T. Boyle - Riven Rock

And then, one afternoon in the final week of their California sojourn, it came to him. He was walking over the grounds with his mother and Dr. Franceschi, the landscape expert, elaborating his feelings regarding caryatids, statuary in general and the function of fountains in a coordinated environment of the artificial and the natural, when they emerged from a rough path into a meadow strewn with oaks all canted in one direction. The trees stood silhouetted against the mountains, heavy with sun, their branches thrust out like the arms of a party of skaters simultaneously losing their balance. It was October, the season of evaporative clarity, the sky receding all the way back to the hinges of the darkness beyond. Butterflies hung palely over the tall yellow grass. Birds called from the branches.

“What curious trees, Dr. Franceschi,” Nettie said, shielding her eyes from the sun, “all leaning like that, as if someone had come along and tipped them.”

Dr. Franceschi was a thin wisp of a man in his fifties, vegetally bearded, with quick hands and the dry darting eyes of the lizards that scurried underfoot and licked over the rocks. “It’s the prevailing winds that do it,” he said in a voice as breathy as a solo flute, “shearing down from the mountains. They call them sundowners — the winds, that is.”

“What about that one over there?” Stanley said, pointing to a tree that defied the pattern, its trunk vertical and its branches as evenly spaced as the tines of a fork. It was a hundred yards off, but he could see that there was a band of rock round the base of it, a petrified collar that seemed to hold it rigid.

“Oh, that, yes: I’d been meaning to show you that particular tree. It’s quite a local curiosity.”

And then they were crossing the open field, Nettie compact and busty, the jaunty horticulturist bouncing up off his toes like a balletomane, Stanley loping easily along with the great sweeping strides that made locomotion seem a form of gliding. As they drew closer, Stanley saw that the massive slab of sandstone girding the tree was split in two, and that the tree seemed to be growing up out of the cleft. “Very curious,” Dr. Franceschi was saying, “one of those anomalies of nature — you see, there was a time some years ago when an acorn fell from that tree there”—pointing—“or that one maybe, who knows, and found a pocket of sustenance atop this blasted lump of stone, and you couldn’t find a less promising environment, believe me—”

But they were there now and Stanley had his amazed hands on the rock itself, a massive thing, chest-high, big as a hearse, rough to the touch and lingeringly warm with the radiation of the sun. It was the very stuff of the earth’s bones, solid rock, impenetrable, impermeable, the symbol of everything that endures, and here it was split in two, riven like a yard of cheap cloth, and by a thing so small and insidious as an acorn….

riven rock…

that was the place where he was now and no one had to tell him that or whisper over him like he was a corpse already and with the reek of illicit sex on their fingers like eddie had on his because eddie was down among the women he could hear and smell and feel in their tight-legged female immanence out in the yard and giggling in the cottages tiptoeing through the kitchen and oh mr. mccormick can never should never and will never know a thing about it a man like him that can’t control his unnatural urges and i heard about a man like that once from my cousin nancy cooper in sacramento hung like a barnyard animal and he had a woman a negress that would come to him on foot six miles one way just so she couldfeelhim in her and if you believe nancy and i do it was just too much for her and she died underneath him of an excess of pleasure and apoplexy and he went right out and got himself another negress just like her only bigger…

but let them whisper let them stand over him and say their prayers for the dead —“Think about it, Mart, he’s Stanley McCormick, one of the richest men in the world, and he doesn’t even know it”— and violate his every orifice with their tubes and their hoses and lay him on his side inthe shower bath that was like the chinese water torture and what did they think he was eddie and mart and dr. gilbert van tassel monkeyman hamilton that they could rape him like that no covering no place to hide naked as a rat and why didn’t they just leave him alone all of them his mother and katherine andcyrus the president and harold the vice president and anita too with her big swollen suety tits and her insinuatinghands like he was some sort ofpet or something some sort of baby…

but it was his nerves and he wasblocked that wasall just a temporary condition not a thing like mary virginia his crazy bughouse sister with her white nightmare of a naked body and he would be up and about and better anyday now just like at mcleanthe first time but no he wouldn’t no he wouldn’t because what they didn’t understand and appreciate not a one of them especially katherine who only wanted to climb atop him and make his penis disappear inside her like mireille sancerre’s fingers and wouldn’t give him any peace not a second not a minute not an hour and she waslurking around somewhere even now he knew all about it with her binocularsand her sorrowful pitying face all drawn-up like a lemon-squeezer’s poor stanley poor poor stanley what they didn’t understand was that he couldn’t move a muscle to save his life because the Judges wouldn’t allow it they howled and shrieked in execration if he so much as shifted his tongue when sex-stinking eddie forced that tube down his throat the Judges who wouldn’t let him move and cried out his sins from every corner of the room sloth and depravity and sexual deviation and comptrollership not the presidency or even the vice presidency and corruption in his heart and impotence with his wife and deceit of his mother the Judges shouting him down with their lips writhing like a spadeful of earthworms through the black gnarled ape’s beards that covered their mouths and their screaming wet cunts…

but all night he lay there and all day it was tuesday wasn’t it always tuesday and tuesday again and tuesday till all the months fell away like leaves from the trees and the years too and he prayed to the Judges to release him to commute his sentence time off for good behavior if only he could keep himself from sinning if only he could get back in the harness just once more just one more time…

When Rosaleen stepped down off the train, thinner and paler than he’d remembered, with the Irish bloom caught in her cheeks and her eyes like tidal pools filling and draining and filling again and little Eddie all grown up in her arms, O‘Kane was helpless: he felt the surging oceanic tug of her — he couldn’t resist it, didn’t want to — and plunged in like a deep-sea diver. “Rose!” he called, spreading his arms for her, and he wanted to kiss her right there in public, wanted to have her on the platform, in the ferns, and how could he possibly wait till he got her back to the fresh-painted apartment on Micheltorena Street with the garden and birdbath out back and the big high-gunwaled boat of a bed Ernestine Thompson had helped him pick out? He was trembling. He was in love.

She didn’t say a word. Just held him, the surprising strength of her arms, the baby alive between them like a living sacrament, golden hair and a navy blue sailor’s suit, cooing and burbling and giving out a smell of new-made flesh, his flesh, Eddie O‘Kane’s.

“You look beautiful, Rose,” he murmured, still attached to her but drawing back now for a quick glance of appraisal, “never more beautiful, even on the night I met you at Alice Dundee’s.” He was feeling sentimental, filled to the eyes with soggy emotion, like when they sang the old songs at Donnelly‘s, and he wanted to say more, wanted to whisper intimacies into the soft white shell of her ear and smell the shampoo in the curling wisps of hair that had fallen loose there, but he caught the eye of a sour-looking man in evening clothes and bit his tongue. This wasn’t the place.