Little, Big Part 28

"Girls," she said.

"And the knives and forks are boys," he said, glimpsing a pattern.

"No, the forks are girls too."

They had cafe-royale before them. Outside, hatted and scarved in the deathly cold, people hurried home from jobs, bent before the unseen wind as before an idol or a lofty personage. Sylvie was herself between jobs at the moment (a common dilemma for one with a Destiny as high as hers) and Auberon was living on his advances. They were poor but leisured.

"The table?" he asked. He couldn't imagine.

"A girl."

It was no wonder, he thought, that she was so s.e.xy, when all the world was boys and girls to her. In the language she had been born into there were no neuters. In the Latin Auberon had learned, or at least studied, with Smoky, the genders of nouns were an abstraction that he at any rate could never feel; but to Sylvie the world was a constant congress of male and female, boy and girl. The world: that was el mundo, a man; but la terra, the earth, was a woman. That seemed right to Auberon; the world of affairs and notions, the name of a newspaper, the Great World; but mother earth, the fructifying soil, Dame Kind. Such appropriated divisions didn't extend very far, though: the lank-haired mop was a girl, but so was his bony typewriter.

They played that game for a while, and then commented on the people pa.s.sing by. Because of the tint of the gla.s.s, those pa.s.sing by outside saw, not the cave's interior, but themselves reflected; and, not knowing they were observed from inside, sometimes stopped to adjust their clothing, or admire themselves. Sylvie's strictures on the common run of people were harsher than his; she had a great taste for all eccentricities and oddities, but stern standards of physical beauty and a finely-honed sense of the ridiculous. "Oh, papo, check this one out, check him outa . That's what I meant by a soft-boiled egg, you see what I mean?" And he did see, and she dissolved in her sweet raucous laughter. Without ever knowing he did so, he adopted for life her standards of beauty, could even feel himself drawn to the lean, brown, soft-eyed, strong-wristed men she favored, like Leon the cafe-creme-colored waiter who had brought their drinks. It was a relief to him when she decided (after long thought) that their children would be beautiful.

The Seventh Saint was preparing for the dinner hour. The bus-boys glanced at their messy table. "You ready?" Auberon said.

"I'm ready," she said. "Let's blow this joint." A phrase of George's, full of aged double-entendres more reminiscent of wit than exactly funny. They bundled themselves up.

"Train or walk?" he asked. "Train."

"h.e.l.l yes," she said.

Whispering Gallery In their rush to the warmth they leapt by mistake onto the express, which (full of sheeplike, sheep-smelling riders bound for the Bronx) didn't stop before it reached the old Terminus, mixing it up there with twenty other trains bound in all directions.

"Oh hey wait a sec," she said as they were changing trains. "There's something here I want to show you. Oh yeah! You gotta see this. Come on!"

They went down along pa.s.sages and up ramps, the same complex Fred Savage had first threaded him through, though whether in the same direction he had no idea. "What," he said.

"You'll love it," she said. She paused at a turning. "Now if I can only find it a There!"

What she pointed to was an empty s.p.a.ce: a vaulted intersection where four corridors met in a cross.

"What," he said.

"C'mere." She took him by the shoulders and steered him into a corner of the place, where the ribbed vaulting descended to the floor, making what seemed to be a slot or narrow opening but which was only joined bricks. She faced him into this joint. "Just stand there," she said, and she went away. He waited, obediently facing into the corner.

Then, startling him profoundly, her voice, distinct yet hollow and ghostly, sounded from directly in front of him: "Hi there."

"What," he said, "where a"

"Sh," her voice said. "Don't turn around. Talk real soft: whisper."

"What is it?" he whispered.

"I don't know," she said. "But if I stand over here in this corner, and whisper, you can hear me over there. Don't ask me how."

Weird! It sounded as though Sylvie were speaking to him from some realm within the corner, through a crack in an impossibly narrow door. A whispering gallery: hadn't there been some speculation about whispering galleries in the Architecture? Probably. There wasn't much that book didn't speculate about.

"Now," she said. "Tell me a secret."

He paused a moment. There was a privacy about the corner, the disembodied whispering, that tempted confidences. He felt bared, or barable, though he could see nothing: the opposite of a voyeur. He said: "I love you."

"Aw," she said, touched. "But that's not a secret."

A new fierce heat flew up his spine and erected his hair as a notion came to him. "Okay," he said, and told her of a secret desire he'd had but hadn't dared express to her before.

"Oh, hey, wow," she said. "You devil."

He said it again, adding a few details. It was just as though he were whispering the words into her ear in the darkest privacy of bed, but more abstract, more perfectly intimate even than that: right into her mind's ear. Someone walked past between them; Auberon could hear the footsteps. But the someone couldn't hear his words: he felt a shiver of glee. He said more.

"Mm," she said, as at the prospect of great comfort or satisfaction, a small sound that he couldn't help answering with a sound of his own. "Hey, what are you doing over there," her whisper said, insinuatingly. "Bad boy."

"Sylvie," he whispered. "Let's go home."

"Yah."

They turned away from their corners (each appearing to the other very small and bright and far away after the dark intimacy of their whispers) and came to meet in the center, laughing now, pressing into each other as much as their heavy coats allowed them to, and with many smiles and looks (G.o.d, he thought, her eyes are so bright, flashing, deep, full of promise, all those things eyes are in books but never are in life, and she was his) they caught the right train and rode home amid self-absorbed strangers who didn't notice the two of them, or if they noticed (Auberon thought) knew nothing, nothing of what he knew.

Right Side Up s.e.x, he had found out, was really terrific. A terrific thing. Anyway the way Sylvie managed it. In him there had always been a split between the deep desires enchained within him and the cool circ.u.mspection which seemed to him required in the adult world he had come to inhabit (he felt, sometimes, by mistake). Strong desire seemed to him childish; childhood (his own, anyway, as far back as he could remember almost, and he could tell stories of others') was darkly aflame, burdened with heavy pa.s.sions; adults had pa.s.sed beyond all that, into affections, into the calmer enjoyments of companionability, into a childlike innocence. Weirdly backward he knew this to be, but it's how he had felt it. That adult desire, its exigency, its greatness, had been kept a secret from him like all the rest, he didn't wonder at; he didn't even bother to feel cheated or enraged at the long deception, since with Sylvie he had learned otherwise, broken the code, turned the thing inside-out so that it was right-side-up, and caught fire.

He hadn't come to her exactly a virgin, but he may as well have; with no one else had he shared this huge, this necessitous child's greed, no one had ever lavished hers on him or eaten him up so complacently and with such simple relish. There was no end to it and it was all gratified; if he wanted more (and he discovered in himself astonishing, long-compacted thicknesses of desire to be unfolded) he had more. And what he wanted he was as greedy to give and she as greedy to take. It was all so simple! Not that there were no rules, oh yes there were, they were like the rules of children's spontaneous games, strictly adhered to but often made up on the spot out of a sudden desire to change the game and please yourself. He remembered Cherry Lake, a dark-browed imperious little girl he had used to play with: she, unlike all the others he played with who said "Let's pretend," always used another formulaa"she said "We must." We must be bad guys. I must be captured and tied to this tree, and you must rescue me. I must be queen now, and you must be my servant. Must! yes a Sylvie, it seemed, had always known, had never been in the dark about it all. She told him of certain shames and inhibitions she'd had as a kid where he'd had none, because all that stuff, she knewa"kissing, taking off clothes with boys, the rush of feelinga"was really for grown-ups, and she would come to it truly only when she was older, and had b.r.e.a.s.t.s and high heels and make-up. So there was not in her the division he felt; while he had been told that Mom and Dad had loved each other so much that they had subjected themselves to these childish indignities (so it seemed to him) in order to make babies, and could not connect these reported (and only halfbelieved-in) acts to the huge lashings of feeling invoked in him by Cherry Lake, by certain photographs, by mad games played naked, Sylvie had all along known the real story. Whatever other terrible problems life put before her, and they were many, that one at least she had solved; or rather she had never felt it to be posed. Romance was real, as real as flesh; love and s.e.x were not even woof and warp in it, they were one indissoluble thing, like the seamless fabric of her scented brown skin.

It was he only, thena"though in stark numbers she was not more experienced than hea"who was astonished, amazed, that this indulgence like a greedy infant's turned out to be just what grown-ups do, turned out to be adulthood itself: the solemn bliss of strength and capability as well as the mad infant bliss of selfsatisfaction unending. It was manliness, womanliness, certified again and again by the most vivid of seals. Papi she called him in her bliss. Ay Papi yo vengo. Papi! Not daytime papo, but strong nighttime daddy, big as a platano and father of pleasures. He almost skipped to think of it, she pressed to his side, her head just reaching his shoulder; but he kept a steady, long-legged, grown-up pace. Was he right that men sensed his potency as he strode along with her, and deferred to him, was it true that women glanced at him covertly, admiringly? Why didn't everyone they pa.s.sed, why didn't the very bricks and blank white sky bless them?

And so they did: at that moment, as they turned onto the street where Old Law Farm could be entered, between one footfall and another something anyway occurred, something that he thought at first to be within himself, a seizure or a heart attack, but instantly felt all around them: something enormous that was like a sound but wasn't one, was either a demolition (a whole block of dirty brick and wailpapered interiors gone to powder if it was) or a burst of thunder (breaking the sky at least in two, the sky which remained inexplicably blank winter white above, if it was) or both at once.

They stopped, clutching each other.

"What the h.e.l.l was that?" Sylvie said.

"I don't know," he said. They waited a moment, but no roiling smokes arose from the buildings around them, no sirens wailed, ignited by catastrophe; and still the shoppers and loungers and criminals went their ways, unalarmed, unmoved, their faces filled with private wrongs.

They went on warily to Old Law Farm, holding each other, each feeling that the sudden blow had been meant to separate them (why? how?) and had only barely failed, and might come again at any moment.

What a Tangle "Tomorrow," Tacey said, turning her embroidery-frame, "or the next day or the next."

"Oh," Lily said. She and Lucy were bent over a crazy-quilt, enriching its surface with different st.i.tcheries, flowers, crosses, bows, esses. "Sat.u.r.day or Sunday," Lucy said.

At that moment match was put to touch-hole (perhaps by accident, there would be some trouble about it afterwards) and the thing that Sylvie and Auberon in the City heard or felt rolled over Edgewood, booming the windows, rattling knickknacks on etageres, cracking a china figurine in Violet's old bedroom and making the sisters duck and raise their shoulders to protect themselves.

"What on earth," Tacey said. They looked at one another.

"Thunder," Lily said; "midwinter thunder, or maybe not."

"A jet plane," Tacey said, "breaking the sound barrier. Or maybe not."

"Dynamite," Lucy said. "Over at the Interstate. Or maybe not."

They bent to their work again, silent for a while.

"I wonder," Tacey said, looking up from her frame half turned back-to-front. "Well," she said, and chose a different thread.

"Don't," said Lucy. "That looks funny," she said critically, of a st.i.tch Lily was making.

"This is a crazy-quilt," Lily said. Lucy watched her, and scratched her head, not convinced. "Crazy isn't funny," she said.

"Crazy and funny." She worked. "It's a big zigzag."

"Cherry Lake," Tacey said. She held her needle to the wan light of the window, which had ceased to tremble. "Thought she had two boys in love with her. The other day a"

"Was it some Wolf?" Lily asked.

"The other day," Tacey went on (slipping at the first try a silk thread green as jealousy through the needle's eye), "the Wolf boy had a terrible fighta"with a"

"The rival."

"A third one; Cherry didn't even know. In the woods. She is a"

"Three," Lucy sang, and on the second "three" Lily joined her an octave lower: "Three, three, the rivals; two, two, the lilywhite boys, Clothed all in green-o."

"She is," Tacey said, "a cousin of ours, sort of."

"One is one," her sisters sang.

"She'll lose them all," Tacey said.

"a And all alone, and ever more shall be so."

"You should use scissors," Tacey said, seeing Lucy face down on the quilt to bite a thread.

"You should mind your own a"

"Business," Lily said.

"Beeswax," Lucy said.

They sang again: Four for the gospel-makers.

"Run off," Tacey said. "All three."

"Never to return."

"Not soon anyway. As good as never."

"Auberon a"

"Great-grandfather August."

"Lilac."

"Lilac."

The needles they drew through cloth glittered when they pulled them out to the full extension of the thread; each time they pulled them through the threads grew shorter until they were all worked into the fabric, and must be cut, and others slipped through the needles' eyes. Their voices were so low that a listener would not have known who said what, or whether they talked at all or only murmured meaninglessly.

"What will be fun," Lily said, "is to see them all again."

"All come home again."

"Clothed all in green-o."

"Will we be there? Will all of us be? Where will it be, how long from now, what part of the wood, what season of the year?"

"We will."

"Nearly all."

"There, soon, not a lifetime, every part, midsummer."

"What a tangle," Tacey said, and held up for them to see a handful of stuff from her workbox, which a child or a cat had got into: silk thread bright as blood, and black cotton darning-stuff, a hank of sheep-colored wool, a silkpin or two, and a bit of sequined fabric dangling from it all, spinning on a thread-end like a descending spider.

She heard a note in Elmond's wood And wished she had been there.

a"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 G.o.dfrey 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.