Steven Millhauser - The King in the Tree

Sometimes it seemed to Don Juan that there were two lives: a public, proper, entirely uninteresting life witnessed by everyone, and a secret life of bliss and torment that had nothing to do with that other life. In one life he sat sipping a cup of green tea, among friends, in the pavilion of an English garden, while in the other he was lying rapturously beside Georgiana on the floor of a hut in the middle of an impenetrable forest at the bottom of a hidden valley surrounded by impassable mountains. Mary Hood smiled over a cup of tea, but in her eyes was a night-world where she and Don Juan wandered hand in hand forever through the rooms of an abandoned country house filled with beds and sofas. And what of Georgiana, pointing at a bird singing on a branch — is it one of yours, Augustus? — or urging Mary to eat a biscuit? — she too must be the mistress and goddess of a secret world where, unknown to Juan, she led her other life, the one she concealed from him behind her cool smile and quiet gaze. Hood was no less difficult to unriddle, since he lived in a world of contrivance and artifice, of secret mechanisms and skillful illusions, as if, desperately dissatisfied with the actual world, he must continually replace it with another. In Hood’s case, then, it might be said that the secret world was repeatedly erupting into the first world. But Hood, for all his frank friendliness, was also elusive, like a child or an elf, so that perhaps he too concealed, behind his restless activity, another life that he inhabited more deeply than this one. Juan, who was unaccustomed to working things out in his mind, felt suddenly exhausted, and studied the rim of his cup without interest.

Because Georgiana did not love him, because he could not compel her deepest attention, Don Juan had grown to dislike himself, and above all to dislike his face. Staring into the mirror in his sitting room, at a face so famous for its beauty that women had been known to swoon when he entered a room, he saw only a repellent mask: the sharp beard that looked like a dagger pointed at his chest, the teeth too white and too sharp, like instruments for inflicting pain, the nose a blade, the forehead harsh, the whole face tense with will — and the dark eyes, fierce with sorrow, staring up out of deep pits like drowning rodents.

One afternoon when he was sitting in an armchair by a window in the library, trying to concentrate his attention on a book about the harrowing of ninth-century Wessex by Danish Vikings, while imagining that he was alone with Georgiana on a green island in a blue lake in Elysium, he was irritated by a sudden knock at the door. Georgiana entered and closed the door quietly behind her. Juan stood up. Georgiana walked to an armchair on the other side of the high window. She sat down and said, “Pray be seated. Forgive me for — disturbing you.”

Juan, who could scarcely look at her because the sight of her hair against her cheek made him want to cry out in pain, opened his mouth to make a witty reply, closed it, and sank wearily into his chair.

“You are looking tired, Don Juan. But I’ve not come to speak to you about that. I’ve come to speak to you about Mary. She worries me, Sir. She does not eat; she is growing thin; yesterday she grew dizzy again on the path. She refuses a doctor, insists she is well. She is behaving strangely. ’Tis plain she is fond of you; she watches you. Be kind to her, Don Juan. I fear some terrible disaster.”

Juan looked at her sadly. “Am I unkind to Mary?”

“Pray forgive me. I did not mean that you have been unkind to her. I meant that I wished you to be particularly kind to her, since she is unhappy. Hush!”

Georgiana held up a hand to command silence and tilted her head to listen. Rising quickly, she strode across the rug and pulled open the door.

Mary, standing with her arm out as if to turn the handle, gave a little jump.

“You frightened me, Georgiana.”

“He is in the library,” she replied, striding out with a loud rustle of silk.

Mary closed the door and walked across the room to the empty chair beside the window, where she sat down.

“I was looking for you, Don Juan. I didn’t know you were with Georgiana. I thought you might be, but I didn’t know. May I sit here? I shall be very quiet while you read. I don’t know how it is, but I wanted to sit with you, for a while. There is no reason. Don’t you find that very strange? That there should be no reason for things, I mean.”

Juan, who was so tired that the bones of his face ached, did not know whether she was speaking nonsense or uttering profound truths in riddles. Meanwhile, he tried to understand what Georgiana had said to him. He was already spending a good deal of time with Mary — was she asking him to spend more? Was it possible that she meant something else, that she was asking him — but surely she could not have been asking him to become the lover of her married sister. Perhaps she was being kind to him again: since you cannot have me, Sir, I offer you her. He felt that he was not thinking clearly, or perhaps too clearly. Mary sat in the chair. Suddenly he stood up. Mary looked at him with wide, nervous eyes. He placed a finger severely over his lips, then walked swiftly across the room and pulled open the door. No one was there.

“I thought I heard something,” he said, as he returned to his armchair and picked up his book, which he immediately closed.

“I hear things,” Mary said. “In the dark.”

Juan leaned back his head and closed his eyes. Through the high window, sunlight struck his face. He was lying back in a warm gondola with the sun on his face, listening to the lapping of water and the distant song of a gondolier.

“Oh, look,” Mary said, and when Juan opened his eyes he saw her studying a spider on the back of her hand.

“I used to be afraid of spiders,” Mary said. “But not any more. Hello, little spider. Do you want to play with me? Oh!” She shook her hand violently. “He startled me. Poor little spider.” She began to look for it in the folds of her overskirt, but the spider had disappeared.

Don Juan had always known exactly what he wanted from life, and it exhausted him to recognize that he no longer knew. At night, lying restlessly awake, he posed questions to himself that seemed crucial and unanswerable, as if he were a stern priest administering the catechism to a bewildered pupil who knew nothing but feared eternal damnation. If you were allowed one night of bliss in the arms of Georgiana, followed immediately by banishment, or a lifetime of chaste friendship, which would you choose? If you were permitted to ravish Georgiana night after night for the next ten years with the knowledge that she despised you, or to leave tomorrow with the knowledge that she loved you passionately, which would you choose? Would you love Georgiana if she were a leper? A dwarf? An idiot? If you were given the choice of leaving Swan Park for thirty years with the knowledge that when you returned she would love you, or of remaining forever with the knowledge that nothing would ever change, which would you choose?

Sometimes he had the weary sense that Georgiana had been a little more kind to him than on some other occasion. Then he would find an excuse to be alone, in his sitting room or the library, where he savored the moment, turning it over in his mind, before it had a chance to be damaged by the little knife-points of indifference that glittered through her friendliness. At other times he tried to lose himself in the routine of Swan Park, as if the familiar motions of strolling along the riverbank or riding out with Hood would stimulate in his mind an earlier exuberance. But the familiar motions had suffered a change: Georgiana walked with a more measured and attentive tread, Hood watched Mary carefully, and Mary, tense and pale, her eyes large and restless and burning-dark, a hand fluttering now and then to her hair or to her gown, talked in sudden breathless bursts or not at all.