Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

BUT SHE DIDN’T BELIEVE she knew anyone by that name. Had she been aware of having said it, she would have been as surprised as Etcher, not because she wasn’t seeing another man but because his name was not Thomas but Joseph.

He was a large bear of a man who spoke in a hush, and he had a stall in the Market. She’d gone there several months after having recovered from her nearly fatal illness, browsing among the Market’s paltry offerings. He made jewelry of a less exotic sort than Sally’s — strings of benign white wafers that hung as plain functional necklaces — and had been watching Sally from the other side of the Market; when she wandered over to him he could barely believe his good luck. Then, as she studied his jewelry carefully, he took notice of the necklace she wore.

“Where did you get this?” he said in his hushed voice.

The way he spoke, the way she could hardly hear him at all, felt familiar to her, as well as the way he looked down on her from a height. She was immediately sorry that Etcher didn’t look down on her from a height. She was immediately sorry that Etcher, a soft-spoken man himself, now seemed so loud. “I made it,” she said of the necklace.

Joseph looked around him, over both shoulders. “They allowed this?”

“I’ve never … subjected it to their approval.” She asked, “Do you think I’d have trouble selling a necklace like this?”

“It’s a very unusual necklace,” he advised her.

She got the idea, then, of selling some of her necklaces through Joseph’s stall. She came back the next day to talk to him about it and, though he was dubious and afraid, since he couldn’t afford to have the police shut him down, he wanted to see Sally again, so he offered to keep her necklaces and earrings under the counter and show them to anyone who appeared adventurous. Unknown to Sally, he bought some of the jewelry himself, so that she’d return.

Slowly he began to steal her heart.

One night she went home with him, and didn’t return to her own circle until late the next morning.

Perhaps it was the jewelry. Perhaps it was that she wanted to be admired for something she created rather than someone she was, since she had no idea who she was and therefore could never really trust anyone who loved her for that. Of course it wasn’t her jewelry that Joseph loved, it was the same intangible thing about her that all the men had loved; from the other side of the Market she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen as she had been the most beautiful woman a thousand other men had ever seen. But she chose to believe it was the beauty of the necklace she wore that attracted him. And then, if she was touched by the familiarity of him, there was also the way that he was utterly different, because though he wanted to ravish her like the others, he was incapable of it.

They lay together in bed and he tried to will forth the manifestation of his desire. His mind roamed around itself to find the magic click of the cells in his brain that would spark an erection. When he could not, when he suffered in her arms, that need for her comfort and assurance and pity felt more like real need to her than the need others had for her body or soul, particularly her soul, since its contents were so mysterious and unnamable to her. Comfort and assurance and pity were qualities she recognized readily enough in herself that she could offer; they possessed a value she understood. If there was ever a woman who needed to pity a man, who needed to be needed for the heedless assurances of her heart when her body could not be taken, it was Sally; and so she gathered him up. She held him just as the big bearness of him gathered her in his arms and held her. Once she had needed the ravishment. Once, amid Gann’s indifference and in the aftermath of a dream from which she woke in a strange hotel next to a strange man in a pool of blood, she needed the carnality of love. But Etcher had satisfied that need, and once he had, Sally in her fashion couldn’t quite believe in it anymore, since the slave in her couldn’t understand anyone loving her as anything but property; and when Etcher ravished her not as property but as a person, she could no longer understand ravishment at all, nor his in particular. She believed ravishment was bigger than she was worthy of, which made it unreal. Joseph’s love, crippled and pitiful, was real. It didn’t overwhelm her in the way of Etcher’s. It didn’t impart meaning to her life in terms of what it gave to her but in terms of what it asked of her. She had found someone as wounded as she. And so for several months she loved Joseph, the fact of their love sexless if not the intention.

“There’s someone else,” she told Etcher, not long after it began.

“Then you have to find out what it means,” Etcher choked. It was the sort of thing someone believes when he says it but hopes that, the moment he says it, the new infatuation’s meaning will become instantly and clearly trivial, and no further investigation will be necessary. It was a fair answer, but not an honest one. She begged him to help her. It was an honest plea, but not a fair one. He’d helped her with everything else, after all; Etcher had been from the beginning the one who helped her more than either of them had a right to. It was unfair of her to ask for his help now because what she really asked was that he accept part of the responsibility for a decision that could only be hers. The night she told him there was another man they made fitful angry love in the middle of which she moaned desperately, “Marry me.” Etcher knew at that moment that Sally did not know the meaning of her heart. In a single hour she’d gone from telling him there was another man to a frantic plea for marriage, and everything he’d allowed himself to trust could never again be trusted the same way. At the end of their sex, when she cried, as she had many times before, “No!” to her own orgasm, the no had a new conviction, the no had a new persuasion about it, the no believed anew its unworthiness to be yes, the no believed anew its unwillingness to be possessed.

It might have been easier if Etcher could have hated Sally. But he knew she acted not out of malice but confusion; Etcher’s faith in this love was such that it was incapable of comprehending how confusion could be as destructive as malice. “You want to know if he and I have made love, don’t you?” she asked witheringly in one of their arguments about the man who didn’t even have the same name for both of them, Joseph to her and Thomas to him. But even when Sally scorned Etcher’s pain with a contempt he’d never heard from her before, even when Sally scorned his unasked questions, he knew it was really her own heart she scorned. At such moments he wanted to protect her again, as he’d come to protect her since the moment she walked into the archives searching for Madison Hemings. Etcher wanted to protect her from the way the chaos of her heart spilled into the shambles of her soul; it might have been easier, since he couldn’t bring himself to hate Sally, if he could have therefore hated the man whose name she knew as Joseph but whom Etcher knew as Thomas. But he couldn’t hate Thomas either. It was impossible for Etcher to hate any man for loving Sally; it would be tantamount to hating himself. And so that’s what he came to do. Once again he extended the benefit of the doubt to everyone but himself. Once again he was the most convenient target of his own agony and rage, as though he didn’t believe anyone else could really sustain the impact of either his agony or rage.

He didn’t follow her. He didn’t track her through the city, or conspire to confront her infidelity. He didn’t spy on her affair around corners. He did, however, wait outside her door. He did sleep at night against the obelisk in the Vog, pulling his coat around him and waiting for her return. He did linger beyond the circumference of her old circle, out in Redemption known as Desire, where Gann now lived alone except when Polly was with him. One night he finally approached, knocking on Gann’s door. “Is Sally here?” he asked when Gann answered.