Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

Isabel appeared to be on the edge of tears, and there was a grimness in her profile that moved me. There was old Scots’ darkness in her eyes and heaviness in her brow. “My God, Isabel,” I said, “I’m sorry as hell. What am I saying?”

She looked at me quickly and then looked away.

“What do I know about Shakespeare?” I said.

She spoke quickly and her voice was soft and distant. “That’s not it, Ben. It’s not Shakespeare.”

“I know,” I said, becoming explanatory now. “I know it isn’t. I don’t know why I…”

“Don’t explain, for Christ’s sake,” she said. “Just shut up. You’re not talking to me . You haven’t talked to me all evening.” She stared at me hard. “Don’t you know, Ben, that the things you say hurt ?”

I stared at her. “I’m sorry, honey,” I said. “I’ll fix tea.”

On her bathroom wall Isabel kept a hologram of herself as a seven-year-old, taken for her first day at Socialist Primary School in Paisley. She wears a hand-knitted sweater and a kilt and her eyes hold a look of anxiety. Isabel’s father was at sea for most of her childhood, and her mother was as cold as mine. Sometimes toward the end of our stay together I would see that same anxious look in Isabel’s eyes, in her early forties.

In the hologram she holds a striped cat in her lap. Something in Isabel’s psyche had always drawn her toward cats, and when I moved in with her she had the two, Amagansett and William. I remember shouting at Isabel once in the middle of the night that I could probably get it up for her if she weren’t so damned anxious about it and her saying, levelly, “Don’t get it up for me , Ben. Get it up for yourself!” and knowing with a knot in my stomach that she was right, I padded for refuge into the bathroom and found the two cats huddled behind the base of the sink. They stared up at me with pained, curious eyes. I looked at them silently a minute and then said softly, “She knows everything , boys.”

My red Chinese computer also reads. I can set a book in its drawer and it will turn pages and read aloud in a pleasant, avuncular voice with a midwestern accent. Sometimes I do that with my library books when my eyes are blurred from morphine or I just don’t want to open them. I set the drug synthesizer to make ethyl alcohol, mix it with grape juice from my garden vines, and drink myself into a near-coma while my computer reads the short novels of James: The Lesson of the Master, The Beast in the Jungle, The Pupil . I’ve never read them sober; I’m not sure which has the ball-less William Marcher as protagonist, but I know I see him looking like my father. Distant, lost in terminal self-regard.

I speak in this journal as though my time on Belson were spent in reading and thought; in fact, much of it is passed in the grip of an uneasy lassitude. For the last five days I have been incapable of action or reading or of amusing myself in any significant way. I merely pass time. Often I feel like a fifteen-year-old hanging around the drugstore waiting for someone to drop in. Yesterday I merely waited all day for Fomalhaut to set.

When dusk comes, the sky has a way of modulating its colors that evokes feelings I have no names for. There is nothing like it in the skies of Earth, no pinks and yellows to match these pinks and yellows, no blue-grays so somber as Belson’s. Last night I felt a gentle suffocation as I watched Fomalhaut descending. As it touched the magenta horizon and reflected from the thousand acres of obsidian the suffocation was relieved and my heart expanded with my lungs and I became for a moment dizzied with happiness.

It is a terrible comment on the nature of capitalism that a man as baffled by himself as I can be so successful at it—that I could become so rich and so confused at the same time.

Three days after I moved in with Isabel the temperature dropped to eighteen below zero. It was November 1, 2061. All Saints’ Day. Isabel had a matinee and an evening show and she was out of the apartment all day. I managed to get out onto the icy streets and buy enough wood to make a big fire in the fireplace; I spent most of the day huddled by it, wrapped in a blanket, reading a book called Nuclear Fission in the U.S.: The Loss of Denver . I don’t know why I didn’t find myself a warm hotel room. Yet something told me I should stick with Isabel for that winter, and I didn’t really question it.

She got home a little before midnight, wrapped up in a heavy coat with artificial furs and looking like a Russian countess. Her cheeks were as red as apples. She blew steam by the doorway, stamped her boots and sang out, “Hello, darling.” It thrilled my heart, grumpy as I was, to see her like that.

But a blast of icy air had hit me from the open door and I suddenly found myself furious. “Shut that damned door!” I shouted. And that was the way it often went from then on.

Sometimes, walking through the park that winter, dressed in a parka and muffled like a seal hunter, I would hear Isabel suddenly break out in song:

Her voice was so direct and unaffected that the old child in me wanted to cry at the sound of it. We held hands a lot, squeezing hard to feel one another through mittens.

We walked every day, no matter how cold it was. Isabel is the only woman I know who shares my love for walking the streets of New York. Her gray hair glowed in winter sunlight and she would face the icy air with zip and aplomb; I think I loved her most while striding briskly up Madison or Fifth Avenue in December, seeing the stares she would get from Chinese tourists muffled in their Korean scarves.

Sometimes she would window-shop. At first this was annoying; it seemed to be the customary female dumbness. But gradually I saw that Isabel was as perceptive about clothing as she was about the paintings in museums. She knew a lot about shoes, for instance—more than some people know about life. She had a sense of the sheen and poise of a shoe and eventually made me see it for the piece of minor sculpture it could be. But when I offered to buy she said there wasn’t room in her closets.

Eating at restaurants with her was delightful, and we did it a lot that winter. I think I began to love her a dozen years ago when I first saw her eat truite fumée . She would cut it neatly with her knife, slide an ample slice onto her fork, push a dozen capers on top—still using the knife—and then put it into her mouth and chew with serious concentration. There was nothing prissy in this; Isabel was a formidable trencherwoman and her eating was punctuated with little sighs of pleasure. That was when I was married to Anna; I was backing a play that Isabel had a tiny part in. She had also carpentered one of the sets. I was taken by her intelligent face and her figure and asked her to lunch. Nothing developed from that meeting for a long time, but watching her eat made my heart go out to her. I love people who like to eat and don’t get fat doing it. This woman ate with gusto and had a waist like a girl’s. In the twelve years I’ve known her her hair has become grayer but her figure hasn’t changed. I tingle now to think of that figure, to remember her putting away truite fumée .

We laughed a lot on our walks and in restaurants. We hugged each other spontaneously from time to time. I was delighted by her in hundreds of small ways. But whenever we tried to make love during those five months I found myself with a knot in my stomach and some old smoldering fury in my loins. What had been a happy afternoon of walking and chatting could become a nightmare; sometimes I became withdrawn and bitchy for hours. I should have quit trying altogether; Isabel herself told me I should quit, but I found ways to override her objections. I told her my sexual failures needn’t upset her, that if she were really turned on it might help my problem, that maybe at depth it was she who was afraid of sex. For about two weeks I had her buffaloed. Everybody has sexual fears; I developed Isabel’s like an impresario, trying to cover up my own.