Читать книгу The Second Baptism of Albert Simmel - Rodney Clapp - Страница 8

He touched Val the first time they met. It was a January morning. Snow blanketed the ground, its stunning whiteness broken only here and there, by the russet yellow ribbons of dog markings. Ice encased trees. When glittering limbs clattered in the wind, the air echoed with a sound like tackle tinkling against the aluminum masts of harbored yachts. He was on an errand and tried to hustle. But the sidewalks and streets were treacherously slick, so slick it seemed that if you fell you might slide clear off the face of the earth. These conditions forced him into a halting, uneven gait, with his arms spasming out for balance each time he slipped. Which he did frequently. Still, he was not self-conscious until he was six or seven blocks from his home and saw her stepping onto the front stoop of a brick bungalow.

She wore woolen pants and a white, waist-length down coat. Her brunette hair flowed luxuriously out from under a red and yellow striped stocking cap. It was the hair he noticed first. Then he took in her long legs. Suddenly he caught himself trying to walk normally, at a casual gait with his hands relaxed at his hips. You idiot, he thought. You’re twenty-five years old, not a middle schooler who’s just realizing it might be more rewarding to impress girls than pester them. They nearly intersected as she attained the sidewalk. Then she surged ahead of him at a quick pace that would have been natural and sustainable on dry ground. He knew how slippery the surface was, and that she operated unawares. He stretched strides to close the distance between them, trying to imagine how he might tactfully suggest that she slow down and take care. He was nearly even with her elbow when one leg jackknifed out from under her. She tipped backward and righted herself, barely, with a jerking forward over-correction. Now her feet scooted backward and she began to fall facedown. He got a grip on her churning elbow and pulled her up straight. In the instant that she recovered her footing, he lost his. Levering her upright rocked him off balance. His feet flung forward as if they were taking flight from the rest of his body. Instantaneously, without time even to flail, he was on his back.

She looked down at him with wide-open green eyes, gasping alluringly feminine sounds of concern and alarm. At impact his cap had shot off his head like cannon-fire. He lay below her bareheaded, his feet still held off the ground. His body was unhurt; his pride, decimated. Ridiculous figure that he was, what had he to lose now? His spirit felt buoyant, unbound from the merciless gravity that had thrown him on his back. A smile rose to his lips. He looked her in the eyes and heard himself say, “Such is the state of chivalry in the Age of the Descent.”

And they laughed, together.

≤

Next their paths crossed at the train station. She sat on the bench with a beaten up paperback copy of East of Eden on her lap. They remembered each other’s names, and smiled about the Chaplinesque aspect of their first meeting. He told her how much he liked Steinbeck and she went through her personal ratings of the author’s canon: East of Eden in the lead, with The Grapes of Wrath second, then the others following in a blanket-finish. Except for Tortilla Flat, which left her cold; it seemed that Steinbeck wanted to make the paisanos sympathetic, but had managed only to show them comic at best and pathetic at worst. Directly he and she agreed to sit together on the train ride to Old Chicago. They both loved books, and with that mutual love a bridge sprung up between them. This, their first real conversation, was effortlessly rich and resonant. He reveled not only in her words but in her lilting soprano voice and her brilliant smile, which burst into view repeatedly. She liked his ready sense of humor, his unusual but not grating laugh. For emphasis of a point, she at one moment lightly poked and tapped his upper arm. To him it was as if she were gingerly testing a stovetop pan or pot, making sure it was not too hot to touch. The small gesture captivated him. Before they left the train, they had planned a date.

Over subsequent months they went downtown and walked the shores of Lake Michigan. They watched neighborhood softball games and flew kites and met at each other’s home to eat together and play board games. They taught each other favorite songs. They took turns reading aloud all manner of books—Augustine’s Confessions and Kierkegaard and Michel Serres and A Prayer for Owen Meany. Every occasion, whatever else it involved, was an opportunity to talk and to listen, to learn more about the other, sometimes in sips and sometimes in gulps, but never with the thirst for their company slaked. For each of them the other was a new world to be explored, brimming with wonders and some dangers (those helped keep you alert). After a few months it seemed that there was nothing either would hide from the other. They related not only triumphs and amusing foibles, but what they considered the darkest, most shameful parts of themselves. They learned to be confident in their them-ness as a single planet securely encompassing both their worlds, both their lives past and to come. The only passion neither could evoke in the other was humiliation or embarrassment.

Naturally their spiritual and emotional intimacy was accompanied by physical intimacy. At first they simply learned how to fit each other’s lips together, keeping noses out of the way. But since they found each other’s outer selves as endlessly fascinating as their inner selves, their bodily explorations advanced quickly. One summer night she arrived at his place in cutoff jean shorts and a T-shirt. A lean woman in cutoffs was irresistible to him. They were on the couch, necking, before she had time to ask for the glass of water she needed after her walk from across the neighborhood. He caressed her rump and thighs as his tongue slid into her ear. Wait a minute—he felt goosebumps, but only on one leg. A probing tongue in her right ear raised bumps on her right leg, though not the left. He kissed across her face, grazing her cheek, the tip of her nose, her lips, the other cheek, then slyly flicked his tongue in her left ear. Now there were goosebumps on her left leg, though not the right. For the next five minutes he delectably repeated the experiment. The hypothesis was validated, and with amused pleasure he informed her of his discovery.

“Wow,” she said. “You’re teaching me things about myself that I never knew.”

“A sweet victory of the scientific method,” he humbly demurred.

This was a woman and a man in their mid-twenties, playing as grownups do. Yet though they were not ashamed or feeling guilty, a shadow hung over their sexual activities. That shadow was the National Anti-Natal Law. If she were to become pregnant, the baby would be removed from them and they both would suffer penalties. Certainly they would be separated, which itself would be an unbearable punishment. So they took precautions.

Their parents, at first encouraging of their relationship, had grown cooler on it as it became apparent how serious the two were about one another. They took occasion to remind their adult children, not always subtly, about the NAN laws and the fact that subordinates—unlike constituents—always suffered their consequences. Eventually, his father became especially insistent that the two should, as he put it, “slow down.” Then one night they dropped by her parents’ house and found his father there. What was he doing? The parents were briefly sheepish, blushing and clearly caught in the act of something. They quickly picked up the bobbled ball of their conversation and put it back into play. But he had taken note, and at the end of the evening he followed his father out the door. As they walked together, he queried about what his father and her parents had discussed before their children arrived. He learned that his father was pressing with her parents the case that the two of them should “take a break,” and maybe resume their friendship in few years, when both were at least twenty-eight years old.

He was outraged at his father’s meddling. He wanted a promise that his father would drop the suit against their relationship, and never again present it to her parents. His father stalled and attempted to divert the discussion from any such vow. The heights of the son’s sense of injustice then rose, and it was from atop a wall of righteous anger that he threw down an ultimatum. He demanded that his father immediately promise to desist, or else the son would quit not his relationship with his lover, but his relationship with his father. In quiet but unrepentant sorrow, the elder responded that the younger couple’s love was a fine thing in itself and at the same time too hazardous to continue. “Then that’s it. It’s decided,” the son said. And he stalked away from his father into the night, until darkness obscured each from the other’s sight.

The following day he and Val were alone, in his apartment. They lay together on his bed, in the big cave at the end of the long, tunneling flat. An early fall breeze blew through the open windows at the front of the apartment. The yellowed trees rocked their boughs gently. They rested in each other’s arms. She told of her disappointment with her parents, and he told her about the confrontation and then the break with his father. She wept. Then they were kissing and embracing desperately. Clothes came off as if of their own volition. At some point they were both naked. This was the point when they normally paused and saw to their precautions.

But now, in the swirl of anger and desire, he wanted nothing between them. Nothing—no parent, no law, no withholding thin skin—nothing could keep them apart, not by a millimeter or a million miles. She was no less caught up in desire than he, but not so angry. There was a moment when she started to say something, but then his hips were cradled by her opened legs, and she could not and did not want to stop it. For months and years later he would look back on that first instant when he was fully inside her. He would want to forget it, but he knew that at that moment he felt an onrushing ecstasy and yet held back a piece of himself, reserving it for anger, for spite of his father. The ecstasy rolled, gained momentum, then crested and broke over him like a wave. It washed away the anger and engulfed him in the love he shared with this woman. But still, it was clear and undeniable that he had interrupted their fusing and tainted it with the dishonoring of his father.

What was it about a man, he wondered as she drifted off in a nap, that made him turn love against love, working death in himself by that which is good? He decided he should not completely trust himself. He turned to her with a resolve to build and fashion a love that was pure, that did not rely on spite or hatefulness or any kind of exclusion for its definition and animation. He reclaimed her and them on the basis of this resolution, poised like a marathon runner with eyes on the distant goal of pure love.

≤

But then, barely two months later, she was gone. That was what people said about people who had died. They were “passed away,” “departed,” “no longer with us”—in short, finally and irrevocably “gone.” His life, like a calendar hinged on the advent of a new millennium, pivoted on this before and after. The before was when she was not gone. Those were the days when it was not too hard, usually, to imagine God smiling on creation: in spring sunshine, in soft rains, in the raucous play of children and the full gallop of a fine horse. The after was when she was and would always be gone. In the after he was numb to the surrounding world, rain or shine, imploded into the black hole of himself. His laughter, when it came, rang hollow to his own ears. Eventually he forgot how to cry. For all he would let anything touch or move him, he might as well have been walking about in an astronaut’s suit. He imagined exactly that sometimes. Helmeted and carapaced, he was insulated, invulnerable to whatever toxicity (or perfume) other people released into the atmosphere he did not share. He breathed in only the fumes of his private despair. Like a floating spaceman, he drifted along on the momentum built up in the before part of his life.

Here was the bitter story Val’s parents told: With them, she had gone downstate to visit her cousins. One warm but not too hot afternoon, the cousins decided to hike a nearby riverside forest. It was a beautiful place, with impressive draws cut into limestone, their walls glowing with an emerald light filtered through the foliage of trees and vines. A well-worn trail led by these small canyons, then climbed up and up, until green gave way to blue and you burst out atop towering cliffs. Far below coursed the river. Like a placid beast of burden, it carried felled trees and resting waterfowl and massive barges. In the air above it, hawks spiraled high on thermal currents. As cozy and secure as a forest might be, there was something liberating about working your way through a dense enclosure of woods, onto a promontory from which you could see as far as forever.

Maybe it was this sudden and exhilarating sense of freedom, they said, that impelled Val to venture out on the edge of the cliff. In all events, she was nearer the rocky cusp than either of her cousins. Then the soft stone crumbled and broke away, and just like that she disappeared. Or, to be more precise about how the witnesses put it, she was “gone.” Reluctant to move any closer to the cliff’s edge, the pair of cousins shouted out her name. Only echoes of their own calls returned to them. Eventually one cousin made brave and crawled, then wriggled on her stomach, so that she could look over the drop. All the long way down, plunging into greenery below, she saw no sign of her disappeared relative. She returned to her sister’s side, then the two retreated hastily back the way they had come. They breathlessly accosted a ranger at the park’s lodge office. The ranger questioned the panicked cousins, then enlisted a colleague for the rescue.

Her body was found two hundred feet below the point where it fell. It had struck at least two abutments on its drop. That and unyielding tree branches, to say nothing of the force of final impact, had horribly bent and mangled her. Three hours later police escorted her father to the mortuary. He came back out in shambles, a much older man than he was when he entered. His daughter’s broken body and ruined face were so horrible he advised his wife against viewing it. She had never seen her husband so ravaged, and finally she relented. Since they were forgoing an open-casket funeral, they had her cremated in the downstate mortuary. They returned home a week later, bearing their only child in an urn.

At her interment her ashes, safe within a toy-sized and ornate casket, were reverently placed in a hole three feet deep. A few of the bereaved, those closest to her, grimly formed in a single file line for a turn at dropping a handful of soil into the grave. Al, still shell-shocked from the news of her death, stood in line behind her parents. For several excruciating moments, her father and mother awkwardly looked at each other. Neither wanted to commit the terribly final act of beginning to close the grave. Then her mother stepped forward brusquely, knelt on both knees, and scooped at the small earthen pile. She managed to grasp a fistful of soil and move her hand above the hole, but then her hand would not open and release the dirt. She breathed deeply and stifled her sobs. She bent down, her arm extending in the grave until her knuckles brushed her daughter’s casket. Then she opened her hand, withdrew her arm, and struggled to her feet, with a relative sidling up to assist her.

Next her father dragged himself forward, as if to his own execution. He took hold of a couple of clods and straightened up over the grave. His hand trembled, so violently that the clods jostled and crumbled in his loosely closed fingers, sifting out beside the grave as much as into it. “Oh, Jesus!” he cried out. Solicitous relatives helped him move again.

It was Al’s turn next. He sympathized with her parents. But he was numb, chronically stunned, not quite believing she was really dead, really gone. Let this be one of our lighthearted games, he thought, a kind of hide-and-seek in which he actually knew exactly where she was secluded but bumbled around as if he were clueless. Complete the ritual with the dirt, so as to be released and go to find her, to talk to her and listen to her and take her in his arms. In this state, he was able to perfunctorily enact his duty. He dropped soil into the grave, glancing at and away from the golden box at its bottom. Now I’ve completed the count: ready or not, girl, here I come! He staggered away from the graveside.

And he kept staggering, wandering in a daze for a week or two, half expecting her to bound off a car at the train stop or knock on his door some evening when the summer light had gone buttery and enshrouded everything in a tender veil. But he couldn’t find her or be found by her, and gradually grew tired and then frustrated with the game. Okay. I give up. Come out, come out wherever you are. And still she made no appearances. For several days he was flooded with unbearable anxiety, trying not to remember the funeral, the thing with the dirt, fighting and pushing it all back with memories of her pert nose, her so-alive eyes, her cinnamon-freckled breasts, her touch and embrace.

Then he was worn down and overcome. Frighteningly, bitterly, it was getting harder and harder to remember her as she was, in all her spiritual and physical vitality. More and more he could only think of her as dusty ashes and shards of incinerated bones. He could not find her, he could not recover her, in any other form. Only then, tortured beyond his endurance, could he admit to himself that she had passed away, she had departed, that she was no longer with him or anyone else on the face of the earth. She was, oh no-no-no-no but yes, gone.