Other Voices, Other Rooms Read online

  “To wash with, stupid,” she told him. “And don’t look so prissy. Everytime I come down here, I always take a scrub. Here, you put your clothes on that stump where the fishpole is.”

  Joel looked shyly at the designated place. “But you’re a girl.”

  With an exceedingly contemptuous expression, Idabel drew up to her full height. “Son,” she said, and spit between her fingers, “what you’ve got in your britches is no news to me, and no concern of mine: hell, I’ve fooled around with nobody but boys since first grade. I never think like I’m a girl; you’ve got to remember that, or we can’t never be friends.” For all its bravado, she made this declaration with a special and compelling innocence; and when she knocked one fist against the other, as, frowning, she did now, and said: “I want so much to be a boy: I would be a sailor, I would . . .” the quality of her futility was touching.

  Joel stood up and began to unbutton his shirt.

  He lay there on a bed of cold pebbles, the cool water washing, rippling over him; he wished he were a leaf, like the current-carried leaves riding past: leaf-boy, he would float lightly away, float and fade into a river, an ocean, the world’s great flood. Holding his nose, he put his head underwater: he was six years old, and his penny-colored eyes were round with terror: Holy Ghost, the preacher said, pressing him down into baptism water; he screamed, and his mother, watching from a front pew, rushed forward, took him in her arms, held him, whispered softly: my darling, my darling. He lifted his face from the great stillness, and, as Idabel splashed a playful wave, seven years vanished in an instant.

  “You look like a plucked chicken,” said Idabel. “So skinny and white.”

  Joel’s shoulders contracted self-consciously. Despite Idabel’s quite genuine lack of interest in his nakedness, he could not make so casual an adjustment to the situation as she seemed to expect.

  Idabel said: “Hold still, now, and I’ll shampoo your hair.” Her own was a maze of lather-curls like cake icing. Without clothes, her figure was, if anything, more boyish: she seemed mostly legs, like a crane, or a walker on modified stilts, and freckles, dappling her rather delicate shoulders, gave her a curiously wistful look. But already her breast had commenced to swell, and there was about her hips a mild suggestion of approaching width. Joel, having conceived of Idabel as gloomy, and cantankerous, was surprised at how funny and gay she could be: working her fingers rhythmically over his scalp, she kept laughing and telling jokes, some of them quite bawdy: “. . . so the farmer said: ‘Sure she’s a pretty baby; oughta be, after having been strained through a silk handkerchief.’ ”

  When he did not laugh, she said: “What’s the matter? Don’t you get it?” Joel shook his head. “And you from the city, too,” she sighed.

  “What did he mean . . . strained through a silk handkerchief?”

  “Skip it, son,” said Idabel, rinsing his hair, “you’re too young.” Joel thought then that the points of Idabel’s jokes were even for her none too clear: the manner in which she told them was not altogether her own; she was imitating someone, and, wondering who, he asked: “Where’d you hear that joke?”

  “Billy Bob told me,” she said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “He’s just Billy Bob.”

  “Do you like him?” said Joel, not understanding why he felt so jealous.

  “Sure I like him,” she said, rising up and wading toward land; her eyes fixed on the water, she was, moving slowly and with such grace, like a bird in search of food. “Sure: he’s practically my best friend. He’s awful tough, Billy Bob is. I remember back in fourth grade we had that mean Miss Aikens, and she used to beat Billy Bob’s hands raw with a ruler, and he never cried once.”

  They sat down in a sunny place to dry, and she put on her dark glasses.

  “I never cry,” Joel lied.

  She turned on her stomach, and, fingering moss, said with gentle matter-of-factness: “Well, I do. I cry sometimes.” She looked at him earnestly. “But you don’t ever tell anybody, hear.”

  He wanted to say: no, Idabel, dear Idabel, I am your good true friend. And he wanted to touch her, to put his arms around her, for this seemed suddenly the only means of expressing all he felt. Pressing closer, he reached and, with breathtaking delicacy, kissed her cheek. There was a hush; tenuous moods of light and shade seem to pass between them like the leaf-shadow trembling on their bodies. Then Idabel tightened all over. She grabbed hold of his hair and started to pull, and when she did this a terrible, and puzzled rage went through Joel. This was the real betrayal. And so he fought back; tangled and wrestling, the sky turning, descending, revolving, they rolled over, over. The dark glasses fell off, and Joel, falling back, felt them crush beneath and cut his buttocks. “Stop,” he panted, “please stop, I’m bleeding.” Idabel was astride him, and her strong hands locked his wrists to the ground. She brought her red, angry face close to his: “Give up?”

  “I’m bleeding,” was all Joel would say.

  Presently, after releasing him, she brought water, and washed his cut. “You’ll be all right,” she said, as if nothing had happened. And, indefinably, it was as if nothing had: neither, of course, would ever be able to explain why they had fought.

  Joel said: “I’m sorry about your glasses.”

  The broken pieces sprinkled the ground like green raindrops. Stooping, she started picking them up; then, seeming to think better of this, she spilled them back. “It’s not your fault,” she said sadly. “Maybe . . . maybe some day I’ll win another pair.”

  EIGHT

  Randolph dipped his brush into a little water-filled vinegar jar, and tendrils of purple spread like some fast-growing vine. “Don’t smile, my dear,” he said. “I’m not a photographer. On the other hand, I could scarcely be called an artist; not, that is, if you define artist as one who sees, takes and purely transmits: always for me there is the problem of distortion, and I never paint so much what I see as what I think: for example, some years ago, this was in Berlin, I drew a boy not much older than yourself, and yet in my picture he looked more aged than Jesus Fever, and whereas in reality his eyes were childhood blue, the eyes I saw were bleary and lost. And what I saw was indeed the truth, for little Kurt, that was his name, turned out to be a perfect horror, and tried twice to murder me . . . exhibiting both times, I must say, admirable ingenuity. Poor child, I wonder whatever became of him . . . or, for that matter, me. Now that is a most interesting question: whatever became of me?” As if to punctuate his sentences he kept, all the while he talked, thrusting the brush inside the jar, and the water, continually darkening, had at its center, like a hidden flower, a rope of red. “Very well, sit back, we’ll relax a minute now.”

  Sighing, Joel glanced about him. It was the first time he’d been in Randolph’s room; after two hours, he still could not quite take it in, for it was so unlike anything he’d ever known before: faded gold and tarnished silk reflecting in ornate mirrors, it all made him feel as though he’d eaten too much candy. Large as the room was, the barren space in it amounted to no more than one foot; carved tables, velvet chairs, candelabras, a German music box, books and paintings seemed to spill each into the other, as if the objects in a flood had floated through the windows and sunk here. Behind his liver-shaped desk unframed foreign postcards crusted the walls; six of these, a series from Japan, were for Joel an education, even though to some extent he knew already the significance of what they depicted. Like a museum exhibit, there was spread out on a long, black, tremendously heavy table a display consisting in part of antique dolls, some with missing arms, legs, some without heads, others whose bead-eyes stared glass-blank though their innards, straw and sawdust, showed through open wounds; all, however, were costumed, and exquisitely, in a variety of velvet, lace, linen. Now set in the center of this table was a little photograph in a silver frame so elaborate as to be absurd; it was a cheap photograph, obviously taken at a carnival or amusement park, for the persons concerned, three men and a girl, were posed against a humoro
us backdrop of cross-eyed baboons and leering kangaroos; though he was thinner in this scene and more handsome, Joel, without much effort, recognized Randolph, and another of the men looked familiar, too . . . was it his father? Certainly the face was only mildly reminiscent of the man across the hall. The third man, taller than his companions, cut an amazing figure; he was powerfully made and, even in so faded a print, very dark, almost Negroid; his eyes, narrow and sly and black, glittered beneath brows thick as mustaches, and his lips, fuller than any woman’s, were caught in a cocky smile which intensified the dashing, rather vaudeville effect of a straw hat he wore, a cane he carried. He had his arm around the girl, and she, an anemic faunlike creature, was gazing up at him with the completest adoration.

  “Oh, yes,” said Randolph, stretching his legs, lighting a mentholated cigarette, “do not take it seriously, what you see here: it’s only a joke played on myself by myself . . . it amuses and horrifies . . . a rather gaudy grave, you might say. There is no daytime in this room, nor night; the seasons are changeless here, and the years, and when I die, if indeed I haven’t already, then let me be dead drunk and curled, as in my mother’s womb, in the warm blood of darkness. Wouldn’t that be an ironic finale for one who, deep in his goddamned soul, sought the sweetly cleanlimbed life? bread and water, a simple roof to share with some beloved, nothing more.” Smiling, smoothing the back of his hair, he put out the cigarette, and picked up his brush. “Inasmuch as I was born dead, how ironic that I should die at all; yes, born dead, literally: the midwife was perverse enough to slap me into life. Or did she?” He looked at Joel in an amused way. “Answer me: did she?”

  “Did she what?” said Joel, for, as usual, he did not understand: Randolph seemed always to be carrying on in an unfathomable vocabulary secret dialogues with someone unseen. “Randolph,” he said, “please don’t be mad with me: it’s only that you say things in such a funny way.”

  “Never mind,” said Randolph, “all difficult music must be heard more than once. And if what I tell you now sounds senseless, it will in retrospect seem far too clear; and when this happens, when those flowers in your eyes wither, irrecoverable as they are, why, though no tears helped dissolve my own cocoon, I shall weep a little for you.” Rising, going to a huge baroque bureau, he dabbed on lemon cologne, combed his polished curls, and, posturing somewhat, studied himself in a mirror; while duplicating him in all essentials, the mirror, full-length and of French vintage, seemed to absorb his color, to pare and change his features: the man in the mirror was not Randolph, but whatever personality imagination desired him to resemble, and he, as if corroborating such a theory, said: “They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities? I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was no egotist . . . he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the one beautiful comrade, the only inseparable love . . . poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point.”

  A shy rap at the door interrupted. “Randolph,” said Amy, “is that boy in there with you?”

  “We’re busy. Go away, go away . . .”

  “But Randolph,” she whined, “don’t you think he ought to come read to his father?”

  “I said: go away.”

  Joel let his face reveal neither relief nor gratitude: to obscure emotion was becoming for him a natural reflex; it helped him sometimes not to feel at all. Still there was one thing he could not do, for there is no known way of making the mind clear-blank, and whatever he obliterated in daytime rose up at night in dreams to sleep beside him with an iron embrace. As for reading to his father, he’d made an odd discovery: Mr Sansom never really listened: a list of prices recited from a Sears Roebuck interested him, Joel had found by experiment, as much as any wild-west story.

  “Before it happened,” said Randolph, resuming his seat, “before then, Ed was very different . . . very sporting, and, if your standards are not too distinguished, handsome (there, in that photograph you can see for yourself), but, to be truthful, I never much liked him, quite the contrary; for one thing, his owning Pepe, or being, that is, his manager, complicated our relations. Pepe Alvarez, he is the one with the straw hat, and the girl, well, that is Dolores. It is not of course a very accurate picture: so innocent: who could imagine that only two days after it was taken one of us fell down a flight of stairs with a bullet in his back?” Pausing to adjust the drawing board, he stared at Joel, one eye squinting like a watchmaker’s. “Careful now, don’t speak, I’m doing your lips.” Rustling the ribbon-dressed dolls, a breeze came through the windows bringing here in the velvet shade sunshine smells of outside, and Joel wanted to be out there where right now Idabel might be splashing through a field of grass, running with Henry at her heels. The circular composition of Randolph’s face lengthened in concentration; he worked silently a great while until at last, and it was as if all that had gone before had indescribably led up to this, he said:

  “Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover’s eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child’s Sunday, lost voices, one’s favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory. A nostalgic list, but then, of course, where could one find a more nostalgic subject? When one is your age most subtleties go unobserved; even so, I imagine you think it incredible, looking at me as I am now, that I should’ve had ever the innocence to feel such love; nevertheless, when I was twenty-three . . .

  “It is the girl in the picture, Dolores. And we met in Madrid. But she was not Spanish; at least I do not believe so, though actually I never knew precisely where she came from: her English was quite perfect. As for me, I had been in Europe then two years, living, as it were, and for the most part, in museums: I wonder really whether anyone ever copied so many Masters? There was almost no painting of which I could not do a most engaging facsimile . . . still, when it came to something of my own, I went quite dead, and it was as though I had no personal perception, no interior life whatever: I was like the wind-flower whose pollen will not mate at all.

  “Dolores, on the other hand, was one of those from whom such as I manage occasionally to borrow energy: always with her I knew very much that I was alive, and came finally to believe in my own validity: for the first time I saw things without distortion and complete. That fall we went to Paris, and then to Cuba, where we lived high above the bay of Matanzas in a house . . . how should I describe it? . . . it was cloud-pink stone with rooms strewn like gold and white flowers on a vine of high corridors and crumbling blue steps; with the windows wide and the wind moving through it was like an island, cool and most silent. She was like a child there, and sweet as an orange is sweet, and lazy, deliciously lazy; she liked to sit naked in the sun, and draw tiny little animals, toads and bees and chipmunks, and read astrology magazines, and chart the stars, and wash her hair (this she did no less than three times a day); she was a gambler, too, and every afternoon we went down to the village and bought lottery tickets, or a new guitar: she had over thirty guitars, and played all of them, I must admit, quite horridly.

  “And there was this other thing: we very seldom talked; I can never remember having with Dolores a sustained conversation; there was always between us something muted, hushed; still our silence was not of a secret kind, for in itself it communicated that wonderful peace those who understand each other very well sometimes achieve . . . yet neither knew the other truly, for at that time we did not really know ourselve
s.

  “However . . . toward the end of winter I discovered the dream book. Every morning Dolores wrote out her night’s dreams in a big scrapbook she kept concealed under a mattress; she wrote them sometimes in French, more often in German or English, but whatever the language, the content was always shockingly malevolent, and I could make no sense of them, for it seemed impossible to identify Dolores with her ruthless dreams. And I was always in them, always fleeing before her, or hiding in the shadow, and each day while she lay naked in the sun I would find the newest page and read how much closer her pursuit had come, for in early dreams she’d murdered in Madrid a lover she called L., and I knew . . . that when she found R. . . . she would kill him, too.

  “We slept in a bed with a canopy veil that kept out mosquitoes and sifted the moonlight, and I would lie there awake in the dark watching her sleep, afraid of being trapped in that dream-choked head; and when morning came she would laugh and tease and pull my hair, and presently, after I’d gone, write . . . well, there is this I remember: ‘R. is hiding behind a giant clock. Its tick is like thunderstrokes, like the pulsebeat of God, and the hands, shaped like pointing fingers, stand at seventeen past three; come six I will find him, for he does not know it is from me he hides, but imagines it is himself. I do not wish him harm, and I would run away if I could, but the clock demands a sacrifice, or it will never stop, and life must cease somewhere, for who among us can long endure its boom?’

  “Aside from all else, there is some truth in that; clocks indeed must have their sacrifice: what is death but an offering to time and eternity?

  “Now, oddly enough, our lives were more than ever interlocked: there were any number of times I could have left, gone away, never seen her again; however, to desert would’ve been to deny love, and if I did not love Dolores, then no emotion of mine has been anything but spurious. I think now she was not altogether human (a trance-child, if such there be, or a dream herself), nor was I . . . though for reasons of youth, and youth is hardly human: it can’t be, for the young never believe they will die . . . especially would they never believe that death comes, and often, in forms other than the natural one.