to have been; so the saplings grew, dirty-faced urchins, tough, neglected and sharp. They grew, fattening in the trunk, buckling the sidewalk that ran beneath them. They wore broken kites and candy-wrappers, burst balloons and sparrows' nests in their hair, unmindful; they shouldered each other for a glimpse of sun, they shook their sooty snow winter after winter on passersby. They grew, penknife-scarred, snaggle-branched, dog-manured, unkillable. On a mild night in a certain March, Sylvie, returning to Old Law Farm at dawn, looked up at their branches outlined against a raw pale sky and saw that every twig-tip bore a heavy bud.

She said goodnight to the one who had seen her home, though he was importunate, and sought the four keys she needed to get herself into Old Law Farm and the Folding Bedroom. He'll never believe this crazy story, she thought laughing, never believe the crazy but essentially innocent, nearly innocent, chain of events that had had her up till dawn. Not that he would grill her; he'd only be glad she was safe, she wished he wouldn't worry. She got whirled away, sometimes, is all; everybody put a claim in on her, and most of them seemed to her good. It was a big city, and its revels ran till late when the moon was full in March, and hey, one thing just led to another. . . . She unlocked the door into the Farm, and made her way up through the sleeping warren of it; at the hall that led to the Folding Bedroom she slipped off the high-heeled shoes from her dancing feet and tiptoed to the door. She unlocked the locks quietly as a burglar, and peeked in. Auberon lay in a heap on the bed, obscure in the dawn light and (for some reason she was sure) only feigning untroubled sleep.


An Imaginary Study

The Folding Bedroom and its little kitchen were so small that Auberon, in order to have some quiet and isolation in which to work, had to create out of it an imaginary study.

"A what?" Sylvie asked.

"An imaginary study," he said. "Okay. Look. This chair." He had found somewhere in the ruined habitations of Old Law Farm an old schoolhouse chair with one broad paddle arm for a student to use as a desk. Underneath the seat was a compartment for the student's books and papers. "Now," he said. He positioned the chair carefully. "Let's pretend I have a study in this bedroom. This chair is in it. Now really all we have is this chair, but . . ."

"What are you talking about?"

"Well will you please just listen a minute?" Auberon said, blazing up. "It's very simple. There were lots of imaginary rooms at Edgewood where I grew up."

"I bet." She stood arms akimbo, a wooden spoon in one hand, head bound in a bright hussy kerchief beneath which her earrings trembled amid escaping curls of raven hair.

"The idea is," Auberon said, "that when I say 'I'm going into my study, babe,' and then sit down in this chair, then it's as though I've gone into a separate room. I shut the door. Then I'm alone in there. You can't see me or hear me, because the door is closed. And I can't see or hear you. Get it?"

"Well, okay. But how come?"

"Because the imaginary door is closed, and . . ."

"No, I mean how come you need this imaginary study? Why don't you just sit there?"

"I'd rather be in private. You see, we have to make a deal, that whatever I do in my imaginary study is invisible to you; you can't comment on it or dwell on it or. . ."

"Gee. What are you going to do?" A smile, and she made a rude gesture with the spoon. "Hey." But what he intended to do, though no less private and self-indulgent, was mostly to daydream, though he wouldn't have put it that way; to court, on long woolgathering rambles, Psyche his soul; put two and two together, and perhaps write down the sum, for he would have sharpened pencils in the pencil-well of the desk and a clean pad before him. But mostly, he knew, he would only sit, twist a lock of hair between his fingers, suck his teeth, scratch himself, try to catch the flying speckles that swam in his vision, mutter the same half-line of someone else's verse over and over and generally behave like the quieter sort of nut. He might also read the papers.

"Thinkin' and readin' and writin', huh," Sylvie said with great affection.

"Yes. You see, I have to be alone sometimes . . ."

She was stroking his cheek. "For thinkin' and readin' and writin'. Yes, baby. Okay." She backed away, watching him with interest.

"I'm going into my study now," Auberon said, feeling foolish.

"Okay. 'Bye."

"I'm shutting the door."

She waved the spoon. She began to say something further, but he cast his eyes upward, and she returned to the kitchen.

In his study, Auberon rested his cheek in the cup of his hand and stared at the old grainy surface of his desk. Someone had scratched an obscenity there, and someone else had priggishly altered it into BOOK in block letters. Probably all done with the point of a compass. Compass and protractor. When he started in at his father's little school his grandfather gave him his old pencil-case, leather with a snap closure and weird Mexican designs cut in it—a naked woman was one, you could run your finger over her stylized breast and feel the leather button of her nipple. There were pencils with dowdy pink hats for erasers, which pulled off to reveal the naked pencil end; there was another rhomboid dialectical gray eraser, half for pencil and a grittier half for ink, which macerated the paper it was used on. Pens black and cork-tipped like Aunt Cloud's cigarettes, and a steel box of points. And a compass and protractor. Bisect an angle. But never trisect it. With his fingers he moved an imaginary compass above the desk-top. When the little yellow pencil wore down, the compass leaned at a useless angle. He could write a story about those long afternoons in school, in May, say the last day, hollyhocks growing outside and vines clambering in at the open windows; the smell of the outhouse. The pencil box. Mother Westwind and the Little Breezes. Those protracted afternoons . . . He could call the story Protractor. "Protractor," he said aloud, and then shot a glance at Sylvie to see if she had overheard him. He caught her just having shot him a glance, and now looking back at her task unconcernedly.

Protractor, protractor . . . He drummed his fingers on the oak. What was she up to in there anyway? Making coffee? She had heated a big kettle of water, and now dumped heedlessly into it several big shakes of coffee, right from the bag, and threw in this morning's used grounds as well. A rich, boiling-coffee smell filled the air.

"You know what you ought to do?" she said, stirring the pot. "You ought to try to get a job writing on 'A World Elsewhere.' It's really degenerating."

"I . . ." he began to say, but then studiously turned away.

"Oops, oops," she said, stifling a laugh.

George had said that all that TV was written on the other coast. But how would he know anyway? The real difficulty was that he had come to see, through Sylvie's elaborate retellings of the events of "A World Elsewhere," that he could never have thought up the myriad and (to him) incongruous passions that seemed to fill it. Yet for all he knew the terrible griefs, great sufferings, accidents and windfalls it told of were all true to life—what did he know about life, about people? Maybe most people were as wilful, as overmastered by ambition, blood, lust, money, passion as the TV showed them. People and life weren't his strengths as a writer anyway. His strengths as a writer were . . .

"Knock-knock," Sylvie said, standing before him.

"Yes?"

"Can I come in?"

"Yes."

"Do you know where my white outfit is?"

"In the closet?"

She opened the door of the toilet. They had screwed into the door of this little chamber a collapsing clothes-rack, which held most of their clothes. "Look inside my overcoat," he said.

There it was, a two-piece white cotton outfit, jacket and skirt, an old nurse's uniform in fact with an identifying patch on the shoulder. Sylvie had ingeniously altered it into something at once stylish and improvised: her taste was sure, her skills didn't match it quite, he wished not for the first time that he could give her thousands to lavish on herself, it would be a joy to watch.

She looked over the outfit critically.

"Your coffee's going to boil away," he said.

"Huh?" With a pair of tiny scissors in the shape of a long-beaked bird she was removing the identifying shoulder patch. "Oh, yike!" She hurried to turn it down. Then she returned to her outfit. Auberon returned to his study.

His strengths as a writer were . . .

"I wish I could write," Sylvie said.

"Maybe you can," Auberon said. "I bet you'd be good at it. No, really"—she had snorted in contempt at this notion—"I bet you would." He knew with love's certainty that there was little she couldn't do, and that little wasn't worth doing. "What would you write?"

"I bet I could think up better stuff than they think up on 'A World Elsewhere.'" She carried the steaming kettle of coffee to the tub (as in all old-law tenements this sat squat and unembarrassed in the middle of the kitchen) and began straining the liquid through a cloth into an even bigger cauldron set in the tub. "It's not touching, y'know? It doesn't touch your heart." She started to undress.

"Do you mind," Auberon said, abandoning as hopeless the imaginary walls and door that separated him from Sylvie, "if I ask you what the hell you're doing?"

"I'm dying," she said calmly. Shirtless now, the globes of her breasts swinging gently with their pendular momentum as she moved, she picked up the two parts of the white outfit, looked them over a final time, and thrust them into the cauldron of coffee. Auberon got it, and laughed delightedly.

"Sort of a beige," Sylvie said, pronouncing the "g" as though it were in "badge". She plucked from the dish-drainer by the sink the little sock-like cotton strainer—el colador, a boy—which she used to make strong Spanish coffee, and showed it to him. It had turned a rich tan color he had himself often admired. She began stirring the cauldron slowly with a long-handled spoon. "Two shades lighter than me," she said, "is what I want. Café-con-leche."

"Pretty," he said. Coffee spattered her brown skin. She wiped it off and licked her fingers. With the spoon in both hands she lifted the garment up, her breasts tautening, and looked at it; it was already deep brown, browner than she, but rinsings (he could see her think it) would lighten it. She dropped it back in, with a quick finger tucked a lock of hair that had got away back under her snood, and stirred again. Auberon wouldn't ever decide whether he loved her more when her attention was on him, or when as now it was fixed on some task or thing in the real world. He couldn't write a story about her: it would consist only of catalogues of her actions, down to the most minute. But he had no real desire to write of anything else. He was standing now in the door of the little kitchen.

"Here's an idea," he said. "Those soap-operas always need writers." He said this as though it were a fact he was sure of. "We could collaborate."

"Huh?"

"You think up some stuff that might happen on the show—coming out of what's happening now—only better than what they'll do—and I can write it."

"Really?" she said, doubtful but intrigued.

"I mean I'll write the words, and you write the story." What was odd (he came closer) was that he meant by this offer to seduce her. He wondered how long lovers are lovers before they stop having to plot each other's seduction. Never? Perhaps never. Perhaps the lures get smaller, more perfunctory. Or maybe just the reverse. What did he know?

"Okay," she said with quick decision. "But," she said with a secret smile, "I might not have a lot of time, because I'm going to get a job."

"Hey, terrific."

"Yeah. That's what this outfit's for, if it comes out."

"Gee, that's great. What kind of job?"

"Well, I didn't want to tell you since it's not for sure. I have to get interviewed. It's in the movies." She laughed at the absurdity of it.

"A star?"

"Not right away. Not the first day. Later for that." She moved the sodden brown mess to a corner of the tub. She poured out the cold coffee. "A producer, sort of, I met. Sort of a producer or director. He needs an assistant. But not like a secretary exactly."

"Oh yeah?" Where was she meeting producers and directors and not telling him about it?

"Like sort of a script girl and assistant."

"Hm." Surely Sylvie, even more alert than he was to such things, would have sensed whether this sort-of producer's offer was real or mere predation; it sounded doubtful to him, but he made encouraging noises.

"So," she said—turning cold water full force over the now-tan outfit, "I got to look good or at least as good as I can look, to go see him. . . ."

"You always look good."

"No, really."

"You look good to me now."

She flashed him the briefest and brightest of her smiles. "So we'll get famous together."

"Sure," he said, coming closer. "And rich. And you'll know all about movies, and we'll make a team." He circled her. "Let's make a team."

"Oh. I got to finish this."

Okay.

"It'll be a while."

"I can wait. I'll just watch."

"Oh, papo. I get embarrassed."

"Mm. That's nice." He kissed her throat, smelling the biscuity odor of her exertion, and she allowed him to, her wet hands held out over the tub. "I'm going to let down the bed," he said in a low voice, something between a threat and the promise of a treat.

"Mm." She watched him do so, her hands in the water but her mind not now on her task. The bed, lowered, intruded suddenly into the room, very bedlike but also like the prow of a laden ship that had just come in: had just sailed through the far wall and hove to there, waiting to be boarded.


Nevertheless Spring

In the end, though—whether because she came to doubt that her producer really was one, or because the false spring of that week vanished and March went out like a lion freezing her tender marrow, or because the dyed outfit didn't ever please her quite (there lingered about it after no matter how many washings a faint smell of stale coffee)—Sylvie never did go to be interviewed for the movies. Auberon encouraged her, bought her a book to read on the subject, but this only seemed to plunge her into further gloom. The klieglit visions faded. She sank into a torpor that alarmed Auberon. She lay till late in a huge tangle of bedclothes, his winter coat atop them all, and when she did rise, mooned around the little apartment with a sweatshirt over her nightgown and thick socks on her feet. She'd open the refrigerator and stare irritatedly within at a container of moldy yogurt, nameless leftovers in tinfoil, a flat soda.

"Coño," she said. "There's never anything in here."

"Yeah? Is that so," he said with heavy irony from within the imaginary study. "I guess it must be broken." He rose, and reached for his coat. "What do you want?" he said. "I'll go get something."

"No, papo . . ."

"I have to eat too, you know. And if the refrigerator won't supply it."

"Okay. Something good."

"Well what? I could get some cereal . . ."

She made a face. "Something good," she said, with a twohanded, chin-uplifted gesture that certainly expressed her desire, but left him no wiser. He went out into a new-fallen still-falling snow.

As soon as she closed the door on him, Sylvie was swept by a tide of gloomy feeling.

It amazed her that he, brought up the baby boy in a household of sisters and aunts, could be so endlessly solicitous, take so much of their daily domestic life on himself, and bitch so little. White people were strange. Among her relatives and their neighbors a husband's chief domestic duties were eating, beating, and playing dominoes. Auberon was so good. So understanding. And smart: official forms and the endless paper of an aged and paralytic welfare state held no terror for him. And not jealous. When early on she'd developed a pressing crush on sweet brown Leon who waited at the Seventh Saint, and indulged it a while, and lain then next to Auberon every night rigid with guilt and fear till he'd wormed the secret out of her, he'd only said he didn't care what she did with others as long as she was happy with him when she was with him: now how many guys could you find, she asked herself in the clouded mirror over the sink, who would act like that?

So good. So kind. And how did she repay him? Look at you, she insisted. Bags under your eyes. Losing pounds every day, pretty soon—she held up a warning pinkie in the mirror—like this. Flacca. And not bringing home shit, useless to herself as to him, un' boba.

She'd work. She'd work hard and pay him back everything he'd done for her, the whole oppressive relentless treasure of his goodness. Toss it back in his face. There. "I'll wash f*ckin' dishes," she said aloud, turning away from the small pile of them by the squalid sink, "I'll turn tricks . . . ."

And was it to that that her Destiny led her? Bitter-faced and rubbing her horripilated arms, she paced from bed to stove like a caged thing. What should free her bound her, bound her to await it amid a poverty, an impoverished day-to-day existence different from the long, hopeless poverty of her growing up, but poverty nonetheless. Sick of it, sick sick sick! Self-pitying tears sprang to her eyes. Damn her Destiny anyway, why couldn't she trade it for a little decency, a little freedom, a little fun? If she couldn't throw it away, why could she get nothing in exchange for it either?

She climbed back into bed, black resolution in her mind. She drew up the covers, staring accusatorily at the middle distance. Dark, asleep, far-off but built into her very stuff, her Destiny couldn't be resigned, she'd learned that. But she was tired of waiting. It had not one single feature she could determine, except that Auberon was in it (but not this squalor; Somehow, not even this Auberon), but she'd discover it now. Now. "Bueno," she said, "All right," and took a stem attitude under the covers with arms crossed. She'd wait no more. She'd learn her Destiny and begin it or die; she'd drag it out of the future where it lay by main strength.

Auberon meanwhile plodded to the Nite Owl market (surprised to find this was Sunday and nothing else open, what do weekends mean to the leisured poor?) through snow that lay just for this hour virginal and new, his the first feet to begin its long defilement into rotten slush more black than white. He was angry. In fact he was furious, though he had kissed Sylvie gently farewell, and would kiss her again in ten minutes when he got back, just as gently. Why didn't she ever even acknowledge the equability of his temper, the sunniness of his disposition? Did she think it was easy to maintain, easy to press down honest indignation into a soft answer, every time, every single time? And what credit did he get for his efforts? He could sock her sometimes. He'd like to give her one good punch, quiet her down a little, show her just how far his patience had been tried. Oh God how awful even to think it.

Happiness, he had come to see, his happiness anyway, was a season; and in that season, Sylvie was the weather. Everyone within him talked about it, among themselves, but no one could do anything about it, they could only wait till it changed. The season of his happiness was spring, a long, skittish, changeful spring, as often withdrawn as proffered—like any spring: but nevertheless spring. He was sure of it. He kicked the wet snow. Sure.

He mooched indecisively among the few and expensive goods the Nite Owl offered—one of those places that keep up a marginal existence by being open on Sundays and deep into the night—and when he had made his choices (two kinds of exotic juices for Sylvie's tropical palate, to make up for punching her) he drew out his wallet and found it empty. As in the antique joke, a moth should lazily fly out. He scrabbled in his pockets, inside, outside, under the eyes (reserving terrible judgment) of the counterman, and at last, though having to resign one of the juices, made up the amount in found silver and linty pennies.

"Now what?" he said when, snow on his hat and shoulders, he opened the door of the Folding Bedroom and found Sylvie in bed. "Having a little nap?"

"Leamee alone," she said. "I'm thinking."

"Thinking, huh." He took his sodden paper bag into the kitchen and messed around for a time with soup and crackers, but when he offered her these she refused them; in fact for the rest of that day he could hardly get a word out of her, and grew afraid, thinking of her familial streak of madness. Dulcet, kind, he spoke to her, and her retreating soul fled from his words as from a cutting edge.

So he only sat (his imaginary study moved into the kitchen since the bed remained opened and occupied) and thought of how further to indulge her, and of ingratitude; and she struggled on the bed, and sometimes slept. Winter deepened. Black clouds formed over their heads; lightnings answered lightnings; north winds blew; cold rain poured down.


Let Him Follow Love

"Hold hard," Mrs. Underhill said, "hold hard. Somewhere here a slip's been made, a turning missed. Don't you feel that?"

"We do," said the others gathered there.

"Winter came," Mrs. Underhill said, "and that was right; and then . . ."

"Spring!" they all shouted.

"Too fast, too fast." She beat her temple with her knuckles. A dropped stitch could be fixed, if it could be found; a certain unraveling was in her power; but where along the long, long way had it been? Or—she cast her eye along the vast length of Tale unfolding from the to-come with the steady grace of a jewelled and purposeful serpent—was it yet to be? "Help me, children," she said.

"We will," they said, in all their various voices.

This was the problem: if what had to be discovered lay in what-was-to-be, then they could discover that easily enough. It was what-had-been that was hard to keep in mind. That's the way it is for beings who are immortal or nearly so; they know the future, but the past is dark to them; beyond the present year is the door into aeons-ago, a darkling span lit with solemn lights. As Sophie with her cards probed an unfamiliar future, pressing on the thin membrane that separated her from it, pressing here and there to feel the advancing shapes of things to come, so Mrs. Underhill felt blindly among the things that had been, searching for the shape of what was wrong. "There was an only son," she said.

"An only son," they echoed, thinking hard.

"And he came to the City."

"And he came to the City," they said.

"And there he sits," Mr. Woods put in.

"That's it, isn't it," Mrs. Underhill said. "There he sits."

"Won't be moved, won't do his duty, wants to die of love instead." Mr. Woods clutched his skinny knee in his long hands. "It could be this winter will go on, and never stop."

"Never stop," Mrs. Underhill said. A tear was in her eye. "Yes, yes, that's just how it appears."

"No, no," they all said, seeing it so. The freezing rain beat on the deep small windows, crying in mourning, the trees lashed their branches at the implacable wind, the Meadow Mouse was seized in the Red Fox's desperate jaws. "Think, think," they said.

She knocked again at her temple, but no one answered. She rose, and they retreated. "I'll need advice," she said, "that's all."

The black water of the mountain pooi was just unfrozen, though jags of ice like broken stone projected around its margins; on one of these projections Mrs. Underhill stood and sent down her summons.

Sleepy, stupid, too cold even to be angry, Grandfather Trout rose from the dark depths.

"Leamee alone," he said.

"Answer up," Mrs. Underhill said sharply, "or it'll go hard with you."

"What," he said.

"This child in the City," Mrs. Underhill said. "Greatgrandson of yours. Won't be moved, won't do his duty, wants to die of love instead."

"Love," Grandfather Trout said. "There is no force on earth left stronger than love."

"He won't follow the others."

"Then let him follow love."

"Hm," said Mrs. Underhill, and then "hmmm." She put her thumb to her chin and her finger along her cheek, resting her elbow in the cup of her other hand. "Well, perhaps he ought to have a Consort," she said.

"Yes," Grandfather Trout said.

"Just to trouble him, and keep his interest up."

"Yes."

"It is not good for man to be alone."

"No," said Grandfather Trout, though whether in agreement or denial was hard to tell when the word issued from a fish's mouth. "Now let me sleep."

"Yes!" she said. "Yes, of course a Consort! What have I been thinking of? Yes!" At every word her voice grew greater. Grandfather Trout sank quickly in fear, and the very ice melted away by inches from beneath Mrs. Underhill's feet as she cried "Yes!" in a voice of thunder.

"Love!" she said to the others. "Not in the Was, not in the Will Be, but Now!"

"Love!" they all cried. Mrs. Underhill threw open a humpbacked trunk bound in black iron and began rummaging in it. She found what she wanted, wrapped it featly in white paper, bound it with red-and-white twine, neatly waxed the ends of the twine to keep them from raveling, took pen and ink, and on Mr. Woods's bent back addressed a label: all in less time than it took to think of it. "Let him follow love," she said when the package was made. "And so he'll come. Willy." She dotted a final i. "Nilly."

"Aaaah," they all said, and began to drift away, talking in low voices.

"You'll never believe this," Sylvie said to Auberon, bursting through the door into the Folding Bedroom, "but I got a job." She'd been out all day. Her cheeks were red with March wind, her eyes bright.

"Hey." He laughed, astonished, pleased. "Your Destiny?"

"F*ck destiny," she said. She tore from its hanger the coffee-dyed outfit and flung it trashcanwards. "No more excuses," she said. She pulled out work shoes, sweatshirt, muffler. She banged the shoes on the floor. "Have to dress warm," she said. "I start tomorrow. No more excuses."

"That's a good day," he said. "April Fool's."

"Just my day," she said. "My lucky day."

He laughed, raising her. April had come. And she in his embrace felt a thing that was at once relief at a danger avoided and a foreboding of that same danger, and her eyes filled at the safety she felt, within his arms, and at its fragility too. "Papo," she said. "You're the greatest, you know that? You really really are."

"But tell me, tell me," he said. "What's this job?"

She grinned, hugging him. "You'll never believe it," she said.